Month: July 2021

Narcissists find their way in and trick you into accepting them, letting your guard down and weakening your defenses. You don’t realize it until its too late and they have done significant damage. It would be nice if there was a way to know who these people are before they come into your life. A wanted poster that gives you the heads up to keep your guard up and teaches you how to defend against their charm and ego. You could learn the lesson “naturally”, the hard way, or a wanted poster tells you beforehand to strengthen you for the fight and deny them power over your life.

The virus is like a narcissist, it has a sort of charm. Most viruses do this, but this one is particularly good at getting in and telling the immune system to shut down and ignore it. Like that narcissist, your body is tricked into letting it in and doesn’t build a defense until its too late. It turns off parts of your immune response which is why trying to fight it naturally fails for so many people. Like the wanted poster, the vaccine tells the immune system what the virus looks like and prepares the body to defend before the virus can tell the immune system to shut down. This is the key part of the vaccine. Your body can learn to defend against it without the vaccine, many are able to, but there is the serious chance it learns too late. That is the purpose of the vaccine, to show the body a sort of picture of the virus. Before it even gets in your body, the immune system has and knows how to build antibodies to destroy it.

The vaccine is not 100% and no one ever said it was. In fact they said it helps prevent hospitalization and death and at that its around 96%. You are unlikely to get sick, but if you do, you are likely to fight it off. Right now most people dying are unvaccinated, likely 99%+. Yes some small percentage are vaccinated. It is not 100% effective.
The vaccine does not alter your DNA. All it is, is something that looks like the virus but isn’t actually the virus. That’s all. It is a wanted poster telling your body what to look out for. Whatever facebook memes you have been looking at to scare you away from the vaccine are BS. Find a doctor, you have one on your friends list, talk to them.

The vaccine does have side effects. When the body finds a virus it turns the heat up. This is a fever. It isn’t the virus that creates the fever, its your immune system. Its intentional and its good. Its actually not good to prevent all fevers, just the ones that get too high. So when you get your second dose, the immune system already knows about the virus from having been given the first dose, the wanted poster. It turns up the heat thinking its being attacked by the virus. It isn’t, its just the vaccine, but that’s actually good. It means the body sees what it thinks is the virus which means its likely to see the real virus. You feel bad because your immune system is responding. Its a whole lot better to feel bad for a day than to end up with “long covid” or dead. I want you to feel that second dose.

Kids get it, kids die. My sons 9 year old friend just got over a case of covid that he picked up on his first vacation trip out of the house in over a year. Healthy people get it and healthy people are dying. Its not many but Delta is having more of an impact on young people now and if we allow this virus to keep mutating it will eventually find a strain that kills them as easily too.

We have a chance to stop it. Wear a mask, because that helps. Yes the virus itself is smaller than the holes in cloth masks. But the virus isn’t floating around on its own. Its in water droplets that are larger than those holes. So the mask can stop the virus from getting in and its especially good at it when everyone is wearing one. Again, it isn’t 100%. Even if one particle gets in, the body has other defenses before the immune system to prevent infection. What you want to do is try to prevent tons of virus from getting in. Yes yes “freedom”. Freedom to do the right thing and work together to defeat this virus or screw it, we’ll have our ERs overflowing forever and pay the price.
We have healthcare workers that have been in covid soup for over a year. When they get infected its usually a larger dose and a larger dose has a better time taking hold than a small one. So they are getting hit hard.

Right now on your friends list there is someone that has had the virus and now suffers some long term consequence. It could be something like Tinnitus, ringing in the ears. It could be when they eat the food smells like crap, literally. It could be they now have a heart problem that could shorten their lives. The vaccine works, largely, and it along with mask wearing can stop this virus. But what wont stop the virus is the day the cases drop low we all give up and say its over. Its not over until the virus is gone. If we keep giving up too soon the virus is more than happy to come right back with a vengeance. It will burn through us until millions die. 1.5% die. Thats millions of Americans dead. Of course it helps when we slow it down and give healthcare workers the time and resources to fight it. That reduces death rates. We’ve defeated past viruses and this one should not be allowed to become endemic, permanent.

We are currently in the middle of another surge. Florida is actually worse than any other state. It is no longer giving daily numbers because Desantis decided it was all over right around Memorial Day. Guess when the surge started. Last week it was 8000 cases a day. Its now over 12000 per day. Florida is at least 4 times any other state. Drill down in to FL numbers and look at the daily new cases chart.

Vaccines will not stop this surge. At least not those taken today. Masks and social distancing will because they’ve done it every time you see the peak fall. I’m all for staying open but to do that means as many people as possible wearing masks. Vaccines, if enough get it in time, may stop the surge that starts when school starts.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

Right now a lot of people are complaining about rich people funding development of commercial space tourism. The issue being they would spend the money to give someone a meal or shelter. While I am not Christian, I do believe in the idea that giving a man a fish he can eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he can eat for a lifetime. Space tourism is a way to fund teaching mankind to go to Mars.

How do we fund advancements in our society?

We are overpopulating this planet. Actually, that sounds like we haven’t reached that point already. I believe we have and its just going to take a while for us to chew through available resources. Until we can control our population, and reduce it, we need to reach for the stars. How do we fund that? Do we tax everyone to fund a public space program? I do believe we should have a government space program but I also believe people would tire of spending money on an idea that may take years if not generations to come to fruition. People do need to eat today.

To that end I think rich people funding pet projects of taking people to space just to look around is a good idea. We fund amusement parks now. To say that we cannot fund space tourism because people need to eat, is to suggest we also should not have Disney World or movie theaters so long as one person goes hungry.

Commercial development will help with teaching mankind to go to Mars

Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), Elon Musk (SpaceX), and Jeff Bezos (Blue Origins) are all pursuing some form of space program that doesn’t directly lead to feeding the masses. However, they are all employing high end workers, scientists and engineers, to develop space programs teaching mankind to go to Mars. Some are developing commercial space travel for recreational trips to space, while others are developing Internet services and planning future missions to Mars.

All of them are paying workers and those workers pay other people throughout their day to day commerce. That puts food on the table up and down the line. They can take their money and build a space tourism business that pulls money from the wealthy and puts it in to the hands of pilots, cashiers, restaurants, flight attendants, and others far into the future. They are magnifying the impact of their billions by creating commerce. Anything that gets stagnant money out of the pockets of the wealthy and feeding the economic engine is good for putting bread on the table of ordinary people.

A rich persons money unspent is wasted money

Money sitting in some investment or safe of a wealthy person is doing absolutely nothing for regular people. The problem is of course, that money has been accumulating up in to wealthy pockets for decades. I’ve seen wealthy people buy gold plated scooters and guns and someone will say that is a waste of money. Not if it gets it out of their pockets and back into the economy. That is looking at a wider view than just that person riding a scooter made of gold.

Now of course a gold plated scooter is silly, I’ll grant you, but space travel is not. We need some way to fund the missions to Mars that will elevate our society to space faring. Sure, sure, we could live within our means and only produce that which the Earth can provide, but be realistic, that will not happen. It is not going to happen across all nations on Earth because people are greedy, racist, and will just take what they will from others.

Short sightedness is killing us

People are inherently selfish. Both as individuals and corporations, we only look so far as our own self interests. If I fire this person today will it get me more profit this quarter? Do they consider the value of that person in the long term? I’ve seen it, middle managers making a name for themselves off of short term gains all while cutting a business to the bone.

If I replace all my low end workers with artificial intelligence, AI, will I profit? No one ever thinks about those workers and whether they will have jobs in the future. At some point with AI taking over, many people will be left jobless and there will not be some better skilled job waiting for them because AI can do that too. Will the money they no longer have to spend cause the economy to suffer such that replacing their jobs with automation ends up costing that business enough that they go in to bankruptcy? Seeing that coming, will that business just double down and replace more workers? No one thinks about the larger picture and because they do not or cannot, we will never stop the waste that leads us as a people to overconsume this planet’s resources.

Going Up Mankind is the new Go West ,Young Man

We must expand or die. Two hundred years ago we started our expansion across this nation to help our population grow. We needed room for our population to proper, “Go West, Young Man, Go West“. We destroyed an indigenous population to do it but we prospered, and now there is no more West to go to. Our cities overflow, our forests burn, our farmlands dry out. To prosper we either change fundamentally how we live or we find a new place to go and that new place is up.

If the rich want to have cocktails in low Earth orbit, so be it. If that pays for the research and development that helps in teaching mankind to go to Mars and gets us the technology to get resources from space or to take us to new planets, then that is money well spent. Yes, they could buy every person on Earth a burger give someone a meal for a day. That would be a charitable and good thing, but it does nothing beyond that. It would be short sighted and foolish and end up leading to poverty and decline, the exact opposite thing those complaining seem to wish.

There is no one solution to all problems

I do believe a universal basic income is what is needed to solve the issue of artificial intelligence replacing workers. There is no great overseer to ensure everyone has a job. The government tracks various statistics but no one says we are going to have one thousand fewer jobs than workers in a month, we need to make a thousand new jobs. The market does not care. Universal basic income will help redistribute enough money to keep everyone fed.

And yes, I believe that the rich should pay more in taxes. I have no issue with a 90 percent tax rate at the highest 1% bracket. We have done it before and when we did our country prospered and paid down its debt. No one, not even Elon Musk, does enough personally to deserve to make the yearly income of one person every few seconds.

We have many issues that have many different solutions. Certainly we likely do not have the time to take advantage of space to save our society from overpopulation. We need to address how we procreate and how we consume resources. Living within our means should also be a goal. That said, what people do with their money, if it involves teaching mankind to go to Mars, is good for everyone.

This is just a list of what I feel are plot issues with The Tomorrow War. Its an excellent movie from an entertainment stand point and no where close to the mind numbing stupidity of a Fast and Furious where a car does a Tarzan swing. However, plot issues exist that could have been easily handled.

• People falling that distance into a pool would die, especially those that fell on top of others. Easy enough to handle, show everyone else appearing at the height of the building and he and his pool size crew appearing just above it. Sci-fi needs to be sci.
• Dan would not leave his family. At least not based on anything shown in the film up to the point of him being told that is his future, or anything to come after it. The director needed to give more of a reason why he needed personal success, if that was the reason. Why there might have been some marital issues, something. He showed too much love in the moments he had with her as a 9 year old to ever leave. I’m a father, the love of a child is chemical, its tied to you right to the core of you as a human. That’s not to say fathers don’t leave, they do, but they don’t leave when they show that twinkle in the eye that he showed to her.
• Why is Dan so special? Why wouldn’t anyone else choose to take the poison back and have it manufactured to prevent the war from happening in the first place? Hell Ill do it. For that matter, let the scientists in the past run all those test iterations.
• Before they left, why didn’t they just kill the queen, or cut off all its limbs beforehand? Something, and I don’t mean poison, because they said why, but maybe just shoot it.
• They do not show people reloading their weapons enough considering how many rounds they are firing. And given how many rounds they are firing they would need to be much more heavily loaded up prior to going in. The average solider carries about 7 magazines, 30, 40 rounds each. They shoot that in one failed burst.
• Why not more powerful weapons, even if they shoot less, that can penetrate anywhere? Seriously, at least someone should go in with a 50 cal or heavier machine gun.
• I get not having civilians learn to march, hand to hand combat, exercise, but why not teach them how to use their weapon in a basic way. Getting back to reloading, thats a really hard thing to do quickly in combat without dropping a magazine or have some other mechanical difficulty. They should learn basic weapon mechanics and basic combat tactics. Flanking, reloading, clearing a jam, aiming, that they need to scavenge from the dead, basic squad movement and communication. Nothing deep, just show them being run through it more. And yes, I did see CPR lessons but the one not knowing which end was up on his weapon? That shit comes first.
• They have poison that kills the males. The males are the ones that attack. Have a way to deploy that at critical research facilities like Halon gas.
• That these aliens were just a weapon and not the actual intelligence behind the invasion should have occurred to them much earlier. You don’t become a space faring species and viscous chaotic base instinct creates devouring a planet bare. In the couple of years the future world spent dealing with them they should have asked that question as well. Granted, its not all that important. I will at least commend them for wrapping up this plot issue at the end, but its convenient that Dan and his wife are the ones that figure stuff out at the end vs some ancillary character. Too much was riding on one person.
• There is no way 500,000 people support the level of technology and logistics that still exist when Dan jumps in. A simple explanation that they created fallback bases, and planted supplies and weapons at various facilities. I also may have missed it, but some explanation of why they don’t nuke them. Like inevitably some survive in their caves and nukes just didn’t work. They still had advanced fighters (note, the aliens had no air superiority, just “gliders”), helicopters, and ships along with the fuel requirements and ammunition production.
• At the end they spend time injecting each creature in their suspension chamber but have to blow up the ship and kill them because there are so many. Why not blow it up to begin with?
• Why would the Secretary of Defense give a live speech to each set of draftees?
• They did not show the SoD being sniveling enough to not want to send in a real military team to find and destroy the ship at the end. I mean its believable. Hell, just show Trump in office would be enough I guess. As it is I also find it hard to believe society would rally. We can’t get people to wear masks to stop a pandemic when it directly impacts them.

With all of that said, I found the movie thrilling and heart wrenching in ways I did not expect. What sucks is, and I give the movie high marks for being entertaining, most of these issues could have been resolved easily with some character development conversations or exposition early on. Dan is being sent in because he’s intelligent and meant to help with research. As others are learning CPR and weapons mechanics he could attend a quick seminar that answers some of these questions.