boscohorowitz
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One thing a decent bot does (not saying def is a decent bot, not saying he isn’t) is test various logical fallacies on people. Remember, a bot has virtually unlimited data storage/access capacity, depending on its owner. (arf!) It can literally prodfile each of us in minute detail, store that data, integrate it with other details… in that sense, they are far superior to us.
def seems determined currently to see how much traction it can get with the ‘but alternate covid treatments aren’t perfect nor are their promoters and marketers!’ fallacy. The fallacy being the idea that imperfection is a disqualifier, when after all, nothing is perfect except, maybe (just maybe) the core laws of physics, which if not perfect are at least supernally reliable.
Any decent bot already knows how easily humans get sucked into arguments via ego and accompanying facets like our sense of justice and fair play (but mostly our pwesshus widdle egos). That’s old ho-hum stuff for what I will call an agit-bot.
The bot doesn’t even care that much whether we doubt its humanity. So long as we engage with it, it’s doing its job and getting what it “wants”. Ignoring it is mostly futile so long as it can observe. Interacting with us is extra bonus pay but dicet too, because, if we merely toy with it, its data hygiene goes to shit.
It reminds me of something I wrote about my experience as a Sally Ann bell-ringer many years ago:
Shekina: during last Xmas’s bell&kettle gig, my friend Jay’d loaned me his Tibetan singing bowl. Same one I have now, up here. When struck, a singing bowl hums like a choir of tuning forks, the sound going through your body like that one second just before you realize you’re awake. All during the vicious freezing week before last Xmas, it’s soft bronze om toned incongruously warm through Albertson’s parking lot like a dinner bell for homeless people.
Tap bell; heads turn. Tots in tow would wrench free of their mother’s hand to stare at me, this wild Noel creature wearing a bird’s nest sprouting faux reindeer antlers of Xmas tree branches. With a red clown nose. But after they’d passed and their tiny attention spans had turned to the next moment’s revelation, I’d tone the bell and their heads would whip around, eyes wide. One lad kept his eyes on me the entire walk to the far end of the parking lot, head rotated almost 180 degrees, his Mom smiling at him, then me, then him.
Startled grownups would stare, sometimes almost angrily, hungry eyes howling like dogs at a passing ambulance siren. Recovering, they’d smile and wink as they entered the store. Exiting, they’d dutifully donate like they were passing through security at the North Pole and being scanned by a Good Kid/Bad Kid mettle detector.
It wasn’t a job, it was performance art, busking on an hourly wage, convincing others and myself to suspend their disbelief. Paid to be a convincing kook, I was disturbingly good at it.
I’d pretend I was a wind-up elf in a Macy’s Xmas window. It had to be subtle: a gently repeated slow-motion, a semi-wooden smile, not some break-dancer doing the robot. A good robot doesn’t try to act like a robot, it tries to act like a person. You have to believe the mythos you’re projecting for it to work. Imagining I was an android on the lam, desperately trying to pass for human in my camouflage Xmas troll suit, only my eyes showing. Like a black man passing for white in a Whites Only sauna. I think I got pretty good at it. Pawning myself off as a mechanical hominid posing human kept my mind off the cold.
Closing my eyes, I’d summon my muse, the Waltzing Woman, and perform. Imagine the Xmas ballet’s Nutcracker doing Tai Chi. The Terminator looking for the one last hope of all mankind to skateboard across the lot in order to saved a young John Connor from the Tehminatuh T-1000.I knew I was in the zone when people ‘knew something was wrong’ but didn’t get the robot act. Thought I maybe had a neurological disorder. Parkinson’s, maybe. And what could be more human than feeling like an outsider trying to fit in?
How do you mime being invisible? I’d like to see Marcel Marceau do that. Like household ghosts practicing Stanislavsky method-haunting, making you aware of them even though they’re invisible to your senses: be the ectoplasm! make them almost but not quite see you! smash the 4th wall!
Can you tell I miss that month? I soaked up all that unearned kindness like frozen earth on a sunny winter day. The view from where I manned my red kettle in front of Albertsons waves at me when I remember it. Stare at the same horizon for hours and it will burn its silhouette in your memory.I knew every tree, telephone wire, and chimney of that parking lot skyline on a first name basis, sensed their mood swings as the light and wind changed through the day. After sunset, they’d remain in virtual sight, mental sonar reconfirming their location, and I could see the wind move them even in darkness. When the wind picked up, this one spruce named Freddie the Freeloader did this shuffle groove with its limbs, like a busstop waiter dancing in place to his iPod.
By the end of the first week I had Pavlov’s Condition: when someone approached I’d unconsciously wiggle my bell hand like a dog wags its tail. I actually sustained a job-related injury: bell-ringer’s elbow, basically tennis elbow but with different etiology. Had to get a cortisone injection December 31st.
New Years Eve sucked big booze bottles. It was the pain meds my doctor gave for that cortisone injection that set me off. Opiates make me irrationally exuberant and suddenly anything goes. Doc gave me the injection that morning, squeezing me in a crowded half day schedule, provided me with a few days’ supply of Tramadol samples, some supposedly subdued synthetic codeine that nonetheless got me higher than belfry bats, and I drank quite a bit after that. Perhaps I romanticize my bell-ringing because of how bad things got afterward?Counselor, I was sober for a whole. goddam. month. Longer. A biblical 40 days. It felt as epic to me as Moses in the wilderness. If I could ring a bell in the cold all year I would do so if it would let me be a decent human being. O counselor! I have failed everyone!
<end>Boop.
“Oh, I think it’s pretty obvious (the second one).”
COnfirmation bias runs deep in all of us. WHile IU’m not invested in believing that the likes of def are human or not, the fact is that bots have gotten so good it’s become almost impossible to tell.
The “Turing threshhold” has been crossed. Not entirely. Long term study of the output of such entities will eventually betray something obviously not human. But they’ve become really really good. You mentioned knowing when someone is too emotionaqlly invested in something. I submit that it’s possible for you or I to become so emotionally invested in believing that sucn entities are or aren’t human that we lose objectivity — something a bot never does — thereby putting ourselves at its advantage.
One thing a decent bot studies is how emotionally invested we are in this or that.
Even dumbbots need a hobby, I guess. It’s sad when someone is such a one-note johnny you can’t decide if they’re a robot or just a compulsive obsessive vendettaist.
Bannon is being generous. Beheading is humane unless you use a dull sword. Crucifixion or being burnt alive or merely pulled apart by an hysterical mob is more likely if he doesn’t suicide oe get taken out by a (presumably corporate) sniper a la JFK, which act will then of course be blamed on whomever seems to TPTB to be the most useful.
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In the McCarthy 50s, nuclear alert drills weren’t just in school; they were mandatory for the public too. Don’t know if its universal or varied state-to-state etc. Mothers got sick and tired of having to freak their kids out and ruin a picnic just because Dr. Strangelove wanted to play with his air raid siren. By the time I was in kindergarten in 196i in Chicago, we had tornado drills not nuclear drills. Duck’n’cover was actually reasonably effective for these, although we usually went downstairs to the furnace room. No one in public or the workplace was expected to do more than otice that the authorities were testing the air raid siren system.
We don’t do those anymore although the nuclear threat is greater than ever. We do mass shooting safety drill, although I suppose those have mostly stopped.
Now we walk around with masks and demand vaccination.
This time around, when the people have had enough, it won’t just be a fadeaway of a former policy. As the body count rises, so will the propensity for civil outrage.
And, as Nicole Foss (and Noam Chomsky and virtually every celebrity) demonstrates, one can be a genius, yea, even a genius at holistic analysis as is Nicole Foss, and still be a stark raving moron concerning things that align with your sociopolitical outlook a certain way.
Seeing as how Trump fast-tracked the original Pfizer vaccine, Nicole’s attitude seems to be: Dump Trump but not his policies.
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At the doctor’s office today, a modest clinic with maybe 10 practitioners, covidiocy reigns, of course. It occurred to me that most medical personnel don’t have time to vet the validity of the mandated covid narrative. They’re too busy keeping up with increasing regulations, medications, & regimes amid an increasingly insane payment system.They can’t afford to doubt the word from on high, not necessarily because it could cost them their job, but because they don’t have time to vet the Official Word from the AMA/CDC/NiH.
Ask your doctor abou…t what we told him to tell you.
This seems pertinent:
Regarding global corp statehood, I read this book 10-15 years ago. The fact that the dominant emerging form of government is what is loosely called the “market state” is well laid out in this book without any need to rely on heavy-breathing geriatric baby-humping biollionaires. Greedy sociopathic rulers are as old as Chinese oracle bones. The size of empire has steadily expanded through the millennia, going as far as the resource/technology base of the time would allow.
Our modern consumer society would morph into market state-hood even if Zuckerberg had never learned to write hex code. When an entire species is bent on sucking the planet and all non-human life into scattered waste heaps, the concept of global corporatism is inevitable.
laffin boy: you’re welcome to swing by my place and physically inspect my cajones up close. Orally. With a mouthful of Listerine. My balls need gargling.
Get back to us when you have determined how to make humanity do your bidding and rise up together to Smash the Man and all that glorious stuff. I’m sure that you of all people have figured out a way to bell that cat. I’m sure you can make the Glorious Revolution and that yours won’t be even more disastrous than that against which it revolts. You are obviously The Man. Our own Little Lenin.
Meanwhile try telling us something that doesn’t already get said here about a dozen times a week:
” it’s the horrifying fact that there’s a GLOBAL PLAN to replace all existing governments with the world’s first planet-wide Totalitarian Corporate State.”
We already know that rich megabillionaires and such would like to rule the world. Really. We’d kinda noticed that. We disagree over how imnportant a factor this is, and how likely they are to succeed at it, but we have noticed that megalomaniacs generaly do fit their description.
Raul has his issues as do all human beings, but somehow I suspect that a crucial lack of courage or moral resolve is among them.
SInce you came out swinging ad hominem at virtually every soul-shadow in the room, I’ll reply in kind, per the Golden Rule:
“no particular message, but it’s duke, the greatest human ever to arise from the swamps of the potomac, and one of the principal reasons god invented america.”
Ain’t he just swell? Thx:) Didn’t know that video exists. You have made my day and my whole week just might never got off the A train.***
Regarding my old high school chum:
This fellow has never addressed his mental health issues and it shows: he’s a flat earther who believe the Rothschilds have giant underground tunnels crisscrossing the globe (with or without ley line associations — I forget), space travel is impossible including the fact that spaceships will smack into the Firmament, and jet engines run on compressed air sans fuel.
(He called me a “fucking ninny” for pointing out the countless ways that known physics makes this impossible. It was saddening but insightful and just plain fascinating. And he doesn’t even work for the CIA or NSA. He does it all on his own!)
Possibly the smartest manh I’ve known captured his essence here:
“I’m not trying to ask Bosco out on a date here…no offense.”
I’m reminded of a quip by an old high school friend of mine. Paraphrased due to memory failure:
“So what if I’m easily fooled and prone to delusion? All I can do is wear a cute dress and some Chanel # 5 and hope that Fate mistakes me for an easy date.”
Sometimes it’s wise to be a tad reluctant of homoeroticism, especially with a man who’s known as:
*snigger*
Fwiw, I think you’ve given me the full loving measure: you accept me as I am. My motto is that ‘like’ is approval while ‘love’ is acceptance.
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I love that scene in Frankl’s book where, rescued from extermination in a Nazi copncentration camp, he sees the little bird in the morning sunlight.
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btw, it occurs to me that it may not be entirely coincidental that we escalated in Nam around the time Hogan’s Heroes did such a good job of defanging the culturally enshrined image of Germans as evil barbarians with no conscience. They tried to replace Nazis/Chinks with gooks but one too many picture of napalm babies en flambeau by our bombs for the hatred to stick.
By 1980, we had Iran and our new enemy: sand nigrahs.
Today it’s Russia, China again, and the unvaccinated. They appear to be going all-out.
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John Day: outside the paramedic circle, I’m not sure that ASAP has a reliable functional meaning in the Euromerican medical complex. But whatever. Today is today. Tomorrow will be tomorrow. Sooner or later, somebody’s bound to be standing over somebody’s grave.Just because I fell in love with the expression when it was used to describe my apparel when camping last week, I share this image of me in a “Canadian tuxedo”:
“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.”JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE” (from the INFJ profile shared by Mr. Roboto)
That rather sounds like me although I am both introverted and extroverted. Doing what Goethe describes gets me into enormous trouble. I mostly keep to myself these days, especially with my hearing issues, and often consider taking a vow of silence. But I can’t help it: I want to help people escape their inner prisons.
“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds
Have no fear for atomic energy
‘Cause none of them can stop the time
How long shall they kill our prophets
While we stand aside and look? Ooh!
Some say it’s just a part of it
We’ve got to fulfill the book”***
“Depopulation is “the answer” to what?”
A reliable way of ending the incessant destruction of a nice little place I call Terra the Fair, not to mention the ongoing cyberneticization of a once tolerably clever and once not entirely and vacuously rapacious species known as homo sapiens.
“The shadowy puppet masters are NOT trying to select for people who solve their own problems.”
Doesn’t matter what the shadowy ickazoids think they’re selecting for. It’s HAPPENING. The shadow-icks are pointless, futile, ultimately incosequential. There’s this thing called nature, reality, the dao, even god, if you will, that does.
“Focusing on a 90% population reduction is not helpful. Doing everything necessary to cooperatively adapt and survive is helpful to the process.”
Nonetheless, it helps to pay attention to the road one is on when driving. That road is, from all perspectives, heading smack into a major bottleneck i.e. die-off. Of course wokring cooperatively is the answer: we’re social creatures. We can’t live without each other. Those alive 50 years from now will understand that thoroughly, even if they continue humanity’s standard ops procedure: cooperate as one group to annihilate, oppose, enslave, or — at best — assimilate the other.
What merciful grace we experience among each other will almost certainly happen within that paradigm, unless someone like Jeebus shows up and saves our ass… but that forecast predicts an incredible amount of suffering before life on Terra is properly repaired: “Jesus gave His life for us…” my aching arsehole. He paid His price but we will nonetheless pay our way too. Entropy is the foundation of physics, the one principle operant in all physical interactions: you got to pay your way. TANSTAAFL, even, altho I fear I may have lured a flock of Randroids with that phrase.
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“Human moral progress is the one form of progress I deeply hope we can somewhat hold on to.”Just my sorry-ass opinion, but human moral progress in the cointext (an apposite typo, yes?) of human civilization, roughly the past 10k years of human activity, has always been dependent on increased a) material/energy abundance and b) other populations — animal and human — to oppress, enslave, slaughter, and — when we’re sane enough to remember that we’re predators not moral crusaders, eat, as is the Lawe of the Jungle which we ignore even as we consume vast volumes of life.
But that’s just me. Ain’t looking for no debate. My opinion is that the best we’ll do is some kind of reset to our neolithic Edenic state after a century or so of godawful suffering and savagery. Which is by no means an endorsement of apathy or cruelty, but rather, very much the opposite. Fuck the world. One can’t save the world. But love thy neighbor… if neighbor lets you. If they don’t, you’ll probably have to put a spike in their head. If you don’t do that, not only might they hurt you, but if you pull your punch and don’t kill them, you’ll probably succumb to the temptation to oppress and enslave them. Be what you are: a predator, and you’ll be able to morally govern yourself sanely. Even Ted Nugent grasps that much.
We are ruled by degenerate monsters not because they are so clever and powerful — they ain’t. We’re ruled by such critters primarily because we don’t take full responsibility for ourselves. As soon as we become “successful” enough to form groups larger than the homo sapient “monkeysphere” of roughly 100-200 max — “mere tribalism” as it is dismissively called — we devolve from sharing responsibility to delegating responsibility, yea, paying for responsibity. This I see as ‘Foundational Socialism’, that thing Dr. D describes as being so seductively rewarding at first but ultimately enslaving and depriving afterward. If I read him correctly, he seems to associate this with modern political movements called socialism, when it is merely the essential aspect of all super-tribal human systems of mutual engagement.
As soon as arbitarily institutionalized authority is enacted, we strive for comfort at the expense of others in ever more powerful, i.e. destructive, ways.
Trying to fix the large social situation is a sucker’s game. Work on forming a tribe in your vicinity. Genuine generate human cooperative groups are primarily functions of proximity and frequency. This is why families fall apart once Junior and Junette leave home to find work in the Big City. Too far away, too infrequent physically present time together.
What matters is what you do with who you’re with, period. The rest is mediated action-at-a-politicized/commercialized-distance, and it always produces more evil than good overall, evil usually disguised as good, a deception that works so long as the bread’n’circuses are sufficiently abundant.
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“that Thantos dude<>ROck’em-SOck’em”You’re so right! Something tickled me subliminally when I saw that image. One was a resemblance to Tom Waits but the other JDay has now revealed to me.
I think that many people including me think that depopulation is the answer. Many people including me believe that depopulation is the inevitable outcome.
How intentional the obviously inevitable depopulation that our major policies — not just covidiocy — will produce is a question unanswerable with certainty.
What pair of butterfly wings in China may have triggered this thunderstorm everywhere is somewhat answerable. Why those wings flapped the way they did is also unanswerable outside the constants of human craving for power and admiration from without and within.
But I feel confident assuming that many people think that depopulation by means other than outright fire’n’brimstone nuclear annihilation is the better inevitability.
As always, my core position is that our belief in Mighty Global Masters grossly exaggerates the amount of control they have. Power up the yinm-yang, yes, but control?
A 10-year old kid who joyrides Daddy’s Corvette is likely to wreak devastation, but that’s not the child’s intent. I believe that for every Dr. Evil there are 100 power-hungry fools making vroom-vroom noises with the authorities, monies, and powers they have. SInce theirs is a circular self-serving logic, and the amount of authority, money, and power are limited even with a metastic Federal Reserve, the world’s largest military budget, and a Congress that passes deranged legislation the way cows pass gas, they must share a circular course and so follow each other like hot-doggers at the Indy 500.
Somebody go in the basement and mend the fuse, eh? The power just went out.
Clueless Honky:
tI will acknowledge upfront that I will probably come across as arrogant judgmental and insensitive when I critique honkycat’s article, but it comes from admiration and respect for the core article:
1) more contrast between text and background, pls. Plain black against plain white is ideal, especially for older eyes like mine or impatient eyes like most of ours. Subtle matte shades of vanilla blonde grey and such are for business-and-Hallmark cards, in my earnest opinion.
2) your Tolerant Class trope is superb. I would focus on that portion and condense or remove much of the prefatory and explanatory items. For example, this quote: “hearing someone utter a critique against an ideological construct that another person told them was good and correct is much more problematic than forcing someone to be injected with an experimental drug under the threat of losing their livelihood.” will just make most readers’ eyes glaze over, alas.
3) I’d remove the second paragraph entirely. It’s unnecessary and therefore an eye-strain.
4) Beginning with “If you have somehow made it this far…” on down, I’d remove the entire text. Your point has already been well made by then. Assuming you’d like others to share your article, for it to make the rounds on the web, concision and pertinency are your core allies.
The discussion of Mass Formation requires readers to deeply and critically self-analyze themselves, and that is a rarity in our culture, even if you pay someone $1 million. Stick with the ‘we’ve been duped’ approach, sez me: people are happy to blame others and loath to admit responsibility. The ‘others’ in this case are so blameworthy there’s no need to ask readers to examine themselves in an unflattering way.
As the song says, “a broken heart needs someone new to blame it on”.
This comes from a person who has been told to cut to the chase, awreddy, more times than he cares to remember.
You write awesomely, chooch. Folks like me and Doc D, with our excessive flair for poetic hyperbole, are hardly models of clarity. We compensate with flair. It’s like Ravel told Gershwin when Gershwin asked Ravel to teach him composition:
‘You’re already a first-rate Gerswhin. Why aspire to be a 2nd-rate Ravel?’ (or words to that effect)
It occurs to me that homogenization is not pasteurization. Tune in tomorrow when I discuss Hegelian Dianetics. 😉
As for solo Sting, my fave song of his along with Fields of Gold:
Vinnie C> on drums is superb on this one.
P.S. Jeez, chooch, you conveyed an awful lot of complex info in 3 smallish and easily understood paragraphs. FOr you:
To be clear, I don’t write off Mercola’s milk claims per se, just note that the mechanism of injury he cites is not finding much if any support via lab testing. THAT said, today’s lab testing and peer review are ambiguous at best, of increasingly questionable competence, and at worst (and too often) plainly corrupt.
As for whether drinking whole milk versus homo-milk is “healtheir” (word in quotes because health/healthier is a broad topic with shifting variables): of course fresh milk is more nourishing, all other things being equal, for example, no harmful bacteria in the fresh milk.
We tend to forget that things like homo-milk exist is because there is no other currently feasible way of providing daily milk to a few hundred million milk drinkers without a whole bunch of them dying from milk-borne disease. Almost every problem we complain of aside from personal misfortune is a result of Too Many People via Petro-Techno Industrialism and the enormous consumer poopulation this engendered.
I drank fresh milk that I milked myself on my Uncle’s rural estate back in the late 70s/early 80s. Awesome stuff — so long as you kept the cow out of wild onion and such.
This reminded me of something Lincoln said. First, the context:
Lincoln and His Team of Homeopaths
The controversial but perennially lovable Lincoln (well, he was a charmer and his gift with language has yet to be seen again in USA political rhetoric) knew how to brew high-proof analogies:
“He has at last invented this sort of do-nothing Sovereignty-that the people may exclude slavery by a sort of “Sovereignty” that is exercised by doing nothing at all. Is not that running his Popular Sovereignty down awfully? Has it not got down as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death? But at last, when it is brought to the test of close reasoning, there is not even that thin decoction of it left. It is a presumption impossible in the domain of thought. It is precisely no other than the putting of that most unphilosophical proposition, that two bodies can occupy the same space at the same time. The Dred Scott decision covers the whole ground, and while it occupies it, there is no room even for the shadow of a starved pigeon to occupy the same ground.”
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Thank you, uzeroid. The Police impress me more and more over time — and I was a big fan when they were big. Just not their first album.
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Noirette:
Having you around is like having a magnifying glass that reads the invisible fine print between the lines.
sumac: thanx so much for the recommendation. I will put it wo work right away. By the time a dermatologist will see me and get the lab results back, I’ll probably be cured.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mercola spread misinformation about the virus and pseudoscientific anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms;[10][11][12] researchers have identified him as the “chief spreader of coronavirus misinformation online”.[10][13][14][15] He has been warned numerous times by the FDA for selling unapproved health products, including supposed treatments for COVID-19.[14] Mercola was banned from Youtube on September 29, 2021.[16]”
Hard to imagine a stronger endorsement of the man as a medical advisor/practitioner. Lordy how the mainstream medical establishment hates it when alt-med practitioners use marketing tactis to make money, a practice apparently reserved exclusively for Big Pharma and the AMA. A quick perusal of his wiki shows that he supports some unproven, perhaps even refuted, concepts (his opposition to homogenized milk, for example), but then, most AMA doctors also promote numerous unsound medical hypotheses. Especially of late…
‘Ask your doctor about nexifibulastin. Don’t ask why, just ask.’
All that said, it unfortunately looks like melanoma. Fortunately, the doc I see tomorrow is old school. Saved my life a year or two ago when I was bleeding so badly from my HHT and developed severe anemia (the worst dear old Dr. Buchanan had seen in terms of low ferritin levels). The manifold experts at OHSU, Portland’s bloated health monolith that has a major HHT clinic, only know to shuffle paper work. They made uselessness look overworked. Dr. B actually listened to his patient, took bloodwork, got me an ASAP for an iron infusion.
I have what probably is skin cancer on my back so I must submit to the maniacal discipline and see a doc. Wife has the phone at work, made the call. We learn:
“They are way out on scheduling, but suggested you go to your Primary care and if they deemed it urgent you could get in faster.”
I’m not surprised. I know the situation. Still, when you experience it first-hand, it drives the reality into one’s visceral understanding: modern medicine is toast in Euromerica. When you ask for a dermatologist appt because you likely have skin cancer, and they drive you to an unnecessary visit to your primary care doc, the pass-the-buck while making you pay that much more for that much less factor lights up neon bright.
It occurs to me that what educational TV has taught our children is to watch TV.
Ere I’m off to dreary work, a quick quip on modern economics especially the stock market:
I got rich quick! I went broke even faster!!!!
An 89-year old woman who lives in our apartment complex (and was partial template for the madamski construct) is an avid NPR/CNN liberal. I terminated the friendship not because she asked me to wear a mask (whgile she didn’t) because I am unvaccinated (and she is) but because, as I explained my willingness to make her comfortable via masking while attempting to explain that the vaccines had minimal if any effect on contagiousness, she dismissed my concerns with that arrogant superciliousness we’ve come to associate with vakzinazis. She chose politics over friendship — and I was being a very kind friend looking in on the old broad and playing with her neurotic house-bound poodle.
No point to the above other than my fondness for context.
The point is this: her rear vehicle bumper has a sticker reading FIGHT HATE.
Talk about fingers pointing at the moon. The War on Hatred, coming to a loony bin near you soon.
“And if you missed it, I was looking for you when you were gone.”
Aw, man. That’s almost enough to make me wanna share my Bud Lite with youy. 😉 ‘stead, have some lucid juice.
P.S. It occurs to me that the mass hypnosis we’ve seen regarding covid is an example of what Buddha meant when he described how the unenlightened see a finger pointing at the moon and focus on the finger not the moon at which it points.
“Mass General Brigham has restored wages and instituted retroactive salary increases for most of its workforce, thanks to visits volume that has returned to near normal levels, the health system said.
“In June, the system was staring at a $2 billion projected revenue shortfall, as coronavirus sidelined elective procedures and largely canceled outpatient visits.
“Executives subsequently announced that all executives across the system would have their compensation reduced by 25% for one year, beginning July 1. All senior leaders across the system also had their compensation reduced by 5% to 20% for the same time period.”
Mass General Brigham restores wages, salary increases
While I trust Raul more than most online presenters to reliably share only information that has been properly vetted or with appropriate caveats , I still do my own due diligence, especially with images in this photoshopped virtuality called the internet.
The Mass Brigham picture coupling covid vakzines and child organ donation is extreme enough for me to feel vetting is warranted. NOt lack of trust in Raul, just the general dodgy nature of the current infosphere.
DIdn’t find a source for the image; no biggie. But that search revealed the article above, which quote thereof* caught my eye. ( * did I just murder English grammar here or merely smack it in the kneecaps?)
It occurred to me that the enormous revenue losses that the medical establishment has experienced from covid shutdowns etc. would naturally be a part of their almost gleeful embrace of Das Vakzinario — assuming that it rolls money their way.
I have no idea if this phenomenon is large enough to be a significant factor. Med industry insiders should be able to assess that better than me
So the profit motive exists outside the vakzinario. Some people are trying to get rich selling medicine that actually works, like Ivermectin. I’m stunned.
One argument against def being a bot is that AI is supposed to steadily learn and get better at what it does, while def sucks at least as much as ever at its game, and if anything gets worse at it.
Riddler: Riddle me this, Buttman: what is too phony to be human but too dumb to be a robot?
Buttman: A troll?
“Might at least some of them be folks seeking refuge from the Covid Cult in the blue states?”
Judging from the remarks I see the right wing crowd expressing on Facebook, I’d say YES.
Refugees of all stripe are a defining feature of our times.
phoenix voice:
I did some quick shopping at Fred Meyers today mostly maskless. I masked up fopr checkup, but then only when it was my actual turn.
It occurs to me that the same mechanism by which everyone conforms to masks ( the desire to avoid unpleasant confrontation), even though a large % of folks don’t believe in their efficacy, works the other way: few folks want to mess with someone blatantly ignoring the mandatory mask protocol. Not even security guards. Doing so naturally appears to them like an especially unpleasant confrontation.
It’s funny although the context is tragic.
A 20-something homeless dude outside the entrance allowed me to reduce some of my compassion burden by graciously accepting $20 and a bag of dog food for his glorious rat terrier who is obviously his best friend. You could tell life had knocked him around pretty hard.
Can’t save the planet. May not even be able to save yourself. BUt you can lighten the darkness, always, if only with a caring smile.
“Armchair Hitler: he is not alone, the Democrats seem to breed this sort.”
In this century’s first decade, the Republicans bred abundant armchair generals willing to bomb the flaming crap out of anyone they felt didn’t have enough democracy.
“Everybody takes their turn in the bucket.” (old carny phrase)
I perceive a roughly equal lack of intestinal fortitude in both partisan camps. Over time, they become increasingly identical. With the War on Terror, Dems went along so they wouldn’t appear “soft on terror”. Likewise, most Republicans went along with covidiocy because they didn’t want to be seen as “soft on covid”.
“pelvis and breasts in 5/4. gotta love it…”
tdk has a knack for getting to the heart of the matter. 🙂
“Moth to a flame.”
Excuse me for switching from the satirically hedonistic to the poignantly bittersweet romantic, but:
“BTW, thank you for posting here. Your posts are often like the pivotal scene in a Colombo episode: “Oh…just one more thing…Can you clarify a point for me?””
NIce. Noirette does indeed do a fine job sweeping the nuances into a tidy plot resolution. 🙂
***
VP: In this lufrewnow dlrow that we live in, I wonder if we’ll see flagellants a la the 13th?14th? century plague years when people realize they’ve sent their kids, spouises, friends, and parents to the slaughter.I’ve noticed that we sometimes discuss partisan politics here albeit mostly elegaically in a rearview mirror perspective on our political past. It feels odd to mourn what was o0bviously a shitshow from Day 1, but it seemed to be the only show in town at the time. (What’s another little delusion, eh?)
Addressing that, I share this:
The Lonesome American Choo-Choo with special emphasis on the de facto punchline beginning at 7:10.
We, the politically friendless, salute those who still believe their glowing tele-screens when told that Biden is a genuine human being or Trump or Rand Paul will set things straight. NOt that we ever WANTED to wuin a bullshit pie-eating contest, but still, wow. That’s impressive.
Me, I place my hopes for the future in TInkerbell. Everybody… CLAP!
“Today, at 11:30 am, one of my sons has his eye exam. Time to do “civil disobedience” all over again.”
The group is not very powerful unless directed by authority figures either charismatic or deeply graven into life by tradition or law, or when BillyBob’s life is so disaturbed he gets off the couch en masse (I think it’s called a ‘mob’?)
An individual has far more power to act. Mere audacity alone can stymie seemingly powerful groups.
I cite the infamous Colonel Sherburn again.
(I recall being in a hippy head shop circa 1972. Incense and the smell of weed. This song is playing from the box. Drum solo starts and some gorgeously pelvic and large-breasted hippy girl says, “I LOVE this drum solo!” andf starts shaking it.
I was 16. Innocent Mormon brat recently departed from the church and mainstream thinking in general.
‘Now THAT’s what I’m talking about!’ I thought as I watched.
