Corona Virus Is Stupid

Covid-19 is a mass hysteria pandemic, not a viral threat.

If you look at the prison system, absolutely nothing practical is being done to stop the spread of the virus.  They have taken some precautions, but there is no hand sanitizer, and no way these inmates can stay 6 feet apart at all times.  In low level and minimum institutions the inmates are in dorm type settings with 60 other men or women in the unit.  That unit is around 20 feet wide.

If the virus was going to spread anywhere, it would spread in prison.  Inmates would be dropping dead by the thousands, and mass panic would ensue.  Guards would refuse to go in to work, and the few remaining healthy inmates would simply walk out.

None of this is happening.  Not even close.

If you look at the bureau of prisons, 54 people in federal prisons across the United States have died from this virus since they started testing for it back in March.  I did a little digging, and according to the Department of Justice, back in 2016, 444 federal prisoners passed away for some reason or another.  That’s 37 inmate deaths per month, for any kind of reason.  Old age, flu, accident, murder…anything.

If you take the 54  victims of Coronavirus that have died in the federal prison system so far, you average around 18 people per month that have died of this thing.  That’s it.  Most of those who died were elderly, and would have died regardless of what sort of sickness blew through the compound.

You would think the numbers out here in the general population would be much lower.  After all, prisons are unsanitary and there is zero social distancing.    It’s actually not much different though.  In fact, if you look at how many people have died versus the rest of the population it’s the same.  Around .3 percent of people who are sick enough to go to the doctor and get tested die of the virus.  That’s .03 percent of the general population, and a lot of those people probably got it and were asymptomatic, or had mild cold like symptoms.

I’m over this virus.  For many it seems it has simply become entertaining to be scared of it.  Like we can live in our own walking dead episode, meanwhile we’re loosing income and jobs.  It’s not fair to keep people scared and living in fear of this insanity.

Update On My Friend In Prison

I’m tired of worrying about somebody who is a pedophile and all around pretty horrible person.

I don’t know why I worry so much about him anyway. He doesn’t care about me. He is really self centered, and doesn’t even care very much about the things I have done for him. For example, I sent him a birthday present. He did say “thank you,” but just turned around and asked for something else a day later.

Maybe I’m giving him a pass because he’s miserable. The prison has been on lock down for 47 days, but maybe he deserves it. He did the crime…he probably should do the time, and if that time is terrible, well then maybe he shouldn’t have gone to prison in the first place.

Then again, I still think 9 years is excessive for what he did. I’m sure he’s depressed. He was charged with looking at things on the internet. He wasn’t out there doing anything. He obviously got off on the stuff, (he had been doing it for the last 5 years) but at the same time, he didn’t actively go out and rape anybody. What he did was essentially a thought crime, even if it contributed to sex trafficking.

Actually, it’s really strange to me that looking at porn on the internet (however bad it might be), is more punishable than going out and having a forced sexual encounter with a 10 year old. That makes no sense to me. People say if videos of sexual encounters are viewed, it’s like getting raped over and over…but I don’t see it that way at all. How would the person harmed even know the video was looked at? Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about, but the person looking the video shouldn’t be punished more harshly than the person out there making the video in the first place, yet that seems to be what happens.

I totally get how you could disassociate porn from reality though. Yes, they are real people getting hurt, but how many times have we all heard from a very young age that the movies aren’t real? Yes, the actors are real people, but thanks to trick photography and CGI, most movies really are just made up figments of the imagination anyway. Shoot, even reality shows are not real. They are all manipulated. Also, the modeling industry…yes models are prettier than average women, but they are made up to look more beautiful by stylists and makeup experts.  The point is, we’re told over and over and over again that what we see on film and in the media isn’t real.  Even our presidential elections aren’t real anymore.

We are also told all the time porn is ok. It’s a fantasy. We’re allowed to live out whatever we want sexually through videos. I absolutely understand there is a line, and that line is crossed when anything involves anyone under the age of 18, but at the same time, I understand how this type of thing could be seen as  recreation, and that’s it.

I think too for my friend (yes, I’m likely making excuses), he’s a naturally really curious person, and kind of knows about everything. He’s very smart, so sometimes out of the box people have out of the box sexual preferences. For example, Lawrence Olivier was supposedly bisexual along with Leonardo DaVinci. I’m not saying my friend is on par with those guys, (those guys were only ever accused of wanting to have sex with men so not even close), but I am saying maybe his mind works differently in a lot of respects.

It probably took a lot for him to write to me at all. Maybe I’m giving him too much credit, but I would think writing to me would be really difficult under the circumstances. He fell hard from grace. He was very successful, and had been making a lot of money. I am sure it was hard for him to write to me, knowing I know…what he was into.

In retrospect it was obvious. I always knew there was something. He would talk about porn, but it was in a way that sort of let me know I couldn’t quite understand. I was like “What are you talking about? I watch porn. All kinds of porn. I can’t be shocked.” But at that time, (in my very early 20’s) I didn’t know THAT kind existed. It never even occurred to me anyone would dream of harming a child that way.

In fact, even as late as last year sometime, maybe even around the time he got arrested I was thinking about what he’d said about porn. I knew he had to be into something deviant. Something that wasn’t acceptable. I imagined him in a club somewhere, smoking a cigar and watching…I didn’t know what. I thought it might be strangulation or something like that. Something that wasn’t quite right. I guess now I know what it is. The curtain has been pulled back.

In my gut, I think he’s glad I’m writing to him. If I don’t for a few days, he’ll write to me and ask me a question to Google. I think he does it because he wants me to write, but doesn’t want to sound desperate. I guess no matter what, it’s nice to have somebody care about you. I do, even though I’m not sure why.

Of course he says he has a fiancee, but I feel like she’s dropped him. I would too, honestly. She was “long distance for years,” so that’s very telling. She is probably a commitment phobic person, and he’s a pedophile, so it worked out. Also, if she really was engaged to him, he cheated on her recently, about a year before he got arrested. Or at least he said he screwed some 23 year old girl…according to a conversation we had a few years ago.   I didn’t call him on it of course.

He hasn’t said anything at all about the pornography to me. He’s said he was hooked on drugs (or at least used heavily), and was stressed out of his mind. That reeks of an excuse to me. He also said, (strangely) that he could never find a woman that wasn’t horrible, and most of the women he dated “would eat their own young.” I guess that could be true given the fact that he said he went on cocaine benders every night. But who knows? He probably did use drugs since he felt guilty, but the use couldn’t have been all that heavy given the fact that he was extremely successful.

He probably just wanted to be like everyone else, but couldn’t be, and that’s why I suppose I can’t drop him. There is something about him that, though he’s got evil in him, he also tugs at my heart strings.

Mass Hysteria Created by Coronavirus

According to the Bureau of Prisons site, out of 140,119 inmates, 45 of those have died from Coronavirus. 3,082 have been infected and 619 have recovered. According to my math, that means that right now, 0.03 percent of inmates have died from the virus, and only 2.2 percent of inmates have gotten it at all.

The BOP has done some superficial things to make it seem like they care about the health and well being of the inmates, but everyone is packed in close quarters. There is no social distancing and no hand sanitizer, yet only a small percentage of inmates has been affected at all.

What’s even stupider is that the inmates aren’t allowed out for rec, and at this point have been confined to their cells for 39 days. This is going on even though having sunlight and fresh air would actually help prevent the spread of disease.

Oddly enough, the rate of death in prison is about the same as it is in the general population. In California, the death rate is about the same: around 0.03 percent. In Georgia it’s 0.02.

What’s more disturbing is people aren’t going to regular doctor’s appointments and are staying home in order to help “flatten the curve.” They have been told to keep space available in hospitals for Coronavirus patients, but that onslaught never happened. Huge wings in big hospitals in cities like Miami and Houston are currently empty. Medical professionals are getting furloughed and laid off, while people stay at home quietly suffering from heart attacks.

I myself have directly experienced sub par care during the Coronavirus epidemic as well. My son experienced a rash that didn’t clear up over several days. I called the doctor to make an appointment, and they insisted on doing a visit over video chat. Fortunately for us, the video didn’t seem to be working, so the office allowed us to come in for an in person visit, but what if it had? What if my son had something serious like Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever or Lyme disease? Could they have really been able to tell the difference between that and poison ivy over video chat?

I also have a friend who is 9 months pregnant, and because of the virus, she has experienced horrible continuity of care. She is forced to wear a mask to appointments and has seen different doctors at each visit because they are now on rotation and not working full time anymore. She has also seen a woman told to leave and reschedule because she coughed. All in the name of the virus. What if the woman who coughed was having a miscarriage, or worse, was about to have a miscarriage that was preventable with a cervical staple but couldn’t get it? All because she coughed.

Upon further research, I found out that 40 percent of the Coronavirus deaths are happening in care homes. Those deaths are tragic of course, but most of these people already have underlying conditions, and the vast majority of people in these places are at the end of their lives and would be just as likely to die from a cold as Coronavirus. What I don’t understand is why we don’t aggressively quarantine places where there are lots of older, sick people, and let the rest of us live our lives?

Right now it’s like people want to be scared of the virus, and the more evidence that comes to light stating it’s not that big a deal, the more people dig their heels in and insist it is. The other day I read an article about “Corona Toe” stating that asymptomatic people tend to get discolored toes, and that’s related to the Coronavirus. There have also been articles out about how the virus can cause a rash that “can look like anything from hives to chicken pox.”

It would almost be funny except that people are dying of other medical conditions, and this is having a huge economic impact. Fortunately my husband’s job is safe for now, but being a music teacher, I am only teaching around 15 online zoom lessons a week at this point (down from about 40). I’m fortunate to have any work at all when so many other jobs have laid off workers indefinitely, but I’m making less than half of what I used to.

To make matters worse, people seem to think this should be a game changer forever. Some retail stores have made mask wearing mandatory, and even in places where it’s not required, there is tremendous social pressure to wear them. Piano teachers seem to think online lessons are a good substitue for in person lessons, but they are not. You can’t play duets, ear training goes out the window, and it’s impossible to correct even the simplest things like hand position.

A lot of people who are tired of this pandemic seem to think the whole thing is blown up in order to boot Trump out of office. I don’t know how true it is, but if so it’s a low blow. I for one am tired of hearing about Coronavirus, and wish we as a society would stop the mass hysteria over something that isn’t preventable and isn’t killing a significant portion of the population.

My Weird Obsession with a Sex Offender…

Clearly I am a crazy person.

For the past two and a half months, I’ve been writing to this guy I know in federal prison. He’s an internet sex offender in for 9 years.

We were close in college, so the second I found out where he was (six months ago in late October), I flipped out. I sent several letters snail mail begging him to write back. When I finally did hear from him in mid December, it was the best present I could have gotten. All he really said was “I’m ok,” in about 200 words, and I responded immediately with a heartfelt letter of my own. I told him I was glad he was alright, that I heard he was engaged and was happy for him. I hoped having a fiancee meant he had support, visitors and wasn’t alone.

I didn’t hear anything for awhile. I but then in late January/early February, he sent me another letter asking if he could add me to his Corrlinks account. I immediately said “yes.” I don’t know if he had anything to do with it, or if it was just a coincidence, but I got a link from the bureau of prisons (BOP) to set up an email account February 14th. Valentine’s day.

I have no idea why this guy has affected me so much.

Despite the Valentine’s day thing, he’s not really nice to me. He’s only asked me about two personal questions the entire time we’ve written, he’s been somewhat angry, (not really at me, but I can tell he has anger issues), he uses terrible language, and seems miserable. He will talk to me, but generally it’s all factual. If I ask him about how the prison is, he’ll describe what it looks like. There is no real feeling to it.

I’ve also let him take advantage of me. I sent him a birthday gift, (worth about 20 dollars), and did a few internet searches for him. I’ve also sent him some information on how the Coronavirus is impacting prisons. I did draw the line at retrieving his personal information for him though. He wanted me to get his contact list from icloud, and I told him no. He also wanted some lengthy information on some laws concerning his profession, and he wanted me to send them snail mail, but I said “no” to that as well since it was a lengthy search.

The first time I said “no” to his request, he got angry. Not at me, but more about his situation I think. The second time he asked for a favor, I told him I was starting to feel like more of a secretary than friend. I had already sent him a few search results from an article he wanted and that gift for his birthday, so I felt like I had already done quite a bit. Of course I said it the nicest way I could, something like “I love you and all, but…” and he responded nicely the second time around. He told me he understood and respected how I felt, and that he “retracted the request.”

Over the last week or so, he has asked me for a few internet searches, but generally for something little like the price of something. It occurred to me that he might do that to ensure that I write him back. I don’t know though, it’s hard to say. He did ask me to look up the dumbest thing ever about soap making though. Something he really should have known given the fact that he has a chemistry degree.

He still says he has a fiancee, but I have my doubts. I mean, as a sex offender, that’s pretty isolating already. He had to keep that secret, and most women would run screaming if something like what he had been doing came to light. He tells me she is from west Africa, an NP, and they met at an airport five years ago and have been “doing the long distance thing” ever since.

I don’t know that I believe it though. He told me about a girl he met back in 2016 at an airport, but he said she was Bulgarian. Also, he tells me nobody is sending him stuff and doing internet searches and stuff like that. I don’t know that I buy it. The only thing that makes me pause is that his sister was the one who told me he was engaged.

I should’t care. I mean, if he’s telling me he’s engaged, I need to respect that. I’m going to assume he’s writing to her all the time, calling her every day and generally in love with her. If that’s what he wants me to believe, I will.

I’m conducting an experiment as of today. I’m not going to write to him at all for the next 7 days and see if he picks back up the conversation. We’ve come to a natural close on the last one, and he only wrote back a sentence or so, so I simply won’t pick it back up like I’ve been doing. I’m going to see if he does, or if he calls me at all.

I think it’s his intelligence that keeps me coming back for more with him, and the obvious flattery he gave me a long time ago with his adoration. I really do need to chill out and just let this guy go though. He’s not worth it. He’s a pedophile, not very nice, and though he’s smart, I don’t think he’s good for me to be corresponding with.

Somehow I keep torturing myself over him though….