Thursday, July 30, 2020

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
...

​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.

​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.
  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.

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%.

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.

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.


​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

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.

​Free Gardener

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

Sunday, July 26, 2020

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.

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.

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.​

​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.
​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".  
​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.

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.

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.

Gardening Outdoors

Thursday, July 23, 2020

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...

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.

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.

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.
 
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.

 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."

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."

Laughing With My Fears

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Waiting For It

Stalwarts,

There has been a lot of fearful name calling in political circles in recent years.
"FASCIST!"
""COMMUNIST!"
There are others, but those hit the buttons pretty well.
What are the components that make up a political movement? Let's call them "Axes" for this exercise, please.
 There's Left and Right, which are mostly feelings and patterns of social engagement. 
Lefties tend to be more spontaneous, take superficial risks more, engage socially in a "lefty" kind of way. 
Morality may be perceived as more situational than absolute.
Rightists tend to be more concerned with consequences, and more formal. 
Morality is not a casual thing to rightists, but a serious concern for society, and when it is abandoned, some very bad things happen, especially to children. That's certainly true.
I adjust my presentations to people based on whether I'm with lefties or rightists. It's all valid and useful. 
I seek to avoid offense. It's possible. It's more productive. We all have to work together.

 There is Liberal, or Free, vs Illiberal, or Totalitarian.
I'm kind of bent-outta'-shape about how many ways the term "liberal" is used and misused recently, so I'd prefer "free" and "totalitarian" as an axis. Fascism and Soviet Communism, as Americans know them were both totalitarian, illiberal.
I might make the argument that Teddy Roosevelt was a right liberal populaist and Franklin Roosevelt was a left liberal populist. Some might well disagree, but I just want to show that such things have existed.

  The next axis, and Americans have a hard time seeing it as independent, is Private vs Social dominant values.
It's never one or the other, and we are at the extreme of a swing to private-ownership, including means of production, money creation, and credit-taking. If you own the media, you get the credit for whatever good happens, but not the blame for bad stuff. We admire groups of pioneers, settlers, who raised barns together, and cleared fields to grow crops together. We encourage children to cooperate. Most of what we have accomplished as a species has come from our stellar ability to cooperate. 
Right now the wealth disparity is as high in the US as it has ever been in our history, maybe a tad higher, and it's absolutely high by the standards of world history.

 Let me argue at this point, that the only way for society to go is to more socialism/populism. The elite owner class absolutely hates this fact, but they also see it. they just want as little safety net action as possible, and they want assurances that they will still get the first drink of all the fresh money that is created, before they pass it through their systems to the rest of us. I don't think it's possible for wealth to remain this concentrated without breaking the social order, and I think it is actually broken, and denial won't be sustainable, even for the elites. I don't know what will burst that bubble for them, but it will be most unpleasant for you and me, too.

 What about Left and Right? America seems stuck at an impasse between left and right dominant values. It was Left in the "Roaring 20s", and swung to Right during the "Great Depression". 
It swung to the left in the 1960s and 1970s, and it seems sort of that way now, but it doesn't feel real. I think "Limousine Left" is not "left".  I seem to know more and more people who were moral-left in 1960s and 1970s, anti-war, and are now moral-conservative, anti-war.
The pro-war-left is now a thing that bombs babies to protect them. Weird. 
Clinton did that in Bosnia. It worked for team Clinton-Bush.

 It could/should be that moral-right is the next swing. I'm ready for some real morality in politics. It has been such a looong time... 

 We could also get totalitarian-right, which is what a lot of people are afraid of. We call that Fascism, and lack of freedom of speech is a big part of totalitarian-subjugation. Hard totalitarianism is not open to debate. Obey or be branded for prison, torture and death. This is what the American military and covert mercenary armies have been doing throughout the world since 9/11. 
The public was against this immorality in Vietnam, but has been neutered since 9/11. 
No draft. No TV news showing horrors of war, not lately.

 I look around and see a subtle slide into immoral-left already underway. There is no longer full support for freedom of speech. Standing up for freedom of speech is "hate speech", now, and gets professors fired without recourse. This seems like the early days of the Cultural-Revolution we are seeing. 
People were really hungry, starving and desperate in China's Cultural Revolution. We are not... Yet. 

 We should best pick a healthy path before things get really bad. 
Left and Right are matters of style, and will decide themselves. 
I suspect a swing to the Right will happen as history tightens up, and social leftist identity-politics has played some pretty impractical cards recently.

 Individual is at an extreme swing, and absolutely must give way to Social. We have tremendous changes to make, to recreate a living, working economy, as energy supplies delete, the globe heats up, and the consequences and failures of a system based on infinite growth crash all around us and on our heads. 
Let's just help each other and be seen doing it. Grow vegetables together. That's our basic successful social function. 
It's nice. It feels good, once you get in the groove. 

 The threat to us all, including our selfish, parasitic, sociopathic elite owners (no offense intended) is totalitarian SUBJUGATION
 The efforts to extend the current private-ownership-of-the-world paradigm can only be totalitarian-subjugation efforts, because the system has gotten too inefficient and bureaucratic for anything but threats of pin and violence to extend it. Threats of pain and violence are comparatively cheap. They force the systemic costs onto the people complying with the threats. That arrangement is inherently unstable. Working people are already cracking from the stress.
 The last cards of make-believe are being played right now, with the Fed and high-frequency trading manipulating equity markets and bond markets to higher and higher nominal valuations. All investors are getting rich as the real economy simultaneously evaporates. This is the final, manic, fear-of-missing-out phase of financial bubbleism.
It's all police state when the happy-lies go POOF!
Unless we chose FREEDOM.
 The last Moral Candidate for POTUS, that I saw was US Army Reserve Major and Congresswoman , Tulsi Gabbard. 
I would categorize Congresswoman Gabbard as Freedom-loving, Right, Populist/Socialist. You might disagree.
Bernie Sanders has always been left, "mostly-Socialist" and Freedom-propounding, though he plays-well-with-capitalists, Bernie did accidentally become a "millionaire" through the wonders of inflation and old-age. 
Bernie Sanders would do, but it's a bit late in the life-cycle for him. Times like this call out for youthful vigor.
  I see the need for a national leader with an independent moral compass as the highest priority. 
The current political system has not let any candidate advance without being controllable by the current elite oligarchs, except for this orange haired Tasmanian Devil accident that happened 4 years ago. 
Weird fluke. It was supposed to be Clinton or Bush again...
  The "You're-Fired" guy is trying to look moral, but he accidentally held the Bible upside down in that photo-op the Army cleared the crowd for last month. "Grab-em-by-the-....."  He sued the porn-queen-for-snitching-after-he-paid-her-off.
Donald Trump is none of the categories above. He's Left-right, Billionaire-populist, too-erratic-to-be-a-hypocrite.

Trump And Biden Should Debate While Attached To A Lie Detector
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/rabo-trump-and-biden-should-debate-while-attached-lie-detector  

Charles Hugh Smith: Inequality Is America's Monster Id
  The only possible result of this system is that the wealth of the nation is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few with access to the Fed's nearly free money, and so the unearned income (interest, dividends, rents, etc.) all flow to them--not because they created value or goods and services, but because they were closest to the Fed's money spigot.
  The political game is to obscure this source of inequality and distract the unprivileged many with bread and circuses: an extra $600 tossed to the restive crowd of unemployed, $1,200 to the fitful audience, and eventually, some monthly amount of Universal Basic Income (UBI) calibrated to be just enough to get by but not enough to ever own any productive assets.
  As I often point out, the real goal of UBI is to ensure debtors can make their credit card / student loan / auto loan payments, as these monthly payments by the masses are the interest income of the super-wealthy with the privileged position by the Fed's money spigot.
  The privileged super-wealthy also own the media, of course, and so they're delighted to virtue-signal their support of purely symbolic actions such as toppling statues and occupying worthless chunks of cities. None of these symbolic actions threaten their privileged position by the Fed's money spigot, and even better, they distract and divide the exploited populace.
  For if the people never catch on to the source of inequality, that ignorance is all the protection the privileged super-wealthy need.
  The privileged super-wealthy are feeling very confident in their control of the financial system, the source of inequality. They own the wealth, the income streams, the media, Big Tech, and the machinery of political power.
  What they don't understand is inequality is America's Monster Id: the more you try to suppress it, the more powerful it becomes. The Monster Id of inequality is already rampaging through the social and political orders, and eventually it will burn through the Fed's free-money vault with a white-hot intensity that will surprise the privileged super-wealthy and their armies of self-serving toadies, lackeys, apparatchiks and technocrat flunkies.

  Several people sent me these stories about Portland. Is this ham-handed incompetence, or a test of how Americans will react to police-state actions against citizens. Our oligarchic owners watched how people reacted indecisively to Antifa taking BLM protests as a chance to destroy things and beat people up. The oligarchics can use either a left or right totalitarian angle if Americans will just show a clear preference and take sides against each other. 
  With so much doom to scroll through, it’s hard to know when to stop and pay attention, but one story that jumped out at me – and, I hope, at many others – is the account of how demonstrators in Portland, Oregon, protesting racism and police brutality earlier in July, were tear-gassed, beaten, seized off the street by unidentified, masked federal agents in camouflage and fatigues, hustled into unmarked vans and detained for hours. The agents were reported to work with the US Marshals Special Operations Group and Bortac, the Border Patrol Tactical Unit.
   Government-funded thugs, assaulting citizens, still conjure up repellent images of Hitler’s Brownshirts stomping their fellow Germans, and the street kidnapping of civilians has been the hallmark of authoritarian dictatorships. That was how you wound up in one of Stalin’s labor gulags, in the helicopter from which the Argentinian junta dropped its critics into the sea, or in a CIA black site.

Ray and Marjorie sent me these videos/stories about US military veterans being gassed and beat up when they ask the federal-thugs about their oaths to uphold the constitution. (Maybe this branch doesn' take that oath?)

This has the look of an overt threat to federal judges, a really high level threat signal. Dead hit man is not talking.
Alleged Salas Family Assailant Previously Worked for US/Israeli Intelligence-Linked Firm
The alleged gunmen who killed the son of Esther Salas, the judge recently assigned to the Epstein-Deutsche Bank case, worked for a company of corporate spies and mercenaries with ties to intelligence and also to Deutsche Bank.

Europe has been preparing for a global gold standard since the 1970s
Europe appears to be ready to drop the $US global reserve currency and switch to $10.000/oz gold. It looks like this has always been Europe's preference, since Nixon had to default on the gold-window after DeGaulle sent the destroyer over to take delivery of France's gold-purchased-for-dollars. This is long and very well researched.

The numbers on the graph are all more than 7 weeks old. The current COVID seroprevalence numbers are secret.
As scientists get a better grasp on the coronavirus and how it has spread across the US, a new survey from the CDC purports to show that the true number of coronavirus cases is between 2x and 13x the official count, varying from state to state.
 Data released by the CDC suggest that large numbers of asymptomatic people may have kept the virus spreading in their communities, directly contradicting the findings of another study cited by the WHO last month.
Following a similar finding by scientists in Sweden, the researchers working with the CDC found that even the hardest-hit area in the study - ie NYC, where 1 in 4 people have been exposed according to antibody surveillance studies - isn't anywhere near achieve herd immunity, which scientists believe will require 60% infection rate.
If these seroprevalence rates are accurate, then Missouri is suffering from an outbreak that is 13x its reported rate.


​In No Hurry​

Monday, July 20, 2020

Signaling Virtuous Victimhood

Assessing Situation,

  There is a process of abstract simplification in our primate brains. A thing we do that helps us multiply and prevail as a species is predictive-modeling of our world. Our models are never as complex as reality, but the better ones give us practical advice and direction as to acting today, to benefit ourselves in the future.
  Our cognitive models long for clarity-through-brevity, even if it's wrong. (Our target is slightly- wrong-but-useful.)
It's a setting we ALL come with, and to varying degrees, but it only works when it works, and when a lot of changes are happening at once, lots of interwoven complex processes, we can be more wrong than usual, just when it matters most for our survival.
  I posit that we are now in an epoch where more is changing at once than any of us can cognitively model, The global resources are running lower, and are more expensive to get. Economies are loaded with more parasitic debt, which is growing , while economies shrink, global heating, dying coral, plastic particles in oceans and our food, algal blooms, CIA/narco-terrorists have no boundaries as "American" dirty wars just keep growing as their own economy...
WE, in our relative remove and insulation, are having to face viral pandemic more personally than we are used to. 
  Viral pandemic is War-by-Fire, and whether the fire got out of Ft Detrick or Wuhan-IV lab, it is loose among us, up-close-and-personal. We are white-water-rafting through the rapids of history, and we do not know when the rapids smooth out.
We need to maintain immediate focus and paddle whatever direction at the bow that we need to avoid a big rock RIGHT NOW. 
  Our family did this in Thailand. It's a practice of immediate awareness in the moment.
In chaotic systems, the conditions at onset of chaos are one of the most important factors, and about all we can really consider in our simplified predictive models.
  A city where the service sector is already strained in business-as-usual, and that can't fund police, EMS, fire, trash, sewer, roads and pensions, is predicted to collapse in chaotic conditions. 
  That's the easy part. Picking your own best bet is much harder, because your human network is wherever you have been the last 20 years, and that is really important in chaos. We are wired to maintain our human network relationships. It's deep wiring. It informs the most fundamental form of human economy, "Gift economy".
  I've been seeking a safer homestead for the tumult since we traveled the world with bikes and backpacks 2005-2006. I wanted to protect my sons from the threat of a draft-resumption under Bush II.
I interviewed for a job in Christchurch NZ, as well as looking carefully at patterns of life, everywhere we went. Later I worked 4 times on the north tip of Hawaii (Big Island), and thought I had really gotten it figured out. I learned a lot about small community, where people work together and all have vegetable gardens. The local economy of cane plantations had a LOT of gift-economy in place.
  After the move there failed for clinic financial problems, and we moved back to Austin, I was determined to just start growing a kitchen-garden and fruit trees, wherever I was. That was summer 2013. It seems longer ago, when I say the year, 7 years ago.
  As I studied predictive climate change models, soil characteristics, ground water availability, population densities, land prices, and historical farming practices of a century ago, a few areas looked more likely prospects than others. The land in San Marcos was finally 3 times what we could afford, and went POOF! I had put a lot of planning into it, a lot of study, by then. 
  Nothing for a few months, then suddenly this place in Yoakum popped up with all the markings of fate. 
We were prepared. We jumped. We are working the project. 
  Jenny and I are still working in Austin, where we are known and appreciated in our workplaces, where we have social capital. We hope to build social capital in Yoakum, and we maintain social capital in our Texas family-relations, which are a bit more fluid than exact locations.
  I'm just saying that this is the path we are on as we enter this process of complex change. The complex societal and environmental reorganization is in the direction of less stuff, less energy, less hierarchy (unaffordable) and abrogation of the guarantees of the exhausted post WW-2 social contract.
  We are already all into the beginning of the white water rapids, but we also all have some agency, some ability to adjust direction, both immediately and knowing that we are in the rapids until further notice.

Charles Hugh Smith:  Welcome to the Crazed, Frantic Demise of Finance Capitalism
  The cognitive dissonance required to ignore the widening gap between the real economy and the fraud's basic machinery--speculation funded by "money" conjured out of thin air--has reached a level of denial that can only be termed psychotic.
  When scams start unraveling, the scammers become increasingly frantic to maintain the illusion of legitimacy and the delusion of guaranteed gains that are the lifeblood of every scam. One sure sign that the flim-flam is about to collapse is the manic rise of FOMO, fear of missing out, as the scammers jam the Ponzi scheme's stellar returns to new extremes...
  Unfortunately for everyone invested in the scam, all the "wealth" created by financial engineering / legalized fraud is fictitious, i.e. phantom. All Ponzi schemes collapse once the supply of greed-blinded marks dries up, and so the "solution" in our finance capitalism fraud is for the central bank, the Federal Reserve, to become the mark with an infinite checkbook: the Fed is busily conjuring "money" out of thin air to buy corporate junk bonds and other "assets" (ha-ha, as if these are actually worth anything--the joke's on you) to prop up the Ponzi scheme.
This works until it doesn't, of course.

 Help, I've fallen and I'm out-of-practice at crawling on the floor!
Why a Great Reset Based on Green Energy Isn’t Possible
, Gail Tverberg
The economy isn’t really like a computer that can be switched on and off; it is more comparable to a human body that is dead, once it is switched off...
​  ​Modelers of all kinds would like to think that there are no limits in this world. Actually, there are many limits. It is the fact that economies have to work around limits that leads to cycles such as these. Some examples of limits include inadequate arable land for a growing population, inability to fight off pathogens, and an energy supply that becomes excessively expensive to produce. Cycles can be expected to vary in steepness, both on the upside and the downside of the cycle.​..
​  ​Many people have been concerned that we might “run out” of oil. They expect that oil prices will rise to compensate for the shortages. Thus, many people believe that in order to maintain adequate supply, we should be concerned about supplementing fossil fuels with nuclear power and renewable energy.
​  ​If we examine oil prices (Figure 2), it is apparent that, at least recently, this is not the way oil prices actually behave. Since the spike in oil prices in 2008, the big problem has been prices that fall too low for oil producers. At prices well below $100 per barrel, development of many new oil fields is not economic.​..
 Prices were very low in 2015 and 2016 for both coal and oil. China stimulated its economy, and prices for both coal and oil were able to rise again in 2017 and 2018. By 2019, prices for both oil and coal were falling again. Figure 2 shows that in 2020, oil prices have fallen again, as a result of demand destruction caused by pandemic shutdowns. Coal prices have also fallen in 2020​...
 The low prices since mid-2008 seem to be leading to both peak crude oil and peak coal. Crude oil production started falling in 2019 and can be expected to continue falling in 2020. Coal extraction seems likely to start falling in 2020.​..​ investment in new oil wells is being reduced, and unprofitable coal mines are being closed.
​  ​Modelers missed the fact that fossil fuel extraction would disappear because of low prices, leaving nearly all reserves and other resources in the ground. Modelers instead assumed that renewables would always be an extension of a fossil fuel-powered system.​..
 Thus, modelers looking at Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI) for wind and for solar assumed that they would always be used inside of a fossil fuel powered system that could provide heavily subsidized balancing for their intermittent output. They made calculations as if intermittent electricity is equivalent to electricity that can be controlled to provide electricity when it is needed. Their calculations seemed to suggest that making wind and solar would be useful. The thing that was overlooked was that this was only possible within a system where other fuels would provide balancing at a very low cost.​..
 The low selling prices of commodities makes it impossible for employers to pay adequate wages to most of their workers. These low wages, in turn, feed through to the uprisings we have been seeing in the last couple of years​...
​  If electricity is only available when the sun is shining, or when the wind is blowing, industry cannot plan for its use. Its use ​​must be limited to applications where intermittency doesn’t matter, such as pumping water for animals to drink or desalinating water. No one would attempt to smelt metals with intermittent electricity because the metals would set at the wrong time, if the intermittent electricity suddenly disappeared. No one would power an elevator with intermittent electricity, because a person could easily be trapped between floors. Homeowners would not use electricity to power refrigerators, because, as likely as not, the food would spoil when electricity was off for long periods. Traffic signals would work sometimes, but not others.​..
​  Wind, solar, and hydroelectric today only comprise a little under 10% of the world’s energy supply.
We are deluding ourselves if we think we can get along on such a tiny total energy supply.​..
​  Few people understand how important energy supply is for giving humans control over other species and pathogens.​ [I personally expect malaria and other mosquito born illness​es​ to return to places like Houston.]
​  ​Control over other species and pathogens has been a multistage effort. In recent years, this effort has involved antibiotics, antivirals and vaccines. Pasteurization became an important technique in the 1800s.​..
 We do indeed appear to be headed for a Great Reset. There is little chance that Green Energy can play more than a small role...
​ It is true that some Green Energy devices may continue to operate for a time. But, as the world economy continues to head downhill, it will be increasingly difficult to make new renewable devices and to repair existing systems. Wholesale electricity prices can be expected to stay very low...  
​...​we can expect more revolutions and wars at this stage in the cycle. At least part of this unrest will be related to low commodity prices and low wages. Globalization will tend to disappear. Keeping transmission lines repaired will become an increasing problem, as will many other tasks associated with keeping energy supplies available.https://ourfiniteworld.com/2020/07/17/why-a-great-reset-based-on-green-energy-isnt-possible/ 

 Oh, this is useful information!
Narcissists, Psychopaths, and Manipulators Are More Likely To Engage in 'Virtuous Victim Signaling,' Says Study

​Communication through manipulation of symbols. (I need to learn more about William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt)
​  ​The official portraits of former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were removed from the Grand Foyer of the White House within the last week, aides told CNN, and replaced by those of two Republican presidents who served more than a century ago...
 The portrait of former President Barack Obama is not expected to be unveiled for a formal ceremony during Trump's first term, a sign of the bitter relationship between the 44th and 45th presidents. Trump has accused Obama of unsubstantiated and unspecified crimes, and has questioned whether Obama was born in the US for years...
Trump has -- less frequently -- similarly disparaged Bush and Clinton. In his book, former Trump national security adviser John Bolton wrote Trump "despised" both Bush presidents, and people familiar with the conversations say Trump has lambasted George W. Bush as "stupid." Trump has similarly castigated Clinton, the husband of his 2016 presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, and suggested he was a bad president...
  The Bush portrait has been replaced by that of William McKinley, the nation's 25th president, who was assassinated in 1901, and the Clinton portrait has been replaced by one of Theodore Roosevelt, who succeeded McKinley​.​ 
(Trump finds kinship. Who were their enemies?)

​William McKinley was the last US president to fight in the Civil War, and was reluctant to go to war with Spain (but did). McKinley was assassinated early in his second term, a lone working-class, anti-imperialist, assassin with a hidden pistol.
As a longtime champion of protective tariffs, the Republican McKinley ran on a platform of promoting American prosperity.

Theodore Roosevelt unexpectedly became the 26th president of the United States in September 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley. Young and physically robust, he brought a new energy to the White House, and won a second term on his own merits in 1904. Roosevelt, a Republican, confronted the bitter struggle between management and labor head-on and became known as the great “trust buster” for his strenuous efforts to break up industrial combinations under the Sherman Antitrust Act.  

​Google is forced by circumstances to tighten up on though-policing through defunding. What's the world coming to?
Google Will Ban Ads On Sites Publishing "Debunked" Coronavirus Theories

The problem with antibody testing to determine presence of, or loss of immunity to coronavirus, is that the main immune response resides in immunologic memory cells, which hold the key to attacking invaders the next time they enter your body, but keep a low profile until that happens. It might well be better than we hear, but we won't know until we are challenged with virus.

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons says:
​ ​ Stunning positive news on hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was released in early July, potentially opening up medical freedom at the time of America’s celebration of our Declaration of Independence from British tyranny 244 years ago.
​  ​During the first six days of July, SIX positive clinical studies of HCQ were released:
​​three from the United States (one from Michigan at Henry Ford Health System, and two from New York state, including one primary care outpatient study by Dr. Vladimir Zelenko
three from other countries (Portugal, India, and Brazil).
All six studies showed that HCQ given early in COVID-19, alone or with zinc and azithromycin, reduces hospitalizations and deaths, with no serious heart or other adverse events.


​Seeing Opportunity​

(Pictured yesterday morning with Buddha in Austin garden)

Sunday, July 19, 2020

Walking The Path

Proceeding,

  It has been a long Thursday, Friday and Saturday, with Jenny's surgery process starting hours before dawn, then work that day, and a long work day Friday, bike home and drive to Yoakum. Saturday in Yoakum without a computer, doing things in the garden and arranging for some house repairs, shelling black eyed peas, driving back to Austin, cooking dinner for Jim, eating and talking about our lives. 
  Jenny came through her extensive cervical spine surgery well, and still has her voice, and is able to walk, and is out of the ICU. This is still a long road, but Jenny has a good constitution for walking it.

  What road are we really on? We presume to know where we are going, but we had no idea at Christmas that we'd be where we are today. It's just getting weirder, because that's all it can do until we (meaning "you", as it always does) do one thing that makes sense, one at t time, and maybe re-do one thing repeatedly, until it works. Millions of people die going through transitions, a lot of them with the help of our owners and their military. 
Our turn may also be approaching, and maybe some of our owners , too, this time around...

Jim Kunstler: A Bigger Picture
​  ​Right now, start planning where you might go and what you can do. The turmoil will be filled with opportunity to find ways to be useful to other people, to devise work-arounds for ruptured systems and relationships, in getting food to people, making things they need, distributing them, fixing things that are broken where possible, and moving people and stuff from point A to point B. There will be plenty of work for people who are willing to do it. Keep in mind that it’s entirely up to you to make good choices.
​  ​Don’t despair, and if you find yourself veering toward it, get over yourself. It’s just part of becoming stronger than you thought you could be,  and the times will require it of you anyway. The offices that gave out brownie points for avouched victimhood will also be shutting down. Won’t that be a relief? Welcome to the joyful illumination that life is difficult for everybody. Who is ready for this epic journey?


​Most of human history has happened without money, without currency. How could this be possible? I am attempting to create the conditions ​necessary to slide into a life with less money, with less commerce. That's where I can go today.
This Is A Financial Extinction Event, Charles Hugh Smith:
  The lower reaches of the financial food chain are already dying, and every entity that depended on that layer is doomed.
  Though under pressure from climate change, the dinosaurs were still dominant 65 million year ago--until the meteor struck, creating a global "nuclear winter" that darkened the atmosphere for months, killing off most of the food chain that the dinosaurs depended on. (See chart below.)
  The ancestors of modern birds were one of the few dinosaur species to survive the extinction event, which took months to play out.
  It wasn't the impact and shock wave that killed off dinosaurs globally--it was the "nuclear winter" that doomed them to extinction. As plants withered, the plant-eating dinosaurs expired, depriving the predator dinosaurs of their food supply.
  This is a precise analogy for the global economy, which is entering a financial "nuclear winter" extinction event.

Walking In Your Footsteps, The Police

Roger Seheult MD Discusses the role of vitamin-D in helping the body fight the effects of SARS-CoV-2 virus, with special focus on the arterial lining, the endothelium, where the battle for life is fought. Recent paper has more vitamin-D data, and it's all the same, just more. Take 5000 units per day, or whatever it takes to get your level above 60. Thanks Marjorie

Here is Vladimir Zelenko MD's COVID-19 case series data. This man got no respect for his successful pioneering of outpatient hydroxychloroquine, zinc and azithromycin treatment, except from his patients practicing physicians, and Ilargi at The Automatic Earth, who found most of these COVID links today... 
I first  saw Dr Zelenko's data on April 1, 2020. Wasn't that a long time ago, now? The problem was that it was presented on an independent blog by a non-medical blogger, and mailed to President Trump. No respect. 
I finally posted it, zits-and-all, as the last link in the 4/13/20 "Horowitz Proboscoid Viral Interceptor" entry.  http://www.johndayblog.com/2020/04/horowitz-proboscoid-viral-interceptor.html
​  ​"The world seems to have forgotten common medical knowledge: that we want to treat any patient with an infectious disease as soon as possible," said Derwand. "What differentiates this study is that patients were prescribed these medications early, in the outpatient setting. Dr. Zelenko treated his risk stratified patients immediately and didn't wait for the disease to intensify."
​  ​"The well-tolerated 5-day triple therapy resulted in a significantly lower hospitalization rate and less fatalities with no reported cardiac side effects compared with relevant public reference data of untreated patients," said Sholz. "The magnitude of the results can substantially elevate the relevance of early use, low dose hydroxychloroquine, especially in combination with zinc. This data can be used to inform ongoing pandemic response policies as well as future clinical trials."
​  ​"It's unfortunate much of the news coverage surrounding hydroxychloroquine has been negative," Zelenko added. "This study suggests that when taken early and together with zinc and azithromycin, this cost-effective drug can be part of the solution to the pandemic."


​Dr Zelenko speaks for himself, answering questions on video. He is not wishy-washy. "This is battlefield medicine."   
I think this is a few months old, maybe late April.  He had treated over 1000 patients and had not seen Torsade des pointes cardiac arrhythmia. He "was in direct contact with the White House" and FDA approval had come through.

​Ilargi found this "Deep Dive on Hydroxychloroquine", which has good links to studies and national population data that show that case fatality rates drop when countries institute early outpatient treatment with hydroxychloroquine. 
(My daughter, Holly Day MD says that her hospital in San Antonio had unusually low case fatality rate from March, until mid May, when the Infectious Disease specialists banned the use of hydroxychloroquine. Deaths have been higher since then. Not good numbers any more.​)

​Can you catch COVID twice? Yes, especially if it was mild the first time. It may also be that you could have an overly vigorous "cytokine storm" immune response with a second infection, if you did make antibodies the first time. (People with a mild first case , especially young people, in China, were less likely to mount an antibody response. They just cleared it from their noses. It didn't attack their lungs, guts or blood vessels. Main goals of a vaccine could be to make profits and control people?)​

Yet again. Wear a mask when indoors with other humans. 
  Wearing a mask helps to protect you and others from the spread of COVID-19, which is primarily transmitted by droplets.
  Face coverings reduce the risk of infection by 65%, according to research.
Aerosol particles we expel when we talk are the second major mode of transmission - and are more difficult to defend against.
  Social distancing and wearing a mask prevent you from spreading COVID-19, but they also protect you from getting it, two experts explain in a new video discussion of coronavirus transmission.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/experts-a-mask-cuts-your-coronavirus-risk-by-65/

​On a lighter note, David Stockman says Tony Fauci gets the limo in the clown-car-parade all to himself.

​Since when does the CIA need authorization from Donald Trump?​ 
(It's a good thing Russia doesn't really do this to America. Our allies in Israel have-our-backs, don'tcha know?)
Trump Secretly Authorized CIA To Run "Very Aggressive" Cyberwar Ops With No Oversight
The Central Intelligence Agency has conducted a series of covert cyber operations against Iran and other targets since winning a secret victory in 2018 when President Trump signed what amounts to a sweeping authorization for such activities, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter.  

​  ​By now, you probably already know about the massive Twitter hack that has taken place this evening where, in summary, the following has taken place:
​  ​A massive hack which allegedly has originated at a Twitter employee with access to the user management panel was, has affected hundreds of billionaires and politicians, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Elon Musk, Wiz Khalifa, Apple, Uber, Jeff Bezos, Benjamin Netanyahu
​  ​Tweets urged people to send money to a Bitcoin address; over $113,000 has been sent so far
Twitter has investigated and appears to have resolved most of the issue after taking down the offending Tweets and restoring access to the site for those with blue checkmarks, all of whom were previously shut down from the site
​  ​For the full details on the hack, you can read our report on it here. But now, an even more sinister subplot is emerging from the ruins of Twitter's reputation.
​  ​Sources that are "close to or inside" the underground hacking community have leaked a screenshot of what is allegedly an internal software panel used by Twitter to interact with user accounts, according to a late Wednesday night report from Vice.The tool is said to be used to help change ownership of popular accounts and, in the case of the hack, was said to play a role in usurping the high profile accounts involved. Here is a photo of the panel, with portions redacted by the leaker of the photo to Motherboard.  

​The Bank Of England Governor signals that Central Banking Digital Currency will be coming. This is the right scale for a digital currency, the proper application of bitcoin (while central banking and the internet persist).​
  As confirmed by several economic outlets, including Bloomberg, Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey took part in a VTALK with students this past Monday for Speakers for Schools. When the subject of digital currency came up, Bailey said:
  "We are looking at the question of, should we create a Bank of England digital currency. We’ll go on looking at it, as it does have huge implications on the nature of payments and society. I think in a few years time, we will be heading toward some sort of digital currency."

There is a serious offer on the table to reconstitute Europe as Europe, the land of the Europen peoples. This is at odds with the doomed globalist project. Here is a statement from the opening of the Europe Uncensored Conference:
The Opening (François-Xavier Bellamy)
​  ​The Moderator of the event Mr. Bellamy laid down the ideological framework of the views of an “Eastern” European Union and a summary of its history from this other point of view. He did such an excellent job that it is best to take a look at what he actually said without summation.
​  ​“Politics could finally come to an end and dissolved itself in the efficient administration of the economy, there was nothing more to care about nothing left to be protected…”“All of this, even the human condition itself was to be replaced and this was called progress…”
‘Societies were not made of citizens but of consumers… work was only a boring means to buy leisure…”
“Anything that dared still to claim a higher a higher value than individual life, and immediate pleasure was an danger to denounce…”
​  ​“No limits could now, stop a never-ending movement preventing any historical continuity to occur, no rules to stop the vibrations of the markets to absorb all of human life and no borders to refrain the migration that was supposed to become our common horizon. In this moment it looks like (the) European Union was a synonym for this end of history… we are in 2020 now watching the end of the end of history and this is what we should talk about today…”
​  ​“We are united by the whole history of a civilization, Europe is not an international organization that would be empty of any content, though we denied it in the last decades we are united by our common roots. Eastern, Central, Western Europe share a common heritage and simple eyes can see it…”​ ...​
​  ​Calling a “spade a spade” is always a good option for a Populist, the key thing is, despite these strong words, the message of Mr. Orbán and the other leaders is one of changing course, not jumping ship. So far the subcontext of the language used at the event sounded like a warning shot. They are essentially trying to politely yet loudly tell the EU that the ideological side of the status quo is not working. They want to shift the EU towards a pro-Christian, less-Liberal, pro-Family organization not tear it all down for the sake of some revolution. They want the Eastern vision for what the EU could be to come into mainstream acceptance.​..
   Europe Uncensored was a friendly warning that something is wrong in society with a gentlemanly offer to fix it together. But no offer lasts forever.  

​Appreciating Human Cultures​