Weather or Not

Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Chinese Coronavirus, You, and Me

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It has been a fairly busy year so far, with assorted projects at home and work, so I haven’t posted a lot to the BLOG. For some readers, that’s good news (so why are they bothering reading?).

However, the coronavirus that arose in Wuhan, China, and is igniting a worldwide and U.S. pandemic, has taken over the news, and the minds of everyone who isn’t utterly isolated from modern communications. This is the worse worldwide disease outbreak in 102 years, since the Spanish flu, because of its easy spread and higher-than-flu death rate of roughly 3-4% (so far).

Two days ago (as of this writing), my friend Dr. Jason Persoff, physician at a major Denver hospital and all-around great guy, sent out the following update from the front lines of medicine. I’m posting it unedited, exactly as he wrote it.

This is not some clickbait quack online, nor your buddy Bubba who heard something on the news, nor Aunt Bea with her worthless herbal remedies. Jason understands the science behind this disease. Pay close attention to his words. If you read anything about the coronavirus epidemic, start here. Serious stuff, but also, reasons for hope…

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COVID Update 3/8–Long, but Important–yes you can share

Well, it’s been an interesting week. For those who don’t know me, I’m a hospital medicine physician and the Assistant Director of Emergency Preparedness for the University of Colorado Hospital. We are still very much in containment mode (isolating patients w/ COVID, quarantining persons of interest), but there are hallmarks that this will likely be in a different phase in the next week or two. For now, the increase numbers continue to be correlated in part with increased testing and in part due to real time increase in disease burden. I think the key message here is that containment will be unlikely and we’ll enter mitigation: treating the most sick with most people quarantining at home. I do think it is reasonable to assume that COVID will be a global pandemic. Now the question becomes: how do we deal with that?

That brings us to the term social distancing. This is a pretty serious issue that is a stage above mandatory quarantine. Social distancing means, essentially, no unnecessary public gathering. We’re seeing ideas of this begin to pop up with the NBA and Olympics. I think others are coming. We’re already seeing self-selection in this direction with canceled conferences, canceled airline flights, and self-imposed canceled vacations.

What makes me the saddest at this time is how truly financially and socially devastating this could become and is becoming. Some of this is driven by hype, but truly I believe all the extreme measures–be it canceling SxSW or closing University of Washington–may help in spreading out the disease. Why would that be a good thing? A trickle of cases over a longer period of time means a better opportunity for us in healthcare not to be overwhelmed.

As an insider in our hospital’s emergency response, I can tell you that this past week has proven to be really draining. Long days and lots of meetings with multiple successes and failures at dealing with this disease. We’re getting on top of it, but this disease is just beginning. We’re still ramping up.

The most startling information to come out of China from the WHO is the abysmal rate of oxygen needs for patients. Five percent of patients end up on ventilators whereas 15 percent require oxygen for the 3-6 weeks it takes to recover. That’s an unprecedented burden on the healthcare system. We are simply not able to take a head-on hit if these numbers remain accurate–but over time, we could handle a sustained surge better.

Think about being out of work for 3-6 weeks on oxygen and you get a better perspective why I have concerns about the wherewithal of the financial system. I feel very sad for people whose lives depend on working day-to-day–this is going to hurt for a while and so that brings us to not panicking.

Okay, so what if we are facing a pandemic. First off, and I beg you to heed this, if you fall ill with fevers and a cough DO NOT GO OUT until the fevers have been gone at least 24-48 hours. I don’t want you to get me sick and you don’t want to sicken anyone else. Sorry, no going to work or socializing–self-quarantine. Oh, not because you have COVID, but because I don’t want any of the other types of illnesses out there either. What has been staggering to me is how many cases are tied to people who were ill not being mindful of others and going to their events anyway.

Second, if you have persistent fevers and are worried about COVID, contact your local health department for guidance. Do NOT go to the hospital unless you are gravely ill or can’t breathe. We’re not going to test you just because you want reassurance you are COVID-free. The most common types of respiratory illnesses remain far more prevalent right now, so you probably have them rather than COVID: flu, RSV, human metapneumovirus, etc.

Third, STOP PANIC BUYING. Hand sanitizer is a good idea, but you don’t need a 36 month supply. Don’t be an asshole–stock up, but leave some for others. I can’t even imagine why people need 14 months worth of toilet paper, btw. Again, be reasonable. If you don’t panic buy, the manufacturers should be able to keep up.

Fourth, start contingency planning. It turns out most travel insurance policies don’t cover epidemics. Anticipate that most businesses may be running at 85% capacity at their worst, so be courteous and patient with everyone. Be flexible with your job–you may need to help keep operations running meaning changes in your schedule–and you may need that time yourself, so be generous. Hold off on purchasing trips for a month or so to see how we’re doing then.

Fifth, masks aren’t going to protect you. Your biggest enemy is your own face. We touch it on average >40 times an hour. Learn to be mindful of this. We believe, other than getting sneezed or coughed on, hand-to-face contact is a main mode of transmission. So, begin to learn when you do this. Do you know that most people unconsciously sniff their hands within two minutes of shaking hands with someone? Crazy but true: therefore, stop shaking hands and bump elbows or feet. Wearing a face mask will not prevent you from your own habits.

Sixth, don’t visit with ill friends. Hospitals, including ours, are severely restricting ALL visitors at this time, and even more stringently for patients who may have COVID. Facetime and video messaging is the way to go.

Seventh, keep reminding yourself that this is going to last a while. Don’t sprint, slow down. Make haste slowly. Don’t spread panic, deal with the numbers as they become available. The current numbers on the Johns Hopkins site show that China appears to be reaching a sustained plateau of cases, but it’s not dropping off yet. Were that to apply elsewhere, we have months to go.

Eighth–have hope. I do. And I’m in the thick of things. We’re all in this together and we’ll muddle through. Things may not look like we want them to look for a while, but this will pass. The virus will mutate, the vaccine will come out, a medicine may work, whatever happens this will change. This isn’t forever even if it feels like it. We’ve made it through 9/11–we made it through 2007. Be at peace that this is happening. Be practical but caring. Believe in the future…

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Jason is well aware of what’s happening in prepared places like South Korea and Taiwan, which are holding their own, and Italy, which is overwhelmed despite a modern health-care system. They are short of both staffing and needed medical supplies, and having to let people die among those most seriously affected with the viral pneumonia that is destroying their lungs fast.

Most folks who get this (apparently about 80%) will experience only minor to moderate symptoms and move on with some immunity. Others, particularly the old, hypertensive, diabetic, cancerous, immuno-compromised, and those with heart or lung disease, have a much higher death rate. The brutally honest truth is that each of us — you, me, each of your friends and co-workers — ultimately will know someone who dies from this, and maybe multiple someones. Perhaps you or I will lose a parent grandparent, mentor, old friend, esteemed colleague, or role model. Even a few otherwise healthy and/or young people will be lost…who knows why?

We have to get obsessive as can be about prevention and hand cleanliness — to delay the onset of this crap in ourselves at least long enough for the medical system to not be overwhelmed everywhere. I’m trying to change habits quickly and use lots of soap and wipes. For the sake of the most vulnerable among us, I hope you are too.

Technological Psyops Against Children, and All of Us

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Some of my posts are intended to get you to think. This is one of the most important I’ve done. Parents, especially young parents, pay attention! Future parents too:

This article (please read it all before proceeding!) is the most comprehensive I’ve seen on how psychologists and social scientists are “weaponized” industrially to hook children and teens on Internet chat, social media and video games.

Excerpt: “The parents I work with simply have no idea about the immense amount of financial and psychological firepower aimed at their children to keep them playing video games “forever.””

Another excerpt: “These parents have no idea that lurking behind their kids’ screens and phones are a multitude of psychologists, neuroscientists, and social science experts who use their knowledge of psychological vulnerabilities to devise products that capture kids’ attention for the sake of industry profit. What these parents and most of the world have yet to grasp is that psychology — a discipline that we associate with healing — is now being used as a weapon against children.”

The issue is bigger still. I’ve seen this play out first-hand in people I’ve known — adults and kids who neglect reality for online. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is well-known in intelligence circles as psyops: psychological operations. It is reality, and at work every day online, as it has in other forms for decades.

Psyops: know this concept, and learn to recognize it, because there truly is a war for the mind being waged on you and your children. The same could be said about social media, or 15-20 years ago, online chats. They all can be tools for good…but also, evil and destruction.

Psyops isn’t just a military concept, despite that origin of the acronym, but has been employed by governments, news media, and corporations for generations in the form of propaganda, overt and covert (including subliminal) mind games. Digital online psyops take it to a whole new level. Artificial intelligence, psychology, social science, and neuroscience work together to build ever-more persuasive yet subtle algorithms to hook people — especially vulnerable, immature, cognitively and emotionally underdeveloped pre-teen and teen minds. [Of course it works with plenty of adults too, but teens are especially susceptible to industrialized online psyops.] The best tactics manipulate individuals and the masses without their knowing it.

Sociopaths are masters of psyops on the individual level. Even simple ol’ stereotypical Bubba, the former dropout and current alcoholic woman-beater, employs psyops to convince the woman to stay in that abusive relationship. So…imagine how well that richly funded and highly coordinated teams of hard-core professionals, including published scientists and their findings, most certainly can manipulate children, teens and vulnerable adults corporately on large scales — and as the article notes well, they do.

Likely without realizing it — since he doesn’t acknowledge the deep history nor the old acronym — the author:

    1. Has stumbled upon the age-old concept of psyops and
    2. Is engaging in taught manipulation tactics himself — the long established, formulaic, paint-by-numbers method of Journalism 101 to hook the reader: a) personal anecdote, b) background, c) interviews for credibility, etc.

Point is: it doesn’t matter if you lean left or right, claim the middle ground (which rarely is, in reality), or are simply apathetic. Psyops are being used on us all, corporately, right where we are, right now. Included in the corporate for-profit psyops is media (this is why clickbait works, as well as more subtle and subliminal forms buried in stories, including media bias).

Governmental deep-state agencies are well-versed in this too. China, for example, is creating a systemic Big Brother psyops control system leveraging AI, cellular tracking, real-time big-data analysis, ubiquitous video cameras, and social-worthiness ratings to control the movements and actions of the people. Orwell and Huxley were prescient, if a few decades early. Russia — and yes, the U.S. — are at the forefront of covert psyops “advancement” and have been for many decades.

These methods are only going to get more sophisticated with time. Don’t think, for a minute, that won’t include government and media agendas as well as non-media corporations. Let’s address three other main areas besides effects on youth (and there are many others!).
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Societal impacts: Minds altered in the process of practicing these addicting behaviors do destroy relationships on individual levels, and cause a collective drag on society. Twenty years ago, social media didn’t exist, but video games and especially online chats did. I have witnessed this phenomenon with a ringside seat (as a former spouse of one deeply involved), and it can lead to dangerously risky behavior toward self and others, as well as attempted or successful suicide. Permitting oneself to get tangled up in this does not absolve one of the personal responsibility to acknowledge, get out of the situation, and get help to fix their problems, as necessary.

Regardless, the collective societal wreckage of many altered/maladjusted minds is going to cost us all. The young adult who spent teen years game-playing while his/her grades plummeted — even if socially readjusted, still can be ill-suited for college and/or job life afterward, their potential delayed by years or never fully realized. Online gambling addicts, gaming fiends, get-rich-quick suckers, smut addicts, the “likes” obsessed…the possibilities are nearly limitless. These will be a large volume of future welfare dependents, low-paid service workers, prisoners, and/or otherwise wasted talent arising from the herds of people involved.

Science ethics and law: The “weaponization” of science is real and has been for a long, long time. You know this. We have seen it with nuclear bombs developed with direct involvement of particle physicists. We’ve seen it with cruelty to animals in scientific lab testing of dangerous chemicals. We’ve seen it with assorted eugenics activities, from Hitler’s human-experimentation “labs” to Margaret Sanger. Those are tangible activities.

These psyops are less tangible, and as such, more insidious. What he discusses in the article is an example — and may be more destructive today and tomorrow due to its mass perniciousness — messing up millions and millions of minds. To what extent should psychology, neurology and social science self-police this? If they fail to, and so far they are, to what extent should these sciences be policed from the outside? By whom, with what qualifications?

Regulations: These issues cross state and international communications and commerce lines, and have obvious effects on the “general welfare” of the people, as well as Fourth Amendment privacy protection and constitutional separation of powers. As such, federal-level regulation of commercial and even media psyops can be constitutionally justifiable. [It’s harder when the media psyops are jointly run with federal help.] A weak argument can be made that psyops constitute free speech and press, assuming you believe mental abuse and manipulation are protected by the First Amendment. You tell me!

Regardless, it’s clear that some form of regulation may be on the way. Could distant, detached, faceless, suit-and-tie DC bureaucrats, almost certainly ignorant of both the technology and the science behind psyops, make the problem worse via good intentions, as has been the case with so many other issues?

Times are changing, and our world is getting more dangerous psychologically even as it may be getting safer from tangible, physical violence. However, what the “world is getting safer” heads-in-sand conveniently ignore is the intangible: psychological danger, clearly on the increase in systematic ways.

Scattershooting 171220

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Scattershooting while wondering what happened to honor, courage and integrity as virtues to aspire…

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STUPID, COMPLICATED, WOEFULLY INSUFFICIENT NEW TAX BILL:
The new tax bill does a few good things (such as repeal the horrid Obamacare mandate), but in sum total, is a massive waste of time and taxpayer money. Now, for me personally, it’s a wash. However, unlike most of the electorate, I don’t vote selfishly on what’s best for me, but on what’s best for the country — and I didn’t support this Rube Goldberg mess of a bill. It falls far, far, far short of true tax reform! Instead it’s a half-baked (or less) kluge that’s bad for the nation: maintains extreme complexity of tax code and returns, is not a flat tax, doesn’t fit onto a postcard, is full or pork, and worst of all, adds to horrendous looming crisis of our national debt. Yes, absolutely and without reservation, I am letting the (nearly) perfect be the enemy of the good. Damn right I am, especially since this isn’t very good at all. I actually have a backbone, and ideals. Too bad our RINOs and faux-libertarians in Congress don’t. Forget the boring, old, hackneyed, outdated, repetitive, “steals from poor to give to wealthy” liberal company line. Go grow up and come up with something interesting and original for once, leftist parrots. You’re even more out-of-touch than the RINOs are.

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ALABAMA SENATE RACE and ANTIQUATED TWO-PARTY SYSTEM: If I lived in Alabama I would have abstained or written in a third party option for their Senate election to fill a two-year end-of-term. What a wretched choice they had between a creep (and possible criminal) vs. an endorser of infanticide of the unborn and other destructive leftist policy. This (aside from complex tax-code bullcrap noted above) is what the horrendously outdated and Constitutionally unjustifiable two-party system yields — a choice of bad choices. It’s much akin to last November nationwide, when voters largely chose between an imbecilic and immoral faux-conservative buffoon on one side, and a corrupt, cutthroat, immoral neoliberal criminal on the other.

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A RECENT EXPERIENCE with HOME AWAY CUSTOMER SERVICE: In trying to get overdue information to access a vacation rental, I called customer service for HomeAway, a major company (owned by Expedia) dealing in that sort of thing. My interaction is summarized by the survey results I filled out after completing the third call. The survey questions were worded as if there only were one call, but I had to make three. This is but a sympton of a larger problem with outsourcing and hiring. See this screen capture of my response. Has political correctness gone so far that supposedly English-speaking “customer service” outlets feel they must hire people who are essentially incomprehensible?


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CHINESE OPPRESSION/TORTURE of ITS OWN — AND NOTHING BEING DONE ABOUT IT: Communist red China is setting the horrid example for other nations to follow in using the domestic-spying technological surveillance state (increasingly including artificial intelligence, AI) as a tool of Orwellian mass authoritarian oppression: elimination of privacy, overt and passive-aggressive censorship, blackmail, torture, imprisonment without trial, and killing, on massive scales, especially of ethnic/religious minorities and any in the 91.5% Han majority who dare challenge authority. Yes, nearly every nation has done this since to some extent since 1950…regardless, scale matters. And as surveillance cameras and AI become more common worldwide, more shall follow. Meanwhile the U.S. and other nations are passively ignoring and sticking heads in sand, as China terrorizes its own people in this manner. Why? For one, don’t think for a minute the domestic deep state — NSA, CIA and FBI power-that-be — and their counterparts elsewhere in Five Eyes, as well as Russia and especially Islamic nations, aren’t envious of this ability to technologically control and manipulate the people. For two, money talks. As of June, China held $1.15 trillion of U.S. debt, plenty enough to demolish the economy, easily, at the whim of instantly calling in said debt — in effect, unspoken blackmail of one nation over another. And we have sat idly by and let them do so…

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JERUSALEM IS THE RIGHTFUL CAPITAL of JUDEA (ISRAEL)!: Where two sovereign nations agree to put an embassy is nobody else’s business. The U.N. needs to STFU and butt out. The courageous and correct resolution veto sends exactly that message. This veto is absolutely warranted. Every other Council nation is wrong on this. Jerusalem is the rightful capital of the Jewish people, and of Judea/Israel, and has been for thousands of years. I stand by Israel firmly, unequivocally and without apology. This is nonpartisan! Readers of this BLOG know I have been a huge critic of Trump in many ways, but when his administration does do something right, I will support that. Finally obeying the law passed by a bipartisan Congress, and signed in 1992, is simply the right thing to do. Nikki Haley is spot on in her words here, as was Edmund Muskie of the Carter Administration in 1980 under similar circumstances. More details in this link…

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END of BLOG YEAR: This is my last entry for 2017, much to the relief of leftists and freedom-haters (redundant terms, I realize) everywhere. Regardless, I love even my left-wing friends…it just sometimes has to be tough love. For all: Have a joyous and blessed Christmas and new year!