Skip to main content

Posts

Another warning against allowing unmitigated Covid spread

I cannot reiterate enough: Covid-19 is a killer virus. Its uncontrolled and unmitigated spread throughout the world is a mistake we'll regret for generations. Its insidiousness is in its ability to be asymptomatic or merely "mild" in its acute phase. However, it is a virus with terrible consequences over the short and long-term for the many who will catch it despite its seemingly asymptomatic or mild effects. Its ability to disable (https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/covid-autoimmune-virus-rogue-antibodies-cytokine-storm-severe-disease/) and dysregulate (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9568269/) the immune system is its greatest strength. It is a virus that shares much in common with measles, Hepatitis, and even HIV. Catching it once can and will likely wreck one's defence against other illnesses. Have you been sick more than once in the past few years? That is far out the ordinary. Prior to Covid, the average for people catching ill was once every fo
Recent posts

The Realization of Edgar Allan Poe's Nightmarish World

We are living in Neo-Antebellum times where the wealthy and powerful have divided society into strict class regiments so entirely there is no semblance of solidarity anymore. People have been so alienated from each other we are even divided from ourselves, our sense of self-preservation heightened to both extreme highs and dulled to the point we care not for own health any longer. We are each of us walking contradictions fleeing from imaginary dangers and sleep-walking into apocalypse. Edgar Allan Poe in his prose, specifically "The Masque of the Red Death" and the poem "The Raven" wrote of death. Both stories present an opposing perspective of death: the former is of death whilst revelling in company, ignoring it entirely; and the latter is of death whilst wallowing in it, seeking only solitude and nothing more. This dichotomy must have haunted Poe, that people would either pretend death was not at their doorstop, and that if they let it in would merely lament its

The Honouring of a Ukranian Nazi

Anthony Rota brought a Nazi into parliament, and encouraged a standing ovation. Perhaps some few will likely go to bat for the former Nazi soldier, Yaroslav Hunka, using the same old tired arguments: it was such a long time ago; he couldn't have known what was happening; he was just following orders; and so on. He's well-within his own lifetime still. He hasn't died. Many of his victim's died back then but some survived, and likely to this day, they haven't been made full for reparations for the loss of life and property of their antecendents. Furthermore, crimes against humanity never expire. He was a former SS volunteer. The absolute scummiest of scum. He was a snitch and likely thug for Himmler's gangs, which were under the direct rule of Hitler, which by 1941-42 had disposed of all pretext and were fully into their systemic murder operations in Ukraine. The simplest rule for intent would've been, what did he know and when did he know it? By 1941, there w

The US Government Shutdown

Meh, we've been through this story before. Anti-government party wants to shut down the government. Minimal governance party does as little as possible to dissuade the anti-government party. Governance by Committee as the US does is mainly about the optics. The day to day stuff will probably just keep on doing by itself but big budgets, which need Congressional approval will probably just halt in place. Sometimes, they'll probably have to be restarted at a later date. Competent government could just bypass this sort of stunt but Democrats think it makes good political theatre and have no interest in stopping. Republicans think their voters just eat this sort of stuff up. However, it's all just theatre. But parties have their leaders mainly interested in the same things but it's all about the optics for them.

We're fucked: Covid edition

We're fucked. There should be no uncertainty or ambiguity. We're hooped. We're over a barrel. We're fucked, six ways to sundown. The evidence is both in the numbers and should be clear anecdotally as well. Just in case you don't know the numbers, a Covid infection has a 1% minimum death rate in the acute phase and 15% disability rate in the long-term. It takes 2-years to recover from a long Covid infection but Covid infections can infect an entire population's worth of people over the course of a year, if not faster, which means the likelihood is people will become sicker before they get better if we're doing nothing to mitigate transmission. Oh, Covid can also mutate faster than we can build immunity to it. What this means is over the course of five years, if not faster, we'll have at least 50% of the population disabled. (I think we're already there.) Moreover, since Covid's introduction into the population, other diseases have grown in numbers

Taking back words: Woke

It is very often important to use correct words in arguing/debating with political opponents. However, it is also very important to protect the words we do use from co-optation by our opponents who would attempt to render them meaningless. Take the word, Woke, as an example. Woke, in its terminology, when used by Black activists was used as a shorthand for knowing about Institutionalized Racism. That government service agencies were often built with anti-Blackness right into their foundation. That someone was woke meant they knew things were wrong at a foundational level for Black people and other minorities. Extreme right-wingers though have been working to co-opt this term, wanting to render it meaningless, using it to describe some "woke" army of people who'd tear apart the whole of society with "wokeness" to appease some special interest groups that are themselves anti-society. To be honest, it is laughable how far these extremists are going to use this form

Technofeudalism: Ending it

Yanis Varoufakis has described a state of affairs which should have us all worried: capitalism has been replaced but not by socialism but instead techno-feudalism (Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism (ISBN: 9781847927279)). That instead of moving forward, Western economies have instead retreated back into a neo-feudalism. That non-wealthy people have been transformed from free people to renters, and owners of corporations into rentiers: "(People) will own nothing, and be happy", as European technocrat had put it some time ago. There is much to what Varoufakis has argued: the things we buy have turned into boxes that can hold licences. Computers programs have transformed into apps which require yearly rental fees instead of being programs that we buy once and can use forever so long as the disc lasts. We can no longer buy movies, music albums, and games but instead licenses to play the movies, music, and games, which can be revoked at any time by the license issuers. We c