Posts
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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment