boscohorowitz
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Born mid-50s in CHicago to poor parents who rode the Boomer Era boom to rposperity and those juicy retirements we see fading our rearview mirrors, I was raised on miracles and wonders. SInce first encountering Jay Janson’s dieoff.org in ’99, I have made Hail Atlantis! my motto, meaning that somebody ought to at least be grateful for all the amazing wonders our time provides at the expense of suffering others from hominids to whales to microbes. Like the internet, the biggest Library of Alexandria we’ve ever known, soon to burn again.
At what point does Hail Atlantis! become Fail Atlantis?
“Don’t look up from your belly button, there are dark clouds gathering over the dark and the mystic continents.”
I kinda like the Biblical ring. Not cuz of any Xtian bias per se but because the Bible is really good at that woe unto Babylon voice.
There is a psych phenomenon, the name of which I forget, describing how groups of people (specifically but not limited to committee-style groupings) are faced with a large problem and find they can’t come to an effective consensus for action regarding the major problem (usually the case), they opt for a minor action just for the satisfaction of agreeing upon SOMETHING. The anecdote I read to describe is that when someone was raped in an old college campus garden shed, the committee deliberation resulted in having the garden shed painted.
Of course our leaders are ineffective at dealing with this or any other significant emergency. Expecting this is like a dog expecting its fleas to solve its mange problem.
Remember those mysterious drone formations 2&1/2 months ago?
Possible correlations with the current move toward lockdown? But this is America. It could’ve just been some first-stage market buzz generation for Drone Wars: The Game Continues, an example of (to quote old man Gibson) the internet “everting”. In this case, in the form of gamers using their gaming interfaces to control real drones in real time.
Sounds crazy, but so is millions of people spending hours a day pushing buttons to move virtual actors through intergalactic battle fleets.
Or just preparing for a massive pizza drop in battle-hardened NYC and similar places:
“Last year UPS beat Amazon and Alphabet to being the first company to get approval to use drones for parcel deliveries from the US Federal Aviation Authority.”
And remember:
“In socialist Ontario, the public health (union) officials are resisting the privatization of any public services even in this emergency! They want to retain 100% control of everything even if many Ontarians die because of it. They don’t want to risk the public finding out how incompetent they really are by letting the private sector help out and show them up! And there is nothing we the people of Ontario can do about it since the socialist control everything!”
The will to power principle works the same in any -ism, but the flexibility factor you cite is imo, indeed capitalism’s great strength. Capitalism fully embraces the truth that money, not morals nor political systems, rule humanity. The communists in China have remained in charge for a few more decades because they embraced the power of raw money. Capitalism also adds the allure of gambling, which is a very powerful and often compulsive motivator for humanity which rarely meets a get-rich-quick scheme it doesn’t embrace.
Capitalism always collapses because it relies on money/gambling which supersede the initial industries that capitalism is so good at creating almost overnight. And since the socioeconomics are entirely money-based, the government soon collapses too unless it’s a dictatorship committed to sound money practices, which practices are hardly even mentioned in economics textbooks and all but one book on the history of money.
Works like this: take accurate census of people, property, resources, and the average prevailing production created by interaction between the three. Mint enough money to pay for all these things according to agreed upon values: a cow, say, is worth $100 ding-dongs, a goat is worth ten, a sheep 20, etc. Print a modest amount more than is needed, say 10%, for inflation. Continue taking censuses. Every five years, ten years, something like that, depending on growth. Print more money according to successive censuses as needed to balance the money supply. Rinse and repeat. Never… never… never “back” your currency with anything: gold, Moon Pies, reefer joints. (Huh. Just realized “reefer” is probably a pun on ‘reefing sails’, which action resembles rolling a joint.)
Specie currency, specie standard money, and fiat money are all doomed to bust, although fiat seems to blow the biggest bubbles since it is entirely based on imaginary notions while driven by ever-present greed.
Communism would probably have worked if they’d stuck to this plan. Emotionally, it’s a very satisfying and socially cohesive system that has failed not just because of Stalins having their way but because it never had a sound money policy, relying instead on production quotas and such. Most people can be greedy but they also like to be members of a group and like everyone to be reasonably happy.
Capitalism wouldn’t have the booms and busts it has always shown, which oscillations disturb things so much we never get to tame the beast that, left to itself, always eats everything in sight and then starves. We never get to create sustainability and stability.
For now, though, solvent economies like Russia, and its key allies who peg their fate to Russia’s, are wise to use gold-backed currencies. In the short run, it will work pretty swell but after that, the money will inevitably detach its nominal value from the actual physical wealth it represents, and will eventually create far far more paper wealth than there is physical wealth.
Capitalist societies ‘come together’ during times of war alone. The USA had an opportunity to go on a serious war footing against this virus, but choose to play games instead. Now they’re trying to corner us into a totalitarian corral without giving us a good enough reason. That is to say that they’re not coming together in concert to deal on local levels with a national problem pouring in from all parts of the globe into us et vice-versa.
I have some hopes for this virus being the ‘fight the common enemy’ consolidator that would also provide cohesion through the inevitable currency collapse, but that hope fades when I see how ineffectually we’re dealing with this problem. While capitalism allows rapid robust responses to major system shocks like WES describes, it is also as good or better at preventing the kind of early consolidated across-the-nation group coordinated response needed to effectively keep the virus down to a dull roar.
We seem dumb enough to play games with our troops abroad and at home even as our (hyperbole alert) pert near everything crashes. This is liable to create more contagion havoc down the road, rather like how the Spanish flu hammered worst when they brought the troops home from Europe. As counterbalance, at least we’ll have gobs more ventilators by then, and other resources as well, since we know what causes this illness and should have good therapies, maybe even an effective vaccine, by then.
If the creeps in charge are seriously looking to put boots on new foreign ground anytime soon (like to try and steal Venezuelan oil), we might find ourselves hammered twice (see quotes below). Unless a flu vaccine has been devised and administered to a large majority of citizens, even just a repeat of the current version will require more shutdown of the economy, although not as bad since we’ll have learned protocols, will have tests, and know how to run group production functions without getting people sick without our knowing it.
“As U.S. troops deployed en masse for the war effort in Europe, they carried the Spanish flu with them. Throughout April and May of 1918, the virus spread like wildfire through England, France, Spain and Italy. An estimated three-quarters of the French military was infected in the spring of 1918 and as many as half of British troops. Luckily, the first wave of the virus wasn’t particularly deadly, with symptoms like high fever and malaise usually lasting only three days, and mortality rates were similar to seasonal flu.” ….
…”As U.S. troops deployed en masse for the war effort in Europe, they carried the Spanish flu with them. Throughout April and May of 1918, the virus spread like wildfire through England, France, Spain and Italy. An estimated three-quarters of the French military was infected in the spring of 1918 and as many as half of British troops. Luckily, the first wave of the virus wasn’t particularly deadly, with symptoms like high fever and malaise usually lasting only three days, and mortality rates were similar to seasonal flu.
“Reported cases of Spanish flu dropped off over the summer of 1918, and there was hope at the beginning of August that the virus had run its course. In retrospect, it was only the calm before the storm. Somewhere in Europe, a mutated strain of the Spanish flu virus had emerged that had the power to kill a perfectly healthy young man or woman within 24 hours of showing the first signs of infection.
“In late August 1918, military ships departed the English port city of Plymouth carrying troops unknowingly infected with this new, far deadlier strain of Spanish flu. As these ships arrived in cities like Brest in France, Boston in the United States and Freetown in west Africa, the second wave of the global pandemic began.”
“The rapid movement of soldiers around the globe was a major spreader of the disease,” says James Harris, a historian at Ohio State University who studies both infectious disease and World War I. “The entire military industrial complex of moving lots of men and material in crowded conditions was certainly a huge contributing factor in the ways the pandemic spread.”
“I read somewhere that every war simulation the gubmint does of gubmint vs. populace, the gubmint wins.”
I mean de gubmint loses. I really need to get new glasses. Anyone know a good optometrist? 😉
“USA’s resource base is so depleted in terms not of natural resources but industrial, human, and infrastructural resources.”
‘not JUst in terms of…’
Considering the event line which has the putative more-or-less initial new strain of coronoavirus leaving the country via initial escape from Fort Detrick’s biolab in a narrative involving suspected Chinese agents, I wonder why we tend to think it is the US who deliberately released it (if the release was deliberate). We’ve discussed China as the likely culprit before but it seems that more of us vote the USA as current Most Likely Villain.
We’re horribly unprepared to deal with the thing. China, on the other hand, is. China has more resources for dealing with such a thing, including what appears to be the world’s largest surveillance network and a people conditioned to believe in government and do as told until the cognitive dissonance overwhelms and becomes active dissidence.
Methinks that if anyone started this bug-war — if war it is — it would be China. They need a reset more than we do and stand to benefit more from same since the petrodollar is in inconceivable arrears and the USA’s resource base is so depleted in terms not of natural resources but industrial, human, and infrastructural resources. China is low on domestic fossil fuel but is chummy with and next door to Russia who has lots to sell at reliably reasonable prices plus sane affordable nuclear power tech for sale.
China even has handy empty cities to deal flexibly with everything from natural population growth during the expected population boom to come, to “friendly” quarantine de facto concentration camps that would make Huxley nod sagely while Orwell says, ‘Not bad for a workhouse prison.’
It has growing single-line ground-based energy-efficient ground transport for moving supplies and people under tightly monitored point-to-point control protocols. It has the world’s biggest manufacturing base, iirc. It has a tech sector now on par with other world-leaders and in many ways superior to ours.
It is best buddies with Russia and so has the world’s best nuclear umbrella on its side (literally).
Seeing as how global geopolitics have always been and still are, now more than ever, essentially about war by any means, it is inherently correct to conceive and define things in war terms even if no actual war plans are being implemented specifically regarding this or that crisis or major event. It’s a natural part of the overall game plan concept of 20th<>21st century Terra the Fair.
Whether one nation or another has this event specifically or generally in its martial/economic strategy, the tendency is for the major players to view it as such more so than not; so if US spooks saw early on how likely the virus was to sweep the planet and even our shining city on a hill, it makes sense to imagine them taking counter-measures to keep their bacon dry and their powder out of the fire. (Well, they get everything backwards in the end, right? and in the front too, hence the need to buy an etnire media complex to stay in power for a few more pizzly decades.)
What counter-measures to Euromerican surveillance China may have is a mystery concept, but it is a plausibility that should be considered in any well-honed global coronavirus pandemic conspiracy theory, theory as in set of hypotheses woven together that actually survive close scrutiny and ‘replication of results’ (via historical examples, which is the only method I can think of to address the macro ‘results replication’ aspect of scientific examination and analysis).
I’ve stopped examining Corvid-19 minutiae as much as I did when we were first sizing its basic aspects, so there are probably elements to this storyline that I’ve missed, but it seems likely to me that it could’ve started with the Most Likely Suspect, a candidate towering above even above greed: NSI aka negligence/stupidity/incompetence. That in turn could open a door for Chinese agents if we wish to place that gizmo in the predictive model Rube Goldberg machine we communally belabor here.
Said Chinese agents could, in fact, have provided initial early alert to an otherwise probably clueless US administration, spooks or no spooks, by being caught. Or, assuming greater competence on our part than is normal, we could’ve started this whole Milton-Bradley’s Mouse Trap on purpose with cheese cunningly laid out via an “accident” for said agents to steal (an idea I believe someone suggested here awhile back). Or… or…
All that said, it astounds me to accept, as is at least likely as any other “or”… that the Euromerican global elites are really dumb enough to start ANY kind of war with the Sino-Soviet gang. I know they are. I defined my entire view of the last prez election on my conviction that the neo-con/libs are determined to have it out with two colossal empires at once.
So, it’s not that I have difficulty believing the USA would initiate such a thing. I just find it pert nigh impossible to believe they’d do it even remotely competently. My relative lack of alarm at obviously looming totalitarian power grabs by our reptilian shape-shifting Satanic Annunaki overlords* is not just my previously expressed a) fatalism and b) preference for biological war over the more conventional means (nukes are conventional, alas: they’ve been used and stockpiled awaiting further use).
*( I say that not to demean conspiray theory itself but because I can’t think right now of a sufficiently nasty original epithet to call the creeps in charge)
It’s because I doubt they could make a go of it after an initial period of submissive compliance. Remember, these guys suck even worse than the USSR or today’s Chinese communist capitalists at doing anything but intimidating midget nations and printing money everyone knows is worthless.
Call me crazy, cuz I fuckin R, but I’m old-school American Naive enough to say, ‘Come and get me coppers!’, not just out of orneriness (which I have ample supply) but because I believe the gubmint is no match for a buncha crazy cultural narcissists with guns and short attention spans, easily irritated into irrational behavior, broke, bored, unhappy, and scared into the active anger level. Freakin out, y’know.
I read somewhere that every war simulation the gubmint does of gubmint vs. populace, the gubmint wins. I didn’t vet the claim, it coming from what I remember as a reliable source, because I totally believe it to be true.
Planned or not, rich folks sure seem to like this pandemic:
Speaking of virality, this seems to be making the rounds. Deservedly so. Uncommonly brilliant and apt:
WES: very pleased about your wife.
I keep my eyes open for positive synergies like you report in GM etc. The darker the clouds, the more silver the linings. The good thing about things like this pandemic is that they force positive action from things like, for exampole*, panicked herd pressure.
*I like that typo. Doctor: ‘This is an exam pole. You may feel a little discomfort at first.’
“The horrific scale of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic is hard to fathom. The virus infected 500 million people worldwide and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims— that’s more than all of the soldiers and civilians killed during World War I combined.
“While the global pandemic lasted for two years, the vast majority of deaths were packed into three especially cruel months in the fall of 1918. Historians now believe that the fatal severity of the Spanish flu’s “second wave” was caused by a mutated virus spread by wartime troop movements.”
from this article by The HIstory Channel
Seeing as how it’s not about Hitler or WWII, should we trust it?
Somebody here loves jazz as much as I do, right? Let’s compare this:
where Duke steals the show
with this:
Weather Report Rockin in Rhythm
where Wayne Shorter does likewise.
Blaming Boomers is hard to resist even if it’s not our fault any more than the G.I. Generation’s… and they fucked up a lot of shit too. We’re such a huge target and the worst did happen on our watch.
If we should blame any generation, it’s the bunch in charge during the 20s/30s. They overturned a plausibly viable Melting Pot urban culture and pout it on the path toward today’s suburban isolated lifestyle heavy on the gas and light on the kind of self-reliance farmers used to know. If anyone can find a copy, a short story by R.A. Lafferty called Interurban Queen expolains the dynamic uncannily well.
But blaming and shaming is for suckers. I should know: I suck.
Before resubmerging into the focused day-dreaming of writing a novel, I want to note the excellence of today’s article by Raul. It makes its point with clear concision and is easily understood. ONe could forward it to someone with good reason to hope they understand and get the point.
V. Arnold: I didn’t know Venezuela had Russian air defense equipment.
Looks like USA is reduced to invading itself.
“They turned friend into foe. They turned family against each other. They pathologized generosity and gift giving. In my life, they turned colleague against colleague, inverted the chain of command, and turned groom against best man.”
Aye, and I sometimes think I smell a Robespierre snoring in the woodplie soon to emerge, hungover and grumpy. They do the above too much, see, and people gets to talking to each other once the $$ bonds that bond them, that let them tolerate each other’s stinky ass, financially evaporate. Or even burn for a bit of winter’s heat.
The world no longer needs us as a market except by fomal inertia. That form is rapidly changing and soon it’s inertia will become centrifugal angular momentum spinning us away the general world’s newly forming center somewhere in Eurasia between Russia and China.
Before 911, the Patriot Act, and our re-embrace of torture after a brief lull, it was illegal to write so tortured a metaphor as above.
But no worries rries, we’re safe: Already irked fans threaten boycott over Marvel’s new Hydra campaign It should’ve been a simple T-shirt promotion, but some fans believe it has harmful political connotations.
Remember: Obi Wan is coming to save us, with Yoda at His right-sabre hand and the Holy Force on His left. Let us pray:
“and abusive prosecution of any swarthy, disloyal appearing schmuck ”
Whew! Good thing I’m not swarthy!
It seems the new econimic transitory paradigm has reached Portland area internet. Looking up a youtube thing, I was given an ad for Centrum featuring VITAMIN C! followed by the Taco Bell chiming uncommonly proud as it declared with great social benevolence and patriotic fervor that it’s drive-thru is OPEN!!!!
Poor advertizing industry. It’s gonna get dizzy and ‘splode at some point not far off, lessen the government hires it on as its new Orwellian Mandate broadcast system beforehand.
If I’m watching Big Bro watching me, is it more or less kinky than just Him stroking his panopticones as He watches me?
“The store was crowded and there were no children. No one wore a mask (we don’t have any).”
Not even scarves or bandanas? Or family heirloom gorilla masks?
“I may die yet. (My lungs are guava jelly.) ”
EIther I believe I’m potentially immortal, or I meant “during this virus pandemic”. Considering my belief in an afterlife, I guess bof dem’s true.
Dr. D Rich:
I feel we are dumb enough to invade Benezuela for the lousy low-grade oil left in its reservoirs. Likewise, I see us hanging on to Saudi Arabia by whatever means so long as we don’t go beyond that, whereupon the Other Boys will likely fence us inside the ARabian peninsula, or even out of the Middle East entirely. But for now, I think they’d welcome us busting open that chocolate Easter egg, to borrow Dimitry Orlov’s description. It’s gonna bust any way, and might as well let us expend our resources making a relatively neutralized mess of it. Or maybe, once Russia has out-pumped and out-profited them, they’ll move in with their nice shiny reactors (like ancient Romans building aqueducts for people tired of recurrent cholera and diptheria infections), in exchange for the oil, which is very handy for some things, I’m told.
But even those operations look increasingly dicey. I recall the once globally powerful British Empire stooping to the level of engaging with Argentina over some silly islands back in the game-changing 80s, inspiring the famous Borges quote about “two bald men fighting over a comb”.
Best I can tell, USA political leadership really believed it could rule over Russia for its oil and other resources, which would’ve continued the petrodollar charade for quite some time, I would think. That proving unwise after Trump’s first term stymied those nonsensical plans long enough for us to learn that Russia would’ve clobbered us had we tried, the parasites in power apparently discovered they have no Plan B. Some believe the handling of this virus is Plan B. Others feel that they’re simply exploiting yet another unforeseen problem in the same way the Dubya gang exploited 911 whether they made/allowed it to happen or not. Functionally, the effect is virtually identical in both cases.
If designating Venezuela as the new neo-terrorism target is how the parasites in power hope to distract us from our current public health concerns and their consequent economic results, I can only marvel at their vacuity. That said, the vacuity of our deeply indoctrinated and conditioned populace is also a marvel. Somehow, I don’t think even the American populace will fall for this one. However, they haven’t failed to disappoint me yet, not that I can blame them. It’s hard to jump the corral, hard to live outside the herd, and jumping back in when you’ve had enough exile tends to make a returned lone wolf all itchy and scratchy, probably because all the sheep wool suits, that the wolves of the American populace wear to convince themselves they’re not part of the biggest global predator pack in known history, are rife with vermin of the soul.
Our new norm of record-breaking floods, heat tsunamis, chronic forest fires, violent weather, and hurricanes is just now getting started. Many regions will perhaps find nature breaking quarantine for them.
I note that all of this is entirely self-inflicted. Should the more advanced nations decide to give us grief, perhaps making surgical cyber-attacks under cover of said natural disasters, well, that’s that much more trouble on top of a double flu season, one out of the blue and especially viral. (How virulent remains to be conclusively determined.)
Over a lifetime of musical exploration, I find this thingie, that I first encountered at age 18, to be my favorite piece of lyrically inclined music. Sort of a desert isle pick:
A miraculous if devastating century, the 20th.
” “At Least 13 Patients Die from Coronavirus in One Day at New York Hospital (CNN)”
“420 people die every day in NYC on average.”
There is a birth in New York City every 4.4 minutes. 327 people are born in NYC every day.
There is a death in New York City every 9.1 minutes. Roughly half that.
About 1 in every 38 people living in the United States resides in New York City.
“37,461 US Traffic / Year = 9,365.25 / 4 months. Corona = 685, making your daily commute 13x as dangerous. Loooooooong way from Obama’s 12,000 H1N1.”
There are 102 traffic accidents a day, yes, and it’s way stupid, the entire automotive society is dumb-dumb, but that’s who we are. It’s sad but no one is working to build other means of existence since capitalism has us all working for The Man and The Man says CARS! and the people do what The Man says here just like they do in communist Narnia. It’s a constant. We’ve built large industrial/financial/service industries around keeping that death toll “manageable”. It’s how we think. Cars are “normal”. We’re a society built on shared indoctrinated norms. The Great Melting Pot. Our society is adjusted to it. Just like it is to the constant mutations of what we call “the flu” as if there were only one.
We are not adjusted to this virus. Apples, you see, are red with crisp white interiors. Oranges are orange with soft juicy orange interiors.
” “Personavirus: Greta Thunberg Says Its “Extremely Likely” She Had COVID-19 Despite Never Being Tested”
“Not only can she see carbon dioxide, but can identify viruses with her naked eyes too. Superpowers! What’s that? She’s in a nation with socialized medicine and can’t get a test, just like everyone in America? Just what I thought to myself, too. If only we had Sweden’s system, we could be ignored by the government and killed in the streets, but with higher taxes and less freedom.”
A) Greta says it’s extremely likely. It is. She’s been traveling everywhere alla time. During a time when no one thought about contagion much less took measures. We believe people here when they think their spouse has, and might be at severe risk from, the virus. We console them. But we attack Greta, because she is BAD. Like Orange Man=Bad thinking. Russiarussiarussia is as well-supported as the bases for picking on this person as if she somehow weren’t human, as if she were the cause of Peak Oil, pollution (of which anthropgenic global climate disruption is a subset), and the way creeps like Bloomberg, Soros, et al selfishly exploit the climate situation.
I remember my liberal friends back in the day when they bought the propaganda that Assange was “just a self-serving narcissist”. They sounded just like today’s Greta-bashers.
B) Greta is not Sweden, and viruses really don’t have a political persuasion. srsly. Some renegade virolgist said so. Even the WHO agrees with him cuz even they’re right some times.
“But socialized medicine is infinite and free!”
Straw men are bad enough. Straw teenage girls are worse. But using bullshit to hold the straw together really stinks.
““Trump’s Deadly Mistake in Comparing Coronavirus to Flu (IC)”
“I’m sorry, what’s the difference except that COVID is much less deadly and we have a cure?”
We don’t have hard numbers, right? So we don’t know, right? Except China is hiding a zillion corpses cuz it’s not as bad as the flu, right? If it’s bad for experts, so-called or otherwise, honest or corrupt, to spew bullshit, maybe it’s bad for to spew bullshit also.
a) We don’t have a cure, we just have a very powerful therapy that appears able to cut mortality rates way down if properly applied. I’m excited but calling it a cure is not correct except case by case.
“ “California Sees 1 Million Unemployment Claims in Less Than Two Weeks (CNBC)”
“Faster and more deadly than COVID. Yet we ache, beg, cajole, harangue, to kill people via the economy. Good work, people! Crime, murder, and suicide rates should spike shortly.”
The economy is already Dead On Arrival. The train carrying its corpse has just been delayed by devious dubious means. Crime, murder, suicide rates will spike no matter what path we follow into the inescapable facts which are the basis of mutual understanding here at TAE. Meanwhile, and again: hard numbers. Get back to me with discernible death counts based on people forced to spend time together even if only on social media etc. outside of family/roommates rather than also spending time with people at the workplace.
Get back to me when we’re pouring milk out into the dirt to raise prices like they did in the Depression in true socialist/communist fashion even though it happened entirely under the aegis of capitalism until the gubmint stepped in with socialist concepts in order to keep us from revolting and turning into something communistic or factiously violent rather than the friendly old fascistic capitalism we all now and, for some mysterious reason, love. Stop making this into something it isn’t. Last I heard, that was the WHO’s job.
“Staying home: Will kill us all, not the Dow. WE are the ones who turn the economy that WE depend on for our lives.”
I doubt farmers aren’t working. By the time harvest is full on, we’ll have enough people with immunity to harvest enough to do okay although food export sales will suffer. But sales don’t produce anything any more than printing money does. Most of the jobs people are staying home from are nonsensical make-work or more of that same old dumbass car culture/media hypnosis shit that has so impoverished us in terms of genuine physical resources and wise expenditure thereof.
When a reset happens, a real honest fundamental reset, the price of energy will go ballistic, because USA dollars won’t buy shit-nits’ worth of foreign oil and USA wells are as weak and geriatric as your average Boomer. THEN we will see lots of deaths. Oh, lots. Unless we’re under the control of a genius benevolent dictator, which is perhaps a little more likely than the Return of Jeebus to save us all, and maybe the same thing if you’re an Evangelical Xtian.
Staying home will increase certain kinds of deaths while decreasing others. For example, traffic fatalities. The roads are a mostly vacant breeze right now. Like lung issues from air pollution, which are taking a break right now from everything but stale roommate farts and a certain virus along with other airborne pathogens. Show me this mysterious math that shows one dominating the other, and I’ll consider this something other than sheer self-indulgent spleen-venting on your part based more on confirmation bias than rigorous data analysis.
“Farmers will be happy to keep that food in the field”
Seems to me they’ll cry at all the grain rotting in the dirt while their income also goes tits-up even though they’ve not stayed home and have been working their arses to the tailbone.
You’re a brilliant man, Doc, but brilliant minds are a dime a dozen here. Honor, as in logical rigor, data hygiene, stuff like that, are what count around here, best I can tell. If I’m wrong, well hush my mouf.
As for this thing being a planned, or at least heavily exploited, disaster: seems likely.
Also seems like a good thing. We bemoan the looming loss of civil liberties, but we are not alone on this planet. The rest of the world might be pleased that we do our necessary reset without having to go nuclear head-to-head with Russia/China/India.
That rationale is my SOLE reason for preferring bathsit Trump to ratshit Hillary. Trump doesn’t want Big War. Call him crazy (he is) but he doesn’t. (If only, or at least among other reasons, because he knows he’s impulsive when cornered and might well command a ballistic fusillade.) Hillary seemed to be part of a nearly ubiquitous agreement among the brain-drained neo-cons/neo-libs (same coin, different sides) that we can and should corner Russia.
So I for one am glad to see the creeps getting full-bore jiggy with their totalitarian impoulses. It beats dying cold, thirsty, starving, half-charred or eviscerated, in the glowing radioactive dark. Every empire takes its turn in the bucket. We were raised on stories of how Europe (an empire with revolving king-nations), China, and Russia each collapsed into horrific self-destructive totalitarian insanity. We were taught that We Are Better, just like NKoreans are taught they are ruled by divine guidance in an overweight foreign exchange student frat boy.
It’s our turn, and I’m pleased with how things are going, all things considered, seeing as how I (and most everyone here) agree that collapse is inevitable and highly imminent to the point of being breaking news not quite yet recognized as Major History.
I may die yet. (My lungs are guava jelly.) But my kids have a better chance without nukes, I’m thinking, and so do the rest of the world’s kids.
Oh, our poor poor pweshuss widdle Constitution! and the surreal American fever Dream it spawned as it decomposed under its own rising swamp waters! O shining ignis fatus! Oh noes! We’re going to experience at home things like what we’ve done to others since Columbus first came here and cut off aboriginal arms just to make a point.
Embrace your karma, repent, and get healed. (Does this hairshirt make my beard look fat? What? I have locust legs in my teeth?) And, if you’re lucky, be around to watch the next generation figure it out, occasionally even asking your advice.
Strong instinct for survival
Romantically insane
Moving soft along the edge of time
Like a panther in the rain
Manipulated rebels
With a total disregard for the rules
When pride comes tumbling off the great white stallion
You move closer to the truth
And the search continues for the meaning
They build the cathedrals high
But we keep our weapons ready
Looming dark against the sky
They’re taking down the rain forest
Changing it to a room without a view
And the big trees fall like dominoes
And we move closer
The eagle watches from the mountain
As the warriors turn into fools
And the dice are thrown on sacred ground
And they move closer to the truth
And who’s gonna tell the children
How the rivers used to flow cystal blue
And we keep leaving scars on Mother Earth
And moving closer to the truth“The stock market does not respond, it want to go up and see if the sky is falling.”
Why, Zero, you’re a poet!
I will share this:
wife is on day 3 of work at home. She gets room service breakfast and l;unch “at work” (spare bedroom) and dinner when she comes home. And the backrubs and the hot pads and the cuppa cuppas throughout the day.
Her productivity is sky-rocketing.
Right now I hear her singing (lovely) to her corny Xtian pop music stream (ick). She is losing weight (obesity being the defining bane of her life), eating healthier than she ever has while still getting a bit of cake etc.
We get to boink on her lunchbreak just like we’re cheating adulterers in the backroom at Wal-Mart.
Months from now, we may almost envy the refugees on Lesbos (it’s possible). But right now, today, all one ever has outside of memory and speculation, we are very happy, I am taking the day off from the novel-in-progress, and in many ways life has never been better for me than today.
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Hunter S. Thompson
for my parents:
Stillest of songs is the night
Softest of chants is the dark.
Softest sleepwalker, moonlight,
Makes indistinct shadow marks.Nocturnal sonances seem,
By contrast, cut-throat and stark.
Cats’ eyes save their somberest gleam
For poaching mice in the park.For everyone:
“Sometimes the sweetest music is hearing his breath through the quiet night. ”
Dr. D Rich, have you read a book called Peace Like A River? Very very good book (fiction) imo, with a severe asthmatic as narrator.
I know it’s cornball, WES, but I’ll pray for your wife. I don’t know if I believe in “intercessionary prayer” or not, but I know that the effort itself can cheer a person to know someone thinks enough about them to ask the sky to likewise think about them.
Yes, I can’t keep my mouth shut.
teri: thank you. What we see is that the risks of ‘quine” drugs are well known, even regarding use with CORVID-19. It is ready to be used — in hospitals, under close supervision, as a powerful adjunct to ventilators and such. Judging it by its riskiness as home-taken medicine is judgment too harsh.
During the video conference last week with Trump and Fauci, when I foamed at the mouth, my foaming was because they exacerbated the problem. Trump jumped the gun (which of course he would, being a seriously mentally il person), but Fauci totally botched his end. He offered the vaguest information which would of course inspire over-reactions both ways: too cautious for those who tend to trust mainstream media and authority, and too bold for their opposite.
It still is the most powerful effective therapy outside of a prolonged ICU stay that we know of.
Thanx again for the detailed info.
LIkewise, thanks Dr. D Rich for the provided link.
Gratuitous verbiage added so I won’t be posting a link by itself.
Wanted y’all to know my wife starts working home tomorrow. She works in a small corporate headuqarter with 5-8 employees, good closed offices, no customer traffic. Weather’s warm enough that personal space heaters would suffice on cold days. But still they closed down. One wonders if insurance coverage is part of the decision. Wonder if he’ll renew the lease on the corporate office (it’s a medical practice) when he gets back to serious business.
Sort of a grassroots demographic datum on the virus wave I thought might provide a sense of the wave outside media reportage.
Listening to this as I wrote, I realized how poetically perfect a prophetic song this was and dropped in to share it:
After all, America is really just a continuation of Rule Britannia under another name.
AFter letting current events and minor challenges interfere, the book demands my attention again, so I will resume radio silence for awhile except if I come across exceptionally noteworthy data. The last we saw our anti-hero, he was seguing away from external reality into the fields of fiction, walking through a pixellated portal, closing it behind him like a door on which we read:
Ken has taken up prayer. Being chronically awake at 3am can do that to a person.
“O lord, how foolish we are. Yet beautiful in our way. And your world! This tiny orb, your little bauble, polished stone under the glass of a fragile atmosphere. It horrifies me yet entrances. We’re supposed to be something, right? Not just confused dolts running amok, right?”
hostebbe: That’s nothing. Watch this: su-per-ca-li-fra-gi-lis-tic-ex-pi-a-li-do-cious. 😉
Oh um-diddle-iddle-iddle um diddle-aye
Most young people can’t get their heads around this. I get reports from my son in the heart of Gen Z downtown Seattle. That’s my impression too.
Regarding toilet paper:
“After much badgering, Queenie finally allowed John to take up the instrument. Required to practise out of his stepfather’s sight and earshot, Entwistle would shut himself in the toilet. One day, he was amazed to discover the belated arrival of toilet paper.
“I found the usual knotted squares of newspaper to be missing,” he wrote. “Anxiously, I shouted out, ‘Where’s the paper, Gran?’ ‘It’s the white stuff on the roll,’ she replied. No more newsprint on my bum. We were on our way up!”
from
Some folks today say Malthus was wrong because, hey, look, 7-plus billion people adding numbers every second or three. He wasn’t wrong, and when the oil runs low enough, billions will die. Around the time old Thomas was writing, the global population was around 800 million to 1.25 billion, best we can tell.
Around then, Enlightenment science/engineering met coal and the enormous population bloom of the past 200 years kicked in hard. One should pay attention to such people and their projections so long as their current data basis is correct. They’re like triage. Such prophecies give us the means to potentially prove them not just a bit off but virtually false.
When the data bases changes, so does the projection. That’s science.
“Not only can you not possibly have smooth exponential growth since behavior immediately adapts, but blast from the past where an ‘expert’ epidemiologist wrote him in 1985 that all human life would die of AIDS by 2015. Still here. That’s their “math” and “models” for you, smart enough to use calculus, but not smart enough to realize what you put in the garbage can is in the garbage can. Like 30 years of AGW models? Anyway, discusses how this self-regulates, like all natural systems. If not, we would have all died every 200 years for the last 100,000 years in a row. Bad. At. Math. You’re fired.”
The 1985 AIDS computer model simply said, “If this goes on,” it’s point being to spur said adaptive behavior that wopuld render the projection false. The point of its accuracy was to foment the defeat of the outcomes it projected. The computer model was first order linear thinking/projection, which is what you need to informedly adapt to something as invisible as viral transmission through a population, using second-order and even third order thinking, which is where the calculated rubber of hypothesis meets the road.
“200,000 were lost in a day in the Somme over 100 years ago. We survived that few worries. ”
I suppose one could survive a mugging, too, but that hardly diminishes the mugging.
They called that demographic of youth from which 200K died in the Somme the Lost Generation. My granddad was in that war and got mustard-gassed in (Flanders, I think). He had shrapnel in his leg but managed to get up a tree above the worst of the gas.
Came home, married, made 9 kids, worked hard in PIedmont area South Carolina as a textile mill loom setter, the day’s equivalent of computer programmer. HIs PTSD fucked up all but the very youngest of them kids. Probably a big part of why me Mum was a covert malignant narcissist who majorly fucked with my head.
Snowflakes? Survived? As in “we survived”? Well, then, fuck them young dead soldier boys. Buncha snowflakes. Survived? Yeah, fuck them surviving war-scarred veterans. Buncha snowflakes.
Or am I reading you wrong, Doc D?
As for postal service, all I’ve read says the virus only lasts 24 hours on paper. Just delay pickup for a day or two and use standard precautions. We simply cant’t stop some forms of shipping, because very few urban areas if any can last on local production. Postal service, Amazon, alla same. Packages can be handled with a very high degree of safety: they don’t suddenly sneeze like people do.
Meanwhile, we all know that “desperate” is just some jopurnalist trying to write with something like flair, just as we know that the use of the word is not false.
One must pick a lot of nits to get a reasonably straight accurate concept of what’s happening, but that doesnt’t mean one should pick ON said nits, glorifying them to a significance they don’t possess.
“All this has existed every day since Hippocrates practiced medicine back in Kos. Sorry to introduce you to everyday reality of “limits” and “costs” this way, but trust me, the world is full of them. ”
Please, tell us something we all don’t already know, nor pretend that new guidelines are somehow silly machinations designed to conceal another vast conspiracy rather than merely bumbling through as we usually do.
The Russian aid is on its way. Looks like Italy accepted. Not everything is political. Politics are a subset of human reality, not voice-versa.
