boscohorowitz
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I saw on Facebook (someone else’s feed, I dropped out a good while back) my first ‘Calm Down About Coronavirus’ “meme” (I have yet to get used to how vernacular has ruined Dawkins once useful term). It failed even a glancing logic test. But very few people practice logic.
Anyway, it depressed me. And that takes a lot; I’m already miserable. 😉
I don’t know if this is cheering, but it’s awful damn good. There are some amazing musicians out there these days.
“ps I never knew anyone dying from the seasonal flue”
It happens. If not for modern medical care, my grand-niece would’ve died from it last year. Right now she’s recovering from Epstein-Barr disease. Before IV drips and related aids, children whose immune systems take awhile to obtain robusticity (it’s a word now, dammit, not to be confused with robossticity, which is how smartphones act these days) often died in their first fgew years. She’s had maybe 4-5 touch’n’gos, but with luck will grow to be strong and resilient.
I was a sickly toddler too. As an adult, I starved and froze and shared close quarters with questionable characters and did fine.
10,000 people out of 300,000,000 is one out of every 30,000 people. I don’t know 30k people, and I doubt you do too.
” it’s the perfect coverup device/event for blaming instead of fake ‘growth’ ghost cities ”
Those ghost cities will make quarantine sites, either positive (ship sick people there) or negative (ship people there who’ve tested clean.
Money is an illusion. Rebar steel, plumbing, wiring, streets, rail lines, remain real whether the money behind them retains its perceived value or not.
“A Win-win for both corrupt tyrannies masquerading as free markets.”
Only if they can quickly repair the damage, which they most certainly cannot.
Lose-lose.
If we had a medical system avble to deal with a pandemic of significant speed/density/lethality, we’d know it. We’d be part of it. We’d all have been trained in basic protocols, and have neighborhood “block captains” etc.
We’d know where local essential supplies are kept, who to go to, etc.
But we don’t need the absence of that to know we’re incapable of dealing with it. Our medical system as it stands is unable to provide basic healthcare needs for a large swath of Americans as it is. It is designed in a way that forces many people to go to work when ill so long as analgesics and symptomatics casn keep them on their feet and doubling over to cough their lungs out.
USA people sneering at the Chinese communist party are better advised to sneer at their own. I have what’s considered pretty good healthcare. Even so, it’s a ightmare navigating the sytem. I’d love to have Canadian healthcare. (I know Canadians who’ve been through major health crises that typically destroy an American family’s finances even with decent insurance. All systems, repeat, ALL systems have parasites and weak links, period. But not all systems are for a select target audience and unaffordable for the rest. My wife has worked in healthcare admin for 20 years. She concurs. The system is not only slanted toward the upper crust, it is Byzantine and incompetent.)
If… and I say if merely as a rhetorical device to pretend I’m objective, really, I mean when the virus mainstreams here in the States, the shoddy mess of USA public health care will be revealed. We’ve been resting on the laurels of a healthcare system in significant part put into place as a response to the 1918 flu epidemic.
Now it’s Ask Your Doctor About Drug with 7-Syllable Name… so you can find out what the drug is about. That’s what passes for public health care information: TV ads as misleading as the average Alternate Nation headline.
The panic wave is liable to be tsunamic: suddently bursting onshore after lying low during its transoceanic crossing.
I mean, we don’t even make our own face masks, right? Except for the ‘spensive ones, that is:
Microbes don’t care. They don’t even know we exist, best we can tell. They are not moved by rhetoric or political determination or solidarity.|
We’ve ignored reality long enough. It’s tired of being ignored. It wants our attention. It will soon get it.
“was more genuine than anyone in the contest except Bernie on the other side.”
Oops. Didn’t mean to slight Ron Paul, who is also fairly cngruently genuine. But he’s become like Bernie, an old has-been.
“No need to ask anyway: nobody knows what a tree is anymore, they won’t recognize the action.”
here’s literally no space around me. It’s all forest or someone’s backyard, and I’m too old and frail to be planting some railroad plot.
I do have a buncha two year old weed seed, half of which should be viable, that I’d like to scratch into some wild place off a county hiway come March, cuz reefer is good medicine and legal weed is as vulnerable to foinancial failure as corn crops. Any real physical effort I make anymore is about cooking good food for my hard-working wife, giving her deep massage, keeping our prison cell apt complex clean, and making love.
My planting days are over. But I like having crows as friends, and intend to stockpile peanuts along with rice, beans, oatmeal, and the like. WOn’t be much good if the water pumps driving local water supply don’t run, but someone else may find them useful once wells have been dug.
Me? Greta gonna kill me. I’m old. 😉
I was a janitor in large gay bathhouse on Chicago’s North Side (“Man’s Country”) when AIDS first hit. I was their token straightboy, was the joke we made about it. Crazy place. Hedonism squared. Nice people, obvious chip on their shoulder, but generally kind, sweet, and sympathetic.
The sad thing is that, at first, a whole buncha them faggots believed it really was some kind of curse, divine or otherwise, for being gay. If one wonders why gay pride has metastasized into the oppressive rainbow pride nonsense we see today, understand that gays have been horrifically oppressed in our culture for a long time. What is compressed will eventually rebound, and its trajectory will tend toward the ballistic.
We tend to reap what we sow.
Meanwhile, the crowlings got to do what young folks got to do, lord love ’em:
From comment thread for song above:
Christine Brown
11 months ago
Who is listening to this during the apocalypseToronto cops
9 months ago
Christine Brown omg MECyphik
9 months ago
Did I miss it? Wat happened?Aman Mohammed
9 months ago
Lol , meDon Harrison
9 months ago
Bring it……..all we Care about is talkingggg,talking about me and youuuuuuu….Don Harrison
8 months ago
If I told you how I used to B…….TOXIC_ V3NOM111
8 months ago
It’s always the apocalypseEzekiel Watters
7 months ago
The stage is being set as we speak.Deja Seigler
7 months ago
😳james pilcher
7 months ago
@Cyphik it’s literally happening right now all around youCyphik
7 months ago
@james pilcher No offense, but I really hope you’re wrong about that… btw, it was a joke that I made, friend. No seriousness intended. Buscemi Love
<end>Helluva zeitgeist they have to contend with. Nobody’s fault. Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, Greatest Gen, Silent Gen, Lost Gen.. it’s all been too big for us since, to quote Joni Mitchell, “we ate that altering apple”, or whatever those Edenic creation myths are trying to convey about this species, homo sap, stepping outside certain boundaries before their time (assuming divine oversight) or just plain outside (assuming nature is blind yet weirdly obedient to its own laws).
It looks more and more like 2020 gonna be The Year.
Song always makes me wanna march somewhere, but marching’s no good. Makes me wanna punch a hole in the wall, but walls are stronger than fists. Makes me wanna go and do what I can out on the streets, but I am old and sick, my wife wants me alive, and I owe her primary allegiance.
So I pray. I can’t cry. Not because I am emotionally numb but because crying makes me bleed, asnd i lose enough blood as it is.
So I pray. And remind myself that you can’t stop running water, you can’t kill the fire that burns inside.
It’s all we have in the end.
As for Antifa/Salem (Oregon, btw, not Massachusetts), it’s not the B&W Doc D portrays:
Political Theater Is Political Theater
If they were serious, they’d be pulling up to the countless (and filthy) homeless encampments throughout the area and offer to haul trash away from the encampments. Most of the times, a fair number of the homeless would help them. They would also haul off dirty blankets/pillows, etc., while proferring used in exchange.
I’ve little use for Antifa. I have little use for anti-antifas, either. Neither do jack shit for the problems, Both sides gather at their respective boundaries and toss shit at each other.
How very unhelpful.
A quote from the plehtora of articles challenging the more or less official version of the outbreak:
“We must have an investigation of the outbreak in Wuhan. The Chinese must grant the world total transparency. The truth must come out. If Chinese officials are innocent, they have nothing to hide. If they are guilty, they will refuse to cooperate.”
This is obviously bullshit to anyone who understands bureaucracy. Innocence is not itself sufficient protection. Meanwhile, looking whom to blame wastes resources that could be used dispensing practical wisdom on exposure prevention and recovery if infected. While it is intriguing, therefore entertaining, to pursue these mytho-rabbits down hypothetical holes, that’s all it is in the practical world: fun if of a dismal sort.
I think zerosum’s advice is the basic best. Avoid public places. Wear breathing filters of some kind. Wash your hands before (because you may already be carrying virus and not know it) and after. Take good care of yourself, paying speciall attention to hydration (and its cohort, sufficient electrolytes).
Bill Murray makes even stupid pointless car commercials something to genuinely enjoy:
Oh, regarding Schiff: this is as goodly bad as it gets:
“On October 23, 2018, Schiff solemnly told a young audience at the old Hillary Clinton/John Podesta Center for American Progress Action Fund that he had been told that Putin has one of his henchmen follow Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev around with a pillow to smother him in his sleep if he ever gets out of line.”
Followed by a pillow man to smother the pillow man if he ever gets out of line. It’s pillows,pillows, pillows, all the way down…
Trump saved the 2016 GOP from exceptional disgrace. He did so by being his genuinely lunatic self which, for all its contradictions, frank callousness, open corruption, and blatantly visible absurdity, was more genuine than anyone in the contest except Bernie on the other side.
It seems that the Dems can’t quite grasp that, to the American plebiscite, offensive and inconsistent but sincere phoniness sounds more truthful than the equally offensive and inconsistent but insincere phoniness they sell. I started that sentence with “It seems” because I don’t pretend to understand their motives other than the obvious one: stay out of jail.
As the Dems plumb the depths of the USA populace’s credulity, they find time and again that they suck at lying perhaps even more than they suck at telling the truth. Having trashed their mainstream media platform (specifically, Ms. Maddow falling into her own cloaca live on TV), they seek to exploit the online media they previously denounced as agents of Russian voter puppetry. While I confess that the boneheadedness of their voter bloc is stunningly dense to logic and reason, it seems to have reached its nadir and is now moving to its zenith. This zenith is surely not much higher than its nadir but it nonetheless seems incapable of believing the same old nonsense to the same degree as before — and the previous level of credulity was already insufficent to defeat a well-known blowhard whose record of malfeasance is plainly on record and didn’t need a Steele dossier to paint him black.
This must be very disturbing to them.
Meanwhile, the GOP rides the tiger that is Trump, aware that their standard-bearer is not one of them and something they’re unable to sufficiently control.
How much longer can this continue before a genuine* demagogue arises from the populist depths? One can’t even *see* the GOP at this point. It’s just a cloud of gnats hovering about Trump’s combover. Meanwhile, the Dems are far too visible in their inept chicanery. Between the two parties, there’s enough bruised and bleeding cognitive dissonance to elect the ghost of Barney Fife if he managed to speak any truth.
*Trump is a bona fide demagogue but not one that speaks across the political spectrum. I mean a demagogue that gets conservatives and liberals together in the same room shaking hands and agreeing on common principles. A demagogue who really knows how to lie from both sides of his mouth at the same time. Or, or, maybe even a genuinely truthful, morally congruent demagogue who captures the nation’s heart and presumably gets blown away. Or, or… (Bosco staggers to his Chamber of Recovery to take a hot bath in his tinfoil-lined clawfoot tub and watch the surf on his new improved waterproof iphoney…)
Sped up for the kids:
“One more chance for Schiff to take revenge on the entire world”
How you are able to watch those proceedings and remain sane is a wonder to me. I suspect today’s Calvin & Hobbes reflects the allergic reactions you must be having to your prolonged exposure to so much bullshit expressed through living human beings in the audio-video virtual flesh.
Man, I love how Vietnam Vet lays out big logical fact-based pictures with just a few strokes. I’ll add that while the Dems were more in the center of the Ukraine jumpstart of the Cold War, Dubya actually got that ball rolling. As for Obama, I quote Dubya himself from late 2008, maybe early 2009 (parpahrase alert): “I’d have given him my endorsement if they’d asked me.”
Obama carried the neocon program right nicely, especially with Hillary helping.
Posted here for current visibility’s sake, but is a response to Planetary Citizen’s remark on yesterday’s AE (the one with the football pic):
“In 1905 there were 19 deaths from high school and collegiate football and another 137 were seriously injured.”
Which is why they were wearing leather helmets and a bit of protective gear in 1923 — 18 years after 1905 — when the picture Doc D commented on was taken.
Plastic helmets weren’t added until 1939, the technology not being available until recent to that year. 80 years later, we have massive body armor to protect ridiculously massive men from ridiculously massive men taking drugs also not available in 1905 or 1923 — steroids. And so forth. The damage done to them is now spread out, and less horrific to view. Maybe the overall damage is less, maybe more. A couple of highly visible deaths and traumatic injuries are tragic; statistics on overall physical damages to today’s pro-ballers are just a buncha numbers justifying an inherently vicious sport. Want safe football? We have it. It’s called touch football. But who would pay to see that? No one’s banging the shit out of each other. Maybe pro football would not be the enormous industry and moral brain-drain that it has become if we hadn’t sanitized it as we have.
While I do not share Doc’s nostalgia for the good old days, that being a conservative trait more than a liberal trait, his point still stands: you can’t remove danger from inherently dangerous activity, and football is inherently dangerous.
I have no interest in football, find it nauseating, in fact, but I accept it because I see it as part of inevitable male coalitional violence, which is endemic to homo saps. Team sports in general bore me as such because they define themselves by winning vs. losing, and that’s boring and pointless to me.
Likewise driving at 20mph to 75mph in 1,000s of pounds of steel. Seatbelts minimize certain risks but serve to justify more and more people driving more and more cars. The problem with football and autos is the same: they’re both ridiculously dangerous. Weighing pros and cons of added safety features only obscures the primary fact: they’re both very dangerous. Too little safety gear, you get one kind of inescapable injury. Two much, you get another spectrum. You can’t protect bodies from the effects of very rapid sudden acceleration/decceleration in an activity based on same.
” In 2010, there were an estimated 5,419,000 crashes, 30,296 deadly, killing 32,999, and injuring 2,239,000. About 2,000 children under 16 die every year in traffic collisions. Records indicate that there were 3,613,732 motor vehicle fatalities in the United States from 1899 to 2013.” (some place what calls itself wiki)
Here’s a graph illustrating the more-or-less-the-sameness of the plus ca change-yness of it all:
Looks to me like the only thing down from when the auto age started is Deaths per Miles Traveled (VMTs in the graph), which itself relates to the rise in heart disease, obesity, and generally inability to wipe our butts without robotic aid that continues to grow under liberal and conservative administrations alike.
“You mean one that can recognize the fact that nearly every country that was a satellite of the USSR was clamoring to get into the EU. ”
That’s nice. The USSR collapsed in 1989, and Russia as we know it today was in place by 1999 when Putin took charge. this is 2020, and Russia is again Russia, not USSR.
A few data:
a) “Of the four major western European countries that are not EU members, Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland have submitted membership applications in the past but subsequently frozen them, while the United Kingdom is a former member.”
b) Europe has always treated Russia as an outsider, so countries coming out from under the Soviet lash naturally leaned to the EU both for reasons of geographical identity and abhorrence of Soviet rule which, I remind us again, has been absent for 30 years.
The USSR’s non-European satellite states have not applied for membership in the EU, and are instead joining the Silk Road club, which is only logical. I say that “nearly all satellites of the USSR” kinda insults places like the five ‘stans, two ‘ians, and Georgia”. That’s eight Asian former satellite states that stayed out, and eight (or 9?) European states that opted for Europe, for mysterious reasons like being European nations.
The Cold War is over, except in both parties of the duopoly. Only critters in D.C who seem to recognize that are Trump. Tulsi, Ron/Rand Paul.
“You mean one that knows an invasion when they see one instead of “reunification.” Ala Crimea and Ukraine, and yes Iraq and Afghanistan as well. Not to mention Viet Nam. That liberal Democrat?”
Rather than bog down in the myriad details that show that Russia’s military involvement in Crimea and the Ukraine are hardly expansion-of-empire invasions, but instead, stabilization-of-neighbor-states-being-manipulated-by-Euromerican-dickwads (as has been the case since, like, for-ev-ah, I’ll point out that Iraq, Afghanistan, and Viet Nam are halfway around the globe and never presented even the slightest threat to USA sovereignty.
Russia has had intimate involvement with Ukraine and the Crimea for almost 1,000 years. Ukraine has good reason to hate the Soviets, but Russia left them alone until we started agitating Ukraine via the Maidan, To quote dear old Noam’s favorite line: “You can look it up. It’s in the history.”
None of this makes Russia a saint but it doesn’t make it an evil aggressor, either. Comparing contemporary Russia to contemporary USA does, however, tend to make Russia look a whole lot better than us… if you survey the actual facts. This guy does that tolerably well:
Politics, like football, is a team sport. Like football, it is full of sound and fury signifying nothing while getting people hurt. We adopt safety gear in the form of measures like “holding the nose and voting for the lesser evil”, in the process dragging both parties down to a level where the differences between them are superficial, concealing an equally vile rot underneath the charade. We seek logical reasons for supporting our team but they almost always come down to sentimental attachments that rarely submit to logic or notions of integrity. I assume that that phenomenon is behind your statement here:
“Yes we realize the division and dualism with the the Democratic Party. Republicans on the other hand revel in their monolithic duplicity and lack of moral courage.”
I don’t see it. I see BOTH parties reveling “in their monolithic duplicity (a coy trope, that one) and lack of moral courage”. If you’re trying to make the case for some kind of liberal superiority, you’re achieving the opposite of your aim. I just see plain old partisan/ideological chauvinism.
Ah, the brisk invigorating wind. Bosco pees into as powerfully as a 64-year old bladder allows… but pees downward, legs spread wide, aiming at the ground between him and his fellows, the one thing they indubitably share in common, not at their seperate belief systems. Works like a charm. Even my shoes are dry.
If it looks like a bl;ack swan, and quacks like a black swan… it’s probably an audio hologram of a bl;ack swan, but close enough, eh?
“That sentiment was echoed by National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien who told CBS “Face the Nation” on Sunday, “Right now there is no reason for Americans to panic” regarding the coronavirus. O’Brien added, “this is something that is a low risk we think in the US.”
Some dumbass CNN article with a picture of an airport lobby empty save for one person wearing a mask, cuz a picture tells 1,000 words or something.
There is no looming shortage of paranoiaic skepticism among TAE’s readers, so I don’t have to elaborate on the subliminal undertones in “Right now there is no reason for Americans to panic”.
There is no dearth of contempt among TAE readers for the dogmatic institutionalized stupidity of opur elected and appointed officials, so I don’t have to elaborate that it seems normal for those officials to not think past ‘right now’ unless told to do so otherwise, nor is it unusual for them to say things implying that there are times when panic is proper, right, and useful for population counted in millions.
“Hammer Time!”
Lol. That image made my day. It would be lovely to have M.C. Hammer disrupt the DNC candidate debates with a flashy dance every time a candidate lied or interrupted another. I might even watch them iof they provided that. If our election system stays intact long enough, say, 2028 (a miracle, methinks), they will have become better entertainment than the Oscars, which will in turn have become some kind of forum for superficially serious discussion of morality and whatnot. Both shows’ ratings would improve.
I can’t stop smiling. Ellen Degeneres is pissed.
“…Okay, now expand the principle to finance, bailouts, seat belts, drugs, airbags, free speech, fireworks, gun rights…”
There’s no way to make safe a society based on money, an especially dangerously powerful form of language.
There’s no way to make guns safe without turning them into not-guns.
There’s no way to make cars safe.
There’s no way to make fireworks safe.
That leaves free speech, and we don’t want to begin a discussion on the risks of large-scale communication of countless abstract ideas, few of which are about feeding, sheltering, or nurturing us… because that would require free speech, something whose value rests on honesty and integrity, the absence of which forms a core basis of our culture: how to get along while lying and deceiving as de facto enshrined principles of discourse?
What’s ludicrous in all this is the belief that we can somehow have 7 billion people crawling around urban termite mounds interpenetrated by myriad passenger-laden vehicles traveling here and there from 60mph to 500 mph 24/7, and somehow control the microscopic life-forms we all carry and are, in fact, essentially composed of.
The model described above, btw, has its analog even in our weapons delivery systems, designed to fly above the stratosphere and then rain various forms of unholy fire on said termite mounds in a balance of power called Mutually Assured Destruction.
We have no agreed upon plans for reducing the population, which is the most important step to reducing the insane recipe for global catastrophe described above. It goes against nature for people to plan how to make less of themselves, much less design systems whereby they enjoy less delicious foods designed to titillate not nourish, and less magically flowing electrical energy allowing us to turn darkness into light and boredom into enthrallment, at what used to be the touch of a finger but is now only a word spoken to a robot.
I’d plant that mulberry tree Doctor D suggested if there were a place to plant it. Here in apartment row on the Portland/Beaverton divide called West Slope (but I call Mayberry), there’s no place to plant anything but a few pretty flowers in planter boxes.
“The DNC does the exact same thing again that lost them the 2016 election. It’s like a comedy act.”
Seems to me that their job is to distract people from doing something politically meaningful, whatever that might be. I used to think I had some idea on that. Now I just depart, looking warily over my shoulder. Voting is bad for your mental health, and a nasty way of spreading infectious disease, come to think of it.
Regarding coronavirus and the seafood market: whatever vector agent(s) first spread the thing in a noticeable way could certainly have been infected by someone who’d gotten the virus from the seafood market but been uncommonly resistant to its symptoms, and never knew they had it. The whole world is in love with false dichotomies.
Yes, China has a bioweapons lab there. The problem is the existence of biowepaons labs in the first place. Not only are that bad, period, bad things for bad purposes, but it only takes one successful transgression to breach security in a calamitous way.
Wife and I borth have a fairly nasty head cold after spending time in the hospital for my surgery last Thursday. Fever, body aches, moderate sinus pressure (for her; for me, it doubles down on the pressure from having my sinuses cooked). Hospitals are natural disease vectors. Eventually, we’ll go through a period where travel is viewed with suspicion and people wear clothing modeled on the habib or at least go about with scarves wrapped around their face.
The problem is not the nature of the coronavirus so much as the dependence of daily modern life on consuming goods from everywhere, and people traveling everywhere, often in pressurized cabins whose air is very dry as it circulates around a very crowded passenger compartment. One of my post-op instruction is no flying for two weeks. Not just the dry air, but the shifting pressure that can cause sinuses to expand and contract considerably, which is a great way to pump pathogens through the defensive mucus layer and into the skin where it can take deep hold.
Too little too soon, too much too late: by the time everyone is wearing masks or quarantined, countless vectors are running loose without masks or beyond the quarantine zone.
“Across China, drones are being loaded with disinfectant to spray public streets (another shock-and-awe measure with little real-world advantage).”
I am reminded of 911 whodunnit arguments. My final line of reasoning on that was that it didn’t matter if there was complicity or whatever. What mattered was how the Bush admin responded to the event. They took advantage of the event just as if they had wanted it to happen. So, while the investigation stunk just like the Pearl Harbor investigation stunk, and there are ample reasons to believe some complicity or causality by gubmint actors was involved, debating it just wasted energy in light of how brazenly the government exploited 911 to achieve nefarious ends.
Looking at these useless drones, I feel the same way about the Chinese government. This tells me that the Chinese government’s actions toward this outbreak will be mostly self-serving, and therefore China will deserve (poor people but it’s their government and we deserve the eladers we put up with) the shunning and hardships it seems bent on receiving.
Not that our response will be much different, I suspect, but we shall say.
Hardly matters on ground level trying to avoid getting sick. We’re obviously on our own. It’s going to spread and there will be that much more tension fueling social unrest and mistrust of government.
2020 looks to be as pivotal as 4th Generation Theory suggests. Right down to the eerie echo-numbering, impressive ocust plagues, wild fires of epic proportion, this or that epidemic, and of course, the ever more tenuous economic prospects of Euromerica.
Who thinks Trump will get to build in Iraq those bases he said he would? Who thinks he’ll even follow through on it? Verbal bluffmanship of a highly flexible nature is Donald’s standard M.O. I think the frat boys know that they can’t have that oil. Like Orlov explained recently: No More Free Oil for USA.
I stick my marker again on the slot marked Retreat to Saudi Arabia and hold on if possible. I think we’ll be allowed to do this, because Saudi Arabia is a rancid mess and no one wants to deal with it. Let the USA get sprawled across that mess. Once we subdue the population enough to get the worst inevitable initial ruckus out of the way, then the likes of Iran/Russia can kick us out and come in as “liberators”. Since neither nation needs SA’s oil, said “liberation” will likely be more valid than our “liberation”.
” In other words, Biden actually believes his own rhetoric, ”
I don’t mean he believes it’s TRUE; he just believes it. His mouth is in control, not him. Trump is somewhat verbally incontinent but far from entirely, and he is able to learn from his mistakes. Joe is… different.
“Bosco: You’re not going to be around forever. ”
Party pooper. 😉
“Even the Independent(?) asked “Is Biden really running?” ”
Someone somewhere yesterday (I think) raised the idea that Biden was trying to imitate Trump as in driving all over the road and half the countryside. But that’s not something you can imitate. Joe is a highwayman, a devotee of the striped yellow lines and prearranged hijackings. When he tries to drive erratically a la Trump it doesn’t work. Trump’s derangement is Trump’s; Joe’s is Joe’s. Trouble is, Joe’s too deranged to even know how his derangement works. Trump has spent more energy lying to others than himself, as I see it, while Joe has been so busy lying to himself foremost he doesn’t seem to know the difference any more. In other words, Biden actually believes his own rhetoric, whereas Trump’s faith in his own utterances is optional depending on his mood and the needs of the situation as he sees them.
“Hey, has anybody thought that his geriatric election IS Bernie’s revenge on HRC?”
Either that or he has no choice but to run per some form of offer he can’t refuse. I find the former more credible and certainly more fun. I suspect he knows with exceptional detail what her triggers are. There may be more than just vengeful bitterness involved. He may be strategically pushing her to prove in public just how very deplorable she is. DO something that all the news agencies can’t ignore if only because it will sell so many ads at premium rates.
One wonders.
Interestingly enough, I first encountered the concept of Alternative Energy at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont in 1975. I wasn’t a student. I’d hitchhiked from SLC to Plainfield to be with a girl I’d fallen in love with in SLC as she traveled to Plainfield with a bunch of hippy types who all hoped they’d get a piece of her action. Man were we in love. Anyway, there I learned a lot in two weeks about how/why the petrol/internal combustion engine model was insane and unsustainable. (As positioned in our culture as the center of everything.)
Regarding automobiles and the culture they formed:
” when some New England shopkeeper decided to employ the radical notion of setting a fixed price whose appeal at the time was that he wanted gouge anyone but instead, ask a fair price. ”
Wouldn’t not “wanted”. I’ll be glad when my brain is no longer on fire.
Reading about media star after media star making the same dumb conclusions per their general political bias and, worse, their general adherence to status quo cultural concepts, is disheartening. Stephen King is obviously a very intelligent man.
But success breeds enhanced self-esteem that in turn makes people like him think they understand things they scarcely analyze.
It’s like the rather terrifying heartbreak I felt reading Nicole Foss touting the same old Trump Is the Sickness! nonsense. She should know enough about large systems and nodal points to recognize that Trump is just a big pimple oozing the pus flowing creepy through the veins of our various governances.
It reminds me again that, should things collapse (how can they not?), the most reliable neighbor will be a dead neighbor.
I’ve ashared the following before. I share it again:
When the basis of one’s culture is a failing sham, the collapse of its facades reveals a glaring nihilism only needing hardship and mistrust for it to become a mutual mistrust of pert near everything except what you can hold in your hand. I hasve a copy of Among the Thugs, and both volumes of Victor Klemperer’s I Shall Bear Witness. Their observations are not encouraging.
Our currency reads In God We trust, but people only trust cash to cooperate together. We have entirely lost ancient social protocols involving mutual understanding of mutual needs including, especially, the mutual need to cooperate together to survive even during the best of times. “Entirely lost” isn not hyperbole. As someone who spent much of his young aduly years homeless in various forms, I can attest how little we know how to function without money easing the way for us.
Money, said some smart guy in a book called Non-Zero Sum or something like that, is “deferred reciprocal altruism”: we trust that a dollar exchanged for something will in turn be exchangeable (although it’s more fun to say ‘fungible’ 😉 ) for something “equally valuable”, that if you scratch my back today in exchange for some currency, said currency will be redeemable in the future for a back scratch or maybe a lollipop.
Even the concept of barter is downright rude and offensive to our sensibilities. This is a Puritan or Calvinist, I forget, product of the Euromerican colonial experiement in North America a few centuries back, when some New England shopkeeper decided to employ the radical notion of setting a fixed price whose appeal at the time was that he wanted gouge anyone but instead, ask a fair price. It was heavenly at first but it cost us our ability to negotiate exchange values and contracts outside of things like the stock market which, as we’ve seen, are now cattle pens where the population of beed grows far past any healthy sustainable population because of central bank equivalent of hormones and antibiotics.
We have two basic social modes available to us at this point: everything’s swell or I’ma take from you what I want if I can. We ignore the latter prospect because aren’t we nice civilizwed human beings? Look how we gather together as comrades when the power goes out or the levve breaks and we’re briefly without various necessities. But let those periods go past a few weeks and all hell will break loose.
I don’t think there has ever been a more pampered, complacent population so disconnected from the fundament (the earth) of provisions. We’ve never seen a population so conditioned by ludicrous false beliefs, or so dependent on inevitably collapsing resource bases amid the growing disruptions caused by the greatest resource extraction and waste thereof in history.
But Nicole Foss and Stephan King are worried about Donald Trump being a pighead in open rather than the socially approved secret mode of pigheadedness.
Wife and I ordered a buncha Vitamin D3 and vitamin C from Amazon last night. One never knows when the media will trigger a panic run on such items. All it takes is some expert doctor on some talk show advising people to buy this or that preventative measure. If it happens in the right moment of general public awareness from public health announcements, like we’re seeing now, the just-in-time stocks can vinish quickly. I saw that Singapore required registration to purchase face masks. One assumes this is so scalpers don’t but the stocks and then gouge the public with hyper-priced face masks as people panic.
I’m old and growing rather frail, with lungs weakened by periods of nasty smoking from times when bleeding really got me down and desperate. I mention this because, iirc what I read last night (my brain is still a whirlagig from having the inside of my face fried), the fuirst reported case in the USA was a guy in the Seattle area. He was 35 years old and went from mild symptoms to raging pneumonia. He lived but it took eight days in the hospital. Eight days.
So I will be following WES’s example and the advice of otheras like John Day and taking extra good care of myself.
Ironically, the latest version of coronavirus running at large in the world is triggering a renaissance of self-care after a year of just kind of hanging on while I often smoked too much dope and frequently broke down and smoked cigarettes.
I hope this stuff doesn’t affect crows. I have adopted two crows who claim the trees behind “our” apartment complex. GOmez and Morticia Adams. Morticia has a lame right foot. After almost a year, they have come to trust me enough to regularly get into easy pellet gun range, which I take as high trust. Crows are smart and wary. Morticia will sit in the pine tree just 6-8 yards from our veranda and gently, politely caw for peanuts. I toss hard-boiled eggs onto the carport roof below every morning.
I take uncanny pleasure in being their “retirement fund”.
But also, I figure that, since people will quite likely literally be eating crow in a few years, I might as well up the population of same by making it easier for them to brood and raise more crows. I find it disturbing to observe how readily I anticipate the worst happening sooner than not, but that continually seems the most logical outcome. When logic and intuition both nestle in my gut like old friends, I figure they’re on to something and I should believe what they tell me.
***
Hillary is acting like a classic sociopathic narcissist. If she can’t have it, she’ll take down everyone else with her if she can. Since my biases imprinted toward the left as I learned about and became involved in politics (that’s a curious expression from someone raised in a democratic republic with compulsory public education), I feel more bitterness toward the icons of that side of the spectrum than I do toward those of the other side. I expect Lindsey Graham to be a punk. I expect Mitch McConnel to be a slow-moving reptile with the soul of a restaurant check. Cruz, Rubio, the infamous Bushies… but watching Hillary turn nto hazmat what was left of an already thinned-out Democratic party, is especially galling.
There is no good reason for me to be mad at any of them. They’re made possible by collective human nature, the inherently toxic nature of what we call civlization (military forces invading and acquiring slaves and plunder in the name of some glorious concept of group identity that allows us to fall for Us vs Them without considering that we’re Them to their Us), our generally hypnotized state in a realm of increasingly virtual reality.
But I would love to be close to her, vetted through a Secret aservice line, shake her hand, and say, “I feel so sorry for you. You’re obviously a miserably deranged pathetic wretch. I pray for you just to rinse from my soul my disgust toward you .”
My brain must be calming down. I’m registering the necessities of orderly syntax again.
I worked briefly in a tunnel-digging operation in late 70s Chicago. Huge central sewer main. The digging machine was, I think, 36′ across. No bureaucrats as normally thought of were necessary, just bosses, management. Which is, of course, bureaucracy, but we like to think of bureaucrats as white collar paper-pushers.
Anyway, the guys in charge were West Virginia coal miners. Dumber than the rocks they tunneled through. Almost got me killed playing a practical joke. I was gonna deck the fuc ker but the guy who got me the job, held me back, said something about weird stringent laws concerning violence in mines or something.
Glad he did. I know now that I might well have killed the fucker. Didn’t know at that time how accessible my inner sociopath can be.
Communists, capitalists, you name it: make an organization of human beings working ensemble in some kind of ideologically defined way (including the ideology of “let’s make some money if we can”, everyone’s favorite doxology), and it will be uselessly fucked up. Only thing that works in our culture is print a bunch of money and wave it in front of our noses. Money is the only leader people will reliably and reasonably follow. We’re cattle. Actually, more like ants. Social insects who follow the $$$ pheromone chemtrail wherever it leads us.
When the dollar collapses, the social collapse in Euromerica will be breath-takling, yea, often even one’s last breath.
We have no social cooperation skills other than go to school, get a job, watch some commercials cuz you have to if you want to enjoy diversion via the Magic Screen, and buy what those commercials tell you.
Like Harlan Ellison said (paraphrase alert since the internet currently doesn’t remember the original altho it did a year ago): “Americans? Hopeless. Corporate purchasing machines. It’s the tyranny of the stupid.”
You can’t have a democracy run by blind followers, especially of a system that actively discourages voter turnout because smaller herds are easier to roundup and herd.
Reason Russia runs as well as it does now is because it’s a relatively benevolent dictatorship.
All systems make people look bad unless directed by a powerful shepherd.
Russian Space Age Elevator Music
It just seemed to fit.
Being an inherently diabolical advocate, I’ll say that the Chinese are basically as humanly foolish as any race, and the symbolism of a new hospital going up zip fast can be inspiring, while conscripoted work forces have their morale boosting virtues also. Like the Russkies, the chinese people are coomfortable with hard times in a manner of reassurance. They’ve survived incredibly hard times and it made them stronger. Moderately hard times are like a diet regiment with a workout routine: getting back in shape.
As far as actually containing the virus: let’s get serious. We and they can’t control our banking systems, things entirely under our purview. No way we can contain those shape-shifting genii, the coronaviruses, whether we manufactured them or not.
I am like the Russians and Chinese. Abundance leads me to extravagant excess (mostly giving money away; it’s so much fun) and diminished focus, while hard times focus me like a sharpened pencil.
Remember: this epidemic is something REAL, a product of nature, however lab-preocessed it may be, and we are helpless before nature. It’as not a product of politics or human imagination. It’s a virus we were dumb enough to fuck with, although I can’t say for certainty that our lab follies are what caused this outbreak.
Every attempt to control nature leads to short-term victory then long-term failure. This virus gonna kick our vbutts, and that’s good, cuz like my maternal grandma, Nanny Ruth liked to say, “Some mules you have to talk to on the hind end with a stout hickory stick.” If its true for plain old mules, it thrice as true for dumb asses like ourselves.
This is a time for us to help ourselves and not worry about what the big systems are up to: they’re of little consequence in times like this. When the volcano blows, Pompei is no longer a political city but a place in which to attempt survival somehow. Planetary Surface Reality 101 refresher course.
