…with COVID-19?
Your Eyewitness isn’t gonna get into the technicalities of the COVID-19 pandemic. He gave a stab a couple of days ago, and the reaction wasn’t exactly scintillating!! Even his regulars gave up on him, as their eyes probably rolled out of their sockets!! Nah! Less folks want to know about the science of COVID that those who want to know what goes into sausages!!
With COVID, the downsides are at best serious illnesses, probably with lifetime lingering effects if you’re not vaccinated, and at worst, death. And if you’re fully vaccinated? Then you MIGHT have some symptoms, but minuscule chance of dying. The latter is such a rare event that it’s called a “breakthrough” effect. To your Eyewitness, this presented him with a choice that was a no-brainer…take the goddamn vaccine!! And he did, pretty early on – AstraZeneca.
A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and he’d read about possible “blood clots” with this particular vaccine. But the odds were so infinitesimal that, once again, it was a no-brainer – for him. By now you would’ve figured out that, in making decisions, your Eyewitness plays the odds! Not that he’s a gambling man…but when you weigh the choices presented to you about any action you might have to take, it’s a gamble, isn’t it? It’s called “rational choice”, but, really, it’s a “gut feeling”.
Cause no one can predict the future with 100% certainty, can they? In school, your Eyewitness had been taught the “Principle of Ergodicity”. If you know the properties of every element in a collection and the conditions under which they exist, you might be able to make such predictions. But, even here, the predictions – let’s say of gases in a fixed space at a given temperature – are only statistical! You can’t tell how a particular molecule will behave. And humans certainly aren’t even molecules!!
We exhibit “reflexivity” – that is, we think about what’s presented to us, make decisions on what to do – individually. And that’s why neither I nor the Government can predict with any certainty what our good fellow citizens will do when they make a decision on vaccination. We can’t call them “stupid” or “illiterate” and even stubborn – they’re just being humans!! What goes into each one of us in making a decision – the “gut feeling” – is a variable.
Take this “Mark of the beast” that’s given as a reason for refusing the vaccine. Upon investigating, your Eyewitness discovered it’s a biblical reference of a “mark on the right hand or forehead” of a person signifying an allegiance to Satan.
Now, your Eyewitness would’ve just requested the vaccine on his left hand.
But each gut is different! And COVID be with us till the end of never!!
…with Haiti
Poor Haiti…when it comes to disasters – natural or man-made – whenever it rains elsewhere, it just cascades there! If your Eyewitness was superstitious, he’d swear that Haiti was jinxed. But seriously, folks, what can be done for a Haiti? For one, we should learn from the recent American pullout from Afghanistan after they’d spent US$2 trillion, that it ain’t gonna come through force.
Even though they’d gone in to hunt Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaida after 9/11, the Americans said they stayed behind to “democratise” the society. After 20 years, they were forced to concede that it couldn’t be imposed by force. And that corruption becomes rampant and endemic when funds are poured in to “build institutions”.
Haiti has experienced such interventions since the beginning of the 20th Century (1915) by the same Americans, and all that was left were dictators and poverty.
And with “aid” since!
…for Granger
Granger has now said that his “leave of absence” has been blown out of proportion – and he’s just taking a rest after his hectic schedule!! Hectic schedule? What was he doing at Pearl after hiding out for the last year?
Running on the spot?
