Don’t Fear The Wu-Flu

The lady argues well:

I confess I???ve been afraid of the Wu-flu. Oh, not the disease itself. Look, I???m at SLIGHTLY more risk than the rest of you, simply because I catch everything that passes within a block of me.

However, the REALLY important thing to remember is that we really don???t have any idea ??? yet ??? how this will play in the US, but we don???t really have that much of a reason to panic either.

Even in Italy . . .

. . . the mortality is mostly among Chinese transplants. And before you tell me I???m racist (rolls eyes), no, I???m not. Leaving aside the protein in the lungs this thing might or might not bind to, there are co-morbidity factors for Chinese (and to an extent for Italians. Definitely for Iranians, particularly Iranian males.) One of them is smoking like a chimney.

The other is that China (where the mortality seems to be way higher, honestly) is more polluted than you can imagine.?? Iran might be too. You know dictatorships don???t really much care for the environment, and I remember Portugal in the early sixties, when going out early in the morning during rush hour was like putting your face fully in the exhaust of a car.

I have no clue as to Italy air quality, and I have a full schedule ahead, so I refuse to fall down that rabbit hole.

So. Argues well but not definitively. Of course, no one is at this point.

The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization

For instance:

Diana West sees a US filled with middle-age guys playing air guitar and thinks “No wonder we can’t stop Islamic terrorism.” She sees Moms Who Mosh and wonders “Is there a single adult left anywhere?” But, the grown-ups are all gone. The disease that killed them was incubated in the sixties to a rock-and-roll score, took hold in the seventies with the help of multicultralism and left us with a nation of eternal adolescents who can’t decide between “good” and “bad”, a generation who can’t say “no”.

From the inability to nix a sixteen year-old’s request for Marilyn Manson concert tickets to offering adolescents parentally-funded motel rooms on prom night to rationalizing murderous acts of Islamic suicide bombers with platitudes of cultural equivalence, West sees us on a slippery slope that’s lead to a time when America has forgotten its place in the world. In The Death of the Grown-Up Diana West serves up a provocative critique of our dangerously indecisive world leavened with humor and shot through with insight.

Not a pretty picture.