Tried to go shopping

I'd gone shopping for survival food a week or two ago. It made me realize that pretty much all I eat is survival food. But my mother talked to my brother in Seattle and he told her to buy toilet paper! Lots of toilet paper! Him she listens to. So I waited until 10:30 when the stores would have fewer people. All the paper products were long gone as were rice, beans, potatoes and ramen. There was lots of canned soup and some of the less desirable jars of spaghetti sauce. Lots of meat but not in hotdog form. And bread was gone. I got two cans of tomato paste and some Pop Tarts.

I got in line with the cashier who's covered with tattoos. If you say "how are you", he says that he's "blessed".

Prices seem to have gone up. I paid a hundred bucks for what didn't seem like that much. It was two bags of groceries.

A few weeks ago, I would have quipped that I'd be disappointed if I didn't get to self-isolate for fourteen days, but now I'm just worried. How do you avoid a virus like this?

Maybe this little world-wide disaster will make people take global warming more seriously. It's not like other things. When a blizzard hit the UK, newspapers had the good taste to report on it like it was a big disaster but it was really rather pleasant for most people. They got to stay home from work while the kids played outside.

With COVID-19, it's hard to see an upside. Though a British paper did:

The Malthusian power elite of Big Capital used to talk like this only in the privacy of their country clubs. Now they just write it openly. Here’s Jeremy Warner, “business” writer for The Telegraph: “From an entirely disinterested economic perspective, COVID-19 might even prove mildly BENEFICIAL in the long term by disproportionately CULLING elderly dependents”.

That from counterpunch.org.