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United State of Terror: Is Drone War Fair?

Thursday, April 30, 2020

Rent Asunder.



Twin Teepees of Green and Fossil Fuels: Alien technology Trying to look Native. 

As in the drafting of the US constitution and the Treaty of Versailles, the manner in which wealth is being divided is now done in such a way as to ensure endless litigation: drawn up in extraordinarily involved and deliberately complicated language which, under the pretense of being fair to all, would force them instead to tear each other apart; since you can't take it with you, you may as well die with the consolation that the nations' treasures will poison the lives of your heirs; the only drawback being you will be deprived of the pleasure of watching your family scratching each other's eyes out to claim a share of a fortune built up over a lifetime that has, unbeknownst to them, dwindled to a pittance in the blink of an eye.

An invisible gas, accumulating with each rig drilled in the vast shale deposits of the continental United States has been flared, piped, collected, frozen, pressurized, encapsulated in floating bombs that have proliferated around the globe to bring a bonanza of cheap energy to the resource-starved nations, only to now sit afloat, while demand sinks and markets implode, and only one well-piloted, off-the-shelf drone need arrive to ignite the implosion into a fiery explosion, turning an unwanted asset into an insurance claim. With off-shore companies and hidden connections, shadow bankers and dark pools of cash stashed in black holes or under black rocks, the very real possibility emerges of the owners themselves having shunted the monies to the organisation that now claims credit for the act of sabotage. So then, would/could it be against the insurance company, not Chesapeake energy, that the subterfuge was directed?

While humans of the planet have been sloganeering about saving it, they were in fact saving something else. Or trying to. Now no one can remember why. A flight of stares, a magic car pet ride, ostentation nation while reality slides deeper into a trap of indenture they hope lacks teeth. But there's something afoot; something's amiss. The dreadful feeling that something's coming for you only gets stronger as one calamity is followed by another, one plan replaces another just in time for that plan to collapse too: Jit Disaster Capitalism.

There is something coming for you.

There were warnings. Signs. Not exactly what we refer to as omens, which are fanciful and arbitrarily divined, but signs posted as datapoints, concatenating catastrophes, population collapse in the midst of teeming oceans, or insect populations disappearing thereby decimating the ranks of their avian predators. A great healing was in order, but there's no time to stop the hemorrhaging to allow it to occur. But nature finds a way.

The microbe we have freed to ravage our species is a mere shadow, a fleeting moment of time during which we  have let loose a plague on ourselves that has undermined much of what we held dear; but a mere molecule that is just as invisible and that we have been instrumental in loosing upon the world is just as dangerous to those innocent of any involvement in its release, even as we have mortgaged our future by pouring trillions of borrowed dollars into a bailout for the very industries that pour out billions of tons of this molecule to ensure the freedom of a few to live like kings while the masses are reduced to ashes in crematoria that turn even their corpses into a black cloud of noxious CO2.

While our Furor pulls pranks, telling his Reality Show fans to shoot up disinfectant, the movie Planet of the Humans comes out, wherein it is dutifully demonstrated that the wind farms and solar arrays we are being sold as "alternative energy" or "renewable fuel" are of the exact same nature. Yet the first Prank, that, "Climate Change is a Hoax", is still ignored: but both are delivered as distraction from our own active participation in our own demise. They are not just related; they are intertwined. Yet the one that is the least harmful, its idiocy so obvious it can be immediately discounted, is the one harped on and dragged through every news outlet to heap scorn onto, while the far more dangerous, and deeply-rooted, "Hoax" assertion continues to go unchallenged, even as the entire economy has been surreptitiously built around it.

It's as though the concept of injecting disinfectant were immediately adopted and the Defense Production Act invoked to assure supply and to manufacture needles for its injection. As a country, that is what we have done with the "Hoax" assertion: ramped up hydraulic fracturing, extolled LNG as the Future, flared an escalating amount of our gas supply into the troposphere, erected gigafactories to churn out millions more automobiles that will just add to the already billion vehicles jamming the fossil-fuel-dependent asphalt roadways, driveways, and sprawled across sidewalks built for pedestrians. Yet in the space of a couple of days, the moronic UV/disinfectant advise from the Furor was rescinded with the facile excuse that it was but a prank, whereas not a peep is heard about his "climate change is a hoax" stance; as though it were any less dangerous, ridiculous, or easily refuted by fact.

We set ourselves up for this, as is clear from NIH internal documents and cross-border crossings of dizzying numbers of people on a daily basis, now bringing unwanted microbes as well as what they were always bringing: unwanted Global Warming. Why can we stop everything to fight one calamity, but only increase the very economic activity that is the known cause of the other? (Building an entire Green infrastructure on top of the fossil fuel infrastructure does what basic physics says it has to do: Increases CO2 production, because it pays it forward: you burn now what you HOPE to save in the future, a future that will, because of the Green Machine being hobbled together, have far, does already have far, more carbon in its air than it would have had had we just burnt through the stores of fossil fuels, which we are burning through now anyway, only at a faster pace precisely because of Green Energy).

The reason for such ersatz thinking is demonstrated to us each day by our Furor: Delusion.

The nonsense that Climate Change is a hoax is never attacked because the only solution we've come up with to counter it, Green Energy, is a cruel hoax as well.

Like the Republican and Democratic parties, they are purposely distorted Funhouse mirror reflections of one another: if one gets shattered, so does the other.

We watch DC's Daily Coronacircus because its Emcee is the embodiment of Folly, and folly is what the economy thrives on. Thus can the stock market and unemployment soar simultaneously, 35 millions without work, but the market roars ahead despite the economy collapsing beneath it. For even Folly needs energy, and energy feeds Power; more energy means more Power. And we are all, above all else, Power hungry, even when it drains our humanity of every ounce of compassion it once upon a time felt, or at least felt obliged to pretend it felt, for the afflicted.











Monday, April 27, 2020

The Prankness is a Losing Race.


Yo Hon, How d'ya like that new shade of lipstick?
"I think I'll go Bach to the Fuschia."

Nor all of our piety nor all these bailouts, not all our lockdowns, nor all our masks will stop one outbreak in nursing homes, will stop one prison from being infected, can halt any industry from being impacted, so long as the force that drives the owners of Capital impel them to steer it away from those who have nothing. 

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Michael Moore Presents: Planet of the Humans | Full Documentary | Direct...



I so often get misunderstood as being anti-green, but that's because I believe there' no such thing ... a rather lonely position. But This film shows why, presents my case in a far more convincing and comprehensive than I ever will be able to. But, I've never embedded a vid, so I hope this works.

 Although there's moments filled with Blood and Gore in this movie, and it is a repulsive sight, I highly recommend it. I found it posted in the comments section on my favorite accountant's site, Gail the actuary, of the wonderful resource of my early blogging daze, the oildrum.com, long since shuttered, but she still writes at :

https://ourfiniteworld.com/

You can find the oildrum posts there, too.

As a last comment, I just read a post  about, Surprise! Surprise!, coronavirus that put my attitude toward the Greening of the energy sector in perfect terms, or at least as succinctly as I've ever seen it:

The paradigm we have been sold by the Green Spin Machine is one in which we, "Treat the symptom to make the world safe for the pathology."

Bingo. That is what the Green economy is really all about: allowing, nay, enabling, the continued combustion of every fossil fuel on earth. It treats the symptom to make the continued pathological behavior of ever-more widespread incineration possible, so that it now not only encompasses the unholy trinity of Oil, Coal, And natural Gas, but now includes every living plant on earth.  Either growing them, with massive fossil fuel inputs, or harvesting them (switch grass) them to make ethanol; or razing forests to create woodchips and biodiesel, clear-cutting forests in the Carolinas and rainforests in Indonesia to ship the output to Europe to be incinerated. We have created a Concentration Camp-style industrialized death machine for all of Nature into which we throw our plant-slaves once they've been stripped of any semblance of Life.

We had to be stopped, and as Jeff Goldblum put it in "Jurassic Park, "Nature finds a way".

It appears that it has.

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

The High Cost of Being Exceptional.



Dr. Richard Levitan, writing in the NYT's about the intensity of New York's COVD-19 disaster, notes that:

"Even patients without respiratory complaints had Covid pneumonia. The patient stabbed in the shoulder, whom we X-rayed because we worried he had a collapsed lung, actually had Covid pneumonia. In patients on whom we did CT scans because they were injured in falls, we coincidentally found Covid pneumonia. Elderly patients who had passed out for unknown reasons and a number of diabetic patients were found to have it."

"And here is what really surprised us: These patients did not report any sensation of breathing problems, even though their chest X-rays showed diffuse pneumonia and their oxygen was below normal. How could this be?"

Well, I can tell you how:

"Zhou Qing still remembers the dismay she felt on Jan. 22 as she walked into Wuhan No. 7 Hospital to begin her emergency assignment.

Zhou, an intensive care specialist with three decades of medical experience, had been dispatched to No. 7 Hospital — a mid-ranking facility in the central Chinese city — to lead its intensive care unit during the epidemic."

“They were not aware this was a serious issue,” says Zhou, as though she were referring to New York's medical personnel a full three months later.

She goes on to say,

"The lack of protective measures quickly led to a wave of cross-infections that swept through No. 7’s medical team, making it even harder for the hospital to cope with its large influx of COVID-19 patients. Yet doctors in the city remain haunted by the chaos of the early stages of the outbreak, when hospitals were overrun by a sudden surge of pneumonia patients."

And echoing what the NYT's article referenced above as, " here is what really surprised us:", Dr. Qing noted,

"One of the first things we noticed was that our COVID-19 patients had a higher tolerance for hypoxia, a kind of oxygen deprivation, than typical viral pneumonia cases. Patients with other viral pneumonias, such as H1N1, typically develop fevers and feel weak after just 20% of their lungs are affected. But COVID-19 patients could develop severe pneumonia while experiencing only mild respiratory issues. Most patients I treated only had trouble breathing after 60% of their lungs or more were affected.

Thus, the majority of patients displayed relatively mild symptoms in the first week. But this made the second week all the more critical, as patients’ conditions would deteriorate rapidly."

Notice the phrase, 

"One of the first things we noticed ... "

In other words Dr. Qing remarked on and explained the exact phenomenon in January what right now, in late April, has New York Doctors wondering why:

"These patients did not report any sensation of breathing problems, even though their chest X-rays showed diffuse pneumonia and their oxygen was below normal. How could this be?"

He then explains that,

 "We are just beginning to recognize that Covid pneumonia initially causes a form of oxygen deprivation we call “silent hypoxia” — “silent” because of its insidious, hard-to-detect nature."

If, however, my good Dr, you, or your colleagues, or the NIH, or the CDC had had the least bit of interest as to what was befalling China, you could have read this where I did, not in a medical journal or a textbook, but in the newspaper (and no, I don't read Chinese, this data was published in an English version of  a Chinese journal that anyone could have picked up and informed you about (But what would have been the point, since you would not have paid the least bit of attention if we had. After all, what do lay people know? Only the much-vaunted opinion of Experts matters).

The article continues:

" ... when Covid pneumonia first strikes, patients don’t feel short of breath, even as their oxygen levels fall. And by the time they do, they have alarmingly low oxygen levels and moderate-to-severe pneumonia (as seen on chest X-rays). Normal oxygen saturation for most persons at sea level is 94 percent to 100 percent; Covid pneumonia patients I saw had oxygen saturations as low as 50 percent".

That is almost verbatim what Dr. Qing, had we cared to listen, described long before the first patient testing positive for the coronavirus showed up in an emergency room in NYC.

But while the press has been so assiduous in their documentation of how feckless the White House response has been, there has been no remarks as to why this vital data wasn't already known and acted upon. As the author, Dr. Richard Levitan, goes on to explain,

"There is a way we could identify more patients who have Covid pneumonia sooner and treat them more effectively — and it would not require waiting for a coronavirus test at a hospital or doctor’s office. It requires detecting silent hypoxia early through a common medical device that can be purchased without a prescription at most pharmacies: a pulse oximeter."

Being a Doctor, he couches that statement in those terms, but what the real situation is, is that,

There was a way we could have identified more patients who had Covid pneumonia sooner and treated them more effectively — one that would not have required waiting for a coronavirus test at a hospital or doctor’s office. It requires detecting silent hypoxia early through a common medical device that can be purchased without a prescription at most pharmacies: a pulse oximeter.

So while blaming Trump and watching him squirm, or seeing him react like a child might be fun, the fact that a simple devise such as this could have been used, not in emergency rooms, but in CVS clinics, for example, instead of just waiting passively for a stampede of patients from a virus that was known by professionals, (I assume that if I knew that what Trump was stating about the virus was right out of fantasyland that they did too) to threaten the very functioning of the hospital itself, simply by talking to the Doctors on the Front line, despite their country of origin, the worst part of this pandemic could well have been avoided.

Which isn't to say I am pointing a finger of blame at the NYC Dr's, but surely the NIH/CDC must have had some inkling of this phenomenon, and if not, why not?, if so, why put doctors and hospital systems under this strain?

The author opines that it was just this type of early detection that saved Boris Johnson, so this has been known for weeks, but the emphasis is still on testing, as though there is no other alternative, even as one graces the pages of the NYT.

Of such laxity are right-wing conspiracies hatched.

But why I felt compelled to point this out is that this same Dr. Qing made another observation that I have been wondering about as the northern hemisphere's weather heats up and Air Conditioning units begin to get snapped on in the coming months:

"The air conditioners were left running, despite the risk of spreading viral droplets." (Although why the A/C would be on in January is a bit baffling).

Are we going to follow the same trajectory with air conditioning as we followed with the virus? Are we going to simply ignore already known data until the second wave "inexplicably" turns into a tsunami?

India Today is running an article that I found posted on Yves Smith's Naked Capitalism site, that theorizes about this same vector of dispersion.

With all the nursing home deaths we've already seen occur, wouldn't it perhaps be worthwhile to examine this possibility before the need for A/C starts circulating the coronavirus among this most vulnerable of populations?















Monday, April 20, 2020

Gnashionalism and SARS Wars Too: The Attack of the Clonal.



Apocalypse on Both Your Houses.

 I am infected.
Apocalypse o' both your houses! I am sped.

What, art thou hurt?

Ay, ay, a sneeze, a sneeze. Marry, ’tis enough.

Courage, man. The hurt cannot be much.

No, ’tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world. Apocalypse  o' both your houses! Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat to sneeze a man to death! A braggart, a rogue, a villain that fights by the book of arithmetic!  

Apocalypse Now: Since Jan 1, 2020:


In the new atmosphere of unproductive but hate-inspiring finger-pointing being stoked by our Furor, I remember a phrase from my youth not heard much today, "A word to the Wise".

When the logic, or justification for a process becomes unmoored from reality, at some point that process comes to an end. With each tick up of the United States' National debt, with it's corresponding tick down of its annual GDP, and with each trillion dollars added to the liabilities of its Central Bank's balance sheet, keeping its mortgage rates low and its GSE's NPL's silently growing as mortgage payments begin to erode, the use of the Fed as a SIV by its "independent" reserve banks, who have been for more than a decade now foisting the growing risk of its bad loans onto the public, while, the squeaky sound of a system foundering on the sandy banks of low-interest, low down-payment home loans bought up as though they were healthy assets by the Centralized Federal government's Bank, an ominous creaking sound is heard as the door opens a crack and sheds a ray of light into the squirming viper's nest of defalcations and rehypothecations hidden in murky transactions by a shadow banking system, reminiscent of 2008.

The Banks collapsed in 2008. This time, however, all the risk has been buried in the heart of darkness inside the federal government. With the Furor declaring America's Energy Independence, right in the middle of a pandemic, the world may begin to wonder if there is still any reason why oil should continue to be sold in dollars. It is the currency that most threatens to implode, its member banks now using the Lender of last resort, as though it were Mar-a Lago, the first resort. When America was the Sole SuperPower, it assumed the cloak of leadership and the burden of running the world. But it has now proclaimed that its sole motive for its actions is to put America First (By which they mean American Corporations, the People who paid for their election). Perhaps that was always the case, and they are actually happy that at last we can admit it, nay, brag about it, now; but it doesn't change the fact that we now make decisions entirely based on our own self-interest, the rest of the world, and even our own citizens, be damned.

Borrowing at 0 risk to themselves trillions of dollars of Bernanke-coined "Helicopter Money", has shuffled all that nasty risk onto the shoulders of the polity that sits in lonely, idle isolation while a mountain of liability is created in their name. Because as the Fed's balance sheet, along with the annual deficits and National Debt, all balloon, the GDP of this same United States continues to leak the hot air that was keeping its bubble economy aloft, so the revenue stream for that government is slowing to a trickle. As the revenue stream slows, while not only does annual spending continue to increase, but Corona Virus increases get larded on top of that in a classic Disaster Capitalism example of a Corporate trough-feeding frenzy, even as States are also taking on an ever larger burden of debt, perhaps more than their already straining budgets can endure.

Contrary to pent up demand just itching to be set free, there is a crashing roar from demand destruction. And no amount of cheerleading, or out-of-touch cheery ads, is likely to change that for the very sad reason that millions are dying all around the world, and their assets will be handed over to fill the demand of the survivors. And that biggest asset, now worth a fraction of the loan balance owed on it, is their personal transportation module, guaranteeing that we will come nowhere near manufacturing the 17 million we did last year (Thank god).

Of course, the problem is, that resilient consumer was resilient because she had a job, and he/she felt that buying trunkloads of Made-in-China products while saving nothing, it is, after all, disposable income, was the way to go, aren't going to be returning to their jobs, because people won't be risking their health, if not their lives, to have their nails buffed, bodies inked, and their privates waxed by strangers.

The deflationary forces unleashed by the collapse of oil prices has yet to even begin to work their way through the economy, yet three of the tools most championed as being effective to counteract it have already been deployed since the Trump took office, and are now merely an accepted part of How the Economy Runs Now:

Low interest rates: after a pathetic attempt to "Baby Step" them up, were hammered back down on the insistence of the President in 2019, which the Powell Fed weakly acceded to,

Helicopter money: Which the Trump dropped onto the corporate sector as his much-ballyhooed "Tax Reform", which raised the deficit by cutting revenues, with not just no reciprocal cut in spending, but a major increase instead, sending both the annual deficits and the National Debt soaring, yet did nothing for jobs, demand, nor consumer spending, as it never resulted in the slightest "Trickle down" effect that Screwyou economics is supposed to deliver, most of it having been siphoned into the energy sector to fund the increasingly sketchy proposition of a bankrupt oil industry somehow creating an "Energy Independent" USA.

QE: Helicopter drop is an expansionary fiscal policy that is financed by an increase in an economy's money supply. To simultaneously institute helicopter money drops while engaging in massive bouts of QE, which the Fed was in the midst of providing far in advance of any Corona Virus pandemic or threat thereof, makes the accusations against China especially galling.

Each of  of these steps taken while the USA!USA! economy was "The Best Economy Ever", are or at least had been, until GW Bush got finished with the economy, considered to be last resort-type monetary stimulus strategies to spur inflation and economic output. Now they are out-of-control "business" as usual, leaving the Lender of last resort without resources when they're needed the most, all to make the stock market climb to unsustainable valuation to stoke the ego of our adulterous, Primping, Genius billionaire President who derides Elites, even while preening about claiming to be a genius: there's one elite group he apparently is envious of; while boasting of his billionaire status, an even more elitist group he spent a lifetime attempting to become a part of, while insisting he wanted to remain apart from; and of course, President, the elitist of elite groups, there being but a handful on the entire planet.

Two of the more desperate measures, that of re-igniting QE and hammering down interest rates, rates the GSE's desperately need raised as their reserves for NPL's are close to non-existent, revealed a desperation for making the economy look good to its citizens while exposing it to the world for the basket case it was. The GSE's have been buying mortgages from banks that, thanks to the suppression of interest rates that leaves them far lower than if they reflected the real amount of risk lenders assume when issuing them, the FHA and the Fanny and Freddie loans cost the US government more and more the longer they remain on their books, in terms of real collateral: the real value of the properties on their books isn't close to their appraised values, and, when inflation of the currency occurs simultaneous with deflation of the assets explains the negative interest rates facing savers. Buying mortgages whose interest rates are a mere 3.5 - 4% while inflation is still 2%, means that the interest payments go down every year after the first two, so the real interest on the loans goes negative after the third  year. Which is why the banks don't want them on their books, but shuffling the riskiest assets onto a SIV's balance sheet, even when that SIV is the FED, neither reduces the riskiness of those assets nor changes the calculus of profitability. With low inflation, the interest rate equals a revenue stream to the entity that owns the asset, but when inflation eats the value of the loan, using the appreciation of the asset as a counterpoint, when the asset loses value, as a pumped up asset eventually always does, then at the slightest downturn, there is no reserve. The asset then becomes a liability as the value it holds on the books is far above its Market value, ie the amount you could actually sell it for.

IN this context, not a month after the Fed had to step into the repo market to keep it from spiraling into a credit crunch, the USA sent military personnel to Wuhan China to join in the World Military Games.

In February, the Japanese Asahi news report (print and TV) claimed the coronavirus originated in the US, not in China, and that some (or many) of the 14,000 American deaths attributed to influenza may have in fact have resulted from the coronavirus.

After collecting samples of the genome in China, medical researchers first conclusively demonstrated that the virus did not originate at the wet market but had multiple unidentified sources, after which it was exposed to the wet market from where it spread everywhere.

According to the Global Times:

A new study by Chinese (Taiwanese ... a staunch US ally) researchers indicates the novel coronavirus may have begun human-to-human transmission in late November from a place other than the Hubei seafood market in Wuhan. (The exact time it would need to incubate if it had been brought to China during those Military Games ... what a coincidence ... do you believe in such coincidences?)

Chinese medical authorities – and “intelligence agencies” – then conducted a rapid and wide-ranging search for the origin of the virus, collecting nearly 100 samples of the genome from 12 different countries on 4 continents, identifying all the varieties and mutations. During this research, they determined the virus outbreak had begun much earlier, probably in November, shortly after the Wuhan Military Games.

 In February of 2020, the Japanese Asahi news report (print and TV) claimed the coronavirus originated in the US, not in China.

The Military World Games were held in Wuhan in October, and it had already been widely discussed that the virus could have been transmitted at that time – from a foreign source.

Then, Taiwan ran a TV news program on February 27, that presented diagrams and flow charts suggesting the coronavirus originated in the US.

One of his main points is that the type infecting Taiwan exists only in Australia and the US and, since Taiwan was not infected by Australians, the infection in Taiwan could have come only from the US.

The basic logic is that the geographical location with the greatest diversity of virus strains must be the original source because a single strain cannot emerge from nothing. He demonstrated that only the US has all the five known strains of the virus (while Wuhan and most of China have only one, as do Taiwan and South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam, Singapore, and England, Belgium and Germany), constituting a thesis that the haplotypes in other nations may have originated in the US.

Korea and Taiwan have a different haplotype of the virus than China, perhaps more infective but much less deadly, which would account for a death rate only 1/3 that of China.

Meanwhile while we castigate China, the world is already trading with them, as we know from the reported influx of faulty facemasks, tests that give wrong readings, and gowns that tear as easily as tissue paper, it's clear China's cheap products are still acceptable.

But people that are coming from the US once the lockdown is terminated will be highly suspect, as the country has shown itself to be in a different class than its trading partners. More like a third world country than a modern industrial state, the USA may well find itself unable to reopen, not only because of its own citizens' reluctance to get on board planes but because European countries will erect walls to keep the Americans out. With their lack of testing and their casual attitude toward spreading Covid-19 to other nations, as will be evident by the way it will continue to be spread from state to state here, since there is not even random testing, one can hardly blame them.

Already China has closed its border with Russia for precisely that reason, and yet compared to the US, Russia's response has been far less nonchalante.

While we sit in our splendid Aren't We Great Again? isolation, other countries, with forward-looking, energy-balanced growth plans that emphasize a reduction in their fuelish use of deadly energy regimes will form the same kind of blocs that some of the States within the United States are forming as they plan to re-open their businesses. And the hapless way the US has conducted its response will not encourage countries that are actually serious about infection control just won't wash: No country will want to risk the likelihood that the US will re-infect them. Nor the backlash from its citizens such a 2'nd wave might occasion.

And, as an ominous factor for the future deployment of US troops abroad, as the abrupt termination of a Naval officer who DARED speak truth to our Corona-in-Chief makes manifest, the biggest danger to our allies is the US Armed forces living in their homeland, its members now openly threatened with being summarily dismissed by the reality show-based policy of "You're Fired", if they let their hosts know they have disease-bearing military personnel frequenting their cities. They will instead, by order of said Corona-in-Chief, keep their infection status secret. Thus will every American base be the first suspected source of any future outbreaks in any country hosting them. And because their SOFA agreement with the US are couched in terms that make the US unaccountable for any such occurrences, maybe they'll be reluctant, or maybe it will be made impossible by its citizens' protests, to continue to have US bases in their country. The costs will simply prove too much as they're forced to close their economy all over again, not because of their own citizens, but because of the foreign virus living in their midst that is unable or unwilling to provide the status of infection among its troops housed in their lands. US Homeland Security mandate: Spreading a virus all over a world that takes it seriously, but that the US and its armed forces don't.

So monomaniacal has the US concept of Security become, that its President himself, the Commander-in-Chief of its armed forces claims he feels no responsibility whatsoever for the pandemic let loose in his own country. That the Head of the Military blatantly trumpets his  unconcern for his own people is a clarion call to any Nation that has US troops on its soil that the US holds them responsible should an outbreak be traced back as having been caused by the US presence. Especially as the US attitude toward the coroanvirus, as suggested by such tweets as "LIBERATE MICHIGAN", is still that it's, "Only a bad flu".
                                                              Washington State Protests
Actual sign: "Give me Liberty or give me COVID-19".

Remember, the treaty on biological warfare describes it as "any living biological entity": technically that includes human beings, even deplorable ones, which the last time I checked were biological entities. So tweeting such volatile encouragement to his groupies to protest, the Commander-in-Chief is waging biological Warfare against Blue States in his own country ... what are the chances that he would hesitate to do the same in yours?

 And now the Corona-in-Chief has made it plain that it's where the virus originates that matters. Following his example they will blame the source, which will then be us, not their own lack of testing or any other preparation having been made, or rather having not been made, despite an outbreak on any base, as an outbreak, being part of the US defense strategy.  Sending troops that are threatened with dismissal if they reveal their Covid-19 status makes US Army bases biological weapons of mass destruction, deployed around the world where they are free to disseminate a known deadly pathogen. That fits the exact definition of biological warfare, not what China did/didn't do.

Now, since the press has taken to likening this endeavor to a War Effort, the obsession to cast blame on one country for having started the "War" doesn't exactly imply a position of strength. On the contrary, since it resembles nothing more than puerile playground finger-pointing, it reminds me of children insisting "You started it", "Did  not, You started it", wherein the one losing the fight is the one more strenuously insisting the other chap started it. And judging from the caseload as well as the casualty figures, the US, where one city alone has more cases and a higher death toll than entire countries, is the hands down loser. Again.

 Now, despite all that, the main reason I believe the US is shooting itself in the foot again by following the policy of blaming China is that US energy policy, no matter where you wish to point, is having disastrous financial repercussions across the globe.

https://www.dw.com/en/davos-2020-trump-rejects-prophets-of-doom-at-climate-focused-wef/a-52083749

"Our house is still on fire. Your inaction is fueling the flames by the hour."

But what the adults know is that Greta is only half right, it is our Actions. Unless she means we spend more time inactive than active: our transit from one transportation module to the next is the only time we aren't sitting on our asses. We have come to associate "driving" which is an inaccurate term for our time spent sitting behind a wheel, with "action"; but human beings don't, as AI has surely shown us, "drive" cars; the engine does. Humans only pilot them. When you drive  a team of horses, you expend energy in order to do so, whereas that toe on the accelerator, while indeed it fuels the engine, doesn't drive it, internal combustion resulting in controlled detonations is what drives it. "Your inaction", as Greta claims, "is (simply) fueling the flames by the hour."  

The fact that Mr.Trump's rhetoric on climate change is couched in exactly the same terms that he used to forestall any counteraction to the threat of the coronavirus, including characterizing both of them as a Hoax, leaves the United Sates of America fully naked before the world as its leading Climate Criminal. Having adopted Milton Friedman's snide anti-social claim that,

“The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits: “the paramount duty of management and of boards of directors is to the corponation’s stockholders.”

... continues to inform America's stance toward the TransNational Corporatons it lets loose onto the world. If they have no responsibility in their Homeland, they certainly don't have any in the rest of the world.

"One's freedom and rights end where they infringe on the freedom and rights of others."

But Friedman nightmare economics renders this accepted maxim as simply quaint, as he turns it on its head.

Others have no rights, no freedom, if that freedom restrains your pursuit of property.

Just ask the Native American population. Well, the tattered remnants of it.

As this Friedman theory results in Fried Man in reality, Trump, with his stultifying braggadocio, has put a target on our backs. If the center of US financial shenanigans and global fraud, New York City, thinks it has standing to sue Exxon for climate change, surely, given the logic of these suits against China, the USA is culpable for changing the world from one in which Climate Change was a theoretical possibility to one in which it extracts a daily toll thanks to the deliberate untrammeled expansion of hydraulic fracturing with its attendant flaring of enough natural gas to power the households of a nation as large as the state of California, all in order to liberate Freedom Molecules in one part of the country only to then transport them and bury them in a different hole in the ground hundreds of miles away (what does a country that ballyhoos itself as being "Energy Independent" need with a Strategic Petroleum Reserve?), is a Crime against Humanity on a similar, and perhaps even larger (I would certainly, unsurprisingly I imagine, make that claim) scale than the Coronavirus. One which the world has nevertheless sat silently by and allowed to happen.

That complacency, given this lawsuit against China, the clamor for which Germany (Bild) has joined in on, may soon be coming to an end.

Despite concerns about emissions, Trump praises the US as one of the world's largest producers of natural gas. What he failed to mention, but that is a matter of documented fact, is that the US is the world's largest producer of natural gas, because it is, by far, the #1 producer of flared natural gas, pushing its total production figures higher than its competitors (and producing methane leaks all along the fracturing zones at the edge of the North American craton, with an also well-documented increase in fracturing-created MEQs (Micro Earthquakes), that result in a dramatic increase in methane emissions: you can plug a hole, you can't plug a fracture).

So the CO2 concentration continues to skyrocket, even while the world is in shutdown:

March CO2

Mar. 2019:  411.97 ppm

Mar. 2020:  414.50 ppm

April CO2:

Apr. 19, 2019:  413.86 ppm

Apr. 19, 2020:  416.05 ppm

 The US, unlike Canada's tar sands oil production cessation, continues to produce natural gas in abundance, but not for a market, nope ... that's so old-school; just to burn it up. Adding to the CO2 burden of the atmosphere, thereby making a mockery of, say, Denmark's zero emissions efforts. The US CO2 output, from its zero regulation regime, floods the troposphere with both CO2 and methane in outsize quantities, all to obtain a product that is priced so low that the industry producing it can't pay its bills, never mind its groaning layers of debt, occasioned by an ongoing Market failure to align demand and supply. EMT needs a real EMT?

The damage coronavirus is doing may in fact,"wash through" as they have claimed, but what the US is currently engaged in, won't. And the damage it is wreaking, as it catapults the world from Climate Change Hoax to a Climate Catastrophe Reality Show, simply to Make America Energy Independent Again, is every bit as Provable as whatever proof they come up with to extort damages claims from China (Reparations, Germany? Really? It worked out so well just one hundred years ago at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, didn't it?). The US has set the stage for its own judicial "GUILTY" verdict. And the economy, now strapped with the additional trillions upon trillions of dollars in liability this fiscal year will end with, is heading down the path of monetary implosion, destroying the one export it produces that is still coveted around the globe: The US Dollar.

The Trumpelstiltkins's Wheel of Fortuna is indeed, dear Boethius, spinning us downward. We are strapped to its wheel, which, fueled as it is by his capricious spite - blind, heedless, godless - will crush us beneath its spokes while his Confederacy of Dunces dance to his tune of Liberation.

Last but not least:
Wikipedia:

In 2005, a group including researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology published research into the origin of the SARS coronavirus, finding that China's horseshoe bats are natural reservoirs of SARS-like coronaviruses.[7] Continuing this work over a period of years, researchers from the Institute sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across China, isolating over 300 bat coronavirus sequences.[8]

In 2015, a team including scientists from the Institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect HeLa. The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[9][10]

That was the point, so the immune system would then respond by creating antibodies, thereby conferring immunity.

The relevant article is: https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985

The reason? To create a vaccine.

That is why no one wants you to know the reason, because they want to sell you, or sell your government, a vaccine against the disease they spread while they were trying to develop a vaccine, with NIH funding if the Daily Mail is to be believed, against a disease that hadn't: SARS. But somehow SARS WARS fails to have the same fun-time sound of explosions and hi-tech fetishism the world loves to Marvel at.

What a world, what a world.















Wednesday, April 15, 2020

The Heat is ON.



From Wunderground.com,

"When the sun rose at about 7 a.m. Monday, Miami was sitting at a miserable 81 degrees with a heat index of 86. But the low temperature for the day will go down in the record books as 80 degrees because it dropped to 80 just before midnight."

And that's not the worst of it:

"Regardless, Monday's low of 80 was not only its warmest low for April 13, but it was the city's all-time-warmest low for the entire month of April. That temperature is closer to Miami's average high for mid-April (83) than its average low (68)."

Perhaps not very eye-catching to you, but you hadn't written a post entitled:

  The Hoax that Chokes: "The Extremes" Greatest Hits.

Nor penned a piece opining that the corona virus was in the act of changing the weather as in, 

Australia Agonistes: Where the future is baked in and we're baked in the future.

Nor, and here I'm being presumptuous, read about the 3'rd, and worst, coral bleaching of the Great Barrier reef in five years, or

The rapidly growing ozone hole in the ARCTIC. And maybe you missed the Antarctica heatwave, forgotten about the Australian wildfires, ignored the Pacific typhoons ravaging Fiji and Tuvalu.

Nor have you ever asked, "Why isn't Florida suing Texas?" as I did in ... oh hell, who cares, citing is like, so annoying, it takes up more time than the actual writing, so I'll just go on to my next one: 

In an article in the South China Morning Post, the author asks, "Do air conditioners help spread coronavirus?",  having found that the direction of airflow from air-conditioning ventilation was found to be the key factor in what was believed to be droplet transmission.

Now let's go back to the first headline: 

"Miami was sitting at a miserable 81 degrees with a heat index of 86" ... while not half-way through April! So as the corona virus infections spike well into May, having Fun in the Sun suggests you'll get toasted, while sheltering in place will ensure you get roasted. And if you turn on the AC, you just may well be spreading deadly pathogens.

Much of India meanwhile is already being broiled in 100 degree heat ... but let's leave them be, as the next headline is from https://www.worldoil.com which is reporting on a deal between the Russians and BoneSaudi Arabia to curtail their petro output by millions of barrels/day, while "hopes that the U.S. would formally commit to its own curbs have evaporated", so at the moment, “This looks like a victory for the U.S."

But not for Florida.

"Miami is a warm place to begin with, but no one has ever experienced heat like this before here."

"McNoldy noted that one contributing factor to the recent South Florida heat is a weak southeasterly wind flow over "insanely hot water" for this time of year in the southwestern Atlantic Ocean. As of Wednesday, sea-surface temperatures there were running in the lower 80s, far above average for mid-April."

Now a few more threads need to be woven into this tapestry of looming disaster:

Those infamous "Freedom Molecules": that are composed of CO2, CH4, and H2O and other gases.

The amount of methane being released into the atmosphere has taken an unprecedented jump even as the amount of natural gas being flared in the Permian basin has increased twofold since the Trumpelstiltskin took office. What is being flared is basically methane. So even as the amount of methane escaping from wells and rigs rises to a stratospheric level, the flaring done to burn it off has increased even more, the exhaust of such flaring simply being set free to waft in the direction of the Gulf and the Southeastern Atlantic, collecting over it and producing "insanely hot water" as the sun's rays, no longer deflected back to space by jet trails, coal combustion's aerosols, and a shroud of auto exhaust, penetrate through a troposphere burdened now with 415 ppm of CO2. It's most concentrated load since prehistoric times.

And the hydraulic fracturing of the earth that is producing those potent GHG's, despite being given a perfect opportunity to curtail them, is instead set to proceed unabated, and that is being hailed as "a victory for the U.S."

One that has hidden in its laurels a disaster for the United States.

If the Leader of the richest country on the planet can point the finger of blame at another country on another continent, a country that manufactures absolutely No airplanes, for bringing a microscopic particle that wreaked havoc on our economy, how can it now maintain it is not responsible for the exhausting of its industries' waste into the atmosphere, when it actually brags about the fact, calling the CO2, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and  nitrogen oxides it produces, "Freedom Molecules". Even as it thereby boils Cuba:

"Cuba, some 300 miles south of Miami, has also been searing in record heat recently. An all-time record high for the entire country was set on three consecutive days, from Good Friday through Easter Sunday."

You could fry your Easter eggs on the pavement.

This is how one disaster feeds into another, for if the Chinese reporters are correct, as they have been all along, and AC helps spread the virus, the long hot summer we are about to experience could very rapidly turn into a nightmare, and Cuba just might have enough allies, new allies this administration's intractable stance toward it has recruited, to start having the balls to point out the harm the untrammeled growth in GHG gases (and our lack of enforcement of even the lax standards put into place with a wink of the eye to the oil producers ... seriously, the Texas Railroad Commission is going to enforce environmental law? You're kidding, right?) that the USA's maniacal "Energy Independence" goal is having on not just its neighbors, since exactly like the Corona Virus, those Freedom Molecules are free to go wherever they like, but the entire globe, maybe other Nations can finally demand that we STOP! CO2 respects national boundaries no more than virus particles do.

Because, should the US proceed in it's puerile "Blame China" tantrum, while other countries start experiencing record heat, they may finally grow a set and star blaming the US as the culprit. And they'll do so by using precisely the same logic that allows the President to continue to refer to a microbe as the Wuhan Virus. It is quite possible that, by the middle of August or so, the world will start referring to the New Normal of deadly heat as the American-induced Climate Emergency.

Because if the logic used to deduce that if any country can be blamed for the spread of Corona virus, it is China, is then applied to climate science, then if any country can be blamed for deliberately morphing Climate Change into a Climate Emergency, it is these United States. Because just as declaiming the Corona virus as a hoax doesn't make it so, insisting Climate Change is a Hoax has the exact same effect on the reality of the harm it's inflicting on those not actively stoking it: None. They suffer from from our actions without gatting even a dollop of the benefits.

At the end of the article about Australia's wildfires referenced above, Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch wrote,

"unless we get rid of the arsonists who are running too many countries and figure out a way to come together in human time, we’re likely to enter a world where there will be no fire fighters to save us".

Watching how the US has so haphazardly and off-handedly dealt with the catastrophic pandemic that is engulfing it, I would amend that statement to,  

"unless we get rid of the assholes who are running our country and figure out a way to come together in human terms, we’re likely entering a world where there will be no healthcare workers to save us".














Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Liebesträume vom Lebensraum: I Detest Cheap Sen Sen Mints.


Anti-Social distancing: "Back Off!"


As death comes even for the archbishop, 
the rest of us are stuck with the strictly limited 
and unsatisfying freedom of domestic cats, 
well-fed and declawed,
 like Harold and Maude;
 no longer able to rummage in dustbins
 and fight in Alleys,
 no more Bowling for Dollars,
  licking ourselves while dressed in flea collars.

Everywhere we vainly search for any release for our reserves of creative energy,
 but too long and many hours dedicated to having our entertainment piped into our minds,
 by ad-libbed sit-coms and Marvel-ous heroes, 
caped squeaky-cleaned males in bulging tights proffered by censorious sponsors,
 such that we no longer know how to occupy ourselves, or entertain others, 
so  instead indulge ourselves by solving countless puzzles
 and exchange cross words when not wearing our muzzles.

With all libraries shuttered, every school forced to close,
 both wet dreams of the Rebel South
 enforced by our Emperor without clothes, 
whose tattered remnants of the Confederacy of dunces, 
would prefer to ride in a horse and carriage
 than contemplate a world that sanctions gay marriage.

 It feels as if our life's been put on hold, 
Every minute we live begrudgingly doled;
Over our heads looms the spectre of Death 
 Though still years from drawing our last breath.
 Our children sit in anguished lethargy, 
or tear up the house in bursts of pent up energy. 
This pent house, however was never meant to be.

Somehow it feels like this is all part of a plan, 
a first step in forming 21'st Century man, 
a new world order, one without hope, 
where now, if you're depressed, they'll just give you more rope.
 Not in the form of coiled twine tied into a noose,
 but opioids prescribed by a
 "Need an Oxycontin refill, dear?" Doctor Chanteuse, 
one plied by Pharma-Suit-it-kills. 
All of whom lobbied the DEA to detain, 
anyone caught smoking MaryJane. 
 'Cause lacking the addiction the Capitalists crave, 
its users were cadged, then cudgeled and caged.

At night we venture outside like opossums; 
Notice how without us, the natural world blossoms?    
In daytime bees are now busy pollinating, 
whereas last year their numbers were rapidly abating;
And even ourselves, who we think above nature, 
are forced to desist from enduring material pains
 to make material gains, 
so the ethereal reigns;
 while even the losers among us
 gain that peculiar and delicate wisdom 
that is only learned in defeat; 
so although they're despised by the possessor class, 
for a while at least, 
they're able to see,
 what it's like to live 
like the Keptocracy.

Can you fire a silver bullet from a Copper's gun? 
Drink Champagne with Attila the Hun? 
Shine the floor with ceiling wax,
 or ask a whore why she clickety-clacks,
 around in shoes with five-inch heels 
dressed in body leotards like Emma Peel's? 
Stop dressing me down and dress yourself up, 
use different metrics to measure up;
 try your hand at creating art: 
although you do it in solitude, 
everyone else plays a part: 
our fellows, who, during this interlude, 
we've come to appreciate that without them we're just screwed.







Monday, April 13, 2020

TSA: Transmission-Spiking Agency.


In this our new world, Fantasy and Horror are twin cities, divided by a river of black water. Horror is the more dangerous place ... you can walk around Fantasy on your own, in thrall to a Throne of Games as you stumble through a vale of Mysts, whence you depart unscathed. Then you learn that the road between the two cities is Corona St, a long street that runs from the  outskirts of one city into the other. One that began with a minor thoroughfare, but has now morphed into a six-lane freeway, its roadmarkers changing each time you traverse it.

Thus has man, through his own machinations become an anachronism. With an odious Musk still clinging to his shroud, he fantasizes moving to other realms, soaring through space to conquer other worlds, having turned his back on the only planet in the universe that nurtured him. Burning his bridges before learning how to keep even the air he breathes from destroying life on earth thanks to his intransigence, his inability to differentiate between deeply shared desires and shallow wishes springing from mere Vanity ...

After reporting that a TSA worker had succumbed to the COVID-19 virus, ABC News reported that,

"A total of 329 Transportation Security Administration employees have tested positive for COVID-19 and two have died ... "

This is now our "Aspirational" April 12, yet only now has, according to this same report,

"The agency ... begun to allow its workers to wear N95 masks, goggles and surgical masks. 

These workers, despite the fact that there are, according to our Administration, plenty of PPE, and of course, "millions of tests, and the tests, They're Beautiful" (but just try getting one) are all untested.

"The agency screened 94,931 passengers at U.S. airports Wednesday compared to 2,229,276 on the same day last year."

So, even as the administration and the press were exchanging barbs, no one in the press thought to ask the Nasty question of why, with more than 2,000,000 people it was exposing to a known deadly pathogen, the wearing of masks which were to protect those who didn't have it from those who did, were these untested TSA employees not only then, but now, not being REQUIRED to wear masks at least while at work?

This results in us being in the situation now where a federal employee can come from home dutifully wearing a mask on the subway (There's footage online in which a man was shown being physically removed from a train for not wearing a mask) on the way to work at their Federal position scanning passengers by the thousands, yet can, once they reach their place of employment, then remove their mask as they begin to interface with the public. Oh wait, until the second agent died, so for most of the two weeks counting down to April 12, they were FORBIDDEN to wear them ... so now that a Federal employee, who, by the way, is paid from the taxes levied on the rest of the population that have real jobs, is now being paid with those tax dollars to infect the public with COVID-19, which anything that I've read about this virus, means that's exactly what's happening: to "protect" us from an imaginary threat, they are intentionally exposing us to a killer predator.

But no plane will go down in a fiery blaze taking entire buildings with it. The deaths will be spread silently, infect secretly, and be blamed on the country to which the travelers vacated to, no one being able to trace the origins back to the deceased TSA agent, so, "Carry on", and not just your luggage. Wave your tragic wands over your unsuspecting victims: You don't care, you don't have to, you're a Federal employee.

Remember, the TSA is a part of the Homeland Security, an organisation now culpable of spreading a deadly virus to every airline customer in the country.

Even as our President was spewing his "Asspirational" date for "Getting America to Work", because, as this virus has eloquently demonstrated, America simply doesn't work in its present configuration, hence, any aspirational date would of necessity be preceded by taking steps to ensure amelioration. Aspiration isn't simply desire, passively making a wish. Aspirational includes desire plus ambition, it means not only that you wish for something, but that you actively outline the steps necessary to ensure the desired outcome can be achieved. But aside from social distancing, what steps have we taken to arrive at the state where we can say it's time to go to work, and this is how we're going to do it?

Instead Easter has come and gone yet TSA workers are only now being ALLOWED, not required, to wear masks (that they must procure on their own) while interfacing with the public, exposing it to a deadly disease that's very real - in order to "protect" us from a threat that is apparently hidden in our shampoo, sequestered in weaponized (somehow) fingernail clippers, or lurking in an unopened bottle of body lotion.

But the most curious fact about our having gone by our asspirational (sic) date, is that despite said date having come and gone, there is still no plan as to how we would have gone about opening the economy again. If Easter was the date we planned on celebrating the economy's rise from the dead, where are the plans to do so? How can the 12'th have come and gone without the Sole Super Power, the Exceptional Nation, the Full Spectrum Dominatrix of the Globe,  having the briefest outline or sketchiest puff piece in which to set forth the means of doing so?

Or is the plan to simply continue to do the same thing we did at the beginning of this pandemic's outbreak? Namely make absolutely no plan and then simply follow step-by-step what the Chinese are doing, and them scream how it's all China's fault because the plan they used, thereby demonstrating that it doesn't work, we then copied anyway. Since, being America, and the Exceptional Nation it is, surely it'll work here; it'll be like  a miracle.

Right now in California, the State developing various shoulder ailments from patting itself on the back for shutting down in a timely fashion, in the City that called a Health Emergency before the month of February had ended, an RN with whom I lately had a conversation told me of yet another hospital worker at their facility coming down with the COVID-19 flu (none of their patients have tested positive for it).

This worker had come straight to work from a job at another hospital, despite not feeling well, and got his temperature taken only when another staff member insisted he do so. It was 104 degrees.

This is the second employee in as many weeks, the first having done pretty much the same thing (except that she was an RN!).

Yet, only patients in the rooms for whose health the RN was responsible were tested for the virus. NONE OF THE OTHER STAFF MEMBERS OR PATIENTS WERE ALLOWED TO BE TESTED. (This is hardly the action one would expect from a country that has "plenty of tests available").

(If I'm permitted to make a statement that may seem overly bold, methinks there's something we're not being told).

So now, Surprise! Surprise!, this other staff member has tested positive, and that staff member worked not only at the facility that finally told him to go home, but at another hospital as well. Because workers who work for a living caring for others instead of waving a wand between their legs while alleviating them of their toiletries and bringing them home, can't afford to maintain a household in the San Francisco Bay area without holding two jobs, as their pay isn't even close to what Federal workers makes. This particular person holds two full-time jobs at two different health facilities, and goes from one job directly to the other. 

That's the reason I picked up on the TSA's statement that, "The agency has begun to allow its workers to wear N95 masks". Like the testing for those at-risk hospital workers, that "allow" is quite literal: they wanted to be tested, but because they were showing no symptoms (those personnel included the one that is now ill with the virus) they couldn't get tested. So workers wearing PPE have the same blindness that TSA has with "Security": "Protection" as to meaning "security/protection" from what?" ... and for whom? Sure the RN got tested, but then returned to work (why is that even an option?!) for the three days it took for the test results to come back, and although she infected none of her patients  she may well have infected her fellow employees who she interfaced sans PPE. And yes you read that correctly, suspecting she had the virus so much she got tested, she went to work in a healthcare facility regardless. I guess if you're told you are an essential worker, isn't it essential that you go to work? As the TSA spokesperson remarked:

"Frank (the deceased) screened hundreds of thousands of passengers, keeping them and the transportation network safe."

SAFE!? Which he said with a straight face, completely unaware of the irony of what he was saying.

That's how blind he is to the fact that what it actually means is that Frank unknowingly (we hope) exposed hundreds of thousands of passengers, making them and the transportation network he was "making safe", a nexus of contagion, efficiently infecting airline passengers with the same virus that was silently killing him. And he was but one essential personnel.

Of the total of the 329 TSA employees testing positive for COVID-19, 162 were reported in just the past week. So for this whole "Aspirational" window of opportunity, a major Federal agency, one claiming it was "keeping us and the transportation network safe", was covertly putting everybody's life in danger who came in contact with them, and, like the San Francisco hospitals, continues to do so. All while we assert our desire for everyone to go back to work.

 But if lightening was desire, this White House would've burnt down a long time ago. 

One more point before I get back to the hospital workers as vectors, is that, despite this Trumpette being convinced that it is still all about Her (Sorry, I just can't help it. I'm an old sod, and this effeminate ritual of daily daubing one's face with such a heavy multi-layered regime of make-up, while talking to constituencies about how, the ozone be damned, you can't abide by those spritz sprayers, which deliver their hairspray in glops, necessitating your just having to avail yourself of the full gas-propelled effect to care for your carefully-coiffed, carotene-colored canopy, was simply not done by real MEN. This queenly primper, whose daily toilette resembles Ru Paul's more than Rand Paul's, is voted for by the very people who slapped their own sons in the face and called them sissies for any amount of self-pampering and womanly obsession with their physical appearance ... even weight lifting was frowned on as being too suspiciously homo. Yet they flock to vote for this preening peacock because they find Gay Marriage so insulting it means this is not America, so if Trump will destroy America, all the better. "How do they reconcile this?", I can't help but wonder. It is truly beyond the beyonds for someone who was born in the Military-addled, ultra-conformist fifties that was dominated by Corporate Males, not this she-man who's as self-pampering as any kept mistress. From "I like Ike" to "Divine is Fine". How'd that happen?) But the lack of a national response isn't just one going back to January, February or March ... we are suffering from the lack of a concerted federal response right now.

As a federal agency that interfaced with "94,931 passengers at U.S. airports (last) Wednesday", will only "allow" its employees to wear masks, despite knowing many of them are already infected (Remember, "a total of 329 Transportation Security Administration employees have tested positive for COVID-19 ... therefore there are untested hundreds more who are still spreading it right now). Similarly, the Postal Service, even as twelve states remained open for Business, (which means open for the business of spreading COVID-19), was tasked with the responsibility of delivering to every household a card from the federal government that contained social distancing guidelines, the first of which should have read, "Wash this card upon receipt, as your State doesn't take this virus as a serious threat".

So because isolation isn't a national policy, but the dispersion of this printed material is, a substrate known to be capable of transmitting the corona virus for several days after coming in contact with a contagious individual, is brought door-to-door to inform you on how not to get the virus, even while delivering the pathogen it's warning you about right into your hands.

What just these two or three scenarios suggest is that although the shelter in place has helped stop spreading the virus from those who have symptoms to the rest of the population, those who are asymptomatic, even when they work with a very sick population (The particular LTAC referenced has many  patients already on ventilators) among whom there is not one infected individual, has no guidelines as to whether you can have another job where they do have COVID patients, even though two of their employees came to work several days in a row despite feeling ill. Simple epistemological probability means that the odds of there being others who are untested yet infectious approaches certainty.

The overriding reason for those workers going to work when they suspected they were ill was monetary. Non-essential personnel may get that promised $1200 check, but essential personnel don't. And because the "essential" label is exactly that, a label, their "essentiality" being conferred from above, not by their "Industry", their usual level of benefits/pay in no way reflects their enhanced status. The CEO still receives his lifeblood-sucking level of compensation, but the so-called "essential" workers get the same old pay that they got when they were sneered at just for asking for a raise, since they are considered to be totally and easily replaceable (After agitating for higher compensation recently, the CNA's at this LTAC were snidely awarded a raise of .20/hr. That's $1.60/day; not even enough to pay 3/4's of what it costs to just get to work on Muni). Since you just clean shit, we'll just pay you shit, how's that? Now off to work you go.

Unlike TSA, which is part of a Federal Employees Union, CNA's get scant few benefits, and extra sick days are not among them. There is no check in the mail for them. They get to work.

In other words, calling the Easter date "Aspirational" is a far cry from what any child would know it  actually is, which is nothing more than wishful thinking.

And mere wishful thinking in the middle of a pandemic mean that that six-lane Freeway between Fantasy and Horror gets increasingly mined with IED's. While the road back to reality remains unpaved.

United States 

Cases: 555,371;

 Deaths: 22,056

After a mere month, the corona virus has caused an equivalent number of fatalities as the the regular flu causes during the entire flu season.













Friday, April 10, 2020

The Blame China Syndrome: A Core Onus' Meltdown.

                                         

                                              Chimerica: It was never their Idea, it was ours.
                                                    And we thought ourselves so clever.
The fault, dear Brutes, Lies not in their Stars,

As seminars for fyi masks and instructions on how to wear them and care for them so as to be able to re-use them, the chorus of voices raised to now not only suggest, but require, that masks be worn anytime you leave your enforced imprisonment are overtopped only by the din from the troglodytes demanding revenge against China for bringing this on.


...but in our Own.
                                                 
Nowhere do you hear a suggestion, or read a hint that, had we an ounce of human compassion in our hearts, we would have months ago been working hard, our Free Enterprise, Capitalist system would have been zeroing in on, a method to help the population on another continent where they go to work each day, not to manufacture products for their own use, but to toil in conditions we would never allow in this country to make not only our necessities, but the most trifling, useless of objects for our one-time use or amusement for which they receive little more than IOU's. IOU's that in 2008 proved to be not just worth less but worthless.  Yet we didn't bother to lift a finger to help, cared not a jot despite how much they were suffering from the effects of a pandemic raging through their country.

Instead we ignored, it, until we couldn't; and then we pretended it would simply dissipate like those papery fortune cookies made soggy by the slightest moisture and leaving nothing but a bad taste in our mouths. "Like a Miracle", it was going to just disappear from the earth. But not from China. Yet we cared not a whit. All of a sudden the billions to be made by providing the largest population on the globe with a remedy, a product that would be made available to all the Chinese, stamped "Made in the USA", no longer had a single entrepreneur chomping at the bit to develop.

That's curious enough. But, having seen what it did to the South Koreans and Italians, the USA simply denied there was any problem.

Now, whereas one could conceivably come up with, if not justification for, at least plausible enough reasons why, one wouldn't want to shutdown the economy, what one couldn't justifiably argue against was the efficacy and necessity of the population donning masks in  order to curtail the spread of an invisible virus transmitted by oral droplets.

Had the USA adopted the KNOWN precaution of wearing masks, a prophylactic shown to be effective by the Chinese, months, well actually, years, in advance, as they donned them during the SARS outbreak as well, instead of deriding citizens who did wear them, chiding them that they were idiots just using up precious supply needed by healthcare professionals, the stockpiles those professionals are burning through now would never have been needed.

Because healthcare professionals don't don a mask and wear it all day, wash it and then use it again. That is not how things are done in our wasteful western ways. The mask is worn once and then discarded, the next patient, another mask: There will therefore never be enough masks to protect 330 million citizens, and that was a fact known by those claiming they had no protective effects, an outright lie revealed by the fact that healthcare workers were getting sick ... and dying ... from lack of PPE. But if PPE was to protect only the patients, as these authorities were claiming, how were healthcare workers getting sick from its lack? Because the amount of masks, gowns, and gloves needed to protect hospital staffs and their patients climbs toward infinity as more and more people get infected with corona. In other words, the reason you are being told to make your own, of a kind that is far less effective than the n-95's, is that even with the well-published and documented scary events taking place amidst our largest trading partner's population, there was no rush, nor even the slightest effort brought to bear by the all-knowing, all pervasive Market. Relying on Market wisdom has  shown the cornucopia of America's Market Basket to be a basket case. The profits of doom weren't alluring enough to tempt capital to risk the thinnest dime in an effort to save lives. That is not what we're about. Having been weaned from Risk, knowing only how to slough it onto the public, the Capitalists did nothing, they are now however lined up to reap the grim rewards, and pass them on to their shareholders, now that demand has been guaranteed, profits from disease assured.

Fearful that it would spend even a nickel on a product that would then be in oversupply, in our jit inventoried world, the Market, that cares nothing for human suffering and despair, as doing so robs from the bottom line, and therefore could possibly shave a penny from dividend checks, the Market Economy we have honed to a droning efficiency, is too calcified to respond to actual Market demand, busy as it is, formed as it has been, to respond only to Government and the Pentagon's demands. Once the economy has been optimized to supply our ever-expanding Wehrmacht, the prospect of millions of deaths to a system that is basically a War Machine is not a deterrent, it is the desired outcome the US economy has been built to inflict: Satisfy the demands of "Defense" first, let China worry about how best to satisfy US consumers' demands. We have real work to do here stateside: we have tanks to build, missiles to stockpile, ammo to disburse, bases to construct, MRE's to manufacture, camouflage uniforms to churn out for those millions of boots on the ground, while we fill the air  with Raptors and Predators and other killer drones, Cobras, Blackhawks and Condors, Patriot missiles and Stealth bombers; we must have more AK-47's and Abrams tanks, we need missile silos and Polaris subs to construct, Aircraft carriers and multi-billion dollar aircraft to launch, ICBM's and Hummers to modernize. But a supply of ventilators we may never use? Feggetaboutit! We do Man's Work for Macho posturing, none of this sissy medical supply paraphernalia. What? Us make gowns?! Whaddya think we are, fer crissakes, French?

The buildup of Weapons of Mass Destruction has never been more fierce, the potential for a single misstep resulting in a conflagration incinerating a sobering swath of the earth's population has never before been so callously stoked. So it's little wonder that excess Vanity would stop a country from protecting itself, even when every news source in the world was reporting on the insidious spread of Covid-19, except those in its own country, which were deriding as nonsense any attempt to prepare for what was bearing down on us.

And now as Easter approaches, it's hard not to reflect on its beginning, the day after Mardi Gras, a festival of costumes and frivolity that would have Lent itself well to the donning of masks, but what instead, not from anything that China did, but thanks to our own Hubris, became the major hub of infection for the entire state of Louisiana.

Because that's the reality we are facing right now: the reality that it was not China's doing, but our own intransigence, our own vanity, wherein as little as a month ago you would have been hooted at or sneered at for wearing protection, yet, had we started, not last month, but better yet, the month before, when we saw South Korea, Italy and Iran already reeling from the ravages this virus was inflicting, to wear masks when gathering in public, there would have been plenty of them then, and there would definitely be plenty now. Oh, but not us. "We don't need no stinking facemasks! Only the stupid Chinese wear those".

And those who disagreed were shouted down by the very government that is now REQUIRING us to wear them ... but if they can require masks now, they could have require them then: it's the same government. But nope. It's a Democracy. You have to wait until the economy's destroyed, tens of thousands have died, and mass lockdowns have been necessitated before we can so gently suggest maybe, if you could manage to throw one together, it would be wise to protect each other from this deadly microbe.

The case load would have been lightened, perhaps not enough to stop a shutdown entirely, but the first wave of people would have crested far sooner and at a far lower number.

The US also had the AIDS outbreak to inform its decision, wherein a simple prophylactic could save your partner from disease, yet even the most logical step of closing down the bathhouses drew howls of protest from the very community it was being implemented to protect.

As I recall, not a single person was either blaming Cameroon, nor calling for revenge against it. It came from "Africa" is all anyone knows to this day ... that a place called Cameroon even exists, never mind where it is, is a mystery to 99% of us. But that was in the eighties. And El Cid and Nancy were still in the White House; the vicious Bush Family had yet to leave their imprimatur of war-mongering, Neo-con, compassionless conservatism indelibly branded onto our hide.

That apotheosis came on 9/11. And we allowed ourselves to be led by our basest instincts then, not knowing the torrent of cash and bloodshed that was to pour out of the US economy for decades as the cost of that revenge. Revenge against countries whose ability to threaten us at all was enabled entirely by the Pentagon (Why was Bush so sure Iraq had WMD? ...  "Daddy had the receipts.")

But blaming them was so much more fun.

The same dynamics are at play here, demonstrating, (by demonizing) we have learned absolutely nothing.

It is not China, but the USA that is blocking, yet again, medical supplies that are in dire need, this time to Iran and to Venezuela. There is not a murmur of dissent opposing this murderous wickedness.

Madeleine Albright once callously opined that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children was, "Worth it", knowing full well that what the "It" was need never be elaborated upon. She knew we simply wouldn't care enough for her to have to bother.

In John Prine's words, referencing yet another military "adventure",

"We lost Davy in the Korean War,

Still don't know what for, don't matter anymore ... "

And as this disaster is again and again compared to War, our stalwart medical personnel's dedicated determination to fight it likened to a military action, maybe we should take a minute or two to reflect on that, as a military action desires in its barbaric heart a completely opposite outcome: to inflict Mass Death. The same as sanctions, which are in fact an act of War. No guilt, no one to care about, just Kill. Let them dispose of the dead.

But these doctors and nurses are NOT in a military action, they are NOT trying to snuff out lives, they are trying desperately to SAVE lives, risking losing their own as collateral damage, and there is a world of difference. It is compassion, a sentiment America's bible belt long ago chose to close its heart to, that drives them, not hatred stoked to such a red hot fury we could actually liken the ease with which we would rain destruction down on a nation, to "a Cakewalk". Lobbing our arsenal of weapons of mass destruction on their heads because we suspected them of harboring weapons of mass destruction. Our battle cry as we also dropped one planeload of ordnance after another on one of the poorest countries in the world was, "Bomb them back into the stone age".

Something we seem to have forgotten.

How that's possible, having started the New Year by dropping more chemical weapons of mass destruction on both of those same countries almost 20 years, and trillions of dollars, later, is truly bewildering.

It's not China that needs a doctor, Blanche.

Thursday, April 9, 2020

Inflicter of Collateral Damage is now Damaged Collateral: The Idiot's Guide to Turning a Country into a Shithole.


Easter Bunny funny money Can't Raise the Dead.

A dark cloud has descended on the world of human affairs, making manifest the increasingly suffocating  miasma of CO2 we breathe in and out. One of the stark consequences of which is now upon us.

Naturally it’s not the first time, it’s just the first time there were no precautions, no game plan, no preventive measures, despite months of warning. In the nineteenth century, Italy suffered from a plague of cholera. Fearing its re-importation from abroad, Mark Twain describes the draconian treatment even Americans were subjected to (can you ImAgine!?) before being allowed entrance:

“ ... when we walked ashore a party of policemen put us into a little white stone cell and locked us in. We had the whole passenger  list for company. There was no light, there were no windows, no ventilation. It was close and hot. We were much crowded. It was their Black Hole of Calcutta on a small scale. Presently a smoke rose about our feet - a smoke that smelled of all the dead things of this earth, of all the putrefaction and corruption imaginable."

In utter disbelief he complains, “ We were in there for five minutes, and when we got out it was hard to tell which of us carried the vilest fragrance.”

“These miserable outcasts" (that’s how he refers to the natives of the country hosting him) "refer to this process as “fumigating” us, and the term was a tame one indeed.

They fumigated us to guard against the cholera, though we hailed from no infected port.

We had left the cholera far behind us all the time. They however must keep epidemics away somehow or other, and fumigation is cheaper than soap. They must either wash themselves or fumigate other people. Some of the lower classes would rather die than wash, but the fumigation of strangers causes them no pangs. They need no fumigation themselves. Their habits make it unnecessary.”


The modern version of this draconian procedure will have to be put in place before this pandemic will "wash through". Maybe they'll call the revelation of what really went down FumiGate.

We all have been allocated a lot more time to think lately, and although all the thoughts aren't always merry, some have turned out to be most mundane. And that's how I came to think about the title of this blog, and this post, in that they are both referencing the basic foundation of the neo-capitalist cum communist model of finance the foundation of which is currency manipulation via the fluctuating foreign exchange rates and the control and dispensation of energy resources on which those valuations are based. Controlling supply and then pretending it's a "Free" market, as "Look ... see? Demand is responding to supply!"  Supply, however, isn't as tractable to demand destruction as demand is to being inundated with supply .

"There's something coming for you ... "

"Rush to Judgement" pic of Limbaugh with the Medal of honor hanging from his neck as he spews corona virus particles into a mike: "It's just the flu!"

As Trump supporters regale his acumen, the 2020 GDP comes into focus, a figure far smaller than the $20Trillion of 2019's GDP.

As the GDP of the USA continues to dwindle, the debt has exploded, surpassing the already rapid pace that it had when the economy was growing. Corporate, personal, Municipal, and National debt, were all growing at unprecedented rates during our so-called "growth" period of the pre-twenties.

That growth rate is gone. Collapsed.

But as the debt that was amassed to spur the adrenaline-amped growth has not been borne by those profiting from that growth, but by the workers, so the income needed to service that already over-burdensome weight of indebtedness, shrinks dramatically. Yes the interest rate on that debt is indeed low. But like the death rate from Covid-19, the percentage may be low, but what it is a percentage of is a truly staggering number. A mere 1% death rate of a population of 330 million people still means 3.3 million people are destined to be scythed down by the Grim Reaper. The same math applies to the interest rate when it's applied to a debt of $25 trillion dollars of National debt alone, which doesn't even account for the $6Trillion the Fed so non-chalantly added to its liabilities. And that burden is growing far faster than the economy is now growing or will be growing in the foreseeable future.

As the President has warned:

"This is not a financial crisis".

Which, translated from Trump-speak, means:

 "This is a severe financial crisis unlike anything we've ever seen".

What they used to call a Depression.

Consequently, due to damaged collateral, collateral being that which supports those ever-increasing levels of indebtedness, the main economic engine of the globe has rapidly taken on the characteristics of the economies of those Nations its President referred to as "shithole countries". Or what more nuanced observers call "Failed States."

Merely by doing the math of what's been promised to be more deficit spending, such that the $30 Trillion mark is quickly approaching, that makes the Debt-to-GDP ratio 150% ... but this is no longer a $20 Trillion economy now, is it? Estimating the 2020 US output at $15 Trillion could be considered a sanguine outlook, yet even at that optimistic number, the Debt-to-GDP ratio is rapidly approaching an unprecedented 200%. That's going to require a whole new tranche of rehypothecations (Rehypothecation is basically embelzzlement on an institutional level: the same asset is use to back multiple claims upon it; three-card Monte, c'est-à-dire).

As cited on Angry Bear, "Last year the World Bank released Global Waves of Debt: Causes and Consequences, written by M. Ayhan Kose, Peter Nagle, Franziska Ohnsorge and Naotaka Sugawara. The authors examined a wave of debt buildup that began in 2010. By 2018 total debt in the emerging markets and developing economies (EMDE) had risen by 54 percentage points to 168% of GDP. Much of this increase reflected a rise in corporate debt in China, but even excluding China debt reached a near-record level of 107% of GDP in the remaining countries. (Moi: Why would you not include the world's 2'nd largest economy, I wonder?)

But those shithole countries don't have the outlandish energy utilization and correspondingly large carbon footprint of the new shithole on the block. As we are beginning to see, my prognostications regarding the increased reliance on industries tied to the continued increase in the combustion of fossil fuels in a world screaming to curtail the use of fossil fuel can not but have a hard landing when disaster strikes. And disaster in a hyper-amped, race to extinction, damn the consequences, economy is baked into the yellow cake:

The US economy is in thrall to:
  • air travel
  • automobile manufacture by the millions
  • military adventurism
  • boondoggle federal spending on such nonsense projects as its "Space cadet Farce" and Star Wars programs, nuclear missile buildup, maintenance, and "modernization" (ICBM's are such retro rockets, n'est-ce pas?)
  • petrochemical plantations
  • aircraft manufacture
  • hydraulic fracturing and its attendant pipeline build out and oil services
  • IPO's and other Wall St pump and dump schemes designed to scam investors hungry for yield
  • LNG production and exportation in a world now choking to death on gas fumes
None of theses industries on which the economy is betting are climbing back to anywhere near their pre-Corona levels anytime soon.
 The real generator of jobs and growth, small businesses, are now being crushed as inexorably as the small banks were during the last financial crisis that left a mere four financial institutions, those deemed TBTF, to lord over the land. While the "investment" banks were left to continue their rape of the American polity. The damaged collateral they used to fund their crime spree is still sitting on the balance sheet of the Fed as the major component of their Trillions in liabilities, while the banks under its tutelage pay a mere pittance for the customer deposits without which they would crumble.

We are seeing the same process replay, as small businesses go under in record numbers while trillions of dollars are created as liabilities to taxpayers that are dumped into Corporate coffers to use for FDI. But much like the tax structure of individuals, wherein the poorest pay the largest share of their income to the Federal/State/local governments, small businesses have a larger tax burden than, let's say, Apple and Amazon, neither of which pay any US taxes. All of their revenue gets sucked out of the US economy by these ginormous corporations which then return none of it to the US Treasury (Apple pays more taxes to the Communist regime in CHina than it does to the Capitalist government of the USA ... gonna blame THAT on China, too? See why Corporate America love, love, LOVES Capitolism? (sic)). They have used those tax savings, not to invest in American business, but instead as FDI to build a backward, impoverished Centrally-ruled nation into a militarized Communist Power. Thus does the US Corporate community that has stolen trillions over generations in order to make the USA into a supposed bulwark against Communism, transfer the wealth of those same citizens of capitalist countries directly into mainland China's industrial development, enriching Communist China's CCP and its Party members as they impoverish the citizens of the USA, drowning its economy in unpayable, unsustainable, crushing debt.

An enormous percentage of this debt that the US has accumulated over this century has been lavished on to the Asian continent via a flying carpet groaning under the burden of pallet after pallet loaded with Benjamins airlifted to: Iraq, Afgahnistan, Communist China, yet receiving nothing in return but the enmity of all three of these US dollar-vacuum economies, all of which are on the President's "shithole countries" list.

All of these countries, thanks to our own foreign policy, a policy that is in fact foreign, as it is heartless: a sadistic imposition of sanctions during a pandemic on countries that have done nothing to us while our so-called "allies" maneuver and scheme to continue to benefit from the hemorrhaging of taxpayer-provided cash that pours from the wound inflicted on the populace by Vampire Capitalism. A wound the Corona Virus has torn the scab off of, leaving the host to bleed out.