6 thoughts on “Monday Message Board”

1. Test.

2. A longish quote from an interesting fellow on Threadreader.

   “We’re still expected to believe that spending a few months at home a few years ago so damaged our acquired immunity that the whole population is now under continuous assault from a range of infectious diseases.

   I feel the worm is turning. I’m the only person masking at my work, and have been that only person for a couple of years now. This winter for the first time multiple people have said to me ‘you know I think that mask of yours might be a good idea.’

   People are SO sick. And so *repeatedly* sick. They know something isn’t right. The idea that we all missed out on a good healthy annual dose of pneumonia and whooping cough and scabies and MCAS in 2020-21 is too ridiculous to even say. But it’s the hypothesis de jour.

   We’re infecting EVERYBODY. Over and over. The total absence of risk management in doing that is…there are no (polite) words. It’s like a dystopian science fiction movie. If as some suspect we’re seriously compromising the health of all those infected, there’s no coming back. We’re already at dysfunctional. People return to work, barely capable of functioning, because there’s no more sick leave and nobody else to do essential work.

   And then they’re gone again, because they or friends and family just collapse. Carrying diseases most of us have never heard of, or which pre-Covid only the old had in any great numbers. I’ve spotted people half-asleep at their desks, out of exhaustion. We’ve arrived at the chronic damage experts not motivated by self promotion warned us about.

   And we arrived there scarily fast. Not the 8-10 years of HIV to AIDS or the several decades of EBV to MS. We arrived here in a couple of years. And there’s no indication whatsoever of any accumulating ‘hybrid immunity’. And no slowing of variant evolution. The time to call BS on the whole charade is now. Reality is doing it for us.” – Henry Madison.

   I agree with Henry Madison. Time to call a halt to endlessly infecting almost the whole nation over and over. There are a few of us who still mask, vaccinate, take other precautions and have not yet caught the airborne immune-system destroying virus known as COVID-19. It would be easy to virtually eradicate this and a number other airborne pathogens if everyone was as vigilant as Henry Madison. Tolerating widespread endless disease unnecessarily is simply mass insanity.

3. “COVID-19 infections are surging worldwide – including at the Olympics – and are unlikely to decline anytime soon, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Tuesday. The UN health agency is also concerned that more severe variants of the coronavirus may soon be on the horizon.

   “COVID-19 is still very much with us,” and circulating in all countries, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove of WHO told journalists in Geneva. “Data from our sentinel-based surveillance system across 84 countries reports that the percent of positive tests for SARS-CoV-2 has been rising over several weeks,” she said. “Overall, test positivity is above 10 per cent, but this fluctuates per region. In Europe, percent positivity is above 20 per cent,” she added.

   New waves of infection have been registered in the Americas, Europe and the western Pacific. Wastewater surveillance suggests the circulation of SARS-CoV-2 is from two to 20 times higher than current figures suggest.

   Such high infection circulation rates in the northern hemisphere’s summer months are atypical for respiratory viruses, which tend to spread mostly in cold temperatures.

   …

   Vaccines availability has declined substantially over the last 12 to 18 months, WHO admits, because the number of producers of COVID-19 vaccines has recently decreased.

   …

   “With such low (vaccine) coverage and with such large circulation, if we were to have a variant that would be more severe, then the susceptibility of the at-risk populations to develop severe disease is huge,” Dr. Van Kerkhove warned.” – UN News.

   https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1152866

   The COVID-19 crisis continues and shows every sign of getting worse once again. This is as predicted by those who understood the science, understood evolution and the sui generis nature of COVID-19. Also, the ongoing costs of inaction were predicted by those who properly understood economics.

   Neoliberal capitalism, on the other hand, continues to demonstrate its profound ignorance of biological realities and physical forces in our complex world. It also continues to demonstrate its abysmal ignorance of ethics and morality. It is this profound ignorance and immorality of neoliberal capitalism which is driving its current destruction of humankind and the supporting natural world. We will pay a tremendous price, perhaps the ultimate price a species can pay (extinction) for all this greed and ignorance. The time on the official doomsday clock is 90 seconds to midnight. I think it’s a lot closer than that.

4. Ukrainian forces entering Kursk are not meeting with resistance – the residents appear to be relieved. Much the same happened with Prigozhin – his forces met with no opposition and arguably he could have taken Moscow.

   It does seem that the Chekist house of cards is crumbling – maybe this time Russia can get it together and join the modern world.

5. Another Iko rant and prediction. (Give up already Iko, the world is never going to change.)

   The so-called smart meters being introduced in the energy system will be used mainly to rip off consumers and to enrich private interests. Of course, they could be used to help consumers, workers, pensioners and the nation as a whole plus the environment as well but I predict that, in the main, they won’t be used that way. They will be used to increase the profit share for private interests and with mere lip service to peoples real concerns.

   The highly inequitable and indeed downright swindling intent of the demand pricing idea shows the direction the thinking of the energy private corporations is taking. Essentially, they want to profiteer and rip off consumers and smaller business owners with impunity. The governments seem on board with this. I guess they are all getting their political donations and payola in the form of grey gifts, golden parachutes, sinecures etc. from the corporations.

   As with most innovations now, they are used to make promises which they quite possibly could deliver, at least in part. But they are mainly used to perpetrate various swindles on the general public. This is par for the course for ascendant neoliberalism. I don’t expect anything to ever change for the better under neoliberalism and I don’t expect neoliberalism to be reformed.

   Neoliberalism will continue to be intensified until it shifts virtually all wealth to the rich, impoverishes the rest and destroys our societies and our planet into the bargain. This is because the elites live in their own self-interest bubble and echo chamber. They are not touched by crises until they become catastrophes and they have found effective ways to keep the general populace permanently fooled on all important matters. By the time the deluded majority realise the dire nature of the global situation (climate change, the pandemicene etc.) it will be far too late.

6. I may have used the wrong term above. Perhaps I should have used “demand tariffs” instead of “demand pricing”. I mean the tariff where you can for example use minimal power for weeks while you are away, then use high power for one day and the energy company charges you this high daily rate for every day of the month. That is, your bill will be 30 times higher than it equitably should be. This is an extreme example perhaps but it is happening. How governments (the politicians) can even permit this sort predatory pricing is beyond me. They are either asleep at the regulatory wheel or they have been bought off. Frankly, I think they have been bought off.