Accidents Happen

 ​Witnesses,

​  ​On Tuesday 4th of August, an explosion at the Lebanese harbour in the heart of the capital Beirut caused devastating human casualties and material destruction. Over 140 people died instantly, 80 are still missing under the rubble, and over 5000 were wounded. More than 300,000 homes were destroyed and many more were damaged. 2,750 tons of Ammonium Nitrate (AN) (an equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT) somehow ignited and registered the largest explosion since the end of World War II. Many theories, accusing Israel or Hezbollah or the CIA, are circulating like wildfire in the Lebanese capital. Where is the truth? Cui bono? ...
​  ​Ammonium Nitrate has many properties, notably as a component of explosive mixtures (Mellor, 1922; Elvers 1989, Suslick 1992). Pure AN is very stable and should meet specified quality requirements to be used in the production of industrial explosives. According to the European Fertilizer Manufacturers Association, AN is especially difficult to detonate and does indeed need a substantial stimulus for this to happen. But it must be stored in a dry, well-ventilated and sealed storage area. Moreover, any electrical installation in the storage area must be resistant to ammonia vapour...
​  ​For over six years, the 2,750 tons of AN remained in the Lebanese warehouse without any plans to relocate or re-sell it. Moreover, the storage area chosen is subject to the changing weather of the Lebanese climatic seasons, which include suffocating heat in the summer. The storage area was of metal construction with no proper ventilation.​..​
​  ​Last year, Captain Naddaf who works at the harbour under the National Security Service, called his superior to inform him about the presence of a “dangerous cargo at warehouse no. 12.” His superior officer, General A. instructed the young officer to provide a written report and take pictures of the warehouse and the contents. The warehouse construction had a breach big enough for the passage of a man, which would facilitate entry or even theft.​..

​ ​ ​On the 4th of August, at 15:00 local time, a blacksmith was asked to close the holes in the warehouse to prevent potential smuggling of the content. The blacksmith was not informed about the hazardous content of the warehouse, nor he was told to take the necessary precautions to prevent the spread of metal particles that produce fragments and can trigger fire. He was working at a distance no more than a few centimetres from the AN bags that were lying on the floor, from which a clear substance was leaking. Once the job was done, between 16:30 and 17:00, smoke was seen coming from the warehouse.

https://ahtribune.com/world/north-africa-south-west-asia/lebanon/4333-beirut-explosion-who-is-responsible.html 

​Moon Of Alabama has videos, and what appears to be the final update as to the causal sequence, which fits well with about 10 videos from various angles and distances. The impounded fireworks were in the same warehouse with impounded ammonium nitrate, a high explosive, when detonated by another explosion. The first fireworks explosion blew off the roof, and the compartments were not much separated, as fireworks continued to detonate.​

​  ​There is a short video of firefighters at the initial fire. Reportedly none survived when the fireworks fire set off the ammonium nitrate. Another video shows the initial fire caused by welding. It burns a while and then sets off fireworks in a first explosion. This takes the roof off the warehouse. A few minutes later the fireworks cause the huge explosion of the ammonium nitrate.  

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/08/beirut-blast-wrap-up.html#more 

"Leave, You Are All Killers!" Protesters Storm Multiple Government Ministries In Beirut

​ ​The expected protests and riots have broken out in Beirut at the end of a week in which families mourned the over 150 killed in Tuesday's blast centered on the port, which it's now been revealed was the result of years of negligence by authorities who allowed 2,750 metric tons of ammonium nitrate to be unsafely stored right alongside a large stash of impounded fireworks.​..

​  Like the years-long banking crisis, the government is seen as directly responsible for this week's epic tragedy, also given the lengthy paper trail showing multiple officials and entities begged the government to do something about the explosive substance stored so near a densely populated area.​..

​  ​It appears that going into the night the ministries now "taken over" the protesters include the Foreign Affairs, Environment, and Energy ministry buildings, as well as the Ministry of Economy.
​  ​Chants of “the people want the fall of the regime” as well as the burning of portraits of top Lebanese leaders and politicians, such as of President Michel Aoun could be observed during mass demonstrations at Martyr's Square.

​ ​Lebanon's national grain stockpile was completely destroyed, though the once massive silos shielded the Western part of the city from vast damage.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/leave-you-are-all-killers-lebanese-protesters-storm-multiple-government-ministries 

​Libyan General Haftar, backed by Egypt, Russia and France appears to have advanced anti-aircraft defenses from either Russia (S-300) or the capable Iranian copy.. This puts pressure on Turkey to avoid risking aircraft, pilots and national prestige in an attempt to take the oilfields and port of Ras Lanuf, used for export​ of the oil. Standoff.

https://southfront.org/s-300-system-spotted-in-libya/ 

Tom Luongo opines that "The DNC Convention Is The Election", because Trump wins if they put up the empty shell of Joe Biden. What trick cards does the DNC have to play? They won't nominate Bernie Sanders or Tulsi Gabbard, will they? Elizabeth Warren? They can't even allow a debate, let alone an election. What will they pull?

How can they possibly run Joe Biden?
It’s not that Biden hasn’t been a good soldier for the empire, he has. It is that he is unpresentable as a candidate in public. The evidence of his cognitive decline, which has accelerated in recent months, mounts every time he fails to even read a teleprompter correctly.

 https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/08/06/dnc-convention-is-election/

(All those little clots sludge up all those little arterioles that supply all our vital organs with oxygen and vital nutrients.)

​ ​While lung scarring, heart and kidney damage may result from COVID-19, doctors and researchers are starting to clock the potential long-term impact of the virus on the brain also.
​ ​Younger COVID-19 patients who were otherwise healthy are suffering blood clots and strokes.
​ ​And many “long-haulers,” or COVID-19 patients who have continued showing symptoms for months after the initial infection passed, report neurological problems such as confusion and difficulty concentrating (or brain fog), as well as headaches, extreme fatigue, mood changes, insomnia and loss of taste and/or smell.
​ ​Indeed, the CDC recently warned that it takes longer to recover from COVID-19 than the 10- to 14-day quarantine window that has been touted throughout the pandemic. In fact, one in five young adults under 34 was not back to their usual health up to three weeks after testing positive. And 35% of surveyed U.S. adults overall had not returned to their normal state of health when interviewed two to three weeks after testing.
​ ​Now a study of 60 COVID-19 patients published in Lancet this week finds that 55% of them were still displaying such neurological symptoms during follow-up visits three months later. And when doctors compared brain scans of these 60 COVID patients with those of a control group who had not been infected, they found that the brains of the COVID patients showed structural changes that correlated with memory loss and smell loss.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/55-of-coronavirus-patients-still-have-neurological-problems-three-months-later-study-2020-08-07 

​  There is a move by Fox News to get Julian Assange to testify in US court, in defense of a Fox news story, which implied that Seth Rich was murdered for downloading and providing to Wikileaks, the DNC emails. (I believe that was the case, myself.) His family has brought the suit for defamation, and the pain it caused them. The family are recipients of money from the Democratic Party, and might much rather believe that Seth was killed in a botched robbery on his way home from a DNC office party at a bar.​ 

What is in this for political prisoner #1, Julian Assange?

​  ​Netburn said that "evidence regarding the source of the leaked DNC emails and the communications (if any) between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks will be highly material to Fox’s contentions."
​  ​"Mr. Assange, as founder of WikiLeaks, is exceptionally suited to provide testimony that will be highly relevant to these issues," Netburn wrote. "Therefore, Fox News, by and through this letter of request issued by the District Court, is formally requesting the testimony of Mr. Assange for use at trial."

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/judge-calls-testimony-julian-assange-civil-suit-against-fox-news-over-seth  

It's been a bad 30 years for polar ice caps, as the ice tries to cool off the rest of the world, as it absorbs more heat. Like a drink, Earth doesn't get much warmer until the last of the ice melts.

Canada's last fully intact Arctic ice shelf collapses

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-canada-idUSKCN2523JH 

My first pick of most important movie ever, Koyaanisqatsi (Life Out Of Balance) is explained here in 2 minutes, by Producer/Director, Godfrey Reggio. Thanks Cat.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj0XL-5S-Ew&feature=youtu.be

Illuminated

Hiroshima Anniversary

Blasted,

2750 tons of ammonium nitrate, equal to about 440 tons of TNT, exploded in a warehouse in Beiruit, Lebanon, after being stored there about 7 years, since being unloaded from a leaky, leased ship, abandoned by it's Russian lease-holder in 2011, when the unpaid crew mutinied and the ship was impounded as unsafe. Some crew members were stranded on the ship for 3 more years. The port authority requested the government to move the unsafe material somewhere else, anywhere 6 times. 

 https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/he-abandoned-deadly-cargo-meet-mysterious-businessman-center-beirut-blast-saga

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/huge-crater-revealed-satellite-image-close-ups-beirut-blast-epicenter  

 My thoughts about this are that the government of Lebanon has long been overdue for a restructuring, and it's not really my thoughts, but the world consensus, and Lebanese accepted fact. 

The government structure was devised under the Ottoman Empire to have certain important posts split up between appointees of 3 major religions. This divided the people, and kept the Ottomans holding the decision-process, but the Ottomans have been gone 100 years, and nothing can get done effectively in Lebanon.

 The current government has put all (surviving) Port Authority officials under house arrest, which briefly casts them under suspicion, but it is clear that they requested 6 times that the cargo be moved anywhere else, because it was dangerous. The government must quickly turn over all authority to some new, emergency government, with a strong central executive. From what I have read, this is possible, and the process is underway, and broadly supported..

 The devil is always in the details, but people will only get more bloodthirsty for revenge as the situation sits unmanaged.

 The obvious-to-me deal that must be made is to promise China a commanding cut of the action of the Port of Beiruit in return for rebuilding it. Lebanese workers must be employed as a large percent of the workforce now and in perpetuity.  China gets a prize Mediteranean port out of the disappointment of being run out of Haifa by Mike Pompeo during his spring visit. 

 Lebanese banking is bankrupt, but this deal needs to be done as a partnership, with China getting 51% interest, or something. No $US need to be used. Win-Win for China and Lebanon. 

 I don't even think Israel and the US will try to prevent such a deal. (The US can plan to sabotage China later, after it pays for all the work.)

On Imperial public-private-partnerships:

A recent off-hand remark by one of America’s oligarchs points toward a new methodology for undermining what is left of international law and order. Speaking in earnest or in jest, nobody really knows, but smart money would certainly bet on the former, when admonished that the Bolivian coup that toppled President Evo Morales last year “wasn’t in the best interests of the Bolivian people,” Elon Musk, the Tesla electric car magnate, brazenly tweeted: “We will coup whoever we want. Deal with it!”  

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/08/02/the-privatization-of-global-chaos/ 

Eighty-six percent of Americans believe there is “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of political bias in the way the media covers news, according to a Knight Foundation/Gallup poll released on Tuesday. The number of Americans that see bias in the media is up almost 25 percentage points from 62 percent in 2007. Almost half of Americans — 49 percent — now say there’s a great deal of political bias in news coverage.  

  https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/04/poll-more-than-8-in-10-americans-say-media-is-biased-to-blame-for-political-division/  

​  ​Current (PCR) tests for active infection with SARS-CoV-2 are highly sensitive—but most are given to suspected COVID-19 patients long after the infected person has stopped transmitting the virus to others. That means the results are virtually useless for public-health efforts to contain the raging pandemic...
 ​  ​Furthermore, such tests detect tiny fragments of viral RNA even after the patient has recovered. Mina says that means “the vast majority of PCR positive tests we currently collect in this country are actually finding people long after they have ceased to be infectious.” In that sense, a positive result can be misleading, because the results can’t be relied on to guide the epidemiological efforts of public-health officials, which are focused on preventing transmission and controlling outbreaks: “The astounding realization is that all we’re doing with all of this testing is clogging up the testing infrastructure,” with results arriving a week or more after tests are administered, “and essentially finding people for whom we can’t even act because they are done transmitting.” In fact the testing backlog is so dire, and so “absolutely horrendously useless as a system for public-health surveillance,”...
​  ​What the country needs instead are rapid tests, widely deployed, so that infectious individuals can be readily self-identified and isolated, breaking the chain of transmission.
​  ​To do that, Mina says, everyone must be tested, every couple of days, with $1, paper-based, at-home tests that are as easy to distribute and use as a pregnancy test: wake up in the morning, add saliva or nasal mucous to a tube of chemicals, wait 15 minutes, then dip a paper strip in the tube, and read the results.

https://harvardmagazine.com/2020/08/covid-19-test-for-public-health 

​Bashing effective hydroxychloroquine/zinc early outpatient treatment, fear and denial are still what the American media and CDC are pushing, so people die in hospitals alone.

​  Fauci seemed to be unaware that there actually was a national pandemic plan for respiratory viruses.
  Following a careful regimen developed by doctors in France, some knowledgeable practicing U.S. physicians began prescribing hydroxychloroquine to patients still in the early phase of COVID infection. Its effects seemed dramatic. Patients still became sick, but for the most part they avoided hospitalization. In contrast --- and in error -- the NIH-funded studies somehow became focused on giving hydroxychloroquine to late-presenting hospitalized patients. This was in spite of the fact that unlike the drug’s early use in ambulatory patients, there was no real data to support the drug’s use in more severe hospitalized patients.
  By April, it was clear that roughly seven days from the time of the first onset of symptoms, a COVID-19 infection could sometimes progress into a more radical late phase of severe disease with inflammation of the blood vessels in the body and immune system over-reactions. Many patients developed blood clots in their lungs and needed mechanical ventilation. Some needed kidney dialysis. In light of this pathological carnage, no antiviral drug could be expected to show much of an effect during this severe second stage of COVID.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/04/an_effective_covid_treatment_the_media_continues_to_besmirch_143875.html

​Ivermectin, zinc, doxycycline treatment for COVID. Thanks Marjorie:

​https://www.trialsitenews.com/well-respected-australian-researcher-consider-triple-therapy-ivermectin-zinc-doxycycline-for-covid-19/

​A randomized trial of ivermectin/doxycycline, vs hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin in COVID-19 patients (I see no reason not to use both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Mechanisms of action would be complementary)​

This trial found the treatments to be similarly well tolerated and similarly beneficial. Ivermectin had not statistically different lead.

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-38896/v1  

​80 mg of Pepcid/famotidine, every 8 hours, for about 10 days, was a helpful treatment for COVID-19 in this case series. (Good luck finding any. Pharmacies are telling me to prescribe something else, because they don't have any for standing refills.)​

https://gut.bmj.com/content/early/2020/06/10/gutjnl-2020-321852 

​How might ivermectin work? It's not the usual way. All of the medicines that work against novel-coronavirus are working in different ways than how they are used for other disease processes. Look in after 6:35 as Dr Seheult lectures and explains.

​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk7KNBak-i0

Picking Up Pieces

Relenquish Citizenship

Former Citizens,

  I was pulling weeds a few days ago when I had the epiphany that all of the features of my "white privilege" were what we called "citizenship" when I was a kid. Citizenship gave us rights to due process, presumption of innocence, a voice in society, and the right and responsibility to act for the good of society, including our best efforts to choose honest and reliable public servants through voting.

  Citizens had very serious discussions about the propriety of things like wars, and the best way to solve societal problems, like racism, and unequal opportunity, and pollution. Citizens voted and got a lot of legislation passed in the 1960s and 1970s, which helped some problems, as intended, and had some unforeseen negative consequences, hurting some unintended victims, and making some corporations surprisingly rich, but...

  That was all very messy, and those who still think they are "Citizens" need to be publicly shamed for their effrontery. Look what they are doing to the descendants of slaves, even though they are also descendants of slaves! 

The real owners want the damned "Citizens" to shut up and quit making problems. 

  We have a crisis that requires creating trillions of dollars to be given to the owners again, same as a few months ago, which the "citizens" are responsible to make good on eventually. 

  Self-professed "Citizens" are too stupid to understand high finance, and need to get out of the way. "Citizens" should better apologize for things rich white people in America did in the 200 years before they were born, even if their ancestors didn't come over from Europe until later, and their other ancestors weren't rich. 

  The mass media are working hard to present these interests of the owners to the imagined "citizens" in a way that they can understand. Whether it is all perfectly factual misses the point. It's what might work, and that's critical.

  What if all of these "citizens" created a populist-revolt? That would destroy America. What could be worse?!

Now go back and watch TV, and try to pay attention this time. 

White Privilege is your sin, and you can never be forgiven.

Listen to the woman of color with the megaphone (in front of those white guys dressed in black). 

Do not pay any attention to the man behind the curtain.

Charles sent the first 4 stories. Charles is nailing this transition. https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html

When Charles Darwin was reduced to "survival of the fittest", one word was misunderstood. He was not talking about who could bench press the most on free-weights, or run the fastest hundred meters, he was talking about who would have the most long term progeny and grand-progeny and great-grand-progeny survive. It turns out that nice-guys-don't-finish-last, and it's not just true in humans, either. Friendliness and cooperation are the key to long term success in the gene pool! (Not explained is why we are in this current mess, being ruled by sociopaths, who convince us to slaughter each other every 60 to 80 years.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/friendliest-not-fittest-is-key-to-evolutionary-survival-scientists-argue-in-book/2020/07/17/6f70697e-c5fe-11ea-a99f-3bbdffb1af38_story.html  

  Today the entire world is in a similar position to Europe in the months leading up to the First World War.  Oil production – including the fracking and tar sands which kept us afloat for a decade – finally peaked in 2018.  There is far more oil beneath the ground than we have burned thus far; but we have reached the cost-complexity limit on oil extraction technology beyond which – for new deposits – further extraction costs more energy than it is worth.  Unlike Europe in 1913 (peak coal), however, there is no alternative lower cost energy substitute capable of being deployed on an industrial scale.  Worse still, our oil-based technologies have also reached or are close to reaching their cost-complexity limit...
  Like medieval plague doctors seeking to respond to the Black Death, without a theory of energy modern economists blithely imagine that our problems can be overcome by simply printing new currency out of thin air.  The left would choose to invest it in non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies for which there is simply not enough left of Planet Earth to achieve more than a fraction of the intended aim.  The right, on the other hand, will go full steam ahead in attempting to extract fossil fuels which lie beyond the hard limits of an oil-powered economy.  Whichever path we take, the final destination will be the same – a much smaller population living a much less consumptive life on a largely depleted planet whose changing climate may ultimately render even that life unsustainable.
  With a theory of energy, we might, perhaps, cushion the blow by saving the best of our current way of life – like access to clean drinking water and basic healthcare – before it is too late.  But, at a time when emotions outweigh data and reason in decision making; I’m not holding my breath.

https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2020/07/20/the-symptom-of-our-disease/ 

Is history repeating itself? Again? Like before? With different actors and scripts? Same plot?

​  ​Unpredictability can arrive in the form of tyrannical technologies, the cascading effects of climate change or in the form of a globe-trotting pathogens.
​  ​As a consequence, tomorrow will not look like yesterday. This modest pandemic, which will be followed by more pathogenic mischief, has reminded us that our society has entered a very dangerous phase in its historic cycle.
​  ​Can we build a simpler society that can survive random shocks? Can we re-localize the economy, tax the rich, support small farms, simplify our brutal technologies, power down and distribute authority more evenly among local communities?​ (Crazy talk!)
​  ​Or do we return to “normalcy” by courting more catastrophe with accelerated globalization, sending ourselves galloping over the cliff?
​  ​This pandemic has given us a clear historic choice: change or collapse.​ (It's no choice at all, is it?)

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2020/05/06/Boom-Pandemic-Crash-History-Repeat/ 

​A Job Guarantee Costs Far Less Than Unemployement 

(Hmmm, I'm worried. This author has a Russian-sounding name, and so did the last one.)​

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-07-22/job-guarantee-costs-far-less-unemployment 

The ACE-2 receptor is what SARS-CoV-2  binds to on human cell walls, and then it passes through those walls, into the cell, which it orders to create a whole lot more viral particles, and not let the immune system know that it is doing so. Ilargi posted this article, with excellent graphics, showing where those receptors for novel-coronavirus are located in the human body. This clarifies a lot, and visually. Thanks Ilargi, at The Automatic Earth.   

https://www.embopress.org/doi/10.15252/msb.20209610 

From ‘brain fog’ to heart damage, COVID-19’s lingering problems alarm scientists​. 

(Mainly those scientists who get them​ are "alarmed"​. Other scientists might be "intrigued".)

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/brain-fog-heart-damage-covid-19-s-lingering-problems-alarm-scientists  

​27 year old star baseball pitcher is out for the season with coronavirus damage to his heart. Healthy young guy.

They get Fauci pitching a grounder to open the season, instead.

​https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/aug/01/eduardo-rodriguez-coronavirus-out-for-season

The first antiviral drug to be approved (China) for novel coronavirus treatment is a pill, which has very low side effects and can be taken early in the course of illness. It is used for seasonal flu in Japan. Mechanism of action is very similar to IV-only remdesivir, which doesn't seem to do much at all when given to very sick people in hospitals. It seems to be buried in a small-number, minor clinical trial in the US, even though it went through FDA testing here in 2015 for flu, but was not marketed. Fuji-Film makes it. Not Kodak, not Tony Fauci.

​  ​Favipiravir is an oral antiviral approved for the treatment of influenza in Japan. It selectively inhibits RNA polymerase, which is necessary for viral replication. Japan has commenced with a phase 3 clinical trial. In the United States, a phase 2 trial will enroll approximately 50 patients with COVID-19, in collaboration with Brigham and Women's Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In India, a phase 3 trial combining 2 antiviral agents, favipiravir and umifenovir, started in May 2020.  

https://www.medscape.com/answers/2500122-197485/what-is-the-status-of-the-antiviral-drug-favipiravir-in-the-treatment-of-coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19 

​Interesting portfolio! What doesn't this guy do?

DARPA’s Man in Wuhan
  Michael Callahan’s career began in USAID and in the bioweapons labs of the former Soviet Union, advancing the agenda of the global bioweapons and pharmaceutical cartels. He would take what he learned there to execute a massive expansion of DARPA’s "biodefense" portfolio and today finds himself squarely in the center of the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/07/investigative-reports/darpas-man-in-wuhan/ 

Caitlin Johnstone:  How come she makes it seem so obvious?
When Corporate Power Is Your Real Government, Corporate Media Is State Media

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/07/31/when-corporate-power-is-your-real-government-corporate-media-is-state-media/ 

10 years since Collateral Murder video from US Army chopper pilots killing reporters, a kid, and an ambulance crew. Now Assange is a "rapist" stuck in prison, though he's not charged with rape, because he never did, but don't be like him, see? 
  Last Saturday marked ten years since WikiLeaks published the Afghan war logs, a vast trove of leaked US military documents, which provided an unprecedented insight into the criminality of a war that has become the longest in American history.
  The documents were released, with commentary, analysis and contextual material, in partnership with the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, some three months after WikiLeaks published “Collateral Murder,” the infamous video showing a 2007 US army massacre of civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in Iraq.
  Taken together, the exposures had an immense impact on popular consciousness, fortifying and deepening the mass anti-war sentiment first revealed in the huge international protests against the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/31/assa-j31.html 

Writing “Israel” In Quotation Marks Is A Peaceful Form Of Pro-Semitic Protest​, Andrew Korybko (Russian​?​)

https://www.globalvillagespace.com/writing-israel-in-quotation-marks-is-a-peaceful-form-of-pro-semitic-protest/  

 The world's largest nuclear fusion reactor is now being built in France. This one will work, for sure, and make excess energy for limitless electrical power for the new-green-economy-to-infinity-and-beyond. It's really big and expensive, but it will pay for itself many times over by the year 3000. One little detail, still to work out, is that it needs tritium, which doesn't occur much in nature, and happens to be made only as a byproduct of nuclear fission. (All of the nuclear reactors in the world produce a total of about 44 pounds of tritium per year.)

https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/The-Worlds-Largest-Nuclear-Fusion-Reactor-Is-Finally-Being-Built.html  

Civic-Minded

Hydroxychloroquine Saving Black Lives In Houston

Speaking Truth To TV,

Stella Immanuel MD is an American Cameroonian physician, trained as a GP in Nigeria and as a Pediatrician the US. Dr Immanuel is 55 years old and practices medicine in Houston, Texas. 

She treats humans with hydroxychloroquine and zinc for novel-coronavirus. Because of this, and openly advocating it as a life-saving practice, Dr Immanuel has been criticized, mocked, censored on Facebook, and threatened professionally. In Houston, she successfully treats people like blacks, Hispanics, Vietnamese and Chinese early in the process of COVID-19, and helps them come through in a shorter time, with fewer hospitalizations, and with a higher survival rate.

  Dr Immanuel is an uppity-educated-black-woman, and must be made-an-example-of before she hijacks the narrative away from the Blue Church. 

 That's not her Church. Dr Immanuel's Church is Fire Power Ministries. She is pastor. 

It is important to mock her religious beliefs and teachings, also. They are not mainstream. They are very weird and misguided. She believes in space aliens and that people engage internally with evil spirits, which causes them physical, spiritual and psychological illness. She wrote some books. Don't look at them. 

Here's a title for ya: The Keys to Effective Spiritual Warfare: How to Fight and Not Be a Casualty

In the Houston TV interview below, Dr Immanuel mentions the infectious disease expert , Didier Roult MD, of Marseilles, France, and his conclusive, large, peer reviewed study on use of hydroxychloroquine and zinc to treat SARS-CoV-2 infections, preferably early in the course. Here is that study:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7315163/ 

Houston TV Interviewer is smarmy and tries to be condescending. You judge how that works.  

Joel​ (interviewer)​: You’re an old hat at this already. I mean you had such an impassioned, on Monday that was pretty incredible how impassioned you were. Did you practice that speech?
Answer​ (Dr Immanuel)​: No I’m upset. I’m upset. This is not, I’m not acting up, I’m not putting this up, people are dying. Do you understand? People are dying. Like we just had news that Herman Cain died. He didn’t have to die. People saying he should’ve worn a mask. Yes, he should have if he did haven’t hydroxychloroquine. But she should’ve worn a mask.
Joel: You’re saying Herman Cain died, he just died. He didn’t need to.
Answer​ (Dr Immanuel)​: If someone would’ve given him hydroxychloroquine it’s most likely he wouldn’t have died. Just like every other people, just like every other person that has died from coronavirus did not have to die.
Joel: But, you understand the ​W​orld ​H​ealth ​O​rganization​ ;​ the FDA they don’t agree with you?

Answer​ (Dr. Immanuel): Of course they don’t agree with me.
Joel: They think you’re dangerous?
Answer​ (Dr. Immanuel)​: Of course they think I’m dangerous because I’m speaking the truth. I said it many times. Number one: Ask Dr. Anthony Fauci, when was the last time he saw a patient?
When is the last time he put a stethoscope on a patient’s [inaudible] and I’m willing to ask him that. 

Number two: I’m still waiting for him to come and give me a pee sample to find out if whether he’s on hydroxychloroquine to treat himself. 

The studies that we did on hydroxychloroquine were done without Anthony Fauci.

https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2020/07/31/full-interview-houston-doctor-in-viral-video-touting-hydroxychloroquine-as-virus-cure-doubles-down-on-claims/?fbclid=IwAR1Ds1NZJEgFN5jIpUncltX4DaVzJ-P3Uvb6rlmShNQuZvbizqN4n_b6Pbw 

​Here are a couple of excerpts from the 7/7/20 blog post, 

“A secretly recorded meeting between the editors-in-chief of The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine reveal both men bemoaning the ‘criminal’ influence big pharma has on scientific research...
 The email continued with a quote from that recording: ‘Now we are not going to be able to … publish any more clinical research data because the pharmaceutical companies are so financially powerful today, and are able to use such methodologies, as to have us accept papers which are apparently methodologically perfect, but which, in reality, manage to conclude what they want them to conclude,’ said The Lancet’s editor-in-chief, Richard Horton.”
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/493732-big-pharma-pandemic-covid/ 

Finally, Vladimir Zelenko MD's research is published. The outcomes of the humans he treated earlier this year.
We all saw this online, but here it is wrapped up nice and proper:
COVID-19 Outpatients – Early Risk-Stratified Treatment with Zinc Plus Low Dose Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin: A Retrospective Case Series Study
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202007.0025/v1

​Why early testing and early treatment, before the body is overwhelmed by high visl loads in the bloodstream and vital organs are important:

​  This virus is different from any previous pathogenic virus, in that it attacks sequentially, at multiple sites in the body, and causes different kinds of damage at those sites, though the main site of serious damage is the linings of arteries and arterioles, where it not only replicates and spreads in the bloodstream, but causes clotting in all the little arterioles it infects, which clotting-factor-hairballs break loose in the bloodstream, and can catch and blob up in other irritated-infected places, causing heart attacks, a special kind of shower of blood clots in the lungs, similar diffuse damage to arterial beds in the kidneys, and little diffuse strokes, or big fatal ones, like one of my daughter's patients just died of, a huge brainstem stroke, when he seemed like he was starting to recover.

  The other thing we actually do not know is if this thing can be a chronic viral infection, like Epstein Barr virus, HIV, and Herpes family viruses. It has a gain-of-function optimization that does what HIV does, removes the surface marker from viral infected cells, which tells the t-cells that this-cell-is-infected. 

The t-cells usually see that cell-membrane marker and destroy the infected virus-filled-cell, but not with this virus.

This thing was gain-of-function-customized for multi-pronged attacks AND invisibility, once inside a cell, which is creating more viruses. It is not a one-trick-pony.

  It is still a coronavirus, and your best defense against it is your first line "innate immune system" in your nose and throat area. This is what children do so well.

  Take 5000 units/day vitamin-D, and if you are able to find quick testing and a doctor who will treat with Hcq/zinc early, then you will be doing better than most.

  Your own immune system is your best weapon, maybe your only weapon, and some do a LOT better than others.

Helping Humans

Not Deceived

Free Thinkers,

What is the best way to enslave (other) people?

This is the important and recurrent question, plaguing our shadowy puppet-masters again these days.

It has already been established that physically enslaving people is very costly, brutal, and inefficient, because the slaves know they are slaves and hate their masters, who they are able to identify and take revenge upon.

Debt slavery was the permanent-fix, but it is also showing signs of weakness. It needs shoring up with better marketing.

Other aspects of technology also demand consideration. Machines are better slaves for a lot of work than people are, and machines are getting better at running the machines. They also show promise in learning to fix other machines, and AI is good at figuring out what is wrong, so most of the debt-slaves will soon become redundant to industry.

Economics still needs "markets", so living humans will buy and use stuff, as long as they have money. 

Our puppet-masters hate giving handouts to "useless eaters", but they are having to wade in that pond a little this year.

This is all so confusing, because we are made to live in a world of other people, animals and plants. 

We just don't think and feel right to deal with a world of machine-slaves, which we rule absolutely.

Maybe our shadowy puppet masters can find a way to transfer their consciousnesses into super-intelligent AI platforms, and live forever, ruling a world of other intelligent and less intelligent machines.

Until then, there is another war on, the war for our consciousnesses, but there is armed back-up, to make sure our bodies comply, until our consciousnesses are completely subsumed into the nice Borg.

A Polish writer lays out the war underway, between elite factions, to control our conscious worldviews. Thanks, Eleni.

​  ​For six thousand years, since the invention of the wheel, the measure of human progress was movement, the ability to move. There is something ... fair in the fact that the end times we seem to live in are heading towards the complete immobilization of humanity. This is no accident, though for at least several decades, if not for 100 years, that the technological progress has been sought in the old way: individual wings, flying cars, even teleportation, and of course the conquest of space – but real... traffic is in the opposite direction. It is no accident that the word “communication” means both straight transport and information transfer. At least from the expansion of the internet, if not from the proliferation of personal computers, humanity pulls feathers from its wings by itself, wanting to be stuck in one place, but not in the old, safe, high, community sense, but in extreme individuality combined with extreme susceptibility to external imprinting. Dystopian visions of passive skin bags connected to information systems are dangerously approaching as the future of the human race.
​  ​And this fight is accelerating right before our eyes. On the one hand, we have been more than ever chained to computers, online banking, closed and isolated. At the same time, the signs of material culture are being destroyed, the same which could lead (at least the wanted ones) to a conclusion, that there had once been some other reality. And finally, at the decision-making level, there is a war - a real, global, and ruthless war over resources, sources and tools of power and control. And the only positive​ (?)​​ ​ is that this time that conflict is not about our lives, but only our consciousness, so something that when we lose it, we will not remember that we ever had it...

http://oneworld.press/?module=articles&action=view&id=1539  

​Who are those Federal Military squads, hustling civilians away in unmarked vans, without ID or due-process, up in Portland.? Thanks, Jerry.

Bortac, a quasi-militarised outfit some compare to the Navy Seals, has been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan  ​    I​n January 2011, James Tomsheck, then a top internal affairs investigator inside US Customs and Border Protection, attended a meeting of about 100 senior CBP leaders in a hotel in Irvington, Virginia.
​  ​Amid the sanitized splendor of the hotel ballroom, he vividly recalls hearing the nation’s then highest-ranking border patrol agent, David Aguilar, laying out his vision for the future. Border patrol, the former CBP deputy commissioner said, was to become the “marine corps of the US federal law enforcement community”.
​  ​Another leading CBP figure remarked that border agents were not required to adhere to the same constitutional restraints on the use of force as other law enforcers. “We are not cops,” he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/27/trump-border-patrol-troops-portland-bortac 

​In my last post, "Cooperative Survival", I linked to an 89 page online pre-publication, "Rethinking Humanity", about a "different" predictive model of human near-term future. The introduction was promising, appeared to have "good facts" and seemed rational. A couple of sharp commenters at the blog replied with further insights after reading into it.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/585c3439be65942f022bbf9b/t/5ef223cbff5d8e025b9d2fee/1592927193457/RethinkX+Humanity+Report.pdf

  I read further, myself, and my view changed from curiosity about answers, to curiosity about seductive threats to humanity. I read it entirely, so you don't have to.

 The history of human societal endeavor is fairly well laid out, in a useful way, going into the reset we have just entered. We are faced with the threat of a new-dark-age. Yet there is the promise of a quantum leap to a new economic paradigm of freedom, freedom from want and coercion. 

  Humanity needs a new operating-system. The operating system of the age-of-empires won't work, because it is extractive, and extraction of human and environmental resources at global scale has put us in the binds that we now see everywhere we look. 

  The new operating-system will need to arise spontaneously. We can't create it, because we are bound by the worldview of the current operating system, "global capitalism", if I may give it a name. 

  This arising of a new paradigm usually takes hundreds of years, but we are hopeful that we might get it in 5-10 years this time. We just need to prepare ourselves and wait-for-it. The new paradigm will not be coercive, extractive, nor elitist. Anybody going into it with that predatory and competitive mindset will just be left behind by history. 

  This new economy will not be based upon scarcity, because the new green energy and genetic engineering of microbes to make our food will be so vastly more productive than anything we have ever seen, that they will just leave the current systems of production in the dust. Nobody will need to "work", as we have always known it, either. We will all be able to find the true spiritual and artistic meaning in our lives. 

  We will not burn fossil fuels, even for heat or cooking. Nor shall we drive cars. We will use autonomous electric transport of many types, which will be cheaper, safer and more reliable. We can get rid of almost all parking places and a lot of roads. All the roads can be repurposed moment-to-moment for all kinds of traffic flow. Remembering how to get places, or even which side of the road to ride your bike upon will be things of the past. Traffic will all be a big, busy, efficient flow, and Sirie will direct you if you are on a bike.

  Cities will become much more efficient, and will be able to safely grow to sizes of 100,000,000 or more, while providing 500 square feet of living space per human, and genetic-designer food, tastier than what we have known until now, from microbial manufacture, close to where we live. 

Plants and animals won't need to take up land area, which can be reforested to solve global warming.

  All old industries will be defunded and regulated against, so internal combustion vehicles and gas stoves will phase out by 2030, or 3035 at the latest. 

  Capitalists will not profit from the limitless-solar-electric-society, because all of people's retirement funds will be directed to invest in this productive and safe new world, perfectly meshing the needs of society with the provision of those needs. A bit of raw-material will be needed to "seed" this new world, but just a bit at the beginning. It will all enter a stream of intelligent re-use and recycling after that.

  The new paradigm will do all of this very efficiently, without need for government oversight or regulation, except as it pertains to mandating the new way and defunding and criminalizing the old ways, which is a temporary formality in the transition period. Predatory efforts to enslave other humans will just get left-behind as the paradigm unfolds.

  Investments and profits would clearly still appear on the books in the transition period, but would just as clearly be swept away by the power, elegance and sublime-equanimity of the new paradigm. Anybody caught with their pants down, mired in capitalist exploitation of others, will be chagrined at least, as the tide of inevitable improvement sweeps them downstream to the Niagara Falls of history.

  You may see some interim problems, or potential snags in that plan. 

What happens if the new paradigm doesn't arrive right away. Will we be in a holding pattern for 400 years, having already thrown away the past?

  What about those greedy capitalists, who bought-up the privatized-by-design all electric economy? What keeps them from just squeezing everybody to the last drop of blood, while the new paradigm waits to manifest? What if such capitalists were to swindle all the retirees out of their fractional ownership of the smart-electric-economy? What would become of them/us?

  I am dismayed that this plan does not have any interim failsafe mechanisms, in case the new paradigm takes centuries to arrive. I just can't advise you to put all your eggs in this innovative basket until the new paradigm is already here and we're all cool with it. 

  For now, I'm still growing vegetables the old fashioned way, pedaling and navigating my own bike through the crazy old-style traffic on Texas roads.

Meanwhile, on the unpaved road to herd immunity, Sweden appears to be in the lead, after taking some early losses.

I'm sorry to say that this article grinds several political axes. I have excerpted some useful facts.  

  "They recommended that people maintain a safe distance between each other and they banned gatherings of 50 people or more. They also asked their elderly citizens to isolate themselves and to avoid interacting with other people as much as possible. Other than that, Swedes were encouraged to work, exercise and get on with their lives as they would normally even though the world was still in the throes of a global pandemic." ...

​  "​Experts compared mortality rates and cases in 50 badly-hit countries up until May 1 and calculated that only 33 out of every million people had died from the virus…The study found that imposing lockdown measures succeeded in stopping hospitals becoming overwhelmed, but it did not translate into a significant reduction in deaths.​" ...

​  “Sweden’s top health authority says people who have had the novel coronavirus are likely to be immune for at least six months after being infected, whether they’ve developed antibodies or not….A recent study from King’s College London showed that the level of antibodies may drop to a degree that makes them undetectable as soon as three months after infection. However, the body also mounts other forms of immunity responses, including from so-called T-cells, which appear to play an important role in protecting against reinfection with Covid-19.
Research from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute has indicated that about twice as many people infected by Covid-19 have developed a T-cell mediated immunity response as those who have a detectable level of antibodies.

 https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/sweden-the-one-chart-that-matters/

I think Texas is emulating Sweden, though not saying it that way. About 14 Texans per thousand have had confirmed COVID diagnoses. In round numbers the number of infections might be 10 times as high, about 14%. This is really a rough estimate. It's about 1:7 Texas residents. That is still a long way from 70%.

https://apps.texastribune.org/features/2020/texas-coronavirus-cases-map/?_ga=2.172970531.1618186004.1596026429-1037324414.1591643250 

The kids will go back to school, as will teachers and staff. It remains to be seen who might be excepted from physical presence. The elementary and middle school kids seem to be at low risk of getting and spreading significant disease, due to their bodies keeping virus contained and at low levels in the nasopharynx. There are exceptions, and this benefit wanes by high school. This is a big societal experiment in pandemic management. I hope it goes well.

  After weeks of confusion and conflicting signals, Texas has settled into policies that effectively compel schools to reopen their classrooms this fall no later than eight weeks after the academic year begins, whether they want to or not.
  Teachers, parents, school administrators and public health officials have been seeking clarity for weeks on how the state will approach reopening schools safely as coronavirus infections and deaths rise across Texas.

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/29/texas-schools-reopening-coronavirus/ 

The heart is a highly vascular organ. So are the lungs, kidneys, brain and eyes. SARS-CoV-2 attacks the lining of blood vessels, causing inflammation, injury and blood clots, lots of little tiny clots and sometimes big ones that cause strokes and heart attacks. We still don't know if viral infection persists in some people, either.

​  T​wo new studies from Germany paint a sobering picture of the toll that Covid-19 takes on the heart, raising the specter of long-term damage after people recover, even if their illness was not severe enough to require hospitalization.
​  ​One study examined the cardiac MRIs of 100 people who had recovered from Covid-19 and compared them to heart images from 100 people who were similar but not infected with the virus. Their average age was 49 and two-thirds of the patients had recovered at home. More than two months later, infected patients were more likely to have troubling cardiac signs than people in the control group: 78 patients showed structural changes to their hearts, 76 had evidence of a biomarker signaling cardiac injury typically found after a heart attack, and 60 had signs of inflammation.
​  ​These were relatively young, healthy patients who fell ill in the spring, Valentina Puntmann, who led the MRI study, pointed out in an interview. Many of them had just returned from ski vacations. None of them thought they had anything wrong with their hearts.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/27/covid19-concerns-about-lasting-heart-damage/?

https://people.com/health/three-quarters-recovered-coronavirus-patients-have-heart-damage-months-later/  

​Kodak may be making chemical precursors to hydroxychloroquine and other drugs soon. They may even manufacture a vaccine. Stocks went up. (It has been a roller coaster since this story was published.)​

Kodak Soars After Government Loan To End China Medical Supply Chain Reliance

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/kodak-soars-after-government-loan-end-china-medical-supply-chain-reliance

Fauci Accused Of 'Misinformation Campaign' Against Hydroxychloroquine; Ohio Gov Wants State Officials To Reverse Prohibition

​  ​The anti-HCQ push has infected Silicon Valley as well - as tech giants have been labeling pro-hydroxychloroquine content as 'misinformation' - most recently banishing a press conference by a group of doctors touting the drug from just about every platform.
​  ​To that end, Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch has accused Dr. Anthony Fouci of waging a "misinformation campaign" against the drug, according to Just The News.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/yale-epidemiologist-accuses-fauci-misinformation-campaign-against-hydroxychloroquine-fda 

​Free Gardener

(Jenny is pictured this morning in the Yoakum vegetable garden, improving from surgery 2 weeks ago)

Cooperative Survival

Friends and Neighbors,

 I'm sorry to address mask-wearing again. It seems to me to be a modest, necessary public health measure, which is starting to reduce Texas COVID cases since Governor Abbot finally "ordered" it (without legal penalty for non-compliance). The psychology of not fining and arresting people for not masking appears sound, if one actually wants high compliance. 

 There is plenty of mask resentment already. Texas does not need to waste precious energy, and resources. 

 Austin Texas is a highly-masked city. I compare Austin HEB grocery stores to Lockhart HEB and Yoakum HEB. 

Austin HEBs have been 100% masked for months. Lockhart, an hour's drive from Austin, lagged way behind, but is probably up to 85% or so now. Nobody is refused entry.

 Yoakum, the most rural, has been the slowest to mask, but is now up to about 50%. All HEB employees and old women appear to be 100%. Old men may be 80%. Younger men, pretty low masking. Younger women are increasingly masked, maybe 65%.

 The main areas where masking helps are enclosed spaces, with numerous people, since particles float in the air for a half hour after being invisibly exhaled, especially when speaking. That would be classrooms, of course. 

I'm glad the bars and strip clubs are shut, even if the Governor is getting sued. 

 It's sure appropriate to be unmasked when walking and biking in suburban neighborhoods. Most people give space graciously, in my experience. 

A few are hypersensitive, wear masks, and rush to the opposite side of the street complaining loudly at those not wearing. It's understandable. Risk-of-exposure gradients are a subtle concept for most people.

 Young people appearing fairly carefree is a false appearance. I read that they worry a lot bout COVID. On the other hand, they have strong biological drives, which vie against their cognitive-dissonance. 

It is increasingly the feeling in this cohort that "I'd like to just get it and be done with it".

 It is rare for people under 30 to die. Few will be severely ill. It happens. It's low-frequency.

SARS-CoV-2 infection has multiple stages:

Nasopharyngeal, where it stops for most people, a "cold".

Pulmonary, which is what caught global attention,

Gastrointestinal, which fooled the Chinese hospitals and contributed to spread at first.

Disseminated through the bloodstream, which causes organ damage in vascular organs like Lungs, kidneys, heart, brain, even retinal.

Persistent, which we don't even know the mechanisms of. Is it just all that damage to small vessels and the tissues they support, oris there chronic viral persistence in the "long haulers"?

 Take 5000 units (largest dose on shelf) vitamin-D daily. Take twice that for a couple of months if you are just starting. Low vitamin D greatly hampers immune function against this virus. Normal blood level is 30-100. Optimum appears to be 60+.

 Thanks for looking. Having said all of that, Jenny is gradually, but not steadily, recovering from her extensive surgery 10 days ago. I'm nursing Jenny back to wholeness. This is a long process.

 The main thing on my mind as a topic is the threat to the power elites, posed by citizen-cooperation, outside of their direct command and control. 

 This is a long term Catch-22 for the elites, since they need society to cooperatively create an economy to feed them.

In the short term, elites need to maintain their power and privilege, at the cost of everything else. That short term means the economy cannot adjust when it needs to. Our economy badly needed to adjust in 2008, but it just kept the same course, promised the moon. Power elites made sure stock valuations kept rising, and dividends got paid, while the production-economy got bled.

 We are cognitively trapped in the world we have known, the world in our heads, where we can predict things day to day, but our cognitive models are not the real world. All of us have great reluctance to broach the subject of complete societal change (to less wealth) with others. There is a whole lot of criticism and shunning of people who are accused of saying the wrong thing these days. It's harsh. It shuts down discussion immediately. I see this at my own work, among physicians in public health. It's pervasive. 

 We cannot question the belief systems which bind our social groups together. 

Everything is already contained in a belief system. 

Know your belief system or be taught your error through public denunciation!

 The tide will begin to turn when we give up on competing social orthodoxies, to work together for practical necessity.

Working together for common good, cooperation, is our most successful human trait over the eons. 

 In times of plenty, societies may be driven down other trails, but at the end of any such historical experiment, when the support system for the society fails, people either cooperate to find solutions, or slaughter each other,,, eventually followed by survivors cooperating to find solutions.

Small Farm Future: Business-as-Usual-Porn; We Need to Talk About Collapse

  I want to imagine myself metaphorically out on the ice with Inuit hunters as Hugh Brody was, with no food, no game in evidence, and many days journey from safety, with only a tired dog team, my knowledge of the terrain, my hunting skills and my fortitude in my favour.
  Of course, in reality I’m not out on the ice but on a small farm near the edge of a small town in a small country that’s thoroughly imbued with the culture of global capitalism. I can try to imagine a cultural awakening fit for my time and place, but to write it down on the page will make it thinner and more fugitive than it needs to be in practice. The words I’d write on the page would probably include things like autonomy, self-reliance, community, land, skill, care, craft, work, health, nature, play, creation, love and argument. You can write those words for most cultures. But I think they’ll soon mean different things in our culture than they do now. The trick is going to be building out quickly from the place where we now are, creating culture in practice, but letting go of a lot that we now take for granted, or insist upon. We need to build a new culture that’s calmly open and alive to the possibilities and dangers of the present and the journey ahead, not angrily insistent upon the virtues of the path that took us to where we now stand.  So I don’t think it’s worth spending too much time debating on paper (or online) the detailed shape and content of that new culture. I think it’s better to shape it in practice, by doing what we can as peacemakers, storytellers, educators, healers or agents of the practical arts to breathe local life into it. But I do think it’s worth spending time debating the political and historical circumstances in which that shaping can take off and propagate.

https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk/2020/07/business-as-usual-porn-or-we-need-to-talk-about-collapse/  

Charles Hugh Smith, Why the Unraveling Will Accelerate

Sclerotic, hidebound institutions optimized for linear stability and permanent growth are simply not designed to adapt to non-linear change and disruption of permanent growth. Systems stripped of buffers are fragile, systems stripped of feedback are fragile, systems that optimize doing more of what's failed spectacularly are fragile, systems that are little more than fractals of incompetence are fragile, systems that rely on the artifice of denial and fantasy are fragile.
Fragile systems break. This is why the unraveling is accelerating.

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2020/07/why-unraveling-will-accelerate.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+google%2FRzFQ+%28oftwominds%29 

A Soviet citizen, imprisoned for his intellectual innovation, described the break-up of the USSR, in accurate detail, including regions and sequences, 30 years before it took place. His main failure was that he laid out a 24 year timeline. He died in a car crash in a storm. 

Surprisingly, it turns out that his investigations and insights are transferable to modern day America!

Where is the breaking point? How long can a political system seek to remake itself before triggering one of two reactions—a devastating backlash from those most threatened by change or a realization by the change makers that their goals can no longer be realized within the institutions and ideologies of the present order? Here, Amalrik warned, great powers’ proclivity for self-delusion and self-isolation puts them at a particular disadvantage. They set themselves apart from the world, learning little from the accumulated stock of human experience. They imagine themselves immune to the ills affecting other places and systems. This same predisposition might trickle down through society. The various social strata could come to feel isolated from their regime and separated from one another.  ​Thanks for this, too , Charles.​

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2020-06-30/how-great-power-falls-apart  

​We Are On Our Own In The Post COVID World, Chris Martenson (maybe even sooner, John)

This chart says that the very highest income earners have a lower effective tax rate than anybody else in the nation.  Billionaire Warren Buffett famously pays a lower rate than his secretary. Goldman Sachs bankers are taxed more favorably than their Uber drivers. Again, this isn’t happening by accident.

And it reveals that, despite the fiction of fairness and freedom, America’s true values and priorities are aimed at funneling more and more of its wealth to in the pockets of an elite few.

​https://www.peakprosperity.com/we-are-on-our-own-in-the-post-covid-world/

​And to further clarify (though "civil war' remains completely undefined)

In an unpublished paper submitted for peer review, Professor Goldstone, who is a sociologist, and Peter Turchin, an expert on the mathematical modelling of historical societies, have concluded that the US is "headed for another civil war".  

​https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/model-predicting-united-states-disorder-now-points-to-civil-war/12365280

​This is extremely weird,  A Federal Judge says the state "lacks standing" to question the Federal goons (not "army"; not "police") complete violation of the rights of Oregonians to well-established due-process under the law, which is guaranteed in the constitution, and well established for police and American military engagements with citizens.​

U.S. District Court Judge Michael Mosman rejected an effort by Oregon’s attorney general to restrict federal law enforcement agencies as they police protests in downtown Portland.  Oregon asked a judge to make federal officers identify themselves and their agency before arresting or detaining a person and to prohibit arrests that lack probable cause.
In his 14-page ruling, Mosman said the state lacked standing to bring the case, in part because Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum failed to show the interests of the state of Oregon itself had been harmed.

https://www.opb.org/news/article/judge-denies-oregon-restraining-order-federal-law-enforcement/ 

Charles also sent this pre-publication, an online publication, "Rethinking Humanity", which is 89 pages, of which I have read the introduction, which seems promising. This book propounds different predictive modeling for society, used successfully by the Authors for about 15 years, and which seems sound, at first glance. Thanks Again, Charles.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/585c3439be65942f022bbf9b/t/5ef223cbff5d8e025b9d2fee/1592927193457/RethinkX+Humanity+Report.pdf 

The current contender for Best-place-to-catch-Coronavirus seems to be slaughterhouses, big closed refrigerators (COVID thrives at cooler temperatures in the nose and throat), where the same viral particles from people working hard, all day long, in close proximity, assure a really good viral cloud stays aaiborn and viable for everybody to inhale. 

Lesson: Be outdoors, moderately removed from others, in warm air and sunshine, to avoid breathing clouds of virus.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/coronavirus-traveled-nearly-30-feet-german-slaughterhouse-where-1500-employees-contracted  

Gardening Outdoors

Misplaced Fears

Inhaling Fear,

 Fear is in the air. I smell it. I see it in people's eyes and in their furtive actions, like anxiously jumping away from others.. 

Rulers maintain their power by managing the narrative which directs the fear in a way that makes people do what the rulers want. People are compliant when they comply because of fear, but it tires them out, and they don't do their best work.

 People long for release from the relentless pressure of fear.

Austin is a college town, and also obsessively compliant with masking and social distancing, because Austin jobs are compliance-jobs, in government, education and high-tech. Much was made of UT students coming back from spring break infected, as if they did not worry. What I have recently read is that levels of worry are very high in teens and twenty-somethings. What is also high is biological drives. That creates cognitive dissonance. When I heard there were COVID-sharing parties, I thought it was fake-news, but it appears that some college students did hang out with those recently diagnosed, and put money in a pot for the first diagnosed to claim. I've heard a young, pregnant coworker, very responsible and careful to comply, say that she would prefer to just catch it and be done with it. There was something like assent from her peers. We see it. Several of her peers are back to work after having had it. 

It's not so bad for most people, and we see the spectrum of illness personally.

My point is that the persistence of threat is deeply disturbing and emotionally exhausting. 

This viral threat won't fade much before next summer, I suspect. 

People under chronic stress are beginning to seek relief valves.

 People and other animals under increased stress from threats tend to do the same things they usually do, but harder and faster. They don't tend to do something completely different. 

It's just typical of animals, including us to double-down.

 This is probably part of the extremes of political dogmatism we are seeing all around us. The Social Justice Warrior "left" has crossed over into a world where logic and reason are cast out as tools of white-supremacist-imperialism. 

 Discussing this rationally, or looking at history to see what the other options might look like, are expressly forbidden.

Overheated emotions, especially fear, without self-reflection and thoughtful analysis can grow into The Killing Fields, The Cultural Revolution, and the worst mass purges of Bolshevism, which all killed millions, and made monsters of the killers.

 The power elites also get caught in the worst of these crises. They should be more careful, less smug, in feeding these kinds of little brushfires between social groups.

 Please consider that the wave of fear may be slightly leading the wave of massive societal change, now underway, We have been debating this inevitable change in abstract since the early 1970s.  It's now happening without any regard to our assumptions, whatever they were. That's scary.

 Being afraid of little things which we can manage by becoming more devout in whatever belief system we espouse, is a form of denial of the fact of the huge and sweeping changes now underway, and uncontrolled. These changes will take whatever form we, ourselves create, though each of us has some minor input. Those of us who see what is happening, and act constructively today, or last year, might have a little more cumulative effect, and it might be good.

 I think there is a special place in Heck for those who saw this coming since 2008 and built special bunkers in hidden places. I think they are creating their own, personal forms of heck. 

They will be preyed upon by the special predators. Yuck! I can't go there anymore.

 Do wear masks in crowds, especially indoors, and do it casually. It's some protection for everybody.

Don't think things will be ok after the November election, or after there's a COVID vaccine, or herd immunity.

 Things won't get better, ever. This is as good as it gets. None of us can get away.

I accept this new normal and do constructive work for those I love, and life on this planet. 

Growing food is good. (Grow food that produces steadily and can't easily be stolen all at once.)

 Eleni sent this historical review from Professor Paul Craig Roberts. Lincoln was a Racist (typical of his era), and the Civil War was about money and power, not slavery. It's a good historical review. Emotional issues get playe to make people pick sides, but the sides are really about power elites fighting over cash-cows. Southern agriculture created king-cotton, and sent money to banks and industry. The North wanted that money in Northern banks and factories, but England, and the Bank of England, had been giving Southerners better deals...

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/07/20/the-cause-of-the-so-called-civil-war/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=how_lincoln_destroyed_the_united_states&utm_term=2020-07-21 

Global Capitalism is the main, hidden enemy and slave-owner these days. GloboCap is the unseen hand. Several people sent me this story. ("Know Yourself, and Know Your Enemy" to have a chance of prevailing in war.) 

GloboCap can take anything you might "fight" for, turn it into your slave-chains, and teach you to muder the evil-other.

https://consentfactory.org/2020/07/20/globocap-uber-alles/  

Wayne Madsen: As the Covid-19 pandemic continues its deadly march around the world, a number of relatively dormant conflicts, as well as several well-known flash points, stand ready to place the world on the edge of a major armed conflict. History shows us that during times of stress – economic depression, religious strife, vacuums of political leadership, and public health crises like that which is now plaguing the world – the chances for war increase commensurately.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/07/21/pandemic-and-hair-trigger-flash-points-an-explosive-situation/ 

Sun Belt States Choose "Third Path" To Confront COVID-19 Without Destroying Economy

This is a modulated run at herd-immunity, with the modulating factor being hospital-overwhelm. Even this is hard to carry out in Texas, and the governor is under several lawsuits, personally, asserting that Greg Abbot broke the law by choosing to shut down certain businesses (bars, strip joints, massage, restaurants) and not others (grocery stores, churches, car repair). This might seem funny, but it's not funny to Greg Abbot. He has made it clear that he will only take any steps to limit business when the hospitals come under stress. He has been true to his word, and more, and he still gets sued, for acting a month too late to shut bars again, and reduce stores to 50% occupancy again.

 Additionally, Governor Abbot has been very clear that no penalty is to be enforced for failure to comply with his edicts, none. That's smart, because when fines are brought against people who don't wear masks, mask wearing decreases.

 People are ornery. I certainly include myself. 

People think more clearly if you don't threaten them with violence for disobeying, if what you condone is logical. 

Wearing masks in stores and restaurants, while coronavirus spreads, is logical, and supports the economy at as low a long term cost as possible.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/sun-belt-states-choose-third-path-confront-virus-without-destroying-economy 

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/20/hidalgo-county-coronavirus-emergency-order-gov-greg-abbott/  

 

It's hard on "last responders". Nobody thinks about the humans who pick up all the bodies and deal with all the dead.Tough job. We should think about them.

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/21/texas-coronavirus-deaths-rio-grande-valley/

 Yale epidemiology professor Dr. Harvey Risch told Fox News's "Ingraham Angle" that he thinks hydroxychloroquine could save 75,000 to 100,000 lives if widely used to treat COVID-19, and that it's unfortunate that a "propaganda war" has been waged on the commonly prescribed drug which is not based on "medical facts."

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/yale-epidemiologist-hydroxychloroquine-could-save-100000-lives-if-widely-deployed  

John Cleese: Society Is Now Controlled By The Most Touchy, Emotionally Unstable, & Fragile People

​  ​“I believe there’s something wrong with these people. The reason they want to be powerful is that they want to control people, so that they don’t get lathered into situations that they can’t control emotionally. The one thing they fear is losing power, so they’ll do almost anything to hold on to it.
​  ​If they don’t know what they’re doing or what they’re talking about, there’s no way (the world) will ever get well.”

​ ​Cancel culture "misunderstands the main purposes of life which is to have fun", Cleese told Reuters, referring to the trend in which people are ostracised because of behaviour or remarks seen as objectionable.
"Everything humorous is critical. If you have someone who is perfectly kind and intelligent and flexible and who always behaves appropriately, they're not funny. Funniness is about people who don't do that, like Trump."

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/john-cleese-society-now-controlled-most-touchy-emotionally-unstable-fragile-people  

Laughing With My Fears