Sunday, August 30, 2020

Pawns Shoot Pawns

Shrimps On Barbie,

​  ​So this teenage summer-lifeguard goes to scrub graffiti off a school after work, then goes over to help protect a garage from getting destroyed in a riot, and also to provide first aid. He does both thing​s​, but ​somehow, ​he’s got an ​A​R-15 when he’s giving first aid​. 
He didn't bring it from home.
​Some of the ​rioters​ he kept away from the garage he was protecting recognize him and attack him in a couple of waves. 
​Summer-lifeguard​ shoots the first ​armed ​guy rushing him from behind in the arm, and then renders first aid, until more people come after him, shouting to others to join them. 
​Our well-intentioned teenager with an assault rifle​ runs, stumbles,​ and gets physically​ beaten​.
​M​ore ​angry rioters ​are gathering around him to beat him more. He shoots the closest 2 guys beating ​hi​m, one ​who is armed​, shoots them dead.
Who gave the 17 year old lifeguard with a first aid kit the AR-15?
That’s the important question in war.  
Both "sides" in the streets are being funded and supplied by the rich and powerful.
The owners would like everybody to pick a side against those other not-rich people, please.​ 

​It seems to be working, same as usual. Just wear something that identifies you as a target for "the-other-side".
'I'm Not Sad That A Fu*king Fascist Died Tonight': Left-Wing Portland Protesters Celebrate Murder Of Trump Supporter
​  ​A man was shot ​  ​in the chest and killed in downtown Portland Saturday night as violence broke out across the city between a participants in a pro-Trump caravan and a protest organized by several opposing groups, including Antifa.
​  ​Police are investigating the incident which occurred at around 8:45 p.m. when officers responded to the sound of gunfire.
According to The Oregonian, police found "camouflage gear with infidel and thin blue line patches, which commonly indicate support for law enforcement, while the New York Times reports that he was "wearing a hat with the insignia of Patriot Prayer," a right-wing group which has had frequent altercations with Antifa over the past several years.  

Samo Burja joins Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton to discuss how great founders make history through the institutions they create, how political transitions actually work, and what intellectual dark matter exists in our society today.​ (Full transcript, too)

 Shadowplay revisited: how Eurasia is being reshaped​ , Pepe Escobar, via TheSaker Blog
​  ​A closely guarded secret in Moscow is that right after German sanctions imposed in relation to Ukraine, a major global energy operator approached Russia with an offer to divert to China no less than 7 million barrels a day of oil plus natural gas. Whatever happens, the stunning proposal is still sitting on the table of Shmal Gannadiy, a top oil/gas advisor to President Putin.
​  ​In the event that would ever happen, it would secure for China all the natural resources they need from Russia. Under this hypothesis, the Russian rationale would be to bypass German sanctions by switching its oil exports to China, which from a Russian point of view is more advanced in consumer technology than Germany.
​  ​Of course this all changed with the imminent conclusion of Nord Stream 2 – despite Team Trump taking no prisoners to sanction everyone in sight.
​  ​Backdoor intel discussions made it very clear to German industrialists that if Germany would ever lose its Russian source of oil and natural gas, coupled with the Strait of Hormuz shut down by Iran in the event of an American attack, the German economy might simply collapse.
​  ​There have been serious cross-country intel discussions about the possibility of a US-sponsored October Surprise involving a false flag to be blamed on Iran. Team Trump’s “maximum pressure” on Iran has absolutely nothing to do with the JCPOA. What matters is that even indirectly, the Russia-China strategic partnership has made it very clear that Tehran will be protected as a strategic asset – and as a key node of Eurasia integration.


EU Prepares Sanctions On Turkey Over 'Militarized' Mediterranean Drilling​   (Pipeline wars will only get more important)
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/eu-prepares-sanctions-turkey-over-militarized-mediterranean-drilling  


The Next Normal, looks at the stresses to our declining political economy (We don't call it that these days.) and the various decision-trees going forward into Central-Bankism, Populism, "Marxism" with various non-Marxist features, and so on. 
Informative and politely written. Thanks Randy. Thanks also for help accessing the PDF link!
file:///C:/Users/John.MEADOWS/Downloads/2709750_The%20Next%20Normal%20(1).pdf

New Insights into How COVID-19 Causes Heart Damage

​Even people with fairly mild COVID still had damaged hearts months later.
Signs of Cardiac Damage Even in Younger, Nonhospitalized COVID-19 Patients
A series of middle-aged patients followed more than 2 months after diagnosis showed that most had abnormal results on CMR..
​  T​here are more signs that COVID-19 may cause damage to the heart that lasts beyond the acute phase, based on an imaging study conducted at a single center in Germany. Despite the fact that 67% of the patients who volunteered for the study never required hospitalization, 78% had abnormal cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) findings 2 to 3 months after testing positive for the virus.
​  ​“These were not the patients that had problems or any cardiac symptoms at all,”


 In an Egyptian medical study, a prospective, controlled trial, not yet peer-reviewed, ivermectin performed very well as post-exposure prophylaxis for close family members of COVID patients.Thanks again, Marjorie.

If you can get tested and treated, you don't need to be an early vaccine adopter.
Russia’s Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine gives good immune response, critics don’t understand how it works – Health Ministry expert

​Beating Heart​

Thursday, August 27, 2020

Vocation

Working On Solutions,

Bread and circuses only supported Roman social structure for so long, after the richest came to own all the arable land, and the grain came from far away North Africa by ships.
Humans need the meaning imparted into their lives, which shared work towards tangible goals provides.
Growing food, making clothing, building houses, fixing plumbing, tending children, cooking for people, and so many human vocations provide this. Social engagement is inherent in the meaningful work, which makes it stronger and more real.
Is rioting a vocational activity? It might meet those core criteria. People seem to flock to it after lives without meaning, at critical turning points in history.
Only Bernie Sanders seems to be talking about a job guaranty, or he was before he just started talking about electing Joe Biden 24:7.
Hey, I keep seeing more interviews with black people who say that jobs are the fix for the unrest they have to live with every day. I wonder if they’re onto something, there…
This is not the way the minds of our shadowy puppet masters work, because they want centralized production and centralized control of “the masses”.

​Samo Burja, again, and worth pondering, again: 
How Late Zhou China Reverse-Engineered a Civilization
  Confucius, who died just a few years before the 
Warring States period, has a popular reputation among Westerners today for the wise sayings attributed to him. But his true project was to discover and restore the practices which had made the Zhou dynasty great. By doing so, he believed a ruler could renew an entire society, bringing a decayed, dysfunctional state and people back to health. This was to be achieved with the proper application of rituals by sufficiently virtuous rulers. By pursuing the correct relationships and rites, they could correct the damage done by the decline of the Zhou social order and the resulting warfare. Confucius focused on ascertaining both the correct rituals and the means with which to achieve virtue (德) in rulers. The meaning of 德 is subtle; perhaps it should be thought of as including what we might today understand as prestige, an important resource for any statesman. He crafted his philosophy by extensive research and study of the Zhou dynasty and its predecessors, attempting to reverse-engineer and understand the lost knowledge of the Early Zhou. Confucius sought to fill the gaps in his understanding of social technology by close study of the ritual and literature of a society which no longer existed.
​  ​The role of harmonious social relationships is the most widely known attribute of Confucian teaching. But an aspect that is overlooked is Confucius’ emphasis on the traditional Chinese rites. In particular, Confucius was obsessed with the classical Book of Changes, also known as the I Ching, authored by King Wen, the founder of the Zhou dynasty.

Let me preface this article​, and I do not fundamentally disagree with it, by saying that totalitarianism is a short term plan, not a long term strategy. It is exhausting and destructive to maintain. A better and more elegant solution is always longed for and quietly sought by "rising elites"..
The Totalitarian Future Globalists Want For The Entire World Is Being Revealed
​  ​All over the Western world ever since 9/11 there have been incremental steps towards what many liberty advocates would call a “police state”; a system in which governments are no longer restricted by the boundaries of civil liberties and are given the power to do just about anything they want in the name of public safety. The use of “the law” as a tool for injecting tyranny into a culture is the first tactic of all totalitarians.
​  ​The idea is that by simply writing government criminality into the law books, that criminality somehow becomes justified by virtue of legal recognition. It's all very circular. Whenever government abuse of the people is initiated, it's always initiated in the name of what's “best for society as a whole”. To save society, the individuals that make up a society must be sublimated or destroyed. This mentality is the complete opposite of what the Founding Fathers in America fought and died for, but as Thomas Jefferson once said:
​  ​“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”
​  ​In countries like Australia, which claim to value Western democratic principles of liberty and rule by the people, the perception is that civil rights are codified into the legal framework just as they are in the US. However, there are some glaring differences and issues; specifically, Australian citizens (like many European citizens) have absolutely no means to compel their government or the elites that influence their government to limit themselves.

​This article opens, which I skip, by telling people WHY Trump is suddenly the most popular he has been, but I'm still trying to figure that out. I think it's complex. Trump  is not the status quo, and everyone who looks at him says that he's incapable of being that. 
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?​ (Trump disrupts. I don't think he can found a dynasty. Do you?)
​  ​The latest Zogby Analytics poll just shared with Secrets had Trump’s approval at 52%. “The president has recorded his best job approval rating on record,” said pollster Jonathan Zogby.
​  ​What’s more, his approval rating among minorities was solid and, in the case of African Americans, shockingly high. Zogby said 36% of blacks approve of the president, as do 37% of Hispanics and 35% of Asians.


  In the face of growing concern about online content and antitrust investigations, the monopolistic positions of Silicon Valley’s Big Tech giants have increasingly come under scrutiny. As a result, they have all been ramping up their lobbying capacities by recruiting well-connected insiders.
  The Wall Street journal revealed that in 2019, Facebook increased its expenditure on lobbying by nearly 25 percent, to $12.3 million, through the first nine months of the year. Amazon notched a 16 percent jump in lobbying outlays, to $12.4 million. Apple boosted its spending by eight percent, and Microsoft by nine percent.
  The main goal of this is the protection of their existing and future businesses. When Facebook announced its move into the financial sphere by unveiling plans for a global cryptocurrency, it drew a barrage of trenchant criticism. Undaunted, it hired seven new outside lobbying firms to work on financial issues, including two former aides to the GOP chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Amazon, too, has brought on seven additional outside lobbying shops since the middle of 2018, including former members of Congress and congressional aides who work to influence federal spending.

​  ​In an open letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci, George C. Fareed, MD, of Brawley, California, Michael M. Jacobs, MD, MPH, of Pensacola, Florida, and Donald C. Pompan, MD, of Salinas, California, demonstrate the flaws in the positions adopted by NIH and FDA and give strong support to Dr. Risch. In particular, they criticize the nihilism of demanding proof of efficacy from randomized clinical trials (RCTs), when time is short and when highly suggestive observational proof of the efficacy of these inexpensive drugs exists. In the past, the FDA has approved many drugs without RCTs; penicillin was so efficacious in the treatment of pneumonia that there was no need for an RCT to have penicillin registered. Perhaps most disturbing is that not a single RCT is designed to test the efficacy of the triple therapy in outpatient settings as early as possible among those most at risk. Nevertheless, the official position is that “the overwhelming evidence from properly conducted RCTs indicates no therapeutic efficacy of HCQ,” though the RCTs are simply designed not to answer the right question: whether the triple therapy prevents deaths among the elderly and those with comorbidities when taken in outpatient settings, even before people are notified about the lab result as to whether they have Covid-19. It cannot be ethical for public health bodies to demand impossible standards of proof for potential lifesaving therapies.
 Indeed, Dr. Fauci’s position seems remarkably similar to that of the famous English statistician Ronald A. Fisher, who, in 1957, denied that tobacco smoking caused lung cancer, despite evidence of the strong statistical relationship. Fisher argued vehemently that observational data cannot prove causality. It is disturbing that Dr. Fauci does not engage in honest scientific debate based on observational evidence but rather resorts to personalized attacks.


Is Gilead, the maker of Remdesivir, waging war on HCQ (hydroxychloroquine)?
 Attacks on the drug have been continuous ever since Dr. Didier Raoult used this quinine derivative to save the lives of COVID-19 patients last March.  The first attempt to discredit HCQ was a hastily compiled Veterans' Administration hospital system study last April.  Notably, one of the study's authors had in the past received numerous grants from Gilead, with one grant in 2018 totaling nearly a quarter of a million dollars.
 After deep flaws in the V.A. study were exposed, Surgisphere came to the rescue in May with a "15,000 patient" megastudy allegedly compiled from hospitals all over the world.  This strategy succeeded: following its publication in the Lancet and the NEJM, all outpatient use of HCQ was severely restricted in the U.S., Australia, and most of Europe
 When the Surgisphere scam was exposed, both articles were quietly retracted, and the editor-in-chief of the Lancet tried to wash his hands of this embarrassing incident by denouncing Surgisphere's "monumental fraud."
However only a few days earlier, Lancet editors played a major role in persuading the WHO to suspend all trials for HCQ.  Who put them up to it?
 
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/what_is_gileads_role_in_the_war_on_hydroxychloroquine.html

​Obesity is a pro-inflammatory condition in the body, particularly in the critical COVID battleground of the arterial lining, the endothelium.​
Diet should be mostly fresh vegetables, cooked and raw (not potatoes), no sweet drinks (real or artificial), and avoiding starches at evening meal, after the day's work is done, since they will go to storage. 
Take 5000 units of vitamin D daily, please!
Obesity increases risk of Covid-19 death by 48%, study finds

​Healthy Contributor​

Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Nightmare Spreads

Can't Wake Up,

  From Lockdown to Police State (just a lateral move at that point) Ellen Brown writes about sudden imposition of tyranny in Australia.“But the piece de resistance,” writes Burchell, “has to be that now police officers can enter homes with neither a warrant nor permission. This is an astonishing violation of civil liberties…. Deaths of this kind are not normally cause for government action, let alone the effective house arrest of an entire city.” He quoted Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews, who told Victorians, “there is literally no reason for you to leave your home and if you were to leave your home and not be found there, you will have a very difficult time convincing Victoria police that you have a lawful reason.”    [U]nder this new regime you can’t even remain in your house unmolested by the cops, they can just pop ‘round anytime to make sure you haven’t had Bruce and Sheila from next door round for a couple of drinks. All over a disease that is simply not that fatal….   Last year more than 310,000 Australians were hospitalised with flu and over 900 died. By all metrics that makes flu a worse threat than COVID-19 but police weren’t granted Stasi-like powers during the flu season. Millions of people weren’t confined to their homes and threatened with AUS$5,000 fines for not having a good reason for being out of their homes.   At an August 19th press conference, Australia’s second most senior medical officer said the government would be discussing measures such as banning restaurants, international travel, public transport, and withholding government programs through “No Jab No Pay” in order to coerce vaccine resisters.https://www.unz.com/article/from-lockdown-to-police-state-the-great-reset-rolls-out/

   Don't Trust The Medical or Security Establishment, RFK Jr. Particularly watch 4:00 to 12:45 as he discusses the assassinations of his father and his uncle. There is alot about vaccine toxicity and chronic lifetime conditions, including autism, after that  RFK Jr is a friend and advocate of science, but the science does not say what big pharma says it says, or their spokesdog Tony Fauci says. It doesn't have to. Congress exempted them from liability 3 decades ago. Fact-free-profits. Thanks Eleni.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kJdOtnBUcw&feature=youtu.be*

 "We Are Entering Into A War Period" - Catherine Austin Fitts Warns "Nothing Will Ever Be The Same" We are in the process that I would recall is a global reset. The entire financial system is being reset. There are two aspects of this: One is extending the old system, and the other is bringing in the new system. It’s very much being done on the fly by trial and error, but the new system is 100% digital.” The new system, according to Fitts, will be a top down control system where “tyranny” will be the key feature. Fitts predicts, “If you look at the tyranny they are working on delivering, I don’t think most people realize how hideous some of their plans are. So, the tyranny that’s coming and the printing that’s coming is greater than anything we have seen so far...
"https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/we-are-entering-war-period-austin-fitts-warns-nothing-will-ever-be-same

 It has been hard to find factual, complete, and even handed reporting of this important story. "The Wobblies" provide that, here.  Protests erupted in Kenosha, Wisconsin Sunday night after a still unidentified Kenosha police officer shot an unarmed African-American father of three, 29-year-old Jacob Blake, in the back seven times at point-blank range. Blake was attempting to enter his vehicle where his children, aged three, five and eight, were seated in the back.   The video, which has been viewed millions of times across multiple social media platforms in less than 24 hours, uncorked a geyser of social anger in Kenosha and across the country as protesters took to the streets in opposition to unending police brutality...  The Wisconsin Department of Justice Division of Criminal Investigation released a statement within hours of Blake’s shooting declaring that the agency will be leading the investigation into the shooting with the aim of providing “a report of the incident to the prosecutor within 30 days,” after which the prosecutor will make a determination “about what charges, if any, are appropriate.”   Two unidentified Kenosha police officers have been placed on administrative leave, pending the results of the investigation, which will rely on witness statements and social media video footage...    Witnesses and Blake’s attorney, Benjamin Crump, attest that Blake, who works as a security guard, was breaking up a fight between two adult women. Stella London, who lives in the neighborhood with her daughters, thought the incident began over a scratched car and that once the police showed up, they just “assumed” Blake was the problem, she recalled to the Washington Post.   La-Ron Franklin, speaking to ABC7, said she witnessed “some girls fighting.” Franklin then saw “a gentleman breaking up the fight. When he was turning to get his kids, the officer shot this man seven times."   Blake’s fiancée, Laquisha Booke, told ABC7 that Blake was unarmed. “That don't make no sense to treat somebody like that, who is not armed, with the kids in the back screaming,” she said.    Following the shooting, a crowd quickly gathered around the officers, who were forced to retreat in the face of hundreds of people as they marched towards the local police station, demanding that the shooter be arrested.   Upon arriving at the police station, a multiracial group of protesters, including women and children, were ordered to disperse and then met with a fusillade of rubber bullets and tear gas. Police attempted to use garbage trucks to block the protesters’ path. However, as night fell, the trucks were set ablaze, as angry demonstrators remained on the streets outside the Kenosha County Public Safety building, filling the night with cries of “No justice, no peace.”   Hundreds of protesters continued to remain in the streets, defying the hastily imposed 10:15 p.m. Sunday night curfew. In response, SWAT teams as well as riot police and an urban assault vehicle were deployed in an attempt to enforce the curfew, with police firing tear gas and rubber bullets at marchers well past 1 a.m.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/25/keno-a25.html 

 This seems likely, too: "This Isn't The Kenosha I Know" - Local Law Enforcement Believe Rioters Fueling Wisconsin Violence Travel From Chicago https://www.zerohedge.com/political/kenosha-law-enforcement-believe-rioters-fueling-violence-travel-chicago   After Nancy Pelosi referred to Republicans as "enemies of the state". The power elites are really fighting between factions we cannot even see, and whoever concedes will likely lose power and money.“Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually, I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is,” Clinton said in an interview. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hillary-clinton-says-biden-should-not-accept-results-2020-election How Nations Collapse: Disunity, Charles Hugh Smith  Though many blame Donald Trump for dividing the nation, the nation was already disunited. Trump's election simply added day-glo paint to the lines that had long been hardening between disunited, disaffected camps.  As I've explained over the years, disunity is the systemic source of collapse-- not just of nations and empires but of enterprises and families. In other words, disunity is scale invariant: it breaks down marriages, family fortunes, partnerships, corporations, nations and empires with the same dynamics.  When challenges arise--and challenges always arise--the unified family, enterprise, nation or empire can make the shared sacrifices necessary to meet the crisis head-on, and not just survive, but as befits an anti-fragile system (as per Nassim Taleb's definition of anti-fragility), become stronger as a result of adapting to the crisis.  The family, enterprise, nation or empire fragmented by profound disunity is incapable of not just shared sacrifices but of a shared consensus on how to proceed against challenges such as famine, pandemic and economic depression. It is the nature of human existence that shared sacrifice is the glue that binds disparate individuals and groups into a unified and thus powerful entity. http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2020/08/how-nations-collapse-disunity.html

 The End of Empires, The Expansion of Tax Havens, and Decolonization as an Economic and Financial Event  This article explores the question of what happened to European assets in the process of decolonization. It argues that decolonization created a money panic of sorts that led white settlers, businessmen, and officials to seek to liquidate assets they owned and move funds out of the colonial world. Instead of being repatriated to metropolitan countries with high tax rates and exchange controls, money moved to tax havens.     Decolonization thus provided an important share of early postwar tax haven business in a period when tax havens and offshore finance expanded during the 1950s and 1960s. In turn, the withdrawal of Euro-American investments from the decolonizing world set the stage for the politics of development and modernization in the coming decades.   Ironically, the outflow of funds during decolonization and the subsequent return of some funds in restructured form as investments by multinational and other companies soon caused difficulties in newly independent developing countries. Companies soon found ways to rebook profits to have occurred in a tax haven rather than in the developing world, thus depriving low-income countries from tax revenue. The withdrawal of Euro-American investments from the colonial world during decolonization moreover had implications for the growth of portfolio investment, as funds removed from colonies were often invested through a tax haven onwards in US securities. All in all, decolonization was an economic and financial event that is only beginning to emerge in full detail.  https://academic.oup.com/past/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pastj/gtaa001/5896119?guestAccessKey=7d08e2e1-59c0-48e0-8c02-38b072ad9762 

 Wikipedia on all of the machinery of the Republican National Convention. Trump will accept the nomination from the (DMZ) White House lawn.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Republican_National_Convention  

 Senators Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Mike Lee (R-Utah) sent a letter to FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn explicitly asking about the agency’s handling of information regarding the drug and its use during the pandemic. Doctors and researchers advocating for hydroxychloroquine are recommending it be used in high-risk outpatients.   In the letter to Hahn, the senators are asking about specific actions the agency has taken regarding hydroxychloroquine. The current FDA guidance is that it should not be used outside the hospital setting for COVID-19, and the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) has been withdrawn. Given the safety profile of the medication and the fact it is used daily on an outpatient basis around the world for malaria prevention, malaria treatment, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus, this guidance is ridiculous on its face.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2020/08/24/the-fda-gets-tough-questions-about-hydroxychloroquine-from-republican-senators-n829877 

  Ralph Nader (I voted for him, so Bush won.) Discusses the power dynamics of the Democratic convention. (LBJ's rules, not FDR's deal.)  A national political nominating convention, as the Democrats have just completed, is, to be sure, a mutual admiration event. A steady stream of speakers led to the finale with the acceptance speech by the presidential candidate, Joe Biden. But the Convention has another declared purpose:  to show the country what the Democratic Party stands for and the future it wishes to shape for the American people.   Repetition is expected and it was no surprise that speaker after speaker attacked “inequality” and the injustices of discrimination against minorities, women, and the poor.   Intriguingly was what the three-day talkfest left out.  The Democratic Party avoided the issue of what to do about the gross maldistribution of power between the tiny few and the rest of the people in America.  This glaring omission signaled that the aggressive progressive wing of the Party – led by Bernie Sanders and youthful incumbents in Congress could have their priorities excluded with impunity by the Party bosses. The overriding desire for unity against Trump became the muzzle for most of the progressive delegates.   When unity, as if any Democrat had anything else in mind in stressing the defeat of dangerous and corrupt Donald, becomes a tool to demand unanimity on policies, alas, the Party is up to its old establishment ways...   The gross distortion of the federal budget with over 50% of operating expenditures going to the Pentagon, the bloated military contractors, and the pursuit of a boomeranging, draining Empire. Speakers could have felt secure by quoting President Eisenhower’s farewell warnings regarding the military-industrial complex. Empires starve their country’s necessities and the U.S. is no exception to such misallocation of funds.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/ralph-nader-the-democratic-party-is-avoiding-the-issue-of-what-to-do-about-the-gross-maldistribution-of-power-between-the-tiny-few-and-the-rest-of-the-people-in-america/  

 (Mach-V and very accurate against aircraft carriers, I hear...)  "China launched two medium-range missiles into the South China Sea on Wednesday morning, a source close to the Chinese military said, sending a warning to the United States," The South China Post reports in a major breaking development.   The launch is said to be in response to the major incident from Tuesday, wherein China's PLA military angrily denounced that a US U-2 spy plane allegedly entered a 'no-fly zone' off China's coast while the PLA conducted live-fire military drills. It was unclear exactly where the claimed breach of airspace happened, however.https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-fires-two-missiles-sea-warning-united-states-biggest-escalation-yet   Iran considers becoming a junior-partner to China, a very hard pill to swallow, and with no real assurance of support, when it will be most needed.
https://en.qantara.de/content/hic-sunt-dracones-is-iran-set-to-forfeit-its-national-interests-to-china?nopaging=1

  Might Belarus Become the Next Syria? The Saker  (What just changed?)
First and foremost, we can see a truly radical change in Lukashenko’s policies: if his initial instinct was to unleash a brutal repression of both the violent rioters and the peaceful demonstrators, now he has made a 180 and the outcome is quite amazing: on Sunday there were large anti-Lukashenko demonstrations yet not a single person was detained.  Not one.  Even more amazing is this: the Polish-run Nexta Telagram channel (which is the main medium used by the Empire to overthrow Lukashenko) initially called for a peaceful protest, but at the end of the day a call was made to try to take over the main Presidential building.  When the rioters (at this point we are dealing with an illegal, violent, attempt to overthrow the state – so I don’t call these people demonstrators) got to the building they were faced with a real “wall” of riot cops in full gear: this (really scary) sight was enough to stop the rioters who stood for a while, and then had to leave.  Second, Lukashenko did something rather weird, but which makes perfectly good sense in the Belarusian context: he dressed himself in full combat gear, grabbed an AKSU-74 assault rife, dressed his (15 year old!) son also in full combat gear (helmet included) and flew in his helicopter over Minsk and then landed in the Presidential building.  They then walked to the riot cops, where Lukashenko warmly thanked them and which resulted in the full police force giving him a standing ovation.  To most of us this behavior might look rather outlandish if not outright silly.  But in the context of the Belarusian crisis, which is a crisis primarily fought in the informational realm, it makes perfectly good sense.   Last week Lukashenko said that no other elections, nevermind a coup, will happen as long as he is alive. This time Lukashenko decided to show, symbolically, that he is in charge and that he will die fighting along his son if needed.The message here is clear: “I am no Ianukovich and, if needed, I will die just like Allende died”. ...  I have a strong suspicion that what happened between Putin and Lukashenko is very similar to what happened between Putin and Assad: initially, both Assad and Lukashenko apparently thought that pure violence will solve the problem.  That profoundly mistaken belief resulted in a situation in which the legitimate authorities were almost overthrown (and this is still possible in Belarus).  In each case, the Russians clearly said something along the lines of “we will help you, but you have to radically change your methods”.  Assad listened.  Lukashenko apparently did too, at least to some degree (this process has just begun)... We must remember that when Russia intervened in Syria, the Syrian military was in shambles and basically defeated.  This is not at all the case in Belarus which has a superb military (of the “lean and mean” sort) and they can secure their own country, especially when backed by the KGB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs forces.http://thesaker.is/might-belarus-become-the-next-syria/

  Tsar Bomba video documentary is declassified and released. The largest nuclear warhead ever detonated equaled 50 million tons of TNT and made a proper mushroom cloud 42 miles tall. I can't imagine that, but there is the video with tense, then romantic music and narration in Russian.https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/tsar-bomba-russia-declassifies-footage-most-powerful-nuke-ever-tested

 No-Green, no-brain...  The study, published in the journal Plos Medicine, used satellite images to measure the level of greenness in neighbourhoods, including parks, gardens, street trees and all other vegetation.   The average IQ score was 105 but the scientists found 4% of children in areas with low levels of greenery scored below 80, while no children scored below 80 in areas with more greenery.   The benefits of more greenery that were recorded in urban areas were not replicated in suburban or rural areas. Nawrot suggested this may be because those places had enough greenness for all children living there to benefit. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/24/children-raised-greener-areas-higher-iq-study  

 Climbed Trees Unsupervised

Sunday, August 23, 2020

Why Now

 Curious,


Why Do Civilizations Collapse? by Samo Burja, looks at the difficulty in transmitting expert knowledge, handing it down as culture, between generations. NASA (under Werner Von Baun, only) sent men to the moon, but now it is mostly a bureaucracy with declining competence. It just can't do the things it did 50 years ago. The US as a nation has outsourced most industry, due to making higher profits for the global capitalist class. Is it possible to reintroduce industry here? Do the social patterns and human skills exist in the US to do that?
  Why do civilizations collapse? This question bears not only on safeguarding our society’s future but also makes sense of our present. The answer relies on some of the same technē that humanity needed to build civilization in the first place...
  During civilizational collapse, no organization can properly hide its own inadequacy, since the whole interdependent ecosystem of institutions is caving in on itself. States, religions, material technologies, and ways of life that once seemed self-sustaining turn out to have been dependent on the invisible subsidy of just a few key institutions... 
  Despite being an excellent epistemic opportunity, civilizational collapse seldom inspires introspection among thinkers living through it. Mayan or Roman thinkers don’t seem to have reflected on their ongoing collapse. As institutions turn to cannibalizing each other, there is little patronage or emotional energy going towards accurately describing the wider process...
  In the West today, we operate under the influence of our own key philosophy, which we can call scientism: the tendency to rely on scientific claims to describe the functioning of society, even when there is no empirical reason to assume that they apply... 
  Our organs of economic management do not secretly know how the economy really works. Our systems of political regulation are operating on the fumes of their institutional inheritance from two or three generations ago—the last spurt of institutional growth in Western societies happened roughly during the 1970s...
  Civilizational collapse always looms on the horizon. Though we usually think of collapse as a slow process, it can in fact happen very quickly, as was the case with the Late Bronze Age collapse... 
  Our society is dominated by large bureaucracies. These bureaucracies break down the processing of physical goods and information into discrete tasks, such as how a factory worker puts doors on a car, or a stock trader buys futures contracts. These tasks are shorn of their context and executed in a systematized environment whose constraints are quite narrow: put the car door in, increase the portfolio value. Our society is thoroughly compartmentalized. This compartmentalization isn’t driven by the division of labor, but rather by the need to make use of misaligned talent without empowering it. By radically limiting employees’ scope of action, you make office politics more predictable. By fragmenting available knowledge, you can leverage information asymmetries to the intellectual or material advantage of the center. Some of this is necessary for scaling organizations beyond what socially connected networks can manage—but move too far towards compartmentalization, and it becomes impossible to accomplish the original mission of the organization...
  If you want to know, say, why the FBI exists, you can find the answer in the documents of its founder, J. Edgar Hoover...  
  It is very difficult, though, to apply this analysis to the construction of society. No matter how large or how small, institutions always coexist in a symbiotic relationship with other institutions...   Society is not a single institution, after all, but an ecosystem of interdependent institutions...
  In addition to this complexity, non-functional institutions are the rule. Our institutions today rarely function in accordance with their stated purpose... 
  Institutions often become non-functional due to the loss of key knowledge at critical junctures. Take, for example, the recent failure of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to reproduce a niche classified material known as FOGBANK that is necessary for manufacturing nuclear weapons. It took the NNSA ten years and millions of dollars to re-engineer a material that their staff in the 1980s knew how to make...
  Civilizational collapse, then, looks like this dynamic at the scale of an entire civilization: a low-grade but constant loss of capabilities and knowledge throughout the most critical parts of our institutions, that eventually degrades our ability to perpetuate society... 
  The key dynamic here is the loss of the subtle social technologies that allow us to solve the succession problem. Running a large and complex institution requires skills which are often difficult to fully pass on. How can a successful founder ensure a successor who leads as competently as they did? The succession problem is the central obstacle to transferring the ownership and knowledge of institutions from generation to generation...
  Often the problem is that the kids “don't get the joke”: if you create an institution with a false premise in order to mislead society as to your true goals, the people you hire into it might be fooled by the propaganda themselves...
  We can define civilizational collapse as a process wherein most recognizable large-scale institutions of a society vanish, coupled with a drop in material wealth, a drop in the complexity of material artifacts and social forms, a reduction in travel distance and physical safety of the inhabitants, and a mass reduction in knowledge. 
  Loss of knowledge is especially damaging, since it accelerates the other aspects of collapse and ensures that they will be long-lasting...  
  Such losses of knowledge are a constant throughout human history: as with FOGBANK, or as with the state of New Jersey recently scrambling to find a COBOL programmer with the ability to overhaul their legacy information systems...
  My theory of history is great founder theory: I propose that social technologies do not evolve out of mass action, but rather are devised by a tiny subset of institutional designers. Looking at history, we see that new organizations and social forms often arise within a single generation, showing jumps in social complexity far too rapid to be explained away by collective action or evolution... 
   It often takes an exceptional individual with exceptional vision to create a new social or material technology... 
  The result is usually one or more institutions, created by the individual to carry out their goals. Institutions are not naturally self-documenting. The descriptions of themselves that they provide can be misleading...
 (Note: Global CO2 production seems to have fallen after 4th quarter 2014, with a bump in much of 2016 and 2017, then gradually declined from 2018 to present.)
  The interesting question for the prospective collapse of our own society is this: if you were a late imperial Roman, and someone told you about the ongoing decline in atmospheric lead, how would you process this information? Today, if we saw a drop in lead pollution, our first assumption might be that this is due to the advent of greener technology. Economic decline wouldn’t naturally come to mind...
  If we compare the roughly twelve identifiable Dark Ages following civilizational collapse on the Eurasian continent—the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations, the end of Mohenjo Daro, the decline of the Roman Empire, Han China and so on—we always find that nearly all material technology is not self-perpetuating, but rather rests on foundations of social technology. The only material technologies that routinely survive collapse are small-scale agriculture and small-scale metallurgy, likely because the social technologies needed to sustain such smaller communities can arise organically. Since collapse in material technology is always preceded by collapse in the practice of social technology, Dark Ages are always preceded by Intellectual Dark Ages. Knowledge of these social technologies is highly compartmentalized and, as a result, they are not understood explicitly by all parts of society. This means that a society undergoing an Intellectual Dark Age doesn’t realize it is going through one at all —all the people who would notice are long-gone, and those who remain are miseducated, role-playing the forms left behind by their predecessors without realizing that they’ve lost the substance. Often not just the knowledge, but the socioeconomic niche that once fostered the creation of new social technology has been obliterated in all but name...
  But if the Industrial Revolution was over, what would we expect to see? Much as we see a late Roman drop in lead pollution, today we see drops in pollution in the West...
  One could hypothesize the American worker and manager have, over time, lost the social technology that enabled them to run the assembly lines in the first place and that, now, our support for outsourcing isn’t so much due to greed as it is an adaptation to inability... We should seriously consider the possibility that we are a post-industrial society not in a positive sense, but in the sense that in our society the Industrial Revolution has stopped...
  Our society is the product of what were once advanced, rational, self-catalyzing systems of production, but we have now reverted to a more customary system, where things are simply done as they were 40 or 50 years ago. We have the same bureaucratic and economic institutions as we did then, with some marginal tweaks... 
  The United States is well-positioned to attempt such civilizational reforms, since it has a remarkable ability to integrate exceptional talent from all over the world and has put that talent to work on some of the most successful institutional projects in history, including the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program. America is, for now, in an unavoidable period of relative decline, and in 2030 or 2040 the largest economy in the world will almost certainly be that of China. But absolute decline is reversible—2060 is still an open question... 
  The solution lies with a small number of people who can independently judge the generative minds behind the facts, rather than merely minding the integrity of the established body of theories and observations... Engineering society to be self-perpetuating is an extremely difficult challenge, and we can devise all sorts of machinery to do so, but this is the bottom line. Such people are extremely rare, but if we create a socioeconomic niche for them, our civilization can rewrite its own future for the better.

That may seem long, but it is my excerpting of the high points of the short read. The long read is 95 pages, and I spent yesterday understanding and absorbing it.  Nore essays by Samo Burja, about the workings of human societies are here.: http://samoburja.com/essays/
This is the "executive summary" of "Great Founder Theory":  http://samoburja.com/great-founder-theory/
Here is the full 95 page treatise of Great Founder theory that I digested yesterday:  

Eleni sends this paper by William Engdahl, looking at the global political strategic positionings of the USSR and Germany before WW-2, and the parallels of positionings between the USA and PRC currently. His premise is that global-financial-imperialism set up those dynamics to destroy Russian and German competition, and would like to see US and Chinese nationalist powers broken down in the same way today.
  One of the great mysteries of that China growth is the fact that China was allowed to become the “workshop of the world” after 2001, first in lower-skill industries such as textiles or toys, later in pharmaceuticals and most recently in electronics assembly and production. The mystery clears up when we look at the idea that the PTB and their financial houses, using China, want to weaken strong industrial powers, especially the United States, to push their global agenda. Brzezinski often wrote that the nation state was to be eliminated, as did his patron, David Rockefeller. By allowing China to become a rival to Washington in economy and increasingly in technology, they created the means to destroy the superpower hegemony of the US.
  By the onset of the Presidency of Xi Jinping in 2012, China was an economic colossus second in weight only to the United States. Clearly this could never have happened–not under the eye of the same Anglo-American old families who launched the Opium Wars after 1840 to bring China to heel and open their economy to Western financial looting–unless the Anglo-Americans had wanted it.

Congresswoman, Tulsi Gabbard, of Hawaii, the peace candidate, who outlasted Kamala Harris and earned a couple of delegates, was not invited to participate in the Democratic convention in any way, after being smeared with accusations of being "groomed by Russia", and such.
She is against wars, even though she has served 2 tours in America's mideast war extravaganza, in a medical unit. Why is she such a wet-blanket. No wonder she didn't get invited to the Party (of humanitarian wars). Russia Today has the story, of course.

Dider Raoult MD et al responds (politely) to another hodroxychloroquine hit piece (European Journal of Medicine) as first-world folks die of COVID. (Does this seem intentional yet?)
 We read with interest the letter entitled “COVID-19 and hydroxychloroquine: is the wonder drug failing ?” by U. Paliani and A. Cordona [1]. This work illustrates the need to be very careful in analyzing the literature at a time when scientific conflicts of this magnitude are taking place. Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine have moved beyond their practical aspects as drugs or as potential toxic substances to become a clash on several fronts. The countries of the South use hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine on a massive scale, just as they used them before for malaria, or still use them now for systemic lupus erythematosus and rheumatic diseases. And, as more than 2 billion people at least have used this treatment, they have the greatest difficulty in believing that this product has become, by 2020, an extremely toxic product. Coincidentally or as a consequence, the countries with the highest mortality from COVID-19 are also the countries that have demonized chloroquine the most, i.e. Western Europe and part of the United States. There is therefore a geographical pro- or anti-chloroquine correlation, on the one hand North-South, on the other hand West-East, which is beyond scientific data.  

 Look here, there's nothing to be afraid of when research scientists modify infectious viruses to help make vaccines to protect us!
Researchers Created a Virus That Mimics SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 Coronavirus – Here’s Why
Lab-made virus is safer to work with, can aid efforts to find drugs, vaccines.  :-)

 He says they were all working on this kind of weaponized virus, but feels he has reason to believe that it leaked from China.
Renowned European scientist: COVID-19 was engineered in China lab, effective vaccine ‘unlikely’
Professor Giuseppe Tritto, an internationally known expert in biotechnology and nanotechnology, says that the China Virus definitely wasn’t a freak of nature that happened to cross the species barrier from bat to man.

Australian GPs are urged to prescribe ivermectin triple therapy to fight COVID-19 

There is more and more talk of mass mandatory-vaccinations when the track record of coronavirus vaccines is that too many vaccinated animals die when exposed to the vaccine. It kills.
Australia Prime Minister Puts Citizens On Notice: All Will Likely Undergo Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccinations 
 

This just in!

Planet in Crisis, Higher Values of Society Corrupted, The Expression of Moral and Ethical Values

One cannot fail to recognise the ubiquitous crisis in all forms of leadership that exists on the planet today. Qualities of wisdom, courage and statesmanship, once admired and emulated by aspiring people of principle, have been undermined and sterilised via collective slavery to the prescribed money and power agenda, which reflects the default position of society. 


 
Losing It

Jenny pictured last week at one end of long break patio vegetable garden I tend at People's Clinic, with orange trees, sweet potato vines, cucumber and black-eyed pea vines

Thursday, August 20, 2020

Update On Available COVID-19 Treatments

Interested Parties,

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. He recommends 50,000U initial dose for all hospitalized patients.

Look at 11:30 to 13:30 (the last 2 minutes) for specifics on vitamin-D in hospital by this critical care pulmonologist. This COVID-19 update series is excellent! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdc7T2UTHBI&list=PLQ_IRFkDInv_zLVFTgXA8tW0Mf1iiuuM_&index=103&t=0s

JCEM paper cited in lecture: https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/97/8/2792/2823373

Charoenngam/Holick paper cited in lecture: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342970598_Immunologic_Effects_of_Vitamin_D_on_Human_Health_and_Disease

This is a comprehensive aggregation of papers relating directly to Vitamin-D levels and supplementation in COVID-19 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7276229/

This much cited Indonesian study , reported in June, is included in the above analysis, and is worth its own link: https://emerginnova.com/patterns-of-covid19-mortality-and-vitamin-d-an-indonesian-study/

My general advice for people over 100# is to take 5000 units of vitamin-D daily, long term, unless you have not been taking it, in which case, take 10,000 units vitamin D3 daily until Thanksgiving or Christmas or New Years Day or something. If you weigh 80# take 4000 units per day, 60# gets 3000 units, etc.

This is the influential study from Bangladesh, reported in July, which prompted the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh to change from hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin to ivermectin/doxycycline. 
It explains the known antiviral mechanisms at work very well.

A Case Series of 100 COVID-19 Positive Patients Treated with Combination of Ivermectin and Doxycycline 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343305357_A_Case_Series_of_100_COVID-19_Positive_Patients_Treated_with_Combination_of_Ivermectin_and_Doxycycline  


Dr Alam's randomized, controlled follow-up trial is approved and funded  and underway

This paper explains that ivermectin blocks a transport mechanism that viral RNA and proteins need to get from the cytoplasm, into the nucleus, where the machinery for viral replication exists. 
Ivermectin turns the nuclear-membrane into a wall against coronavirus, and some other viruses, too.
The broad spectrum antiviral ivermectin targets the host nuclear transport importin α/β1 heterodimer

Ivermectin helped sick hospitalized patients in Florida survive, especially some of the sickest one
 Conclusions and Relevance: Ivermectin was associated with lower mortality during treatment of COVID-19, especially in patients who required higher inspired oxygen or ventilatory support. These findings should be further evaluated with randomized controlled trials.

More News on Dr. Borody's Ivermectin proposal

Here is my essay on the sick husband and wife I treated with Ivermectin, zinc and doxycycline last week. She gets nauseated from the zinc, but they both got out of crisis right away. He still feels tired and coughs.

A randomized trial of ivermectin/doxycycline, vs hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin in COVID-19 patients (I see no reason not to use both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Mechanisms of action would be complementary. It is being proposed and has been done.)
This trial found the treatments to be similarly well tolerated and similarly beneficial.(Ivermectin was better, not to statistical significance.)

A compilation of hydroxychloroquine studies treating COVID-19, and in-vitro studies, to date and summarized. Thanks Marc.

Hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin + zinc got more patients home from the hospital than hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin without zinc:

Dr Raoult's large scale and successful study of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. (Not randomized with a placebo arm, since people were dying and placebo was already known to the investigators to lead to more deaths than treatment.)
Outcomes of 3,737 COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin and other regimens in Marseille, France: A retrospective analysis
Treatment with HCQ-AZ was associated with a decreased risk of transfer to ICU or death (Hazard ratio (HR) 0.18 0.11–0.27), decreased risk of hospitalization ≥10 days (odds ratios 95% CI 0.38 0.27–0.54) and shorter duration of viral shedding (time to negative PCR: HR 1.29 1.17–1.42). QTc prolongation (>60 ms) was observed in 25 patients (0.67%) leading to the cessation of treatment in 12 cases including 3 cases with QTc> 500 ms. No cases of torsade de pointe or sudden death were observed.  

Here is an ongoing prospective, randomized American study, which does assign people to HCQ/Azithromycin or clever placebo pills. 
Zinc is not part of it.

Here is Gummi Bears' "Deep Dive on Hydroxychloroquine" from last month. Scroll down 2/3 of the way and see the national responses to initiation of HCQ/Azithro treatment in Brazil, Algeria and Morocco. Deaths plateau in 10 days, while cases keep rising to a much later plateau.

Not Complacent 

Pandemic Complacency

 Looking Around,


  I am seeing complacency in medicine about the coronavirus pandemic, which is not warranted. It's not everybody. 
I went to bed with this eating me, and awoke well before dawn, with the urge to address it in writing. 
  My daughter, Holly Day MD, is deeply engaged with her hospitalized patients and their families, and has sheparded too many young families through the death of a mother or father recently. Then they are gone.
This is not gone when it is out of your sight.
  You do not merely "have a role to play", like the youthful critical care pulmonologist from the new medical school, who gave a virtual talk to doctors and nurses and PAs at our clinic yesterday. "I'm a Pulmonologist. This is what I do. Here is what I would like you to do when patients leave the hospital" 
Pleasant enough young guy. No sign of passion. No sign of intellectual curiosity. No apparent knowledge of antiviral treatment ("That's funny. We're going to look at an article on Ivermectin in journal club tomorrow.") 
He pooh-poohd vitamin-D. "We don't use vitamin-D or vitamin-C or any of that in the hospital. There's no evidence that it works." 
"No, you're Wrong!" I quickly and emphatically blurted out. (You have to get a person's attention.) 
  He looked surprised and I said I would put plenty of information together for him, which I did. 
I went on a round of internet cutting and pasting again, and I'll post it separately, some updates on current medical therapeutics to fight the virus.
  Fighting an infectious disease is not merely supporting the body with IV fluids and a ventilator, while lying face down, and suppressing the immune system on dexamethasone, while blotting out consciousness with benzodiazepines, opioids and paralytic drugs.
  I don't intend to pick on the guy. He's young. He's got a prestigious position at a medical center, teaching students, interns and residents. Nobody calls him out for lack of knowledge.
He appears to be complacent. He is not the only one.
  Complacency is an inappropriate psychological defense mechanism, and it is one of the attitudes which relieves a person from the responsibility of having to figure out how to change things, to do them better, to solve a serious problem that is killing people, impairing people, and causing our impressive-yet-fragile economy to break and fail in a million little ways that we are all noticing as a million separate small failures. 
  Nobody is doing things right, and then they are done. 
Tag, you're it. Not my problem. I did my job. I have more check boxes to click , before I can quit today.

  We cull ourselves and we cull each other, but we mostly do it unconsciously. 
We would not intentionally kill/cull. Not yet.
I have been writing about mass-psychosis, and I realize that I have been overstating the case, as history systematically repeats itself. We are at mass-irritation, rising frustration, but it has backed off this summer; backed off to complacency.
We are approaching the fall harvest. What will we harvest? It won't be a harvest of plenty. Winter is coming, and the US is still unable to treat people for coronavirus as outpatients, even though the rest of the world is doing so and getting better at it, even India. 
Is something wrong with America when we cannot even consider doing what India is doing to treat sick people with cheap medicines before their bodies break down? (No offense, India. I'm trying to shame.)
Indians are not complacent about the coronavirus pandemic. Indians have little room for complacency as a society. 
Their basic life-support system (economy) is chronically stressed. Declaring the larger denomination bills void in 2016 was a big mistake, from which India is still trying to recover. 
India is responding to coronavirus appropriately now.

Fix something that you see is wrong, please, today.

Hair On Fire

Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Trump Pardons Jesus

 Flabbergasted,


OK, I'm sorry, the headline is not accurate. Trump pardoned Susan B. Anthony, the first lady to be on a dollar coin.
Her crime was voting-while-female. She never paid the fine. Some folks say that she would have been against this on principle. No comments from Susan. Free publicity for President Donald. 
Good practical joke not pardoning Ed Snowden like he hinted, and certainly not Julian Assange or Private Manning.

Famine; Hard Times:
Kim Jong-un Orders North Koreans to Hand Over Pet Dogs So They Can be Eaten

​  ​North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has ordered citizens to hand over their pet dogs so they can be killed and eaten as a new famine threatens the country.
​  ​Heavy rain, widespread flooding and crop damages have left the country short of food supplies, leading the Stalinist regime to demand more wealthy North Koreans give up their dogs, which are considered “decadent” luxury and “a ‘tainted’ trend by bourgeois ideology,” according to South Korean news outlet Chosun Ilbo...The pets are rounded up, with some of them being sent to zoos
(feed the big cats?) ​and others being sold directly to the restaurant trade.​ ​ https://summit.news/2020/08/18/kim-jong-un-orders-north-koreans-to-hand-over-pet-dogs-so-they-can-be-eaten/​ ​

The Biden/Harris campaign and the dead-end of “lesser evil” politics​   Really, nothing better is being offered in terms of policy. Nothing.​ All we have is Bernie Sanders saying Biden will fix everything, a lie.​

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/17/pers-a17.html  

​Scroll down a little to see the funny picture.   https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2020/08/debt-rattle-august-19-2020/#post-62327

​There are all of these tough decisions to make regarding the economy, feeding the rich people, and maintaining the imperial reserve currency, the US Dollar, which extracts tribute from all who use it.​ Charles Hugh Smith presents the conundrum in 2 essays: A mildly weaker dollar pumps the stock market bubble, but the global reserve currency needs to be a bit stronger than that, so the world does not use the alternatives, which are being used some already, due to the dollar being used so punitively in recent years (Venezuela, Iran, Russia).

It's Do-or-Die, Deep State: Either Strangle the Stock Market Rally Now or Cede the Election to Trump​   ​https://www.oftwominds.com/blogaug20/deep-state-trump8-20.html

The Empire Will Strike Back: Dollar Supremacy Is the Fed's Imperial Mandate

​The US military recently gave up the frequencies of about 8.6 cm wavelength to civilian use for 5g. Currently US civilian 5G uses wavelengths about 1 cm long.​ The US , thereby defaults to adopting the Chinese 5G standard, which is a better standard in terms of lower cost, easier implementation, and reduced damage to human cells. The current 1 cm wavelengths are the ones also used by the US military for crowd control pain-ray devices. They make your skin burn, when focused on you. You will run away.

​  ​The short-wavelength route would require U.S. telecoms to build a very dense—and  expensive—network of 5G base stations throughout any city or other geographic area to ensure reliable connectivity. The Defense Innovation Board report also cast some doubt on whether U.S. telecoms can absorb the cost of installing the infrastructure necessary for a full mmWave network.
​  ​China has taken the opposite approach. It favors low-frequency transmission, primarily in the 3- and 4-GHz bands. This strategy enables Chinese telecoms to swiftly roll out broad 5G coverage with fewer base stations because the wavelengths in these bands are able to penetrate obstacles.

 WASHINGTON: After a remarkably fast interagency review, the White House today announced a massive transfer of electromagnetic spectrum from military use to commercial 5G. It will be the “fastest transfer of federal spectrum to commercial use in history,” US Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios told reporters proudly this afternoon. But, Kratsios and Pentagon CIO Dana Deasy assured reporters ahead of the announcement, the rush won’t compromise military readiness or operations.
​  ​The 100 megahertz of spectrum runs from 3450 MHz to 3550, so-called mid-band frequencies prized by 5G developers because they allow longer-ranged transmissions than the millimeter-wave spectrum that makes up most of what’s been available in the US so far.​..
​  Currently, Deasy said, “the 3450-3550 mHZ band supports critical DoD radar operations, including high-powered defense radar systems on fixed, mobile, shipboard, and airborne platforms, [including] air defense, missile and gun fire control, counter mortar, bomb scoring [during training exercises], battlefield weapon locations, air traffic control, and range safety.”

​  I'm not sure how I missed this story last month, but last week I saw a patient who had tested positive for COVID-19 about 5 weeks earlier, recovered right after that, got sick again, with kidney symptoms, a persistent/recurrent kidney infection, and I did not test her for COVID again. She got tested in the hospital a few days later, and was positive for SARS-CoV-2, and had typically increased clotting factors in her blood, and a lung CT that looked like COVID, so the real thing, not a false positive.​
  In this story, somebody got over COVID and donated blood and there was viral RNA found in the blood, replicating virus in the blood. That kind of seeding for long term infection, even in a few people, might make this impossible to eradicate without potent antiviral medicines and years of close surveillance for outbreaks.
SARS-CoV-2 RNAemia in a Healthy Blood Donor 40 Days After Respiratory Illness Resolution  

​  Testing for antibody response can and does miss T-cell mediated immunity to SARS-CoV-2, which is sort of good news, but not really anything you can act upon.
​  SARS-CoV-2-specific memory T cells will likely prove critical for long-term immune protection against COVID-19. We here systematically mapped the functional and phenotypic landscape of SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell responses in unexposed individuals, exposed family members, and individuals with acute or convalescent COVID-19. Acute phase SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells displayed a highly activated cytotoxic phenotype that correlated with various clinical markers of disease severity, whereas convalescent phase SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells were polyfunctional and displayed a stem-like memory phenotype. Importantly, SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells were detectable in antibody-seronegative exposed family members and convalescent individuals with a history of asymptomatic and mild COVID-19. Our collective dataset shows that SARS-CoV-2 elicits robust, broad and highly functional memory T cell responses, suggesting that natural exposure or infection may prevent recurrent episodes of severe COVID-19.

Thanks Rototillerman. This is May/June data which looked like the April date from California and New York, showing about 10 X the exposure to SARS-CoV-2 in the Oregon population, as what nasal swab testing had found up until then.
Interestingly, nobody under 17 had antibodies to it. What's that going to mean?
​  ​Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 were detected in nine of 897 specimens, yielding an unadjusted seroprevalence of 1.0% (95% confidence interval = 0.2%–1.8%). Antibodies were not detected in any specimens from the 29 persons aged ≤17 years. Seroprevalence generally increased with age (chi-squared test for trend, p = 0.049) (Table).
​  ​The estimated seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in a convenience sample of adult Oregonians was approximately 10 times the measured cumulative COVID-19 incidence obtained by nucleic acid testing, consistent with results from seven other U.S. states and geographic areas
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a4.htm  

We need cheap, quick tests before winter, don't we?
​  T​he Food and Drug Administration on Saturday authorized emergency use of a new and inexpensive saliva test for Covid-19 that could greatly expand testing capacity.
​  ​The new test, which is called SalivaDirect and was developed by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health, allows saliva samples to be collected in any sterile container. It is a much less invasive process than the nasal swabs currently used to test for the virus that causes Covid-19, but one that has so far yielded highly sensitive and similar results. The test, which also avoids a key step that has caused shortages of chemical reagents used in other tests, can run approximately 90 samples in fewer than three hours in a lab, although the number can be greater in big labs with automation.
​  ​Moreover, Yale intends to provide its “open source” testing protocol to laboratories around the country. Other labs can now adopt the method while using a variety of commercially available testing components that can reduce costs, speed turnaround times and increase testing frequency, according to the FDA. And because the reagents for the test cost less than $5, the Yale researchers estimated labs should charge about $10 per sample, although that remains to be seen. The testing method is available immediately, but the researchers added it can be scaled up quickly for use in the coming weeks.

​The global thermal buffers look doomed. They're  going to stop buffering global warming when the ice cubes are gone.​
​  ​Nearly 40 years of satellite data from Greenland shows that glaciers on the island have shrunk so much that even if global warming were to stop today, the ice sheet would continue shrinking.  

​Enjoying Normalcy​