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.)
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.
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.
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?)
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.)
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.
(Mainly those scientists who get them are "alarmed". Other scientists might be "intrigued".)
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.
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. 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.
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.
Caitlin Johnstone: How come she makes it seem so obvious?
When Corporate Power Is Your Real Government, Corporate Media Is State Media
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.
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.
Writing “Israel” In Quotation Marks Is A Peaceful Form Of Pro-Semitic Protest, Andrew Korybko (Russian?)
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.)
Civic-Minded
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