Oct 042020
 
 October 4, 2020  Posted by at 9:14 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,


EdgarDegas A la mer 1863

 

Scientists Study Whether Immune Response Wards Off Or Worsens COVID (O.)
Low-Flying Black Swans (Jim Kunstler)
Inflation Targeting Is a Very Stupid Policy (Cookson)
Assange Forced Those Behind War Crimes To Look In The Mirror – Pilger (RT)
John Pilger, Eyewitness To The Agony Of Julian Assange (Arena)
FBI Seized Legally Privileged Materials From Assange After Arrest (Gosztola)
Low Status Science Increases Jargon Use (SD)
Mask Facts (AAPS)

 

 

I guess it was perhaps inevitable, but today I find myself wondering what news to aggregate here. This is because Donald Trump has managed to now completely monopolize the media, and neatly divide it into two diametrically opposed camps. On the one hand there’s the camp that says the President is doing very well, on the other hand there are those who claim his condition is much graver that let on, and everybody’s lying who says it’s not.

It’s probably wise to realize that the media today is entirely based on a clickbait chase, and therefore on scandalizing and manipulating everything. The aim is not to inform people, but to make them click and read, click and read, rinse and repeat. Brought to you by their sponsors.

Personally, I think it would take a Herculean effort to get so many doctors and others in on the Big Lie, but on the other hand it’s entirely logical if the reports on his condition are skewed towards the positive. One would think that in normal times the press and the people could wait a few days to see how the disease evolves, but that doesn’t produce clickbait, which translates into no revenue. So that’s out.

I like this quote someone tweeted: “Burroughs once explained the phrase “Naked Lunch” as referring to “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” A better line than any in the book itself, I should say, and the perfect description of America this morning.”

But I thought I wouldn’t join that big effort here today, even if that leaves precious little other news. Still, here’s Trump speaking:

Trump

 

 

German lawyer COVID scandal
https://twitter.com/i/status/1312639876970491904

 

 

Maté

 

 

Everyone’s an export on COVID, but nobody knows a thing.

Scientists Study Whether Immune Response Wards Off Or Worsens COVID (O.)

British scientists have launched a major study aimed at uncovering the critical role that human antibodies and other immune defences play in the severity of Covid-19 cases. Results could support some scientists’ belief that antibodies triggered by common colds could be protecting children against the disease. Alternatively, the study could confirm other researchers’ fears that some immune responses to the virus may trigger deadly inflammatory reactions that could bedevil attempts to create anti-Covid vaccines. “This study could go in two very different directions,” said Michael Levin, professor of paediatrics at Imperial College London. “It could reveal that cross-reacting antibodies explain why children are less likely to suffer from severe Covid-19, or it might show patients’ own immune responses cause life-threatening effects.”

The study is being carried out by Levin’s group, a team led by Professor George Kassiotis at London’s Francis Crick Institute, and scientists led by Dan Davis, University College London. They will use thousands of samples which have been collected as part of existing studies funded by the EU and Wellcome. Much of the groups’ work will focus on antibodies, key immune defence proteins that bind on to viruses to block their activity. When Covid-19 first appeared, scientists began searching for antibodies against the virus in patients and healthy individuals and to their surprise found them not just in samples taken from recently infected people but in specimens that had been collected before the pandemic began.

“We discovered a small group – about 6% of the UK population – already had antibodies that could recognise the new virus, although they’ve never been exposed to it,” said Kassiotis. “We realised there must be cross reactivity occurring between common cold coronaviruses and the new pandemic strain. Both are coronaviruses, after all.” Coronaviruses cause about a fifth of UK common colds and antibodies triggered by them latch on to the Covid-19 virus. But could they actually be blocking Covid activity? “Our laboratory experiments suggest this may be the case,” Kassiotis said. “These antibodies may actually protect against Covid-19.”


Adults get common colds caused by coronaviruses once every two or three years. In contrast children get them five or six times a year because they constantly reinfect each other at school, said Kassiotis. As a result about 60% of them have coronavirus antibodies, 10 times the adult level. “Children do not generally get severe Covid-19 and I believe that protection is provided by cross-reacting antibodies triggered by repeating coronavirus colds,” said Kassiotis.

Read more …

“It typically takes about four days for Covid-19 symptoms to present, so early next week sometime the world will know if the bug made the president sick or if he shook it off like just another impeachment effort.”

Low-Flying Black Swans (Jim Kunstler)

The New York Times almost wet its panties breaking the pre-dawn news that the president has tested positive for coronavirus. By the end of day, Democrats across the land — or, at least, up and down the east and west coasts — will be gathering unto Santeria shrines, lighting MAGA hats on fire, sacrificing chickens, drawing Wiccan pentangles in the moonlight, and entreating all the other unseen powers of Providence to rapture Mr. Trump into everlasting oblivion somewhere beyond the crab nebula. The Judeo-Christian God of our fathers must have a special animus for the Golden Golem of Greatness. He / She / It / or They have heaped more tribulation on Mr. Trump than on the biblical Job of Uz, anguishing in Yahweh’s holy whirlwind.

RussiaGate, VeryFinePeopleGate, UkraineGate, BoltonGate, now this! It typically takes about four days for Covid-19 symptoms to present, so early next week sometime the world will know if the bug made the president sick or if he shook it off like just another impeachment effort. The ordeal will also be an interesting test of the hydroxychloroquine + zinc regimen Mr. Trump says he’s been on. The joyful hysteria in the mainstream news is so boisterous this morning that The Times hasn’t even played its obvious next card, which, I guarantee you, will be an effort to postpone the hearings over SCOTUS nominee Amy Coney Barrett on account of coronavirus being on-the-loose among government officials.


I’m pretty sure that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will keep a firm hand on the tiller of that ship — even if the darn proceeding has to go full Zoom meeting, they will git’er done (as we say in Deplorable Land). If the virus doesn’t knock Mr. Trump on his ass, I imagine we’ll be seeing quite a lot of him campaigning by video in quarantine, old game-show performer that he is. I wouldn’t even rule out some updated Oval Office versions of The Apprentice, with the president taking the opportunity to dismiss a few of the seditionists still lurking in government. Gina Haspel, you’re fired! Christopher Wray, you’re fired! Michael Horowitz, take a hike! General Mark Milley, you’re busted to corporal! Remember, the old Chinese word for crisis, weiji, means a combo of danger and opportunity.

Read more …

The damage cannot be undone.

Inflation Targeting Is a Very Stupid Policy (Cookson)

Much ink has been spilled in recent weeks over the U.S. Federal Reserve’s announcement that it will now, in effect, target inflation over the whole cycle. The message from the rest of the developed world’s central banks is similar: Most say that if necessary they’ll do more to get inflation back on target. This week Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central bank, laid the groundwork for following the Fed. The ECB will now also allow inflation to overshoot on the upside. Presumably such comments are meant to reassure the handful of people still worried that central banks might move a little hastily once the effects of the pandemic have dissipated and growth and inflation start to pick up.

Economists, strategists and investors have parsed their comments, altered their forecasts and placed their chips accordingly. Yet any discussion of whether inflation targeting is a good thing has been notable by its absence, even before large swathes of the economy were shut down by government edict. This is strange, because to anyone who’s not a central banker it has become increasingly clear that inflation targeting is a policy of great stupidity. When they introduced inflation targeting, starting with the Reserve Bank of New Zealand in 1990, central banks doubtless worried about too much inflation, given their experience in the previous couple of decades. Since the turn of the century, however, they’ve largely been trying to counter disinflationary forces. Not very successfully, it must be said.

In trying to increase by a fairly random amount an index of prices that they largely can’t or shouldn’t control, central banks couldn’t have done much more harm. They’ve crushed the savings and finance industry by slashing interest rates to historically low levels and driven the prices of all financial assets to a point where the phrase “unprecedented” scarcely covers it. Interest rates, bonds, credit, equities, foreign exchange: Not a single market is unmanipulated by central banks. By encouraging sky-high asset prices and huge leverage, they’ve made it far more likely that the world ends up with the sort of debt deflation that helped make the 1930s depression so awful. Or, failing that, they may be setting us up for an inflationary burst that would hammer the price of pretty much every financial asset.

The problems start with what central bankers are trying to achieve. Presumably, if they’re to look at inflation at all, they should look only at inflation over which they have some control, to whit domestically generated inflation (broadly, non-traded inflation). However, overall inflation measures also include tradable inflation, which relates essentially to imported goods. For the biggest economies, roughly a third of overall inflation comes from tradable inflation. And whilst non-traded inflation has remained very stable over the years, the tradable slice has really only headed in one direction: down. Since the global financial crisis, U.S. traded goods prices have fallen about 10 percentage points.


Crucially, these prices are set by North Asia in general and China in particular. If domestic inflation is stable, then the change in the overall consumer-price index must be driven by the far more volatile tradable part. Both the overall direction and the cyclical moves in G7 inflation are thus set by China.

Read more …

“The West’s self-perception is that it generally doesn’t do awful things… #WikiLeaks showed it’s not true” – Pilger

Assange Forced Those Behind War Crimes To Look In The Mirror – Pilger (RT)

Assange exposed Western hypocrisy and discovered “too much truth,” so his trial became a form of “revenge,” journalist and filmmaker John Pilger told RT’s Going Underground. The main part of the extradition trial of Julian Assange came to a conclusion this week, and a decision is now expected to be announced in early January. Pilger, a long-time supporter of the WikiLeaks founder, closely monitored the proceedings, which were barely covered in the Western media despite the serious repercussions for journalism that a ruling to extradite Assange would entail. Assange’s demise came because he provided “too much truth” and exposed Western hypocrisy, Pilger believes. “He made those who committed those war crimes, he forced them to look in the mirror… That’s his unforgivable crime.”

The West’s self-perception is that it generally doesn’t do awful things, and that its politicians are mostly truthful and are held in check by an independent media. WikiLeaks showed all these things not to be true, Pilger said. As a result, Assange was blatantly mistreated by the British justice system, both during his September trial at London’s Old Bailey and before that. He received an unprecedentedly harsh sentence for skipping bail, was locked up in a maximum-security prison with terrorists and violent criminals, was prevented from communicating with his defense team in a reasonable way, and faced numerous other injustices. “There has not been due process in this court; there has been due revenge.”


Should Assange be extradited to the US and tried for things that are no different from what many other investigative journalists did for decades, it would set a dangerous precedent, Pilger warned. It would send a signal that the US can get to anyone in any country who dares to publish anything that is not to Washington’s liking.

Read more …

“We were here for the ultimate of what the philosopher Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle: a man fighting for his life.”

John Pilger, Eyewitness To The Agony Of Julian Assange (Arena)

The prevailing atmosphere has been shocking. I say that without hesitation; I have sat in many courts and seldom known such a corruption of due process; this is due revenge. Putting aside the ritual associated with ‘British justice’, at times it has been evocative of a Stalinist show trial. One difference is that in the show trials, the defendant stood in the court proper. In the Assange trial, the defendant was caged behind thick glass, and had to crawl on his knees to a slit in the glass, overseen by his guard, to make contact with his lawyers. His message, whispered barely audibly through face masks, was then passed by post-it the length of the court to where his barristers were arguing the case against his extradition to an American hellhole.

Consider this daily routine of Julian Assange, an Australian on trial for truth-telling journalism. He was woken at five o’clock in his cell at Belmarsh prison in the bleak southern sprawl of London. The first time I saw Julian in Belmarsh, having passed through half an hour of ‘security’ checks, including a dog’s snout in my rear, I found a painfully thin figure sitting alone wearing a yellow armband. He had lost more than 10 kilos in a matter of months; his arms had no muscle. His first words were: ‘I think I am losing my mind’.

I tried to assure him he wasn’t. His resilience and courage are formidable, but there is a limit. That was more than a year ago. In the past three weeks, in the pre-dawn, he was strip-searched, shackled, and prepared for transport to the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, in a truck that his partner, Stella Moris, described as an upended coffin. It had one small window; he had to stand precariously to look out. The truck and its guards were operated by Serco, one of many politically connected companies that run much of Boris Johnson’s Britain.

The journey to the Old Bailey took at least an hour and a half. That’s a minimum of three hours being jolted through snail-like traffic every day. He was led into his narrow cage at the back of the court, then look up, blinking, trying to make out faces in the public gallery through the reflection of the glass. He saw the courtly figure of his dad, John Shipton, and me, and our fists went up. Through the glass, he reached out to touch fingers with Stella, who is a lawyer and seated in the body of the court.


We were here for the ultimate of what the philosopher Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle: a man fighting for his life. Yet his crime is to have performed an epic public service: revealing that which we have a right to know: the lies of our governments and the crimes they commit in our name. His creation of WikiLeaks and its failsafe protection of sources revolutionised journalism, restoring it to the vision of its idealists. Edmund Burke’s notion of free journalism as a fourth estate is now a fifth estate that shines a light on those who diminish the very meaning of democracy with their criminal secrecy. That’s why his punishment is so extreme.

Read more …

Laws have never meant a thing in the chase for Assange.

FBI Seized Legally Privileged Materials From Assange After Arrest (Gosztola)

The FBI in the United Kingdom enlisted the Ecuador government’s help in seizing legally privileged materials from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after he was arrested and expelled from their embassy in London on April 11, 2019. According to Gareth Peirce, one of Assange’s attorneys, that day she “made immediate contact with the embassy in regard to legally privileged material, an issue of huge concern.” Assange wanted the material—in addition to “confidential medical data”—”identified and released to his lawyers.” “Repeated requests by telephone, email and recorded delivery mail were entirely ignored by the embassy,” and in testimony submitted during the final day of evidence in Assange’s extradition trial, the embassy has never responded.

“One record of [Assange’s] entire archive” was effectively purloined, and without it, Peirce mentioned it has made putting together a defense in his extradition case more difficult because the initial allegations relate to communications, meetings, and events from 2010 and 2011. Proceedings in the evidentiary portion of Assange’s extradition trial concluded on October 1, and Judge Vanessa Baraitser announced she would rule on the request from the United States government on January 4, 2021. Before the last day wrapped, multiple statements from Peirce related to abuses of process in the case were entered into the record. They included details related to the espionage operation the Spanish security company UC Global carried out against Assange with the support of U.S. intelligence.


Peirce’s law firm Birnberg, Pierce & Partners asked the Australian Consulate in London for intervention because Assange is an Australian citizen. The Metropolitan Police in the United Kingdom claimed they played no role in the seizure or retention of any legally privileged materials. On May 20, 2019, the Australian Consulate received a request for Assange’s property to be “transferred to Ecuador.” The firm was invited to collect any “remaining possessions” that were not seized. When Assange’s property was collected shortly after, Peirce stated, “All legally privileged material was missing save for two volumes of Supreme Court documents and a number of pages of loose correspondence.”

Read more …

As if we never noticed.

Low Status Science Increases Jargon Use (SD)

Jargon is commonly used to efficiently communicate and signal group membership. We propose that jargon use also serves a status compensation function. We first define jargon and distinguish it from slang and technical language. Nine studies, including experiments and archival data analyses, test whether low status increases jargon use. Analyses of 64,000 dissertations found that titles produced by authors from lower-status schools included more jargon than titles from higher-status school authors. Experimental manipulations established that low status causally increases jargon use, even in live conversations.


Statistical mediation and experimental-causal-chain analyses demonstrated that the low status i! jargon effect is driven by increased concern with audience evaluations over conversational clarity. Additional archival and experimental evidence found that acronyms and legalese serve a similar status-compensation function as other forms of jargon (e.g., complex language). These findings establish a new driver of jargon use and demonstrate that communication, like consumption, can be both compensatory and conspicuous.

Read more …

Just so you know.

Mask Facts (AAPS)

COVID-19 is as politically-charged as it is infectious. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the WHO, the CDC and NIH’s Dr. Anthony Fauci discouraged wearing masks as not useful for non-health care workers. Now they recommend wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are hard to do (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies). The recommendation was published without a single scientific paper or other information provided to support that cloth masks actually provide any respiratory protection. Let’s look at the data.

The theory behind mask wearing:

  • Source control: Cloth mask can trap droplets that come out of a person’s mouth when they cough or sneeze.
  • Protection: Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) – only N95 masks

Transmission of SARS-CoV-2

Note: A COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) particle is 0.125 micrometers/microns (μm); influenza virus size is 0.08 – 0.12 μm; a human hair is about 150 μm.

*1 nm = 0.001 micron; 1000 nm = 1 micron; Micrometer (μm) is the preferred name for micron

*1 meter is = 1,000,000,000 [trillion] nm or 1,000,000 [million] microns

Droplets

  • Virus is transmitted through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or talks.
    • This idea guides the CDC’s advice to maintain at least a 6-foot distance.

Air currents

  • In an air conditioned environment these large droplets may travel farther.
  • Ventilation.  Even the opening of an entrance door and a small window can dilute the number of small droplets to one half after 30 seconds. (This study looked at droplets from uninfected persons). This is clinically relevant because poorly ventilated and populated spaces, like public transport and nursing homes, have high SARS-CoV-2 disease transmission despite physical distancing.

Humidity

  • Since 1961, experiments showed that viral-pathogen-carrying droplets were inactivated within shorter and shorter times as ambient humidity was increased. Dryness drives the small aerosol particles. See e.g., review of studies, https://aaqr.org/articles/aaqr-20-06-covid-0302

Conclusions

The preponderance of scientific evidence supports that aerosols play a critical role in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2.  Years of dose response studies indicate that if anything gets through, you will become infected.

  • Thus, any respiratory protection respirator or mask must provide a high level of filtration and fit to be highly effective in preventing the transmission of SARS-CoV-2.  (Works for Mycobacterium tuberculosis (3μm)
  • Public health authorities define a significant exposure to COVID-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic COVID-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes).
    • The chance of catching COVID-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal.

Read more …

 

 

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A society is as advanced as its treatment of its weak, its handicapped and incapacitated.”
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Home Forums Debt Rattle October 4 2020

Viewing 17 posts - 1 through 17 (of 17 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #64051

    EdgarDegas A la mer 1863   • Scientists Study Whether Immune Response Wards Off Or Worsens COVID (O.) • Low-Flying Black Swans (Jim Kunstler) • I
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle October 4 2020]

    #64054
    Basseterre Kitona
    Participant

    Corona Scandal? I like it. Good to see that lawyers are finally making some pushback.

    As for masks, even the advocates seem to admit that the cloth and surgical varieties are only marginally useful. Call me crazy, but aren’t those face shields with a plastic (impermeable) barrier a better choice for limiting spread from coughs/sneezes/talking?

    And since you can actually see the entire face through the clear shield, they are much more humane than the ridiculously stupid looking cloth and surgical coverings.

    Or why not go a step further and just mandate motorcycle helmets for everyone in public? Protect against viral spread and concussions, that’s a win-win.

    #64055
    Mister Roboto
    Participant

    About the “Association of American Physicians and Surgeons”, according to Wikipedia.

    The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a conservative non-profit association founded in 1944. The group was reported to have about 5,000 members in 2014. The association has promoted a range of scientifically discredited hypotheses, including the belief that HIV does not cause AIDS, that being gay reduces life expectancy, that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer, and that there is a causal relationship between vaccines and autism. It is opposed to the Affordable Care Act and other forms of universal health insurance.

    So there’s that….

    #64057
    zerosum
    Participant

    ” … today I find myself wondering what news to aggregate here.”
    I got an idea ….
    Let’s not do reruns.
    Let’s not do cut and paste.
    Hummmmm!
    Wait.
    I’m thinking.

    #64058
    sumac.carol
    Participant

    Re the AAPS: I thought they identified some valid issues of concern related to vaccines. Unfortunately they have some very unscientific positions on other issues, which undermines their credibility.
    Re Taleb’s note of the day: if only we really followed this idea. In Europe you have refugees living in squalor. Here in Canada we have Aboriginal people living on reserved located in the most polluted places, without access to clean water, often in homes that regularly get flooded. Access to health care is terrible, high rates of suicide among youth, high rates of substance abuse. Drives me crazy when people (invariably non-Aboriginal) day what a great country Canada is.

    #64060
    Jim W
    Participant

    I have just finished watching the video submitted by John Kirby about the German lawyer working to expose the conspiratorial fraud of covid 19, as practiced by most countries’ governments. The story appears to have been ruthlessly suppressed but deserves a wider audience. I’m eager to know your thoughts on it. Thanks for your invaluable contributions.

    #64062

    Re: Taleb’s note: someone here in Greece tweeted today that there has been no running water in the new camp on Lesbos for three weeks

    #64063

    Yeah, the AAPS are a weird bunch. But the article makes sense

    #64064

    Re: plastic face shields: they have huge spaces at the top. Useful if viruses and droplets would travel in straight lines, but they do not

    #64065
    Geppetto
    Participant

    A society is as advanced as its treatment of its weak, its handicapped and incapacitated.”
    – Nassim Taleb

    Normally would not check here at the beginning of a potentially beautiful Sunday…But.
    I saw that yesterday on Taleb’s Twitt and I had this muse that certainly Raul would quote. Sure enough. This begs so many questions and further discussion. Potentially opening a giant can of philosophical if not scientific worms.

    Not sure how this squares with complexity and emergence… science(?) Evolution? To me it seems to separate mankind from it’s very source. Dominion over nature. A surreptitious quantification of what intelligence is? Which kind of goes against Taleb’s anti Quillet tack..?

    I don’t know? Maybe it was the psychedelics in the 60’s and 70’s? A thousand hikes and rides to the top of the mountain? Thousands of hours spent on the surface of the great sea? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

    A very strong and kind buddhist friend of mine once told me. ” ….let’s just wait and see..”

    I’m all for helping the weak, the handicapped and incapacitated. No problem . But it would probably be socially *just* if in fact they themselves realized that the were in fact of those conditions….otherwise create the perfect conditions for a kind of *normalized* co-dependence. And we know where that leads….

    #64067
    madamski cafone
    Participant

    @ Gepetto

    “A society is as advanced as its treatment of its weak, its handicapped and incapacitated.”
    – Nassim Taleb

    Perhaps you didn’t write clearly enough but your closing paragraph seems to border on blaming the victims. The defining word in Taleb’s statement is advanced. We have not advanced from neolithic justice equality. We have, however, created the largest population of the most aggressively invasive species the planet has seen outside of a few insect and microbe species. Those hominids in turn have demanded the most per capita use and waste of planetary resources of any organism ever. It’s compounded greedy madness.

    This has placed enormous demands on those neolithic sociomoral capacities that we are still limited to. Such extravagant resource use using such advanced technology should create utopia for humanity and steadily reduce its greedy blind waste of finite resources and harm to non-human beings. This is what the (eco) hippies were screaming about in the 60s/70s. Instead, we are regressing to conditions that resemble the Pharaonic empire at its worst. The cost/benefit ratio is very expensive for so little. No matter what, more people are impoverished every day, both in total and in ratio to the population. Meanwhile, the resources to rebuild in more humane just manner are disappearing.

    Humanity is a case of Utopia or Bust. We are obviously going to bust. Advance, remember, means forward motion. We’ve taken a million steps forward with our petro-technical civilization, but the way we do a will require a billion steps back. Many won’t survive the trek.

    &*(

    As for AAPS, someone I know said (just this morning) that if one doesn’t read books by con liars and artists, one’s reading list will fit under a postage stamp. Same guy quoted a Baltimore homicide detective, again this morning: “Let’s see who’s lying, who’s lying more and who’s lying the most. ”

    #$%

    As for inspirational songs:

    If  you say a prayer
    Say  one for me
    Oh keep me in your thoughts

    ’Cause I’ll say, say one for you
    Hold  it for the truth
    I  won’t let go at all cost

    I can’t play the blame game any longer
    Made  me feel stronger
    Just to say that I’m weak

    Dark thoughts pile in
    One upon another
    Dark  as any other place, place that I’ve been

    So light a candle for me
    Be the guide that I need
    When I’m all alone

    So light a candle for me
    Be the joy I see
    I’m on my way back home

    I’ll dream of you
    And all the things you do
    When I’m gone

    I’ll dream of you
    And the truth
    Oh the truth

    Is anybody out there
    As full of shit as me?
    Does anybody out there feel my guilt?

    ’Cause we can start over and over again
    Lit by our own light
    We’re all just candles in the night

    So light a candle for me
    Be the guide that I need
    When I’m all alone

    Light a candle for me
    Be the joy I see
    I’m on my way back home

    #64069
    Susmarie108
    Participant

    ALERT: JKunstler in freefall. Consumed by the red swans of his own imagination, he hysterically claims we’re on a roll celebrating Trumps Covid diagnosis. If he really wants to rally the Deplorables, why not give them some sanity with their spittle? Defending the President’s bad behavior by not calling it out (like Trumps debate moment where he mocks Biden for wearing a BIGGLY mask) – is not cool. How much more fun could JK have had taking us down the KARMA road? I mean, how crazy is it that the guy who does a major mask smackdown in the middle of a Presidential debate ends up getting Covid a few days later?

    The Assange Revenge Trial….say no more.

    Gender Reveal marquee is funny…thanks for the laugh.

    #64070
    madamski cafone
    Participant

    @Susmarie108

    Perhaps Kuntsler is not trying to rally Deplorables. Kuntsler has never baan a fan of Trump. Kuntsler has ripped Trump a new asshole so often it’s useless counting.

    #64071
    Susmarie108
    Participant

    Lighting a candle for the caregivers and shepherds of our weak, our handicapped, and our incapacitated.

    #64072
    Susmarie108
    Participant

    @madamski: you are correct, JK would not be rallying the Deplorables as it is unlikely they would be reading his works (books included). He is rallying on behalf of the Deplorables, smacking down those who put them in the basket in the first place. A smackdown well deserved!

    #64073
    Kimo
    Participant

    “A society is as advanced as its treatment of its weak, its handicapped and incapacitated.”
    – Nassim Taleb
    “I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.” – Nassim Taleb
    Combining these two quotes, I would conclude that government charity is not the answer Taleb would advise. More likely church groups and other local organizations. Never involuntary, as in sourced by taxes. Thus voluntary, and universal, participation is the ultimate in advanced society.

    #64116
    ezlxa1949
    Participant

    One metre is a billion nanometres, not a trillion.

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