Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

Just a few thoughts bouncing around in Ol’ Robbo’s braims about your and my favorite topic these days:

♦  We learned last week that Bible-Thumper Camp is suspending all operations this summah.  Although I’m not surprised, this is truly a disappointment.  Youngest had been scheduled to work a term on the kitchen crew next month, and then to go back in August as a counselor-in-training.  She’s being a good sport about it, but I know she’s upset, too.

♦  On the other hand, the national park up the road from us suddenly reopened last Friday and was almost immediately mobbed.  The signs along the roads stating the park was closed because of COVID-1984 are now saying the park is closed because the parking lots are all full.

♦  For all we are supposed to be on lockdown, Middle Gel went on a dive trip downstate with her scuba club last week, and then went to Virginia Beach with her Young Man to cavort in the surf.  No signs of the WuFlu so far, but she did nearly get hypothermia in both cases.

♦  Mrs. R overheard somebody shouting at somebody else about following the arrows at the grocery store yesterday.  This is why she won’t let me go shopping.  I’m so sick of Karenism that if somebody pulls it on me I’m likely to get violent.  Or at least rude, anyway.

♦  Speaking of shopping, I note that some teevee commercials are beginning to take a more optimistic “once we get past this” tone.  Good on them.

♦  People need to remember that the CDC is not an oracle and Dr. Fauci is not a high priest.  Instead, before the panic broke it was known as a fairly disreputable branch of the bureaucracy with a track record of bad predictions, chronic lab quality-control issues, and a penchant for wasting taxpayer money on studies of bogus social-justice “health” issues.

♦  That said, it seems to me the CDC’s primary task now ought to be de-buffaloing all those people it threw into panic (and there are still many, many of them out there).  But since this is all about politicks** and not health, of course it’s only going to do so in a way that saves its own face.  After all, what with the lockdown, the economic collapse, and the unquantifiable suffering and hardship that followed on its initial prognostications of doom, it can’t simply turn around and say, “Whoopsies! Our bad. Never mind.”

♦  CYA or no CYA, I expect the CDC’s current “guidelines” on reopening schools this fall, which would be almost literally impossible to actually implement, will be modified if not, at some point, quietly discarded (or ignored) altogether.  Even my hard-left utopianist work colleagues were ranting about them at the “virtual happy hour” I forced myself to attend on Thursday.  Facts on the ground are simply going to pass the oracle by.

♦  They’re also going to pass by everyone else who continues to hope to use the WuFlu panic to make politickal hay.  (I name no names but friends of the decanter know exactly what I’m talking about. **Cough, November elections, Cough**)  I’ve a feeling, especially now that summah is arriving, that the recovery is going to come slowly, then all at once.  I certainly hope so.

♦  Mrs. R was able to start playing tennis again last week.  When Mamma’s happy, everyone is happy!

 

** At this point Ol’ Robbo is content to believe that the initial panic was a good-faith mistake and that all the follow-on totalitarianism simply a matter of “not letting a crisis go to waste”.  I haven’t yet bought into the theory that this was all a deliberate ploy on the part of a globalist cabal headed up b people like Bill Gates.  But then I haven’t completely dismissed the idea, either.