Oct 042021
 


Paul Gauguin Apatarao 1893

 

 

I was working on something else, check back later, and then I saw this comment by Automatic Earth resident physician John Day, about to lose his job because doctors are not supposed to have their own opinions and judgments either about medical procedures these days, let alone refuse a vaccine. Even if they’ve been working their nuts off for 30 years. Boy, do we live in strange times.

Simply thought John’s words might help someone somewhere realize they’re not alone. And it also made me realize -once more- what a great community has spontaneously grown at the Automatic Earth over the last 20 months. Where else on earth do you find that? And how can you not want to join?

 

 

John Day: When people think of Nazi Germany they typically think of 1939 to 1945, so when I liken the depersonalization of “the unvaccinated” in the west today, to how Jews and other minorities were treated under the Third Reich, I am taken to task. Today is more like 1932 than 1939, still pre-war, with the way forward not yet clear. The US is not Germany, and is not even the UK. Analogies can only be taken so far, but the process of depersonalizing a group of people, to blame them for things going bad, is a standard operating procedure.

• It has to become normal to blame the scapegoat group. Everybody has to know.
• It has to be common and accepted knowledge that this group made our current problems.
• It looks to me like this is still in beta testing with blaming the COVID-unvaccinated.

The US government today is more like the floundering Weimar republic in 1932, with divisions, and lack of a clear, guiding vision for the country. In 1932 the Weimar Republic did not have a majority in government, but it had the largest minority. Close upon its heels were the National Socialists and the Communist Party. The national Socialists and Communists were in opposition, and considered a political alliance. They did align on some things. Positions were not too different to reconcile, and the Deutschmark was not yet into hyperinflation.

With the ongoing global great depression, the Deutschmark, unmoored from gold by necessity, and based on a property bubble, started inflating away so rapidly that it was an economic crisis. People were desperate for a solution. The US is not there yet, but it looks like it is on the horizon. The world does not need to pay the US for dollars. Other global trade arrangements can be made. Dark-money trades move a lot of $100 bills around, and have for a long time, but gold works, and always has.

Gold and physical cash working as currency is a problem for global central bankers. They probably have a much better idea of how much dark-commerce is going on than we do. They launder the drug-money, for instance. They would prefer a cut of every single transaction. What central bankers openly want is global digital currency, under their control, for every participant and for every transaction. The vaccine-passports are an opportune pathway into that for Central Banking. Blaming the unvaccinated enough for COVID to enact widespread digital vaccine passports looks like a concept that needs widespread acceptance as normal, for it to be the go-to solution in the upcoming reset. If the global digital currency function of vaccine-passports were in place when the global financial system collapsed, it could be built up as a solution.

 

To me it seems that people don’t invent completely new solutions in a crisis. Rather, they press into service whatever they have that can be made to work. If cash and gold are eliminated, and only electronic transactions are possible, then global central bank digital currency can be made to look like the only alternative. Most people would prefer cash, which gives them autonomy, if they think about it.

Most people don’t have to think about it much these days. Credit cards work. In a crisis, people do think a lot more about their options and how they can protect their options and defend their resources from further predation. Before the overt crisis of global economic reset, here in the partly-contrived crisis of COVID-Pandemic-Unending, we might give careful thought to our positions in society, to how much normalcy migration we should roll-over for and permit.

I am not a victim, and I am sorry if I appeared to present my human experience recently in a way that made me seem that way, or seem as if I were putting on the identity-cloak of victimhood. I have intentionally decided to stand, immediately, with a scapegoated group, not least because I believe the group is right to resist conformity pressure, but because now is the time when a firm stance, before the onset of a real crisis, might be the most influential on the future course of society.

If we resist the normalization of unfair scapegoating every time it is attempted, then we resist being divided against each other by the owners. When the crisis hits in earnest, they need us to be divided against each other, in order to maintain their positions of power and ownership over us and over the physical world and it’s life forms. I am able to stand firmly against vaccine-mandates and vaccine passports because the kids are all in their careers, we own the house in Yoakum, and have low taxes there, I have vegetable gardens, and we have been practicing different life patterns, growing, harvesting, storing and preparing food.

We have modest retirement savings, no debts, and are about to get the attic insulation updated, the last major maintenance project on the homestead. The plumbing, electrical wiring, roofing, flooring, internal and external repair and paint have all been done, roughly in that order. It is a sturdy 1957 house, which has withstood every storm since then without appreciable damage. Jenny’s position as a school librarian does not appear threatened. We are able to subsist on her salary alone.

 

I am doing everything I can to ease the transition of care for my patients at what began in 1970 as a free-clinic, and what is now a largish Federally Qualified Health Center. I may or may not be employable, and I have learned better than to think I could run a business long ago. It’s not my nature. The near future is in a fog bank. Things are not usually this way. We need to not run into an iceberg while we await the lifting of the fog, and the improvement of visibility.

There is a lot that we can do each day which is productive and useful to ourselves and others. Much of it is really mundane, but it facilitates human repatterning, which is our own self-guided migration of normalcy. We can even choose to migrate towards historical normalcy. It might be a good start.

This Saturday Jenny and I experimented with the new technique of shelling black-eyed peas, which Dan and I worked out last weekend on the dried black beans, which had been very slow going for hand shelling. We harvested about 6 five-gallon buckets in June, and managed to shell 3 of those since then. Some people stomp black beans on a threshing floor (messy). The most promising technique I found online was to put them in a burlap bag, beat it mercilessly, then pour the loose beans out of it.

We experimented with that. The sharp black bean pods poked out through the burlap, spear-like. Wrong kind of burlap bag? The beans didn’t pour out so well, either, and the beating process seemed like we could do better. Dan started pounding the black bean pods in the 5 gallon bucket with an axe handle, not hard, just tap, tap, tapping. That seemed to be working pretty well. I did some hand mangling to loosen up remaining beans, and picked off a lot of the chaff from the top.

Dan had dropped the axe head down by then, which seemed to work better-still. We processed all 3 buckets pretty quickly, while working this out, then poured the buckets into a clean wheelbarrow, across the brisk wind of a fan, which blew away the chaff. We cut our processing time to about 10-20%, which made it look ok to grow black beans again, though we will experiment with pinto beans next spring.

The black-eyed peas did not respond well to the pounding-in-bucket technique. The pods seem to be more flexible, less dry and crispy. The “peas” don’t separate out easily that way, but they do separate out well by hand, just splitting the dry pod and stripping the (African) beans out with one’s fingers. The traditional way seems to be fairly efficient for low tech. Weevils mess with that. Old world beans are poorly defended against new world weevils. The wind-winnowing step works after hand shelling. They are a lot easier to hand shell than black beans are. Some pods shell easier than others. Some beans are bigger than others. Some varieties seem more resistant to weevils than others. One would desire large pods, with large beans, which shell easily, and are minimally susceptible to weevil damage.

[..] It is late in the season to judge weevil susceptibility, having planted in July (gave up on Mackey Peas). Both kinds shell readily when dried. The Purple hull peas are much larger, so the same amount of shelling get more dried “peas”. They taste fine, but the smaller Red ripper “peas” have a nice, appealing nutty flavor. We will have to see how they do against weevils next summer.

 

 

 

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