So my aunt's mother-in-law just died. Not the Wuhan Flu, she was just really old and had Parkinson's, but the nursing home stuck her in a COVID ward when she was circling the drain, and then refused to let her husband of 68 years visit her, even in PPE, because, quarantine bullshit. She's going to have a memorial service this weekend, but only 10 people are allowed in, so my family's out, despite being close to them when I was growing up.

Meanwhile, a cop in the next town over died, as they do. The main street of the town was shut down for his funeral procession, with cops gathered from all over the area. A friend of my father attended a burial, with absurd limitations on the number of people allowed into the cemetery. The plot was near the edge of the cemetery, so some people were "attending" by standing on the sidewalk, watching through the fence. And a cop came driving up with his lights on to disperse them.

And there are people dropping off food at the local police department just about every day. A charity started a month or so go, gathering donations and buying box lunches to give to first responders.

The economy is going in the shitter. Small businesses are being destroyed and whole industries are being irreparably altered over a panic generated in the media, and carried out by politicians from a combination of power-madness and the need to look busy. People are losing jobs they might not get back and taking hits on their businesses from which they might not recover. And charity is going to people who have jobs, and despite swearing oaths to the Constitution are accepting orders to harass people trying to make a living or occupy themselves without spending money!

The same nursing home where my great-aunt-in-law died is inside a senior-living facility, which has a big banner out front saying "Heroes Work Here".
A. Fuck you
B. It was almost certainly an employee who erected that banner, and if you are the one calling yourself a hero, you absolutely are not
C. "Hero" is an odd thing to call the people in the facility who there out of self-interest, and are not the group dying in larger numbers within those walls.
D. The 'heroes' there are not saving lives, or doing anything noteworthy. If anyone is in danger, they call an ambulance, which takes the endangered subject to a hospital. My brothers and sister-in-law worked there in high school. They served food in a cafeteria, or sat at a desk and directed visitors, passed along residential complaints and called the ambulance when necessary. I have never heard a workplace anecdote that might suggest heroism in anyone there.

And I saw another nursing home displaying a similar sign saying the same thing. Doubt it. There are mass-produced signs on people's lawns thanking first responders and health care professionals. Do they know what "professional" means? It means you get paid! Quite a lot, too. And they're raking it in, according to my brother, a nurse, with extra shifts and overtime.

Our police departments are not entering houses when responding to calls. Sick people expected to walk their sick or injured asses to the front door to get in the ambulance when it comes. The police are not pulling over cars, or proactively doing much of anything, unless requested. Some calls, they actually tell people 'we're not coming out for that'. The (okay, volunteer) fire department has the chief show up to a call first and the relays back to the fire house if it warrants violating "social distancing" to put a few guys on a fire truck to respond. And the police are not dialing back to free themselves up to escort the plague carts or anything. They're mostly watching Netflix at HQ like the rest of us, or studying for the upcoming promotions tests. So all those traffic stops aren't exactly essential, are they? They're really harassing motorists to pad their stats, and essentially confiscate money for the town. Oh, sure, there's a court, but municipal traffic courts are such rubber-stamp institutions, they should have marsupials as their official logos. So the Wuhan Flu has basically exposed the whole traffic safety scam. The danger of unsafe driving is apparently less than a virus with a miniscule death rate, for which the treatments include vitamin C and bed rest. Or cops are cowardly chicken-shit bullies, who are neglecting their obligation to the public safety in order to keep themselves safe.

Heroes my ass. Can we stop with the obnoxious virtue signaling and auto da fe to a bunch greedy, well-compensated institutions?

A few weeks back, there was a national story about Amazon suspending the seller account of a business that was run by two brothers, who were selling sanitizer and other such supplies for more than Amazon arbitrarily thought they should. Price-gouging is an arbitrary label. The definition is raising prices on scarce commodities... But that's how prices WORK! They go up when a commodity is in low supply! That actually works to the general benefit, because it incentivizes producers to bring additional supplies to the market. That's what these brothers did.

They went around to small retailers in their area and bought up quantities of goods for which they anticipated a demand. If people did not want these things they bought, they'd have been out of luck. They charged more than they paid for the items, yes, but that's how EVERY business makes money, including Amazon. No one is forced to buy from these people, no one is dependent on their supply alone and held hostage to the demands of their prices, they are one independent seller on a huge website.

An ignorant socialist, forgive the redundancy, might yammer about taking money without adding anything of value, but stuff does not get from manufacturers or growers to consumers by magic. The extra money the seller would have made was their compensation for their efforts to take items sitting on a shelf in some dollar store on a back road in West Appalachia and make them available to people all across the whole country! But they can be prosecuted by a sanctimonious state AG, while hospitals, those dens of heroes, mark up their medical supplies far above what any successful small business internet retailer could get away with in their wildest dreams. The difference is that people made a willing choice (or would have if Jeff Bezos wasn't the only person allowed to do well through Amazon) to buy from the internet dude, in full knowledge of the price, while a hospital shoves a couple ibuprofen down the throat of a sick person and only tells him it costs $10 after the fact. But the heroes get overtime pay! While posting dance videos in scrubs & N-95 masks on Tiktock and YouTube. 'Cause they're swamped with work and traumatized by all the people they're killing with ventilators.