Wednesday, January 27, 2021

Distributed Strengths

 ​Participants In Life,


  We are living within a competition between a machine paradigm and living ecosystems which self organize and evolve around light and water.

  The industrial economy which developed machines that use combustion of coal and oil, then machines powered by electricity is really new on the scene, just born, but has become all that we learn about and see in our even-shorter lifetimes. We as organisms and as a cooperative species are truly ancient compared to combustion powered machines. Our bodies and our human ways contain deeply embedded adaptive mechanisms, selected for by hundreds of thousands of cycles of good times and bad surprises. Our individual experience gets surprised a lot, but our ways of engaging problems together are far more deeply proven. We cooperate well in small groups, platoon sized groups, but we can work well together in groups of up to about 150 members. Bigger groups than that require a hierarchy, because we quarrel too much to get tasks accomplished. Centurions commanded 100 soldiers in the Roman army. It was an empirically driven arrangement. It worked.

  Hierarchies above that basic building block get more and more machine-like, and less adaptive at the level where humans engage problems, because of strict orders from above. We all have more experience with this rigidity and the ground-level stupidity it enforces than we did 20 years ago, 40 years ago, and so on. 
  Rigid hierarchy has flourished in our lifetimes despite it's inefficiencies, including "corruption" (siphoning off resources) and maintenance of the hierarchy by burdensome compliance-assurance work, which displaces productive work. 
  Compliance tasks might be worthwhile if they prevent corruption, but corruption is tricky. Corruption can just move up to a higher level of the command structure, leaving all of the lower level inefficiencies intact, then take half of the pie, not just bites, or the pie can go somewhere else, altogether.
  Large hierarchies have been able to grow and dominate because they can crush smaller organizations, or subsume them into the inefficient-but-unassailable "machine". What large organizational machines need to keep growing, or even maintain their inefficient, complex structure is lots of energy and material flows into the machine. Every player must be fed, watered and rewarded for compliance. All of this must continue to be more desirable to the players than doing something outside the organization, something like working a small farm, our ancient fallback option.
  Hierarchical organizational machines have a new tool, of course, which is direct communication and enforcement between the top layers of hierarchy and the performance of specific tasks at the working end, through computer networks, which become essential to systemic function.

  When we were traveling as a family in the late summer of 2005, we traveled by train from Germany to Croatia, then back to Germany. Getting the tickets arranged in Germany took a full half hour of the diligent effort of the german clerk at the train station, getting everything arranged on her computer, assured, confirmed, and reserved for us. We were grateful for her efforts. On the way back to Germany, the Croatian clerk was able to get all of our tickets arranged, confirmed, printed and handed to us in less than 5 minutes. I was very impressed at her efficiency. She spoke English. I told her that it had taken a half hour for a German clerk with a computer to do the same thing. She immediately responded that it was because she had a computer that the German was so slow. The Croatian clerk had made one phone call, then processed our tickets.

  Now I experience this effect every day. All my medical documentation and all orders must be through the electronic medical record. I cannot print x-ray reports these days, because the new system since last fall prints 1/8 page onto a whole sheet of paper. Why the software does this to me is not yet diagnosed. We have a platoon of computer, software and network software and hardware geeks, currently working from home. The structure to emulate a quick flip through a paper chart is slow, and prone to thousands of little failure modes that need constant monitoring and fixes, and the system must be protected from hacking, which is endemic. 
Despite what all of the advertising said, this is bad for patients and doctors, extremely expensive, and is always broken to some degree. 
It is mandated by law. It keeps hierarchy in control. It is prone to catastrophic failure, at which point nobody gets medical attention, prescriptions or necessary procedures. 
That's the threat the system wields.
Can we do anything at all to help each other outside the internet?

 The monopolistic hierarchical machines own all of our life support structures, and if we fail to support and feed the system, we face removal from life-support. As individuals we can store water, beans, rice, salt, oil, onions, spices and maybe some propane, but that does not mean we have other options to engage in smaller and more efficient human economies to meet our basic needs. 
They have been eliminated.
Can we do anything to help each other from day to day without the internet?

  China and India are ancient and successful civilizations. Chinese imperialism has always been rigidly hierarchical, whereas India had the caste system, where roles were distributed throughout all of society, in every village and family, so functionality was embedded at all levels. Any town could reorganize after a war, for instance, and without orders from elsewhere. There is much to criticize in the caste system in our modern world, and China has vaulted ahead of India in the last 40 years, but these have been the good times, of plenty of fuel, food and mineral wealth.
  China has strip mined her farmers to feed factories in Guangdong. India continues to have a majority of citizens directly involved in subsistence farming. India took out a lot of loans from the World Bank in the last 10 years. 
  Bayer/Monsanto and Cargill have a plan for repaying those loans by replacing all of the small family farms with a few big factory farms, using lots of fertilizer, GMO seed, pesticides and diesel powered machinery. The profits can pay on those loans. The farmers can find other work. The economy can export more stuff. What could go wrong? 

Indian Farmers on the Frontline Against Global Capitalism
Indian farming “reforms” will benefit a handful of billionaires at the cost of small farms and ordinary laborers.
..He, along with thousands of other farmers, are mobilising against three important pieces of farm legislation that were recently forced through parliament. To all intents and purposes, these laws sound a neoliberal death knell for most of India’s cultivators and its small farms, the backbone of the nation’s food production.  

The Consequences of Moving from Industrial to Financial Capitalism
MICHAEL HUDSON AND PEPE ESCOBAR
  The wealth is no longer made here by industrializing. It’s made financially, mainly by making capital gains. Rising prices for real estate or for stocks and for bonds. In the last nine months, since the coronavirus came here, the top 1 percent of the U.S. economy grew by $1 trillion. It’s been a windfall for the 1 percent. The stock market is way up, the bond market is up, the real estate market is up while the rest of the economy is going down. Despite the tariffs that Trump put on, Chinese imports, trade with China is going up because we’re just not producing materials.
​  ​America doesn’t make its own shoes. It doesn’t make some nuts and bolts or fasteners, it doesn’t make industrial things anymore because if money is to be made off an industrial company it’s to buy and sell the company, not to make loans to increase the company’s production.​..
...​The government in America provided low-cost education, not student debt. It provided transportation at subsidized prices. It provided basic infrastructure at low cost. And so, government infrastructure was considered a fourth factor of production.
​   ​And if you read what the business schools in the late 19th century taught like Simon Patten at the Wharton School, it’s very much like socialism. In fact, it’s very much like what China is doing. And in fact, China is following in the last 30 or 40 years pretty much the same way of getting rich that America followed.

​Tulsi Gabbard, like Ron Paul, Cynthia McKinney and Dennis Kucinich, is no longer a member of Congress.
Tulsi Gabbard: Domestic-Terrorism Bill Is ‘a Targeting of Almost Half of the Country’
​  ​“It’s so dangerous as you guys have been talking about, this is an issue that all Democrats, Republicans, independents, Libertarians should be extremely concerned about, especially because we don’t have to guess about where this goes or how this ends,” Gabbard said.
​  ​She continued: “When you have people like former CIA Director John Brennan openly talking about how he’s spoken with or heard from appointees and nominees in the Biden administration who are already starting to look across our country for these types of movements similar to the insurgencies they’ve seen overseas, that in his words, he says make up this unholy alliance of religious extremists, racists, bigots, he lists a few others and at the end, even libertarians.”
​  ​She said her concern lies in how officials will define the characteristics they are searching for in potential threats.
“What characteristics are we looking for as we are building this profile of a potential extremist, what are we talking about? Religious extremists, are we talking about Christians, evangelical Christians, what is a religious extremist? Is it somebody who is pro-life? Where do you take this?” Gabbard said.

  “You start looking at obviously, have to be a white person, obviously likely male, libertarians, anyone who loves freedom, liberty, maybe has an American flag outside their house, or people who, you know, attended a Trump rally,” Gabbard said.

Look, this shark's even closer. It's right here, already!
Covid-19 Variant In California May Explain Sharp Rise In Cases
​  ​ But just as the U.K. has identified a more transmissible variant, termed B.1.1.7, South Africa has identified another highly transmissible variant, and a third variant has arisen in Japan and Brazil, California has found one of its own.   The California strain, known as Cal.20C, has been identified in 35-50% of recently diagnosed cases in Los Angeles. And as has been the case for the other variants across the world, all of which have crossed oceans and borders, the Cal.20C variant is more infectious than the prior forms of coronavirus, or SARS-CoV2.  

I posted this broadly insightful article from LArry Romanoff in December. 
Here is the reminder that SARS-CoV-2 was circulating in America in fall of 2019 (and very likely near Ft Detrick Maryland, even before that.)
​  ​A number of American cities made the same discoveries of the virus in their wastewater samples from 2019. The US mass media didn’t pick up the stories, but the local papers did. It was at that point that Pompeo issued another gag order that hospitals and labs were forbidden from disclosing any virus information directly to the CDC or the media but that all must be passed through the White House. That killed all further reports of COVID-19 in America’s wastewater in the second and third quarters of 2019.
​  ​With the accumulated volume of evidence, it now seems a certainty that COVID-19 was circulating in the US since June or July of 2019, far earlier than admitted, and that the CDC’s prevention (and forbidding) of testing was to bury this evidence. One example was headlines in the US media on June 21, 2020, stating, “Over 40 mysterious respiratory deaths in California could dramatically rewrite narrative of COVID-19” in the US.[21] The LA Times reported on “a cluster of mysterious respiratory deaths” beginning in December of 2019. The local news website www.bakersfield.com stated this meant that COVID-19 was circulating in California “way earlier than we knew”. Evidence of COVID-19 was also found in many blood donations collected from residents in nine states across the US as early as mid-December, according to a study published on Nov 30 in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases

​Thanks Jeremy​.
​  ​The previously discussed, WHO-sponsored meta-analysis of ivermectin against covid-19 has now been published as a preprint. It found a highly significant 75% reduction in covid mortality, based on randomized controlled trials only, and will be continually updated with additional trial results.
​  ​To date, the mode of action of ivermectin against SARS-CoV-2 has remained somewhat of a mystery. Early studies indicated that ivermectin may inhibit viral protein transportation. But a new US-Canadian study, published in Nature Commincations Biology, found that ivermection is highly effective (>90%) in inhibiting the main enzyme (3CLpro) involved in the replication of SARS-CoV-2 (and other RNA viruses). This might explain why ivermectin appears to be highly effective even as a prophylaxis against SARS-CoV-2 infection.
​  ​Nevertheless, many patients, and even doctors, continue to be denied access to low-cost and safe ivermectin, especially in Western countries. Others are paying obscenely overcharged prices, visit dubious online merchants, or resort to animal-grade products. Given the current global covid death rate of 15,000 people per day, the SPR Collaboration has decided to provide access to a certified Indian pharmaceutical exporter of ivermectin, vetted by SPR readers: Kachhela Medex Ltd.

Identification of 3-chymotrypsin like protease (3CLPro) inhibitors as potential anti-SARS-CoV-2 agents

​Pierre Kory MD gives an update on Ivermectin treatment of COVID, based upon the WHO meta-analysis findings paper above, of which he is a co-author. He is an ICU doc, who has been treating COVID patients for almost a year now, in the worst hot spots. 
Thanks Jeremy. Medical lecture starts at 12 minutes.

​A healthy Florida doctor got the Pfizer COVID vaccine, and noticed little spots of bleeding in his skin a week and a half later. 15 days after the first vaccine dose, he bled into his brain and died of a hemorrhagic stroke (not an ischemic stroke that chokes off blood supply). He had gotten autoimmune thrombocytopenia. His immune system had attacked his platelets until he bled freely. He was not reportedly feeling sick, but he knew what those little petechiae meant, and sought medical care.

Hank Aaron got the Moderna vaccine, and died 17 days later of a "massive stroke". Which kind of stroke?
  Baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron, who battled racial prejudice and hatred on his way to breaking the major leagues' career home run record, has died at the age of 86, the Atlanta Braves announced.
  According to a person with knowledge, Aaron died Friday morning after suffering a massive stroke. The person requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

​There is a coroner's report, which fails to answer that very basic question of "which kind of stroke did Hank die from?"​ 
Coroner's report quoted as "natural causes" of death. Here we get non-medical hearsay.
  In an interview with Ambassador Andrew Young, who also received the shot with Aaron, Young also told 11Alive Aaron "never had any reaction."
  "I talked to the fella who was his driver, and I said, 'was hank feeling any discomfort or any problem over the last few days?' and he said, 'no, he wanted to keep his schedule,'" Young recounted.
What do you mean by "stroke", sir? What about that doctor in Florida, sir? ​Was that a​ "stroke", or not?​ Who pays your salary?​
​  ​A spokesperson at the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s office, which examined Aaron’s body after his death, told PolitiFact that his cause of death was natural and not linked to the COVID-19 vaccine.  ​ 
​  ​If Aaron did die of a stroke, that would make it even less likely that the vaccine contributed in some way to his death. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said that it would be “biologically implausible” for the COVID-19 vaccine to cause a stroke.
 “The coronavirus can cause strokes, but the (Moderna COVID-19) vaccine only contains one protein of the virus, and there’s no evidence that that one protein is inducing inflammation of the blood vessels (which could cause strokes),” he said.

​Striking Out​

2 comments:

  1. Meet Mr. Dunbar:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07IpED729k8

    ReplyDelete