Advice from Spain

Spacebunny transcribed some translated advice from Spanish medical professionals who are fighting Corona-chan and are up on the latest protocols. Keep in mind this is advice for the medical personnel who are in regular contact with the infected; no need to be paranoid or apply the "every 20 minutes" advice. It's also consistent with other information that is being passed around by informed European sources.

The Chinese now understand the behaviour of the covid19 virus thanks to autopsies that have carried out. This virus is characterized by obstructing respiratory pathways with thick mucus that solidifies and blocks the airways and lungs. They have discovered that in order to apply a medicine and unblock these airways so that the treatment can be used to take affect. However, all of this takes a number of days.

Their recommendations for what you can do to safeguard yourself are

1. Drink lots of hot liquids. Coffees, soups, teas, warm water. In addition take a sip of warm water every 20 minutes because this keeps your mouth moist and washes any virus that’s entered your mouth into your stomach where gastric juices will neutralize it before it can get to the lungs.
2. Gargle with an antiseptic in warm water, like vinegar, or salt, or lemon, every day if possible.
3. The virus attaches itself to hair and clothes, any detergent or soap kills it, but you must take a bath or shower when you get in from the street. Avoid sitting down anywhere and go straight to the bathroom and shower. If you cannot wash your clothes daily, hang them in direct sunlight which also neutralizes the virus.
4. Wash metallic surfaces very carefully because the virus can remain viable for up to nine days. Take note and be vigilant about touching handrails and door handles, etc. I guess within your own houses you can keep those clean by wiping them down regularly.
5. Don’t smoke.
6. Wash your hands every 20 minutes using any soap that foams, do this for 20 seconds and wash your hands thoroughly.
7. Eat fruits and vegetables. Try to elevate your zinc level not just vitamin C levels.
8. Animals do not spread the virus to people. It is person-to-person transmission.
9. Try to avoid getting the common flu, I guess because this just already weakens your system. And try avoid eating and drinking cold things.
10. If you feel any discomfort in your throat, or a sore throat coming on, attack it immediately using the above methods. The virus enters the system this way and remains for 3 or 4 days within the throat before it passes into the lungs.

I'm beginning to notice a note of confidence that was previously absent as the medical authorities seem to feel they are beginning to get a handle on this whole thing. There is no panic, and the young people are actively cooperating and doing everything they can to help the elderly stay well supplied.

I wonder why he needs them

The President requires enhanced detention powers... because the virus must be arrested!

The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the coronavirus spreads through the United States.

The move has tapped into a broader fear among civil liberties advocates and Donald Trump’s critics — that the president will use a moment of crisis to push for controversial policy changes. Already, he has cited the pandemic as a reason for heightening border restrictions and restricting asylum claims. He has also pushed for further tax cuts as the economy withers, arguing that it would soften the financial blow to Americans. And even without policy changes, Trump has vast emergency powers that he could legally deploy right now to try and slow the coronavirus outbreak.

Wait, the President is using a crisis for the benefit of the American people? Surely that is an impeachable offense.

Coronavirus and medication

Spacebunny passed on a translated warning concerning several common over-the-counter medications from the French government. TL;DR: do not take aspirin or Advil or other forms of ibuprofin for headaches, flu, or fever at this time. Tylenol is to be preferred.

The virus has just been shown to enter the lung alveolus cell through the ECAII receptor. When it binds to it it overexpresses it and kills the alveolar cell. Hence everything it produces. Men have more receptors than women, Asians more than Caucasians and people who take anti-hypertensive drugs such as antiECAs and especially Anti-ECAII have a brutal overexpression of the receptor and therefore are more susceptible to infection and infection is more serious.

The serious cases of young people are patients who have taken anti-inflammatory drugs at the beginning of the disease. Aspirin, ibuprofen, naproxen, voltarene (diclofenac), etc. must be avoided, because they favor the grave forms. You should only take Paracetamol.

Do not take ibuprofen or anti-inflammatory if you suspect Covid. In France, four serious cases of young people without previous pathology have in common the taking of ibuprofen. Apparently it makes the infection develop much faster.

They are reminded that they should NOT take Ibuprofen, Motrin, Advil, or aspirin for flu or fever symptoms. In Italy and France they have discovered that people who have died from Covid-19 have taken ibuprofen and causes the virus to be potentiated five or more times.

Anyone who has symptoms should take only and exclusively PARACETAMOL  (except, of course, medical prescription), drink plenty of water, and very often (if possible sips every 15 minutes). We also have natural antivirals such as Garlic, Ginger, Propolis, and almost all aromatic plants (Mint, Melissa (Torongil), Rosemary ...) Cinnamon, Curcuma, Fruits with Vitamin C ... in direct infusion.

I've also heard from various sources that large daily doses of Vitamins C and D3, as well as zinc, have been reported to be efficacious.

Hate isn't just a human right

Hate is good for your health. Especially racial hate, if this Italian virologist is to be believed:

An Italian virologist says that the country’s attempt not to appear “racist” in the early says of the coronavirus outbreak crippled the ability to properly respond to the pandemic. Professor of Virology and Microbiology at the University of Padova Dr. Giorgio Palù told CNN that measures imposing travel restrictions and border controls were taken too late due to fears over political correctness.

“There was a proposal to isolate people coming from the epicenter, coming from China,” Palù told CNN. “Then it became seen as racist, but they were people coming from the outbreak.”

Italy is now the hardest hit country in the world in terms of coronavirus deaths, with 3,405 people losing their lives.

The need to minimize potential “racism” and “stigmatization” in response to the coronavirus was a policy endorsed by the World Health Organization itself on numerous occasions and adopted by the left-wing Italian government.

As we previously highlighted, the Mayor of Florence launched a nationwide campaign at the start of February encouraging Italians to hug Chinese people on the street to “stem the hatred.”

That Florentine campaign certainly didn't age well. And if you weren't already convinced that anti-racism is immoral, at least you should now be able to grasp that it is both unhygenic and anti-public health. President Trump's "racist" action in shutting down travel from China earlier than the experts advised almost certainly saved many American lives.

Now contemplate how many more lives will be saved when similar "anti-racist" policies are abandoned. Imagine a return to crime-free shopping malls and safe neighborhoods where no one even needs to lock their doors. Regardless of what you believe about "racism", do you genuinely believe it is worse than rape, murder, and the plague? Do you seriously believe it is worse than all of them combined?

Nobody knows anything

Five percent, 24 percent, it's hard to say exactly:

Goldman Sachs predicts the coronavirus crash will be bigger than it originally thought. In a Friday research note, the bank projected a 24 percent drop in the U.S. GDP in the second quarter — a stark revision from its prediction of a five percent drop earlier this week. 

Even that's not going to be enough to clear the outstanding debt issue. But the important thing is not the size of the estimated contraction, it is the fact that the margin of error over the course of less than a week is so massive.

Meanwhile, the federal government is about to prevent Americans from travelling out of the country. Curiouser and curiouser....

The State Department is preparing to issue the strongest travel advisory it can, two individuals familiar with the decision told Politico Thursday. It'll tell Americans abroad to either return to the states or prepare to shelter in place — a Level 4 advisory, those sources said.

China and Mongolia are currently the only countries subject to a State Department level 4 travel advisory due to spread of the new coronavirus. The rest of the world is under a level 3 global health advisory, which suggests travelers reconsider their plans. The escalated level would instruct Americans to halt all travel out of the country; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has approved the measure, Politico reported.

Re-employing the natives

Corona-chan even has the agriculture industry in Britain looking to hire young British workers:

Farmers say the fall-out of the coronavirus chaos means they desperately need an army of Land Girls - and boys. Travel bans brought in to prevent the spread means they have lost the thousands of foreign workers they need to pick fruit and veg crops. The industry trade body British Summer Fruits is warning that produce will rot in the fields and orchards unless they can find replacements....

"Last year 98 per cent of harvest staff were from outside the UK. We are now very concerned about securing enough workers to help harvest our vital crops and get fresh fruit and vegetables to the public. To help, in the next few days the berry industry will be mounting a large-scale recruitment campaign to encourage people who are in the UK and looking for work because of the current economic impact of the coronavirus to come and work on our farms."

If you ever wondered why all those lazy young people can't seem to find work these days, perhaps it's not due to their laziness or lack of a firm handshake, perhaps it's because 98 PERCENT OF THE ENTRY-LEVEL JOBS have gone to foreigners.

This is why you don't bail out the banks

They will never fix anything no matter how sternly they are warned about "the consequences next time". After the last round of bailouts, all they did was double down on what they were doing prior to 2008 and continue their financial rapine without restraint. All the paper wealth everyone "has" is nonexistent, it's just multiple claims on the same underlying property that allows the financial elite to skim off the incessant churn and turn it into stronger property claims. And that is why every debt-based system always collapses over time, as the current financial system is in the process of doing.

Before sunrise this morning, a normally calm and very senior Wall Street banker texted me: “All hell is about to break loose. No safe havens.” His text could not be ignored, coming as it did on the morning after hedge fund manager Bill Ackman’s 28-minute cri de coeur to CNBC yesterday, during which he essentially demanded that the U.S. immediately shut down for 30 days to stop the spread of the coronavirus. What was he talking about, I asked....

Now, apparently, the scourge of interconnectivity is back. Companies are drawing down their lines of credit with abandon. The senior banker seemed to be especially concerned about the portfolios of private equity companies, which are by definition mostly piled with debt and therefore at higher risk of default as the economy contracts. The big worry now among private equity types is that the $1.5 trillion or so of so-called “dry powder”—money that is sitting unused in their coffers or on-call from their limited partners—will now be needed to shore up existing portfolio companies with acute cash needs, rather than for new investments, which would be the preferred course of action in a more normal time, especially with stock prices down around 35% from their February highs. The big worry currently is that the limited partners of private equity funds have enough of their own problems that now they won’t be able to honor their capital calls as they start coming in from the general partners.

That’s yet another scary thought: the domino effect of one private equity portfolio company after another getting into trouble could well be a further negative catalyst to an economy already on the brink of collapse. If one private equity portfolio company after another slips into bankruptcy because limited partners don’t make good on their capital calls, that could mean hundreds of billions more of creditor and shareholder losses.

This is why usury was banned by Christendom and is prohibited by the Bible. I warned everyone back in 2008-2009 that if the banks were not permitted to fail, the next failure was going to be more difficult. It's really not hard to see these things coming, as the patterns of the crisis developing are easily recognizable. And the bigger the bank, the more internationally interconnected it is, the more likely it is to be taken down by the "unexpected" collapse of the system which will likely begin with the failure or bailout of a massive, well-respected institution like Deutsche Bank.

One royal down

Another interesting diagnosis:

Prince Albert of Monaco, 62, tests positive for coronavirus - the first head of state to be infected - nine days after he met Prince Charles in London.

Hey, he travels a lot, you know....

The more things change

The urban rich are beginning to discover why all the rich Romans maintained country estates to which they retreated during the summer plague months:

Wealthy families desperate to escape the coronavirus crisis in London are fleeing the infested city for the country - with some offering up to £50,000-a-month for a rural sanctuary.

British estate agents have been flooded with requests from the super-rich searching for mansions with bunkers, Cotswolds manor houses and uninhabited Caribbean islands to buy. And aristocrats, heiresses and society models are avoiding busy cities like London by staying at their gorgeous countryside homes - including the likes of Emma, Viscountess Weymouth and Lady Mary Charteris.

It comes as London faces plunging deeper into lockdown within days - and potentially with just 12 hours notice - amid fears the 'superspreader city' is driving the UK's Covid-19 crisis.

One thing the open borders and human equality crowds have never understood is that civilization is little more than the art of permitting large numbers of humans to live in close proximity without dying like flies. Import too many barbarians and it won't be long before that art is lost.

In fact, the modern human life expectancy has not significantly increased in two thousand years when compared with the average lifespan of a rural Roman who survived childhood.

Open borders is open disease

Australia is closing its borders, but it should have done so four weeks ago:

The Prime Minister has closed Australia's borders to prevent the spread of coronavirus. From 9pm on Friday night, only Australian permanent residents and citizens will be allowed to enter the country.

Scott Morrison said he made the drastic move because 80 per cent of Australia's 636 coronavirus cases have come in from abroad.

The ban, which has no end date, is likely to cause chaos for thousands of temporary residents who live and work in Australia, such as people on skilled work visas.

If they are overseas on holiday they have one day to return to their lives here. If they are in the country they cannot leave because they will not be able to come back.

Think about how much better off these countries would have been if they never permitted foreign invasions in the first place, and prioritized the well-being of their citizenries rather than sacrificing them at the altar of GDP. Whether the issue is bad government or disease, open borders and centralized governments are like building a ship without watertight compartments. It increases both the risks and the costs of anything going wrong.

Never forget that efficiency is a double-edged sword that always cuts both ways.

A Darwinian theory "proved"

What was actually proved here is that evolutionary biologists a) don't understand scientody and b) are extraordinarily stupid:

Scientists from Cambridge University, in the U.K., analyzed the relationships between the two, calculating how the number of species per genus and the number of subspecies per species for a number of different animal groups.

Laura van Holstein and Robert Foley used information collected by naturalists to determine the “age” of different species and subspecies to see how they closely they were connected.

They noted a correlation between species variation and subspecies variation. Genera with a higher number of species tended to have species with a higher number of subspecies. This relationship was particularly strong among flying mammals like bats. In comparison, land-based animals showed a positive correlation between species richness and subspecies richness—but this correlation was weaker.

It is often observed, correctly, that correlation is not causation. It is remarkable that Cambridge University scientists don't understand that correlation is also not conclusive proof. If you've paid any attention to the non-science of Neo-Darwinian evolution over the years, you will have noticed that every observation that correlates with the revised theory is a proof of it, while every observation that falsifies it is merely an indication that the revised theory requires further revision.

And while one can't blame the scientists for the way the media portrays their work, the headline is even more embarrassing.

Scientists 'prove Darwin's survival of the fittest theory'

Qspiracy goes international

It's interesting that rumors have progressed to the point that the celebrities are being forced to publicly deny their arrests on sex trafficking charges:

Media mogul Oprah Winfrey was a trending topic on Tuesday night, as a conspiracy theory stemming from QAnon went viral, but Winfrey herself debunked it. Numerous bogus reports claimed that Winfrey's home in Boca Raton, Florida was raided and that she was under arrest on sex trafficking charges.

After being a top trending topic for several hours, the 66-year-old Winfrey was informed that she was trending, and made it clear the rumors were not true.

'Just got a phone call that my name is trending. And being trolled for some awful FAKE thing. It’s NOT TRUE,' Winfrey began.

'Haven’t been raided, or arrested. Just sanitizing and self distancing with the rest of the world. Stay safe everybody,' she concluded from her verified Twitter account.

There were also reports of raids on her home, and that she was just one of many celebrities arrested, including Tom Hanks, whose Coronavirus infection was supposedly a 'cover' for his arrest. The next supposed celebrity arrests for 'pedophilia' are Celine Dion, Madonna, Charley Barkley and Kevin Spacey who will all claim to have the Coronavirus.

The net appears to be closing in upon the bad actors. Remember, it wasn't all that long ago that the conspiracy theories and rumors about Epstein and Weinstein were declared to be NOT TRUE as well. That doesn't meant that these specific people are genuinely the culpable parties or that there is anything more to the most recent rumors than trolling from the chans, but it does tend to suggest that there is enough activity taking place to convince an increasing number of people that there is more fire to be found beneath all the smoke.

UPDATE: Speaking of fire, Homeland Security is now circulating plans concerning martial law, interstate travel bans, and evening curfews. This is from multiple law enforcement sources in different states. It doesn't mean that the plans will be implemented, necessarily, but this activity is a precursor to any such actions being taken once the decisions are made.

Don't despair. This could all be very good news in the end.

Throwing gas on the fire

Because Marvel wasn't burning itself down fast enough, they decided to introduce the new SJWarriors.

Snowflake, a cryokinetic, can materialize snowflake-shaped shuriken projectiles for throwing. Safespace can materialize pink forcefields, but he can’t inhabit them himself, the reflex only works if he’s protecting others. They’re hyper aware of modern culture and optics, and they see their Super Heroics as “a post-ironic meditation on using violence to combat bullying.” They're probably streaming this.

"Snowflake and Safespace are the twins," the writer says, "and their names are very similar to Screentime; it's this idea that these are terms that get thrown around on the internet that they don't see as derogatory. [They] take those words and kind of wear them as badges of honor.

"Safespace is a big, burly, sort of stereotypical jock. He can create forcefields, but he can only trigger them if he's protecting somebody else. Snowflake is non-binary and goes by they/them, and has the power to generate individual crystalized snowflake-shaped shurikens. The connotations of the word 'snowflake' in our culture right now are something fragile, and this is a character who is turning it into something sharp.

"Snowflake is the person who has the more offensive power, and Safespace is the person who has the more defensive power. The idea is that they would mirror each other and complement each other."

At this point, even the most rabid comics fan could hardly blame the finance people at Disney or AT&T for shutting down the publishing of new comics before the current generation of editors manages to destroy the ancillary values of the existing properties.

I blame Chernobyl

It's the only scientific explanation for Russia's Eurovision entry.

In case it wasn't obvious

Hint: he's not talking about Corona-chan....

The tech crackdown

France fines Apple more than $1 billion:

France’s national competition regulator announced on Monday it has fined American tech giant Apple a record €1.1 billion ($1.23bn) for anti-competitive practices after nearly a decade of investigations. The decision comes over Apple’s alleged anti-competitive behavior in its distribution and sales networks.

The authority said that two of Apple’s wholesalers, Tech Data and Ingram Micro, were fined €63 million and €76 million respectively for unlawfully agreeing on prices.

According to the French regulator, “Apple and its two wholesalers have agreed not to compete with each other and to prevent distributors from competing with each other, thereby sterilising the wholesale market for Apple products.”

Expect other European countries to follow suit soon. Pretty much everyone around the world is utterly sick of the unethical and anti-competitive behavior of the US-based tech giants. Their rising competitors are going to clean their clocks over the next decade.

Brady leaves Patriots

I have to admit, despite all the warning signs, I'm still genuinely surprised. I thought he would retire a Patriot:

Tom Brady is leaving the New England Patriots. After 20 years with the organization, the quarterback posted a tweet on Tuesday, saying his farewell and his thanks to Bill Belichick, Robert Kraft and the entire Patriots organization.

In other NFL news, the Vikings resigned Kirk Cousins and traded Stefon Diggs for the #22 pick, a fifth-round pick, a sixth-round pick and a 2021 fourth-round pick from Buffalo. I don't like to see Diggs go, but that's an excellent haul that couldn't be turned down, especially in this year's receiver-rich draft.

I think he's going to LA to play for the Chargers. It makes the most sense for his post-football career.

UPDATE: Apparently, I am wrong.

The Bucs have an agreement in principle with Brady for a deal worth roughly $30 million per season, Ian Rapoport of NFL Media reports.

Addio, open borders

At long last, the rotting intellectual corpse of David Ricardo is finally buried:

France, Germany and Bulgaria today blocked travel even within the free-moving Schengen zone as the EU proposed barring all overseas visitors from entering for 30 days to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Border guards were seen across the continent tonight locking off the crossings between Spain and France, Portugal and Spain, Switzerland and France, and in Germany's northern coastal states police prepared to block tourism.

It's probably too optimistic to assume that the econonazis will not start pushing for open borders and the free movement of people the moment the health crisis is over, but at least we will have a powerful rhetorical argument to utilize against them.

A desirable extinction

And long overdue. If the primary casualty is globalism, the winner is humanity:

Globalists May Soon Become an Extinct Species

The disruptions caused by the spread of the coronavirus mean supply chains will be moved closer to home rather than in foreign lands.

The coronavirus’s depressing effects on the global economy and disruptions of supply chains is no doubt driving the last nail into the coffin of the globalists.

They believe in the theory first articulated by Englishman David Ricardo (1773-1823) that free trade among nations benefits all of them. He argued for the comparative advantage of free trade and industrial specialization. Even if one country is more competitive in every area than its trading partners, that nation should only concentrate on the areas in which it has the greatest competitive advantage. He used the example of English-produced wool being traded for French wine—and not the reverse.

But Ricardo’s simple trade model requires economies in static equilibrium with full employment and neither trade surpluses nor deficits, and similar living standards. These aren’t true in the real world. Also, Ricardo didn’t consider countries at different stages of economic development and different degrees of economic and political freedom, or exchange rate manipulations and competitive devaluations since gold was universal money in his day.

Ricardo also didn’t factor in trading partners with huge wage differences such as the U.S. and China.

Corona-chan is demonstrating the truth of Big Bear's sophisticated critique of free trade. Ricardo retardo. Thank you, Corona-chan!

Fortress Europe

The Schengen area closes its borders:

The EU today revealed plans to shut itself off from all outsiders as it takes drastic measures to halt the spread of coronavirus. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen unveiled a proposed ban on all non-essential travel by non-citizens into the 26-nation Schengen free travel area for 30 days.

In addition, emergency medical and food supplies into the bloc will be able to use special 'fast lanes' to ensure health services and supermarkets can cope with demand.

The Schengen area includes 22 EU countries but not member states Ireland, Cyprus, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria. Non EU-members Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein are also within it.

Introversion intensifies..... I'm contemplating giving up talking on the telephone. We don't know that the virus can be transmitted via sound waves, but one can't be too careful.

Creepy Joe rejects VP of color

Creepy Joe appears to have ruled out people of color as well as white men from his list of potential running mates:

Joe Biden picked what will probably be his last debate with Bernie Sanders to make a big announcement ... if he gets the nomination, he's picking a woman to run with him. Biden left no wiggle room. He said there are women in this country who, right now, are capable of being President of the United States, and he intends to pick one of them.

Biden also said the first chance he gets to nominate a U.S. Supreme Court Justice ... he'll pick a black woman, saying it's about time.

It's interesting to see how the ancient Democratic leadership doesn't understand the current mindset of their own party members. They are still living in the 80's and under the impression that picking a female vice-presidential candidate is bold, edgy, and progressive. They don't realize that anyone other than a black woman is racist and offensive, and preferably, said black woman would also be transgender, lesbian, and handicapped in some way.

"Easter" means "Resurrection"

A poster asked about Easter on SocialGalactic:

Why do churches say Easter? Isn’t Easter a pagan holiday? I’ve started to say Resurrection Sunday at church and ppl ignore me.

Easter is not a pagan holiday. That’s atheist nonsense that requires an almost-complete ignorance of literally every foreign language but one. While there is a possible etymological link to the name of an Anglo-Saxon goddess named Eostre for whom there is absolutely no evidence outside of the writings of the venerable, but inventive Bede, but since the Germans use "Easter" too and English is partially derived from German, the word is much more likely linked to the old German word for resurrection, which is Erstehen.

One of the earliest appearances of "Easter" in English is in the Tyndale Bible, which actually refers to Ester. Remember, the conventional accusation about Easter being a pagan holiday concerned Ishtar, an Akkadian goddess of love and war, but that was never a viable explanation because none of the other European languages have any possible etymological link to a pagan holiday. Their Paschae, Pasqua, Pâques, Pascua, etc. all trace back to Passover.

So, the usual suspects dug around the history books and came up with Eostre, who was not a German goddess and for whom there is no evidence in the German linguistic record. But they did posit - or to put more clearly, made up - a nonexistent precursor goddess to a probably-invented goddess, whose nonexistent holiday could theoretically have been coopted by English and German Christians in the Sixteenth Century while celebrating the Erstehen on Paschae.

Needless to say, this makes absolutely no sense to anyone who is capable of understanding the conventional ordering of cause and effect. Note in particular that the first and only known reference to Eostre is in 725 AD, and the first known references to Ester and Passover, both of which are English neologisms popularized, if not necessarily coined by Tyndale, were in 1526 AD, centuries after Paskha (πάσχα) was first celebrated by Christians.

From Infogalactic's Eostre page: a Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn is supported both by the evidence of cognate names and the similarity of mythic representation of the dawn goddess among various Indo-European groups... all of this evidence permits us to posit a Proto-Indo-European *haéusōs 'goddess of dawn' who was characterized as a "reluctant" bringer of light for which she is punished.

Since Easter most likely means Resurrection, it is unnecessary, redundant, and more than a little spergish to make a point of trying to force "Resurrection Sunday" on others.

Mailvox: deal with it, Boomer

I am a boomer and an ER physician and I agree completely with your prioritizing younger people over older people when resources are limited and given that all other factors are equal. Unfortunately, they almost never are.

Except, of course, they already are now in many countries, and if events follow the expected course, they will be in the USA too. There are 5,000 respirators in the UK available to serve as many as 7.9 million cases. The Italians are already adopting triage practices and other European nations are anticipating the need to do so.

And frankly, this relentless boomer bashing and treating the worst of my generation as exemplary gets really annoying.

This sensitivity is downright amusing. My generation has found the relentless Boomer boomering to be really annoying for as long as we can remember. You Boomers were annoying when you were getting divorced and our friends were returning to elementary school in the fall with haunted expressions and new last names. You were annoying when Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven was named the #1 most-requested song on the main rock station for the 25th year in a row. You were annoying when you first proclaimed 40 the new 30, then 50 the new 30, then 70 the new 50.

And Boomers are still every bit as annoying today. I recently saw a grotesque television commercial that literally showed incontinent old Boomer women rolling around in their underwear, with the tagline OUR BODIES CHANGE, BUT WHY SHOULD WE? The name of the commercial? Of course, it's AGELESS. Companies wouldn't still be marketing to the Boomer's trademark generational narcissism if it didn't continue to work for them.

The Boomers haven't changed. They don't want to change. They are still proud of who and what they are. And that is why the younger generations, particularly Generation X and the Zoomers, will continue to relentlessly despise them. The thing is, we've been doing it all along, they were just too self-absorbed to even notice. But now that the media culture no longer caters solely to them, they're shocked to discover that they weren't considered cool, they aren't admired, and no one else wants to be like them.

17 games is go

I hate the concept, of course, as well as the expansion of the playoffs, but no one asked me. In any event, the NFLPA approved the new CBA agreement with the NFL owners in a very close vote:

NFL players voted to approve the new proposed collective bargaining agreement, which signals 10 years of labor peace, increased revenue share for players, added benefits for former players, an expansion to a 17-game NFL regular season and more playoff teams.

The 10-day voting period closed at 11:59 p.m. on Saturday night. Owners voted to approve the new CBA on Feb. 20.

The NFL Players Association issued the following statement:

"NFL players have voted to approve ratification of a new collective bargaining agreement by a vote tally of 1,019 to 959. This comes after a long and democratic process in accordance with our constitution. An independent auditor received submitted ballots through a secure electronic platform, then verified, tallied and certified the results."

It's not all bad, and in fact, it helps the average player quite a bit. But it's still sad to see the records of yesteryear rendered even more irrelevant as what was left of the league's historical continuity is further destroyed.

If you're not convinced Q is real

Consider this bit of obvious paid hasbara at CDAN:

5:26 PM
Blogger Yaccub said...
QAnon conspiracy is a fever dream of sick people with dangerous urges. If you Fetishize QAnon you’re likely the problem.

5:26 PM
Blogger Yaccub said...
QAnon conspiracy is a fever dream of sick people with dangerous urges. If you Fetishize QAnon you’re likely the problem.

5:26 PM
Blogger Yaccub said...
QAnon conspiracy is a fever dream of sick people with dangerous urges. If you Fetishize QAnon you’re likely the problem.

Someone is observably going to a lot of trouble to convince people that Q is not legitimate.

Another word for God

Martin van Creveld considers the problem of consciousness from the scientific perspective:

Starting at least as far back as Laplace—much earlier, if one cares to go back all the way to Epicurus—scientists have been arguing that consciousness grew out of the matter that preceded it. Not so, says Dr. Lanza: no natural process known to us could have performed that feat. Instead, he says, it was consciousness which gave rise to the world—so much so that, without the former, the latter could not even have existed.

To understand what he meant, take the popular riddle concerning a tree that has fallen in a forest with no one there to witness the fact. did it make a sound? Of course it did, say ninety-nine percent of those asked. Not so, say Dr. Lanza and a few others. The splintering of the trunk and its crash on the ground certainly gave rise to vibrations in the surrounding air. However, in the absence of anyone to receive those vibrations in his or her ears, transmit them by way of the acoustic nerves, and process them with the help of the brain, they would not have amounted to what we know as sound.

What applies to hearing applies equally well to our remaining senses. What the specialized neurons in the back of our brains register is not the world’s existing, objective, sound, light, and impact. On the contrary, light, impact, and sound are created by those neurons. To adduce another example, a single rainbow that can be seen by everyone who looks in the right direction at the right time does not exist. What does exist are trillions of raindrops. Each one carrying a potential rainbow; and all “waiting” to be discovered by animal sense organs and brains to be brought to bear on them. Instead of the internal and external world being separate and independent of one another, as Descartes would have it, they are merely two sides of the same coin. That, incidentally, is also the best available explanation for the riddle of quantum mechanics where, as far as we can make out, the speed and position of elementary particles seem to be determined by the fact that they are or are not observed.

This premise serves Dr. Lanza as the foundation on which to build everything else in the book, leading up to the conclusion that “the universe burst into existence from life [which is the seat of consciousness], not the other way around.” What I personally found most interesting in it is the following. We present-day humans are immensely proud of our scientific prowess. And rightly so, given that it has enabled us to study, and often gain some understanding of, anything from the bizarre submicroscopic world of elementary particles that exists right under our noses to gigantic galaxies more than thirty billion light years away. Dr. Lanza’s contribution is to point out that, without taking account of consciousness and the life with which it is inextricably tied, we shall never be able to understand reality as a whole.

One of the great conundrums that confound atheists is that while the average atheist intelligence is modestly higher than the average religious intelligence, the most intelligent individuals are considerably more religious than the norm. This is, of course, because we are less likely to cling stubbornly to our preconceived assumptions than midwits are.

The Fourth Turning

Since the concept often comes when people are metaphorically beating up on Baby Boomers, it might be helpful to understand what is meant by the generational Turnings, which is a four-phase model of social change based on the interaction of the availability and demand for social order:

Fourth Turning

The Fourth Turning is a Crisis. Old Artists die, Prophets enter elderhood, Nomads enter midlife, Heroes enter young adulthood—and a new generation of child Artists is born. This is an era in which America’s institutional life is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up—always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival. Civic authority revives, cultural expression finds a community purpose, and people begin to locate themselves as members of a larger group. In every instance, Fourth Turnings have eventually become new “founding moments” in America’s history, refreshing and redefining the national identity. America’s most recent Fourth Turning began with the stock market crash of 1929 and climaxed with World War II. The generation that came of age during this Fourth Turning was the Hero archetype G.I. Generation (born 1901 to 1924), whose collective spirit and can-do optimism epitomized the mood of the era. Today’s Hero archetype youth, the Millennial Generation (born 1982 to 2004) show many traits similar to those of the G.I. youth, including rising civic engagement, improving behavior, and collective confidence.

In Parsons’ terms, a Fourth Turning is an era in which the availability of social order is low, but the demand for such order is high. Examples of earlier Fourth Turnings include the Civil War in the 1860s and the American Revolution in the 1770s—both periods of momentous crisis, when the identity of the nation hung in the balance.

I have to say, the Zoomers look a lot more like a Hero generation to me than do the Millennials. But, we'll see. Of course, the only two things the Boomers will take from this is a) prophet? I like the sound of that, and, b) see, it totally WASN'T our fault!