@Raggedy Ann
Yes. Center. Even as I see those around me flailing. I send them light, good energy, peace. And I walk. All is good. At the same time I cannot not see the stress that everyone is feeling. Those who are close and the masses who are not. It is real and everywhere. The impacts are far reaching. Just read that 40% of voters think jesus will come back in their lifetime in the nyt. Was not expecting that. Yet another indication that people are searching. There are so many fronts that people are struggling on.

Thanks. Be well and have a good one.

There will be a new normal. We will not be going back to our lives as they were. We are in a shift of consciousness. All the societal agreements will change. We are all perceiving our own reality, at this point in time. We must all figure out what is right for us, what our truth is, and live our lives in that truth.

Mother Nature has taken over. She grew tired of the human species not paying attention to what is right for all. The species will not survive, otherwise.

Come to your center. Take this time to look around and see how you can make that difference. Look for love. Live in love.

Revolution will come. It is all about the timing.

Enjoy the day and be grateful.

@jbob
Sorry to hear about your canceled trip. Hopefully you will be able to go.

Myself, I am taking good care. I worry about others. I hear a low rumbling, an almost audible hum. And I worry about those who have lost their jobs, and those who live on the streets. How are they going to feed themselves and their families. Oh good lord show me the way. Here, Food Not Bombs is feeding people, now every day. Doing what they have done for years but as always with little confidence from the city. I check on people who worked on the campaign. California is more prepared than most states. But there is the whole country and many people are clueless. And there is the whole world. Right? We knew this was coming and did not prepare. The Climate Crisis is ticking along. And now this. We can see it coming. But what to do. Thanks for your good thoughts.

Be well, be safe, and take good care.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CJfxaWRkNs]

Don't despair if you can help it. After first taking care to stay healthy and acquire needed supplies try to find ways to use this crisis as a path to enact positive progressive change. If you see a chance to advance progressive thinking take it and run with it. Many people will be open to hearing about ways we can help each other. Lots of people will be looking to governments for public programs that help citizens. Meanwhile for us, We were supposed to be waking up looking at the pyramids in Giza this morning. The travel company "Archeological Paths" has allowed us to change our dates for a tour in Egypt while holding on to our over $25K US dollars as a "deposit" interest free. I can't wait for them to quietly go bankrupt and screw us over! We can and will make it through these tough times.

@Lookout
The climate crisis is still there. Not as up close and personal as Covid-19.

We are a reactive species unable to collectively create a positive future because of our immediate greed.

And because of our immediate greed we do not plan for the future. I wonder how this will all pan out. What will come out on the other side?

Thanks for the recipe. I have moved the taters to the back in a frame so they are safe. Will dose the other things they attack. Heh. I am good as long as I can walk. We are lucky here to have the beach. I now walk on the sand far away from people. Better exercise as well.

Be well and have a good one.

I can't help but see the parallels between COVID and climate chaos. Denial, denial, SCREAM.

We will perhaps stop oil production when NYC, Miami, and New Orleans are flooded. We are a reactive species unable to collectively create a positive future because of our immediate greed.

COVID will pass. The question is what will we have become on the other side. I'm with RA in hoping we will use this event to redefine ourselves and our society. My fear is we end up with some totalitarian police state that prevents forward progress. With the complete union of government and corporations last week, we will have more challenges than ever. Will we rise to the challenge or be so discouraged that we take the crumbs they offer? I don't know. Time will tell.

I've never felt better about my situation back here in the boonies. Last year you asked about vole problems. Try this:

Vole repellent
1 gallon of water
add to water
1 teaspoon liquid dish soap
1 teaspoon castor oil
Spray around beds where they are a problem.

You can also trap them with peanut butter on a trap by any exit holes you see.

In this situation it is easy to become discouraged, but keep a good heart. It is lots better to be in isolation at home than sentenced to a year or more in jail. We just have to do our time and create plans for what happens when we exit off this runaway virus. Sure would be nice if we could muster a united global response to the global corporate take over.

All the best to all of you!

@Cassiodorus
Thanks for the history. Spent some time living in Berlin and a lot of time visiting the Deutsches Historisches Museum among many others.

Today's political landscape, especially in the United States, is reminiscent of the people who appointed Hitler,

With or without a "Hitler" I think we are in for a rough ride.

Always enjoy your comments. Have a good one.

and if we lodge daily appeals to the guilt of liberals for having allowed Donald Trump into the White House, we can make sure that the individual presiding over this nonstop catastrophe has a (D) next to his name. And then we can relax, because the Republicans are always worse.

This is the end-result of the American public's having no standards as regards our political class.

Another thought: September 1st of this year will be the occasion for the release of the English-language translation for Volker Ullrich's book Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945. Now, if you read the first portion of Ullrich's biography (in English; I do not read German), you can see what is interesting about all this. Adolf Hitler was a man of extraordinary ability as a politician, with incredible megalomania and single-minded purpose. The German politicians who appointed him to power on 30 January 1933 were mental midgets whose elite pedigrees and nostalgia for the old Prussian monarchy were important factors in their underestimation of Hitler and in their granting him what in short order became unlimited power over Germany.

It is also important to see the historical background that Hitler inherited. Germany was the philosophical and technical epicenter of the 19th century. People forget a lot of this because German ingenuity became a taboo topic in World War I -- my family on my Dad's side doubtless lost their German-language abilities at that time -- but 19th-century Germany gave the world Marx and the socialists, the young Hegelians, the Kantians, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and all of the important ancestors of 20th-century philosophy, just to name a few. Germany was the 19th century's Athens. Here I will say little about the 19th-century Germans as rivals to Thomas Edison and inventors of the automobile, since I don't know as much.

Germany did not, however, have a vast empire, which is what the British and the French had, and so the Germans had to be content with a few possessions in Africa and with their jealousy. World War I, the inter-imperial conflict, was a war of attrition, destroying both Germany and France. It was ended in the middle of a pandemic, accompanied by catastrophic information suppression to keep troop morale "up." Hitler capitalized upon the later German resentment of all this while pursuing a two-fold political program: "Lebensraum," which mandated the destruction of Poland and the Ukraine (and the slaughter of 90% of their inhabitants) to create new German homelands, and "Judenfrage," which mandated the slaughter of the world's Jews.

Today's political landscape, especially in the United States, is reminiscent of the people who appointed Hitler, but not of Hitler himself. It is full of arrogant, clueless elites. Its most arrogant ideological hope is Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again"; but the elites do not know how to make America great again, nor are they the least bit interested in such a thing, and there is no Hitler on any horizon to take advantage of their idiocy. Political empire was still a robust concept in the 19th and 20th centuries, and in this regard Hitler appeared as an ardent mid-century revivalist. Political empire today is a mere exercise in depletion, the glories of Rome having given way to ecological catastrophe. There are no Hitlers anymore, just bad people.

But yeah, September 1st.

@QMS
Great cartoon.

This from the nyt this morning. From time to time there is some good stuff there.

The cells of genetic females have two X chromosomes — one from their mothers, and one from their fathers — while those of genetic males have only the one X chromosome, from their mothers, and one Y chromosome.

This is crucial, because X chromosomes come in handy for vital functions like building and maintaining the human brain and the immune system. And biologists have long understood that XX chromosomes give females an advantage in some arenas: Having the use of a spare X in case the other is somehow defective is why females are less susceptible to disorders like color blindness, for instance.

But we’re only just now beginning to understand the full advantage that this extra X chromosome confers: It’s not just that women have a spare X chromosome to swap in. Rather, the more than 2,000 genes that, combined, make up two X chromosomes, are used by cells that actually interact and cooperatewithin a woman’s body. Each cell predominantly uses one X chromosome over the other — so if one X chromosome has genes that are better at recognizing invading viruses like Covid-19, for instance, immune cells using that X can focus on that task, while immune cells using the other X chromosome focus on, say, killing cells infected with Covid-19 instead, making the fight against the virus more efficient. ...

My wife doesn’t win only when it comes to overall longevity. Her risk for developing cancers in organs we both have, for example, is lower than mine. And if she does develop cancer, she has better odds of surviving, as research shows that women respond better than men to treatments.

And our sex chromosomes by and large determine our sex hormones — which also give her an advantage: Higher levels of testosterone appear to suppress the immune system; conversely, estrogens have been found to stimulate a more vigorous immunological response.

Have a good one.

on the other side of this tunnel

also, in response to your description

I am a cartoon tightly drawn into a box.

covid cartoon
https://xkcd.com/2287/

thanks magi and good luck to all

@The Voice In the Wilderness
https://time.com/5814076/coronavirus-stimulus-bill-corporate-bailout/

These are the authors

The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, president of Repairers of the Breach, is a co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, a movement to build the power of poor people and change the public narrative on poverty.

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, president of the Kairos Center, is a co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, a movement to build the power of poor people and change the public narrative on poverty.

Maybe they did not read the article. Heh.

How did THIS get on yahoo finance?

Jeremiah 5:28 cries out: “They have grown fat and sleek. They know no bounds in deeds of evil; they judge not with justice the cause of the fatherless, to make it prosper, and they do not defend the rights of the needy.”

If we do not want to be enablers of evil, we must speak out and stand up against it. To write a bill in the time of a pandemic that includes $500 billion for the already wealth and greedy is–according to the word of God–evil.

@mimi @mimi
Germany would definitely have that issue in the forefront. But it looks like it's working in CA. We are keeping hordes of people out of the hospitals so far. So that is saving lives.

The big question is what do we do when the numbers go down. How do we restart without a resurgence of the virus.

Be well mimi. Have a good one.

are probably all illegal, at least in Germany. There is a long interview here, which discuss the possible illegality of the 'solitary confinement' order into your own home.by the government May be there are articles in English from the US which discuss the same. I am not a lawyer. Here are a couple. May be it's time to discuss that? I would be interested in your opinion about it.

@The Voice In the Wilderness
boondoggle byedone. Have a good one.

But he just forgot the questions.

@Snode
This !!!

they have 300 million plus people dropped on their doorstep needing help. I don't think they're up to the challenge. They threw away the tools to fix things.

Well said. I too hope that there is a way outta here. Be well and have a good one.

The government will do little to help us. In most ways it has abdicated it's reason to exist. It has neglected it's fundamental tasks, allowed it's responsibly to it's citizens to become abuse. It's gone on so long we identify with our abusers. We hear over and over how those morons vote against their own interests....but really, both sides do it.

As for the wealthy, their republican/democrat government and their propaganda media, like it or not they have 300 million plus people dropped on their doorstep needing help. I don't think they're up to the challenge. They threw away the tools to fix things. They shouldn't be allowed to get away with it.

I only hope by depending on each other, helping each other we can see who really deserves our respect. I can only hope that on the other side of this people examine why we have a "government" that is hostile, neglectful or indifferent to it's citizens. After all, isn't a government supposed to be for all of us? I can only hope

@mhagle
Happy planting. I am going to plant more potatoes today. New bed in the back.

Have a good day planting.

Planning to go out and plant seeds today, what I have left. Hope to come back and read everything more thoroughly later.

@MrWebster
Insane. But what is new. Won't happen. Thanks for the link.

Have a good one.

Pelosi keeps talking about a phase four bill when Congress reconvenes on April 20, but on April 20th the DC area will likely be peaking in #coronavirus contagion.

Basically imagine a leader calling for a convention in NYC right now. That's what Pelosi is doing.

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) April 2, 2020

@lotlizard
Same is true for us who grew up post ww2. Good skills to have. The depression was too close to forget.

Have a good one

Their tendency towards stoicism — and cynicism? — turns out to be useful in times of crisis.

Old instincts on how to stick together, scrimp, and survive are returning, now that the Free World they thought they were joining ALSO turns out to be a locked-down, dysfunctional system of government and economy, made to look good only by the efforts of an elite-controlled, party-line-toeing media and cultural establishment …