boscohorowitz
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On one hand, we can point out that people with obesity and other bad-lifestyle health vulnerabilities, along with people kept alive past their sell-by, and other “weaksters” like children and those with wasting conditions (like me) are most likely to catch this or any other bug and get seriosuly sick, even die, from same.
We can use this perspective to blame the death on pre-existing conditions and somehow excuse the virus that actually finished them off.
This also lets us blame the existing culture in which we live for creating such people. (We create each other in a society. We are each others’ keepers: this is the essence of mutually protective society, like those with armies and physically defined borders. It takes a village to raise people. (Y!M!C!A! 🙂 )
We can also blame the people whose lifestyles, however culturally inculcated, are nonetheless their personal responsibility in the end.
We can blame poverty for reducing peoples’ access to the healthier things in life. Poverty, being an abstract concept, has no feelings nor responsibilities nor volitional powers, so it’s an especially easy target.
We can then blame the socioeconomics that create this poverty. We can also say: “Sure, it (economy) was (very nigh collapse), and now they can divert the blame. But beyond that, they are preventing any economy, that is, us, you, from making actions that help ourselves, while they help themselves to quite a lot of free cash, tests, unchecked power, and medical care.”
We can say that although doing so indulges a crass falsehood: “they are preventing any economy, that is, us, you, from making actions that help ourselves”
Apparently, a bit of quarantine prevents us from doing things. Doing things, you see, is how we uh, do things, including survival. Just because we take certain precautions, for a short or even very very long while, to prevent something like we saw in Wuhan (who are not reporting nearly as many deaths as are really happening!, I’ve heard dogmaticvally and absolutely said around here) doesn’t render us helpless. Such periods in fact foment independence and inquiry and new awareness and dialog between neighbors precisely because they’re all sharing this weird new thing, the Time of Corvid. (It’s from an old Tolkien clone fantasy book. 😉 ) Such periods also, at least as claimed in centuries old uncontested epidemiologic theory/history, help save many lives and proviude a better restart to a temporarily subdued economy.
But, since we are no longer diligently obeying cultural orders* to work 9-5 we are of course incapable of creating anything like personal livelihoods. All we can do is continue obeying Mammon even as the merry Mammonites “help themselves to quite a lot of free cash, tests, unchecked power, and medical care” at our expense unless they’ve finally genetically engineered geese who lay golden eggs and elephants who pee gasoline. We can die like a rat or a man but we certainly lack any initiative or pluck under fire. We are all just fluff in Donald’s hairflow wind, all we are is fluff in the wind…
*(except you suckers with crazy schedules or worse, gig economy jobs! you losers work whenever we tell you or you’re lucky enough to get a gig!)
We can blame people for being enslaved fools of Mammon.
We can blame people for not going to work for Mammon even as Mammon told everyone to ignore this virus and keep going to work until the bodies piled up, whereupon we (return to top of page and blame pre-existing conditions, and then repeat the list).
I’ve surely missed some of the steps in this dance called the Blame Game, but there are enough for us to figure the rest out. After all, it’s got a bad beat that’s easy to blame to.
“So do you want more or fewer people killed? Your choice.”
False dichotomy with this crowd. The economy was going to crash anyhow. If you don’t believe that, fine. Most everyone here does. Need to change the algorithm. Wrong vector angle.
” ‘You can’t ask the people of this state or this country to choose between lives lost and dollars gained,’ New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said.
***
”Yes, you you can, Andy. I’m sorry but that is exactly the situation life has presented you. That is exactly what you’re doing, and that we all do every day, when we drive that extra car, and eat that extra cream puff.”How you mangled that logic is almost delightful to watch. Somehow the consumers get blamed for the producers/owners/renters deciding to make money selling toxic wasteful environmentally disastrous buillshit that also needlessly endangers said consumers. The producers/owners/renters do this using their closer connexion to cheap loans and other corp welfare subsidies to continue an economic paradigm that is destroying its fundamental constituents.
But then, someone here recently said: “Nah, you could just go out. Life is dangerous. You might die someday. All you get to choose is whether you die like a rat or a man.”
There’s a thing called living too. It generally precedes dying. It takes up the vast majority of the lives of most people, except those (like me) who have weird wasting diseases that periodically put them into something very much like death until the blood requickens enough to resume the process of living day by gradual day rather than dying day by gradual day. Po po pitiful me. There. I feel better now. 🙂
This living thing involves a bit more than action movie hero decisions. It involves a thousand countless acts of kindness or at least courtesy.
And always remember and never forget: when it comes to the Big Picture, you can’t win. Doc D told us so. The Masters rule; we drool. They control EVERYTHING. But when it comes to the little pictures like, say, my life or that of my wife, then it’s our fault for being weak, ignorant, stupid, and morally inferior. Because Yahweh said so. Or someone. Or maybe Mao. Or Ayn Rand. Howdy Doody Squarepants. I dunno. I just shut up and eat my gruel and act grateful, cuz Doc D said so.
Blame the fat cats for oppressing the little people.
Blame the little people for being oppressed.
Blameblameblameblameblame.Rhymes with Russiarussiarussia if you squint your ears just right.
It’s everybody’s fault… except Doc. D.’s. Cuz he’s been telling us since the Darpanet was born, and it ain’t his fault that we didn’t listen, so he is therefore exonerated.
“Stupid is as stupid does. Come autumn, you’re going to need food. Underpaying essential workers will not help. Raise their wages, and you may even attract a few Americans.”
I did migrant labor agricultural work in the early 80s in Yakima, WA. Picked fruit. Paid by the bin (maybe 4′ x 4′ x 3′). Very hard labor, and I was in uncommonly good shape and used to hard labor.
The last of the Steinbeck generation of Caucasian fruit pickers was almost gone in 1980. a few diehard hippies, a few lingering 3rd generation Okies and Arkies. Hispanics ruled the orchards. They could outpick me 2 to 1. Plus, husband and wife often worked together while their kids hung around the fields, played, and helped mom and dad. A major asset to the economy, those people.
Paying people real wages to do this work is likely to raise the price of produce considerably. Paying them via piecework will teach anyone reduced to this extremely physical, dusty, and presumably pesticide-drenched labor a new meaning of both work and value and will turn their image of reality upside-down and inside-out — and still raise the cost of produce substantially.
As for slaughterhouses: I never worked in one but had friends who did. It was also back-breaking labor, not without danger, to say the least.
And then there’s the psychological toll of taking an entire populace’s life-for-death karma and placing it on… survey says… 500K USA workers. While we buy a large chunk of our meat from abroad, I assume most of it is still rendered over here.
I’ll add 500K foreign meat workers here just for easy rounding’s sake, and call it 1 million USA and foreign souls experiencing daily the horrific muders of living animals or the merely desensitizing rendering of their meat, for 330 million Americans. That’s a 330 to 1 karmic ratio before we begin counting animal souls, at which point the karmic debt resembles the Fed in a Rumplestilskin costume.
The price of animal protein is bound to rise several hundred % in the next few years, along with the cost of dairy, which has been artificially low, practically functioning on life support, for a long time.
It’s time for beans, beans, beans… in ten years, America will have the world’s first form of viral pneumonia spread mostly by public farting. I can hardly find beans at the store right now. The shift is already underway.
And that’s before we consider the inevitable petrodollar collapse/reset.
Oh well. Life’s a Funny Thing
ANd then, counter-counter-point:
The Devil in these details strongly, I say, strongly implies that this thing is the product of some kind of genetic engineering. We’re back where our suspicions first started, only now with enough evidence to feel those suspoicions are more justified.
“This, inevitably, led the neuroscientists who noticed these changes to conclude that “gut feelings and bodily reactions were necessary to think rationally” and that without a functioning ventromedial prefrontal cortex it’s impossible for us to integrate these emotional gut feelings with conscious thought. So without this region of the brain working properly “every option at every moment felt as good as every other.” As it turns out, it’s this most primitive, instinctual, split-second region of our brains that leads the charge into decision-making.
“And so “moral reasoning is mostly just a post ad hoc search for reasons to justify the judgments people had already made,” meaning that by the time you notice yourself weighing options and thinking about the best path, you’ve really already decided subconsciously and emotionally, and are just spinning excuses and justifications to yourself.
“So if you continually put yourself in emotionally-charged situations, it’ll only be a matter of time before this elephant of subconscious emotional desire shifts beneath you and takes a step down a path that can ruin your life and the lives of those around you. And it’s always this dominating emotional elephant of rapid instinctive moral judgments that’s in control, the best that the contemplative reasoning rider on top of this primal beast can do is to come up with rationalizations after the elephant has sated its desires.
“Sometimes these desires are perfectly healthy for ourselves and the society around us, at other times they leave feelings and lives trampled behind. Which means that although the rider can do his best to look into the future in an attempt to steer the elephant down the best path, more often than not he’s left trying to serve as the elephant’s spokesperson without really knowing what the elephant is thinking and “fabricating post ad hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done” while justifying whatever course it feels like taking next.
“On a social level this had an obvious impact, “once human beings developed language and began to use it to gossip about each other, it became extremely valuable for elephants to carry around on their backs a full-time public relations firm” to provide an acceptable justification for everything we do. Because after all, “reason is the servant of the intuitions. The rider was put there in the first place to serve the elephant.”
“But this elephant isn’t always galloping along blind to everything except its own whims. Since although “we make out first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments … friends can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves: they can challenge us, giving us reasons and arguments that sometimes trigger new intuitions, thereby making it possible for us to change our minds.” So although “many of us believe that we follow an inner moral compass … the history of social psychology richly demonstrates that other people exert a powerful force, able to make cruelty seem acceptable and altruism seem embarrassing, without giving us any reasons or arguments.”
“As humans, we see our behavior as far more noble then it actually is, and assume that an outside other wouldn’t live up to the standards we’ve set. But as Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman chronicles in the book dedicated to his late friend, Thinking, Fast and Slow, after we take a careful look at just how subject to outside influence our own behaviors and thoughts are it becomes impossible not to acknowledge just how malleable we really are.”
Gather Ye Childhood Sleds While Ye May?
The acoustics are about perfect, her voice is perfect for this kind of thing.
WES, can you cite the source for the Maine seed banning? I’m not finding anything. I am, however, seeing this:
Maine surge in seed sales exceeds supplies
“Maine-based seed company, Johnny’s Selected Seeds, stopped taking orders from non-commercial customers for a week on the last day of March because their volume of sales was so much greater than previous years. According to a report on Maine Newscenter’s 207, online orders with the company are up 300 percent and half of those are from new customers. Filling non-commercial orders was scheduled to resume this week.
“Melissa Frost of Frost Farms Garden Center and Landscape on Route 102 is waiting on an order of seeds she recently placed and was told would be delayed by a couple of weeks.
“I think we’re going to see quite a surge in veggie seedlings and vegetable starters,” she said. “Our seed order is bogged down because across the U.S. everything is craziness.”
This article goes much deeper into explanations regarding cornonavirus origins than any I’ve read. It sheds a bit of counterpoint on WES’ well-crafted summary of an article he read describing Corvid-19’s myriad ways of messing a person up. By counterpoint, I mean that the list of dangers WES’ summation details is scary spooky indeed and immediately got me to lending more credence to the bio-engineered concept. SO I dug around for hard facts. This shed some light on how such a radical assembly of nasty effects could come together in one virus.
Over all, it fits the speculative narrative someone laid out a few weeks back that the virus indeed came from research with bats done in a facility that had a relatively low security protocol:
“Except for SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, two deadly viruses that have caused outbreaks in the past, coronaviruses have been studied at laboratories that are labelled as operating at a moderate biosafety level known as BSL-2, Ebright says. And, he says, bat coronaviruses have been studied at such labs in and around Wuhan, China, where the new coronavirus first emerged. “As a result,” Ebright says, “bat coronaviruses at Wuhan [Center for Disease Control] and Wuhan Institute of Virology routinely were collected and studied at BSL-2, which provides only minimal protections against infection of lab workers.”
“Higher safety-level labs would be appropriate for a virus with the characteristics of the new coronavirus causing the current pandemic. “Virus collection, culture, isolation, or animal infection at BSL-2 with a virus having the transmission characteristics of the outbreak virus would pose substantial risk of infection of a lab worker, and from the lab worker, the public,” Ebright says.
“Ebright points out that scientists in Wuhan have collected and publicized a bat coronavirus called RaTG13, one that is 96 percent genetically similar to SARS-CoV-2. The Nature Medicine authors are arguing “against the hypothesis that the published, lab-collected, lab-stored bat coronavirus RaTG13 could be a proximal progenitor of the outbreak virus.” But, Ebright says, the authors relied on assumptions about when the viral ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 jumped to humans; how fast it evolved before that; how fast it evolved as it adapted to humans; and the possibility that that the virus may have mutated in cell cultures or experimental animals inside a lab.
“The Nature Medicine authors “leave us where we were before: with a basis to rule out [a coronavirus that is] a lab construct, but no basis to rule out a lab accident,” Ebright says.
“Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently wrote an article for Foreign Affairs that is dismissive of conspiracy theories about the origins of the pandemic but also mentions circumstantial evidence that supports the possibility that a lab release was involved. That evidence includes a study “conducted by the South China University of Technology, [that] concluded that the coronavirus ‘probably’ originated in the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention,” located just 280 meters from the Hunan Seafood Market often cited as the source of the original outbreak.
“The paper was later removed from ResearchGate, a commercial social-networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers,” Huang wrote. “Thus far, no scientists have confirmed or refuted the paper’s findings.”
It is very interesting that dear old safe-as-snow snopes, the Reader’s Digest of quasi-accurate refutations of quasi-accurate allegations, spins the final paragraph’s info negatively: the removal of the paper from Research Gate is implied to mean the authors knew it was spurious.
Nonetheless, it was by enduring snopes’ “final word” on the question that led me to the Atomic Scientists’ article. That door swings bof ways.
snopes article on bioweapons corvid-19 theory
snopes is what the NYTimes and such were like 40-50 years ago: definitely agents of the wealthy but much more subtle in how they used truth to distract from unpleasant querstions, and dedicated enough to maointaining credibility they rarely took the liberties our news media now makes every second, compounded countless ways by network media. Today such standards are deemed by mainstream consensus to be the Final Clear-Headed Word.
Anyway, my current money still leans toward incompetent corrupt arrogant greed not competent global domination schemes. This collapse arose from human nature not underground Annanukai Zionist global Dominionist laborary war game schemes, sez moi.
p. 72 of Straw Dogs bu John Gray especially useful to the worldview(s) my latter years assemble to give me peace and purpose, re-explain pleasure and pain (not to mention my often unconscious love of alliteration;) ).
Haven’t enjoyed a Big Idea book so much in many ages. Rather like reading Alan Watts at age 18 and Chesterton around 40, but together in my 60s. I also very much enjoyed his shish-kabob of myriad Big Name philosophers.
“Philippines: Crawling Out From Under America’s Shadow?
March 20, 2020 (Joseph Thomas – NEO) – President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, has announced his intentions to end the nation’s security agreement with the United States, specifically its Visiting Forces Agreement. “Retrospective speculation: if Johnson hadn’t screwed his own Civil Rights bill by choosing the VN War over what the Civil Rights bill was supposed to do: educate and sustain the disenfranchised, especially the blacks, with good nutrition, safe environments, quality education, and unfettered access to the poll; we wouldn’t be here today.
That is a stretch to swallow. It is predicated on the notion that an enlightened populace would not have fallen for Reagan’s voodoo jive and recognized what Jimmy Carter knew: we had to do something effective, then and there, to create sustainable energy sources and lifestyles calibrated to same, while contininuing to heal our environment (which was happening back then). Somewone will sputter: ‘But! Solar panels! Scam quackery!’
I reply that we didn’t know what photovoltaics were capable of back then. Same with wind, etc. Had we started working on it seriously back then, instead of drill baby drill, baby wants a new dawn in America’s shoes, we would’ve learned these things long ago and used them appropriately, while we could still materially afford it, rather than use alt energy tech as dubious one-size-fits-all bubble dreams like Tesla and windmills used to make electricity rather than do useful work (amazing what well-balanced flywheels can do to store factory-useful energy). Pump water.
We had the means and ways, hypothetically.
Oh, someone would’ve shot this or that president. Other stunts would be pulled. But with a genuinely educated populace not desperate to get paid by whatever means (‘Be! All that you can be! You can do it… i-i-i-n the A-rrrrrrr-my’), we had a working chance to at least not be as depesrately weak as we are now. Just kinda whimpy.
But that’s utopian wish-listing on my part. We would’ve had to have been better people at the time to stop Johnson. We weren’t. We’re a war-like nation, and pride goeth before the fall.
“Look at Boris Johnson’s face in his video thanking the hospital staff, it is a terrible illness. He will never be the same.”
I agree. Humans are kinda deranged but we are indeed highly educable. Typically, this enlarges the mind of compassion, to steal a Leonard Cohen phrase.
One possible bright side of this is a financially induced “peace dividend”, that mythical creature spied and promised to come closer as the USSR imploded. No matter how greedy Blackrock et al are, and how sociopathically-minded, they’ll have to give up ruling the world if they want to rule home. Not that they can rule home more than for a brief lousy while, but ion the process they’re likely to properly downsize our insane romanesque military spending to do what needs doing at home.
This will prove very painful in a number of ways along overlapping probability lines: we’ll experience an increase in authoritarianism reaching for totalitarianism, which won’t be too bad compared to The Mob Unleashed. But the CIC will have neither the competence, viable money (that can buy things abrad or affordably at home), nor adequate public mythos to go full-court Kim Jong. He had the horrors of United States genocidically pounding them into bloody bone dust after nuking HiroSaki. That protective myth has carried a dynasty through many decades of corrupt folly, harsh rule, and deprivation.
The CIC have squat. They blew it all on 911, further stained their image with 2008 and the steady erosion of real value ever since, and the American people, our pampered infantile spoilt natures notwithstanding, will not submit long to those Men in Clown Feet running roughshod jackboots on our backs when said Cown Feets can’t even run a burger joint in the real world.
We will, I fear, suffer that most horrible of fates: left alone to our worst devices, with no one to blame but us. But we will learn, for we will have run out of others to blame. Those who come through the other side will be better overall than we are now.
I have no desire for anyone to be kicked out. I have questions and opinions, is all. Neither my ego nor Doc D.’s ego interest me except abstractly, although my ego obsessively demands I pay it constant attention and so must be constantly addressed, rather like making an unruly dog heel.
Oh, I enjoy my ego when I can, but an overgrown unhousebroken puppy needs restraint.
Doc writes a pretty good schtick. The content, however, is, imo, grossly inferior to that style, and provides a disservice to those of us who want to take each other seriously here when we present serious topics; and Doc always presents his remarks as if they are as serious as a bad lung x-ray, his humorous elements notwithstanding.
I am obviously for fun and frolic myself, and frankly weary of the predominating seriousness of most posts. But if one is presenting one’s material as something to be taken seriously, than I have personal standards that I apply, and Doc steadfastly fails them.
For now, I reiterate: I cannot distinguish what he does from fear-mongering dressed as insouciant “truth-telling”, usually in the form of calling most any other source fraudlent while himself scarcely bothering to vet half the data he bolsters his claims with. Some forms of entertainment are not so good for one’s intellectual (and emotional) soul. I see Doc as such.
at-what-cost-are-the-us-and-its-nato-allies-withdrawing-from-iraq?/
Increasing use of condottieri by an empire is historically associated with the rapid demise of said empire.
“Amid the growing dissatisfaction with the American military presence in Syria and Iraq, CENTCOM has decided to increase the number of military personnel by recruiting hidden reserves — foreign mercenaries from private military companies (PMCs). There are numerous reports online about how Washington has mobilized Polish, German, French, Romanian, Ukrainian and even Moldovan private military companies to carry out sensitive operations. According to statements from the mercenaries themselves, most Europeans sign a contract with the “European Security Academy” in Poland before they are deployed to Syria or Iraq, whose representatives fund these “business trips”. A training session for recruits of the private Swedish military company Vesper Group was held In February at an American military base in Iraq under the supervision of US and British personnel.”
Not for long:
TYhis item is currently out of stock
Many things are out of stock, but I doubt that we’re out of sock. (ouch!)
Let me put it more plainly, Doc. D: if the various NOWoid cabals wanted to spread fear of and submission to their agenda while disguising it as freedom-loving resistance of empire, they would be wise to hire you as Chief Psy-Prop.
What’s really weird about it, is that your posting behavior fits the model of an advanced AI fight-bot to a T:
1) always contentious,
2) dismissive of others in a way that makes them want to engage in futile refutation that you rarely acknowledge, only doing so when denial/evasion becomes obviously nonsensical and therefore counter-productive to your design, which is most of all to build credibility by which to sow fear and a sense of helplessness,
3) able to build considerable support among your readers because you (mostly) accurately detail so much that is indeed true, while studiously avoiding anything even remotely positive, and when you do, typically skipping on the pragmatics that would show that you’ve not even addressed how to bell the cat
d) are a one-note johnny when it comes to expression outside the above-defined range.Normally, inferring motive is a classic logical fallacy used by the softer thinkers among us to dismiss a person’s argument (‘because you’re obviously a libtard/republican’t/whatevs/stupidhead’). But in this case, it seems proper diagnostic technique to poke a stick in your cage and ask: are you a robot? are you on a payroll? or do you merely have nothing better to do than tell everyone over-and-over how you were right about this, that, and any other durn thing that fits your insistent agenda that we are all helplessly hopelessly in the almighty grip of the creeps in charge? Is there a market for frantic furious futility?
I ask with complete sincerity. Sometimes nothing sounds snarkier than genuine curiosity. Especially when the object of curiosity seems composed entirely of a (enviably large) database and a tonal palette composed of 70% snark and 30% outrage. Me, I’m hoping you’re a snark-bot cuz it pains me to think that a living human being, of such obvious acumen and way with words, would behave this way either on their own or for pay.
Doc D: if you would be so kind as to vet your own data reportage more than the news outlets you deride for lack of same, it would be much appreciated by this cad.
The sock mask is simple: cut along dorsal and ventral lines from top[ of sock to top of heel. Stick your face in it like John has in his picture. Find a way to attach the straps behind your head. Tweak as desired for comfort. It makes a super tight but comfortably fit around the face. As shown here:
As for all those gubmint experiments on too often unwitting citizens: on one hand, it is more of the usual power overreach and mission creep, a common result of granting institutional power to Do Whatever It Takes. The Will to Power exists everywhere, nyet? On the other hand, vaccinology is not fake/flake science even if it is currently viewed and presented thru a tunnel-visioned narrow paradigm in which immunization is the One True Way.
Problem is, humans won’t sacrifice themselves for their fellows, for the most part. Not without a major propaganda campaign with enforecable teeth requiring compliance, like conscription drafts for army wars. Whenever possible, we use innocent animals for such testing even though their systems are different from ours. Who cares about a fucking chimp or rat, right? Close enough for government lab work.
So karma rears its annoyed head and next thing you know we’re spraying, I dunno, anthrax on schoolkids or something, cuz we prefer not to confront the reality of who we are and what we do. This includes being trained to be sugarholics, fast food junkies, card-carrying members of the Helpers of Hamburger, etc.
As for all the systemic corruption and undeclared oppression by the powers that be, well, of course. If the aliens didn’t build the pyramids, ten zillion human slaves did.
Pharaoh he sits in his tower of steel
The dogs of money all at his heel
Magicians cry, Oh Truth! Oh Real
We’re all working for the Pharaoh
A thousand eyes, a thousand ears
He feeds us all, he feeds our fears
Don’t stir in your sleep tonight, my dears
We’re all working for the Pharaoh
Egypt Land, Egypt Land
We’re all living in Egypt land
Tell me, brother, don’t you understand
We’re all working for the Pharaoh
Hidden from the eye of chance
The men of shadow dance a dance
And we’re all struck into a trance
We’re all working for the Pharaoh
Idols rise into the sky
Pyramids soar, Sphinxes lie
Head of dog, Osiris eye
We’re all working for the Pharaoh
Egypt Land, Egypt Land
We’re all living in Egypt land
Tell me, brother, don’t you understand
We’re all working for the Pharaoh
I dig a ditch, I shape a stone
Another battlement for his throne
Another day on earth is flown
We’re all working for the Pharaoh
Call it England, call it Spain
Egypt rules with the whip and chain
Moses free my people again
We’re all working for the Pharaoh
Egypt Land, Egypt Land
We’re all living in Egypt land
Tell me, brother, don’t you understand
We’re all working for the Pharaoh
Pharaoh he sits in his tower of steel
Around his feet the princes kneel
Far beneath we shoulder the wheel
We’re all working for the Pharaoh
<end>
There’s some of this in all of us. Boogaloo referred to it obliquely when he confessed his “dark side”.
The Plague the Torah Refers to Must’ve Been Fungal?… Revisionist Religious Conspiracy Theory
I am honored and touched, oxymoron. I too despair of human reality.
HOW A LONE WOLF PRAYS TO GOD
Aside from the vocal delivery mechanism, which is obviously different than those of most homo sapiens, the message is basically this:
Let me walk with you, please, o Lord. Although I can’t bear a leash, and we loners are known to roll in carrion for reasons mysterious to everyone including ourselves, we need to know we have a Master who loves us.
Even if we’re often out of earshot and so don’t always hear when you call, which sometimes causes us trouble and others grief, we sniff your trail often in ways that those who stay close to you can’t, being used as they are to more nearness of your presence than our solitary ways allow. Others are more accustomed to your smell, often to the point where their den is powerfully redolent of your Divine Odor, which can also cause problems: a goldfish doesn’t necessarily notice that its bowl is leaking until the water’s too far gone; we lonesters can smell a trace of your spirit like we can smell the ghost of water on the wind… precisely because we are so often desperately parched.
Let me walk with You, please. I never asked to be without a pack, but that’s how it is and apparently must be. I haven’t had a pack for 48 years, but you blessed me with a mate so I don’t have to always howl alone.
Nonetheless, while She is more company than I’d ever hoped for, I walk the woods alone because their darkness scares others. I get lonely, and need a friend I can rely on.
And… I hate to say, oh, I really hate to say it, but it’s probably you. Not that I don’t love you and adore you, but… I’m a wolf not a God. You’re all I have, like a housedog in a downtown city apartment whose entire world depends on its human. It is not entirely alone: the humans have another dog and they are best friends.
But neither of them will last long without their human god-of-their-lives, and neither will I nor my mate, o Lord.
I will now resume posting relevant links without my personal blather.
bosco understand self-protection and the concept of police invasion of privacy and worse. Him dooz, and would be lying if he said that him wonderz why you imply that he doesn’t. Because him gnoze whies:
your very human ego and its very human attachment to being right, not necessarily all the time in daily affairs, but certainly when it comes to the worldview you’ve attained to explain human geopolitical reality to yourself.
That part of the human ego gets butthurt at the drop of a fart… an unfortunate sort of twisted metaphor, that.
But then, on the other hand: Maybe I Think Too Much
Someone posted a non-paranoiac, mainstream summary of primary significant developments toward handling this virus thingamabob. This summary is broadly inclusive not exclusive in its reportings, speaks from outside both today’s bipolar political landscape and the butt-sniffers-in-a-row world of credentialed experts so adeptly misinforming and mistreating so many of us merely because they’re conditioned to do what they’re told. It uses language that will not satisfy the most ardent counter-culturalists and contrarians on both sides of whatever lines draw whatever today’s PC camps represent (Beavis<>Butthead???), but instead uses language that will communicate clearly and calmly to the vast majority of the human herd in a voice they’ve learned to easily trust and understand.
In the process, it offers what appears to be genuinely accurate information.
One can, however, quibble with this one, for surez: “All evidence suggests that COVID-19 infections produce an effective immune response that should lead to protection for life.” I don’t know if I’m qualified to refute that or not. The fact that some people have recurrent infections of Corvid-19 sounds kinda spooky and has sold its share of page-views, but I have seen no comparison of that to other viral pathogens. It may be something that has been successfully dealt with before with other viruses. If so, then he is accurate to say that “All evidence suggests that COVID-19 infections produce an effective immune response that should lead to protection for life.”
But me no gno.
I repeat: ‘Someone posted a non-paranoiac, mainstream summary of primary significant developments toward handling this virus thingamabob.’ And, it seems mostly accurate and unbiased other than its adherence to vaccinology as the One True Way.
I can hardly believe my eyes, head asplode, hair on fire. Maybe it’s just a Frigmund of my imagination?
MOst of us here are passingly familiar with the D-K Effect.
Here is a nicely succinct but not crudely simplified of this ultimately complex issue and its sibling, “I.Q.”:
A song for all of us:
“I don’t think it is a hoax but a power grab is a power grab and we should as citizens have some say over how this is handled.” oxymoron
Yes, a power grab is a power grab, it would indeed be nice if “we citizens” had a say, but which citizens? The give/take 50% who don’t bother to vote in give/take 50% of elections? Those who reactionarily empower authority by opposing authority? Or, my fave, those who work to build the foundations of something that will endure through this transformatiuon and provide some kind of sensible basis for what comes next? We’re quite a blend, we are.
We the people got us into this mess. We vastly outnumber the 1%. By, give/take, 99%. Congress has an approval rating approaching single digits yet the incumbency rate remains extremely high. We deserve the leaders we put up with, and we deserve the fate we collectively experience via authority, because we are we, and we are not in harmonious communion. We are, as Thomas Carlyle said, “…chaos with ballot urns.”
“I also think it is weird that you can trash your body all your life with shit food and drugs and whatever and crush the health care system with diabetes and the rest and then crush the health care system with Corona. I feel like I am being insensitive but the Lord of More got us here and we ain’t getting out without casualties.”
What’s insensitive, perhaps, is that the Lord of More is a vast conspiracy power grab in its own right: we all grew up with constant mentality derangers* called commercials beamed through our optic nerves straight into our brain every 5-10 minutes as we watched TV, which we did in large amounts as soon as the things arrived in our homes. A new state of couch stasis appeared. Preople could sit and stare literally for hours without maving more than their lungs and heart. Even their eyes remained fixed on the narrow visual space. Only kids, still alive and not yet entirely unsubdued, got up close to the action, making it alas, even more real to them as their eyes raced back and forth watching actors mill about the glowing screen. But sill not so hypnotised that when boring parts happened, they’d get up and play or at least pester their siblings for amusement.
Modernites, especially Euromericans, have voluntarily submitted to a brain wash campaign so blatantly visible we have had to, of course, debate ever since whether it was “really” happening or not. Especially on TV. Oh, how we love to watch things debated on TV. Oh, how hard it is for us to see the ubiquitously obvious. Like goldfish unaware of water because it surrounds them entirely while they admire their (culturally) distorted reflections in the glass.
There are people reading this blog who have “trash(ed their) bod(ies) all (their) life with shit food and drugs and whatever and crush the health care system with diabetes”. Or know someone who has. Like my dear wife, who was raised to watch TV and eat donuts as a kid. Like so many. SHe’s hardly unintelligent or unprincipled or without discipline. She struggles greatly with her early childhood food/TV imprinting.
Some of us were lucky enough to have spied a hole in The Fence. Typically, we had to experience major physical or cognitive pain to actually squeeze through that tiny barbed wire aperture. A major bitch-slap in my face when I was 16, delivered by my Dad because I wouldn’t cut my hair (oh, 1972, you were a very shaggy year), awoke me with a startle to the irrationality of the Grown-Ups In Charge, and I bolted through that hole so fast I’m still scarred from the exit wounds.
How we arrive at our given stations in and perspectives on life is as much chance as self-direction. So, if it sounds insensitive to point out what everyone here already knows via a number of mutually shared perspectives, i.e. that we were already screwed beforehand by Das System and are even more screwed now by same, it is perhaps because your language suggests a sense of removal from those poor fat deplorable zombie Twinkie-eating diabetic couch comas. In the sense of Darwinian survival chances, you probably ARE superior to them, but the act of even seeming to belittle them detracts from your appearance of ‘sensitivity’. You are probably anything but insensitive in your affairs with your daily fellows, but the above doesn’t show the best side of your compassionately moral face, maybe? All that said, I think the cornerstone is your use of the word “we” and “you” in your remarks. We all throw those pronouns interchangeably without seeing the subconscious choices that often pick which pronoun we use.
None of us asked to be born into this world, not that we know of.
*your nephew Oscar and his girlfriend Shalina want to start a punk band with that name: Mentality Derangers
Raul: John Gray is a rare treat. He pisses off equally both sides of most any aisle he comes near while honoring both with the respect of honestly acknowledging their genuine truths, whatever they are.
I especially enjoy how he will naturally piss of Xtians with his at agnostic leaning toward atheism, and he angers secular humanism with his observation that we suck at being fruitful and multiplying in a remotely sane manner.
My kinda guy. Bit of a one-note Johnny, but to quote one music critic concerning the guitar solo in Neil Young’s Cinnamon Girl: “But oh, what a note!”
I ask myself why I bother. I’ll answer that question to myself later, in private. It’s Complicated, my media relationship with myself.
Regarding the Philadelphia transit cops event:
First, the video doesn’t show what the cops do if the unMasked Man tries to board the next train, so saying they are running away is just so much, uh, bullshit. You/we don’t know unless someone has viewed subsequent footage. He’s off the train and the cops don’t care about his badge # requests. Fuck him awreddy. Cops are cops. (I am anything but a fan of cops, btw. Once came *this* close to killing one. He knew it. He saw me pull my strike back just incher, if that, before his eyes. He declined to arrest me while I verbally abused him with full impunity and great relish. True story which is why it sounds unreal.)
Secondly, Typhoid Mary
The social contract is a contract, and contracts are legally enforceable in a society based on Rule of Law under a Monop[oly on Violence as such is The State. That’s how modern life works, warts and all. We believe we’re entitled to live together in large close groups milling about our ant hill all the time, often driving or flying hundreds of miles away to do the same, carrying within us or upon us countless microbes, some of which are pathogenic to those we come into contact with.
When I was a kid, legally enforceable No Spitting signs were still prominent in the Chicago I grew up in, reflecting older public health campaigns based more on, uh, ‘hygiene etiquette’ than vaccinations and antibiotics. In that time (50s/60s) vaccinations of many kinds were already mandatory, typically enforced by one not being allowed to attend school without immunizations. Since school was/is also mandatory, not being vaccined got you culled from the herd one way or another. The truant officer could take you from your home.
In any group living situation beyond tribal size, institutions of bureaucratic authroity arise to address perceived problems, some of them real, some imagined. Granted power tends to corrupt its wielders. Beatings occur. Incarcerations happen. Executions, usually public and a popular form of entertainment before TV hypnotized us all with more satisfying forms of vicarious vengeance, become staples of life.
This is how we live. That sky has always been falling, and someone is always crowing with wings aflap that this is so and deriding us for being stupid because we do not share their precise perspective, at least not in a form they can understand. Understanding is often challenged by the act of crowing and flapping at every thing that seems to confirm one’s personal beliefs.
Sometimes these incessant alarmists get beat up by cops. Other times, citizens themselves weary of the noise and do the beating themselves. Wearing a mask is sometimes a wiser form of precaution than carrying a gun, although come to think of it, the two often overlap, ci?
But then, what could possibly be more important than having someone/something to blame? That ALWAYS solves the problem, right?
“The nation now has the long Easter weekend to stew and ruminate over its fate with spring achingly vivid and beckoning beyond the grim, streaked windows of sequestering.” J. Kunstler
Because I find no articles on this, I must share in my own text-voice this anecdotal info from ther mini-mart dude down the street an hour ago. He is in his latter fifties. Smokes, all his life, has the bad teeth to prove it. Super nice guy. (There’s a funny story attached to that, but never mind.)
He says he has a friend in the vaccine business, either corp or gov, I couldn’t hear with my ancient ears. Friend says that Mini-Mart Dude aka Sheriff Andy per my nomination, should do well when he contracts the virus (and he obviously will) because instead of a regular flu vaccine he got a “flu blocker”, which I presume is THIS.
Apparently, they’re seeing significantly more resiance and/or recovery rates in people who’ve had THIS. According to Sherrif Andy, I’m a bit too old to get it under normal situations; the cutoff age for getting THIS vaccination is around 60. (Sorry for the average-ing. My ears are bad and I can only ask people to repeat so much.)
Uh, the story about Gates/India/polio isn’t holding up to scrutiny very well. Anyone want to search to see if there are significant layers under that onion skin, please have at it. But for now, I’ll take this reportage. It’s at least as viable as something going viral via RBK, Jr., who endorsed Gore in ’00, steadfastly supports the Lesser Evil method of getting elected, and is a sucker for hoaxes like the grossly over-blown issues of vaccines<>autism.
Just cuz the gubmint’s always lying through the media doesn’t mean we should too. Let’s get the junk-science off the page, period, not just gov/corp-agenda-related junk science. Vaccines aren’t The Enemy any more than they are The Only Cure. They’re vaccines. Good for some things, not so good for others. Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don’t.
Vac-cine. Rhymes with Justine.
Liberated Self-Awareness Comes THrough a Glass Darkly
Enjoy the coming weekend, y’all.
Coronavirus claims an unexpected victim: Florida vegetables
“Thousands of acres of fruits and vegetables grown in Florida are being plowed over or left to rot because farmers can’t sell to restaurants, theme parks or schools nationwide that have closed because of the coronavirus.”
