Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Experiences Transform Society

Changelings,

I am beholden to an essay Charles Hugh Smith sent to subscribers, where he discusses the societal trauma now being experienced by human beings throughout China. He was deeply touched by the video of a young girl weeping as her mother's body was taken to cremate, after having lost her father not 3 weeks before that. The children of the children-of-the-Cultural-Revolution have known a hopeful period of growth in their lives, similar to what baby boomers like myself knew until about 1971, when everything began to stall and unravel. 
 Their parents wanted the best for them, not the world they had just lived through. This shock ends that dream, which was already weakened, and had become based on speculative investment bubbles, as much as on actual economic development, which has stagnated in the past few years.
 In the west, we remain preoccupied on containing the Wuhan coronavirus to over-there, and hope that "they" get their economy back together before our bubble economy goes "pop".
However, history is already over-extended for us in this recovery round of an old economic paradigm, gamed into financial speculation, far from the productive world of work, into which I was born.
 We baby boomers had our fade-of-expectations through stagflation in the Ford and Carter years. Our world became more marketing-oriented under Reagan, and left reality behind after 2008.
We will experience the truth we denied in the early 1980s, that the cookie jar is full of worthless IOUs, not retirement security. Many of us are already working at some lower-level job to help provide what Social Security does not. We need not do so in the formal economy. 
Growing vegetables and fixing things gets you more value than working for somebody else. Really.
Prepare today. When there is virus in your community, everything will suddenly become unreliable and uncertain from day to day.

 It's early voting in Texas, so I'm going out to do so. 
Vote for somebody who seems to see the potential for troubles, and has the toolkit to work with it, not a sales pitch. 
 If you are in Congressional District 10, Mike McCaul's district, I endorse Pritesh Gandhi MD in the Democratic primary. He works with me at People's Community Clinic, caring for people who need care. He is a good human, honest, bright, talented, hard-working and realistically-idealistic, if I may say that is possible. (Pritesh has been reading what I send out for some years, maybe five.)

This release of an academic paper, laying out the case for the Wuhan coronavirus having escaped from the Level-4 viral pathogen lab in Wuhan, tells me that there is a power struggle going on in Chinese elite circles, and one side is attacking the exposed flank of the side that covered this up for a month, and worsened the current epidemic by that cowardice. (It's the same cowardice I am seeing in Hawaii, it's normal if you are invested in a business.)
This is good information, and it refutes the New York Times, which has been presenting this theory as tinfoil-hat paranoia. 
(In my mind, it is still fairly likely that this is a western attack on China. China and the west both have SARS-coV-2)
Smoking Gun? Chinese Scientist Finds "Killer Coronavirus Probably Originated From A Laboratory In Wuhan"

​GOTCHA!  ​The deadly new coronavirus is up to 20 times more likely to bind to human cell receptors and cause infection than severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), a new study by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin has found.
The novel coronavirus and Sars share the same functional host-cell receptor, called angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2).

Marjorie sent me a link to BMJ, British Medical Journal, which is continuously updated. The viral outcomes outside of Wuhan are much, much milder in the tested population. Personally, I think this is due to only testing the sickest people in Wuhan, and testing broadly in the rest of China. It could also be that the virus is mutating to a less fatal form, which viruses often do. It improves their success to kill fewer hosts.
Conclusion As of early February 2020, compared with patients initially infected with SARS-Cov-2 in Wuhan, the symptoms of patients in Zhejiang province are relatively mild.  

​This is a perspective piece from the BMJ, and says that no mutation to lessen mortality rate has been detected. This virus is therefore vastly more prevalent in Wuhan than is reported. We all need more and better information.
 Among cases reported to the World Health Organization, 15% are severe, 3% are critical, and 82% are mild (press conference WHO, 7 February 2020. https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1225797786903277568). The estimated overall case fatality rate is around 2% but outside of Hubei province the figure is around 0.05 or less, not so far from the mortality observed with seasonal influenza. We should not be lulled into inaction by this low fatality rate, however: no cross protection by a common human coronavirus infection is expected and SARS-CoV-2 can theoretically infect any one of us. As with influenza, the complications from covid-19 target particularly older people, but the disease can also strike unpredictably in younger age groups.  

The story of the Japanese couple who got diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 in Japan, after over a week in Hawaii has now faded away. No reports in recent days. Hawaii is trying hard to sustain business as usual. DO Shop in Chinatown! 

Wiggs sent this article about GMO foods not being militarized,but having originated from American military research ("Department of Death") I like to grow heirloom varieties adapted to central Texas, when available.
​ ​GM seed was conceived, promoted, researched and funded by the US Department of Defense – the American War Department. GM seed was never meant as a way to feed the hungry, but was instead conceived and developed as a weapon or, more precisely, as a weapons-delivery system. Genetically-Modified seed was never intended to support human life, but to eliminate it.
​ ​GM seed is neither more productive nor healthier than traditional heritage crops, and is far more expensive and destructive, but it presents almost irresistible military advantages against any nation that becomes dependent on this source of food grains. One is that the US can use it as a political weapon, refusing to supply seed to a disfavored nation, perhaps causing widespread famine and dislocation. The other is more sinister, in that many groups have experimented with gene-splicing technology, inserting unrelated DNA into various seeds.


Charles sent this out. The American Life Is Killing You
 In the words of the great propagandist himself, Bernays writes:
​ ​“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”​ ...​

​ ​As Joseph Campbell so poetically voiced, “The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with nature.” ​...
 Become the person you are, and perhaps would have been, before culture contaminated you and brought you into disharmony with yourself.

​Tom and I both found this article today. Power elites have not merely destroyed government institutions...
​ ​Recent research indicates that family and faith (attending church or other place of worship and defining oneself as a very religious person) play a larger role in educational achievement than school-based efforts to close the gaps among racial and ethnic groups.
​ ​A meta-analysis (study of studies) examined 30 studies of attempts to bridge the achievement gap between white students on one hand and Black and Latino students on the other. It “revealed that, if an African American or Latino student was a person of faith and came from a two-biological-parent family, the achievement gap totally disappeared, even when adjusting for socioeconomic status.” [emphasis added]
​ ​Yet progressive elites beyond the administrative state—in academia, law, media, sports, big business, and entertainment—have targeted, unrelentingly, just those institutions that are most important in the lives of ordinary people.


​Our girl, Helen of DesTroy has this article for RT. Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd says that what Israel is doing with apartheid policies against native Palestinian inhabitants shows that "some people have rights and some don't".
​ ​Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, facing a campaign to deplatform him from SXSW after B’nai B’rith got his ads pulled from Major League Baseball, told RT the accusations of anti-Semitism are a distraction from human rights.
​ ​The musician and activist slammed the campaign by the pro-Israel activist group B’nai B’rith to smear him as an anti-Semite and have him removed from the South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival in Austin, Texas, where he is scheduled to give the keynote speech to an audience of hundreds of thousands of people.


Singing Truth

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