I’m almost totally immune to colds, flue, and “that stuff” that goes around every winter. But it gets me to thinking about flu, robots, Davos, and mass murder or excess humans…in roughly that order. My logic may seem a bit circuitous, but that’s the marvel of swilling cold medicine, isn’t it?
Also, notice the qualifier word “almost?”
When my son came back from skydiving last week he attributed his bronchitis and hoarseness to yelling a lot (which is something that skydivers do a lot of when doing link-ups and such).
But since he’s been gone since the wee hours of Saturday, I now have the sore throat and general light touch of it and I haven’t been anywhere near a drop zone.
Most of Sunday was spent in my favorite chair surfing articles about how to get well with Elaine offering helpful hints like “Did you take some zinc? How about some cough medicine?”
So pardon this morning, if with a few more aches and pains that usual, if the column lacks some of it’s usual sparkle.
I’m not the only one getting this crud, either. Dr. Zero, who works on animals, not uprights, noticed it too:
…this flu bug that’s going around hit me very hard. Started on December 1st and I was very sick, but continued to work. Didn’t seem febrile, but had the chills at night. Also muscle aches and pains. 2 weeks and I went to the doctor and he said I didn’t have Pneumonia, gave me an inhaler with multiple refills and put me on antibiotics. Told me that the cough might last for a few months. I also had a sore throat, though not in the usual place but in the back of my Pharynx (mostly soft palate on the roof of my mouth). And sinus discharge too. Others around me had it before and after me, some worse than others. Its only since Monday the 13th that I finally felt better. Still have the cough once in awhile and occasional sinus discharge and shortness of breath. The sore throat pain didn’t really stop until Monday the 13th.
This virus must do a lot af damage, because I don’t think the virus would last this long since the immune system should have knocked it in 2-3 weeks.
Which gets me to the first major point of this morning’s Coping section.
I don’t know about you, but as I told Peoplenomics subscribers recently, it’s Management 101 that there are always two ends to solving a problem like overpopulation on Earth and collapsing economies about to be destroyed by robotics.
You see, the coming mass unemployment by robotics/3D printing/running out of tax money will all be part of the Ugly Vortex that will make this pending long wave economic bottom so terribly awful.
The obfuscation of it is really interesting. On some sites, like Defense One, for example, we see how the defense contractors are getting ready for a field day of next-generation robo-killers.
And yet paradigm defenders are saying in OpEd pieces like this one that “Robots will stay in the back seat in the second machine age.”
Bullshit. Google’s driverless car which has been on the road for a couple of years now argues convincingly that the happily-ever-after, life will be as always, and here, let me sprinkle some fairy dust period will not last.
Davos has just wrapped up with a horrible lack of consensus – at least publicly. Commentator Patrick Young in an OpEd piece suggests that “Davos Groupthink is Dangerously out of touch.”
Oh? Let’ me give you an alternative explanation which is not nearly as warm and fuzzy as a bunch of rich-bastards who just accidentally got their Gulfstreams and billions by pure accident of nature end up filthy rich.
It is de rigueur for the rich to paint themselves as “nice” people. But a close look at the facts generally reveals a very small percentage of wealth accidental or is used to fix core problems of society and most of the Richie Rich types – somewhere in their closets – have boxes of skeletons; people and organizations that have raped and pillaged in order for the top of the heap to claw their way up. Pardon my gentle cough as I read about how there’s “dangerous groupthink” afoot post—Davos.
These folks are mostly schemers of the highest order, one notch above the Madoff class of criminal.
Instead, my cough medicine warped mind looks at the flu. Is it The Plan? Then it watches the videos about how H5N1 (H7N9) may be an entirely man-made flu. Oh, just a coincidence?
We’re hearing reports that the swine flu may be moving into the Rio Grande Valley, especially coming over the border from Mexico. It’s anecdotal so far, but an outbreak there is hot rumor grist in the oil drilling business these days. The six deaths in Hidalgo County earlier this month may have been only a “tip of the iceberg” and preview of more to come. We will keep an eye on it.
As we do, a terrible thought comes to mind: Is it possible that in the back rooms of Davos an ugly plan was unleashed that said words to the effect “We have two ways to attack this global meltdown thing that’s coming: We can place nice and take a minor hit to our power and wealth while we blame the coming disaster it on ”nature” or a laboratory “accident” and downsize population by 5% or more with an outbreak of a terrible 1918-like flu or other bioweapon? Clean, not dirt on us…”
Most people don’t know that the 1918 flu wasn’t that bad as advertised. Oh, sure, lots of people died in it, but the root cause of many of the deaths was that medicine had not yet gotten to the “minimum effective dose” concept. And, as a result, people were popping the new wonder drug of the day, aspirin, like it was candy. As a result, millions may have died from internal hemorrhaging as much as flu.
People don’t read about the role of so-called “medicine” – in the sound-bite world it is just the flu that gets blamed even though now, a hundred years later we are able to read about the still-underplayed role of aspirin poisoning in places like Wikipedia:
“In a 2009 paper published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, Karen Starko proposed that aspirin poisoning had contributed substantially to the fatalities. She based this on the reported symptoms in those dying from the flu, and the timing of the big “death spike” in October 1918 which happened right after the Surgeon General of the United States Army, and the Journal of the American Medical Association both recommended very large (by today’s standards) dosages of aspirin.[64] Further, Starko suggests that the wave of aspirin poisonings was due to a “perfect storm” of events: Bayer‘s patent on aspirin ran out, so that many companies rushed in to make a profit and greatly increased the supply; this coincided with the flu pandemic; and the symptoms of aspirin poisoning were not known at the time.[64]
This hypothesis, insofar as it sought to provide an explanation to the universally high mortality rate, was questioned in a letter to the journal published in April 2010. In it, Andrew Noymer and Daisy Carreon of the University of California, Irvine, and Niall Johnson of the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, questioned this universal applicability given the high mortality rate in countries such as India, where there was little or no access to aspirin at the time.[65]
On this basis, they concluded that “the salicylate [aspirin] poisoning hypothesis [was] difficult to sustain as the primary explanation for the unusual virulence of the 1918–1919 in?uenza pandemic.”[65] In responding, Starko pointed to anecdotal evidence of aspirin over-prescription in India and argued that even if aspirin over-prescription had not contributed to the high Indian mortality rate, it could still have been a major factor for other high rates in areas where other exacerbating factors present in India played less of a role.[66]
It’s all a kind of cough-medicine blur, but the basic concept comes down to this: We have a global population of 7-billion, and if not, give Yemen a few more minutes and we’ll be there.
We have tons of data on flu and some evidence of manmade viruses such as the (purported) H7N9 impossible in nature bird/swine cross. And tell me again, why do we have level 5 biohazard facilities in big cities like Houston?
And why am I the only guy who still seems to take some of the assertions in the book Dr. Mary’s Monkey: How the Unsolved Murder of a Doctor, a Secret Laboratory in New Orleans and Cancer-Causing Monkey Viruses are Linked to Lee Harvey … Assassination and Emerging Global Epidemics as an important enough topic that congress ought to really look at the data and do their frigging job?
In the main, the ultra rich didn’t get that way by being nice. And tigers don’t change their stripes. So if on the back-end of Davos, it seems like they are confused? I got news for you.
Another twist of the knife is pending just as soon as they’re off the public radar for a short while. You and I are expendable and – arguably – stupid. Which is why we didn’t get invited to the party.
If American gets too smart, or too many begin to awaken, there are contingency plans I’m sure to keep us from interrupting “the play.”
End of the World Watch
From Patrick Geryl:
Hi George,
Sunspot 1944 is back!
TWIN BARREL M-FLARES ! Twin barrel M-flares have been detected off the southeastern limb of the solar corona at 1:22 and 2:11 this morning. Solar activity is about to step into another gear once old active region 11944 rotates back onto the solar disk tomorrow. X-ray background rising sharply indicates magnetic complexity associated with this large active region. Last rotation this active region produced a major X-class solar flare January 7th and could continue that activity once fully rotated onto the solar disk as seen from the Earth. – from solar watcher
Michio Kaku states worldwide nuclear Armageddon highly possible
American physicist and media personality, Michio Kaku appeared on “Coast to Coast AM” with George Noory and discussed the inevitable possibility of the Earth being hit by a massive solar flare that would cripple the county’s power supplies and spark food riots within days. If a Carrington Event happens, it will knock out power to 400 nuclear power plants, causing them to melt down, as they point out in this video. We need to shut them all down before they all melt down and explode.
Dr. Kaku and a group of physicists went to Congress and asked for money to start working on preventing this mega disaster, but the current anti science members of Congress laughed at them and did not even give them one cent. They said it would never happen.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y72D31LaT5Q
Link to the predicted activity of sunspot 1944:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Solar-Superstorms-and-Planetary-Alignments/555988174421407
I’m still planning to make a pot roast Wednesday, despite the dire outlooks.
GMO Rebellion
Great report spied by Chris (up at www.thechronicleproject.org) about how farmers are abandoning GMO crops in some places…
Turns out non-GMO crops are more profitable. File under News>roundup.
WoWW (World of Woo-Woo)
From reader AC3…
Hi…
Some people say Coincidence, some Others Superstition… Some others like me a Signal, just that, time will tell what kinda signal was… whatever this Charade is a Circus anyway, i mean the whole Theater of World… sorry War… mmmmmm… Have some fun…
The fact : Angry Birds The Real Deal
http://rt.com/news/pope-doves-omen-ukraine-222/
Best Regards,
Alfred Hitchpope has a nice ring to it.
Speaking of birds: When G2 was down last week, one of our “wild” hawks that benefit from Panama helping out a bit with chicken now and then to supplement thin winter food stocks, decided to come down and try to take the Glock out of his hand.
Teaches great volumes about the eyesight of a hawk: If they can’t differentiate between a 9 and a chicken breast….well, “hawk-eyed” just lost all kinds of street creds around here…
Go Rob a Bank?
We have to ask ourselves on a different front, “How dumb are people in Washington?”
This weekend the head of the Department of Homeland Security was widely quoted as saying that “illegals have earned the right to be citizens.”
IU was shocked that an otherwise apparently well-educated such as Jeh Johnson would make such a statement.
You see: Being an illegal in America is what? Illegal.
Just because a class of people can pull illegal shit for 10 or 20 years doesn’t make it any less illegal.
Yet here we are beholding high lunacy which – when you come down to it – messages that “If you can get away with something illegal long enough, we’ll let you skate.”
Now, here’s the question for Mr. Johnson, should he, or his minions ever chose to read or respond to a minor nit such as this column: If a person went out and robbed a bank, would they have somehow earned a pass on the penalties clearly spelled out in law if they could evade arrest for five years? Ten? 20? At what point does a bank robber “earn” back his rights?
How are illegals any different? They hide out, evade, use fake documents (forgery used to be a crime, too, but that’s overlooked) and police and his how ICE folks are more interested in grabbing a guy in Ohio with Google Glass on that sealing up the effing borders! Search planes of private pilots who have done nothing illegal and are 500-miles inland. WTF?
Worse, Herr Johnson doesn’t seem to bring up the real problems of America. Like what?
His tolerance police provides a huge safe “landing zone” in the US for Mexican drug runners. Go read how “DEA officials gave Mexican cartel permission to bring narcotics into Chicago.”
We apparently don’t need no stinkin’ laws not when officials ignore them. The left hand professes to do good while the right hand makes convenient errors, maybe? Or, is this level of corruption the “new world order?”
Sorry to say, this Johnson “earned the right” pap is just another half-assed attempt at selling the (stupid) ‘Merican public on the idea that illegal immigration isn’t really “illegal.” Which is patently untrue in the law.
The laws are what they are, like them or not. We enforce them or change them. We don’t provide in the Constitution for ad hock “end runs” under the color or “doing good.”
If officials can’t uphold the laws of the land, which includes defending the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic, then they either ought to resign or change the laws. But, one of the surest signs of corruption at any level of government is selective enforcement and tolerance policies.
The law is the law. Or at least it used to be. Seem clear enough that the “New Stasi” have their pals and that includes lawbreakers.
Pour me another slug of the cold medicine, wouldja? I feel the blood pressure coming up.
I’ll go sleep it off and have more tomorrow…so much for writing shorter columns, huh?
George george@ure.net