everything looks normal, the tides come and go, the birds peck around, the setting sunlight illuminates the valley. But for us these are uncharted waters, and for many it will hold much pain. My wish is that the pain recedes in time and a new chart is drawn, one less harmful to all of life.
The soon-to-be demise of the Saudi monarchy has come about from two stupid wars of choice that they intentionally started.
It couldn't have happened to a more deserving group of criminals.
The Oil Price War
Wednesday in The Guardian online there was a piece by Jonathan Portes titled "Don't believe the myth that we must sacrifice lives to save the economy." This is an attempt to rationally rebut the notion that "the economy" is some kind of god or gods which demands continual human sacrifice if the un
Xi, not China this time; how coy of him:
‘Blame Xi, not China, for the impact of the coronavirus’, Austin Lowe, Opinion Contributor — 03/25/20, the hill.com (two paragraphs of a propaganda piece)
“To refer to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus,” as Trump and other members of the GOP leadership have, is deeply problematic. It is also misleading. The severity of the virus has nothing to do with action or inaction by the Chinese people; on the contrary, many Chinese citizens should be lauded for their efforts to sound the alarm on the issue.
My county is has 15 confirmed cases of COVID-19. Testing is still very limited in Oregon and we are in a partial lock down. Some optimization if we follow the guidelines may not overrun our capacity of hospital beds. This will go on for several weeks and every few days there area a few more restrictive orders.
The Federal Reserve on Tuesday hired BlackRock Inc. to steer tens of billions of dollars in bond purchases. Again.
Heroes.
.@nytimes has video from a hospital in Elmhurst, Queens. It is horrifying.
“We had to get a refrigerated truck to store the bodies of patients who are dying.”
“Five ventilators...there’s a mythical 100 ventilators out there that we haven’t seen.” https://t.co/zARPofu6pS pic.twitter.com/JxKl46H5RC
— Tim Hogan (@timjhogan) March 26, 2020
Time for serious contemplation once again about the flourishing pandemic. A recent essay entitled the nose knows has been submitted for your erudition. Loss of the sense of smell, which sensation is called olfaction, is called anosmia. Hyposmia is a milder form of diminished olfaction.
Actually after watching the first two minutes of a youtube video. I won't give you a link because the video is not really the point and I don't want to enable an idiot, but the gist is that the Democratic response to the "stimulus bill" is so bad that the person is voting for Trump.
She's deluded, but right.
I have climbed out of the muck in my swamp long enough to write a non-political essay which hopefully will shed light on the current social-isolation = self-quarantine many of us are experiencing. Now being rather new at this business, the unfolding of forced solitude is a new experience. What's that old saying? Something like you can't teach an alligator new tricks--or sum thin' like that.
[This essay is adapted and expanded from a comment I made in another essay.]
One of my businesses is an online vacuum cleaner supplies store. I just tested HEPA vacuum cleaner bag material for breathability when used as material in a do-it-yourself face mask. It turns out that HEPA is extremely difficult to breathe through when attached to the face with a good seal. It will not make a good DIY mask.
Make no mistake about it: we are in this mess now as a direct result of the policies supported by both parties that own the government. I mean "own" literally: the two parties having members occupying approximately 100% of elected offices in the country are, officially, corporations. Their control over our government is ownership in the most fundamental sense.
