Problem Solvers,
I'm starting with a reply I made on The Automatic Earth Blog.
Boscohorowitz said:“Regarding the benefits of community: the inability of a deeply hypnotized populace to do anything but what they’re told (and as little of that as possible) precluded the inability of most people to adjust to covid in any but a bipolar way: run inside and hide from the Black Death! vs. Fuck that shit, I’m going swimming!”
I said:
This evokes the conundrum of what to do with people who have no gainful work to do, or what they may decide to do themselves, as well as what those who lose their employment may choose to do, or whether they will remain idle and decay over time.
People don’t necessarily RETURN to productive work, nor do they necessarily make the transition from paid compliance tasks to innovative and creative production of real food, goods or services.
The pandemic of measles and smallpox, which destroyed native populations of the Americas and the Pacific Islands opened the door for immigrants to fill the gap, and immigrants did.
If many people in North America are unable to make the transition to something like subsistence farming without air conditioning, then history says the neighbors who grew up like that will take their places.
It’s well underway in Austin, Texas. I did grunt work summer jobs in the 1970s, and there were other young college and high school students and young and middle aged black guys doing basic warehouse, kitchen and construction work then, too. There were a few native Spanish speakers in Austin, then.
Not lately… Austin got a makeover. All of the production and blue collar jobs have gone to Spanish speakers, who went through hell and high water to get here and work for less than Americans. They work hard, and do good work. We’re putting a serious drain on Mexican talent.
In a little over 40 years, there has been a wholesale transition in the local labor force, and it has been pretty steady for the past 10 – 20 years, just some older backhoe operators retiring, and forement retiring, being replaced by native Spanish Speakers.
Is this “white fragility” or “black fragility”? The children of these immigrant workers are pretty similar in their work proclivities to the white and black kids they attend school with. Some work with Dad; not so many.
The demographic transition in the US was offshoring of productive work and blue-collar initiative, and it’s replacement with private prisons for the masses who had no work, and slipped into crime. (YOU, Out Of The Gene Pool!)
Those who could jump through more and more and more hoops, and keep complying with more and more and more detailed regulations, could maintain their employment, even in fields, such as medicine, which used to be dynamic, full of talent and initiative, and competition to find the new best cure, treatment or solution.
The way the AIDS pandemic was engaged was very innovative and fast moving. The most talented doctors got big followings of patients by constantly advancing the “cutting edge” of diagnosis and treatment to keep the gays alive for a cure that would eventually come. It basically did come, and some of those guys from the 1980s are still alive on their highly effective antiretroviral treatments.
The difference today is that Dr Fauci is running the whole US response to this leaked bioweapon, which the US, China and Canada, so presumably the UK, too, all had.
No individual medical initiative will be systemically tolerated, even if treating doctors all across the world, even in the US, are breaking-ranks, and there is substantial evidence of benefit.
We may just be subject to replacement if we can’t aggregate-our-collective-feces.
It's the end of an error... :-)
The Depression Dominoes Are Toppling, Charles Hugh Smith Once you allow your economy to become dependent on extremes of debt, leverage, inequality, legalized looting, monopoly, pay-to-play politics and speculative asset bubbles, a depression is inevitable.
The pandemic lockdown will be blamed for the Greater Depression, but the lockdown only toppled all the dominoes that were already lined up. The lockdown would have been survivable if the economy hadn't been over-indebted, over-leveraged, burdened by insanely high costs, stripmined by greedy monopolies, dependent on stock market fraud, destabilized by extreme inequality, corrupted by political pay-to-play and addicted to speculation...
It's worth recalling that every dollar of debt is someone else's asset and the source of their income. So when the defaults and bankruptcies sweep through the financial system, they'll obliterate all the "wealth" of those holding bundled student and auto loan securities, mortgage backed securities, corporate bonds, and destroy the income streams these trillions in debt generated...
Once you allow your economy to become dependent on extremes of debt, leverage, inequality, legalized looting, monopoly, pay-to-play politics and speculative asset bubbles, a depression is inevitable. The only question is "when," and that's been answered, though nobody wants to hear it: 2020 and beyond.
It has an emergency plan to increase the number of ICU beds from 1,462 to 2,649, but expect they will all fill up in just two weeks
"The Despair Is Smoldering in Society"
Millions of Americans have seen their wages stagnate for decades, even as the wealthiest have grown fantastically rich. Economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case believe the health-care system is partly to blame, and the coronavirus is highlighting the broader dangers American society is facing.
Defund the messenger:
COVID Testing Sites to Lose Federal Funding Even as Fauci Calls for More Testing
This article fails to comprehend that needing a vaccine twice per year is twice as good for business!
Chinese study: Antibodies in COVID-19 patients fade quickly
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/06/chinese-study-antibodies-covid-19-patients-fade-quickly
File under: "All bleeding stops":
(Governor Abbot is keeping bars and strip clubs open but advising hospitals to stop doing elective surgery because they are getting too full.)
Texas is on the verge of a Covid crisis: Houston's largest hospital's ICU is 97% full as daily cases surge to record highs and expert predicts 'herd immunity may be the only way to stop the virus'
Texas Medical Center in Houston said 97% of its ICU beds are occupied, and its normal occupancy rate is 70% to 80%It has an emergency plan to increase the number of ICU beds from 1,462 to 2,649, but expect they will all fill up in just two weeks
New York wants Texans to quarantine for 2 weeks, now.
Millions of Americans have seen their wages stagnate for decades, even as the wealthiest have grown fantastically rich. Economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case believe the health-care system is partly to blame, and the coronavirus is highlighting the broader dangers American society is facing.
The Onion, MENLO PARK, CA—In an effort to curtail the organization’s outsized influence, Facebook announced Monday that it would be implementing new steps to ensure the breakup of the U.S. government before it becomes too powerful. “It’s long past time for us to take concrete actions against this behemoth of governance that has gone essentially unchecked since its inception,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
https://www.theonion.com/facebook-announces-plan-to-break-up-u-s-government-bef-1844121902
Iran is, somehow, not destroyed yet... Pepe Escobar
Islamic Republic has weathered the Covid-19 storm and is on the cusp of a US-defying manufacturing revolution
https://asiatimes.com/2020/06/why-iran-wont-be-broken/
The Arctic Screams with Siberian peat fires and forest fires.
Guido Grosse, head of the Permafrost Research Unit at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, said the fires were stripping away peat and vegetation that normally would form a protective blanket over the permafrost...
And “as the peat burns … its neighbor next door gets warmer, and their neighbors get warmer,” McCarty said. “We’re burning up these ancient pools of carbon.”
Emergency Blanket
Hi Robin,
ReplyDeleteI'm happy to refer to you thusly, by your given name.
I didn't devise the other moniker, and am reluctant to criticize the fruitful mind which did.
Robin is a problematic masculine name in the US, not England.
Name your poison's name, Amigo!