Mourning in America: "Are you better off today than you were four years ago ?”

A Reagan ad from the 80's now has the DT's:

It's mourning again in America. Today more men and women won't go to work than ever before in our country's history. With employment rates at about triple the record highs of Obama's Presidency, nearly 2,000 more Americans today will die, more than at any time in the past even during War years. This afternoon 6,500 young men and women will be infected, and with the nation having less than half of the allies it did just four years ago, they can look forward to a blighted future. It's mourning the dead in America, and under the leadership of Trump, our country is poorer and sicker and deader. Why wouldn't we want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?

                             In Just Two Generations: From Sole Super Power to Pariah Among Nations.

The difference methinks could be no more stark   

 The world position we're in never more dark; 

Now every one of America's political structures 

Are manned by cronies, sycophants, and hucksters. 

This is the witching hour of the Great Baboon

Who loosed bedlam upon us like a mournful tune;

For his Sound of Music a death knell's tolled,  

As the tragedies of the commoners yet unfold. 

Friends he cajoles and enemies fires,

Hacks with no credentials is who he hires.

While through ranks of radical cranks he drudges

To find like-minded trolls he then appoints as judges.

Reagan made our beloved Democracy stronger,

DJ's shown it functions no longer;

One caused the Oval Office to flourish,

 the next made it petty, dark, and boorish.

While One caused the collapse of the USSR, 

Declaiming the Evil Empire had gone too far, 

The other, incessantly "MAGA" tootin',

Pays fawning obeisance to Vladimir Putin.

The one came to the rescue of Afghanistan,

Now DJ's handing it over to the Taliban,

Our fighting men, once honored as all first rate;

Are now derided as nefarious Deep State.

"Obama created ISIS!" was Trump's "J'accuse",

The proof of which was a lack of clues.

While RR negotiated with Tehran,

DJ tore up its anti-nuclear plan.

  "Sole Super Power":
Reagan made us Great Again.

Which status we still held in 2016 when

A malignant despicable odious worm

Took the helm, 

and now we've succumbed to a germ.

 "Are you better off today than you were four years ago ?” 

Ann Aesthetic: To Sleepwalk, perchance to Dread.

La Fleur du Mal.

Each day, little by little, I see tender hearts harden, 

Whether reading the news or tending my garden

Where the composted earth lies velvet and plush

Fed by recycled branches and dried leaves once so lush,

So in every corner that was once desiccated 

Grows a healthy flora, quite variegated. 

The reader, perhaps has already had enough of my rhymes. It's just that with all the talk of virus and beaches and indoor gatherings, it seems the uplifting delight of seeing spring's dawn, or relishing its sweet scent before your first yawn are offering gentle charms that are generally being ignored. But when you walk out on such days, after weeks of confinement, how delightful it is to see nature's abundance. Here and there while a grey sky still twinkles with fading stars, the light waves of a moist breeze stir the air; newly-leafed trees rustle, still immersed in shadow, while you hear the soft movement of invisible fauna, or hear birds start chirping as they sip the morning's dew from petals of a yellow-flowered arbutus that's soon aglow with wet sun-dappled leaves. The air chills you slightly, so you hunch your coat up around your ears, but by the time you've walked a block or two, the air grows brighter, the horizon clearer, the sky is lightening, so the clouds start whitening, while well-tended urban patches of green emerge from night's umbra. In the meantime dawn has burst into flame; strips of golden light streak across the bluing sky, dispelling the last wreaths of mist still lurking in the shade. The lollypop trees that dot the sidewalk start awakening and seem to be fluttering their branches as sparrows twitter, revealing their presence, having invisibly settled there for their nighttime's nestling.  As light floods over the world your heart trembles within you like a little bird itself; everything is so fresh, so gay, just absolutely lovely; you feel you can see for miles, the air is so sparkling, the weather so perfect. You step lively now, assume a brisk pace. The sun is rising quickly, the sky is so clear. Then you ascend a hill ... what a view! The ocean a gold dome blinding and vast past low-lying hills where gulls veer and squawk, heading toward the sea, while an errant hawk is being bedeviled by a pair of crows, their black feathers shimmering shards of violet as they catch and scatter the rising sunlight while pestering Mr Hawkeye away from the morning morsel he had hoped to make of their chattering offspring. Turning toward downtown you can see the transit tracks winding their way for several miles, still but a faint metallic shimmer but already screeching with trolleys bearing their load of early risers off to work. I'm greedily breathing in lungfuls of morning air when I hear a peep peep behind me and see a bird so wee it could fit into the palm of my hand, yet even were my fingers to close around it, it would suffer no harm. It flits from branch to branch peeping with each leap; I feel almost honored that it would feel such safety although it's so close I could just about reach out and nab it like a pesky mosquito.

But such transports are by their very nature  transitory, and soon enough my reverie is shattered by a squawking radio declaiming about those callous congregating youth, caring nothing for their elders, as they gather in mobs cajoling and bursting with healthy energy, so that their ardor and spring fever-born exuberance make it hard to seriously blame them. Especially when I think of what we're leaving them in our wake, how dare we criticize them for not thinking of others? Do we care a fig when we fill a 3-ton SUV's tank? Are we thinking of them when we climb into a jet, fracture a continent or "borrow" from their future to amass an arsenal of nuclear arms we swear we'll never use, despite the trillions of dollars robbed from their future while economists such as the self-congratulatory Paula Krugman, grouse about "The Paradox of Thrift", which decries the selfishness of people with barely a pittance salting away part of their paltry earnings so as to have a cushion for when they're thrown out of their job? But what is the difference, that's what I'd like to know, of burying trillions in silos, from which they'll never emerge? Dollars hoovered right out of the economy to lie buried and useless, a never-ending sucking sound destroying wealth, wasting an ever expanding proportion of the now-rapidly dwindling pie we call the GDP. Is that why they call them black ops, black pools? They form a black hole in the middle of the economy where money goes in, but never comes out.

Well, that moment's ruined;

damned radios. 

Or at least it is gone.

That static-filled reminder of our nation's atomization

has left me feeling forlorn, 

and rudely broken the spell woven

 by this sparklingly perfect morn.

strange fate

A Basket Case.

As a child, in love with maps and books, one that included a fairy tale that pictured a man in the tub inscribed with the quote: "There was no soap ... So he died," hilariously matter-of-factly to our childish minds. Then the world and the universe that contained it were more than enough to encompass a naive vast appetite. How big the world seemed to one sequestered in dark corners, how invitingly it beckons to house-bound youth. But now looking back through the eye of memory, how small it  has become; as though memory were a telescope we peer into ass backwards.

One night we go to bed weary, yet look forward to the morning with hope, assuming the day will carry the same possibilities the previous one had, only to awake and find the world submerged, the Future removed from our grasp and now imprisoned behind a wall of flame, like Brünhild asleep, who lies unconscious of our desire to reach her; likewise ignorant of all those scorched by the effort to release her, the now-unreachable Future lies untouched by the fire burning in our hearts to attain it, despite the fact we can see Her right there, just beyond the pale. Which knowledge, magnifying the intransigence of destiny, inflames otherwise lazy brains with ire; hearts swollen with desire are soon enough filled with bitter resentment as the realization dawns that the only means of extinguishing such intense flames is a deluge that will carry off the very reason we wish to part the blazing wall.  Desperately we concoct ideas that flow, but like a river in spate, they rush past us toward the object of desire, only to see a denouement more akin to The Mill on the River Floss: the closer we get to the future that invites us, the closer the engine of our doom looms in the glowing dawn. We arrive just in time for one final embrace, only to find that what we have a clasped to our breast is a corpse .

But where to go, how to proceed but to follow that rhythm of the waves; rock gently in their hypnotic rolling, recuperating in the embrace of its infinity our finitude afloat on the endless seas: some of us are happy to flee from a dishonored country; others the horror of the plague follows close at their heels, and a few, relying on the astrology of strangers, immerse themselves in the vague promises of seers. Their proferred futures wrapping around them like seven veils, enveloped in an exotic perfume; they follow its scent, though its mists only serve to confuse the senses, they immerse them in seductive illusions that hold promise; the smell of death, for however short a time, is dispersed.

So as not to be changed into Neanderthals, we drink deeply of space and light under flaming skies; biting ice and burning suns slowly erase the love marks of kisses. We have become reclusive, going nowhere; only leaving for leaving's sake; hearts as light as balloons can't help us diverge from the path of our fate and, without knowing why, we're always ready with an enthused, "Let's go." But though desires lie in the shape of clouds, and though we dream of limitless pleasures, with the same dread longing of a recruit imagining cannon fire, ever imagining unknowns, which the human mind has never been able to name, the human heart never able to decipher, the dreams have begun to frighten us.

We imitate horror, a top, a rogue cop, a roller coaster in a park whose theme is danger sugar-coated with assurances of safety; they represent  dazzling balls with their waltzing and bouncing, all to distract us from the knowledge that even in our sleep curiosity torments us and spins us about, like a cruel angel whipping us unconscious only to drop us into this strange fate whose objective we cannot fathom as it is constantly moving, and since we are no longer able to convince ourselves that it is we who control it, spins us off to nowhere, or at least to an anywhere not of our choosing. We're just humanity, whose hope never tires, but seeks repose by running forever like a madman, and think it's normalcy that is what we wish to return to, forgetting how fervently we had wanted to leave it behind. We wanted to leave the entire planet behind. It's only now that we crave it, when it suddenly seems determined to leave us behind.

Astonishing what noble tales we tell ourselves, deep as the ocean; jewel-cases full of rich memories, those wonderful gems sparkling like stars and as amorphous as ether, they allow us to travel without steam or sail, relieving our boredom without imprisoning our minds with dread of gases choking us for our hubris, without remorse stretched across our conscience as tight as a canvas, so that we can't ever see a pink horizon without remembering it's a result of particulate matter of our own generation.

Carbon units unearthed carboniferous pools whose ignition spawned carbon units propelled by flights of fancy; engines launched into the night in the hope of dreams reaching their fulfillment by changing space-time, bending light to weave dreams despite the dangers looming, warping what's weft of Eden. Yet even were the journey in fact the destination, can we say, or even guess at, what it is we saw on it? We saw stars and waves; we saw sands and forests, but in spite of the shocks and the unexpected, we were mostly as bored, despite the unconscionable cost to get there, as here. It' s never long before the glory of the sun on the dancing sea, the splendor of cities in the setting sun, the rustling of rain whose sound is like a string of pearls rubbing against a chiffon dress, leaves us cold, our minds plunging from the skies to indulge in our own alluring reflections, since glorious as they are, neither the richest cities, the broadest landscapes, nor the sweetest twittering of birds, the busiest of hives, ever hold the mysterious attraction of those images which chance makes out of bilious cumulus clouds. Amorphous desire makes fools of us all, makes everyone uneasy.

So then, and then ... what then? Oh feverish brains.

We forget the most important things; we see everything, and notice nothing until, without having to look for it, from the bottom to the top of existence, the tedious spectacle of an overarching pestilence visits itself upon us. Once again we're a slave, contemptible; proud and stupid, adoring ourselves in solitude without laughing or loving, without disgust or delight, a greedy tyrant, lecherous, hard and covetous, slave to a slave, a gutter leading to a sewer. Thus can one see why perhaps the Angel of Death relishes his task as the sobbing martyr bends his neck for the swipe of the scythe. Our most frolicsome Holidays are now seasoned and perfumed with blood; the poisonous miasma unmanning the despot as the people fall in love with the stultifying whip. While religion stands mute, asleep with dreams of the after life, like a Madame wallowing in a feather bed, seeks its pleasure in its treasure; a writhing  voluptuary, aroused by tithing sects.

Chattering humanity, intoxicated with its won genius and made mad more now than ever, shouts at each other in its furious death agony, "I curse you!", while the less stupid, the bold lovers of nature, are sent fleeing from the great herd penned in by Destiny, and take refuge in their survival bunkers or Oxycontin. That is the burning news from the entire globe. It is a bitter knowledge that comes from pestilence. The world, monotonous and small, today, yesterday, tomorrow, always, has never shown us so starkly our own image: an oasis of horror in a desert of tedium. Should we stay in ? Should we go Out? If you can stay, stay; leave though, if you feel you must. One man runs, another cowers to avoid the vigilant, deadly enemy, whose ally is Time.

Whether the wandering few or the stay-at-home many, nothing, no SUV, no airship, will serve to flee this dreadful net, which has spread to encompass even those who it will manage to kill without them ever leaving their cradles. When it finally puts its knee down on our necks, we will be able to hope we can still cry "Farewell" to someone who might care; to utter "I love you" to an unmasked stare, and dream we have left China with eyes fixed on the open sea, and the wind in our hair. But the Sea of Darkness on which we've set sail with the joyful heart of a young wayfarer lures us with songs both charming and deadly, sighing in a breathless whisper, "This way leads back to the placid Normal Sea." But scents of camellias, speak to your heart's desires; come and lose yourself in the strange sweetness of an afternoon in the afterlife. Where you can recognize the ghosts of dear friends, holding out their arms to you, now that they're gone; they invite you to swim to their banks, to their open shops or an empty pew, tables are set, readied for after you've had a few, to repair to, to repair you and your broken heart.

But Death, old nemesis, insists it is time. And Time is endless, and dark as night, while our hearts  are hopeful, full of rays of light, when they're not as black as ink and full of poison that lights the fire that burns our brains, but we yet plunge into the depths of the abyss, while both Hell and Heaven, which both are remiss, so I doubt that it matters, when at the end of the known, Our Reality Show shatters.

Making America Great Britain Again: The D OD'd.

I saw a bit of the satire The Death of Stalin last night, and was bemused by the depiction of Stalin's son sallying out onto the ice to command an amateur hockey team, one that was practicing so as to seamlessly replace the Olympic Team that had been snuffed when an Aeroflot plane crashed to earth with them all on board. No one in the coterie of yesmen and sycophants surrounding him dared mention the fact that the team had been wiped out since, as the Son of Stalin so majestically proclaimed, "Soviet jets do not fall out of the sky." Any contradiction of which, from any of those surrounding him, would have resulted in summary execution.
                                                             Trump Towers over Paris Hilton

Ivanka the Terrible presidential adviser flashing her "Qualifications".

Now, although it brings the electronic media an enormous amount of fun and games (not to mention ad revenues: Listen carefully, or just attentively, and you will notice that every station, whether it's NPR, CNN, or Fox, must mention the name of the Corona-in-Chief several times per timeslice. In the industry they refer to it as the "TrumpBump", expanding their Bottom Line as if in competition to match the breadth of the prodigious President's own ponderous posterior), to Hail the Chief as an aberration and an insult to our Democracy, likening both his selection and temperament as a calamity on the scale of the Corona virus itself. Yet neither one of these disasters are the cause of the collapse of the USA as a great  power. They are both merely the agents that exposed the rot in the political system the former makes so apparent, and the economic system that the latter has shaken to its leveraged-to-the-hilt-on-a-prone-to-liquefaction foundation-of-debt's core (Whew!). 

How quickly we forget the Bush administration and the similar dynamic that prevailed during its disastrous tenure. We had to. How else retain the same rotted timbers that collapsed under the one to rebuild the same rickety debt-based structure all over again for the other?

We have merely replaced "The Decider" with "The Derider": The difference being that the Bushies, being a dynastic family, made sure to maintain at least the token obeisance necessary to maintain the fig leaf of "compassionate conservatism" values, whereas the current iteration of minority rule finds it far more lucrative to sneer at anything remotely resembling compassion, while their fans cheer them on. So, as many of my posts during the Bush era reflected, I found the similarity between the stultifying effect of the toadyism such Strongman politics encouraged as being more reminiscent of the Soviet Union than of the pre-USSR-collapse USA, even naming a post or two, "The USSA", so as to re-enforce the same logic that my reference to the GOP as the Red Party encompasses, one that pointing out its appointments of Bush acolytes to positions for which they had no qualifications, was meant to convey. Thus it also seemed apropos that I should call them Apparatchiks. Because that's all they were. But we had no word in the vernacular that expressed quite so adroitly the new reality Bush's political appointees reflected. They no more represented the interests of the Country than the current presidents' men do, a fact we seemingly, or perhaps just conveniently, have forgotten.

In the movie, when they bring the son of Stalin into the room where Papa's body is laid out, he starts giving ersatz orders, then whips out his pistol and starts shooting wildly when those orders are bemusedly ignored. Only the guard at whom he directly points his pistol bothers to try and restrain him. All the others stand around nervously, unsure of what to do: frozen by fear into inaction ... their fear of lifting a finger against Stalin's Son outweighing their fear of immediate annihilation from an errant projectile. Only when one of the members of Stalin's inner circle makes a subtle gesture do they take any action, even though he's firing a staccato round of bullets in every direction. At least so far, we in the West have not adopted the East's penchant for execution on-demand, settling, for now, on firing you in lieu of firing on you. That's a really big difference, one I in no way wish to portray as trivial. However the underlying dynamic at the heart of it, the propensity to further the abdication of citizens' representative rights to the whims of a Strongman in the name of "Security”, or for the promise of "Prosperity", are disturbingly echoed in the manner in which the so-called "Defense" Department, and increasingly, the equally ironically monikored "Justice" Department, has relegated Congress to the sidelines, investing total authority in the Chief Executive. This dynamic, in full play during the Bush years, had not gone unnoticed by everyone, as both Garry Wills, in Bomb Power, and Sheldon Wolin, with his Inverted Totalitarianism, are both testament to. That issue, long before the current occupant would have been conceived of as having even the remotest chance of becoming the tenant in what his occupation of has turned into the Offal Office, was one we mostly chose to ignore. However, unilaterally waging pre-emptive wars in order to throw open the Treasury chest of goodies, laying it bare to be plundered by the MNC's of America who ransacked it at will, gave full evidence that the Pandora's Box of Fascist rule had been thrown open as well.

What both those tomes suggests is that the Democratic functions  of the USA's political system have atrophied because of, in Garry Wills' argument, the abdication of Congress's power to declare War,  arguing that the relegation into the hands of a single "Decision Maker" the power of nuclear annihilation has had the effect of rendering Congress toothless; while Wolin, as stated by Truthdig, in an essay that reflects the full title of his book, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, "lays bare the realities of our bankrupt democracy, the causes behind the decline of American empire, and the rise of a new and terrifying configuration of corporate power he calls 'inverted totalitarianism.'” As UC Berkeley's Wendy Brown puts it:

"He was especially prescient in theorizing the heavy statism forging what we now call neoliberalism, and in revealing the novel fusions of economic with political power that he took to be poisoning democracy at its root.”

"Heavy statism". Precisely and succinctly put. It gets to the nub of the observation that the USA now more closely resembles the old Soviet Union than Russia itself does. Whether that is a good thing or bad, is not what I'm judging, it's the lack on the part of American polity to grasp their new reality, all in the name of "Freedom", that I find particularly annoying, alarming, and sometimes, I must confess, downright depressing.

It lies at the core of my frustration toward the  media for their supposed animosity toward The Donald, whereas in fact they absolutely Love him and what he's done to their boring ratings. A fact they had no compunction about admitting during his presidential campaign in 2016, but have since pretended no longer exists. But it is the TrumpBump that has transformed our entire media into a circus more resembling a sprawling TASS octopus, its tentacles squeezing every dollar to be gleaned from coverage of The Donald as though he were a member of the British monarchy and the entire press now shared the same journalistic mission of debauchery and slander as The Daily Mail.

Like the Son of Stalin, DJ fires off errant shots of frustration while everyone stands around  helplessly waiting, while cowering to stay out of the line of fire, for an adult in the room to step forward and put a stop to the hail of completely contrived bullet points before someone gets hurt. Even as the pile of corpses becomes unwieldy, he can proclaim, "Let them eat Yellowcake", or shoot up Lysol, ingest hydroxychloroquine, or douse oneself in deadly doses of UV rays. And like Stalin's son, running out on the ice uselessly screaming, "Play better", "Put it in the Goal!", ("Open the schools!"), he also believes his will alone is enough to magically shape reality, even as that reality show is losing the only pole still propping it up: for Stalin fils, the position of favorite son he inherited; for The DJ, the economy's place in the sun he inherited. Neither is equipped to deal with adversity now that Big Daddy's no longer there to wipe their nose, throw them wads of cash or dig them out of bankruptcy.

But whereas in Russia a return to Tsarism would be a return to a blighted peasant economy more in line with the plantation-era slavery of the South in pre-Civil War America, making it dead-on-arrival, the white supremacist movement that buttresses The Donald's great White House hope has a decided propensity for Monarchy and the Divine Right of Kings, having decided that the experiment of Democracy must surely have run its course if it's idea of progress means we must countenance such an outrage as Gay Marriage. The prospect of a queen in the White House, even as The Donald reigns as though he were the HydroxychloroQueen, is simply a step too far; it's that one step beyond that leads right into the Twilight of their God's Zone, such that "This LGBQTrans'-gression will not stand!"

And if that means the Donald is the man who would be King? So be it. As long as it would rid the country of the embarrassing scourge of gay marriage and transgender frights, I mean rights, they'd be perfectly willing to, "Make America Great Britain Again."

Karma Suitsya: Coroney Capitalism.

Russia had its hottest winter ever recorded.

Wildfires in Siberia are bringing even more misery to an area that is already on lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. Nine regions have been affected

Wildfires are burning in the Florida Panhandle.

 Last month was the hottest April on record for the globe,

 Arctic temperatures in the last few days have averaged an astounding 9.4 degrees Celsius above normal, and

Heat has also gripped portions of Greenland, where the ice sheet’s annual melt got started two weeks early.

Maximum sustained winds in Typhoon Amphan increased from 75 mph to 160 mph in just 24 hours.

Heavy Rainfall Floods Homes, Streets in Louisiana and Texas as Covington in St. Tammany Parish reports 15.63 inches of rain late Thursday night, and it's still coming down.

Flash flooding has washed out parts of a couple of roads just west of Greenville, South Carolina, this morning.

North Carolina has already dealt with a damaging round of flash flooding in late April when over 3 inches of rain fell in a short amount of time. In this storm, rainfall totals have already exceeded 4 inches as of early Thursday morning.

Two dams in Michigan were breached after days of heavy rainfall, forcing the evacuation of thousands of residents. The affected area includes Midland, the home of Dow Chemical, which is now under nine feet of water.

Coastal flooding is expected to peak in Norfolk, Virginia, with Wednesday evening's high tide, according to the National Weather Service.

Torrential rain in the Great Lakes region triggered major flooding in parts of Chicagoland Sunday night.

 Other downpours caused flooding in parts of eastern Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky.

Evacuations are underway as flooding hits Roanoke, Virginia.

Ina Deathgrip.

While a virus spreads like wildfire among us, one system after the other is flooded with the completely predictable outcome: Hospitals inundated, funeral homes buried, crematoria demand on fire, coffin makers unable to keep up with the torrent of corpses; it's as though the River Styx is in spate, creating an algal bloom in the propensity of the US to blame someone/anyone else, thereby clogging vital response with an abundance of slime.

Both plagues and natural disasters were or seemed in retrospect to be, so much more, well, natural, when they were what insurance companies liked to refer to as "Acts of God." Never in the past were they considered to be what they have come to represent in today's world: repercussions from the  activities of man: Scientific Horrorifics as dreams of terror and death come vividly to life in a crucible of HP-enabled Hatecraft, natural processes seem to have turned against us as though they had a will, but it is we who wield a will, one as thunderous as Thor's hammer, one that looses monsters into our midst, invites nightmares to dinner; sits man-made ogres with scientifically-sterilized names down with the ladies that lunch.

How timely it is that TV and movies are replete with dead men walking in search of others' brains to gnaw on, giving new meaning to the term, "Let me pick your brain", while mild-mannered males change into beasts under the charming light of the moon, or vampires flit around just outside our windows, succeeding in enticing the weakest among us to invite them inside, where they feed on the innocent who had nothing to do with letting them in. The perpetrators of crimes are always the first to get out of the way: foreknowledge doesn't just save Senators' portfolios' value, it forewarns them to take to their well-heeled heels and get the hell outta Dodge.

The great leveling our changed climate is delivering has forced India and Pakistan to evacuate millions in the middle of a pandemic as one disaster piles right on top of another like a High School game of rumble while "the indispensable country" unabashedly displays to the world, "Hey, you guys are on your own." Unless, that is, you wanna blow somethin' up, I mean; you know, just drop a line and we'll strike a deal. WE've really revved up our defense industry, finest in the world, BY FAR! And we'll even throw in some Covid-carrying personnel if you need some Special Ops done. These boys can drop in, shed virus, be back in Fort Detrick all before curtain call. Huh? Oh yeah, of course, bugle call, Reverie, I'm in a revellie reverie, fer crissakes. Ok now, what else? WE got it set so we can carry on three conflicts at once, anywhere in the World!, goddammit. Full Spectrum Dominatrix! You betcha: Don't Cry for Huawei, make our 5-G your wi-fi. PZZZZZT!

"Just die for me Venezuela!
The truth is, you're just too Socialist,
You're just like locusts;
So for your oilfields,
We give you Guiado;
Cede Orinoco".

The only blessing, and it is one, that this pandemic has delivered is one whose name no one dare speak, whose obvious implications we'd rather avoid. That the activities, the utter folly of the great preponderance of our activities, the very ones that are cementing in the reality of an increasingly unpredictable climate regime, not one that will arrive at some time in the future, but like the virus itself is upon us now, are all non-essential activities without which the air would be breathable, the CO2 burden placed on it radically abated, and our future extinction delayed. Yet despite the obvious repercussions of ignoring what is staring us in the face even while slappin' us upside the head, we insist we  have no option but to continue to support "the Economy". That same one that is delivering the fruits of labor to a dwindling few, wreaking weather catastrophes that pile up one on top of the other, leaving no recovery time, and spreading a plague around the globe in a  matter of months. Precious months that we dithered away, in exactly the same manner in which we are frittering away the last few years left to "do something" about climate change besides crowding into packed jets by the thousands to soar around the globe to attend meaningless conferences so as to make a grand show of doing something, never caring to notice that that something we are doing is only making the problem worse, irrevocably faster.

So we claim helplessness in front of our own creation. But we are not helpless. We are just obdurate, selfish, our desperate indulgence in folly to feed our vanity unconscionable. But due to our deadly arsenals, unstoppable. We have turned the concept of freedom on its head, so that in its current iteration, My freedom doesn't stop where it impacts yours, oh no, that's so old-school. That's when it really gets started. Now Freedom means that I am free to eliminate you from my path because your freedom, well, I mean, what does that mean when I  have ICBM's? Anyway, we all know that:

Freedom's just another word for, I win and you lose
Loser! You mean nothing honey 'cause you ain't free, not now;
And freedom's feels so good If it's, giving you the blues;
If you're feeling bad that's good enough for me, hmm, hmm,
Good enough for me and this Economy. Uh-huh.
La-di-da, la-di-da, La-di-da da da di dah.

The globalized economy wreaks more harm than the corona virus, killing millions prematurely every single year, a toll we ignore even in these, the OECD nations representing the most developed of the developed economies. And, unlike the virus, the Coroney Capitlaist Economy will not be going away any time soon. There is no team of scientists struggling mightily to conjure a way out of the range of its killing field. On the contrary, every OECD nation endeavors to outgrow every other one; "Eat my dust" triumphalism rules the day. Growth is thus proven to be a mere euphemism for burn more fossil fuel than anyone else. Each Nation struggles to makes their own economy a tourist haven, dismissing the fact it would be crushed like an aluminum can underfoot without jet travel; automobile robofacture, its products using more energy, no matter what it's drivetrain, in its robofacture than it will ever consume in its utilization as a transport module; or agribusiness, that brainchild of the first "Green Revolution" that spawned industrialized farming, dependent on natural gas-derived fertilizers, and so has consumed more fossil fuels, generated more CO2 since its genesis than all the underdeveloped nations' attempt to industrialize has.

 "Developed" meaning, of course, those economies that are creating the lion's share of the excess CO2 wreaking havoc with the predictability of the closed system called the atmosphere. Hence, the more developed the economy, the more atrophied that nation's citizens' sense of responsibility for any other person who suffers from the ramifications of their behavior. Yet we can manage to say "globalized" with a straight face. Stratified and gratified, consumerist and buffoonerish, our highest goal in life to lead an effortless existence (well, on their part. You, however? Get back to your essential work. If yet another workplace danger now lurks invisibly in the very air you breath? Well, you have health insurance. Why do you think it's paid for by your employer? Still think it's a Benefit? Lol. Thank God labor is now so utterly dis-organized and hopelessly stupid). Thus do the economies exhibiting the largest amount of Folly, their Demand engine now ruled by the Avatar of Folly himself, his bloated visage floated iconically all over their Corporate-owned and Iron-fisted-controlled HDTV's and plasma screens, the much-caricatured face of the eye-toon, DJ grins out at us mawkishly everywhere we look. As though this were Syria, or No. Korea, or some other "shithole" country lorded over by a Strongman. It's Our Prince, our Scion; Our End.

Political Climate Change: Weapons Sails Abroad

The New York Times, the paper that used a Judith Miller article to rouse the nation up to take a yellowcake walk through Iraq, has decried that, now, years in to the foray, US arms are taking a grim toll in the Yemen War. You'd think  that the DJ's proclamation that, “Our military has never been stronger. Each day, new equipment is delivered; new and beautiful equipment, the best in the world – the best anywhere in the world, by far", would have been a clue, but no. Apparently it's only now that the flailing NYT has discovered that when we sell weapons to a "Kingdom" ruled by a murderous brat, not much unlike our own be-diapered Baby Huey look-alike of a monarch (Is DJ's ass really that big?" ... Depends), he might use them to, ya know, kill people. That's why Reagan sold Tomahawk missiles to Iran, while providing intelligence about where they were deployed, to Iraq, for example. To whom we were selling anti-missile systems (they didn't work).

I find their objection to weapons sales, to allies, curious for two reasons. First, the NRA wins every case they bring when, after some other AK-47 -wielding, disgruntled Tea Partier, wipes out a select portion of the madding crowd, some attempt is made to limit such sales. "Guns don't kill people, people do", is about all they have to say. Oh, right, of course. (Nowhere do bullets get the slightest mention, yet neither guns nor people inflict the fatal damage: Bullets do).  Well then, ... so okay, just you keep doing that. Far be it for me to suggest otherwise. So that's where we stand on that moral/legal issue. Well, Phosphorous cluster bombs, and missiles, their tips alloyed with Depleted Uranium, they don't kill people, either, the Nations (that would be  us ... all but exclusively) that drop them do.

So why not let some one else do your dirty work? Which brings me to my second reason. We are still in a War with Afghanistan that the USA had no hope of winning, nor did it ever intend on doing so. Ditto Iraq. The reasons proffered for both conflicts are total nonsense. Everybody knows this, they just don't want to look the fool for supporting those endeavors when we were being manipulated into doing so. The point being, there is no other actual reason, or rather let's say, not one as disturbingly compelling s the ballooning of the the bottom lines of all those defense firms that need to keep conflict going so their fat profits therefrom keep rolling in. Right now the entire globe is being made privy to biological warfare waged by one party against the other, yet can still think it one step beyond to conceive of these wars as anything more than weapons-tests and display fields for the Awesome power of the USA:

"Each day, new equipment is delivered; new and beautiful equipment, the best in the world, by far."

POW Camps:

Does the NYT think we're fighting in Afgahnistan, after all this time, for Democracy? Have you looked at what's occupying the Offal Office right now? Democracy has delivered to the world a Super Power ruled by a creature so vile he is proclaiming workers being sent to unsafe workplaces under threat of destitution and homelessness (as that's what being cut off from both your job, because they believe their President (they probably actually believe he's being treated with that aquamarineaquine, too)  and consider Covid-19 but a minor inconvenience, so your fellow workers don't deign to don a mask, yet if you don't go to the job, you get fired; and your red State has decreed you're therefore ineligible for unemployment benefits, or SNAP) consider themselves "Warriors", on the fields of the economic Wars he started on day one of his administration. As Betty and Wilma used to cry: "CHARGE! ... it." Yet the Companies being so generous as to provide those disease-ridden environments need never worry, as they are immune to lawsuits from any fatalities they incur on this, our latest war, our War on US. We have seen the enemy, and the Po' go first, boy.

"The best Warriors in the world, by far." ... "Let another one drop."

That includes in the Battleground countries, of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan: where, in order to withdraw the troops, a sop must be thrown to the companies raking in the bonanza from the trade in advanced sophisticated death machines. That is why the DJ has emphasized arms sales to other countries run by dolts with large checkbooks. As no one knows better than the failing NYT, the profits to be derived from selling the daily news are razor thin; but those to be raped, (Oh, did I say "raped?" I meant) reaped from selling machines that promise to harvest human lives, especially in large numbers from a safe distance, are as  fat and juicy as a tick on the DJ's ass (and those nosebleed-level maintenance contracts lock them into being bled for years into the future).

And since Isis, the Taliban, Al Qaeda in Syria, (and Yemen as well, it's been said), all seem to have no trouble ending up with US-manufactured weapons anyway, and at the taxpayers' expense, I for one, would rather we deliver them via a cargo vessel than the way we have been delivering them: directly onto helpless peoples' heads. 

Never Come Morning. IMNOTOK YRU

The Herrenvolk's idea of  Entertainment:

Party Hardy with CharredLize

M&M's: Mechanized Murder; Maniacal Mayhem; Movie Madness.
That hard candied coating that keeps us impervious to the pain we inflict on others.  

NYT's David Leonhardt:

"Gilbert Cruz, The Times’s Culture editor, is offering recommendations for stuff you should watch. Today, he chose the post-apocalyptic thriller “Mad Max: Fury Road”:

“I probably should watch ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ every year given how singular and impressive it is. (Maybe we all should.) I was spurred to do so this week, though, by a massive oral history of the film’s production by The Times’s Kyle Buchanan.

“Starring Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron in intense, nearly wordless performances, ‘Fury Road’ remains an absolutely bananas action movie — large vehicles, driving fast across the desert, exploding, flipping, crashing, people jumping between, over and in front of said vehicles — that is completely engrossing. I laugh and cry during movies all the time. But it is rare for me to just sit there, agape, mimicking the open mouth emoji for two hours.”

Having just finished Nelson Algren's Never Come Morning the night before (or more accurately, earlier this morning, as I was shocked to see it was 2:30 AM before I gingerly placed the text on the night stand), I powered up the PC this morning and saw the above "recommendation" from the "culture" editor of the NYT's and it just brought me down that much lower. You see, when I see even that photograph from the film, that still, that clip, I think of the still-born we leave in our wake, the gun clips strapped to soldiers' torsos that are designed to spit death at random at our fellow human beings, and they mostly remind me of this:

                                      Our Mission? To deliver WMD to the Needy of the World.

Are we Great yet? I'll say Yemen to that.

As death looms in Twilight's growing darkness, stalking menacingly immediately outside our door while the country clamors to invite it inside, our newspaper of record recommends that we watch bloodbaths for fun and games, revel in destruction to get our jollies, harden that shell we've so carefully erected around our hearts with another layer of shellac while we enjoy yet another display of modern mans' descent into madness, as though moviedom's glorification of heartless horror is totally disconnected from our casual cakewalk through the bombed-out world we've bequeathed our "enemies", having successfully bombed them "back into the stone age" loosing an Armamenteria only the Jetson's could be hiding under their lofty high-in-the-sky nests onto the Flintstones, grubbily earthbound and dust-covered, their huts shabby, their transport clunky. Perfect setup for a nation of cowards to bomb the bejesus out of simply because the chance of retaliation is exactly zero. And we'll feel so much better in the morning.

Sometimes I envy you. That you're OK with it. More than OK; you feel great again. Great.

Once it only took Tony the Tiger. Now it takes deploying Raptors. Dropping ordnance the size of a house. Firing missiles to scream through a silent sky to shatter bodies so completely there's nothing left but a pink mist covering the desert floor, naked body parts littering the landscape. Fury Rode, while compassion limped along, eventually disappearing as it was left in a cloud of Humvee dust. "You're Killing it". Great.

"Beautify! Beautify!"

Lady Bird Johnson couldn't even tolerate the litter along America's highways. Even as her husband's forces were dispatched to Asia to "Kill anything that moves" along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Mekong Delta is reedy when you are. Body counts were tallied and daily posted on our newspaper of record's front page. They proved we were getting a good bang for our defense buck.

That era shared a lot with both the WW2 era and our current era: a pervasive sense of preventable loss. Bodies tossed onto carts as they rumble by are now replaced with A/C'd trailers loaded with body-bagged corpses, glad bags turned to cad - as in cadaver -  bags.

Algren 's novel is set in early WW2 Chicago, '42, and is peopled by Poles who mock Jews, jigs and shell-shocked rejects; by pimps, whores and denizens of the boxing underworld, its hero a rapist and murderer who hands over to a mob of miscreants the friend of his youth, Steffi, who has put her trust in him only to be betrayed so brutally she ends up as shell-shocked as the mental prisoner-of-war, Snipes. Her boyfriend Pole, Bruno Lefty "Biceps" Bicek, a boxing champ, if only in his own mind, who is so disgusted with his lame self at the perfidy of his own behavior and the cowardice it reveals, he lashes out at a Greek waiting in line for his turn, who, sensing Bicep's vulnerability rubs a little salt in the wound by confiding that,

"I'm gonna do pen'nce for this afters' Left'. I got no place t' go."
But Bruno turns on him.
"Beat it Sheeny, this is a white man's party."
Why had he had to throw that in? What if the fellow had a knife?
"Make half those gorillas stay out of it and I'll show you who the white man is." The line dissolved behind him to give the Greek room. Bruno stiffened as he heard Steffi call him from below. No, not him, but calling. His fingers spread tensely, uncertain that he had heard or imagined it, till it came again.
"Next!", he heard her call. And she was laughing a laugh like a single drawn-out sob, hard as a man in handcuffs laughs.
"Next! Next!"
The Greek's shoulders were bound by his sleeves as he stretched them back to slip his coat off, so Bruno smashed him in the face. The boy jerked his hands up in haste and wiggled as he felt himself still bound. Bruno cupped the boy's jaw in both hands as he struggled, set it for the left and swung from the pavement: The head jerked back and the boy slipped down the side of the telephone pole, trying to grasp it with his bound hands. Bruno listened. But she did not call again.
  He felt the boys behind him coming up, and saw the Greek trying to raise himself. He'd gotten onto all fours, his forehead against the alley pavement, bracing himself with his forehead. When he got his elbows beneath him Bruno heard Bibleback whisper anxiously behind him:
"You goin' down again yerself, Lefthander? I ain't been."
For reply Bruno brought up his foot as though converting a point after touchdown:  the point of the boot caught the point of jaw. They all heard the snap, like the snap of a brittle reed. They all saw the supporting forearms fold and saw him roll on his side. They stood, looking blindly down, a dozen bald-headed Poles with a warehouse shadow across their skulls.
  There was no sound from below. There was no sound from above. As though the last El had crashed and the last trolley had finished its final run. Only the beat of the powerhouse, the heavy throb through the city wires: and the blind wall waiting before them. Then they ran."

The scenes that follow, depicting two of the gang left behind downstairs with "The Duchess" to the mercy of their mocking jibery, "Sweetheart. At last. Fergive me. Marry me 'r be my wife." (Skinny thing though. Could feel her ribs). "I bet your Ma washes yer clothes on ya - uses yer ribs fer a washboard I bet." She was drunk as a judge. So they took her to the local madam, after deciding that dumping her in an alley might mean trouble with that Greek layin' back there on his ear ...

See why I was kinda despondent this morning? A lot happens after this, but as the story comes to the conclusion, it's Steffi and Lefty again. I had to go back to reread this scene, because I couldn't believe it could possibly be the same woman. Because as sad as the murder is in its casualness, as disturbing as the scene belowstairs is in its dismissive disposal of Steffi once they've all had their way with her, it is her forgiveness, her collapse into his warm arms before he goes to his championship fight that was even more depressing. Forgiveness is sometimes hard to countenance.

But during the final fight scene that finishes the book, we're made  privy to Lefty's thoughts as he somehow holds up under an incredible "Raging Bull"-style thrashing from which he nevertheless emerges victorious, the reader comes to  begrudgingly understand the attachment to the man that lets Steffi contemplate marriage to him. "Everything was going to be all right after all." (Poor dear). It's Algren's best writing. I'd been managing a coulpa pages a night, but last night I just couldn't stop. That love can endure through such squalor and degradation, such hopelessness and fatalism, extends a thin reed of hope to a reader sinking amid this quicksand of human depravity. Isherwood's The Berlin Stories' flash and the Divine Decadence of Sally Bowles had no substance compared to the weight one murder leadened the lives of Algren's characters with, relentlessly leading to the sad conclusion you knew it was working toward: Biceps' arrest. Right after his victory. He didn't even make it out of the gym. As they escorted him out the door he spoke softly, looking down at the air holes punched between the toes of his outworn tennis shoes.
"Knew I'd never get t' be twenty-one anyhow," he said.

Well, neither did the Greek you murdered.

So to slouch out of bed in the morning carrying the weight of fictionalized justice brought down onto the head of someone who deserved it, yet eliciting a throbbing resonance of shared humanity for anyone being caught in the net of justice and made to face the consequences of his overwrought actions, it was hard to find much to identify with in a Mad Max movie that depicts carnage and murder as sport, assures its viewers that killing need have no consequences, each death just a pause before the next execution; all of them set up as BAD guys so no sense of common humanity, no guilt for destroying another human mind, no recognition, never mind accountability, for the evil in your own heart need disturb you; it's all just good clean fun. Instead it's just "exploding, flipping, crashing, people", and now that 's what we call "Culture". A rather jaundiced view to hold while millions are being sickened and millions are being lined up to die, while those who care for the dying must expose themselves to being wracked with that same pain and fever themselves. The specter of death sits on the corner of the bed, and no one else is allowed in to see you, or give you the least bit of human contact. A touch; a lover's hand to hold; a human face to gaze into. I ask myself softly,

What is wrong with us?

Plandemic Pandemic: Adrift in an Ocean of ConspiraSeas.

Having had a frenemy dub me the Celery Queen of Conspiracy theorists, I decided to don my dear stalker hat and engage in a little interrwebs defective detective work for to see the latest offerings. And with the Sole Superpower's (what a laughable appellation that has become) Corona-in-Chief' broadcasting one pathetically lame accusation against China after the other from his bully pulpit on an almost daily basis, I thought I would puzzle together one of my own from the single source that has become one of my favorite go-to blogs since this nightmare began, namely Moon of Alabama, whose comment section is one of those rare species wherein the contributors actually demonstrate critical thinking instead of high-school-level name-calling so prevalent on such blogs as zerohedge, where they quickly descend into the mud-slinging muck of sophomoric shouting matches.

Engineering immune evasion:

  A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence:

2015:

The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV underscores the threat of cross-species transmission events leading to outbreaks in humans. Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.

The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs (same gene/protein in different species) of the SARS receptor human Angiotensin Converting Enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis. Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein. On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo.

 The emergence of SARS-CoV heralded a new era in the cross-species transmission of severe respiratory illness with globalization leading to rapid spread around the world and massive economic impact3,4. Since then, several strains—including influenza A strains H5N1, H1N1 and H7N9 and MERS-CoV—have emerged from animal populations, causing considerable disease, mortality and economic hardship for the afflicted regions5. Although public health measures were able to stop the SARS-CoV outbreak4, recent metagenomics studies have identified sequences of closely related SARS-like viruses circulating in Chinese bat populations that may pose a future threat.


Therefore, to examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs, we built a chimeric virus encoding a novel, zoonotic CoV spike protein—from the RsSHC014-CoV sequence that was isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats1—in the context of the SARS-CoV mouse-adapted backbone. The hybrid virus allowed us to evaluate the ability of the novel spike protein to cause disease independently of other necessary adaptive mutations in its natural backbone. Using this approach, we characterized CoV infection mediated by the SHC014 spike protein in primary human airway cells in vivo, and tested the efficacy of available immune therapeutics against SHC014-CoV.

Together, the results demonstrate that broadly neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV may only have marginal efficacy against emergent SARS-like CoV strains.

Crimson Contagion was a simulation administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from January to August 2019 that tested the capacity of the U.S. Trump Administration's government's ability to respond to a severe influenza pandemic originating in China. The exercise, which was conducted months prior to the start of the coronavirus pandemic, involves a scenario in which tourists returning from China spread a respiratory virus in the United States, beginning in Chicago. In less than two months the virus had infected 110 million Americans, killing more than half a million. The report issued at the conclusion of the exercise outlines the government's limited capacity to respond to a pandemic, with federal agencies lacking the funds, coordination, and resources to facilitate an effective response to the virus:

However, the vaccine failed to protect aged animals in which augmented immune pathology was also observed, indicating the possibility that the animals were harmed because of the vaccination.

 Similar results showing protection against challenge with a lethal dose of SARS-CoV were observed in aged BALB/c mice with respect to weight loss and viral replication.

Having established that the SHC014 spike has the ability to mediate infection of human cells and cause disease in mice, we next synthesized a full-length SHC014-CoV infectious clone (clones are man-made) based on the approach used for SARS-CoV, which suggest that further adaptation is required for its replication to be equivalent to that of epidemic SARS-CoV in human respiratory cells and in mice.

March 2020 Editors’ note: "We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus."

Note that these two possibilities are not mutually exclusive, as an animal could well be the most likely source of the coronavirus, but an animal could also be the most likely source of a novel coronavirus that was engineered and then injected into that animal, thereby causing COVID-19.

Then:

There is this little-known fact: Some Chinese researchers are in the habit of selling their laboratory animals to street vendors after they have finished experimenting on them.

"Instead of properly disposing of infected animals by cremation, as the law requires, they sell them on the side to make a little extra cash. Or, in some cases, a lot of extra cash. One Beijing researcher, now in jail, made a million dollars selling his monkeys and rats on the live animal market, where they eventually wound up in someone’s stomach." (Civets, a favored treat of crazy-rich Chinese, are often used in such experiments as described above because they have ACE2 receptors remarkably similar to our own).

So just because an animal, "is the most likely source of the coronavirus", in no way negates the possibility that said virus was engineered in a lab. That's why the Editors’ note above is so carefully worded. They have no wish for the public to realize that it was the push for a highly-profitable vaccine that spurred the genesis and accidental (I still hope) release of the highly contagious microbe itself.

Born in the USA:

Feb 29, 1919

Some of the work of U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID  was shut down last year over safety lapses, shortfalls that were mirrored to some extent at other military research labs, and is still under a cloud:

"Just this week, David Franz, a former deputy commander of the lab, co-wrote a piece about USAMRIID for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal titled “A Biosecurity Failure.” The article blamed the facility’s troubles on both mismanagement and its being treated as a “backwater” by the Pentagon."
 
Furthermore:

"A 2016 audit by the Pentagon’s inspector general on the entire military biological research enterprise said that “the health and safety of the public was put at risk” because those labs had “used protocols that were not validated for their intended use, been inspected irregularly or not at all, and had significant deficiencies and vulnerabilities that were not corrected by DoD management.”"

Published July 17, 2019:

 Fairfax County ( 46 miles (or minutes) from Fort Detrick).  The outbreak was in June 2019 and the lab shutdown was July. Health officials said they don't yet have a cause of the respiratory illness that sicked more than 60 residents at a Northern Virginia senior living community:

The outbreak at Greenspring Retirement Community in Springfield began June 30, 2019. Sick residents had symptoms such as coughs, fevers and pneumonia.

Three people have also died, but Dr. Benjamin Schwartz of the Fairfax County Health Department said Wednesday afternoon that those who died were "older" and had complex health problems (Sound familiar?). Officials don't yet know the extent to which the respiratory illness contributed to their deaths, he said.

The community has implemented infection-prevention measures including cancelling group activities, increasing cleaning, isolating infected patients in their rooms and restricting visitors, Schwartz said.

"The facility has done an excellent job implementing those infection-prevention measures," he said.

The outbreak was reported in the assisted living and skilled nursing areas of the community, where about 263 people live. The outbreak has now affected 63 of those residents. At least 20 were taken to a hospital.

The health department has sent several samples from infected patients to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing, but no cause for the outbreak has been identified, Schwartz said.

The health department is continuing to work with the facility on the investigation, he said. Testing for Legionnaires disease was negative, he said.

Schwartz said there were also reports of a respiratory illness outbreak at an assisted living facility several miles away in Burke, Virginia. About 25 people were ill there, including two with pneumonia.

August 5, 2019

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided to issue a “cease and desist order” last month to halt the research at Fort Detrick citing, "Problems with disposal of dangerous materials."

In Oct, 2019:

Wuhan Military Games: 10,000 athletes from around the world were present in what has proven to be the starting point of the pandemic which has affected the whole world for several months. Some USA participants came from Fort Bragg, located about 350 miles from Fort Detrick.

Published on 05/06/2020 at 12:03:

Several French athletes have revealed in recent days that they suffered from the symptoms of Covid-19 following the Military Games which took place last October, 2019. This competition, in which more than 400 sportsmen took part, took place in Wuhan, the Chinese epicenter of the pandemic. Olympic medalist Elodie Clouvel unequivocally believes that she has "already had the coronavirus", as does her partner, the pentathlete Valentin Belaud.

 November 17, 2019:

The virus infects its first victim in China.

None of which proves anything, of course, the point being that none of the Administration's accusations against China do either. The man who sat on David Letterman decrying the export of American jobs to China while sporting a necktie sold by one of his own companies that was made in China, never referred to his product as Chinese Ties.

The current American president is in the throes of a full-on campaign to poison the air, water, and ground of his own country. He made sure it wouldn't impact the profits of the insurance giants by first waging a battle to wrest access to health insurance away from those most likely to be thereby sickened. It started as part of a well drawn-out plan of 100 actionable items, to implement policies to boost profits by deliberately destroying the health and well-being of his fellow Americans, a fact that need be documented by nothing more than public statements from his own administration's official announcements or his own personal tweets. And the NYT's has kindly gathered them together in a list of regulations to be eliminated so as to allow increases in the amounts of arsenic and mercury, benzene and other VOC's, and a slew of other respiratory tract irritants from automobile tailpipes, all of which are known to kill. There is no need to list them all (they're in the article cited), as those last two alone will needlessly cause the premature deaths and rob the vitality of millions of children across the country, all of which explains why the specter of a virus adding a few hundred thousand to that death toll is a simple rounding number to him. Move on . Nothing to see here.

What does that prove? Not a thing.

But an administration that has opened the lab that was shutdown for its lack of security and questionable procedures, long before, like the economy itself, it was ready to be opened, and then sent research dollars to a lab his administration, per Josh Rogin, one of his own neo-conservative that:

"Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world (so that would mean in 2018), U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington (which they ignored) about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats".

That is, US-funded research that couldn't be carried out in the US because US labs aren't safe enough, and neither was the research, which is why it was shutdown during the Obama administration. The Fort Detrick lab was flooded and its sterilization system destroyed from climate-change-amped flooding. But in order to enable the increase in the releases of climate-changing gases into the atmosphere, the current administration's hired hands and anyone else who wishes to retain their job must never mention the fact that their facilities are in danger from the extremely-amped weather generated by the changes taking place in our climate. So flood protection, or other precautions, even those as easily accomplished as temporary removal of multi-billion-dollar aircraft in the face of the most violent hurricane to ever ply the Gulf of Mexico's waters, can't  even be suggested. No matter how avoidable nor expensive the resulting damage might be:

Climate-change denial's Collateral Damage.
We'll just build more, we have unlimited Defense Funds.

A lab posing as biodefense is, in US parlance (as evidenced by the real nature of the "Defense" Dept),  is easily seen to be a bio-weapons lab.

There is nothing the US can bring to bear in its case against the Chinese that can't be far more easily conjectured, and proven, against the US itself. Not the least of which is the publicly announced desire to destroy the globalized trade system the US President has set out from day one to dismantle via trade wars, currency wars and now biological warfare against his own country:

A Texas company offered in January to make additional N95 masks. The head of Prestige Ameritech, Michael Bowen, offered to use four of their dormant production lines  to produce as many as seven million masks per month.

But The US President preferred to used absconded defense dollars to instead build a wall his minority of followers wants erected to protect them from a Phantom Menace rather than use them to protect US health workers from being exposed to an actual threat they face every day while attempting to save lives from a virus his administration did nothing in the face of. Although the Bush administration also ignored warnings and allowed a known warned-against threat to materialize, this GOP-installed President has taken it a step further and, far from napping, as the VP Cheney admitted he was doing, assured the American public, still assures the American public, that this threat will just dry up and buh-low away. Much the same thing he told Prestige Ameritech to do when they offered to help.

The President of the United States has downplayed calls for greater testing, suggesting they're motivated by politics, then ordered more testing for himself and his staff.

White House issues memo requiring staff to wear masks in West Wing, having spent months decrying their inefficacy. "We don't need no stinkin' Masks!"

You can't, except in the Blighted State of America, accuse another country of responsibility for a pandemic your own fecklessness has caused to rampage through your own country while you simply shrug your shoulders and say, "Hey, it is what it is" (actual quote), and expect anyone outside of your benighted purview to take such accusations seriously. They are not worth the breath expelled to make them. They are a sad reflection of the sorry state of your own weak, flabby reaction to adversity.

More than that, they're just downright embarrassing.

American Worriers: Reflected in the Washington DC Mirror You are CD: Collateral Damage.

Since we have all now been dubbed "Worriers", reduced to little more than the casualties, the Cattle of the Bulge, c'est-à-dire, to be let loose to develop (or not) herd immunity, can we expect combat pay? VA coverage for a lifetime? PTSD assistance?

It was already safer to join the military, in terms of both job prospects and longevity, than it was to be a civilian, but the Army at least tried to keep that little fact secret. Now its Coward-in-Chief is ordering employees to the front line in the "war" against Covid without being issued even a pair of combat boots. Collateral Damage is your name, as the Death Troll rises from the swamp to swamp the country with deadly pathogens to which we have no immunity. Our sadly Diminished Capitol is panicking from the prospects of the Diminished Capital this economic depression will be providing it.

This doesn't look good, folks.

As the heat in our atmosphere builds up over the coming months, amplified by a growing accumulation of CO2, water vapor, and methane that it has never been burdened with ever before during mankind's entire existence, there are certain known knowns circulating along with this Covid nightmare we are all in:

Fire season, should it follow a remarkably easy to spot trend, will get going earlier and last longer:

Siberia is already on Fire, experiencing the worse outbreak there in known history. Pouring enough CO2 into the air to more than makeup for the drop from other human-caused activities (the fires, the Russian government insists, were almost all started by people);

For example: a Siberian village at 58.4°N, or about the same latitude as Churchill, Canada, the “polar bear capital of the world”—soared to 31.0°C (87.8°F) on April 25.

An outbreak of fires exacerbates two Covid outbreak symptoms:

Lung inflammation and Heart problems,

Both of these put a strain on the human body and immune system anyway, but their toll escalates as the temperature and humidity rise. And now, besides the fires and the inhalation of the resultant smoke adding to the already stressed organism (ie humans), the virus lurks ready to exploit any immune system weakness, such that a viral load that would have been insufficient to cause infection, is now more easily able to attack the already weakened organism. I still have an N-95 mask from the California fires from a few years ago, what that suggests is that while the fires are burning, people may actually be safer, as they will be wearing masks. The downside of that is that they will remove them upon going indoors, where the window will all be shut to keep the smoke out, with the unfortunate side-effect of keeping any viral particles in: turning safe havens into places where they are most likely to be exposed to the highest concentrations of the microbes that cause Covid-19.

It doesn't help that Russia, where fire has consumed roughly 5 million acres of forest and grassland, has, as of May 1, become one of the newest global hotspots for the coronavirus as well. The country is now third in total confirmed cases worldwide with over 221,300.

 Simultaneously, in Milan, the high on Friday was 82 degrees Fahrenheit, over 10 degrees higher than the historical average.

Last month was statistically tied for the *warmest* April on record for our planet.

Wildfires are also burning in the Florida Panhandle: “It boils down to an illegal burning,” said Walton County Sheriff Michael Adkinson: the fire began on Monday as a prescribed burn at a private residence.

 More Man-made CO2.

Vaccine: Because it had to do with a despised minority and was spread via sexual intercourse, there were many arguments, not now being made, about the dangers of a vaccine that had nothing to do with autism, but with behavior. As soon as there is a treatment, it was argued, all those 'mo's'll go back to spreading AIDS indiscriminately. Well the same can be said of a CV treatment. If a treatment is developed and announced before the virus is under control, people will cease to obey shut-in orders, believing they can now be cured, and an explosion in new cases (and death among the uninsured, as no one has suggested any treatment would be available to the indigent) would be at least the immediate result of such a breakthrough.

May 11, 2020

Total confirmed cases: 4,122,173

Total deaths: 282,947

Total recovered: 1,418,656

Is there not an anomaly in those numbers that raises a question?

If you add the good outcomes (recovery) with the bad (DEAD!) you get a total resolved cases of:

1,601,603

 which, when subtracted from total cases confirmed (ie tested positive for the virus) leaves

2,520,570 unresolved.

This indicates that well over half of the number of confirmed cases are still sick with the virus. Those outcomes are unknown, but even at the low 1% mortality rate, it suggests an additional 20,000 deaths will eventually be added to the staggering sum of 80,000 already scythed down by this disease. Why this is important is that I just heard someone, this late in the day, still comparing it to the flu. But as these numbers suggest, the ailments brought on by this microbe don't let up in two/three days, but instead continue for two to three weeks.

For all the talk of a second wave of coronavirus cases hitting the United States this fall, one fact seems to have been forgotten: The country is still in the throes of the first wave.

Apart from the human considerations, which apparently carry little weight, there is the economic consideration that when one of your employees gets "the flu" they will not be gone for just a couple of days, but for a couple of weeks; and if you have one fall ill, they will, like in the meat-packing plants, infect others, who will then call in sick long before the first ones to be stricken, and survive, have returned to the workforce. And if said employer has yet to make that workplace safe, will perhaps never return.

Which makes it entirely reasonable that we be a nation of Worriers, as the floodgates of viral exposure are opened and the biological warfare against its own citizens by the Republican Party, spearheaded by its Mad, Max-Exposure Leader, is waged against the citizenry.

Now you may wonder why, or deny that such a policy could possibly be pursued, but that's because,   you still aren't cognizant of the dire consequences that the collapse of fossil fuel demand is having on the exceptional country - that would be the USA, that Beacon on the Hill - that has systematically used every opportunity available to increase its reliance, not only on the fuel itself, for example its car fleet of lumbering SUV's and trucking operations, and the flotilla of LNG facilities, but also on its hugely expensive extraction and exploitation, using debt instead of equity (of the entire economy and the Fed's bloated balance sheet) to feed to an unsustainable level of indenture, even without Covid-19, in order to effect the dependency of its future on everything oil. A dependency which most definitely includes ethanol and other somehow "green" technologies. For all the brouhaha about solar, no one has cared to point out that the largest solar energy user in the country is agriculture. ICE machines are already partially running on solar energy (Although, being fossil fuels, they have always depended on solar energy, only it was the solar energy from the dim past stored in the guise of hydrocarbon chains), as they are partially fueled by ethanol, which, because it is solar/green, is allowed to pollute the Gulf of Mexico more egregiously than all those oil platforms dotting its surface combined. Those rigs have never been accused of causing, because they don't cause, Dead Zones that wipe out entire fisheries. And if they should impact them, such as during the Deep Horizons' oil spill, they are forced to compensate those businesses they impact, whereas no such burden is placed on the solar plants that produce our corn stocks of federally-funded ethanol.

Okay, okay, I know you don't like to hear that (judging from the reaction to Jeff Gibb's movie, "The Planet of the Humans"), but consider this statement (about the "green"), from an article on our future energy use:

"Moving from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources, it is assumed, would slow down the planet's warming."

Moving beyond the fact that there is no proof of that (dibs go to the author for including "it is assumed"), and accepting the general agreement that indeed it would, there are still numerous problems with that statement, starting with the first word:

If there were indeed cleaner energy sources we would be using them right now, so the idea that we're going to "move" to them, as though Cleaner energy were an empty apartment  just sitting there waiting for us to occupy it, is absurd on the face of it. We are not "moving" to cleaner energy sources, we are using the leverage provided by piles of shabbily collateralised debt to finance the construction of supposedly pollution-free, renewable energy, power infrastructures. This is not nit-picking, as you will realize by reading the rest of the sentence:

" ... Would slow down the planet's warming." Would does not mean will. When people accuse me of nit-picking, they seem to have no idea that when words are written down, they don't simply flow out of a keyboard onto the screen: they are edited; they are read over again and again, often by several people, to ensure ease of reading and shades of meaning. "Would" was used instead of "will" for a very good reason; however, what one can't ignore is that those reasons, those good outcomes they wish you to take for granted, reside in the future. But not in the near future, which is ignored. But it's the near future that we have to survive through in order to ever occupy that remote future where clean energy-derived power uses 100% renewables . But this "moving" we are in the midst of, like any moving, requires energy, and that energy is fossil-fuel derived, which means that that move to a cleaner energy world will entail the combustion, a bonfire that'll burn for decades, of dirty energy to get us there; and the resulting CO2 increase, heaped on top of the already 416 ppm content currently existent, will result in forcing a climate changed world that was once predicted to occur in a  comfortably distant future to occur now instead. A future where, if not for the impact of maintaining and constructing two energy platforms side-by-side, as opposed to the assumed replacement of one with the other, the extreme weather we are seeing now, would otherwise still be. Instead, we are already seeing the impacts from, yet are in denial about (ie the reason we are seeing this increase in extreme weather events is precisely what one might refer to as our moving costs: they are increasing because of the massive increase in green manufacturing, all of which increases the burning of fossil fuels, a fact which is illuminated (I hope) by Dr. Duc C. Vuong's +1 description of the Corona Virus: When confronted by troglodytes insisting that CV will only kill 23,000, and that they are all old anyway, so their time is up, the good doctor tried to impress upon them that it was a +1: it went on top of the other deaths, not in place of them.

Now, whereas there is some overlap in there, wherein people die from the CV before they could catch the regular flu, dying from one instead of the other, the major jump in number of deaths worldwide is undeniable and gives the lie to the trogs' arguments, especially as given a long enough timeline, we're all dead.

A likewise argument describes the green energy scenario, whereas had we continued solar energy's and renewables programs started during the Carter administration more than two generations ago, we would have by now, perhaps, be in a position to move into a renewables energy regime. Instead we opted for Reagan's Screwedyou Economics and War prep Central Planning, along with its trickle down theory (I actually saw a recent article saying/asking why trickle-down economics didn't work. What does that mean? Exactly what, I remember asking this at the time, to blank expressions, do you think a trickle is? It's a little dribble of pee left trickling down your leg after urinating ... it matters not how much ... you can piss out half a cup or half a gallon, the trickle down pretty much stays the same. But in no case is it anything more than a trivial amount of liquidity that inadvertently escapes to flow to a parched civilian economy. It worked exactly as it was supposed to work, funneling the output of labor into "the right hands", as Bush père so haughtily referred to them).

And because the US decided war was more important, sexy, and extreme than boring peace and stagnation, an explosion of energy use resulted that never abated until the 2008 financial implosion and recession. The "recovery" that followed only exacerbated the rate at which CO2, water vapor and methane were being made larger constituents of the troposphere. And the reason for that is that same +1 phenomenon the CV has shown us, only this time it means in terms of fossil fuels use, because far from the use of fossil fuels going down, their use has increased dramatically even as the deployment of clean energy via renewable fuel sources has improved, if you listen to its advocates, adding an enormous +1 to the amount of carbon dioxide being exhausted into the atmosphere, as all those windfarms and solar arrays cost oodles of money, which means they use lotsa energy, which means they burn fossil fuel in every stage of their lifespan while none of the non-green sources are producing less. They can't. Because overall energy demand has, until now, grown far faster than the green energy infrastructure. Conservation as part of our energy-use strategy? What for? After all, why conserve energy when it's Free? And it's Clean? It's even Renewable!

"It's like a miracle".

Does this mean renewables shouldn't be invested in? Well, I don't know. But the point is, neither do you. You take it on faith; but what we both do know, is that there is an enormous amount of energy being put into this "transition" to renewables, a transition that will actually never happen. Yet that word is used all the time, by people who know full well that it won't happen because it can't happen, not because or at least not solely because, Exxon doesn't want it to, but because, in our current method of using energy, it is technically impossible. All energy use, production, and delivery systems come at a price, so when you hear of one that claims it's "free", it is only good American familiarity with the scamming nature of our economic system with which we are all so familiar, needs to be brought to bear to understand that something is going on that the "they" of the Green energy companies don't want you to be aware of. And that never bodes well.