coronavirus

A short editorial

I'm on the fence, kinda torn. On the one hand I think the government (federal, and many states) did a bad job of being consistent in COVID-19 messaging and that fed into a lot of people's paranoia and government mistrust. We really don't need people gathering together to protest social distancing, and part of me thinks they are just pawns doing the bidding of Big Oil who desperately needs us to start consuming gasoline at a breakneck pace again.

The Coronavirus is Finishing the Collapse of America

This is the subtitle of an article published on Medium by Umair Haque. Ironically, the day before Jimmy Dore called our attention to this article in a conversation with Dylan Ratigan, our own Steven D posted a comment in reply to a tweet on Twitter. I saw his comment and added my own. Our two comments may be more prescient than either of us realized at the time we posted them.

Hot Air

Crisis three, have we: SARS-Cov-19, the Climate Crisis, and the disintegration of democracy.

Treatment for the Coronavirus is evolving. The disease is complicated and is not acting like influenza. They are finding that it also causes brain infections, heart infections, and neurological problems. Ventilators are generally not working. So now they are avoiding ventilators for the most part. Sixty to eighty percent of the people put on ventilators either die or end up with additional serious complications.

Instead doctors are now turning people on their stomachs and improving their oxygenation. Dr. Richard Levitan, an airway specialist who has practiced emergency medicine for over 30 years addresses these issues.

What will happen if we reopen for business?

The following calculations are rough and do not use any fancy epidemiological equations. The poor availability of testing and flaky reporting of outcomes make it difficult to know exactly what the numbers are.

According to Johns Hopkins on April 16, 2020:

Case fatality rate 4.5%
Confirmed cases 636,350
Deaths 28,326
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/cumulative-cases

Open Thread Friday 4-10-2020

Compromised breathing is a major problem in modern society. Pollution, smoking, infectious disease and simply aging slowly erodes the effectiveness of our breathing capacity. Teaching breathing skills is not a common practice in the United States. Medical practitioners are doing a better job now than in the past. Competitive practices from alternative medical traditions have increased the use of breath techniques in allopathic medicine. The names of the exercises are different, but the tecniques are similar.

The examples in the following videos are really important to learn before you actually have need to use them to keep breathing. I have put together a selection with different teachers and body types hopefully one resonates with you - to your improved health.

Covid-19 and our disappearing civil liberties and privacy rights


frida kahlo; The Wounded Table

Or: Will there be a post-coronavirus world or more of the same?

Some of our rights are ceded willingly, if reluctantly, due to the intensity of the pandemic panic; others are more covertly arranged.  My last post demonstrating our disappearing rights was global, but included for the US:

The InJustice Department has quietly asked Congress to suspend habeas corpus, as in: ‘Let them rot in jail until we have the time for trials’.

Open Thread Friday 4-3-2020

Seasons come, seasons go and the cycle continues. Most of Americans life revolves around seasons defined by the market place and man-made events. What wrapping paper message in on the boxes of chocolate in the stores. Is it Easter, Christmas, Valentine or Happy Halloween? Which sports season? I became confused as they began to overlap. Is it flu or allergy season? What should I be celebrating or complaining about?

It all stopped. A virus came along. Our carefully constructed illusion of mankind controlling the enviornment is under attack. Mother nature just gave us a time out.

Human sacrifice is not good for the economy, and neither is class warfare

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

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