Hitting the Target

I went to a Target yesterday and to say it was a hot mess would be an understatement. Between empty shelves, some of which I know is a supplier problem and given most merchandise is from China makes sense; however, the problems centered more on merchandising and overall cleanliness. There is a labor shortage but Target has promised a higher wage structure and overall better working conditions, and I saw workers and no issues with checkouts, but there still is an overall shortage of workers willing to work in retail and fast food, the two largest sectors with hospitality facing this problem. Some hotels have already established a protocol that was done in the pandemic, self check in, no room service or housekeeping and that is remaining, less to do with rehiring workers and more in a permanent measure of internal housekeeping and profit boosting due to the lack of guests; that said this I seriously doubt will continue when travelers, particularly business travelers, return. As for restaurants, the ones open with strong reputations that remained during the pandemic were packed and that was during the lunch hour along the same streets only months ago were deserted. I do want to point out that while I walked in the wealthier section of Manhattan, the Upper East Side, I did see many empty storefronts and retail shops with nary a customer, some with signs that request an appointment, much like art galleries in SOHO, and that may be a sign of lack of staff or still residual Covid protocols, on that I am unsure.

As we reopen the issues of rentals and apartments still seem to favor the renter and with the housing market all over the place, last month sales declining, again there is also fewer discounts and incentives. My building is now undergoing massive staff changes as the door is now like the rest, revolving and with the decline in multi family units being built the reality is there are simply fewer tenants and the ones who came for the incentives are leaving as leases expire as well with the New York Times doing a feature on some who are in fact “neighbors” as many are planning to buy and move on. I would like to but with the upcoming evictions now delayed a month I will wait to see how that too effects the market – both in commercial and residential end.

So we have a shortage of labor, a push on evictions held, California looking into allocating funds for paying back rent on those most economically hit by the pandemic and of course the red states cutting extra unemployment, which runs out in September regardless, in time for school, September and October will be the true test as one more shortage remains – Teachers and Superintendents who are leaving in droves.

The complex ebb and flow of the labor market in economic downturns are usually quite predictive, the layoffs occur and the individuals hit the factories of education to upgrade their supposed lost skill set. This falsehood along with the one that students supposedly have thanks to the pandemic are two myths we have not truly gotten over but is perhaps fading with the reality that when you want to learn and work you do and you do so when you need or have to and not because a person is telling you to. Teachers have known this for years and Employers have simply just passed this cost on to the worker to absolve themselves of vesting into their staff’s long term growth. I read where Jeff Bezos in his quest to build Amazon felt the customer was the key, the worker less so. As the culture of Amazon has always been that workers are bees and when they have served their purpose they will die or just go to another hive. In a quote from a recent article about said culture of Amazon, Bezos believes: that people are essentially inherently lazy. The phrase that he would say is, essentially, people would expend the least amount of energy necessary to do what they want or need. And that my friends is the crux of Amazon’s entire system, from workers to customers we are inherently lazy. So much for a focus on customer service and with that it explains the massive turnover the company has with regards to its lower tier labor force. As for their corporate culture, the Times did a story on that years ago and found it toxic to say the least. I know of one woman who went to work for Amazon at night while trying to maintain her job at the storage facility I use and she was found in the back passed out from exhaustion and ended up getting fired from that job for not telling them that she was working two jobs and in turn putting herself and others at risk from both Covid and worker related injuries that could have occurred from her physical health. Amazon allure is that and then as you read the article, the focus on unionization becomes clear and not just with regards to Amazon but for all retail and restaurant work overall.

Which means the current situation with regards to recovery and restoring employment is much akin to the Great Migration of Black Americans in the Depression era that lasted well into the 70s. We are now seeing a similar turn of events only now in reverse with many Black Americans moving back to the South and energizing cities like Atlanta, or Montgomery, where they are electing Black Mayors; cities that are being revitalized with this new energized class of mobile, educated Black Professionals. And with that you are seeing why in those same states immense push back to restrict voting rights and develop a new type of Jim Crow. Ah yes the South shall rise again, they just did not think it would be by the Black people they drove out.

But not all the labor switch is due to that, some of it if not a larger portion was due to the Trump Immigration laws and positions, and when the pandemic hit the reality for those without legal status became more challenging once business shut doors and with that the jobs shuttered with them. Restaurants and hospitality are the largest employers of this classification, so is construction and agriculture which again contributes to some of the issues regarding those supply chains that are not always about materials. Think of the Covid victims in the meatpacking/food processing plants and that too is another group that may have elected to change patterns and move or move into different lines of work.

And lastly the women that we hear repeatedly about how they are the largest portion of population affected by the pandemic. Yes we get it we are the Immigrants and Minorities of all shapes and sizes and colors and we are always the last to get to the table. Why? Cause we put all that shit on the table, who do you think does it?

The one thing that has not been considered is how many women decided to use this as an opportunity to open new businesses, find partnerships and build a better community. That yet will be revealed and the reality is that many, particularly women of color, elected to retain their children in home schooling environments. The media has done an amazing job of illustrating the problems with this dynamic, from lack of broadband, to effective online learning for those children with special needs but in reality there are many who are thriving. The idea of homeschooling is not new, and like CRT it has roots in the 70s with the “Hippie” lifestyle embracing it, later the Evangelical Right taking it on to the point of publishing texts (full of bullshit religious garbage but hey that is how Lifeway became a massive Christian publishing house) to now many Black faces who are the largest growing segment of this type of education. The New Yorker recently did an article on the women who evolved this into a powerful cohort of home educators who may be adding a new element to a consistently changing dynamic of public education.

So for now we have many issues as to why the labor force is not returning in droves back to the low wage jobs they had and are for now looking to new paths and that may not be a bad thing. Catherine Rampall of The Washington Post did a decent essay on why that may be true and that is something that I have long been a champion of – Employers taking on the heavy lifting of training, and promoting their own. And they are looking outside the box to find employees and how to make the box a better wrapped one.

We have dumped much belief on this notion that it is College that trains and educates our workforce and this has in turn placed the focus on secondary education, certain programs and skills to join the workforce, with little to no flexibility on the “type” of skills one needs to find employment, add to this the costs to do so make it almost next to impossible for many to participate and in turn find jobs that will sufficiently compensate the structure that one needs to begin to enter the workforce; this is trickle down economics at its finest when you have massive debt as the ceiling to your home you cannot purchase. Note that the same time home purchases have risen and I suspect that thanks to the stimulus and now child care credits it is making that possible for many who never thought it would be. This again seems counter to the reality of what we are hearing, but automobile purchases are rising and this with a move away from urban cores makes sense. And again that will also affect where one works and who is the primary source of income. Yes folks I do believe at home work will be moving along as a part of the new normal, which despite the belief of it as a negative for women, I suspect otherwise. And yes folks online learning as well. Time will tell.

A Memorial

This marks a year from the death of George Floyd, in that same year 965 others who were killed at the hands of Police, some known some not. We need to know their names as well.

And with that I will say that Police Reform in some States has moved forward while the federal reform promised has stalled as the issues surrounding the rise of gun violence, crime and physical assaults on people of color and of faith has risen as well, making everyone still angry, still afraid and still looking for answers.

I don’t think anyone in this country reads anything. I have said that my loathing of Millennials leads me to have a cognitive bias towards that Generation as they are very demanding of safe spaces and in mandating change yet few of them seem to have ever read a history book, picked up a newspaper or read a journal that covers said issues in detail. To note I was discussing Feminism and a young millennial declared Camile Paglia, her Feminist idol, (a farce given her views she is not), so when I referred her to an current article about Camille Paglia, who is now Trans and still not a Feminist, (odd) said: “That is a lot of words could you just sum it up for me with the important part.” I refused and said, “Try reading, you may learn something.” Not the first time I have had that discussion with that group, proffering articles and magazines and knowing that they are tossed aside upon my departure. The young man keen on getting into my pants was discussing this very issue of Police reform and I gave him an article from the NYT to review. He never discussed it and then wondered why I was not ever going anywhere with him. Truly what would our convos other than him touching my hair or commenting about me getting laid would we have? Oh yeah the part about what he wants on his sammie after he is done servicing me.

And with that the barometer of how I feel about sex and sexuality is my own and I would never presume, just like my own Atheism, that anyone has to agree with me nor even understand its history, but just treat me with respect and know that I have come to these places with full knowledge and time spent working through it. This folks is what is called “my truth.” And for many all of this is an ongoing learned process through encountering others not like you, reading and more importantly taking the time to do the work. Name me three millennials who do. Yeah, me neither. So the protests for George Floyd, were in my mind for all the thousands who have come before and since.

And with that we now are coming to day 438 of Covid Theater, the drama never ends even as we begin to resume to normal. There will be mass evictions I suspect and despite the demand for employees we are seeing fewer return to the work force by choice due to the low wages and crappy working conditions that existed prior to the pandemic. The exodus from the cities will continue and the debate about a centralized workplace will also be examined as this is not simply a light switch that turns back on. Even Biden is considering making some Government positions to permanently remain off site. Again he never ceases to amaze me each day.

And what about Covid itself, will we ever get the answers and the truth about the virus? Yes and no. We still have quite a large failure on the part of the Trump Administration to acknowledge their failures regarding this among many, don’t look for a January 6th commission anytime soon, so it will largely become a project I suspect for scholars to analyze with regards to the mistakes and severity of it all in decades to come. But the real truth, the origin of the virus itself is coming to light. I early on communicated with a Biology Professor who was sure that it was not Zooinotic and that it was an airborne flu-like virus that was almost random in the way it affected individuals who contracted it and at that point they were unclear as to the length and distance it traveled and remained in air. Since then we have decreased the space between people from 6 to 3 and the time frame was once considered 30 minutes now due to variants sits at 15. The CDC has finally acknowledged it is airborne and admitted well into the pandemic it was not tactile, that asymptomatic transmission is possible and yes folks being outdoors is the least likely way to contract Covid. Poor ventilation, air circulation, veracity of the virus in the host and close, prolonged contact is the source which again months spent on cleaning and other bullshit means, such as temp taking and erecting barriers did nothing to actually STOP THE SPREAD.

There is now clear information coming out that the lab in Wuhan as early as November 2019 had cases of two workers with the same symptomatic illness and in turn hospitalized. This is from Pro Publica’s research and collection of information regarding Covid.

Early in the pandemic, President Donald Trump and some scientists speculated about the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was created and accidentally released by Chinese virologists doing some sort of research. That hypothesis was quickly and vehemently dismissed by the scientific establishment, which noted that the genetic makeup of the virus showed no signs of human tampering. I encouraged several ProPublica reporters last year to poke around on a slightly different theory: What if the beginnings of the pandemic were the result of a lab accident in which scientists studying the characteristics of coronaviruses inadvertently became infected with a wild virus and spread it to others. Lab leaks are far more common than one might think and have occurred in the U.S. elsewhere. Our reporting turned up some officials who shared that suspicion. But none could offer any direct evidence that it had happened. This situation is among the least favorable arenas for investigative reporting — a debate in which all sides are drawing conclusions from minimal evidence released by a foreign government renowned for its tight control over information. The credibility of the lab leak theory wasn’t helped by the breathless coverage by Trump-supporting media outlets that took as given China’s culpability. We moved on, but, partly based on my experience reporting on germ warfare, I continued to believe that a lab accident was one possibility among many that would explain the pandemic’s origins. In the year since, theories about the virus originating in a lab have gained traction, even among those who initially doubted it. A growing number of scientists feel China was less than transparent in its recent dealings with a visiting World Health Organization team that was attempting to gather evidence on the beginnings of the pandemic. In a May 14 letter to Science magazine, 17 prominent researchers from around the world called on the WHO to look more closely at the lab theory. “We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data,” they wrote. “A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest.” Days later, Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch, one of America’s most respected epidemiologists, added his name to the letter. “There just aren’t any answers yet, one way or the other, about how the coronavirus that’s now ravaging the world began,” Lipsitch told WBUR, a Boston radio station. “What we are saying is that the existing evidence has not ruled out a laboratory origin, nor has it ruled out a natural origin. And there’s really no positive evidence, either. It’s just pretty much a lack of evidence right now.” The absence of facts fueled a frenzy of internet speculation, a fair amount of which has focused on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a government-funded lab. To conspiracy theorists, it cannot have been a coincidence that China happened to be doing research on coronaviruses just a few miles from where the pandemic broke out. The head of the institute, Dr. Shi Zheng-li, reminded me of many of the dedicated scientists I interviewed for the book “Germs.” Press accounts portray her as someone deeply committed to the battle against microbes. After China was hit by the SARS coronavirus in 2003, Shi led teams of researchers into caves to capture and take samples from bats that might be harboring more dangerous strains of the disease. When an inexplicable outbreak of pneumonia struck Wuhan in December 2019, she worried that a coronavirus had somehow escaped her lab. She told Scientific American that she frantically reviewed records about the genetic makeup of her samples. Li said she was enormously relieved when she learned that SARS-CoV-2 was only 96% similar to its nearest relative at the institute — decades of evolution away from a match. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said in her interview with Scientific American. “I had not slept a wink for days.” The Chinese came up with the now well-known theory for the origin of SARS-Cov-2. It began in bats and jumped to an intermediate animal that was sold at a wet market in Wuhan. Questions quickly arose about that narrative. Chinese authorities had destroyed all of the animals at the wet market soon after the outbreak began, and researchers have never been able to identify the intermediary animal that transmitted the virus to humans. Then, the British medical journal The Lancet published a paper that poked another hole in the wet market theory. It reported that nearly one-third of the people initially treated in Wuhan hospitals, 13 of the first 41 patients, had no link to the market or to one another. The uncertainty about the origins of the pandemic have only deepened over the past year. More facts emerged about Shi’s training, including that she worked with scientists who spliced together coronaviruses, creating the same sort of chimera viruses the Soviet germ warriors were experimenting with back in the 1990s. The 2016 paper documenting that research is now a central element in some of the online conspiracy theories. It had what turned out to be a prescient title. “SARS-like” coronaviruses, it warned, were “poised for human emergence.” The likely source? Chinese bats. As ProPublica President Dick Tofel likes to say, investigative reporting always begins with a question, not an answer. On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal quoted U.S. intelligence reports that three members of the Wuhan institute had become sick in November 2019 and required hospital care for unspecified illnesses. The head of the institute, Shi, has said that all of her lab workers tested negative for exposure to SARS-CoV-2, a result some analysts viewed with skepticism given the prevalence of the virus in Wuhan. The history of germ weapons shows that even eminent scientists can misread the evidence. In the early 1980s, Matthew Meselson, a Harvard geneticist and molecular biologist, disproved allegations that Hmong anti-Communists in Laos had been attacked by a mysterious Soviet chemical weapon known as “yellow rain.” Meselson and a colleague’s inquiry showed it was bee feces. On the other hand, Meselson backed the Soviet cover story that an outbreak of anthrax in the town of Sverdlovsk was due to consumption of contaminated meat. It turned out to be an accident at an anthrax factory. After the fall of Communism, Meselson was allowed to investigate in Russia and concluded that it was indeed a leak from a weapons facility. So where does that leave us? As I’ve watched the theories about the pandemic’s origin wax and wane, I believe more strongly than ever that reporters should begin their research agnostic and remain skeptical as new facts come to light. No story is ever really over. Certainly not this one.

We are a long way from ever knowing the full truth behind the origins of the virus and if it was intended to be a biological weapon, but never in the history of the globe has a virus done this much damage to as many countries at a single moment as Covid has.

I was reading Salaman Rushdie in the Post and he said this: We are not the dominant species on the planet by accident. We have great survival skills. And we will survive. But I doubt that a social revolution will follow because of the lessons of the pandemic. But yes, sure, one can hope for betterment, and fight for it, and maybe our children will see — will make — that better world.

To repair the damage done by these people in these times will not be easy. I may not see the wounds mended in my lifetime. It may take a generation or more. The social damage of the pandemic itself, the fear of our old social lives, in bars and restaurants and dance halls and sports stadiums, will take time to heal (although a percentage of people seem to know no fear already). We will hug and kiss again. But will there still be movie theaters? Will there be bookstores? Will we feel okay in crowded subway cars?

The social, cultural, political damage of these years, the deepening of the already deep rifts in society in many parts of the world, including the United States, Britain and India, will take longer. It would not be exaggerating to say that as we stare across those chasms, we have begun to hate the people on the other side. That hatred has been fostered by cynics and it bubbles over in different ways almost every day.

As I wrote in the post Chrysalis, I am not sure as we emerge from our cocoon’s we are able to fully grasp the seriousness of this pandemic and for those who are still afraid they will continue to be. Those who never took it seriously, never will and so on. I am at odds with most people in the best of times so my contrarian nature found myself living my best life during the early days of the pandemic. Perhaps because I was armed with scientific facts and a knowledge of history, and a well developed sense of personal responsibility I thrived. It was only in the waning days of winter with the endless cold that I became despondent, and with that dropped my “No Compromises” mantra to try to make friends with a Millennial! What was I thinking? But today that is behind me and the light is ahead of me. I believe in the power of science but not of medicine as those are two different worlds to me. The Medical Industrial Complex once again proved to me that it is as dangerous and deadly as any virus and that they are staffed and manned by incompetents whose idea of care is charging more and making you believe that you need it. This is one thing that too must change to go forward. But we shall.