The Addams Family was a popular 1964-66 TV series and a 1991 movie, based on Charles Addams’ New Yorker cartoons. One of the characters was the little girl Wednesday Addams.
I didn’t know until the other day there was an adult Wednesday Addams series on YouTube. I got a kick out of it, but unnfortunately it was terminated in the middle of second series because of copyright consideration.
This often happens for me. I catch up with things after the world has passed them by.
Alfred W. McCoy, who’s observed many a military coup, thinks that a coup to keep President Donald Trump in power was, and still is, a real danger.
Trump’s attempt came in three stages, he wrote.
First there was a proposal by Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser, to invoke martial law to overturn the election.
This was taken so seriously that all 10 living former Secretaries of Defense, including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, issued an appeal to the armed forces to remain neutral in the coming struggle.
Then a Trump loyalist in the Justice Department suggested the department intervene to challenge the legitimacy of the election result by charging fraud.
When Acting Attorney-General Jeffrey Rosen refused, Trump threatened to replace him. He only backed down when Trump’s own appointees at Justice, including the President’s counsel, threatened to resign as a group.
Finally there was an attempt to use the threat of force to prevent Vice President Mike Pence for certifying the election results. A crowd of protesters broke through police lines to enter the Capitol (and in some cases were allowed in).
The Defense Department refused a request by the Mayor of Washington, D.C., to send in the National Guard, which was on stand-by alert. Finally the Secretary of the Army, bypassing the chain of command, gave permission for the Maryland National Guard to intervene.
Mike Pence, unable to find a legal justification for refusing to certify the vote, did his constitutional duty.
All this shows is that there is still respect for the rule of law in the USA, even among Trump appointees. US American freedom and democracy aren’t quite dead, although they’re in bad shape.
But the failure of the Trump coup also shows that he does not have the support of the types of people who support military coups in other countries. I mean the top levels of the military, the “intelligence community,” the super-rich and the heads of big corporations.
None of them have any reason to feel dissatisfied with Joe Biden. I think the outcome would have been very different if the alternative to a Donald Trump had been someone such as Bernie Sanders, who threatened their power and wealth.
Then, too, conditions in the USA are much as if a kind of military coup has already taken place.
The billionaire class is able to thwart popular and necessary legislation. People live in fear of losing their livelihoods for saying the wrong thing. A lawyer is going to prison for the crime of having won a lawsuit against a big oil company. Torturers have impunity while truth-tellers are punished.
And yet, people whom I respect, argue that there is a real and present danger of something worse.
And it’s true. Things could be a lot worse than they are now. Things haven’t reached the point where I, personally, think I have reason to fear—not yet.
LINKS
American Coup: a Recurring Nightmare? by Albert W. McCoy for Counterpunch.
The Whole Country Is the Reichstag by Adolph Reed Jr.
A blogger named N.S. Lyons has a Substack blog called The Upheaval on which he discusses the civilizational conflict between the USA and China. It’s not just an economic rivalry or a geopolitical struggle. It is a conflict of philosophies.
The USA is the heir to a liberal tradition, going back to Ancient Greece and Rome, that values freedom of the individual. China is an ancient and successful civilization founded on quite different values.
All this is complicated by the USA’s embrace of what I call woke-ism and Lyons calls the New Faith.
He has written two parts of a three-part series on China, to which I was waiting to link until he completed the third. But now he has put his blog behind a paywall, and the third part evidently will be for subscribers only. I don’t like to link to articles that are behind paywalls, so here are links to the first two.
China Empire: What is China to us anyway? Part One
The China Dream, Lyons wrote, is the dream of Empire. At different periods of its history, China was a superpower. Xi Jinping wants to make China great and powerful again. In this respect, he is no different from Chinese rulers of the past.
The Chinese government commissioned a study of the rise of the great powers of the past few centuries—Great Britain, Imperial Germany and the USA—and concluded that their rise was due to (1) state-assisted economic development, fueled by foreign trade, and (2) a global infrastructure to protect it, including ocean-going British and U.S. navies.
China’s global infrastructure is its Belt and Roads Initiative—roads, pipelines, ports, power lines and fiber optic cables integrating not only the interior of Eurasia, but also connecting China with the whole world, including Africa, the Western Hemisphere and the Arctic. China is building up its naval force as well.
The history of European imperialism indicates that military power follows trade, in order to protect trade. Lyons says that China already regards Eastern Asia as its sphere of influence, much like the USA’s Monroe Doctrine for Latin America.
The Inscrutable Ideology of the New China: Incoherence or totalitarian brilliance? Part Two.
China is officially a Marxist-Leninist country. The ruling Communist Party enforces ideological conformity on all levels of society.
At the same time China is a highly competitive capitalist country. Ambitious young Chinese endure what they call a “996” lifestyle—working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. Wealth inequality is even greater in China than in the USA.
But China is not a free-market country. State-owned enterprises own 40 percent of national assets and produce 40 percent of national output. Businesses are expected to serve national goals.
In the West, N.S. Lyons noted, the fusion of an authoritarian government with corporate business is commonly called fascism. Another characteristic of fascism is intense blood-and-soil ethnic nationalism, which President Xi also is promoting. Meanwhile many young Chinese embrace an idea “lying flat,” which is doing the bare minimum required to get by.
So what China may be heading for, Lyons wrote, is a new synthesis embracing “the consumptive power of globalized neo-liberal capitalism, the state-directed economic and military might of fascism, the social control of communism, the moralistic welfare-statism of progressivism and absolutely none of the messy liberalism of ye old republican democracy.”
In other words, China is full is contradictions, just like the USA and the West as a whole.
###
Both articles are well worth reading in full. If and when Lyons publishes his Part Three, I will summarize it and, if it is not behind his paywall, link to it.
Korean artist Lee Sangsoo made sculptures of animals by bending and twisting simple strips of resin and metal, plus subtle coloring. Notice how the sculpture above is not only recognizably a cat, but a Siamese cat.
U.S. Treats Imprisoned Drone Whistleblower Like He’s a Terrorist by thedissenter.
Supreme Court hearings on Palestinian man anally raped and hung from hooks by CIA causes Biden administration to tremble by Erik Striker for National Justice.
Photos inside Riker’s Island expose hellish, deadly conditions by Gabrille Fonrouge for the New York Post.
42 Seconds After This Photo Was Taken, Police Shot 16-year-old Payton Ham Dead by Dave McKenna for Defector.
Biden’s DOJ uses a Trump tactic: Federal prosecutors label Black Lives Matter protesters terrorists by Rachel Barkow for the New York Daily News.
U.S. kidnaps Venezuelan diplomat for defying sanctions regime by Bill Van Auken for the World Socialist Web Site.
Rudyard Kipling was a great writer, but his reputation under a cloud because he was an imperialist. Empires are out of favor.
Most people in most periods of history would not have understood this. Most people through the ages admired the great empire builders. They thought that conquering and ruling other people was heroic.
The great conquerors—Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon—were regarded as inspirations and role models.
Britons were proud that they ruled a quarter of humankind. US Americans were proud of our frontiersmen and Indian fighters.
The same attitude prevails in non-Western cultures toward their own empires, past and present, but that’s a topic for another time.
The sun never set on the British Empire…
Rudyard Kipling began his writing career in his 20s, when the British Empire was at the height of its power.
He believed the British Empire was a force for good and that it would endure. He also believed the British Empire was different from, and better than, other empires.
At the same time, he felt the need to justify empire. His stories about India are full of devoted civil servants and military officers who selflessly do their duties for the greater good, without reward or appreciation.
This is because of the rise of liberalism—I mean liberalism in the broad sense, liberalism as belief that human beings have unalienable rights, or that society should be organized on the basis of liberty, equality and brotherhood. You can’t consistently believe in these things, and also believe in the right to rule over other nations.
Kipling’s stories did include Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists who were the equals of the British in terms of both ability and character. But he was not a liberal. He did not believe they had an equal right to self-determination.
His core values were duty, honor and country, not respect for human rights. He thought rebellion should be put down by any means necessary.
In stories about the Boer War, he ridiculed the idea of a Sahibs’ War, in which both sides observed civilized rules of war because neither side was fighting for survival.
But his ideal of the self-sacrificing colonial administrator, being the white man’s burden, no doubt was reflected to some extent in real life. Kipling probably influenced the British ruling class to try to live up to that ideal.
The least you can say for Kipling is that he preached an ethic of responsibility, which is very different from US American attitudes toward our non-empire empire.
……nor does the sun set on U.S. military bases.
When I began my own writing career, in my 20s, I believed that American world power was a force for good and that it would endure. I thought the USA was different from and better than other would-be world powers.
My friend Judith took exception to my posting that “The Man Who Would Be King” was Rudyard Kipling’s greatest short story. She said Kipling wrote a great many others that were better than that one.
She loaned me several of her Kipling anthologies. I didn’t read all the stories, but I read enough of them to convince me she was right.
Kipling is known for his stories of India. He was born in 1865 and spent his early childhood there, then returned to work from 1883 to 1889 on newspapers there.
As a newspaperman, he met all kinds of people, as he also did as a Freemason. The Masonic Order admitted monotheists of many ethnicities and varied social standings.
He wrote poems and stories, including The Man Who Would Be King (1888), that made him an overnight success. He left India at age 24 as a literary celebrity, and never went back except for one brief visit. He died in 1936.
As Judith pointed out, many of his best stories have nothing to do with India.
Kipling was a keen observer, a master of the English language and an inspired storyteller. His stories bring to mind the phrase “magic realism.”
He had a keen eye for details and got the details right, whether he was writing about civil engineering, tiger hunting or life in the trenches during World War One.
At the same time, many of his stories had a supernatural or mystical or some other angle that went beyond the mundane, like the Latin American magic realist stories. Maybe that’s one reason Jorge Luis Borges liked his writing so much.
Here is an account of my recent Judith-inspired reading of Kipling.
One of my faults is reading too fast, and not stopping to appreciate literary style or take in detail.
Probably I would have done better just to have read a few and appreciated them more deeply, rather than greedily gobbling down so many in a short time, as is my habit. But, as G.K. Chesterton said, anything worth doing is worth doing badly.
The first three in my list below are, in my opinion, equal to or better than “The Man Who Would Be King,” which I still think is great. Not all of them are equally good, but I enjoyed them all and together they give an idea of Kipling’s range.
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The Bridge-Builders (1893)
This was a mind-blowing story.
The bridge builders are Findlayson, a civil engineer in charge of building a bridge across the Ganges, plus Hitchcock, his assistant, and Peroo, his native assistant.
These three are presented as the only important characters because only they are dedicated to the mission of completing the bridge. Deaths of individual workers because of disease or accidents are not regarded as important.
Peroo is accepted by the other two as their equal in terms of competence and character, the only qualities they value, although he will never be, and never aspires to be, their equal in rank.
The first part of the story is about the obstacles they overcome—technical, administrative and political—and I at first thought the story was going to be about to be about heroes of science, engineering, discipline and the work ethic.
But then, just as the bridge is almost, but not quite, completed, it is hit by a devastating flood.
Findlayson and Peroo are swept away by the waters and find themselves on an island in mid-river, where animals have also taken refuge.
Peroo gives Findlayson a bit of opium to help him get through the night, and he begins to perceive the animals as talking avatars of the Hindu gods.
The crocodile, avatar of Mother Gunga, the goddess of the river, asks the other gods for their help in destroying the bridge and, by implication, Western civilization.
A tigress, representing Kali, the goddess of death is inclined to agree. But Hanuman, the monkey god, recalls how his own exploit as a bridge-builder described in the Ramayana.
(more…)
Glenn Greenwald wrote an excellent post questioning the constitutionality of the Select Committee on 1/6’s investigation. All the abuses of power of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in an earlier are being repeated, this time with the support of self-described liberals.
The committee’s mandate was to investigate why the Capitol Police were so unprepared to defend the Capitol against rioters, which is a proper and important matter to investigate.
So is the role of the FBI, which had heavily infiltrated three of the major right-wing organizations, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters. To what degree did the FBI hold back its knowledge, or even possibly help instigate the riots?
What is not a proper topic for investigation is the activities and beliefs of private citizens. Law enforcement is the function of the executive and judicial branches, not the legislative.
The executive branch is responsible for investigating and prosecuting federal crimes. The judicial branch is responsible for judging criminal charges and sentencing convicted criminals.
The investigative powers of Congress are limited to oversight of the executive branch and to research in connection with legislation. It has no constitutional authority to investigate the activities of individuals just our of curiosity, or the desire to humiliate and punish.
Greenwald points out the extensive legal precedent for this, much of it dating from the McCarthy era.
The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning by N.S. Lyons for Palladium. The clash of civilizations.
Intersectional Imperialism and the Woke Cold War: The New Faith Prepares for a Global Crusade by N.S. Lyons for The Upheaval.
‘Frozen Chosin’ Korean War Movie Set to Be Biggest Hit of 2021 by James Barber for Military.com. In the movie, the Chinese are the good guys.
Out of the Newsroom by Spencer Ackerman for Forever Wars. Newspapers whose reporters and editors all work from home.
“Government Without Newspapers”: the manufacture of ignorance by Patrick Lawrence for The Scrum.
A strike wave is coming to save America’s working class the old-fashioned way by Will Bunch for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The Great Strike of 2021 by Jack Rasmus. They also strike who simply refuse to take dangerous jobs for less than a living wage.
Why Record Numbers of Workers Are Quitting and Striking by Sonali Kolhatkar via Naked Capitalism. [Added 10/16/2021]
The Untraversed Land by John Michael Greer for Ecosophia. How the structure of the world economy causes shortages.
The Afghan War Comes Home to Minneapolis by Thomas Neuburger for God’s Spies.
The Unvaccinated May Not Be Who You Think by Zeynep Tufeckci for The New York Times.
How many people get long Covid? More than half of those infected, researchers say by Pennsylvania State University.
SHUTDOWN: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy by Adam Tooze (2021)
Adam Tooze is possibly the world’s foremost economic historian. He wrote thick, comprehensive books on the Nazi economy (Wages of Destruction), the war debts crisis of the 1920s (The Deluge) and the 2008 financial crisis (Crashed!).
His strengths are his international perspective (he is a British subject, educated in Germany who now teaches at Columbia University) and his deep understanding of high finance and how it affects society, politics and the overall economy.
Shutdown is not like his other books. It’s slim, and it is being published while the pandemic is still going on, not from the perspective of history. This is because he thinks his message is too urgent to wait.
What is his message?
It is that we the public are on the brink of a new era, an era when our worst crises will not be the result of tyranny, corruption and human folly, but blowbacks from our natural environment.
And we are woefully unprepared for this. The coronavirus pandemic had taken 3.2 million lives, including half a million American dead, as of April, when Tooze completed his book. The number is up to 4.5 million now.
The pandemic resulted in tens of trillions of dollars in economic loss. Yet only tens of billions has been spent on vaccine development, and much less than that on getting the vaccine to the public.
COVID-19 was not a black swan, a completely unpredictable event. It was a grey rhino, an event that many predicted, but were ignored. The climate crisis has bred other grey rhinos—devastating fires, floods, droughts and superstorms.
Tooze wrote that the reason we are unprepared is that the neoliberal policies of the past 50 years have stripped the governments of the USA, UK and much of the Western world of the capacity to respond to emergencies.
The neoliberal philosophy is that, in order to maximize efficiency, institutions should spend no more than they absolutely need in order to function. This means that there is no reserve capacity in case of emergencies, and hospital emergency rooms in the USA are overflowing with Covid patients.
What’s needed, he wrote, is something like the Green New Deal supported by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others. Governments must spend whatever is necessary to be prepared for the predictable crises that lie ahead, and do it in a way that creates full employment and puts money in the pockets of working people.
The International Monetary Fund has estimated that a successful global vaccination program would add $7 trillion annually to the world economy by 2014. Tooze said others estimate that such a vaccination program would cost $50 billion to $100 billion. Yet governments of rich countries, which have spent trillions of dollars on economic stimulus programs, say this is unaffordable.
Tooze quoted the great economist John Maynard Keynes: “Anything we can actually do, we can afford.”
That is, if the human and physical resources to accomplish a goal exist, and the political will to accomplish the goal exists, the problem of finance can be solved. People generally understand this in wartime. Why not in peacetime?
Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, has a new book out called Nice Racism. Here’s what Matt Taibbi had to say about it:
Nice Racism’s central message is that it’s necessary to stop white people from seeing themselves as distinct people.
“Insisting that every white person is different from every other white person,” DiAngelo writes, “enables us to distance ourselves from the actions of other white people.”
She doesn’t, or maybe she does, see where this logically leads.
If you tell people to abandon their individual identities and think of themselves as a group, they sooner or later will start to behave as a group.
Short of selling anthrax spores or encouraging people to start exploring sexual feelings toward nine-year-olds, is there a worse idea than suggesting—demanding—that people get in touch with their white identity?
Of course there’s nothing wrong with attending a workshop to help you to better understand your unconscious prejudices, or to become more culturally sensitive about people of other races and ethnicities.
The problem is when we as a society operate on the premises that (1) being racist is a firing offense and (2) everyone is racist until proven otherwise.
Taibbi wrote:
Her books are chock full of overt threats, using the language of the inquisitor.
When she goes through the list of arguments people make in favor of the arguments that they can or should exist beyond race, she concludes ominously, “None of these factors provides immunity.”
The idea that “continually” availing oneself of DiAngeloid antiracist training is a requirement to remain above suspicion is an explicit warning.
No other strategy is permissible; as she puts it, “Niceness is not antiracism.”
LINK
Our Endless Dinner With Robin DiAngelo by Matt Taibbi for TK News.
The United States is gearing up for a new Cold War with China. But the new Cold War will be difference from the one with the Soviet Union. In some ways, the roles are reversed.
At the outbreak of the first Cold War in the late 1940s, the United States was the world’s leading industrial power and a champion of the status quo.
The Soviet Union tried to catch up with the USA, but never succeeded. It was seen as threat, first, because of its nuclear arsenal. It was, and still is, the only nation with the capability of destroying the United States. Its ability to retaliate with nuclear weapons made it virtually invulnerable to attack.
It also was a threat because it used its invulnerable position to subsidize, sponsor and inspire insurgents and terrorists all over the world, which is not to say the USA did not itself engage in covert action and dirty tricks.
The Cold War ended because the Soviet Union’s failed economic system could not sustain its ambitions for world power.
Now compare that with the situation of the USA and China today. China is expected to surpass the United States as an industrial power within a few years. By some measure, it already has.
China is a defender of the status quo, except for certain border area claims. Unlike the old Soviet Union, it doesn’t have a national goal of making the world over in its image.
It doesn’t project its military power far beyond its borders. Its main tool for power is to grant or deny access to its huge market to nations, companies and individuals based on whether they pay lip service to or go against Chinese perceived national security interests.
One of the main sources of U.S. power is the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which gives it the same invulnerability to attack as the old Soviet Union had and the Russian Federation still has.
The other source is financial power, a legacy of the late 1940s when the USA was the world’s main industrial power. The fact that the U.S. dollar and U.S. Treasury bonds are still the basis of the world’s financial system gives the U.S. government leverage it does not hesitate to use.
It uses its position to finance covert wars, proxy wars and acts of war short of full-scale invasion. It is a source of instability, not stability. The Chinese, except in their own borderlands, and their Russia allies are champions of world order and the status quo.
In the old Cold War, the Soviet Union was pushing an ideology. In the new Cold War, the U.S. is trying to impose “woke-ness” and neoliberalism on the world. In the old Cold War, time was on the side of the USA. In the new Cold War, time is on the side of China.
Of course there are a lot of things wrong with the world as it is. Accepting the status quo means accepting tyranny, poverty and war. And the Chinese system is not one that I would wish to live under.
Maybe I push the role reversal analogy too far. But U.S. interventions do not make the world better, and are not really intended to. The present-day USA is a disrupter. China, unlike in the Mao era, is not a disruptor. And unlike in the first Cold War, time is not on the side of the USA.
Hat tip to Naked Capitalism.
Even though I’ve never been a cat owner, I think this is pretty funny.
I’ve been vaccinated for Covid, I think vaccination is a good idea for most people, but I think it very strange that the Biden administration, the mainstream press and the public health establishment say you shouldn’t consider treatments for the disease.
Why not explore anything and everything that might work? Why limit yourself to just one thing?
The idea is that the general public is so stupid that if they think there is anything other than vaccination that is helpful in fighting the disease, they won’t get vaccinated. The problem with this is that if you blatantly treat people as if they are stupid, they will stop listening to you. Matt Taibbi had a good article about this on his Substack blog.
LINK
The Cult of the Vaccine Neurotic by Matt Taibbi for TK News.
The Big Business of Future Wars by Walter Bragman for The Daily Poster.
The Profits of War by William Hartung for TomDIspatch.
Instead of a Free Press by Patrick Lawrence for Consortium News.
Key US Witness Against Assange Arrested in Ireland by Joe Lauria for Consortium News.
The CIA plot to kidnap or kill Assange in London is a story that is being mistakenly ignored by Patrick Cockburn for The Independent.
CIA plan to poison Assange wasn’t needed | The US found a ‘lawful’ way to disappear him by Jonathan Cook.
Six-Month Sentence to Lawyer Who Took on Chevron Denounced as ‘International Outrage’ by Julia Conley for Common Dreams.
Steven Donziger Was Imprisoned by the 1 Percent’s Favorite Judge by Branko Marcetic for Jacobin.
Will the United States Officially Acknowledge That It Had a Secret Torture Site in Poland? by Raymond Bonner for ProPublica.
THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING and other stories by Rudyard Kipling
After our reading group read Kim, Rudyard Kipling’s best and best-known novel, we turned to Kipling’s best and best-known short story, “The Man Who Would Be King.”
John Huston made a good movie of the story in 1975; it’s unusual for an excellent work of written fiction to be made into an excellent movie.
“The Man Who Would Be King” is the story of two adventurers, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnahan, both ex-soldiers of the British Indian Army, and how they reached the inaccessible land of Kafiristan (“land of the heathen”) and established themselves as rulers, only to have everything go horribly wrong.
Dravot and Carnahan sign a “contract” to stick together, refrain from indulgence in alcohol or women and “behave with dignity and discretion.”
They establish their power by demonstrating firearms, whose power to kill at a distance seems like magic, and by their ability to drill troops, which makes them a force that can defeat mere mobs of individual fighters.
The two men are Freemasons, and the local priests decide they are gods because symbols on their Masonic paraphernalia correspond to ancient sacred symbols known only to the priests.
Everything is fine until Dravot decides to take a wife and establish a dynasty. The people are horrified because they believe a woman who mates with a god will die. Dravot chooses a beautiful but unwilling woman. She bites him, and his bleeding shows that he is a man, not a god.
The story shows Kipling’s gifts as a descriptive writer, an observer of human nature and a storyteller, but it also echoes basic themes of literature. It is a classic story of hubris being clobbered by nemesis.
It is a classic story of the downfall of a ruler who allowed himself to become a tyrant. So long as Dravot ruled justly, he was all right. It was the act of tyranny, taking a woman against her will, that led to his downfall.
It is an echo of Genesis, and of myths and legends, of how people are granted everything they could want, provided they observe one simple rule, and how they fail to keep the rule. In “The Man Who Could Be King,” the simple rule is the contract—the promises to avoid women, and to behave with discretion.
Kipling’s story is said to have been inspired by the exploits of an American adventurer, Josiah Harlan, who in 1839 marched an army into Hazarajat, in the center of Afghanistan, and proclaimed himself the sovereign Prince of Ghor.
Like Kipling’s characters, he fancied himself a successor to Alexander the Great. His reign was short-lived; a year later, a British army invaded Afghanistan and replaced his rule.
There also was Sir James Brooke, the white rajah of Sarawak, who established a family dynasty that ruled the northwest coast of Borneo from 1841 to 1946. But Brooke was granted his authority by the Sultan of Brunei and Harlan also was acting as agent of Dost Mohammed, then ruler of Afghanistan. Their stories were not Kipling’s story.
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In order to read “The Man Who Would Be King,” I bought a collection of Kipling stories. I read the other stories, too, and mostly enjoyed them.
Evidently complaints choirs were a big thing 15 years or so years ago, but I only heard of them last week. They’re a fad that may have come and gone, but, to me, they are timelessly funny.
School children in Austria are tested for Covid
I think most people would benefit from being vaccinated against the coronavirus, because you’ll be much less likely to wind up in the hospital or morgue if you catch it.
But this will do little to stop the spread of the virus because you can catch it from a vaccinated person just as you can from an unvaccinated person.
If I was the parent of a small schoolchild, I wouldn’t care if the school staff was vaccinated.
What I’d want is for everyone who goes through the door of the school to have a temperature check, and for everyone who registered a fever to get a Covid test, and for everyone who tested positive for Covid to stay home for a week.
Ideally, people infected with the coronavirus should go into quarantine, but we in the USA don’t have the capability for that.
I’d apply the same policies to high schools and colleges, and to hospitals (except, of course, I wouldn’t send the patients home).
I think vaccine skeptics underrate the harm done by the coronavirus. It’s true the virus kills a relatively small percentage of those infected, but that small percentage adds up to hundreds of thousands (in the USA) and millions (worldwide).
And this is not something where that which does not kill you does not make you stronger. I had a friend who was vaccinated, but nevertheless suffered what I am convinced was a “breakthrough” infection. She was in such severe pain, along with chills and fever, for a couple of days, that she was not able to function.
I know of a family—husband, wife, three children—who got it. The husband went to the hospital. The wife somehow was able to function at home. They’re all well now, but they don’t know what long-term organ damage the virus may have caused.
But I admit that we also don’t know the long-term effects of the vaccines, especially with pregnant women and small children. If I was the husband of a pregnant woman or the father of small children, I’m not sure what I would advise.
Just as some of us are at greater risk for the virus, so others of us are at greater risk for the vaccines.
I do think that if businesses and other institutions require vaccinations, they should give the employee a day off with pay to get the vaccination, and also days off with pay to recover from side effects.
Phil Ebersole's Blog 