(Trigger warning for more delicate readers. The following screed may include occasional outbursts of profanity.)

I wish I did, but I don’t own any Berkshire Hathaway stock. And while I tend to take the nostrums and bromides of billionaires with a 50 lb. block of salt, I find I pay more attention when Warren Buffett is quoted. Like recently, when he said, ” … there will be another pandemic. We know that there is a nuclear, chemical, biological and now cyber threat. Each of them has dire possibilities…It doesn’t seem like it’s something that society is fully prepared to deal with”.

His concerns didn’t stop at insufficient financial or technological wherewithall. That exists. What doesn’t exist in sufficient quantity is the matter of getting conservative public officials, “thought leaders” and the general public to take such things as seriously as, well, football play-offs, beach raves and motorcycle rallies.

Buffett, who credits his success as an investor to thousands of hours of reading of a wide spectrum of information, has every reason to be pessimistic about the U.S. and the world coping with a truly ravenous pandemic — a medieval-style disease with faster and more lethal rates of transmission than COVID-19. No one who has done any reading (or something other than Facebook posts) can look at this latest fourth surge of COVID-19 and fail to accept that this all but entirely due to an epidemic of stupidity … in one of the most technologically advanced societies on the planet.

I’m sure Buffett would agree that this literally death-dealing imbecility, doesn’t stop with COVID. The same bone-numbing ignorance applies to two other existential thrwats, namely, climate change and authoritarian violence against democracy.

Here in Minnesota we’re well into our second month of yellow, LA-in-the-Seventies-style, crud-filled skies, with daily records being set for the worst air quality … ever. You’d be just as healthy sucking down a pack of Camel straights as spending a day breathing in the air from wildfires. Fires stemming from drought that is a direct consequence of human-caused climate change. A crisis thoroughly researched and scientifically validated but yet still one that essentially the same 25-40% of Americans prefer to see as “liberal fear-mongering”, if not a plot by Silicon Valley elites and radical socialists to somehow deprive them of their freedoms.

That same percentage — and I’m confident a Venn diagram of the COVID “hesitant”, climate deniers and Trump worshippers would have near perfect overlap — sees no reason to investigate the January 6 Capitol riot, convinced by the echoes of their cult that it was something other than what everyone saw and was recorded for eternity.

So if you’re keeping score at home, that’s (1.) A pandemic that has already killed 640,000 and is revving back up again to re-cripple the economy, (2.) Climate change that is now routinely turning summers into bone-dry, smoky, crop-killing hellscapes, like something out of “Blade Runner: 2049” and (3.) A complete indifference to violent insurrection inspired by failed government leaders.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the connective tissue to all this is reckless, wretched stupidity, inspired and validated by a startling minority of players for their self-interest, be that commercial, ego or both.

COVID is resurging, spawned by the Trump base and the chronically alienated. Climate mayhem will only get worse, thanks to the ignorance and indifference of conservative leaders. (Do NOT read “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells if you want to believe otherwise. Stick with whatever Laura Ingraham is selling this week.) And then there’s violent insurrection, (which would aggravate both of those two). Violence egged on by elected Republican officials will happen again and likely repeat itself in worse ways in the absence of investigation and public punishment.

There isn’t just one grand solution to the “unpreparedness”. But permit me to suggest that we’ve reached a tipping point where coddling, and “reaching out” to those who don’t/won’t understand and pretending that global pandemics, global climate disaster and violent (not to mention racist) attempts to overthrow the American government are no more serious threats to our existence than quarrels over tax policy and school prayer.

What’s to be done? In the COVID context: Mandates. French style.

No vaccine? No walking into a bar. No getting on public transportation. No returning to work. Your kids stay home from school. Let the deniers rage. Let Ron DeSantis and Josh Hawley fund-raise off their voters’ dumb-as-a-stump petulance. Protestors in France made headlines, but 76% of the population agreed with the government’s vaccine mandate. Only fools want to prolong this idiocy.

Obviously the Biden administration would benefit from some back-up from private industry, which it is getting in a halting way. But we’d be snuffing out this fourth wave a lot faster if mega-coporations like Delta Airlines for example, denied service to the unvaccinated. (Might cut down on some of their “disruptive customers” problems, too.) Likewise, the Minnesota State Fair. No vaccination? No entrance.

Fair-minded Christian coddling of the stupid, the perpetually reckless (i.e. sociopathic) and the “historically suspicious” has become lethal enabling. So … remove their choice to be stupid and selfish. Give them the goddam culture war they always seem to want.

If that’s the same as saying, “Fuck them and the fucking horses of galloping stupidity they rode in on,” well, there you have it. Nothing else is working.