But I will remember the stupidity and choose to shop elsewhere from now on…

So I went to Menards home improvement store Wednesday for a can of spray paint and a 4 foot piece of one inch black pipe.

The spray paint is for the cylinder so it won’t rust when I put it back on the backhoe (now that the cylinder is fixed) and the pipe is for a lever so I can get the mounting ears for the cylinder bent back into position with a torch and some leverage.

Now,  I have gone to Menards during our time when only (ahem) “essential” businesses were open more or less weekly (I refuse to hide from this disease that is not much more contagious, virulent, nor deadly than many other “Pandemics” in my lifetime) and, until now, have never had any issues. I have walked it, bought my items, stayed 6 feet from other customers, and left. Unmasked. I sanitized my hands once in the car, and that was that.

Until as I say, Wednesday, when I attempted to enter the store only to be politely, but firmly told by the nice young (and new) security guard (who was a new addition to the store…they never had security before) that I had to wear a mask or I could not enter the store. He politely informed me that if I did not have a mask, I could buy one for $1 at the desk right there….

Now, I don’t get it. For 6 weeks, Menards has allowed people in the store, even for non-“essential” items during the “stay at home order suggestion….and never required a mask. Now that the order is lifted, they require a mask on their customers. Why now? WTF? Why not all those other 6 weeks? If it is for safety, either of their customers or their staff, then why did they not require masks for the previous 6 weeks? Or is it something else?

We won’t even discuss the so-called masks nor the failure in fitting or wearing….as long as one had something covering the lower half of their face, it was ok. Forget that fully half of the masks would not have protected either the wearer nor others around them. They were wearing a mask, so it was ok.

This is getting to be bullshit, The Social Conditioning is starting to worry me. Not only because my fellow citizens are going along (what happened to common sense and the American Spirit?) but because they are simply not bothering to think about the effectiveness of what they are being led told to do. 

Of course we are seeing a rise in CASES.

We are testing a greater number of people.

Are we seeing a rise in deaths? No. At least not so far. Nor a rise in hospitalizations either.

Which means that there were a lot of people running around with Covid-19 weeks ago, and we simply did not know it. Now we do, BECAUSE WE ARE TESTING FOR IT IN GREATER NUMBERS. 


Of course, for Liberals and Journalists, this concept is apparently very difficult to grasp.

Oddly, the City of New York is only now disinfecting their subway cars.

For the first time, the city has shut down the subway and is cleaning and disinfecting their cars. All at onece.
One wonders why now? Why not a few weeks ago, when people were dying like flies and the bodies were stacked like cordwood outside of the hospitals when the infection rate was climbing and the city was first shut down?

WTF? I don’t get the timing at all. Why not earlier?  Something doesn’t make sense here.

But that is true of many of the actions by city, state and federal officials in the “Crisis”.
I smell something and it doesn’t smell very nice.

Today, I’m gonna orbit the airport for an hour and do some break-in on the refurbished cylinders.

Hopefully, no engine issues, but that’s why I am gonna orbit the airfield…..

If all is good, then I will resume flying it for IFR training and then, as the country opens up, imma gonna start visiting people again.

So apparently there are a great number of cases in the populations of Meat Packing plants….seems that the workers are getting sick and transmitting the Covid-19 among themselves.

But, a question: Is the transmission happening in the pants, while the folks are working?

It has been my experience that these plants often employ a large number of foreign (and often, but not always, illegal) workers. Often, to save money to send home these folks live very closely, like 4 or more people in a 2 bedroom apartment or trailer…often twice that density.

Yes, improving conditions at the plant is a good idea.  But I would question if the plant is the vector for the disease transmission rather than the living and social conditions amongst the workers.

And since the CDC folks (based on their response to things and conditions at the beginning of this “crisis”) apparently can’t do their job, don’t seem to have much cognitive abilities, can’t connect cause and effect, and apparently cannot think, but merely react and follow orders,  I cannot help but wonder if anyone has investigated the mode of transmission or are they merely Doing Something so they can appear to have Done Something.

38 states are “reopening”.

At best, we reduced (not stopped) the case doublings that occurred about every 10 days. Every 10 days in the larger cities, that is. Not so much in the more rural counties. Let’s face it, even in New York, it wasn’t the “Bodies Stacked in the Streets” we were warned about. Ever. Not even close to that….Even with the reported falsifying of cause of death (John was 200 lbs overweight and had a heart attack, but he had a cough, so it must have been Covid, even though we didn’t test, so put that as “Cause of Death”) …(and yes, they ARE doing that in some hospitals…like the ones in Gary Indiana, where I have first hand knowledge of this) and likely never would have been as bad as the doomsayers CDC forecast.
Not the 6.6 million they forecast, not 4.2M, not 3.6M, not 2.4M. not 1.3M (the forecast kept decreasing every week or so, didjanotice?), not 900K, not 750K, not 600K, not 450K, not 300,000 dead.

And what cost? Our economy is shambles, 1/4 of our people out of work, An additional trillion (so far) dollars of government debt. I thought the whole “Shelter in Place” thing is a stupid move….and yet, having started, we are now wasting all of that, by opening up again. This never should have happened from start. Now we have wasted all the damage to our society and our economy that we have (and will) endure.

If all of this chaos we have created has saved even 10.000 people from Coroanavirus/Covid -19, I’d be surprised. Here is the thing, reopening simply means that the rest of us, if we haven’t already been exposed, will soon be exposed. We really gained NOTHING with the debacle. If yer gonna get a case of Covid-19, yer gonna get it. Now or later. If not today, then next month or the one after that. The only way to prevent that exposure is to hide for the next year or so….until either Herd Immunity kicks in or a year or so after a vaccine is developed. And if you are one of the 7% or so that is gonna be symptomatic then yer gonna have that to deal with it. If you are one of the
And this “Pandemic” is NOTHING compared to others we have had in the US (or the world) in the past.  Back then, people simply went on as normal. The Markets didn’t tank, Nothing shut down, parties went on…. in the end it was a nothingurger….just a worse than usual Flu season. (Today, that 100K/1 million would likely, by population, be equal to over 300,000 in the US and close to 3 MILLION worldwide)

But the CDC and the Federal and State governments have this well in hand…..
Top Men are working on it:

**  Depending on the statistics one looks at, the high end appears (for Covid 19), even with Death Rate Inflation happening, to be somewhere close to 1.2% and the low end just above 0.78%).

HERE.

I mean, someday I might have a use for it….right?

My brother and I just cleaned out the shop we fixed things for our businesses in a month or two ago. We were there for like 19 years. It took WEEKS to get rid of some of the stuff.

We had replacement parts for stuff that had been obsoleted 15 or more years ago. And enough scrap metal to weld together a Titantic sized barge. Wood scraps to build an Ark….enough PVC and other pipe scraps to pipe from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi.
Plus a whole bunch of odds and ends. and other shit. Plus stuff and crap and things…

We won’t talk about my personal barn and garage…

So the folks on the South Side decided, since the weather for the evening was warm and dry, it was time for street parties. Ladies dressing up and shakin’ their shit. men watching, everyone having a drink or two….**

Hundreds of people, mostly black, chose to have street parties Saturday evening. Plus a whole lot of parties happened in private houses.  (and not a mask to be seen)

In other words, a normal Saturday night in Chicago’s South Side.

The mayor, of course, is PISSED that people are ignoring her. The cops are, effectively, helpless as they have conflicting orders….Citing people, handing out fines, is not a deterrent and they know that ignoring those fines won’t be enforced. And they really neither have the ability, nor want to, take hundreds of people to jail.

Guess what, Mayor Lightfoot: your “rule” only works when people are willing to comply. When hundreds, maybe thousands, choose not to, you got nuthin’.

An, of course, this is a large part of the reason that the Coronavirus is “affecting people of color disproportianately”. Other ethnic groups are (more or less) complying with the Social Distancing order…not so much that disproportionately affected segment of the population.

Of course, 7 people got shot in some of those parties, but that is expected on a Saturday night in the South Side.

(*Because Fuck You That’s Why) And Yes, I stole it from Phil


**One wonders how they can afford such nice dress and buy the liquor since we are told they are all poor to the point of poverty and all that….

But I got a checkride in a Cherokee 180 Saturday.

If flies nice, stall easily, turns sharper that my 182, climbs nicely (it isn’t very heavy) and other than the unique characteristics of the Hershey Bar wing, it ain’t a bad flyer. Pull the power back and it drops like a rock. Makes for easy spot landings.

Not an airplane I would buy, but it is fast enough that it could be a spare for me to use next time my Cessna is tits up.
I mean, It doesn’t carry much, and it is narrow and the front seat is too low and all that, but at the end of it, it is big enough for two people, flies just a tiny bit slower than my plane, and is a great way to get somewhere fairly quickly….

Sadly, no autopilot in this plane though.

But it doesn’t suck.

Plus I got 1.2 hours of flight time. 

Today, due to the Coronavirus debacle….

And the new patterns of behavior in our society.

One can walk into a liquor store at 11:00 pm wearing a mask and no one even blinks.

6 months ago, you might get shot for that. Today it’s normal.