Tuesday, May 19, 2020

War Of Attrition

Still Here,

   The pattern which seems to be governing this terrifying-pandemic is that of differential damage, imposing massive damage and losses on groups which are non-tributaries to a particular power structure. 
  The US seeks to impose unlimited losses upon Chinese interests. Fear must remain in place at home, to assure compliance of the masses, so actual cures, or relief from fear are banned on YouTube for going against WHO/CDC edicts.
WHO/CDC have been harmful, not helpful to public health, to date.
  The overarching need of the current elites is to maintain power and control through this crisis, preferably to increase it.
That form of insecurity and grasping too hard, while obscuring or outlawing remedies they don't control SHOULD be their downfall. We'll see how this plays out. 
  Let me clarify that I see all elites as amoral and self serving. 
None of them appear to represent the interests of life on Earth. Sociopaths all the way down...
I'm backing cheap public health measures like vitamin-D, zinc, NAC and growing fresh vegetables.

Craig Murray points out that only PROFITABLE "solutions" to this crisis will be considered by the financial masters. 
Please submit conforming proposals! 
...the UK and the US are attempting to hide their vaccine and treatment research results from the rest of the world to make money out of them.
​  ​Much has been written about the possibility for a new and better kind of world to emerge after coronavirus. Yet our governments cannot conceive of any model for fighting this threat to the whole world, other than the capitalist, money-making model. The much-touted “race to develop a vaccine” is not a race to save lives. It is a race to make billions.
​  ​The United States and the United Kingdom are working in all international fora to head off efforts to pool global research and to make any vaccine or medicine a good for the world.
... the failure to set up a worldwide shared scientific database on all coronavirus vaccine and medicine research, and the failure to set up a prior agreement on free manufacture worldwide of effective resulting vaccines and treatments, is the most revealing fact about the entire coronavirus episode.  

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/05/profiting-from-coronavirus/ 

Donald Trump announces that he is taking hydroxychloroquine and zinc prophylactically against coronavirus.
I hope he is also taking vitamin-D.
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/trump-admits-taking-hydroxychloroquine-zinc  

There is a subset of people, who do not recover, who seem to get chronic migrating viral symptoms from SARS-CoV-2 infections. This is a persistent percentage who only mostly recover, but remain effectively crippled and miserable.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/15/weird-hell-professor-advent-calendar-covid-19-symptoms-paul-garner  

 Mass slaughter of living beings brings misery to all involved... Essential slaves, and their owners, included.
​  ​Even while meat companies say they are stepping up safety protocols as facilities reopen, coronavirus keeps spreading at almost twice the national rate in U.S. counties with major plants​...
  ​ In counties with major slaughterhouses that have less than 1 million people, there was a 31% increase in confirmed cases for the week. Those 72 counties accounted for 6.5% of the nation’s new infections, though they represent only 3.1% of national population.

 ​China presents view that the world does want to know about origins of novel-coronavirus, but rejects American/Australian blame-China approach. 
China insists that the WHO run the investigation, and that it look all over the world, since there have been outbreaks in other countries of related virus, not apparently coming from Wuhan strains.​
"A rational and scientific investigation could focus on three main problems: When exactly did the coronavirus first appear? What is the natural source? And how did the virus pass to humans?" Wang said, pointing out that as mounting scientific evidence suggested COVID-19 may have surfaced earlier than reported in countries beyond China, the investigation should be launched across the world.  

​57 year old Chinese Ambassador to Israel, who was found dead Sunday morning, is determined to have died of a heart attack. (Remember the Church hearings, where it was revealed that the CIA had a heart-attack-gun? I'm sure they had to get rid of it.)
​https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-says-ambassador-died-natural-causes-preliminary-finding-sends-investigators

​Global trade war attack by US on Chinese ability to build 5G mobile devices will have short term success, but it is a one-time play, not repeatable. (At least it delays 5G radiation damage to people for a little longer.)
​  ​Blocking radio frequency devices and other products to Huawei will stop the buildout of 5G in China, and that will not be tolerated. Even switching designs to [the mainland Chinese fabricator] Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp at 14 nanometers would take a year.”
​  ​“It is both a very serious and volatile situation,” Dr Jones added. “There is a 120-day grace period where hopefully compromises will emerge.”
​  ​China meanwhile is considering its response. From the Chinese side of the board, elementary game theory indicates a maximalist response designed to inflict extreme damage on the already-weakened US economy.

 ​ ​U.S. lawmakers and officials are crafting proposals to push American companies to move operations or key suppliers ​ ​out of China that include tax breaks, new rules, and carefully structured subsidies.

​Stockpiling oil is critical in any kind of war, if you do not produce enough at home.
A Huge Fleet Of 117 Tankers Is Bringing Super Cheap Crude To China
​  ​At present, a total of 117 very large crude carriers (VLCCs) – each capable of shipping 2 million barrels of oil – are traveling to China for unloading at its ports between the middle of May and the middle of August.  


​Russia's COVID Game of Elites looks at what has happened in the last 2 months, with regional officials directing regional responses to viral pandemic, sometimes in such a way as to cripple economy, and infect more people, while extending forms of electronic control and surveillance. That went badly. Moscow's mayor did a security check on everybody who was out in early April, causing mass crowds standing in close proximity, awaiting individual evaluations of status and assessing millions of dollars of fines. Cases boomed a week later.​ Putin was in self-quarantine after exposure to a doctor who came down with coronavirus (Did Putin have it?) He is out and completely active again. Traitorous elements in the Russian Federation have shown their unpatriotic hands. The article is long and detailed, and a little hard to read.
https://southfront.org/russias-covid-game-of-elites/  

Sweden, with voluntary social distancing, approaches "herd immunity" sooner than other countries. A lot of Swedes take vitamin-D and fish oil supplements... They figure you get the same number of deaths eventually, no matter what.
 “I think there is relatively little chance of stopping this whatever measures we take.”  
​Reminder: When the very rich are done with us, they plan to leave us behind 
(or worse, but I don't think it will work for them. dead end)​
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/05/reminder-when-the-very-very-rich-are-done-with-us-they-plan-to-leave-us-behind.html  

Hamsters in cages with coronavirus blown onto them by fans have 2/3 reduction in cases of infection if they wear masks.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-hamster-masks-coronavirus-scientists.html 

Left Behind

Pictured last Saturday in Yoakum standing on new slab by workshop, which is curing under plastic

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Monday, May 18, 2020

Cut Out China

Occidentals​,​
​
​ ​China's Ambassador to Israel has been found dead inside his home near Tel Aviv Sunday morning, Israel's Foreign Ministry has confirmed.
​ ​57-year old ambassador Du Wei had only assumed his post in February 2020 in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, due to which he entered a two week mandatory self-quarantine upon his arrival. He'd previously been China’s envoy to Ukraine and is survived by his wife and son, who were not yet in the country.​ ​
​ ​Police were reported outside his residence in Herzliya, which lies just north of the Israeli capital, conducting an investigation but have told the media Wei's death isn't being treated as suspicious. However, a number of commentators are highlighting the context of tensions between the US and China inside Israel as being essentially in a state of behind-the-scenes diplomatic war after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's visit there last week.
​ ​Pompeo sought to urge the Israelis against trading or investing with China, especially the agreement for China to start operating Haifa Port in 2021. As multiple reports underscored:
​ ​On Wednesday, Mr Pompeo denounced Chinese investments in Israel and accused China of withholding information about the coronavirus outbreak.
​ ​Washington has sought to strip China of ability to exercise influence in this strategically key part of the Mediterranean where the US Navy's 6th fleet often docks and restocks.

​ ​A team of Australian scientists has produced new evidence that the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is optimized for penetration into human cells rather than animal cells, undermining the theory that the virus randomly evolved in an animal subject before passing into human beings, and suggesting instead that it was developed in a laboratory.​..
​They tested the propensity of the COVID-19 virus’s spike protein, which it uses to enter cells, to bind to the human type of ACE2 as well as to many different animal versions of ACE2, and found that the novel coronavirus most powerfully binds with human ACE2, and with variously lesser degrees of effectiveness with animal versions of the receptor.
According to the study’s authors, this implies that the virus that causes COVID-19 did not come from an animal intermediary, but became specialized for human cell penetration by living previously in human cells, quite possibly in a laboratory.  

Coalition of 116 countries back Australia's push for independent coronavirus inquiry​ 
(I don't see USA on the list. Is USA quietly offering repudiation of debts to China if China is found guilty? Africa is all on board, suddenly. What's "independent"?​ What about Ft. Detrick leak hypothesis? Ever heard of it, Mates?​)

China adds long-term organ damage to list of effects of Covid-19
Authorities say patients can have lung and heart problems in the longer term – among other consequences

A large-scale study out of New York's Northwell Health adds to the evidence that kidney injury is linked to COVID-19 hospitalizations. Doctors across the Northwell hospital system reported an "alarming amount" of hospitalized coronavirus patients developed acute kidney injury (AKI) during the height of the pandemic. 

​INFECTED, 2012 EU instructional comic book​ reads like a script, except Eurocrats are not super heroes. Thanks Eleni.
EU-funded comic PREDICTED deadly pandemic escaping China - and guess who saves the day?BRUSSELS once predicted the escape of a deadly virus from a Chinese laboratory that threatened the lives of billions - and even painted the European Union as the hero behind the world's recovery.

​Colleen sent this article about President of Madagascar calling on African nations to quite the WHO, due to refusal to test herbal COVID treatment, derived from anti-malarial plant artemisia.
​http://www.celesylvupdates.com/news/the-president-of-madagascar-andry-rajoelina-has-called-on-all-african-nations-to-quit-the-world-health-organization-who/

Well, it looks like they are starting in-vitro (cell culture testing) trials on artemisia for COVID, now. 
That's how they spotted chloroquine and remdesivir.
https://www.dw.com/en/covid-19-tests-for-miracle-cure-herb-artemisia-begin/a-53442366 

Lamas make little tiny antibodies that get into the nooks and crannies of teeny little viruses.
'Llamas are the real unicorns': why they could be our secret weapon against coronavirus
Researchers hope llama antibodies could help protect humans who have not been infected

​Matt Taibbi finds another unforeseen consequence of trying to be nice with other people's money.
Since mortgages all get bundled into mortgage-backed-securities now, and sold-on to investors, who get little pieces of a big pile of mortgage payments, the really weak link is "mortgage servicing companies", with "servicing" being a euphemism. These are run with minimum "service" and maximum profit, and very little cash buffer. 
Guess what is about to break again, like in 2007. 
Paying on a mortgage?
The Bailout Miscalculation That Could Crash the Economy
A plan to help homeowners avoid foreclosure was good, in principle. In practice, it’s pushed the mortgage business toward yet another potential nightmare
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Sunday, May 17, 2020

Answers

Gobsmacked,

​  ​The first signs that something terrible had gone wrong with the security at the Fort Detrick bio-defence facility fifty miles north-west of Washington DC were when cases of a previously unknown and serious respiratory illness appeared at a retirement village on the western outskirts of the capital in July 2019.  The first cases were noted on June 30th amongst the 260 residents of the Greenspring Assisted Living unit, with the infectious disease later affecting 19 staff and taking the lives of some older residents...
​  ​I propose that the scheme devised in desperation last summer for this “diversionary tactic”, was to send the Fort Detrick Virus with the soldiers set to compete at the Wuhan games in three months’ time, while trying to keep a lid on the domestic epidemic until the new year, and a lock on the inquisitive media. Rehearsing for the subsequent global pandemic called for “Event 201” to prepare participants for what they might have to face, and bring their organizational and media responses into line...
 ​  ​Whether this theory is the correct one may not yet be proven, but it does provide an explanation to the conundrum of the genie that was accidentally released from the bottle but intentionally released from Wuhan. And we must all now suffer the consequences of that US “culpable manslaughter” as we learn to live with their engineered Genie.
https://ahtribune.com/world/covid-19/4152-american-genie.html  

​"​A truth that’s told with bad intent​ ​beats all the lies you can invent​"​​ 
William Blake opens for Ben Hunt​ ​  ​  ​
​  ​A political narrative of betrayal is always a top-down application of social abstraction, where a behavioral model is treated as the thing unto itself, falsely elevated as the subject and object of policy, rather than relegated to the analytical toolbox where it belongs. A political narrative of betrayal will always use “model” as a noun rather than “model” as a verb. A political narrative of betrayal always BEGINS with a prescriptive model of mass behavior – a model that by the most amazing coincidence serves the institutional advantage of the narrative creator – and ENDS with a forced fit to the individual citizen.
​  ​All political narratives of betrayal start like this, with a disembodied, modeled abstraction like “the American way of life” or “the economy” or “the market” or “public health” or “national security”. An abstraction that is then defined for you in such a way as to logically require the willing abdication of your individual rights, first as an American and ultimately as a human being.​..
​  ​The American Way of Life™ does not exist. It’s not a thing.​ ​
​  ​What exists is the way of life of Americans.

​Gail Tverberg has the completely valid other horn of the dilemma:​
​  ​We are finding that using shutdowns to solve COVID-19 problems causes a huge amount of economic damage. The cost of mitigating this damage seems to be unreasonably high. For example, in the United States, antibody studies suggest that roughly 5% of the population has been infected with COVID-19. The total number of deaths associated with this 5% infection level is perhaps 100,000, assuming that reported deaths to date (about 80,000) need to be increased somewhat, to match the approximately 5% of the population that has, knowingly or unknowingly, already experienced the infection.
​  ​If we estimate that the mean number of years of life lost is 13 years per person, then the total years of life lost would be about 1,300,000. If we estimate that the US treasury needed to borrow $3 trillion dollars to mitigate this damage, the cost per year of life lost is $3 trillion divided by 1.3 million, or $2.3 million dollars per year of life lost. This amount is utterly absurd.​ (Note: It IS Absurd and completely unreal, making the zombie system keep walking forward by plugging impossible black holes of debt due today with even more vast impossible IOUs of future payment.​)

Want a fast recovery? Invest in tests, Fed's Kaplan says
Even with tens of millions of jobs lost and a historic decline in output projected this quarter, the U.S. economy could still pull off a relatively quick recovery, Dallas Federal Reserve President Robert Kaplan said on Thursday...
“The highest return on equity investment we can make in this country is testing.”  
​(He doesn't know about Vitamin-D​)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-kaplan-idUSKBN22Q3NW  

5000 IU/day of vitamin-D cuts COVID morbidity and mortality by something like half. 
It's the lowest hanging fruit of public health and personal choice. 
I gave away 1250 doses at work yesterday for coworkers to share with their families. 
It's what I could get my hands on. 
I ordered 3000 more doses to do the same thing when it arrives. 
This will be my 4th or 5th  round of that intervention. 

​ ​The juxtaposition of images in the news of farmers destroying crops and dumping milk with empty supermarket shelves or hungry Americans lining up for hours at food banks tells a story of economic efficiency gone mad. Today the US actually has two separate food chains, each supplying roughly half of the market. The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed.​..
 H ow did we end up here? The story begins early in the Reagan administration, when the Justice Department rewrote the rules of antitrust enforcement: if a proposed merger promised to lead to greater marketplace “efficiency”—the watchword—and wouldn’t harm the consumer, i.e., didn’t raise prices, it would be approved. (It’s worth noting that the word “consumer” appears nowhere in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890. The law sought to protect producers—including farmers—and our politics from undue concentrations of corporate power.)1 The new policy, which subsequent administrations have left in place, propelled a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the food industry.​..
 Slaughterhouses have become hot zones for contagion, with thousands of workers now out sick and dozens of them dying.4 This should come as no surprise: social distancing is virtually impossible in a modern meat plant, making it an ideal environment for a virus to spread. In recent years, meatpackers have successfully lobbied regulators to increase line speeds, with the result that workers must stand shoulder to shoulder cutting and deboning animals so quickly that they can’t pause long enough to cover a cough, much less go to the bathroom, without carcasses passing them by. Some chicken plant workers, given no regular bathroom breaks, now wear diapers.5 A worker can ask for a break, but the plants are so loud he or she can’t be heard without speaking directly into the ear of a supervisor​...
  ​ Under normal circumstances, the modern hog or chicken is a marvel of brutal efficiency, bred to produce protein at warp speed when given the right food and pharmaceuticals. So are the factories in which they are killed and cut into parts. These innovations have made meat, which for most of human history has been a luxury, a cheap commodity available to just about all Americans; we now eat, on average, more than nine ounces of meat per person per day, many of us at every meal.7​ ...
 Unfortunately, a diet dominated by such foods (as well as lots of meat and little in the way of vegetables or fruit—the so-called Western diet) predisposes us to obesity and chronic diseases such as hypertension and type-2 diabetes. These “underlying conditions” happen to be among the strongest predictors that an individual infected with Covid-19 will end up in the hospital with a severe case of the disease; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that 49 percent of the people hospitalized for Covid-19 had preexisting hypertension, 48 percent were obese, and 28 percent had diabetes.9
Why these particular conditions should worsen Covid-19 infections might be explained by the fact that all three are symptoms of chronic inflammation, which is a disorder of the body’s immune system. (The Western diet is by itself inflammatory.)​...
 ​ In addition to protecting the men and women we depend on to feed us, it would also seek to reorganize our agricultural policies to promote health rather than mere production, by paying attention to the quality as well as the quantity of the calories it produces. For even when our food system is functioning “normally,” reliably supplying the supermarket shelves and drive-thrus with cheap and abundant calories, it is killing us—slowly in normal times, swiftly in times like these.

Globalization and Financialization Are Dead, and so Is Everything That Depended on Them​, Char​le​s Hugh Smith
​ ​Globalization and financialization have been losing momentum for years. Under the guise of "opening markets," globalization has stripmined every economy that can't print a reserve currency and hollowed out economies globally as only globally competitive sectors survive globalization. The net result is that once vibrant, diversified economies have been reduced to fragile monocultures completely dependent on global flows of capital and spending for their survival.  
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay20/globalization-dead5-20.html  

​I'm sure "we" can do better...
Report: China Has Jailed Hundreds Of People For Questioning Official Coronavirus Narrative
Devastating report details crackdown on dissenters

“Bob Mueller knew the day that he walked in the door there was no evidence of the Trump campaign colluding with Russians,” said Rep. Devin Nunes R-Calif., the ranking Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee, in a Fox News interview in May 2019. “We looked at all the intelligence,” continued Nunes in reference to the House Intelligence Committee’s own investigation. “There’s zero evidence of the Trump campaign colluding with Russians — period,” According to Davis, the Mueller probe was never intended to find collusion but had another purpose. “From the beginning, the Mueller investigation existed to not protect the rule of law, but to protect the FBI and DOJ from scrutiny for their crimes,” he argued. 

[..] the most critical reason to delve deeply into this case is that it reveals one the most dangerous abuses of power a democracy can suffer: the powers of the CIA, FBI and NSA were blatantly and repeatedly abused to manipulate election outcomes and achieve political advantage. In other words, we know now that these agencies did exactly what Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer warned they would do to Trump when he appeared on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC program shortly before Trump’s inauguration:
[Schumer] says Donald Trump is being "really dumb" for picking a fight with intelligence officials, suggesting they have ways to strike back, after the president-elect speculated Tuesday that his "so-called" briefing about Russian cyberattacks had been delayed in order to build a case.
"Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you​.​"
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/14/new-documents-from-the-sham-prosecution-of-gen-michael-flynn-also-reveal-broad-corruption-in-the-russiagate-investigations/  

Sunday Driver
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Thursday, May 14, 2020

Vitamin D Day

UVB Recipients,

 This is a really limited message today, which is to obtain and take 5000 International Units of vitamin D per day until you croak from old age. This is a simple and obvious public health measure, which you can do, yourself, and you can give "cheap and safe" vitamin-D tablets or gelcaps to people you would like to help.
I'm trying to buy 5000 doses of 5000 units today. The online interface says I'm doing it, but I have my doubts.
I have gone through several rounds of buying vitamin-D bottles and giving them to people for themselves and their families in the past 3 months. This time is bigger. I really feel that this is a moment of crisis, where power factions are at each other's throats, and with no common ground for repair.
Vitamin-D for everybody can be that common ground.

Let's say it reduces morbidity and mortality by 50%. 
That's what is speculated here, but I think it would do better than that. 
Let's do the experiment!
10,000 IU/day"for a few weeks", followed by 5000 IU/day thereafter is what they recommend, and it is exactly what I have recommended since early February, except I would say "a few" is 8 weeks.
https://www.nutraingredients.com/Article/2020/04/07/Could-vitamin-D-play-a-role-in-coronavirus-resistance 

Vitamin D determines severity in COVID-19 so government advice needs to change​ ​by Trinity College Dublin
Researchers from Trinity College Dublin are calling on the government in Ireland to change recommendations for vitamin D supplements  


Low vitamin D levels could explain why African Americans and even African immigrants in Sweden appear to be disproportionately hard-hit by the coronavirus, regardless of socio-economic factors, researchers have suggested.
Vitamin D can protect against getting a severe case of COVID-19, a group of Swedish researchers and doctors have suggested in an article in the medical magazine Läkartidningen.
https://sputniknews.com/europe/202005081079239063-cheap-and-harmless-swedish-researchers-assume-vitamin-d-can-protect-against-covid-19/

"Sunshine Superman"​
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Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Tao Flips Out

Unmoored,

Charles Hugh Smith reflects on our current moment in human history, and maybe, evolution...
As Jackson Browne put it: Don't think it won't happen just because it hasn't happened yet.
​ ​We can summarize all that will unfold in the next few years in one line: 
The way of the Tao is reversal. 
This is the opening line of Chapter 40 of Lao Tzu's 5,000-character commentary on the Tao, The Tao Te Ching.

​The Reflex of Obedience:​
​ ​Anxiety is a widespread phenomenon that often accompanies people from the earliest days of childhood until old age. It is part of life and has many causes. When unscrupulous despots – whether medieval popes, modern dictators or so-called philanthropists – stir up this everyday fear from outside, they are concerned with satisfying their own greed for power and subjugating the peoples. In doing so they are “doing the work of the devil”. 
Most people react to this diabolical “game” of the rulers with a reflex of obedience or even with unconditional submission.  

​Alastair Crooke discusses what is actually the opening of political discourse in the USA:
​ ​Today, there are two irreconcilable visions of American life. After 1992, the two parties alternated presidents every eight years. Yet, with each succeeding administration, the political milieu has grown yet more rancorous and divided. There is no relationship between parties now — save as sworn enemies, Vlahos observes.
​ ​On the one side, we have ‘Unionists’, who expect public deference towards the judgements and authority of the élite technocracy (whether financial or medical), and on the other, a tradition of state sovereignty, dating back to the 1871 (the Articles of Confederacy), which grant no deference towards the Federal authorities – but rather is suffused with disdain for them. Hence the culture of (often armed) militia, ready to fight ‘the Feds’ for their ‘liberties’.
​ ​This latter touches a deep skein of emotion: the ancient fight against the tentacles of the British Imperial Octopus to secure America’s ‘liberties’. Thus, lockdown, and the medical world’s dire predictions necessitating economic shut-down, smack of ‘another agenda’ (the octopus agenda) – a backdoor, by which the globalists can complete their (imagined) project to feudalise an otherwise free people.

​The Governor of New Jersey institutes a ramp-up in contact tracing, and seems to say that people who were in contact with a coronavirus case will be confined to home, and not allowed to shop for food, if they do not submit to mandatory testing.​
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/nj-governor-residents-covid-test-deniers-will-not-be-allowed-leave-home-get-groceries 

 The mayor of Los Angeles on Tuesday quickly backpedaled from his top health director's extension of the stay-at-home order that would now last through July, after residents were furious about further quarantines, reported Reuters
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/la-mayor-backpedals-lockdown-extensions-after-furious-reaction  

​On the benefits of adding oral zinc supplementation to hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin treatment for COVID.
​  In univariate analyses, zinc sulfate increased the frequency of patients being discharged home, and decreased the need for ventilation, admission to the ICU, and mortality or transfer to hospice for patients who were never admitted to the ICU. After adjusting for the time at which zinc sulfate was added to our protocol, an increased frequency of being discharged home (OR 1.53, 95% CI 1.12-2.09) reduction in mortality or transfer to hospice remained significant (OR 0.449, 95% CI 0.271-0.744). Conclusion: This study provides the first in vivo evidence that zinc sulfate in combination with hydroxychloroquine may play a role in therapeutic management for COVID-19.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.02.20080036v1 

This story expands on that preprint release.
  Doctors have reported that adding zinc sulfate, a dietary supplement, to hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin may benefit patients with coronavirus disease, adding a twist to the controversy over the rationale for prescribing hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19.
https://www.telegraphindia.com/world/zinc-hope-in-corona-fight/cid/1771935 

In Wuhan, China, there is a new little cluster of coronavirus. 
China is deftly managing that by testing 14 million people in 10 days.
Extremely impressive! 
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3084013/wuhan-orders-fresh-coronavirus-tests-all-residents-new-cluster 

What, we can't even catch up to CUBA?
Cuba begins mass testing for Covid-19 as new cases fall to fewer than 20 per day
A partial shutdown closed Cuba’s borders, tourism, schools and public transportation and it appears infections are contained
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/12/cuba-coronavirus-covid19-mass-testing  

Both Marjorie and Jenny came across this very useful article about how to assess risk of airborn coronavirus spread as we traverse the microenvironments of our lives.
 When assessing the risk of infection (via respiration) at the grocery store or mall, you need to consider the volume of the air space (very large), the number of people (restricted), how long people are spending in the store (workers - all day; customers - an hour). Taken together, for a person shopping: the low density, high air volume of the store, along with the restricted time you spend in the store, means that the opportunity to receive an infectious dose is low. But, for the store worker, the extended time they spend in the store provides a greater opportunity to receive the infectious dose and therefore the job becomes more risky.
 Basically, as the work closures are loosened, and we start to venture out more, possibly even resuming in-office activities, you need to look at your environment and make judgments. How many people are here, how much airflow is there around me, and how long will I be in this environment. If you are in an open floorplan office, you really need to critically assess the risk (volume, people, and airflow). If you are in a job that requires face-to-face talking or even worse, yelling, you need to assess the risk.
 If you are sitting in a well ventilated space, with few people, the risk is low.
 If I am outside, and I walk past someone, remember it is “dose and time” needed for infection. You would have to be in their airstream for 5+ minutes for a chance of infection. While joggers may be releasing more virus due to deep breathing, remember the exposure time is also less due to their speed.
https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them 

 Lots of drugs, already tested and approved, are being repurposed for use with COVID-19, which is completely as it should be. We need to know more about these drugs and their efficacy, what they can and can't do. Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin are certainly at the top of this list, as is remdesivir , and the related favipiravir. 
Missed, but important are oral zinc and vitamin-D supplements. Use of high dose IV vitamin-C in hospital treatment is also not discussed, nor are other adjuvant treatments, which are not directly antiviral. Thanks Marjorie.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/05/07/science.abb9332.full 

Economics and the Pandemic: ‘Where’s the Money Coming From? Where’s the Money Going To? 
​ ​Both the U.S. and Canada have announced that some money will go directly to the people and that is as it should be. Historically it has been said that providing money directly to the people will cause inflation, but it is certainly not true in this case because the money is not additional money but money going to offset lost wages.
​ ​The inescapable outcome of the pandemic will be an increase in national debt and with that increasing profit and power for those who control money. It is not the only way we could have done it.
​ ​The result is nothing new; the rich will get richer.

​James Kunstler, The Sum Of All Broken Promises:​
 “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking real money.” Consider that a trillion is a thousand billion (and a billion is a thousand million). In an ordinary reality, a reality-based reality, that is, with reality-based money, that would be a lot of money (and a lot of debt)! It’s hard to project an exact figure, but with over 20 percent of the US work-force idle, with no income, there’s liable to be a lot of debt that’s not being paid back, will never be paid back, and a lot of money headed into extinction. That will translate into a lot of people with no money. Until all that money they owed is finished not being paid back, and the new money that the Fed is busy creating, with no relationship to the production of things of value, overcomes the old money that’s finished disappearing. Then Americans will have plenty of money. The catch is that the money will be worthless. Thus, the two ways of going broke: having no money; or having lots of money that’s too worthless to buy anything. So it goes.
​ ​Along with people’s hopes and dreams of a decent life. What you see, then, is a nation, and a system, that has come to be based on broken promises. That’s what the restless public will take away from this morass of statistics. The discord will rapidly leave the statistical frame and take hold in the emotional frame, and that frame will feature entirely negative emotion: rage, resentment, grievance, vengeance, feelings like that. The sum of all broken promises is a broken social contract. That’s the agreement that we will behave civilly in exchange for the liberty to go about our business — within clearly defined rules (laws) about what is legitimate business. A broken social contract is exactly what all these machinations are leading up to. Hence, the appearances of the state — the system and the people who run it — become more and more fantastically and transparently dishonest.
​ ​For instance, the fake candidacy of Joe Biden, a man too far gone in age and mind to be president, with a long slime-trail of family money-grubbing in and around his official offices, and now an old sexual molestation charge against him. Who do the Democrats think they’re kidding with this? The coronavirus gave them an excuse to stuff Joe in a closet for two months, but can they keep hiding him there after the grand opening-up?
​ ​Will Wall Street and its errand boys in the Federal Reserve keep working their shifty hoodoo, enriching shareholders, hedge funders, and corporate execs while everybody else hits the red-line of hunger and outrage? Will Mr. Trump do what he suggested way back on the campaign trail in 2016 and declare a national bankruptcy? There is, after all, a difference between bankruptcy and national insurrection. Bankruptcy, at least, holds the promise of a work-out. Financial work-outs are generally painful, but orderly. That could make all the difference.

​Who signed off on​ the money​ for this project, and what were these goons smoking when the took it?
​ ​If you thought you had seen it all with Venezuela’s hard right-wing opposition and their allies in the U.S. with their actions to overthrow the socialist government of Nicolas Maduro, well, think again. In recent days, images of two captured North American mercenaries have been flooding the air waves in the South American country of Venezuela where Maduro remains the president, despite harsh U.S. economic sanctions.
​ ​According to the testimonies of Luke Denman and Erin Berry to Venezuelan authorities, they were in the oil rich country to get Maduro, either through kidnapping or assassination. Both men are former Green Beret special forces soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan while working for the U.S. private-security company Silvercorp USA. In 2018, this company provided security for president Donald Trump at  some of his rallies. Headed by CEO Jordan Goudreau, aged 43 and also an ex-U.S. special forces soldier, according to one report: “the website for his Florida-based private security firm Silvercorp claims it has planned and led international security teams for the president as well as the secretary of defense.”
​The murder of Seth Rich, who downloaded the Clinton-Podesta crime-ring emails and gave them to Wikileaks can now be investigated. 
Seth Rich provided Wikileaks the emails, before he was murdered coming home from a DNC staff party. 
Russia did no hacking. That's over.​ 
There was only one known motive for Seth Rich's murder. He was not robbed.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/05/huge-development-following-last-weeks-release-attorney-clevenger-alleges-office-dni-communications-seth-rich-wikileaks-russia-collusion-lie/  

​This writing is a little dense, but pertains to the same issues of dealing with a completely unexpected transition of management at the reigns of power, a sloppy and malicious hand-off.
​ ​Information released in the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the case it brought against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn confirms the significance of a January 5, 2017, meeting at the Obama White House. It was at this meeting that Obama gave guidance to key officials who would be tasked with protecting his administration’s utilization of secretly funded Clinton campaign research, which alleged Trump was involved in a treasonous plot to collude with Russia, from being discovered or stopped by the incoming administration.
​ ​“President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia,” National Security Advisor Susan Rice wrote in an unusual email to herself about the meeting that was also attended by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, FBI Director James Comey, and Vice President Joe Biden.

​Apolitical​

Picture of Jenny by little apple tree, with tomatoes, and vegetable garden, on Mother's Day

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Tuesday, May 12, 2020

Cheap And Harmless

K-Mart Shoppers,

​  Low vitamin D levels could explain why African Americans and even African immigrants in Sweden appear to be disproportionately hard-hit by the coronavirus, regardless of socio-economic factors, researchers have suggested.
​ ​Vitamin D can protect against getting a severe case of COVID-19, a group of Swedish researchers and doctors have suggested in an article in the medical magazine Läkartidningen.

​ ​Covid-19 cases in France can be dated back to as early as November 16, nearly 10 weeks before the country’s first confirmed cases of the disease were thought to have occurred, according to a French hospital.
The November case was identified by the hospital’s medical imaging department after carrying out a retrospective study on about 2,500 chest scans performed between November 1 and April 30.
 
People who traveled from New York across the US in early March caused nearly 65% of coronavirus cases in the rest of the country
https://news.yahoo.com/people-traveled-york-across-us-005500313.html 

​Charles Hugh Smith:The Outlines of a Better World Are Emerging
 Once the government's ability to sustain its enforcement with money created out of thin air vanishes, the entire order vanishes along with it.
 The era of waste, greed, fraud and living on borrowed money is dying, and those who've known no other way of living are mourning its passing. Its passing was inevitable, for any society that squanders its resources is unsustainable. Any society that makes private greed the primary motivator and priority is unsustainable. Any society that rewards fraud above all else is unsustainable. Any society which lives on money borrowed from the future and other forms of phantom capital is unsustainable.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay20/better-world5-20.html  

More Charles: 
Surviving 2020 #3: Plans A, B and C
​ ​Readers ask for specific recommendations for successfully navigating the post-credit/speculative-bubble era and I try to do so while explaining the impossibility of the task.
​ ​As the bogus prosperity economy built on exponential growth of debt implodes, we all seek ways to protect ourselves, our families and our worldly assets.

The Fascists vs Franklin Roosevelt​, excerpts from longer essay on end of WW-II, by Matthew Ehret
​ ​Within America itself, the pro-fascist Wall Street establishment had been loosing a war that began the day anti-fascist President Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932. Not only had their attempted February 1933 assassination failed, their 1934 coup d’etat plans were also thwarted by a patriotic General named Smedley Darlington Butler. To make matters worse, their efforts to keep America out of the war in the hopes of co-leading the New World Order alongside Germany, France and Italy was also falling apart. A As I outlined in my recent article How to Crush a Bankers’ Dictatorship, between 1933-1939, FDR had imposed sweeping reforms on the banking sector, thwarted a major attempt to create a global Bankers’ dictatorship under the Bank of International Settlements, and mobilized a broad recovery under the New Deal...
​ ​Wall Street’s corporatist organizations were called out by FDR during a powerful 1938 speech as the president reminded the Congress of the true nature of fascism:
​ ​“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism – ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power… Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing. This concentration is seriously impairing the economic effectiveness of private enterprise as a way of providing employment for labor and capital and as a way of assuring a more equitable distribution of income and earnings among the people of the nation as a whole.”​...
​ By the end of 1945, the Truman Doctrine and Anglo-American “special relationship” replaced FDR’s anti-colonial vision, while an anti-communist witch hunt turned America into a fascist police state under FBI surveillance. Everyone friendly to Russia was targeted for destruction and the first to feel that targeting were FDR’s close allies Henry Wallace and Harry Dexter White whose 1948 death while campaigning for Wallace’s presidential bid put an end to anti-colonialists running the IMF.
​ ​In the decades after WWII, those same financiers who brought the world fascism went straight back to work infiltrating FDR’s Bretton Woods Institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, turning them from tools of development, into tools of enslavement. This process was fully exposed in the 2004 book Confessions of an Economic Hit man by John Perkins.

​​
​Populist​

​(Pictured below is your news aggregator holding first 3 Black Krim tomatoes from Yoakum garden, standing within form for concrete work slab, to go with workshop. We poured that slab yesterday, Monday 5/11/20. Thanks Randy and Roark!
It was another working weekend)​

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Friday, May 8, 2020

Downshifting

Engaging Human Life,

The lovely low-rent-Permaculture, "downshifter's guide to the future" book, Retrosuburbia, which 560 pages I bought for $100 last year (worth it) is now available as online book for whatever-you-feel-is-right. Check it out!
https://retrosuburbia.com/  

Political speech takes many forms, and others can chime in. Important to watch this trend. 
The Governor of Texas is watching, and took the side against his own edicts, after seeing how the wind blew.  (I don't like him, but he's not stupid.) 
Half million dollars of donations and counting...
Thousands Donate To GoFundMe For Jailed Salon Owner Who Stood Up To Judge In Viral Video
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/thousands-donate-gofundme-jailed-salon-owner-who-stood-judge-viral-video  
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/jailed-salon-owner-freed-tx-supreme-court-rakes-500k-gofundme-donations  

​ ​German scientist, Professor Hendrik Streeck has been studying groups of subjects in his country and has reached a number of compelling provisional findings regarding the viral behaviour of the new Coronavirus...
 He also presented data which gives an indication of an “Infected Fatality Rate” (IFR), eg. the percentage of people infected who will end up dying. New findings show a COVID-19 infection fatality rate of between 0.24 – 0.36% (as opposed to Neil Ferguson who claims the IFR to be just under 1%, perhaps 0.8-0.9%). Previous interviews with UnHerd, with experts like Johan Giesecke who believes the IFR is closer to 0.1%, or one in a thousand.
The difference between IFR is important, not least of all because this statistic will be used by governments to determine he relative severity of the threat in question.
https://21stcenturywire.com/2020/05/05/leading-german-virologist-covid-19-is-less-deadly-than-we-thought/  


Moon of Alabama looks at the waves and flow of viral pandemic management over recent months, and their misrepresentation in the press.
​ ​The effect of virus-fighting efforts on the Swedish economy has been devastating. A very large number of small businesses have collapsed. All but essential industries closed down almost immediately and many face bankruptcy. People have been told to refrain from all non-essential travel. Virtually all air travel has been suspended. Unemployment figures are soaring. The opposition parties deem government counter-measures to be too little too late.
​ ​Contrary to impressions created in American media, Sweden’s approach to handling the pandemic has not been “relaxed,” but essentially the same as in other Western countries. This country of 10 million has been at least as preoccupied with the pandemic as other countries. Whether its approach has been as efficient remains to be seen. What may stand out as exceptional in the end is Sweden’s glaring lack of preparedness for a pandemic, especially for protecting its elderly, and that the dead are disproportionately recent immigrants.
​ ​While Sweden may not have ordered everyone into a total lockdown the people have largely done that by themselves simply out of fear.

​ ​President Donald Trump said Thursday that his staff will be tested daily for coronavirus after a Navy steward who has been in close proximity to him tested positive for the disease.
​ ​Trump said he knows the aide but has had "very little contact" with him. Still, he said, aides who have been tested weekly for coronavirus will now be given the test daily. Officials would not say whether Trump himself will be tested daily.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/05/07/coronavirus-white-house-worker-tests-positive-coronavirus/3087897001/  


​Chinese clinical trial finds chloroquine phosphate safe and effective at full dose and half dose, and fewer side effects at half dose.
​https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.26.20081059v1
​This is a really good 22 minute medical lecture on coronavirus attacking the blood vessel lining, the biochemical pathways, inflammation and damage to the endothelial lining of blood vessels, and activation of the clotting cascade. These are important mechanisms causing the heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure and blood clots in lungs that are modes of death and morbidity. Thanks Marjorie.
Coronavirus Pandemic Update 67: COVID-19 Blood Clots - Race, Blood Types, & Von Willebrand Factor

​It's not just strip clubs and vast corporations qualifying for majic small business bailout money. 
"These companies help advise and run the government"
SPEAKER PELOSI SUPPORTS PUSH FOR TAXPAYER BAILOUT OF CORPORATE LOBBYISTS  

​Weaponizing the dollar, especially Chinese Treasury holdings is difficult for China to do, despite looking superficially easy. 
Here is good analysis from Ilargi at The Automatic Earth:

​This weapon is more straightforward. Carries hypersonics and nuclear missiles.
China Readies Unveiling Of Stealth Nuclear Bomber Capable Of Reaching LA

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), based in Britain, reported that the number of mercenaries recruited by Turkey to fight in Libya had risen to about 11,000, including 261 killed in combat.  

​Gotta' wonder if we could do something like this in the US, maybe even paying more...
​ ​In 2018, Pakistan pledged to plant ten billion trees in an effort to slow climate change and to replenish a landscape that has been decimated by decades of deforestation, livestock grazing, and drought. It was an ambitious goal, but as the Washington Post reported at the time, "the idea of a green awakening seems to be taking root... The concept appeals to a new generation of better-educated Pakistanis, and it has sparked excitement on social media."
​ ​That program, whose name is 10 Billion Tree Tsunami, has been chugging along for the past two years, but it recently received an unexpected infusion of help from – of all things – the coronavirus. Many Pakistanis are suddenly unemployed, so the government has given them jobs as tree-planters. Unemployed day laborers have been turned into "jungle workers," planting saplings for 500 rupees a day ($3), which is roughly half of what a construction worker would normally earn. It's not a lot, but it's enough to get by​...​
U.S. energy use in 2019

Adjusting Settings
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Wednesday, May 6, 2020

Adapting Over Time

Evolving,

Evolutionary success for the coronavirus family will be obtained through mutations that increase infections/spread, but decrease fatalities.
Coronavirus Mutates Into Now-Dominant, More Contagious Form As Doctors Ponder 'East Coast vs. West Coast' Strains

​About treating COVID-19 with hyrdroxychloroquine, and doing so early, not at death's door.
I reviewed the scientific literature on hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), azithromycin (AZ), and their use for COVID-19. My conclusions:

HCQ-based treatments are effective in treating COVID-19, unless started too late.
Studies, cited in opposition, have been misinterpreted, invalid, or worse.
HCQ and AZ are some of the most tested and safest prescription drugs.
Severe COVID-19 frequently causes cardiac effects, including heart arrhythmia. QTc prolonging drugs might amplify this tendency. Millions of people regularly take drugs having strong QTc prolongation effect, and neither FDA nor CDC bother to warn them. HCQ+AZ combination, probably has a mild QTc prolongation effect. Concerns over its negative effects, however minor, can be addressed by respecting contra-indications.
Effectiveness of HCQ-based treatment for COVID-19 is hampered by conditions that are presented as precautions, delaying the onset of treatment. For examples, some states require that COVID-19 patients be treated with HCQ exclusively in hospital settings.
The COVID-19 Treatment Panel of NIH evaded disclosure of the massive financial links of its members to Gilead Sciences, the manufacturer of a competing drug remdesivir. Among those who failed to disclose such links are 2 out of 3 of its co-chairs.
Despite all the attempts by certain authorities to prevent COVID-19 treatment with HCQ and HCQ+AZ, both components are approved by FDA, and doctors can prescribe them for COVID-19.

​Professor Nate Hagens gives his Earth Day 2020 lecture on The State Of The Species​. 
I don't watch videos, but Nate, with background on Wall Street, then defecting to sustainability, and co-editing The Oil Drum, while it existed, is a rare exception. Nate not only holds the big picture in his cranium, but he is a very good painter with words, graphs and images.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQOnfPBSd8g&t=4068s 

Art Berman, who contributed to The Oil Drum, and also recommends Nate's lecture says it is 
Game Over For Oil, The Economy Comes Next
He thoroughly supports the ins and outs of that assertion. Enlightening reading about the inside of the oil and refining businesses.
https://www.artberman.com/2020/04/27/game-over-for-oil-the-economy-is-next/?unapproved=18166&moderation-hash=ab3a5107a96363353804027a685ab215#comment-18166 

Pepe Escobar looks towards the debut and rise of the blockchained digital-yuan, likely backed by gold in some way. 
It could bypass international and local banking in many ways, which would threaten the present global financial structure to it's core. 
(OK by me, I guess, but cash is not subject to sudden cancellation for targeted persons and groups.)
​  ​A new, radical paradigm shift is in progress. The U.S. economy may shrink as much as 40% in the first semester of 2020. China, already the world’s largest economy by PPP for a few years now, may soon become the world’s largest economy even in exchange rate terms.
​  ​The post-Planet Lockdown world – still a hazy mirage – may well need a post-Planet Lockdown currency.​  ​Under this new framework, nations won’t need to export more to China than they import so they have enough yuan to trade. And Beijing won’t have to keep printing yuan electronically – and artificially, as in the case of the U.S. dollar – to meet trade demands.​..​
​  ​The digital yuan will be effectively backed up by the massive amount of Made in China goods and services – and not by a transoceanic Empire of 800 Bases. And the value of the digital yuan will be decided by the market – as it happens with bitcoin...​ ​ But now the post-Planet Lockdown environment is shaping up as ideal for Beijing to make a move. Even before the onset of the Covid-19 crisis the predominant feeling among the leadership was that China is under a full spectrum attack by the United States government. Hybrid War already reaching fever pitch implies bilateral relations will only get worse, not better...
​  ​A key advantage of a sovereign digital yuan is that Beijing does not need to float a paper yuan – which by the way is being sidelined all across China itself, as virtually everyone is switching to electronic payment.
The digital yuan, using blockchain technology, will automatically float – thus bypassing the U.S.-controlled global financialized casino.
​  ​The amount of sovereign digital currency is fixed. That in itself eliminates a plague: quantitative easing (QE), as in helicopter money. And that leaves the sovereign digital currency as the preferred medium for trade, with currency transfers unimpeded by geography and, the icing on the cake, without banks charging outrageous fees as intermediaries.

​Concrete actions we can take (see how many you are doing, already) to merge into the post-COVID economy. 
Charles Hugh Smith​
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2020/05/where-rubber-meets-road.html 

Gearing Down 
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Sunday, May 3, 2020

Simplification

De-cluttering,

High levels of complexity are energetically expensive to maintain. We have entered the era of declining energy-per-capita​l​  of all kinds.​ Where ya gonna live?​
​ ​Going forward, the cities themselves are likely to be starved for tax revenue and federal grants to maintain their infrastructures and social safety nets, and possibly to maintain civil order. The net result will be a steep loss of quality in city life. Surely a percentage of city people will be looking for someplace else to live.
​ ​They may fantasize about moving to “the country,” but in the post Covid-19 reality, that could prove problematic. Country life without the automobile is a very different proposition than what many have in mind, unless it has something to with farming. As a general proposition, we’re going to see the return of a sharp distinction between urban and rural, and the lifestyles that are suited to them.
​ ​Since suburbia is a dead loss, that leaves the small towns and small cities. These are the places that suffered the worst disinvestment in recent decades. Now things have changed. These places have two big advantages over the big cities and the burbs: 1) many have a meaningful relationship to farming (i.e. food), and 2) they are already scaled to the smaller resource and capital realities that we’re facing.

​What to eat and not to eat: Short version​: 
Avoid snack foods, heavy meats and processed carbohydrates. (What?)
Eat fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, whole grains and (non-farmed) fish, with monounsaturated oils.
Long version and reasons why in this scientific article. 
You'll come through your upcoming coronavirus infection if this has been your diet.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5831951/ 

These countries are not America. The average vitamin-D level for Americans, in my experience, is around 20.
Study compared average vitamin D levels in a country with coronavirus mortality
Found a link showing low vitamin D levels are associated with a higher death rate
Researchers 'believe they can advise vitamin D supplementation' to protect against the coronavirus
Pictured, a correlation graph showing the relationship between levels of viamin D (bottom, measured in nmol/l) and compared to infection numbers of coronavirus for 20 European countries. It reveals a convincing correlation where countries with low vitamin D levels were also the countries with highest COVID-19 infection rates

Marjorie send this lucid medical lecture. You can skip most of the first 15 minutes if you have a good background in physiology, biochemistry and immunology. It's good and well explained. 
There are more in this series and I watched one of the later ones, too. 
He covers everything needed each lecture, so redundant if watched sequentially.
Coronavirus Pandemic Update 63: Is COVID-19 a Disease of the Endothelium (Blood Vessels and Clots)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj2vB_VITXQ&list=PLQ_IRFkDInv_zLVFTgXA8tW0Mf1iiuuM_&index=66&t=0s&app=desktop  

Test early and treat before it is too late. Remdesivir is not a miracle  drug.
​ ​Acute Care Surgeon (and Asst Professor of Surgery at Wash U.) Mark Hoofnagle warns "I am truly sorry to say, Remdesivir is probably worth.less.."  
In an excellent Twitter thread, Hoofnagle details what he calls "some fascinating drug company shenanigans."
​ ​First, the pre-test probability that an infused, small-molecule inhibitor of a virus would improve mortality in symptomatic patients was already pretty low. Unfortunately, antivirals work poorly in acute disease. This has to do with their mechanism of action, and host response.
​ ​Antivirals usually target some aspect of viral replication/assembly/transmission. Remdesivir is a clever pharmacologic prodrug that inhibits a key piece of RNA viruses that mammals don’t have - the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, and inhibits viral replication.
​ ​Unfortunately, by the time you are symptomatic with a virus, you are usually already high/peak viral load. So, when you give an antiviral to someone who is already ill, the damage from the virus is largely done.
​ ​It’s there in big numbers and in the cells.
Consistent with this, the Lancet paper on the remdesivir trial in China shows no impact on viral load clinically.
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/remdesivir-probably-worthless-trauma-surgeon-exposes-drug-companys-shenanigans  


Association of American Physicians and Surgeons announces:
Hydroxychloroquine Has about 90 Percent Chance of Helping COVID-19 Patients

​What would happen if there was a global attitude of fairness and rigorous investigation to really understand the coronavirus threat? 
No, really, what if everybody sincerely sought to thoroughly understand it and where it came from?
​ ​“Coronaviruses, including the one that causes SARS, are studied in virology labs around the world, including the US bio-weapons lab at Fort Detrick in Maryland. In fact, the Fort Detrick facility has a history of safety issues and closures far more serious than anything alleged to have taken place at the Wuhan lab,” he stated.
​ ​“The question then is, if the US demands that it have access to Chinese facilities to investigate its charges against China will it reciprocate and allow Chinese investigators to inspect the Fort Detrick lab?” he asked.
​ ​“There is mounting evidence, in fact, that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus did not originate in China but has earlier antecedents in the US. Will the US investigate that possibility and invite Chinese authorities to participate? If not, then Trump has no right to make spurious accusations against China,” he concluded.

​ Why does this make me think of ​the ​​US government​ wasting 2 months of warning, producing faulty tests, outlawing any other tests, then condemning hydroxychloroquine use and forbidding doctors to prescribe it in some states?
​ ​A leaked dossier compiled by Western intelligence agencies concludes that China lied and deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence during the crucial early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, and notes that Chinese researchers have been experimenting with - and creating - deadly bat coronaviruses...
A key theme of the dossier is that China's negligence and lies resulted in the "endangerment of other countries," as the CCP silenced or 'disappeared' doctors who spoke out.
Doctors who bravely spoke out about the new virus were detained and condemned. Their detentions were splashed across the Chinese-state media with a call from Wuhan Police for “all citizens to not fabricate rumours, not spread rumours, not believe rumours.”  

​The status of Taiwan remains in play, but like Tyson chicken-processors, the people don't matter. 
The people of Taiwan​ have nothing to say about whether or not they will be ruled by the Chinese Communist Party elites, NONE. 
Taiwanese people are not more special than Tibetans or Uyghurs (or Palestinians, or Native Americans). 
Re-education awaits. 
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-doesnt-own-un-furious-beijing-slams-un-missions-taiwan-tweets-political  

US Embassy: Israeli West Bank Annexation Can Move Forward Without A Palestinian State
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-embassy-israeli-west-bank-annexation-can-move-forward-without-palestinian-state  


B​ack to work processing chicken carcasses, Guys and Gals!​
Nearly 900 workers at Tyson meat plant in Indiana test positive for coronavirus

​Unpatriotic sick people? One step above dead chickens? No assembly line distancing? Blame or fix?
Waterloo Tyson plant to remain closed despite President Executive Order to open
​ ​Black Hawk County had its first coronavirus case on March 18th and since then the number of cases has grown to more than 1,300.
​ ​Tyson employees said the company didn't do enough to protect, County leaders addressed the executive order Thursday. The doors to the Tyson Waterloo plant are closed as leaders attribute a large number of cases stemming from working closely with others.
​ ​“We can say that 90% of the cases have been attributed or related to the Tyson plant,” said Black Hawk County Public Health Director Nafissa Cisse. I think the thing to keep in mind is that it might not be a direct Tyson case contact but it might be somebody a second exposure.”
​  ​Cisse Egbuonye says the number of cases Thursday was nearly 1,400.
​ ​“These numbers that I’m sharing with you all are people who are loved and people, who have names, they have families and stories,” she said.
​ ​It’s a jump that Sheriff Tony Thompson said now threatens the most vulnerable of people in the county.
​ ​“Our fight today has changed and it’s changed dramatically simply because the initial line of defense has changed,” said Sheriff Thompson. “It has migrated because we lost our first line of defense out there in the community. We have a huge hole blown in that first line of defense and it’s frustrating because it put at greater risk all of our citizens and Blackhawk County.”
https://www.kcrg.com/content/news/Waterloo-Tyson-plant-to-remain-closed-despite-President--570102481.html 

It's Venezuelan socialism's fault for hogging all that oil, for the people who just live there.
Ex-Green Beret Was Behind Failed Attempt At 'Armed Invasion' Of Venezuela Funded By US Billionaires
​ ​The plan was simple, but perilous. Some 300 heavily armed volunteers would sneak into Venezuela from the northern tip of South America. Along the way, they would raid military bases in the socialist country and ignite a popular rebellion that would end in President Nicolás Maduro’s arrest.
​ ​What could go wrong? As it turns out, pretty much everything.
​ ​The ringleader of the plot is now jailed in the U.S. on narcotics charges. Authorities in the U.S. and Colombia are asking questions about the role of his muscular American adviser, a former Green Beret. And dozens of desperate combatants who flocked to secret training camps in Colombia said they have been left to fend for themselves amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Warren Buffet is completely divested from airlines now, but he still likes trains.
 "When we bought [airlines], we were getting an attractive amount for our money when investing across the airlines,” he said. “It turned out I was wrong about that business because of something that was not in any way the fault of four excellent CEOs. Believe me. No joy of being a CEO of an airline."
​ ​"“I don’t know that 3-4 years from now people will fly as many passenger miles as they did last year .... you’ve got too many planes."
​ ​Realizing that he won't be alive by the time a turnaround eventually happens, he clarified that he made the decision and that he lost money on his investments. “That was my mistake.”

​Not Chicken

Jenny with mandarin orange trees in Yoakum recently


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