boscohorowitz
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Sorry. It offends me that I forgot to include the html for this perfectly deranged image, so here goes again:
FInally (I got hamsters in my head, y’allz!), I leave us be with a little known forgotten gem of hope after darkness:
Danny Kirwan was so good, so very good. (Lead guitar on this song.)
(falls over, eyes glazed…)
I note how Hillary’s refusal to be served papers, regarding a case whose cause is a statement she indisputably made and certainly worth hearing in court since being accused of liking russia is, after all, an impeachable offense, serves to defang the complaints we’ll hear regarding obstruction of witness by the Dems vs the GOP.
Keep those heads glued to their increasingly undetachable screens. Anything but let people see how bad things are, and especially keep them from thinking about what Jeffrey Epstein means.
I tend to agree with those who believe we’re headed toward a coup d’etat. Probably more cryptic than not, disguised as a hung election, maybe, and one that most definitely does not harm Donald or kin cuz no one wants to trigger that dead man switch of kompromat he has somewhere, including shots of Hillary peeing on American flag balloons while whipping 101 Dalmatians.
:”but I’m too head-addled to actually write fiction (which is a novel about an 84-year old man in love with a 72-year old woman with Alzheimers, ironically).”
From opiates and a head full of mounting snot per post-op recovery. I don’t have Alzheimers but I do tend to burn out my bearings being such a hyper-mental mutant.
I’ll have slowed down by tomorrow and will give y’all some rest. I promise.
Yeah! The rest, which in this case is a case of ending with the beginning (because, like Grandpa Funk said, the way to trick robots is to walk in backwards like you’re going out, a line Robin possibly cribbed from a Pete Townsend song I’ma inflict on you cuz it has known flu-fighting properties):
I’m sure I posted it before. Seems to be I’m going through a replay stage of my life… but I’m too head-addled to actually write fiction (which is a novel about an 84-year old man in love with a 72-year old woman with Alzheimers, ironically).
+++
I told my wife yesterday to stock up on cheap Vitamin D while we can. I think tonight’s the night.
Face masks are not the only approach. Saline spray to keep your sinuses moist in public sp[aces, particularly indoors where AC/heat dries the air then thou. Moist sinuses are rich in moving snot that keeps the pathogens from getting under the skin. Snot is full of antyibodies per part of its major functions.
But don’t blow your nose, snorkle it back down your throat and swallow, preferably with water you keep with you, always, everywhere. Preferably from your notoriously oh so toxic public water from the tap (most of which is just fine and better for you than any bottled aqua velveeta). Blowing your nose drives pathogens toward yopur skin. Snorkling it back sends it into your stomach, the acidic hellhole that destroy all but actual stomach pathogens.
Also, virgin coconut oil makes excellent snot-friendly coating to fortify all this, I would think. I use it every day to keep my nose less bleedy than it would otherwise be, and it’s hard to imagine much getting through it.
Mouth-breathing happens, so use saline spray down your oral soap hole frequently when you’re Out There.
Keep those entry passages moist and moving.
As for face masks,if its good enough for the Sand People, it’s good enough for me:
A post split up to hopefully bypass the bots who are again mortified that I dare use the edit function to fix an especially glaring typo:
Actually, there are a million wraparound your neck scarves in our fair country. They wrap around faces really well.
And gloves don’t have to be latex and disposable to shield your hands. Really. There’s this stuff called leather. You can clean it periodically with anything from saddle soap to vinegar (vinegar is great stuff). Oil ’em up first, and replenish the oil as seems wise.
And heartily decline to shake hands, a stupid custom from ancient times when we also liked to swore oaths of fraternal solidarity by reaching down and grasping the other fellow’s testicles while swearing an oath.
After all, China makes all our face masks and latex gloves, right?
Chuck Barris was maybe onto something with his protective gear, but the Unknown Comic kniows what’s most important in preventing infection and contagion:
Either way, it’s our cherished goal to bop until we drop, diseased or not:
Keeping the C-Jam Blues alive for another generation or three
+++
One wonders if it was a real or staged incident. Deciphering meaningful reality from nonsensical surreal bullshit in the news is becoming harder than making sense of the Book of Revelations.
I say staged, or a genuine angry kamikaze type. Not anything remotely professinal in terms of actual assassination attempt, it seems.
“Tell me if its all propaganda.
Could your gov. be able to accomplish this.
Will our society have a better response”I believe it could. Not as fast as claimed by the PR soothies preceding the actual work, but amazingly fast. Also, China has the benefit of numerous almost empty brand-new “hungry ghost” towns:
Hospitals and Hospices Awaiting Equipment and Patients
China is an amazing nation with amazing people. Like Russia, they’re still crawling from their mid-20th century nightmare rubble, with China still poised for a major tumble as their economy does something similar to the USA’s. But, unlike the USA, they’ve been building actual infrastructure along with their mostly empty housing megaliths unlike USA’s increasingly empty Fishcer-Price building block toy neighborhoods for toy people that we now rely on China to manufacture for us like everything else/ (Look, hun! The DNA Store has a special on blonde Asiatics with blue eyes! Guaranteed Made in China!)
” “Racism: 1: a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race” ”
It contributes to the pile of Things That Drive Me Nuts that racism has been defined this way. This is not a definition of racism, this is the definition of racial bigotry. But then, we’ve been calling Semitic Arabs anti-Semites for over half a century or more, so why not?
It’s like listening to a room full of first-graders cussing each other out with words they heard Daddy use last night (watching TV and yelling at the talking heads):
“You’re a mother fucker.”
“Oh yeah? Well you’re a fathermucker.”
Nobody seems to know what the words mean anymore.
***
“Still reminiscing of sending him to outer Mongolia though. That was hilarious.”
Indeed. Add that Bolton wears a lousy imitation of Stalin’s mustache cuz, I guess, he doesn’t have the guts to do the full Hitler job. And that, after a probably very brief spate of sales, Bolton’s new book will probably hit the remainder bins faster than you can say, ‘Aw, shit. This is so lame.”
(Don’t mind me, y’all. I’m on mild opiates per recovery from my latest sinus searing. Add a massive dose of IV steroids to a guy who can’t even take Advil without risking a major bleed, and I’m wired like a paper moon in a 30s musical.)
“Race relations are actually improving”
I agree but tenously. Black and white relations have benefitted from interracial marriage and a We’re All One Big Diverse Rainbow campaign of cotton candy nonsense spun over the very real underlying injustices that brought about the various “XYZ rights” movements of the 60s and 70s, but while the mixed marriages produce a lessening of the old starkly drawn racial divide, I can feel, here in Portland’s decrepit-before-even-born urban utopia, the kind of subliminal tension that can rapidly send people to opposing camps in a single employment crisis.
Which is not to say at all that the manipulators aren’t fomenting racial discord even as they wave their blowup diversity unicorn squeaky toys.
Teach Your Dog Social Tolerance AND Freshen Its Teeth!
There’s a growing passive-aggressive demeanor between the perceived races here. With China being the epicenter of a looming flu epidemic, all the Asiatics who are, how shall I say it, like the New White People (NWP) in the Pacific Northwest (Pac NW), will probably find that those almond eyes peeking over a face mask concealing that uncanny ability to smile like a Cheshire cat on mushrooms, are greeted with growing body language hostility and a certain dimming of the currently de rigeur false enthusiasm toward people of undisguisable ethnic difference. Meanwhile, those face masks won’t conceal that said almond eyes aren’t smiling back; they’re either anxious or angry. I’m enjoying best I can this Universal Family of Mine show while it last. Which is not very much, really, but one obtains pleasure as one can.
As for Hispanic/white relations out here: it is glaringly hostile albeit quiet and tight-lipped. White people aren’t allowed to do menial labor requiring prolonged exposure to the outdoors, significant physical exertion, and Hispanics (and , it seems, blacks) are significantly absent in Portland’s non-yuppie sector of the Euromerican employment sector, the tipping economy.
Which is gonna crash hard when people are serving food wearing face masks, or employees are forced to discard same while getting sick.
***
Kung flu. The Oscar awards this year should be telling. All that kissy-kissy cheeky-cheek stuff should be noticeably reduced, even absent, by then. Backstage, people will be wearing masks, I suspect, and squirting liquid bandage and saline sprays up their noses while gargling Airborne and chugalugging vitamin/zinc kool-aid.
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So there’s no evidence that Trump peed the bed in Moscow with a bunch of hookers, but there is evidence that we were told so by a gaggle of sawed-off buck-tooth liars who, to quote a former sociopathic boss’s favorite politically incorrect insult, “wouldn’t recognize the truth if it walked up and smacked them in their dick-suckers”. I learned a lot from that man. An ethical sociopath who spent the latter 60s<>late 70s working flat joints (scam booths) in the Everyone’s A Winnah! walkways of the already dying country/state fair carnival industry, an industry dominated by Real! Live! Gypsies! who knew more about the foolish underside of human asocial consciousness than Vladimir Putin and W.C. Fields combined, he knew stuff.
It kind of pissed him off that I was smarter than him, who was used to being the smartest guy in the room, and was so naively trusting that his manipulations just back-fired on him.
He was stunned to find himself calling me and begging me to come back to work for him after I walked off the job when he tried his standard prison/gypsy domination tactics.
Back to Trump hookers: the Steele dossier was SO stupid. If they wanted to discredit Trump, all they had to do was treat him with unenthusiastic respect and let him talk. This is a case where I see plain stupidity/craven banal evil running the show with no hidden agenda but the one they so poorly hide, that grows more visible everyday.
It was succinctly described here recently how America hit its domestic peak oil sometime in the 60s (or very early 70s? my memory is performing Alzheimer Neural Epidemic Test Drills of late). As a second-string Boomer born in 1956 (9 months after Einstein died; I’m sure metempsychosis placed his soul into my fetus, so there!), I was raised on American Peak Culture, something especially evinced by those glorious Rogers and Hammerstein musicals. I’ve been crudely hammering my digital Steinway to achieve a rudimentary performance of the miraculous musical number below, also a cinematic miracle of humane considerations enacted by deft performers:
A voice in the back of my foggy brain says I might have shared the above already. Oh well. At least I remember that I already shared a shot awhile ago of the enchanted evening shown below. Both song and image bear repetition:
But this one, even sans balloons, is the best. Look Bawss! De plane!!!! We’re going to Pedophile Island! I love to watch!
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And now, my daughter Chelsea will perform the Miracle of Changing Dynasties! If you approve, vote for me! If you don’t approve, vote for me too!
Closing image: Nancy Pelosi as Cruella Deville. Hillary Clinton as Poseidon’s evil sister, Ursula, from The Little Mermaid
P.S.People fear Trump will go apeshit and go nuclear. Narcissitic solipsism, blah blah blah. As if he invented the arms race and the insane policies that have brought them to this brink. As if voices from both parties don’t collectively recoil and hiss when they hear the words Putin or Russia, as if both parties don’t STILL want to keep poking sticks at Vlad the Bad Bear despite him demonstrating that he has sticks long enough to poke them back more or less all at once.
I daresay that I am much more terrified opf the likes of, say, Nicole Foss (who is a brilliant kind thoughtful caring and maybe even brave human being) who, despite all these glorious attributes, think that removing the the one boss so crazy he knows that winning nuclear war is something you talk about but don’t actually DO, just like you talk about fixing the countless problems pushing us to said nuclear brink but don’t actually DO anything even remotely effective, cuz that would cut in on your after hours sleaze time at a cost of 317 dollars a second (probably more; I probably calculated wrong) if you’re gonna keep on blowing a billion dollars a year for more stuff than all the sultans who ever lived could figure out how to enjoy but you, you just have to have more cuz you, you are hopelessly depraved in a way that even Stalin and Mao’s love children by Typhoid Mary and Maggie Thatcher in a secret lab where Hillary Clinton likes to watch, knows to stay far away from.
I’m not being hyperbolic, am I?
Like a million soldiers
You know you can’t break me
Can you feel the rumble
Up under your feet?
I can walk on water
Get down on your knees
I keep on marching, keep on marching
I can make it rain, I can call on thunder
Make a strong man weak
Oh, I make you wonder
I can feel the fire burnin’ down in me
I keep on marching, I keep on marching[Chorus:]
Sound the alarm
Oh I’m coming
Sound the alarm
Oh I’m coming
Sound the alarm
Oh I’m coming
Sound the alarm
Oh I’m coming[Verse 2:]
Like a dead man walking
And I’mma keep on stomping
Say you mine for gold?
Oh, well I mine for souls
I can feel the fire burnin’ down in me
I keep on marching, I keep on marching[Chorus]
[Bridge:]
I’m like a million soldiers
Can you feel the rumble?
I can walk on water
I can walk on water
I can feel the fire burnin’ down in me
I keep on marching
I keep on marching
I keep on marchingWhether or not JD’s UFC regarding bat meat for profit is true, it illustrates the underlying inescapable fact that something like that WILL happen, especially when the economy is crunching. Or when people are going on fanatic shooting/bombing sprees. The world contains many not so bright people, some of them Ph.D. research types, and a significant number of evil shits, some of them not-so-bright.
All you have to do is line them in a row (I’m seeing a slot machine) just right. Evil or stupid on the left, evil or stupid on the right. Evil or stupid in the middle. Any combination will do, although I think the classic pattern is evil in the middle with stupid on each side and evil bracketing the ends, although a reversal of polarity is probably almost as bad.
But a straight string of stupid can happen, or a straight string of evil, and then you Hit the Jackpot!
Speculations On What/How We Win
However, I think Gibson is doing what most everyone does: tries to gradulaize something that has the potential to happen very very quickly. In the novel in which the Jackpot takes place, The Peripheral, the jackpot is supposed to happen slowly although quite devastatingly over all.
I don’t see it. The amount of deficit in all criticval aspects is so off the chart, and so intricvately and wantonly inter-networked that it’s liable to be like dropping a bowling ball through an enormous mega-stadium sized balloon of spider web.
“But spider webs are ridiculously strong!”
Yes, but hot air is not, bowling balls are very small but very heavy, the speed of an object falling freely will increase by about 9.81 metres per second every second, and the very strength of those boomzillion spider strands will pull the entire thing down with minimal shredding for maximum collapse.
As Dr. D points out, the essentially good idea that is socialism, fueled by the essentially good idea of capitalism, has been used as a cover to disguise the fact that virtually all our governments/leaders today are ratshit asshats smoking batshit who have no clue how to run this thing much less how to make it stop collapsing once it stops. Not.A.Clue. They are, after all, filled with Top People. Expert dipshits.
Some of them are too cranially vapor-locked to realize that what they know they’re doing is, indeed, exactly what they’re doing and will inevitably produce the results that their intelligent but locked-down mindsets know must happen but insist must not so cannot even though they absolutely must continue doing the same or they will face genuine consequences which, as a result of just described mindsets, are to them just mythical creatures in some Harry Potter movie.
Some of them just plain stupid and too numb by fear to be terrified by the fact that they’re terrified at how everything Captain Sparky says will/must happened doesn’t.
Some of them are evil, yea, professing evil, unable to care what happens outside the domain of their glorious megalomaniacal psychopathic malignant narcissism (and a heap of other bad psych words too), so much so that even when a trusted dumb minion tells them not to do exactly what their evil genius boss had literally hard-wired into the minion’s mind not to do, they make the minion do what they told them not to do anyway:
Bonus noise:
O bravew world and Hail Motherfucking ATLANTIS!
So What Awreddy“The Seal of the State of Virginia. Thus to all Tyrants. How we’ve fallen.”
It wasn’t fall too far. Virginia is the rotten center that produced this nonsensical polity known as the Unitesd States, with its silly Declaration of Independence for slave owners or slavery-endorsing wannabes who hogged the l;and from its native inhabitants while revering a buncha same if long dead greeks because, hey, at least they’re not Catholics.
Not far at all. The American dream is something I’ve never once drwamt of nor heard of anyone else doing likewise. It’s something we collectively hallucinate in our somnambulistic waking hours. I know: I’ve seen it on TV. (Don’t tell me that TV isn’t real. Ic havwe personally smashed the screen and sung songs with Little Elmo. That boy’s got some good drugs!)
“When do you think the civil war will start, before or after November 3?”
Like epidemics, it’s hard to identify a desicive ‘nodal inflection point’ (I think, I hope, I used that 3-word expression aprtly, maybe even accurately). Retroactively, perhaps easier.
But if you mean armed bands of self-identifying groups shooting at bands of self-identifying groups (armed or not), I’d say when the food, or water, or lights run out or turn off. Possibly with crank-crime-labelled miniature precursors fighting for gasoline. Can’t say how that relates to the next election.
Or perhaps will see a coup d’etat from within the military, assuming there are enough military personnel in high enough places, of sufficient charisma and skill in clique manipulations who would not be caught up in the slime bomb (call it the unBarred-Epstein virus for poetic sake) I personally believe would explode if Trump were offed. Again, uncertain relation to Nov 3.
I don’t think people will get their civil war on over this election alone. For all the armed protestors milling about some legislature on a public holiday, the USa plebiscite is a bovine mass on hormones, antibiotics, piped-inmusic, eating weird-ass food while doing their best not to think about the way big bunches occasionally leave after being rounded up in cattle cars headed toward death camps that very few of them can even imagine unless they’re watching All Hitler All Day on The History Channel.
My reply to a survey request received just now from OHSU, Portland’s ludicrously over-sized, over-priced, narcissitically self-elated medical monolith, I sent this rather than click the survey and begin answering inane question on a scale of 1-10:
I’m sure that hitting reply won’t place my response before human eyes except maybe one of your IT people, but I have no time to waste on abstracted numerical surveys. Gawdamighty. But if you do read this, I’ll share this:
Despite the constant confusion and the inevitable malfunctions in protocol/procedure produced by an impossibly over-large bureaucracy and the omnipresence of useless, wasteful marketing/PR, I find that, once one gets through the rat’s maze of unnecessary redundancy coupled with missing necessities (‘undone-dancies’), your actual medical staff is an extremely competent joy to work with. It’s almost as if they’re compensating for an administrative structure they know is out of control and incompetent.
Dang. Post-op opiates and my usual disdain of my reading glasses makes for a wealth of typos. Illustratin 1 should properly be:
Illustration 1 in my post above lacks an attacking conservative agenda as well, but its absence rather highlights part of what it illustrates (among other things): partisan politics is a sucker’s shell game with one side ever blaming the other.
Likewise with this needlessly, heedlessly absolutism:
“Except that anyone who knows computers knows they are always wrong and only compound human error faster.”
The first clause is patently wrong in a way that is hard to shrug off even as hyperbole for rhetorical effect. The latter can be true (depends on the program one is using) when human error is involved. Just as GIGO can mean Garbage In Garbage Out it can also mean Good-data In Good Data-out.
Computer models are what gert satellites successfully launched into orbit.
Also, most of the original, pre-politicized computer sims of global climate disruption (yea, the anthropogenic kind no less), have oproven mostly right.
The truth is that reality is not political, that politics are a minor subset of reality, and reality kicks politics ass so often that this is probably why politics rarely ventures forth into that realm.
“Again, this goes back to my line of embarrassment and they knew, as the U.S. knows, or well enough, but also WHY are they developing a disease of this nature? ”
I think that your embarrassment line of reasoning holds its water better than any other attempts to peer over the Official Explanation, but I must dispute this statement: “Well, obviously to kill a lot of people.”
It is just as plausible that they are doing research to attempt to foresee what kind of icky natures this changeling virus might develop that could cause major mayhem. Not all enemies are human foreign entities or human domestic entities. Like I wrote in a short story about a halfwit (me) surviving an unexpected encounter with a cougar (that’s the fiction part) in a very small town where cougar tracks are sometimes found in the sidewalk snow 6 yards from the front porches of its citizens:
“I feel triumphant. I also feel edibly vulnerable with the same knowledge rabbits live and die with: something, somewhere, thinks you’d make a fine meal. Cougars, viruses, IRS, all want a slice.”
Learnig what viruses might emerge to kill you and your people is not only a valid defense against same, it is also a viable source of bioweaponry.
The false dichotomy is DEEPLY coded into our thinking as a culture.
As for socialism never learning, I’ll accept that “Socialists never learn. Voluntary cooperation is the only way,” now for the sake of discussing on established terms. Having said that, I’ll point out that voluntary cooperation borders on impossible in cities of and significant size, a size which can be as “small” as around 100K (see the Bruce Cockburn article on polio in 1956, the glorious year of my miraculous birth).
People in highly bureaucratic authoritarian sociliast polities (China, USA, Russia) don’t do anything like voluntary cooperation until their government/economy collapses (as in Orlov’s description of early post-USSR).
It’s like saying, Capitalists never learn, which is also true, but the only large-scale solution to our capitalist dilemma is a capitalist solution, and since capitalists never learn any more than socialists, we must wait until the Sky City tent collapses before any significant voluntary cooperation among the people emerges to deal with the wreckage.
I tend to doubt Prouty’s version of FDR’s death, and Stalin is as credible as witness as Trump: not.
Which is not to say that the astoery is entirely false, just that it’s not entirely true’ For example, this is a false attribution. The actual quote comes from the 19th century (which one can also see in the VIctorianesque iron trellised prose).
That said, I certainly wouldn’t put it past Churchill, a shiny-nosed SOB albeit a gorgeous writer and somewhat shrewd philosopher so long as he stuck to abstractions and physical reality or factual history.
Here is Patrick Cockburn comparing his personally lived, later journalistically researched, with a polio outbrak in Cork, Ireland (apparentl;y the national whiskey bottle stopper or something?). It presents (at least superficially) as seasoned, level-headed, experienced prudent perspective (but appearances are often deceiving):
“Have I detected a little objectivity and a turn away from the xenophobia to China exhibited on this blog recently?”
I hadn’t seen any xeno-. I saw a healthy mistrust of its government, and a subjective distaste for China’s willingness to not hide all of the animals-for-food slaughtered, but no xenophobia either in the true sense (fear of China/Chinese) nor condescencion toward same.
I too have detected a little objecticvity which, with human beingsd, is as good as it gets: a little here and there. We’re not rational beings.
“Schiff is really getting to me now. he’s doing a little CNN press-op surrounded by real stupid looking lackeys, repeating all the same stuff again that he has for half a year now. ”
Schiff is like a scarecrow. After awhile, the birds ignore him except as a place to roost and shit. Wait and wee what happens when they discover he’s stuffed with peanuts.
I repost the image as a link in case the IMG button fails:
***
“Personally, and it’s just my opinion, but I now strongly believe that 2019-nCoV a bioweapon. And rather than an accidental release, I suspect this was actually an act of war against world “over-population.”
I quite understand the rationale of your logic and how existing data defines a trend of drill-before-deliberate-calamity, so I can’t naysay the concept’s viability. Zerosum has several times said that when it is shown to transit via wealthy persons’ private air yachts, we’ll see and hear a different response from elite-dominated instruments of social manipulation.
I can hear their logic over espresso and cognac: “It’s a necessary evil if we’re to save humanity, which only we can do, being the gods of this milieu.”
It’s plausible.
But self-deceiving arrogant blind self-delusion works as well or better running on stupid ignorance as on intelligent hubris (and the likes of Bill Gates have both in spades).
So I won’t forego the prospect that this is just the natural consequence of overall cultural ignorance, our culture being mostly a tissue of silly dreams driven by the highly accurate applied physics discovered by mostly rogue geniuses, their acolytes, and lackeys. That E.O. Wilson quote again:
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.”
A guy like Gates is perhaps as well satisfied to have his reflection say, “We told them so,” as it is to say, “Looks like it’s up to save the world via encrypted mass euthanasia.” Maybe more so.
It’s hard to say with egoes so hyper-inflated and financially empowered.
***
“Thing is, he’s (Schiff) the only Democrat who’s “attractive” to viewers and voters right now, much more than any of the candidates. They must be wishing so hard he’d run for president, he’s all they have, with his made from whole cloth tales and all. And CNN, NYT,MSNBC and WaPo will go all out for him, because they need to create the impression there’s an actual contest for the presidency.”
Sadly, when I learned from you that Nicole Foss was endorsing the notion that removing Trump is the solution, the inescapable logic I perceived is that the people who identify with whatever it is they call the “left” these days have grown to be the biggest obstacle to meaningful political reform.
If I had a dollar for every time someone said, “At least Obama could form coherent sentences” as if that morally elevated his actions above their vile swamping grounds, as if it’s better to be lied to with elegant sophistry rather than with word salad sound-bites (Trump’s verbal forte), as if it’s better to believe those elegant lies than face discomfiting truths, I’d be able to go out for a swell dinner with my wife tonight.
“Be a healthy young woman, if possible.”
Oh, John, I tried so hard. Really. But not only am I improperlu anatomically provisioned, I’m also hopelessly heterosexual, or if one prefers: a male lesbian. I just plain like pussy.
I used to be a moderately successful wimp, which our culture sadly equates with femininity, but discovered before I’d turned 30 that I am simply not someone to fuck with. I have a kill switch and know how to turn it on.
I am now struggling to relieve myself of the popular delusion (imo, and I’m sticking to it) that violencve other than obvious blatant self-defense, does anything to promote more good than evil in this world. It doesn’t. Violence as our culture codifies and condones it, the popular concept of “necessary evil”, is not. It is unnecessary evil.
WHile I do not absolutely claim that all evil is necessary, I do believe that this is true only in the hands of intelligence, wisdom, and power beyond our own. “Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord, and all that. And evn that allegedly Almighty hypothetical Being gave up on trying to whip or euthanize or coerce and sense into humanity, and this thing they say His Son did was to receive violence unto Himself (for reasons so many claim to understand but not I, although I have a peth theory).
We’ll fight each other and reality to death. Reality will win. We won’t.
But that is just my personal moral sphere, something I have to do to preserve my sanity. Others feel a need to fight and I deeply sympathize with them: been there, done that. It just doesn’t work for me.
We’ll have corpses enough to bury ere soon.
“My theory for colds is this nasty pest is somehow necessary to either test or boost my immune system from time to time to be ready to prevent something more serious.”
I’ll take the liberty of stating that differently, without teleological overtones:
cold viruses have flourished in humans, and whatever other fauna they may find residence in, because they are mild enough to mostly not kill off their hosts. In the process, they flourish enough to develop a robust culture (myriad varieties of cold viruses).
Over time, the symbiosis benefits both. The viruses benefit as described above, and we benefit as WES described, the new varieities teaching our immune system new tools for adapting to new pathogens.
Messed Up Sentence of the Day:
“Their “prophecies” were not well-received; Jeremiah, for example, being thrown into a deep well as well as put in wooden stocks.”
“It’s understandable that people compare the warnings about it to those about for instance SARS (also a coronavirus, so either call this one 2019-nCoV or “Wuhan coronavirus”), and conclude that since that episode was not so bad, neither will this one be, but that’s certainly not the definitive story.”
This lies within the purview of a social behavior complex I recall as The Cassandra Syndrome. Y2K is a textbook case: Y2K was indeed a major problem that could have torn the world apart for awhile. But because enough warnings were made and enough action taken, the damage was 99.9% contained. A wet firecracker.
The success of genuine warnings taken seriously and effectively acted upon leads the masses to believe that such warnings don’t need to be taken seriously.
YOu’ll hear tyhis fallacy all the time frompeople who dislike unpleasant notions. After all, this predicted disaster or that predicted disaster didn’t happen, so this one won’t either.
MAlthus was wrong a few hundred years ago, so all subsequent over-population warnings must be wrong, etc.
Typically, this comes coupled with the “we’ll think of something, we always do” when in fact we usually don’t.
THis also relates to silly jive about ‘Where are my flying cars? as if The Jetsons were remotely connected to genuine futurism rather than being just a silly cartoon.
Dr. D:
“You are correct: 6,000 / 130 = 0.02 which is how to express 2%.”
Well, let’s blame the typo (you originally wrote 0.02%). Thanx for clarifying that and your reference to the tunnel vision WES deals with. I didn’t think you were addressing me, but since I was the only soul present in the declarative room at that time, I had no other hypothesis to follow.
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John Day: I found your sharing and comments today very enlightening. I agree with Charles Smith. This time around, the 80-year 4th Turning generational cycle of history seems to be uncommonly precise. If so, I guess it’s because all the applicable dynamics are adamantly defined, packed as they are with extreme urgent excess.
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fwiw, I don’t see this virus oputbreak as intentionally planned by any body of elites. Too hard to contain and control. But I must remind myself that the level of megalomaniacal sociopathy concentrated in those boardrooms and tropical villas is so great that, as Saul Alinsky said in Rules for Radicals (paraphrase alert): ‘I am convinced I could get a greedy businessman to sign a deal that would make him rich tomorrow even though he knew it would get him killed the day after that.’) That much power and lust for more does seem to breed a special kind of blindness.
Anyway, I think that if it was a deliberate release of a lab-bred pathogen, it was the act of the Harvey Oswald variety: a single agent or a very small group. There are people so disturbed by our future prospects they might decide to start the attrition and collapse of civilization sooner than later. Mathematically speaking, it is morally sound, because the longer we wait to confront the crash, the more people will be alive to suffer and make things worse for everyone in the process.
But I dislike mathematical morals. Not just because of the logic of the infamous Stalin quote about single deaths versus large mortality statistics, but also what Ursula K. LeGuin wrote:
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
However, the question of who or what dunnit is a minor logistical quibble. The existence of labs that breed pathogens for “study” means that such a thing was bound to happen eventually. Let’s pray that neither Russia nor USA ( both of which retain, last I knew, viable smallpox samples in their labs) loses control of their labs or their logic0-moral good sense:
sigh… I remember when our only major global survival concern was nuclear weapons.
Nope. It insists there is a duplicate already posted, but it doesn’t show. It’s corny to say but, Look out for stobor”
btw, editing online is still risky practice at least from my ancient steampunk PC. With or without the edit log box checked, it works when it wants to and doesn’t when it don’t. I’ll try again below
