Day 3753

Isn't it time we stopped calling this a pandemic and started calling it a plague? It's probably time we stopped blaming people for what has happened too. A plague is a force of nature. Like earthquakes, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions, I doubt that we'll be able to stop it. Humans have never been very successful at stopping a plague before. Even the medical experts will tell you that "flattening the curve" is a temporary measure at best. If people rebel at being confined before the virus has run its course, the disease will spring up all over again, just like a forest fire that wasn't completely extinguished.

At some point we will have to decide whether preserving the basic fabric of society is more important than saving lives. Maybe we can do both, but there is a breaking point. Civilization can survive with fewer people. It can't survive for long with mass chaos. Nobody is talking publicly about civil unrest, but behind the scenes, I bet leaders in every country are more worried about this than the disease itself. They know people want a return to normalcy and very few are looking forward to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome becoming our new reality.

I think we have to accept that life will never completely return to normal after this virus has burned itself out. The Black Plague in the 1300's fundamentally changed society. It took 200 years for Europe to fully recover. We are determining what the future will look like right now and I hope we get it right. You simply can't place the entire world on pause for very long and expect a good result.

I hope we are able to determine who is immune to the disease or has developed an immunity very quickly. We need these people to keep the world running. If we can reliably determine who is healthy and who is sick it will become much easier to help everybody. At the moment everyone is a potential carrier of the disease and nobody knows how to stop it.

Right now I'm just a bystander following rules set by people who probably don't have a clue what is really going on. Nobody knows what makes this virus so contagious or how to stop it. Unless someone makes a breakthrough discovery, we are just postponing the inevitable. It's not all bad. I'm actually enjoying the lighter traffic. I can finally get out of my driveway again. Unfortunately, there is no place to go.

I hope we all learn something from this. I've never been a fan of globalism. When the world becomes "too big to fail" what happens when it does fail? I think we are finding this out. We all need to become more familiar with the concept of redundancy. Complex machines like rockets and nuclear reactors usually have built-in redundancy. If the primary system fails, a back up system takes over immediately. So what would a redundant world look like? I think there would be lots and lots of small independent countries that were completely self sufficient. If one country screwed up and failed completely, the others wouldn't be affected and would continue on. Who would be the last ones standing if something really bad happened. Who knows? It could easily be the segment of civilization still living in mud huts.

No answers on anything today. We were still able to take our walk in the park and had a really nice dinner. That's probably enough for one day.

Lexi is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 3684

Whenever something bad happens these days it almost always reminds me of a movie I've already seen. Reality and fiction have become hopelessly blurred together in ways I never would have thought possible a decade ago. When I first started hearing about the coronavirus scare it seemed so much like the movie Contagion that it would be impossible for me to tell which story was real if I didn't already know that Contagion was a movie. In many ways the idea that there is a city in China that is larger than New York City where people routinely eat bat soup and snakes on a stick seems more like fantasy than any movie I've seen. I guess I'm not as well informed as I thought I was. Until a few weeks ago, I didn't even know that the city of Wuhan existed. Sure, I knew about Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, but Wuhan? Never heard of it.

A pandemic like ebola, bird flu or the coronavirus has to make you wonder about globalism. When anything becomes too big to fail, what happens when it inevitably does fail? When engineers want a failsafe system, they build in a lot of redundancy. When a single system fails, the machine continues to run. We ought to think of the world this way. A lot of independent, self-sufficient economies is a lot safer than a single global economy. We were a lot more resilient as a country when every city had a factory and we were able to make everything we needed ourselves. I think a world where it is not so easy to travel from one country to another is better as well. What is so bad about applying for a visa and planning ahead? The reason we all know about Wuhan today is that it is super easy to just hop on a plane and be anywhere else in the world in a matter of hours.

A guess you can't have it both ways. I'd like to see flying cars and cities on Mars, but I'm still more comfortable in the simpleminded black and white worlds of Have Gun Will Travel and Perry Mason. Old TV westerns make more sense to me than today's news.

Our world may be falling apart, but I find that my own little world usually gets better as soon as I turn off the TV. There is something to be said for concentrating on your immediate surroundings. There is usually plenty there to keep you busy. I ran my usual Saturday errands in the morning and took my walk in the afternoon. Not a lot happened today, but that was fine. An uneventful afternoon is much better than a roof leak.

As my trip to the Davis Mountains draws closer, I'm starting to realize that my knowledge of astronomy is woefully inadequate for conducting star parties at the observatory. I'm reading a lot online these days and spending time looking at star charts. This is no substitute for actually going outside at night, but we haven't had many clear nights lately. The more I read about contemporary astronomy, the more I remember why I chose advertising as a profession. A clear, dark night fills me with wonder, but I don't think I'd have the patience to spend years studying the rotation of galaxies or exploring stellar mass and luminosity.

I hope tomorrow is uneventful as well. A good breakfast and a trip to the gym are all that is on the agenda. That's enough for me.

Bones is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day