Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Wednesdays or so…This is a placeholder entry for Wednesday August 12, and yet it is also part seven of seven in this thingymabopper for today I call OopsidentA!
Note2ish: I edited this post during August 2020.
Soon I hope to release, under Creative Commons, some fiction[!] short stories of mine, that I completed more than half a decade ago. I also want to post some old music of mine, completed more than 15 years ago. But I also want to sort of show off a little, my relaxing abilities, and say that another way to structure text, besides whatever this goofy pre-calc shit is about, that I’m actually starting to understand now… f(x) means function of x, and the differential coefficient thing is something about the related rates and chain rule and the Delta(x)/Delta(t), or not, because there is some sort of bullshit fudge factor in math, because only in abstraction does A equal A, but I mean, I don’t want to go on about it here, it’s probably better discussed on reddit if you poke around the twitter feeds of people not me but whose semaphorings I… you know, cuz I sorta need lessons in using an astrolabe or a sextant or something, to understand the crucial importance of the big Deities in the sky that have to do with the sun and the moon and the night and the day, it’s like the devil and the priest, they can’t exist if one of ’em goes away (thus sprache Ian Gillan)…and yet beyond, above, everywhere, there are stars and angles and non-base-tens and other sorts of non-Manichean prosocial actions…
The below-embedded music file, is me, playing an acoustic guitar handed down to me, and um, I hope it works on your enduser audio-producing device or whatever. And I’m just gonna not do too many takes, or anything like that, because the point is to wind down, pobody’s nerfect, etc. I will make the more logical lists of finding my work via this website, douglaslucas.com, at some point of some coordinate pair of some coordinate plane …. Okay, lemme go grab an audio-recording device and tune my guitar…
And let me say few last things, more seriously now —
A few days ago, Billie J. Winner-Davis, mother of Putingate whistleblower Reality Winner (currently recovering from a COVID-19 positive test while imprisoned at FMC Carswell in Fort Worth Texas), tweeted this:
I have reached out to the @ACLU for help, only to be directed elsewhere. They know who she is, they know what's she is going through. They jumped in to assist Cohen & achieved immediate results, but wont do the same for a woman suffering inside a covid filled prison.
Alt-text of what Billie J. Winner-Davis tweeted: “I have reached out to the @ACLU for help, only to be directed elsewhere. They know who she is, they know what she’s going through. They jumped in to assist Cohen & achieved immediate results, but wont do the same for a woman suffering inside a covid filled prison.”
I would simply like to note that I have received similar results while talking with nonprofit leaders supposedly tasked with helping journadoodles and whistleblowers. I have received similar results while talking and following up with federal and state politicians and their subordinates. Not everything that happens is on television or twitter. Some of it’s just plain molecular. After the relative ease with which I saw for years my articles about Assadnge (note the ‘d’ for yes, Syrian Assad) — I didn’t know better, back in the first half of the ’10s — and other masculinist men, articles commissioned by corporate media and their ancillaries, I feel quite comfortable in saying that there is, obviously (obviously to some!) serious misogyny throughout (read this for more if you like by someone other than me, or Ursula K. Le Guin, or…). Oh, this is a neat blog that should be read carefully. The just-over-three minutes of music I jammed out to, tonight, starts off relaxing, but for many (uh, how many?) listeners, might not end that way; indeed, it might sound anxiety-producing toward the end. Except once you know this: toward the end of this ridiculous-sounding recording (cheap device for a freelancer, y’all), I started alluding to some music composed by some (but importantly, not all) of the musicians I grew up jamming with during my teens, musicians whom I referenced in part 3 of this OopsidentA — some of them, that is. It’s hard to get out of narcissism especially when born in the United States, so I’m sorry I’ve spammed people some times with my “content”, but (if I do say so myself) people have to learn somehow… Likewise, I hope you can consider doing something practical to effectively support the projects/people I’m so often referencing. Now I’ll get out of here before I keep headbanging at one’s own risk. Thanks in advance for your patience with my ’60s-’70s weird distortion recording sound quality in the .mp3 below when you listen on a cheap device without headphones, but I kinda like it all the same, I mean, it’s not necessarily for you yourself specifically out of 7.5-something billion people, right? So if you read English (or use a translator, or some sort of Sturgeon-esque tele-empathy), or if you like this weird guitar tone of mine, etc… Rest assured, never surrender; Lettuce quote Jeremy Hammond regarding his noncompliance with a federal grand jury: “I will continue to do the right thing, no matter how long it takes. I know how to do time, and I will never be intimidated by their threats. Ever!! I refuse!!” Here was some optimism…
Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Wednesdays or so…This is a placeholder entry for Wednesday August 5, and yet it is also part six of seven in this thingymabopper for today I call OopsidentA!
Okay so there’s this ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that’s killing tons of people, to put it imprecisely but close ’nuff, since yes, pathogens change, but no, if you’re a USian reading this, you probably haven’t unlocked some Flat Earther mystery of how it’s all bogus hysteria since, in the United States, it is rare to understand how to downshift after exponentiation, even the Washington Post has had to publish articles for the general public like this one: “When coronavirus is growing exponentially, everything looks fine until it doesn’t.” I linked that WaPo article in a 23 March 2020 blog post of mine and wrote:
Addition and exponentiation are both arithmetic operations. Here’s an addition example: 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 = 12. Here’s an exponentiation example: 34 = 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 = 81. That exponentiation is 3 times itself four times. It depends, but disease spread can often be more exponential than straightforward addition. Exponential because each infected person, especially prior to becoming incapacitated (but possibly even then), can infect many people, not just another single person.
Downshifting from recent exponentiation, whether from virii or maniae or credit cards out of whack-o’s, can be even more difficult, than, like, the upshifting part. Here’s my proof in 3-part stupid USian buzzcut sportsball coach logic, like an interdepartmental memo that looks like the 1-2-3 here on that webpage, or this “keys, wallet, cell phone” thing here; then returning to watch the video referenced a few clauses ago in this very sentence and thereafter just making a list of every hospital ombudsman/patient advocate postal address in the United States so Humans can just start snailmailing them bibliographic entries like these, I mean, it’s something of a praxis idea, amirite;
Except I actually remember being in some of those places; and in there, the elderly are already deluged with snailmail, trying to rotate endless envelopes, and I never get a chance to look too closely, because I’m not the sort of guy who would, but it’s terrifying, even from near or medium distance. Of course, I’ve been in those fuckin’ places quite many a times. And sometimes they aren’t as bad as before, but rarely, seldomly, depending on where the fuck they actually put me in those things, like an Aleko going right under a bridge in one of them Mexican radios, and I’m under there still, under that thing, surprised the fuckin’ Aleko shit is halfway legible, because that’s the only one I think I ever got through on that particular set of his Compositions, where they got the weird lookin’ thing that cross like some sort of ninja
Back to my 1-2-3 proof that downshifting is more difficult once you’ve revved up, than the revving up was in the first place, observe please (or not, I mean, you might find this all really immature or obnoxious or something):
I just went to the Spanish-siloed version of Wikipedia for Crecimiento_exponencial and found the below image showing exponential growth surpassing liner and cubic growth:
I don’t trust those date-lookin’ numbers on the y axis…but it is a Euclidean quadrant I, if Euclid was real desert prophet or whatever in ancient Gweece
2. I don’t think “flattening the curve” or even “inverting the curve” is as simple as just turning the picture upside down (or turning your monitor, head, or mind upside down). Because uh, that would be, uh, too…Idk what to say. Comedic, I guess.
3. So instead,
If a person wants to down-shift or chill out regarding exponentially growing curves of mania, or credit card balances, or budget spreadsheets flashing danger danger, or needing more sleep, and stuff, it’s more complicated than just, like, multiplying everything by negative one or turning everything upside down.
Volume up! Kind of like that thing where teachers remind parents about how hard it is for their kids to learn to read. The teachers hand a book to the parents and then instruct the parents to turn the book upside down and try to read it. And the parents are like holy shit, because they can’t just repeat the turn-the-book-up-down procedure a few times and then suddenly have the ability to read upside-down text (I mean, unless they are way impressively neurodivergent!) So yeah. That is why it is important in life to understand maths like the below pictured screenshot’ed by me, which will be explained after the image, thus no alt text. (Volume down.)
Kind of the short version of the above Precalculus introduction, Basic Overview, Graphing Parent Functions, Transformations, Domain & Range, is, to paraphrase something I read in Sylvia Nasar’s biography of John Nash (not the Beautiful Mind movie, dammit), where somebody else was explaining how Nash told them he figured some sort of dealy-out that had a lot of math (and probably death in it too, what with the Air Force associations and all in Nash’s biography, although it’s def out there that he refused to change strategy for very long periods of time…), it’s like, “You have to do this, and watch out for that, and then pay attention to this other thing, and be careful not to such-and-such, and stuffs,” because if you don’t, your car/credit card balance/mania/decreasing-or-increasing-I-often-get-this-part-confused sleep debt just sort of goes kablooey in a bad way. Capeesh? Usually, with my sense of humor, I try to just use a sort of at a glance aesthetic ability that boils down to either “don’t even fuckin’ think about tryin’ that” or “hey, this seems good/fun!” (Get outta here, divine command theory and supposed ancient etymolgoies.) Until very recently I never actually understood why people were sometimes sending me messages about they walked or would have to walk soon this many feet on such-and-such days and had to take this many pills and go to this many meetings and appointments and stuff, it just sounded like some sort of pre-emptive proselytizing and trying to get laid, but now I realize, maybe in some cases, certain good individuals, were defending pre-emptively in a good way against proctologizing!
And now for the grand finale of calming down, I carefully step my way toward the final part 7-of-7 of this OopsidentA (might take a while, but will be really really good, I promise/hope!)…so while I work on that, I will leave you with a comedy video I like by comedian Eddie Izzard, which for all I know, is — the transcript of it, I mean, if there were one, which there probably is — stuck horribly in colonizer etymologies as well. But I mean, pobody’s nerfect. (In terms of the alt text, or for people reading this etched into tablets in the far past/future once all the internet has collapsed/hasn’t yet existed, it’s a video less than 7 minutes of comedian Eddie Izzard explaining-ish Latin versus today’s biz-speak English. The video should be from the last few decades or so.)
Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Wednesdays or so…This is a placeholder entry for Wednesday July 29, and yet it is also part five of seven in this thingymabopper for today I call OopsidentA!
Regarding the whole Dr. Perry C. Baird Jr. study from 1944, more regarding the context/importance of that study is explained by me in the entry on douglaslucas.com/files beginning “In August 2020”. The below picture has no alt text because it’s just a screenshot by me of the “In August 2020” entry at douglaslucas.com/files. BTW I got my little headshot thingy-ma-doodle on this website of mine updated, along with the douglaslucas.com front page News section (another route there is to click “Home” on the nav-menu above, if you want…and stuffs), during the intermission of OopsidentA 4 of 7, the blog-post of mine preceding this one! And now for the screenshot-picture:
The above is a screenshot taken by me of writing by me a few minutes ago (or an hour or two I suppose), and the image supra (not the Toyota sportscar) has no alt-text as that would be just make things worse I assume, and it’s easy enough, I hope, to go to https//douglaslucas.com/files if you need to encourage someone or make something else read my prolixity.
Two more posts to go in this OopsidentA series, I better start downshifting…
Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Wednesdays or so…This is a placeholder entry for Wednesday July 22, and yet it is also part four of seven in this thingymabopper for today I call OopsidentA!
And now for an intermission. Time-spans ago, someone molecular-ly, perhaps craning their neck in toward me through some sort of portal of my place, from their position atop the loop-de-loops of the West Seattle Bridge, that piece of highly salient failed fixed infrastructure of the often and yet not always valence-ing-ly bad United States, said this music below, Nobuo Uematsu’s “Spinach Rag,” is like the soundtrack to my life, so here goes, have a little more than 2 minutes of ragtime from the video game Final Fantasy VI (Japanese numbering) aka Final Fantasy III (USian numbering).
“Spinach Rag” by Nobuo Uematsu
The music is associated with the below-pictured scene/stage/whatever from the game.
I didn’t actually play this version…looks as if graphic-designed for mobile…
Meanwhile, I’m gonna go update some stuff on my website, similarish-ing-ly as I have recently updated the whole ‘graphic design’ or whatever (visuals ain’t my specialty!) for my Twitter. Took me several years to figure out how to actually do that the way I wanted, without losing my damn mind (and thus, rather a long story to explain, or a short one, depending on various variables, like total word counts, whether I trust you, not to mention the ‘as needed’ stockpiles of pharmaceuticals or nukes spanning the globe in mysteriously prosocial suitcases, because they’re just pretend nukes, leading ultimately, if not throughout, to oxytocin-y snuggles).
Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Wednesdays or so…This is a placeholder entry for Wednesday July 15, and yet it is also part three of seven in this thingymabopper for today I call OopsidentA!
When I was in middle school and high school, back in Texas, I used to make a lot of jokes and get in trouble thereupon, but in my opinion, too many powerful people at that overpriced K-12 paid too much attention to the mundane aspects of my prankstering and too little attention to the semantic meaning of whatever I was actually saying in my jokes. More precisely, I might have said something strange and then got told to go to whichever authority’s office, due to the challenging pitch of my voice or due to my challenging facial expressions or my challenging all-black shaved-head Pantera-like get-up or something negligible like that; yet, if anybody actually bothered (the other musicians did bother, mirable dictu!) to translate the semantic or mathematical meaning of whatever I was saying in the multilingual joke, they then would understand there was a lot more to my prank than just being another challenging and traumatized teenage boy, although maybe not, that’s for someone else besides me to decide.
(Only a few days ago, I remembered some telephone calls decades back involving a middle school language teacher in the South Central Region of the United States, but in an important dissimilarity to the caricature-opponents of Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!!, I don’t want to telegraph every last thingy, even if that were possible as I think Parmenides might argue!)
So then, very recently (influenced by a bunch of random computer alphanumerics too nyminous to list; I have no idea what these sets of alphanumerics actually might be theorized to include, hell, they could have been bots, like the programs that write the articles regarding sport and stock market statistics in the United States’ few remaining deadtree newspapers), I sort of like, studied maths or something? So I’ll kind of put a picture below about that (gimme a few minutes), because I’m highly annoyed at having to repeatedly explain this stuff to mental health professionals across my lifespan. These mental health professionals probably check my blog and don’t mention it (nor their various turf wars over unique sales points in the health industry sector and the therapists not doing their clinical supervision in front of the patient; in the Open Dialogue method, the therapists in fact do their ‘clinical supervision’ in front of the patient so that everyone can participate), kind of like me trying to explain to the mental health professionals (across my lifespan) that yes, I recently-ish know ‘adrenal fatigue’ is ‘out of bounds’ in the United States as a concept, but the 1944 study by Dr. Perry Baird cross-referenced by Mimi Baird’s later book about him He Wanted The Moon (I mean, who could blame him?) is still relevant to trying to figure out if my adrenal cortices would exhibit any gross hypergenesis on a simple ‘imaging scan’ (or whatever substitute good a medical-economist might put there, operating on the level of USian high school micro-economics and its endless algebraic multiplicands), without me mentioning that in general it’s kind of an and/or if there’s relevance between the plight I lately hypothesize my adrenal cortices are in and whether the United States will face either a hard coercion ground invasion by a non-domestic opponent for the first time in a very very long time, or the seductive coercion equivalent, as the United States already did: see my in-person reporting in 2018 from Putingate whistleblower Reality Winner’s sentencing hearing (that is to say, Ms. Winner revealed evidence about propaganda-type coercion emanating from Russia, the battering ram of China, and Ms. Winner continues to suffer imprisonment in Fort Worth, Texas), and see as well as 2014’s “Free will and seductive coercion” by Heather Marsh and then this 2014 blog post “How we came to be ruled by Death Eaters” by Heather Marsh too (and if you do read or better yet, re-read, that second blog post of hers, take care to note that the word “resembles” does not mean “equals” — as the George Carlin bitbyte on Baseball versus US-Football might help clarify; like, even USian-football players giving each other concussions on the regular [a really vile practice which involves lies to kids from adults among other things] can become snuggly friends, as appropriate, as much as I am personally reluctant to concede that point, about the sportsball I mean and the damn US-football coaches). Now all that being said, many of these medical industry professionals across my more recent lifespan are actually pretty damn awesome given the context (Seattle; the-ship-has-sailed-on-fixing-the-United-States; so on) and the fact that, given the context, I’m a goofball who might politely experiment with how much it might confuse selves to stare at not-a-mirror and just sort of ponder THAT IT WILL BE CONSIDERED THAT PEOPLE MIGHT NEED TO ROUTINELY DO STUFF while thinking about arpegrogressions, and decjrodalades-old video game music. Now for the promised picture, except after another paragraph.
Delta(x) / Delta(t) is actually correct and it does make a difference, if you wanna leave endless algebraic multiplicands anyway (which is arguable in my opinion, at least for some coordinate pairs!), because it’s not actually Delta(x) / Delta(y), that is the differential coefficient in pre-calculus, or calculus, or something, unless Delta loves to fly and it shows, which probably has something to do with the United States Central Intelligence Agency and all the evil that people, unethically, don’t talk about usually, because we need, um, inquires and I think I’m supposed to get back to working on that, not thinking of it so singlehandedly these times around. There’s some sort of thing in calculus’ related rates called “the chain rule” but I haven’t understood it yet because every time I see that noun phrase, it just makes me think of Rob Halford (as inthis 1984 classic by Judas Priest), not unlike how someone recently told me on a long-distance-communicator-which-allows-amplitude (e.g., shortwave radio, telephonic gizmo-phone, grainy black-and-white video of a brief semaphoring dance) that each and every time he sees the string “Chomsky“, he just reads it as “Quaalude.” Here’s the picture:
Well, of course the article does not cite any sources acceptable to the nonprofit-plus-mansplainy-editors behind Wikipedia; the pictured entry is siloed by the English language version of Wikipedia, and further, at least as far as I can reckon, USian English (not British? idk…) is Command-and-Conquered by the USian 1950s where all refrigerators are the same size even in the year 2020.
Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Wednesdays or so…This is a placeholder entry for Wednesday July 8, and yet it is also part two of seven in this thingymabopper for today I call OopsidentA!
I made this one up using some generic meme-generator! The template’s origin is apparently somewhat disputed; and, no, I don’t want to watch The Big Lebowski (or Seinfeld).
Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Wednesdays or so…This is a placeholder entry for Wednesday July 1, and yet it is also part one of seven in this thingymabopper for today I call OopsidentA!
idk who made this, but I saw it on a kewl friend’s feed
Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Mondays or so…except when I’m not because reasons, pandemics, life, etc. This was going to be a placeholder ‘oops’ post for Week 26, but as usual, I kept typing…
Note added Thurs 2 July: Links for recent articles at NPR and the Economist discussing COVID-19 spreading not by protestors but by parties, and a ProPublica article from July 1: “Internal Messages Reveal Crisis at Houston Hospitals as Coronavirus Cases Surge” Blame those on top, not your neighbor
I have a huge blog post in the works, giving an overview of, and listing resources for, escaping the box of conventional psychiatry. But it’ll have to wait another seven days or so, as I need to sit this workweek out, at least in terms of blogging. Although I’ll keep typing:
For unknown reasons, I’ve felt sad today and late yesterday.
Here in Seattle, the past 48 hours or so, I’ve been thinking, off and on, about Texas, where I’m originally from, probably because of the COVID-19 news there and everywhere. More than 5,000 new cases per day now in Texas. Over the past few months, Texans have told me not to worry about it. Around March or so, I offered to connect a regional hospital in Texas with PPE donors in Dallas; hospital staff declined, saying more PPE wouldn’t be necessary, though I suspect also the (current) neurotypical standard of seeing vulnerability as fault might have been at play. A Texas parent insisted to me that her adult offspring must not think about faraway coronavirus because it’s too stressful: I order you to stop texting these grown-ups about it, Douglas. Texans close to me recently went to gyms and salons and lectured me on their safety and how Trump would get this all fixed. (Except he and his are causing it.) But these are all well-documented, predictable reactions of propagandized humans to pandemics and politicians, just like during other outbreaks, such as this one a century ago.
The solution isn’t to vote for your destroyers but to arrest them, following realistic and practical steps (informed action feels better than anxiety), and thankfully although many of my Texan friends from the past few years have disappeared from my life — I guess they’re too weakened to risk the unpopularity pursuing unusual topics might bring; but, I don’t know for sure, since we no longer talk, typically — skyrocketing follower counts of, and widespread interactions with, goodaccounts show that more and more people globally are taking interest in helping themselves and others each day (instead of just buying and selling every last iota in a self-destructive race to the empty top), so maybe humanity will get somewhere, presently.
I also see many nice little evidentiary pieces of a better world. The neighbor out on his lawn playing his acoustic guitar and smiling, for the first time I’ve ever seen him smile. Customers in the grocery store swaying to the music from the overhead loudspeakers, when they were pretty much never doing that previously. All these little things add up: a reality with time for tasks other than serving powerful employers. Yet the clock is ticking till the unemployment payment boost evaporates on July 25/26/31 (depending).
From the New York Times link above: the United States is exceptionally diseased
So why the fishbowl picture at the start of this post? The past few days I’ve been unfortunately thinking (I’d rather think about something else) that the real core of reactionary Texas ideology is its premise that the individual is not affected by anything but the individual’s own willpower; the individual is not affected by the environment, and to speak of how conditioning or pollution or pandemic might be impacting you, according to the Randroid/Texas vision, is to confess your moocher inability to climb from rags to riches by innovating through the sweat of your He-Man brow, etc. It occurred to me that these increasingly infected Texans are sadly stuck in a small pond, and proudly don’t know it. Like fish in a fishbowl. And unaware of the rising temperatures — they of course think global warming is a hoax, just like Donald Trump calls coronavirus a hoax (and calls global warming a hoax) — and dismissive of any other possible impact from any other possible attribute of their surrounding environment, the Texans swim around their small pond telling each other they will succeed, they will innovate! Meanwhile, all the multinationalcriminalconspiracies destroying the planet/environment, are like a person the fish can’t or just won’t perceive, walking up to their fishbowl, grabbing it, and, while the fish continue to explain their rugged individualism (or so very hairsplitting neoliberalism!) to each other, just throwing the bowl at the wall. The bowl is flying toward the wall, the water is sloshing out, and the medium-size fish is sucking up to the biggest fish (in hopes of paid employment in eating other fish) and insulting the smallest-size fish for protesting, but it doesn’t matter, they’re all about to hit the wall, victims of much they once vaguely sensed and slammed the mental door on (“you shouldn’t think too hard”), or, well, victims of being goldfish I guess (metaphor strain!).
Publishing a couple of our dm responses re Clintons & Obama because we cannot get through all dm's and these questions keep repeating. Tl;dr we are not looking solely for child rapists but for criminal networks supporting them as well. #OpDeathEaterspic.twitter.com/vH0WCmt5kw
I want to type something like, “Please specify the conditions within which, what changes would need to happen so that, you could give your time and assistance not to celebully politicians who have willfully killed many people, but say, to Food Not Bombs, who hasn’t killed anyone and only tries to help?” but I need to do some dishes and then go to bed, I guess, and I’ve never got an answer from anyone to my “what conditions, if any, are required so that you might…” question. It’s basically asking the general public to admit what accommodations we might need to obtain asap, to combat rather than support our extinction. Which things to fix first (maybe these). And we’re pressured to see needing/procuring accommodations as making us less than. But even that “pressured to see” is pointing to an environment, which under rugged individualism, doesn’t exist and/or can have no effect on rags-to-riches High Value Men / Action Figure Superheroes. We’re pressured to see the bad environmental circumstances surrounding us (poverty, mass shootings, no/low access to quality food, anyone could continue) as personal failings, when really, those circumstances aren’t the fault of everyday people, and without talking about them loudly, we won’t ever fix them by convicting those causing them.
I want to power off my laptop and never power it back on. Death tolls getting to me today, and all the bots, and all the humans who have turned themselves into bots (“you shouldn’t care too much”), screaming that masks are a myth, or whatever, at the ER and ICU and other medical professionals on Twitter and in Texas who are asking for help. I should be grateful I’m not there, but it feels in some ways that I still am…
28 June 2020, The Dallas Morning News: We went inside Parkland’s COVID unit during its ‘worst week’ as coronavirus cases spike in North Texas
The critically ill patients in Parkland’s COVID-19 Tactical Care Unit couldn’t wear masks even if they wanted to. They each have a plastic tube jammed down their throats, straight to their lungs […] It’s eerily quiet on this long, open ward and the 30 patients on ventilators seem frozen in place. They’re unconscious, sedated with powerful drugs, in part to prevent them from ripping out the lines that are keeping them alive. […] Not one would hesitate for a nanosecond to trade the invasive plastic tubes for the masks that we, breathing free on the outside, get to wear. Not the 52-year-old man in one bed or his 77-year-old mother a few beds down. Not the man who went on a ventilator Friday night or the one who has been on a machine for more than two months […]
Updates from a Dallas ICU: we are completely full with COVID patients. Our ER is trying to send us 3 more. We are running out of good PPE and having to use shitty backups. The other ICUs are trying to take our AM staffing because they are also full.
Putting our Charge Nurses in staffing with critically ill patients and unable to help the rest of the staff with their equally critical patients. We have 4 patients trying to not code, even though they could at any moment.
I’m trying so hard to not cry at the thought of becoming the next NYC. Please Governor Abbott, tell me where all of these hospital beds are that you seem to think we have?
The best thing we can do besides quarantine is just be smart. Wear a mask when you go out. Wash your hands constantly. Don’t go out to crowded bars or restaurants. Social distancing. It’s just good common sense.
Note also that whistleblower Dr Rick Bright filed on 25 June 2020 an addendum (10-page PDF … it says “second addendum”; what was the first?) to his whistleblower complaint (89-page PDF) about Trump cronies retaliating against him because he “insisted on scientifically-vetted proposals, and […] pushed for a more aggressive agency response to COVID-19″ so they could push ineffective, shit drugs for you to take instead. The addendum documents the authorities on the warpath against his efforts to get his position back and threatening those who might help him do so.
Hopefully, this pandemic will teach people, even in Texas, that far from being a singlehanded titan of industry, each person is just a tiny speck, just one 7.6 billionth of the people alive today (let alone past and future people, as well as nonhuman animals), and imagining a single person as a willpower-y Robinson Crusoe, or belting out that the virus/environment won’t impact you because you think it’s fake, is like trying to section off with floating rope one part of the swimming pool from somebody else in another section peeing. Doesn’t work.
Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Mondays or so. Today’s short-ish post is for Week 25. I planned to just type an “oops” placeholder entry, but if you know me, then you know I can sometimes be a little…longwinded. Week 22 was my #OpDeathEaters review of the recent Investigation Discovery special focused on pedosadist Jeffrey Epstein, and Week 23 was my updating that post. Week 24 was some quick Seattle news. The upcoming longer post I referred tolast week should be up next week. Thanks for your patience!
I know a handful of white, very straight guys around the world who seem identical: roughly late thirties / early forties, recently dumped, fairly high income, lonely apartment, devoted to masculinism, to trade, to downer narcotics that are recreational — decreasingly. Often it feels nothing I ever say successfully combats the propaganda or world to which they are repeatedly exposed. Conversations with them seem like dominance battles; they keep score, and no one just shares.
Briefly, five news links from the past year and a half, to recalibrate readers who, before continuing forward, might need a reminder of the wider perspective outside the masculinist/trade/lonely life:
November 15, 2018: Article in Foreign Policy: In Russia, Feminist Memes Buy Jail Time, but Domestic Abuse Doesn’t
May 21, 2019: NBC News found that during a 5-year period under both the Obama and Trump administrations, within the system of lockup facilities recognized in 2019 by multiple Auschwitz and/or Holocaust survivors as concentration camps (Rene Lichtman; Ruth Bloch; Bernard Marks), ICE has forced thousands of immigrants into solitary confinement (recognized across the planet as a form of torture), not for breaking any rules, but for being physically disabled or gay.
May 31, 2020: My #OpDeathEaters review about Investigation Discovery’s special on Jeffrey Epstein. My review helps explain in practical and realistic terms (what actually are inquiries/tribunals?) how to stop voting for pedosadists and start arresting them.
June 2, 2020 twitter thread by Portland State University instructor Alexander Reid Ross documenting scores of violent, armed reactionary vigilantes carrying out intimidation and attacks against Black Lives Matter protests across the United States.
Today one of the masculinist-ish guys bemoaned to me this week’s efforts to topple the statue, near the White House, of Andrew Jackson, slaveowner. The person did not bemoan anything remotely on the subject of the above five news links. Yet imagine if every time the topic of toppling a slaveowner statue came up for “debate,” the conversation could not begin until first, all concentration camp victims were liberated, all femicides were prevented, all children were protected from pedosadists, all with impunity were convicted, and individuals learned to reject all bigotry.
In the face of torture and femicide and other human rights violations and unlawful killings, relentless cradle to grave propaganda trains too many USians to focus on, and endlessly talk about, rioters breaking Starbucks windows or stealing electronics from big box stores (both just ways of saying Fuck you in light of murders and more), because that tunnel vision means brainwashed USians don’t learn what much of the rest of the planet already knows: massive resistance can be far more powerful than politely giving a quiet speech about how you don’t want to be killed. To take just one example, the 2019-2020 Chileanprotests fight back against austerity and send their legislators fleeing. In other words, in a very practical and realistic move, they kicked their Congress out by force, irl. Yet if nonstop battle by an oppressed public against powerful criminals with impunity sounds scary and sad — and I agree that it frequently is, and frequently has been throughout human history so far — then in addition, stop voting, start arresting. Practical and realistic? The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (which among other things publicly heard applications for limited amnesty from human rights violators) accomplished a great deal, while simultaneously having trouble enforcing subpoenas because the commissioners didn’t have enough power relative to the reactionaries in their region. Still, that the goal of justice never before achieved in full is difficult, and that previous attempts to bring justice have not yet succeeded completely, doesn’t mean quit trying and become a boring complicit and compliant coward; it means, let’s figure out improved inquiries/tribunals — now, little step by little step.
During the pandemic brought to you not by protestors (back people into a corner, what do you expect them to do, die quietly?) — see NPR and the Economist — but by super-spreaders such as Donald Trump, and this month when people are especially discussing and endorsing noncompliance/disobedience with ridiculous and unjust rules against consenting adults putting their various Tab As into their various Slot Bs proudly, while all manner of extreme wild emotions happen, to all those braver than the intelligentsia and the aspirants to the intelligentsia, to all those who read and grow and share and take informed action…
Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Mondays or so…except when I’m not because reasons, pandemics, life, etc. This is a placeholder ‘oops’ post for Week 21, where in theory there would have been a post for roughly Monday 25 May 2020. Thanks for your patience!
Be back soon. Until then, a terrible image, and then a divine one, plus some awesome music.
I’m not sure who created this remix of the Sunday 24 May 2020 New York Times front page. If you are, please lmk.
“Adoration” by Stephan Sinding in 1903. Apparently a series of sculptures?
“Billie’s Bounce” performed by the Count Basie Big Band, I believe in Switzerland at the 1975 Montreux Jazz Festival. A jazz standard originally composed by Charlie Parker in 1945. Since high school, I’ve enjoyed the Count Basie Big Band performance on this disc.
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