February 22

 It is still too early to see anything much outside though the bright, slightly-past-full moon indicates a sunny day--unless clouds come in. The forecast promises three days in the 40s so the snow that has already fallen should be diminished.

The news is still dominated by only a handful of stories--and most feel very remote from life at my level (retired and on fixed income). Queen Elizabeth has a mild case (so far) of covid even though she has had all vaccination shots recommended. Because of her age they are watching very carefully. Prince Charles also has another breakthrough infection even though he has also been fully vaccinated and has even had his own previous breakthrough infection.

The Ukrainian situation is still, as it has been for most of this year so far, the major story. Most of the coverage is highly repetitive and very skimpy on real information. This morning they say that President Macron of France has conducted an extensive round of negotiations by phone with Putin and Biden perhaps arranging a summit between the two leaders though the White House said nothing is firm on such a meeting. They say one "conversation" between Putin and Macron lasted more than two hours. Listening to the story I thought of a scene in Isaac Asimov's sci-fi classic Foundation. The leaders of the Foundation received an emissary from the Galactic Empire and after extensive talks were convinced that the Empire had their backs in their increasingly threatening relations with a breakaway province. One person had the foresight to record most of those conversations and study them with sophisticated linguistic analysis. He found that the emissary spent a good deal of time spewing a lot of verbiage and didn't really say anything at all. No guarantees, no promises, no action to curb the rebellious province. I suspect that the conversations between Putin and Macron are very similar.

The stampede to remove covid restrictions now includes many Democratic controlled states with spokespeople for the national health agencies cautioning those moves may be premature. I thought in the first summer that covid was likely to become and endemic "flu" that we have to find a way to "live with." Our state hasn't had any restrictions for months but we haven't changed our behavior--we still avoid crowds and carry masks in case we come into an unexpected crowd and the medical offices we have to visit regularly still require them. We just picked up the three free N95 masks at our local big-box store (the local Walgreens didn't have any and the clerk said they wouldn't be getting any.) We are keeping the masks I sewed early in the pandemic because they are all double or triple layered and are a good back up. We have not picked up the free tests. Just for the hell of it I looked up some mortality stats on some other causes of death: flu--12000-52000 per year from 2010 to 2019/gun shot deaths-45,222 in 2020 alone/heart disease-about 700k deaths per year/covid to date--900k. If covid become an endemic flu I expect the yearly death toll would be between 50 and 100k deaths each year. We will see yearly exhortations to get vaccinated to both flu and covid (along with other vaccinations against other diseases like shingles.) Over the 2010-2019 years about 48% of the U.S. population over age 5 received vaccines for flu. That percentage rose to about 51% in 2020.  Just like with flu people who get covid will go to work if they aren't feeling too bad, will stay home if they are not feeling well at all, and go the the hospital if they are really sick. After all we still have no real system of effective sick leave and losing a day or two of wages can be catastrophic for ordinary Americans--a situation I remember all too well in my own life.

This story is a good argument for being cautious about adopting electric vehicles. No matter how the fire originally started (and the investigation has to wait for the fire to go out which won't be soon because the lithium ion batteries in all those luxury cars is now fueling the fire.