[boscohorowitz]

” From one set of fangs eating another set of fangs has evolved felicity, motherly love, paternal loyalty, friendship, period, and this weird need to understand that somehow got turned on in humans ”

I have no idea why the word period is in there.

[boscohorowitz]

As a Boomer, I’m amused when we are painted as this unusually selfish stingy bunch. When I was a kid, that designation was reserved for Boomer’s parents, the Greatest Generation. They fucked up the hand they were dealt. (I mean, srsly. They blew it.) Boomers fucked up theirs. Imagine how Millennial/Gen Z kids will feel about their parents.

Did I forget to mention Gen X? Oh yeah, that bunch always blaming my generation for their problems. Here’s to you, Gen-X.

Let’s blame people for being conditioned so much by the largest mind control systems in history that they can hardly think without being told what to think about. Silly cocooners hiding from reality. Why aren’t they smart and brave… like me!!!! Be like ME! My ego wills it! If everyone would just be smart and brave like me, we’d be just fine, right? Right?….

Blaming others soothes one’s ego but doesn’t fix the problems outside that ego. Most of the problems are unfixable anyway. I remind myself what Jesus said as almost everyone He knew turned against Him or merely abandoned Him: “Forgive them, they’re all kinda clueless.” Or something like that.

Human civilization has been fucked for as long as we can trace it. We’ve had a nice lull recently based on the intersection of technology and fossil fuels. What we call the Enlightenment when it was really just a buncha overwhelmed hoiminids blinded by the light produced by a few aqbnormal mutants here and there, freaks like Newton, etc..

The Enlightenment is ending because the lamp is running out of fuel, and being what we are, we never thought what to do if that ever happened, even though we knew it would. Rather typical hominid behavior pattern.

You know that creepy fairy tale snake that told Eve that if she and hubs ate the fruit, they’d be smart like God? That’s the Enlightenment in mythic form. Oh, I love science. But if science tells us anything, it tells us that we may be able to control a few physics, but we can’t do it with a lick of collective wisdom. Instead, we build nuclear missiles. We Monsanto-ize the ecology. We take billions of barrels of oil, each of which contain the energy of 4.5 human work years, and burn everything up almost as soon as we build it. Or just no longer bother to maintain what we’ve built. Currently, we seem bent on destroying all archeological history of human civilization in the Fertile Crescent… just a century after making some of the greatest archological finds in, uh, history. (It gets ironic.) We aren’t nearly as smart as we think we are.

Maybe we’ll destroy our works so well that, 1,000 years from now, when humanity finally gets enough surplus, hopefully, to start poking around in the sand for more than grubs and salt, they will believe they are the first humans to build cities, and the history of the War of the Gods will be deemed just so much mythology.

Question: how many people here have missed a meal? Not because they were too busy but because they had nothing to eat? How many have gone a day? 2 days? 3 days? A week? I hear this word normal tossed about, yea, even in CAPS, as if it were a thing rather an abstract statistical concept. HIstorically, normal is dirt and weeds and trees and things you try to eat while not getting eaten. Normal is hunger and thirst and discomfort and pain interspersed with food and water and comfort and felicity.

For a hundred years or so, normal has been something absurdly, fantastically, incredibly different. So absurd and incredibly different that a great many people actually believed we’d have flying cars in the future, as if it were a natural progression, after which we’d all live cozy in comfy clouds in floating cities.

What’s been happening recently is quite abnormal compared to a few billion years of terran evolution or even just a few hundred k years of homo sap evolution… even so, it involves chronic war and roving hunger, and we live with closer than not to a thousand nuclear ICBMs ready to go atg a moment’s notice, cuz hey, you never know when we might need to wipe out a few cities and a few million people. Or a whole lotta cities and few billion people. Play it loose. Keep our opytions open. Maybe we all want to murder each other and just get it over with?

I dunno. Maybe it is a good thing that danger exists out there. I didn’t make the cosmos, and god isn’t talking, so I dunno. But every time danger came my way, it always turned out badly, either for me or the other critter/feller, and often for both.

It’s NORMAL for people to want to be safe. It’s normal for them to wish to avoid danger, however ill-advisedly or incompetently (and boy are we ill-advised). And it’s also normal for the rest of us to mock and belittle them for wanting to be safe and secure. The pecking order is also normal.

The trouble with our current consensus definition of “normal” is that it only gets worse.

A simple concept: there is nothing inherently evil about demanding everyone wear masks and quarantine for awhile to avoid a major pile-up of bodies and inertia. If we allow governments to form and tell us what to do regarding anything, that is the primary evil. So long as we allow that fact to exist (and we always have), governments will do evil things compared to which a bit of quarantine is a blessing… or would be if we’d done it properly in the first place.

Now we’ve wasted that opportunity. As a result, things will become much more dangerous out there, and not just because viruses can kill, or because a porous misguided public health program was delivered stillborn but made to walk and talk anyway, or because the situation was already fucked in the first place. Things will become become more dangerous most of all because our government has failed its big chance to show that it can govern, period, much less justly or benevolently.

That governmental collapse, currently plainly in advanced progress, will put we the people on our own, with no more government to blame. We’ll be left with each other to blame. Won’t that be fun?

If god has a purpose for danger, for building a tiny Terran corner of the cosmos where critters eat critters and are eaten by critters, all processes stringently bound by pain/pleasure dichotomies and fraught with fearful anxiety, all I can imagine as justifying purpose is that this Grind (as I call it) has steadily created more complexly sensitive beings over time. The higher animals are all exquisitely emotional. From one set of fangs eating another set of fangs has evolved felicity, motherly love, paternal loyalty, friendship, period, and this weird need to understand that somehow got turned on in humans (see: apple/Eden for mythic explanation)… apparently too soon, unleashing homo destruktis, ours truly.

But it indeed arose from constant danger, fear, and pain. So yeah, maybe danger’s good for something… which something appears to be avoiding danger if possible. Danger’s job is to find us goddammit, not us find it. Unless you’re a socio-thrillseeker like Vier Vet mentioned.

Considering that we’re all products of what Richard Dawkins rightly calls The Selfish Gene, it seems natural, maybe even normal, for people to wish to avoid danger. Their wishes may be futile but, as far as evolution is concerned, it’s both wise and normal. Following the mythonarrative, God apparently didn’t have to tell us to stay away from the big furry toothsome things wanting to eat us, just some damn fruit. We already knew to avopid being eaten and experiencing pain or exposing ourselves to high risk thereof.

I despair and highly disapprove of our collective behavior but I can only pity us as individuals. If someone isn’t as brave and smart as you, that’s because they’re them not you. Someone else is way smarter and braver than you or me. And they’re almost certainly not smart and brave enough. Everyone’s arse is up for kicks.

Fearless

[boscohorowitz]

Trump’s rallies may mark the start of something like leadership. Reading the protocols, they’re making reasonable attempts to allow public congregation while significantly reducing contagion. Despite Trump himself being anything but a role model, contagion-wise, how they’re holding the rally is how we should have proceeded from day one.

If the numbers don’t spike too much between now and Nov 4, this might mark the reascendance of Herr Golden Floss’s political star.

In the country of blind people, even the man with one eye peering from his bugnhole can be King. If Biden can be touted as a viable candidate, then the people can be swayed by Trump’s… appeal, I guess you’d call it if he starts responding non-chaotically.

That is obviously just a rough squint-eyed peripeheral take on the subject. I’ll point out that I don’t recall seeing any BLM protestors not wearing masks, and I suspect a ton of tonight’s rally attendees will pointendly not wear masks…

…anyone here think the event will be without violence?

[boscohorowitz]

While the following is an indulgence with some aspects of ‘vanity publishing’, I think it’s also poetically metaphorical to what’s happening now. Besides, I have no idea how to make it into a proper story rather than a literary tableau vivant:

Standstill

Everyone remembers where they were when it happened.

I was one of the more fortunate ones. When the Freeze hit, I was tossing an orange in the air. The look on my face when it froze was almost flattering if a bit slack-jawed. Not that such superficialities really matter now, or shouldn’t, but one feels sorry for those caught picking their nose or masturbating. As for those caught committing a crime…

The first few hours were as fascinating as they were horrifying. With the world turned into a global diorama, and with everyone’s soul cut loose, there was a lot to see. But we mostly didn’t stray far from our bodies, for the worst horror was the loss of identity. We knew who we were, but without our bodies, what that ‘who’ was worried our souls. (One of many casualties of the anomaly was the loss of ‘soul’ as a poetic term; it became just another part of anatomy.)

It is believed by the scientific community that time didn’t literally stand still, but slowed down to something between the speed of glaciers and rust. A temporal Ice Age. For time to stand still, they say, would be impossible. Without time, the cosmos would cease to exist. Makes sense. Time is one of the dimensions. For it to totally stand still would be comparable to the 3rd physical dimension disappearing, turning us all into 2-D flatlanders on a desktop earth. Our world would cease to exist. A balloon without air is not a balloon, it is a round rubber sheet.

It is a popular debate these days: could the cosmos exist without time? or as a flat universe? Topics that once glazed eyes at table dinners are now emotionally held beliefs.

I am of the conservative school that believes if time had truly stood still, the world would vanish, at least for us; but I appreciate the poetry of the liberal school. They ask the fundamental riddle of existence: what is left if one removes everything? If time can stop and the universe remains, static and locked, what happens if we remove the other three dimensions? What is nothing made of?

No one pays much attention to former theories of cosmology, like superstring theory with it’s ten-plus hypothetical dimensions. The four that we know exist are now too much for us to understand.

This means little compared to the discovery that we really do have ghostly selves, and even more, that these ghostly selves were immune to the standstill.

We also learned that our souls move differently than our bodies. We could travel almost instantly to anywhere we’d been before. Travel was virtually instantaneous but not entirely; there is an emotional passage one must travel, however briefly, before arriving.

We disembodied souls experienced this as a disturbing lack of physical motion, replacing it with another sense of motion, the movement of memory: we did not fly above the buildings or trees en route to a destination; we followed the tracks of memory.

I traveled 2,000 miles, from Chicago to Lake Tahoe, along the memories of a childhood vacation. I traveled along roads that no longer exist to places that scarcely resemble their current appearance. While my physical body was stuck in time, my soul traveled freely through my past. Like dream motion, the difference being the greater sense of conscious control compared to the anarchy of dreams.

One could get lost. Most of us discovered our power of motion as souls by finding ourselves somewhere vaguely familiar after wandering in thought. Most memories are both vivid and inscrutable: when was this? what happened? where is it? I don’t remember this place but it feels so familiar…

Eventually, you’d discover a clue, recollection would join memory, and you knew where you were. The easiest movement, of course, was to prowl home turf.

You’d travel to a friend’s house, then release your memory of last seeing him there and let the house bring you up to date, to when the anomaly hit. You did this by following his memory forward until it stopped where he was frozen, remote in hand, before a video screen’s fantasy battle scene stuck in pixilated time. There was something eerie about TV and other video images; they almost seemed more likely to resume movement than the human being frozen on the couch.

This effect was much less at a movie theater. The static audience would seem more potentially alive than the huge people on the silver screen. It is thought that this is because video screens emit raw light, whereas movie screens merely reflect light, and light seemed to be the only thing that moved during the anomaly: we could see things, and that would not be possible if light were at a virtual standstill. (Hence the science community’s conclusion that time hadn’t entirely stopped, just slowed down to an incredible degree.)

Fundamental Relativists say that this proves that C is indeed the universal constant, that no matter what, light moves, and does so at the speed of light.

I’m not so sure. Even if light were as slowed down as the world was, we would still see its movement, since light travels so much faster than everyday motion. It would be a noticeable stream. There wouldn’t be beams of light frozen mid-path in rooms where a lamp had just been clicked, as a few people reported. It was winter where I was, and I visited a few fireplaces burning wood. Frozen flames are fascinating. They weren’t like photographs of flames. They didn’t dance but they seemed to move. The implications of this are staggering, but so was the anomaly.

The accepted theory is that this is because of quantum indeterminacy. The fire in a burning hearth is, at any given moment, an inconceivable amount of electrons being excited into motion, emitting photons in the process. That motion is minutely imprecise; electrons decide where to go when bumped into making what we call a quantum leap. This happens instantaneously. Not just very rapidly, but instantly.

However, with time slowed down to a virtual standstill, as most scientists believe, what was instantaneous perhaps takes a teensy bit of time that we are unable to measure when time moves at it’s normal pace. What is normally timeless — instantaneous — could become “timeful” when time itself is frozen. It moves. It is believed that the one thing that moved during the anomaly, is that thing called quantum indeterminacy, in which an electron is theoretically an indefinite number of places at once within the infinitesimally small area defined by the atom around which that electron orbits, orbiting not as a single object moving in a circle around its atom, but as an indefinite number of paths all occurring at once.

I know: quantum mechanics doesn’t make any sense. But neither does the anomaly, and so it kind of makes sense that when nothing else makes sense, that which usually doesn’t make sense, would.

I suppose the scientists are right. If time moved so slowly that one can perceive the motion within an instant, then the light from the lamps I mentioned could appear motionless for a long time. It isn’t like anyone was able to make precise physical measurements at that time. (For once, use of the word time fits. It was only ‘that time’ during the anomaly, that time and no other time existed. Only in memory was there other time.)

But our memory was anything but frozen.

Homesickness grew by the hour (souls, we learned, feel time even if time didn’t move). We had never before felt so lost or abandoned in our lives. Many of us traveled to our earliest childhood, to memories we didn’t know we had, driven by the fear of homesickness to infantile terror. We all recalled what it was like to awaken at night in our crib, alone. Or be lost in a supermarket.

Oh. I forgot to say that our memories, when we arrived at them, moved. We couldn’t interact with them; we couldn’t touch or talk to any person or thing except as we had during the original remembered event, but they tended to fade as they moved forward in time until they became a chaotic jumble of related memories so disorienting that we usually jumped back to the strongest memory associated with the place or to where we’d last been. (We moved backward through time to a given memory, but once there, that memory moved forward, it being of course a memory of normal time.)

Some of us, including me, learned how to float with a memory, which let us move with it through mnemonic time, retracing our steps, which was disorienting in its own way, because memory isn’t a camera, isn’t just a record of sensory experience, it’s a train of thought. You’d find yourself remembering a memory within a memory as you sat, for example, on the dock of the bay watching the tide roll away, wasting time, the old Otis Redding song taking you to other places the way music, that powerful memory aid, does.

You learned to be a leaf in the wind.

As the homesickness mounted, we became perceptible to each other. Initially, our souls didn’t see one another. But “over time” (our language fails in the face of these developments), we became visible. Not as wraiths, not as translucent versions of our bodily selves, but as memories.

Our souls are creatures of memory and light. We didn’t see each other as beings; we saw what the other was remembering — if they were remembering something in the vicinity of what you were remembering. We noticed each other as we traveled more, and a bit of downtown Portland would look wrong because other souls were visiting it in memories older or newer than ours, in winter memories versus our summer recollections. What we perceived moved an awful lot even though it happened in a physical reality frozen in time.

We attributed the shifting shapes of things to the general weirdness. But after awhile we saw the patterns. We saw the world for what it was, a blending strata of memories, each memory itself a blend of memories.

The effect was most striking in remote regions where fewer people meant fewer memories. You would revisit a sunset vista of Mt. Shasta and the sunset would blend with someone else’s sunrise from a different angle. You would focus and reclaim your remembered view, but a hint of sunrise would remain so long as the other person remained present. (“remained present” is another expression inadequate for those experiences.)

In time — ach!!! — let me replace that with words that do not make paradox — eventually, we realized that the world we souls moved in was nothing but memory, and the recognition that we were living in sheer nostalgia while the world passively ignored us, made us feel lonelier than the most tragically beheaded castle. Like a raw heart still beating long after the body has died.

We began communicating. We gathered at libraries and remembered relevant texts for others to read. We revisited favorite group experiences, like concerts, so that we could share the familiar with each other.

We experienced love. Sympathetic memories nestled into each other and people would quietly open to each other their most intimate recollections in something almost like sex; and offspring of a sort was born: memories no longer one or the others’ but now blended so much that one could hardly tell them apart. If we could have spoken, instead of saying things like, ‘You have your father’s eyes and your Aunt Rochelle’s dimples,’ we would have said, ‘You have your father’s bah mitzvah and your mother’s summer visits with her Aunt Rochelle.’

We were, I think, beginning to adjust to, even embrace, our new state of being when the freeze thawed. We fought it at first. It was disorienting now that we’d begun to understand and accept our circumstance. A vast new world had become ours.

It began as an internal pressure in our souls. Something tugging at our innards. Innards! We began to realize that we were experiencing flashes of actual, not remembered, physical sensations again. It was so disturbing, so newly familiar, that many of us found ourselves remembering being born. We resisted. It was as if something, some dominant, totalitarian memory were taking over ours.

Our memories, which we had learned to move the way an infant learns to walk, wouldn’t move properly. The shifting hazework quilt that we’d learned to conjointly share as a common dream was becoming resistant to our movements.

Some of us recognized what was happening. They stopped resisting and found themselves inhabiting their bodies again, albeit in paralysis. But with all sensations.

Breathing is the most precious sensation and the first movement of resurrection. For all the wonder of living in a land of memory, taking my first new breath, s-l-o-w-l-y but with a delicious sense of fluid motion, like a frozen river beginning to thaw, is to me the most valuable experience of it all. We had our minds and hearts expanded in countless ways during the anomaly, experienced a richness of despair and joy, loneliness and communion, that radically changed what it means to be human, but to experience — in a way we can remember! — the first breath of our resumed lives, was, it seems, the point of the lesson.

Some of us could by then walk again, and emphatically demonstrated the fact of their resurrection.

Things snowballed after that, and it is now a point of major contention whether the thaw was the result of our souls accepting their new found state as mnemonic ghosts, and thus, eventually, finding the levers of time stored within our memories, and moving them to dislodge time from its impasse; or if the world itself was regaining the movement of time and we were merely reacting to this. Regardless, there was a point where things rapidly accelerated and suddenly everyone was waking up.

We were frightened. The world was “real” again. Our eyes looked at each other through real eyeballs not just memories of one another. We had physical power. We could hurt one another. We felt hunger. We could make love. We felt the hideous seductive power of being able to keep secrets again.

I ashamedly observe that I have neglected to share in my account the existence of the souls of animals. We rarely saw them. Time and memory are different for them.

To see them, one had to think like a dog, or a crow, or an opossum. One had to slow down one’s mind to almost Buddhist tranquility to share the sense of now in which they mostly live. Plus, the memories were too often painful. For every dog contentedly having his ears rubbed, there were innumerable animals trapped in feedlot cages awaiting slaughter. Even happy memories were often discolored by most animals’ underlying terror of homo sapiens.

Things have changed because of this, and we are struggling to remove ourselves from the food chain and make enough synthetic food to satisfy us. I say satisfy, not just feed, because eating, one discovers after being something like a ghost, is a huge part of our lives. We are discomfortingly physical creatures. Let’s eat!

That said, reuniting with our pets, or seeing birds in flight and squirrels in frolic, was even more satisfying than being able to hug children and spouses again, for although we’d been closer to them in some ways during the anomaly than we might ever be again, having our memories of our furry friends merge with their living physical selves was overwhelming. Love between species transcends mere intra-species love, I’ve decided.

We reexperienced that most intimate communion of the soul with the body: tears. Joy and grief liquefied, rolling down our cheeks in a manner strangely reminiscent of how our memories had flowed around and through each other.

Already, we have made new children. I can hardly speak of the horrors so many children experienced as disincarnate souls. It was no one’s fault. Adults simply can’t stay very long within such a narrow range of memory as those of a three-year old child, nor can they endure for long the intensity of raw emotions children feel. Things improved once we obtained some understanding of the nature of our new existence and could find ways to bring children together in places of shared memory so that they might not be left so often alone.

Also, many children have new parents, the neglect of their original parents having become apparent during the anomaly. Those former abusive parents that fight to reclaim their children meet bad ends. No one is fooled. (As for sociopaths… not all of them have been killed or imprisoned. A modest number of them actually impressed us by their adherence to higher ethics for logical reasons despite lacking any emotional desire to play fair or give a rat’s ass.)

This was another disturbing yet beautiful part of the experience. We learned things about each other. Especially people who have been close and spent much time together. Our egos were crushed time and again by the truth of our petty cruelties to those we claim to cherish most.

There were riots in the churches. Not over theological differences but over physical space. The anomaly inspired much new or renewed belief in God and things of that nature, and we shared many church memories during the anomaly, people raised as atheists in particular being beggars of those with congregational memories (although too many of those congregational memories reflected poorly on the piety of their rememberers, and we learned that some of the most evil people find churches to be ideal hiding places).

Restored to our physical selves, we desperately sought churches for comfort, and there were many deaths, not so much from fighting but from crowd-crush. It was not our finest hour. This soon passed, and people are again as likely to find God in a double malt Scotch or a game of cards, but do so now with a confirmed conviction that there is more to life than meets the eye.

We are especially aware now that we will be remembered, not forgotten, at least by each other if not by God (whose existence is still as ambiguous as before). We do less, sit more, breathe deeply. Now that time has been restored, we appreciate the power of stillness. As disembodied souls, we spent hours in cherished memories. An afternoon’s satori under ancient elm trees long since dead and removed. The sad pleasures of watching your child grow up. The warmth of an adobe plaza on a cool spring evening. The moment you first fell in love.

The first time ever I saw your face. I lost my wife twice: once in normal life, again during the anomaly. But I met her for the first time many times as well.

There are countless camps of thought about what happened, not just theories of explanation but philosophies of meaning. Almost everyone agrees that whether or not some supernal intelligence did this to us to teach us something, it is as if it were so: the experience was so earth-shaking (I know, it’s absolutely the wrong expression) that we interpret it as divine intervention even if it was only a hiccup in the local space-time continuum, even if we don’t believe in God. The new saying says, ‘A miracle is proof of miracles not proof of God.’ Whether a person believes in a divine god, everyone now believes in a divine universe.

Regarding that: we lost the outer planets. Saturn fled, leaving her rings like a trail of diamonds. Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, the Oort Cloud. Jupiter was, apparently, on the right side of the fence.

So it is almost certain that the standstill was only local. Estimates are that it couldn’t have been more than 300 million miles wide/long and probably less. How thick is anyone’s guess. Long enough for the constellations to be a tad crooked. Measuring this, we conclude that the anomaly lasted for roughly 220 days.

Hard-headed Rationalists insist that it was not an act of God but of an advanced civilization, which may well be true, although cooler heads (including mine) insist that we not forget that we really have no clue. Perhaps the cosmos is the purse of some woman in (ahem) “another dimension” and we are that slip of paper with the nice guy’s phone number that she couldn’t find until she dumped the old purse’s contents into a new one, noticing a place where the seam of the silk lining had come apart.

Reaching in, she finds it again.

For all that we have learned from this cosmic miracle, we still cannot say for sure if the soul lives after death, although it seems very likely, and most of us are now firm believers in an afterlife.

We have no idea why time stood still; we were unable to make measurements during the event of anything but the extent of our memories.

We have learned what we have always known: that we would be happier and wiser to be more kind and to take other beings, including non-human beings, into consideration.

We have also learned that we are not all cut from the same basic cloth, or so we infer from reports of persons (very few) who have no recollection of the event, only the world suddenly going crazy as people suddenly became extremely animated, hugging each other, running from each other, spending hours in front of a mirror, storming churches, restaurants, and grocery stores (the concepts of religion, food, and money will never be the same), and touching, touching, touching. They fear that they may not have souls. We cannot comfort them about this, but we make a point of cherishing them as best we can.

We have more questions than answers, but this is hardly unusual. But we have the courage of having experienced an undeniable miracle. We have new hope. We have found new reason to care about one another.

Time moves on. New children are being born, and in time, all those who experienced the event will die. What is now an inescapable miracle that no one will ever forget, will over generations become another myth. Already, the grounds of its fallibility are being laid by groups of people predicting that this is a sign that God or ET will return to do whatever it is that Gods or fantastically advanced civilizations return to do.

Over time this prophecy will blend with chronicles of the event, and unless God or ET shows their face before too many centuries have passed, the myth will gradually be discredited by association. History of the past grows unreliable over time, especially if it ties itself to predictions about the future. Some day, the existence of the Outer Planets will be dismissed as another myth, and only indulgers of faith will believe.

Already, lies are told about the event. Lying is fundamental to human consciousness; it is what makes imagination possible.

I write these notes because people will forget and disbelieve over time. Most everyone has or will record their memories of it. Time capsules of all kind, including satellites in orbit, are being made.

I close with my own speculations. Let no man quote them as anything but: the ability to think forward and behind is the main component of having a soul. With the advent of human beings and a few higher animals like the cetaceans, elephants, a few others, consciousness no longer fits inside the bodily present. We saw this in the souls of most animals. That they have souls at all was because they have memory. At some point downward on the evolutionary ladder, we find creatures who don’t have memories but simply are memories. Beetles, ants, bees (although some report that beehives have a kind of soul): they appear to be no more than the memory of DNA, not of themselves. Their perception of time is such a narrow slice that the act of self-reflection, which is critical to all forms of sentience, of self-awareness, can’t happen. There is simply no room in them for a soul. For if we’ve learned anything about souls, it is that they are made of memory, which is made of time.

****

Huge dark matter/dark energy lenses responsible?

[boscohorowitz]

My impression is that most photographs are posed. She’s getting a decent view of his crotch bulge while he can’t see her cleavage for the button-down. Most things just happen. LIke me saving my mother’s life by being so bass-ackwards breech they had to do a last-minute crude caesarean to get me out. Doing so, they discovered she had cancer of the ovaries, were able to remove all the tumors, and she lived.

If I’d come out ‘properly’, she’d’ve died in a few months.

Mostly forgotten, Ella Mae Morse was rated the WWII G.I.’s fave singer of the era. Here she is a deacde later during peace time:

Rock Me All Night Long

Ella and Frank

[boscohorowitz]

“I find it very weird that as global new cases have gone up 25% or so in a manner of mere days, there is not a soul here in the Comments that has a single word to say about it.No fucking one.”

Overwhelmingly obvious unpleasant facts are why we have tv and internet porn: to help us ignore said facts.

It’s like Rommel (NAZI general) said about giving orders: “You tell them what you’re going to tell them. You tell them. Then you tell them what you told them.” Only after that can you cash in your ‘I-told-you-sos’. Not before. Of course, hey’re not worth a damn by the time they’re actually redeemable, but that’s how that market works.

Essentially, the pandemic is like global climate change: universal and global. Like global climate change, all we do as a majority herd is bicker even while summers turn insanely hot and winters either too cold or not enough… just like the original models suggested.

By the time people are genuinely engaging responsibly with a reality as broad and diffuse as the air, it is already about done dealing with them. The attempt to dismiss covid as a political manipulation, to explain away contagion/illness/mortality statistics as “politics”, is as quaint as humanity’s belief that it can politically manage itself in large numbers in any reliable fashion.

Reality leads; politics follows. But, being homo saps who tend to believe that “humanity is the measure of all things”, we cling to our belief that we’re in charge, know what we’re doing, and can do what we know. So: a virus of as yet unknown provenance (altho theories of etiology are in ample supply) must of course be political in origina. It can’t be the product of, you know, reality. It must yield to our preferred political understanding of reality. No mere virus, with or without a little government lab juice, can alter the course of human history!!!! We are humanity! I WENT TO COLLEGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Plague, as I recall, was deemed by a great many people at that time as a political attack by Jews against Xtians.

You know: blame anyone or anything but the actual virus and our unwillingness to apply known proven anticontagion methods. Let’s blame the government or some other country or this or that political party or faction or ideology… and if that doesn’t work, deny deny deny!

Rising death counts are not real! They’re political fudgifications!

I suggest that we treat as separate categories 1) this virus and known virology, and 2) government/institution responses to same. They really are separate things.

[boscohorowitz]

zerosum: you’re beginning to create a comedy-by-logic form with your numbered lists.

[boscohorowitz]

“The report says the CIA “did not realize the loss had occurred until a year later, when WikiLeaks publicly announced it in March 2017.” ”

This is why I do not fear Big Brother. Big Brother cannot remember which end of the camera to aim at objecys to be imagized. Big Brother is several generations of dumbass frat bros training dumbass frat bros to train just plain dumbasses.

You see, you don’t create a global overarcing Orwellian state by destroying every thing that holds the state together. That just creates a failed state.

We’re on our own.

[boscohorowitz]

Angry people are angry. Telling them they shouldn’t be angry only angers them more. Especially if you’re all angry about them being all angry. MIx all this in a plastic media bag and shake then bake.

[boscohorowitz]

Smile

How Michael Jackson’s star ever came to eclipse that of this brillieant genius explains in part why we’re so screwed now.

[boscohorowitz]

Give it a few minutes. He hang glides with the bird. Way cool.

Eagle Reborn

Thank god our culture is collapsing. Otherwise, we’d eventually have national parks with with theme music piped in everywhere.

[boscohorowitz]

In case anyone gets optimistic, I remind us that the Jeffrey Epstein remains buried. It was made official today:

Prince Charles in Charge

As for the military and Op Warp Speed: when you occupy your own streets to enforce compliant use of medicine that doesn’t work, your government is about done. My fear is that the military will be humbled by popular resistance, and then we’ll really get to work burning the place down.

[boscohorowitz]

Face of someone arrested for arson in local riots:

Nerds can be really terrifying.

[boscohorowitz]

Campfire Song

Prince Rupert Awakes

Love the minor/major contrast tween verse and chorus.

“Wake your reason’s hollow vote
Wear your blizzard season coat
Burn a bridge and burn a boat
Stake a Lizard by the throat”

(most of the lyrics are sopohomoric sci-fi mythogothic hyper-wrung excess, but the chorus makes the cut)

[boscohorowitz]

“With the collapse of federal government, incapable of fighting the pandemic, plus the greatest depression, and the fall of the Empire; a civil war is inevitable unless the USA peacefully withdraws home and democracy is restored.”

I think the inevitability of civil war is here, while democracy remains a flickering ignuus fatus in the twilight tv screen.

But I do believe democracy is real.

Democracy, I believe, is what happens when people tied by family and history live together over time in groups no larger than 200. I suspect we’ll see that in a few decades.

Dah Big D

[boscohorowitz]

” FL, AL, SC, NV, OK, OR, AK report new highs. Half of states higher than a month ago ”

Warmer outdoor temps and more sunlight mean little to a virus that lives primarily indoors, especially a virus that seems to have been bred indoors in the first place. Record hot early summers in 21st century Euromerica, with relaxed public restrictions, means gobs of people indoors together breathing the same air-conditioned air. Like a reduced version of airline travel.

Here in the PacNW, we’ve had two days above 80, and few above upper 60s. With lots of regularly recurring intermittent rain. And an initial epicenter strain of a very mild covid. If I’m lucky, regional “little managers” will see what is happening southward and take proper steps come any possible heat waves up here (it happens), and especially before next winter. Dry AC air in wet Portland is just as dry as anywhere. By then, plenty of the nastier variations of el covid will be amok here and everywhere. Keep what’s left of the malls closed, pls.

I ponder the vectors of homeless and semi-homeless migrations currently gathering momentum and direction. Having spent a decade or so homeless, it’s fertile turf for my imagination.

Whatever colorization of revolution attempted by the creeps (who everyone thinks are) in charge, the colors will run. The fabric won’t hold. All they have to offer is too much stick and not enough carrot. Professional agents saboteur will find it more dangerous to do their job, while their ability to turn such aggression and destruction into a cohering political message or movement or… will fade into an obscene signal-to-noise ratio aka genuine civil war, the molecular kind that doesn’t need or want sides cuz, hey, we’re Americans: we know who to blame, who to hate, who to shove out if we can… we have a rainbow of diversely intolerant instability already in progress.

When the various power players (of all strata) turn to serious fuckery, I think we’re gonna be right astounded by the weirdness and sometimes foaming nastiness of what crawls out of the urban hives once we stick federal and state stricks into those enclaves of well entrenched organized crime.

Maybe Trump was right: maybe Mexico will finish that wall for us after all. From fear of gringo wetbacks. When begins the standard procession the summer floods and fires and tornadoes and hurricanes and ongoing dam breeches and water system ruptures… we will see the very best and worst of local self-organization in ample display.

It will be interesting to see how this rolls into military involvement from FEMA to National Guard to ICE to maybe even local troops stepping in, especially as we bring home all these freshly traumatized soldiers from overseas. Some kind of dialog will naturally ensue because the leadership the military answers to is obviously out to lunch on all fronts. Ain’t a sane clown left in the Beltway asylum and most state capitols.

Wait till a majority of we the people catch a glimpse of their/our collective self on TV and get caught up in the reflection. We’ve never seen anything like this before. A Rome in which the Coliseum has become the Empire while the physical industrial/military Empire turns into the hiss of a giant balloon of financial numerical inflations no longer able to contain all that nothingness without imploding… running on wizard tech employing the energy of an amount of energy I cam hardly get my head around.

Meanwhile, we now have the conditions for genuine foreign meddling in our government, and it can’t be too much longer before some buncha code guerillas take a critical piece of our digistructure out. From the crude, like knocking our power plants (like we do to others) or subtle: whacking out geolocations for most cellphone apps.

Gone, Baby, Gone

[boscohorowitz]

Raul: saline sinus spray, sez me. You will likely be in way too much dry shared air. Keep your sinuses ooey and gooey, pls.

[boscohorowitz]

[boscohorowitz]

I wonder if he has any statues and if they’ve been toppled:

Old Marcus Garvey

[boscohorowitz]

There are many factors involved in the current spate of protests and statue-topplings, but I perceive all of them as a subset of the phenomenon known as anomie. While some people accuse each other of being racists or snowflakes or empire enablers or empire destroyers or… the anomie grows because the foundation that supported social cohesion has evaporated.

Anyone remember John Brown, a key figure in the events precipitating the USA’s infamous Civil War of 1860-65? Anomie.

Abolitionism

We feel compelled first to destroy the old, especially because it represents perceived wrongs and dysfunctionalities, before building anew.

I’d already picked the song below for my obligatory song choice before mentioning John Brown. No conscious association between the two. Subconscious cogitation rules. Our brains have more synaptic connections than one could count in a lifetime, but the bit of attention we call ‘conscious thought’ commands, at most per current measurements, a bandwidth of about 50 bits.

The guy you think you are is a moron. The thing that is you is a genius but will have little to do with that moron at the wheel. Who let him drive anyway?

Topeka Forever!

“We’re Not In Kansas”

What did you learn in school today
Did you learn to run when the teachers pray
Did they teach you enough to know the state you’re in
Not enough to get out, not enough to win

What did you learn at home today
Did you learn to hate in the proper way
Did your liberated parents patronize your friends
Cos they had enough money cos they had the right skin

I sat me down and wondered, what kind of place this really is
Well maybe it’s in the parks, maybe it’s in the stores
I know if we’re being honest, it’s in the people
But they’re all caught up in the traffic
Listening to the weather

Well dog, I know we’re not in Kansas — the sky’s all colored wrong
I know we’re not in Kansas — the days are all too long
I sure don’t understand this — that’s what you’re howling for
I know we’re not in Kansas, Kansas anymore

What did you learn in your job today
Did you learn to sleep while the boss is away
Did you shut your mouth when he called you down
Cos there’s not much work in that kind of town

I wander around thinking, well what kind of place is this
Where they say hey well what did you do in the war
And I ask well hey man well what did you do with the peace
Well we built these real safe weapons, so we could sleep with ease

Well dog, I know we’re not in Kansas—the sky’s all colored wrong
I know we’re not in Kansas — the days are all too long
I sure don’t understand this — that’s what you’re howling for
I know we’re not in Kansas, Kansas anymore

Well what kind of place is this
On the wrong side of the rainbow where the twisters never come
And they tore up all the yellow bricks and they sold them to Japan
And still the advertisers tell you, hey, there’s no place like home

Well dog, I know we’re not in Kansas — the sky’s all colored wrong
I know we’re not in Kansas — the days are all too long
I sure don’t understand this — that’s what you’re howling for
I know we’re not in Kansas, Kansas anymore

P.S. THe drummer-for-hire in this video is amazing. Lord of Thunder

[boscohorowitz]

“elite ivory tower blogger stalkers”

THat’s us awright.

[boscohorowitz]

Glenn Greenwald seems to be an extremely nice human being. His journalism aligns with my values, especially his emphasis on our collective cruelty to the hon-human animal kingdom.

But he’s a fucking journalist. Ick. (Relax, Raul. I don’t think of you as a journalist even though you generally write about current events and write generally better prose expressing more accurate data and wiser opinions than most journalists including Greenwald.) Journalists are major suckers, wittingly or unwittingly, for the false dichotomies that comprise the bulk of journalism and associated analysis. For example: whether or not the previous lockdowns were justified by covid-19 or not does not necessarily relate to the media bloc’s decision to switch gears and primarily sell Black Lives Matter protest reports/analysis rather than its previous obsession with covid covid covid.

Likewise, the fact that some of the recent media releases by medical associations have about-faced primarily demonstrates their ability to about-face, not the validity (or lack thereof) of their previous positions, which were hardly in lockstep from day one. Conflicting opinions and advice about covid, from the WHO to the White House down to your local doctor’s office, have been rife from the start.

This quote from Greenwald’s article — “So dogmatic was the dictate that we all stay at home that any attempt to question or even balance it — by, for instance, arguing that the harms of the virus had to be weighed against the suffering from an economic shutdown and a global depression — was deemed immoral” — is fluff. Dogma-as-propaganda wants some consistency, and some universal application, to justify the name ‘dogma’. We had no such over-arching dogma, again, from day one. For example: the messages that masks won’t help/masks are de rigeur have shared roughly equal prominence since, again, day one. For example: Some areas were quite insistent on lockdown. Others were lackadaisical bordering on ignorance and apathy (‘we don’t know/we don’t care’).

But Greenwald is a journalist, and journalism as practiced for quite some time is primarily a blame game interspersed with praise for the hero of the week. A carrot’n’stick game based on the specious notion that watering down the truth to suit a squeamish audience’s preference will somehow raise that audience’s taste for less adulterated truth. It’s the same logic as voting for the lesser evil. Pandering and propaganda are major Venn overlaps.

Of course, a globally corrupt kleptocracy will manipulate any event to its perceived advantage. It’s what kleptocracies do. That doesn’t mean it manufactured the event or understands it or even cares about it. Conspiracy theories are based on a desire to assign blame as much as they are based on a desire to know the truth. When the truth fails to provide a sufficiently clear target to blame, which is usually the case because a) it’s a complicated society we live in with more smoke’n’mirrors and hidden passages than a carnival funhouse, and b) the truth generally blames we the people for being complacent conditioned chumps more than our complacently conditioned chumpitude wishes to acknowledge, we generally opt for the theory of our most comforting choice: blame anyone but ourselves.

The people remarking “journalistically” on the virus who mean a shit to me are folks like John Day, who especially uses his platform of relative medical expertise to provide useful methods for not getting seriously ill from the virus, or Raul, who uses his years of deep news analysis, knowledge of certain fields, and willingness to wade through gobs of data, to provide us with reasonably coherent patterns from which to seek understanding.

John speaks to the individual, primarily, giving them info to protect themselves first, and then offering analysis on large patterns like global pandemic, economic collapse, and evil cabals.

Raul speaks primarily to the group, not letting himself be swayed by mere political aspects (viruses don’t vote, after all) while he helps us understand these large patterns through centuries-old proven methodologies and models. Especially, in this case, good old preventative quarantine.

Protests against police run amok, especially along USA’s classic white-on-top vs. black-on-bottom racially bigoted template, have been going on for some time before covid. Things like nationally televised murders by a constabulary empowered and trusted to serve and protect, not oppress and murder, will of course break through fragile things like a piebald quarantine unequally applied or understood (a quarantine in practice that has been about as good at containing contagions as using nylon stockings to carry water), and resurrect the ongoing civil discontent fomenting civil disobedience regarding the modern USA police state. The society was collapsing before covid. No lousy pandemic’s gonna stop that momentum. Just cuz a buncha folks are sick with something awful won’t fix the busted municipal water system that gave them cholera in the first place.

The media will naturally turn its gaze from covid onto this “new” protest thing if only because covid was no longer selling enough ads. For example: TAE, both Raul and readers, has been squirming to find something more interesting and understandably relevant, than the past 3-4 months of all covid all day. The patten has been obvious for weeks.

Whatever our kleptocratically controlled media decides to do with this public/market-driven change in attention spans/topics is whatever it decides, and is not necessarily driving but, more likely (if history is any guide), riding the narrative gestalt for whatever psychopathically callous reasons that motivate kleptocratically controlled media.

Meanwhile, there really is a global pandemic of a weirdly atypical flu, the numbers keep rising overall, and the fact of the sickness itself will eventually (barring a miracle) intrude itself foremost on all the entities currently intruding themselves onto it mostly to try and get a free ride.

It is a deep sin for me to wish the following, but the truth is that I can’t wait to hear about someone busting someone, who is braying about global conspiracy virus et al yadi yada, in the chops. Not that it is or isn’t part of this or that global conspiracy but because there comes a time when we either deal with the thing effectively or it deals with us.

(And that, folks, was EXACTLY 1K words, not by design but happenstance, and I declare that a miracle, or maybe even the product of a global conspiracy.)

Draw a Crowd

[boscohorowitz]

All the history I’ve read says that we have a compulsion to tear down the old before building anew. By anew, I do not mean ‘significantly different’. Just new. New palce temple mausoleum much like the old palace temple mausoleum. New emperor much like the old emperor. New population much like the old population that we decimated, exiled, and enslaved.

Slavery, bad old school chattel-in-chains slavery, has never seemed more likely to again become an openly major part of human civilization since 1865. Never mind Libya etc. We’re talking a major disruptive growth industry. Somebody’s got to work for peanuts getting the last vestiges of petroleum and coal out of the pits. As peak oil rides its downward slope, peak slavery begins its upward curve.

I’ve read that hoary old rotten quote by Orwell quite a bit lately. Something about the future being a boot stamping someone’s face over and over.

To put it mildly: FUCK THAT SHYTE. Only serious losers fall for that crap. Here is the shape of the future since the first hominid discovered how to blow tunes from a bird’s wing bone:

Pretty World

Why don’t we take a little piece of summer sky
Hang it on a tree
For that’s the way to start to make a pretty world
For you and for me

And for the sun we’ll find a lemon bright balloon
You can hold the string
Oh don’t you know that little world of ours will be
The prettiest thing

We can have rain enough for the stream
To hold our happy faces
When we want a breeze, I’ll blow you a kiss or two
Take me in your arms and our little world
Will be the place of places
Nothing left to make but breakfast and love

We’ll hang a little sign that just says Paradise
Population two
And we together can make a pretty world
For me and for you
For you
It’s what I wanted to do for you
To make a world – with you!

Da Blooz

In the cold water of a stream
Sitting I washed my clothes
While sitting and washing my clothes
I was thinking about my dear mother.

While sitting and washing my clothes
I was thinking about my dear mother.

On the edge of а high hill
Willow branches are swaying
While the willow branches are swaying
I was thinking about my dear mother.

Even the willow branches are swaying
I was thinking about my dear mother.

In the cold well water
(She was) sitting and washing her hands
While sitting and washing her hands
I was thinking of my dear mother.

While sitting and washing her hands
I was thinking of my dear mother.

Bushes and trees are curved by the wind
I have thought about my dear mother
In the bitter water of spring
I was thinking about my mother
Who gave me birth.

We can blame… the leaders. We can blame… the institutions. We can blame… each other. We can blame… God or suitable stand-in. We can blame… ourselves.

We can blame like pros. In ten years, we can tumble statues of Trump. Or lord knows whom. We can stomp ’em with our wornout boots over and over. cuz after all, it’s always somebody else’s fault. I just work here.

[boscohorowitz]

“Amazon Bans Police Use Of Facial Recognition Tech – For A Year (BBC)”

I read this and think ‘lawyers/insurance companies’.

Face recog is legally dicey when everyone is wearing a face mask: “I couldn’t recognize him and he’s my best friend.”

When the masks come off a year from now, they’ll be ready, I suppose. What for is another matter.

[boscohorowitz]

Gawrsh. I suppose I should point out that police going on STRIKE, themselves, is different from being defunded by their municipality. Especially when one is in the context of a violent separatist movement during the peak of civil unrest (I think it was the 60s) while the other is in the context of a grassroots nationwide string of protests/riots against said police. I say nothing here about the widsom or folly of disbanding police forces, altho I’ll note I have no use for cops. I speak here about the wisdom and folly of applying apples to oranges.

The 1969 case is cops QUITTING their jobs en masse. Today we’re looking at cops being more or less fired en masse. Is there maybe a teensy difference between the two?

Butg then, some things never change. I suppose I might take some comfort in that.

[boscohorowitz]

[boscohorowitz]

“I know Bosco would agree – yes I know you are lurking…”

Just keeping my mouth shut. My new hobby.

[boscohorowitz]

Best post ever, Raul, you socialistic libertarian bazooki mensch. I’ll dig up some dough soon.

[boscohorowitz]

I do read TAE. Everyday. I read this article and knew Raul was going to get his share of hate mail for daring to so brazenly, clearly, simply and yet articulately reveal the pointlessness of We Don’t LIke Lockdowns So We WIll Demonize Them! As if anyone here likes mysterious lethal flus, or the governments we all live under (being the crazy idjits what we homo saps are), or having our lifestyles greatly reduced (being pampered little petro-rats who never missed a meal).

So I skimmed the comments, and sure enough, it is yet another Happy False Dichotomy Day!

I’ll just leave this here:

Pandemics Are Global & Universal Problems

P.S. You never saw me. I wasn’t here. It never happened. I can neitgher confirm nor deny rumors of my fleeting appearance.

[boscohorowitz]

Per an ongoing and oh-so-not-at-all-fun sociology experiment I’m conducting in the back of my head, I went to visit TAE’s comments one.last.time. cuz I just had to know. Pulling my hands slowly back from my eyes, I see that sure enough, even a bnright chap like DBSmith apparently can’t get a hint even when delivered with a broadside bludgeon like:

“Since I can’t read TAE comments anymore without being seized by the mood swing of a methed-up baboon discovering its first baseball bat, I would appreciate it if folks sent useful comments to either my email: pastmastergeneral@gmail.com or place them in the comments section of my poor benighted lonely hermit blog if you prefer more privacy: Nine Billion Names and Counting”

Sure enough, even a mind as wise and sharp as DBS’s can’t interpret simple ad hoc information if it isn’t formatted in whatever Social Officialeze (for example, “internet etiquette”) currently prevails. One caveat: I did specify “useful comments” and it must be admitted that posting remarks to a person at an eddress said person asked them not to, is not exactly what ye’d call a useful comment. THAT said, I’ll counter-counter-point that one simply could have NOT addressed those comments to me or in the person-to-person voice, and we could all have gone home with a bucket of ice cream and a new box of shotgun shells.

It reminds me of how I felt when I learned that the brilliant and majestically erudite Nicole Foss thought it worth energy to focus on removing Trump from office even when she knows he isn’t the cause of our problems and that the prospects are s-l-i-l at best of getting a supposedly Lesser Evil whose evil is sufficiently lesser (I’m reminded here of her lesser/greater fool analogy) to make a difference.

We are so screwed.

‘We’ of course doesn’t mean everyone, but neither is any man an island. This sudden brush with real reality outside our conventions of How Things Work/How Things Should Work (most of us can scarcely distiniguish the two) is the lowering tide that sinks all boats. Some will be screwed more than others. For some, it will even be a gain. But fwiw, I say the odds are against folks with college degrees. 15-21 years of almost non-stop institutional indoctrination seem able to warp even the finest of minds. I’m SO glad I dropped out in freshman year.

Stop Makin Me Nervous, I’m Holding a Baseball Bat

Raul, I love you, man (says bosco, eyeing Raul’s stash of Bland X Lite Beer), and I honestly don’t know how you deal with it.

Live long and prosper, y’all, etc.

[boscohorowitz]

Oil/nose/moisture/virus: my weird HHT that makes me so vulnerable to chronic, spontaneous, and too often severe nosebleeds, is most consistently allayed by humidity. This is why we abandoned a home in Spokane for a crappy neo-Stalinist prisoner cell apartment in the Portland metro’s myriad prison quarters aka ‘affordable housing/apartment complex’.

I squirt saline spray up my nose like rock stars do cocaine: frequently and in large amounts.

But also, and in some ways maybe even more importantly, I put virgin coconut oil up there like a porn star uses lube. This helps seal the moisture in and promotes the formation of a dense kind of meta-mucus that helps keep in place the scabs inside my nose, in some places all that keeps it from bleeding from hopelessly vulnerable telangiectasias:

Telangiectasia

Why should you care? A few reasons:

I almost never get head colds. COVID-19 almost always enters the body through the sinus regions (this includes virus rubbed into the eyes).

An interesting relevant fact: one reason that flu season is a colder-months syndrome is because that’s when everyone is indoors breathing artificially dry air circulated by duct systems. The drier the sinus tissue, the easier it is for a virus to land atop an unprotected cell and have its spiky wicked way with it.

Another relevant fact: airliners have notoriously dry air circulating the pathogens of an (often cosmopolitan) population the size of a small jungle tribe. William Gibson, author, hates doing his global book promo tours despite a love of travel itself because he invariably gets a sinus infection from hell because of the dry air in passenger, uh, air craft.

Another relevant fact: my understanding is that the kinds of pathogens that love salt-water tissues do not like lipids. Lipids form a layer too dense for most microbes to swim through as it suffocates them. This is why covering just-cooked meat with fat is an old-fashioned preservative method.

Not to mention that saline spray moistens the tissues which makes it easier for them to move anti-bodies and such to the infection site while creating that much more moisture barrier between the virus and its would-be host cell victims.
I rarely get head colds even when my wife’s snot is draining constantly and she sneezes aerosol contagions right into my face. (If a bug gets into my bad-habits-weakened lungs, lord help me. But I almost never get head colds.)

I’m ‘pretty sure’ my wife and I have contracted the virus. She got sick in a way that fits the bill, is now better, but I still badger her into slamming large doses of helpful vitamins, chugalugging Airborne, electrolyte solutions, fresh fruit and veggies galore, indulging a bit of modest exercise including what the young kids call “sex”, and thinking happy thoughts while neither avoiding nor obsessing on virus-news. I do this because the thing seems fond of relapses.

Me, I felt myself fighting something but am highly resistant, I believe, because I have been revving my 64-year old health at high Ferrari cycles. (Now that I have iron again, I am otherwise an uncommonly vigorous Old Dude.) Last night, I felt for fifteen minutes at day’s end the tell-tale symptoms of an encroaching head cold. It feels like no other sinusoidal inflammation, and brother, am I ever a connoisseur of sinusoidal inflammations since HHT gives me chronic de facto sinusitis even without microbial pathogenic ‘help’. I was already feeling low and blue for most of the day: the Ferrari’s timing was off and RPMs were dropping fast.

I chugalugged some Airborne (the effervescent kind which has that hefty placebo kick from the seltzer water effect*), sucked a Zicam lozenge, had yet another of my many daily cups of this or that cold-relevant herbal teas (Gypsy Cold Care/Breathe Easy/Throat Coat/peppermint/jasmine green tea), made it known to my wife that I needed serious baby-ing, and the head cold vanished within another fifteen minutes.

My Ferrari is running strong again this morning.

Also, if you can buy legal weed, buy some edibles and stay high more often than not. Low doses probably will do. Why? Well, reduced stress and elevated endorphins are good, and the plethora of literature on cannabis indicates that it elevates immune system health, whether just by the elevated endorphins/reduced stress aspect or by more direct means.

If you’re stuck with black market weed: buy a bunch of lower grade herb, boil it down, add some olive oil, boil off the water, keep the olive oil. You now have edible cannabis. It doesn’t taste nearly as bad as cod liver oil does. Orange oil helps. Also, take it with food, Weed needs food to properly metabolize: better, smoother, longer high, better therapeutic effects, more economical via efficiency.

I mentioned exercise. Yes. But nothing severe. Nothing that causes lows, however brief, in your body’s core health.

*my own invention, thank you
I hope this information is helpful.
Since I can’t read TAE comments anymore without being seized by the mood swing of a methed-up baboon discovering its first baseball bat, I would appreciate it if folks sent useful comments to either my email:

pastmastergeneral@gmail.com

or place them in the comments section of my poor benighted lonely hermit blog if you prefer more privacy:

Nine Billion Names and Counting

P.S. Awesome post, DBSMith.

[boscohorowitz]

Thanks again for the hard work, Raul.

[boscohorowitz]

a) “I’ve long said that people are social animals, and you cannot -and shouldn’t- keep them apart for too long. ”

b) “For example, if you demand certainty, commit to total isolation.”

c) If you want total freedom void of citizen tracking and other such products of modern hyper-mediated hive life, commit to total isolation. Me, if I want to drive myself crazy, read the comments thread on TAE.

I read them because wise prudent people post useful info and shrewd applicable concepts. However, I pay a heavy price even skimming through remarks.

Oh, and by all means, let’s not measure events as they unfold in real time and affect (infect) people in real-time, but let’s measure them in neat tidy metric increments like “life-years, rather than a simple death count”. Them’s just the kind of statistics your typical Stalinesque police state uses to ruin lives in the name of autoritarian state utopia.

After all, a single death is a tragedy, but 171,333 deaths is just a statistic, and statistics don’t cry, or shit as they cough their last bloody breath, or stink up our nice clean cellar morgue.

Forgive me if I counter a disguised emotional appeal camouflaged as rational logic, but, to repeat the quote leading this post: “people are social animals”… not algorithms. Algorithms are the things surveillance governments use to track citizen contact and so forth.

Does This Statistic Make My Ass Look as Fat as My Head? (Asking for an enemy.)

God ha’ mercy. When pandemic reality sinks its fangs deep enough into the social organism called society, all this putatively rational absurdity (as in ‘things that don’t add up’) is going to evaporate.

[boscohorowitz]

What If Trump Were a Genius?

…and other odd notions.

[boscohorowitz]

“You are encouraging a girly cat fight.”

Good thing I’m not a girly cat. I could get hurt.

[boscohorowitz]

Otto von Bismark, senile and feeble as is Old Joe Biden now, gave Hitler his official seal of approval in a way and time critical to Hitler’s rise to power.

Question: to whom will Joe give his official seal of approval? assuming he drops out after humping the podium on national tv?

[boscohorowitz]

from January 2019 report by Simon Michaux Geologian tutkimuskeskus | Geologiska forskningscentralen | Geological Survey of Finland
Espoo  Kokkola  Kuopio  Loppi  Outokumpu  Rovaniemi
http://www.gtk.fi  Puh/Tel +358 29 503 0000  Y-tunnus / FO-nummer / Business ID: 0244680-7:

“Today approximately 90% of the supply chain of all industrially manufactured products depend on the availability of oil derived products, or oil derived services. As the source material for various types of fuels, oil is a basic prerequisite for the transportation of large quantities of goods over long distances. Oil, alongside information technology, container ships, trucks and aircraft form the backbone of globalization and our current industrial ecosystem.

“Approximately 70% of our daily oil supply comes from oil fields discovered prior to 1970. Most of global oil supply still comes from 10 to 20 huge oil fields. In 2006, 10 oil fields accounted for 29.9% of the global proved reserves. Since 2006, comparatively very small oil fields have been discovered. 74% of the current global oil reserves is geographically concentrated in what is termed the Strategic Ellipse, which is the Middle East and Central Asia. Peak oil discovery was in 1962, since then rates of resource discovery has been declining persistently. New discoveries are limited: the exploration success rate in 2017 was a record low of 5%, and the average discovery size was 24mbbls. A projected range for average decline rate on post-peak production is 5-7%, equivalent to around 3-4.5mb/d of lost production every year.

“Currently the market is oversupplied. When the market returns to demand taking up all global supply, effective spare capacity could only shrink by just 1% of global supply/demand of 96mb/d, leaving the market very susceptible to disruptions. Oil demand is still growing by ~1mbd every year, and no central scenarios that have been recently assessed see oil demand peaking before 2040”

[boscohorowitz]

“There is an 80-year pattern to the weave of history. The pattern is this:
a) a devastating economic crash, followed by a
b) populist revolution, followed by a
c) BigAssWar (BAW) in which
d) bankers obtain a politicoeconomic strangehold by “loaning” “money” to fund the war.

from something I wrote in March 2016 for Facebook consumption.

Something in this classic pattern has changed this time around. Anyone care to offer opinions on this? I will be silent on the matter except to note here that b), c), & d) appear both reversed and c) appears to have morphed beyond mere Ye Olde Bloody Big Ass War.

[boscohorowitz]

“the culturally approved willowy limbs with abundant butt’n’boobs” manner…

[boscohorowitz]

Why You Think You’re Right Even When You’re Wrong

Not only is she an uncommonly attractive babe in the culturally approved willowy limbs with abundant butt’n’boobs, she is also uncommlny articulate in her very well-prepared and nicely balanced presentation.

Youtube showed it to me this morning cuz gooble’s algorithms know me better than  I do myself. Think of google algorithms as The Scout; think of the ads/entertainments/diversions/presentations as The Soldier.

[Author]

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