ok. 

i need to do something productive, now.

so, i'm switching back to the blog cleanup.

so, they catch the animal in the wild, put it in a cage, sell it at the market and then slaughter it in front of the customer, who takes the carcass home and eats it?

yeah. they should ban that; that's pretty barbaric. fuck.

oh, and apparently it's how this virus jumped to humans, too.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/05/asia/china-coronavirus-wildlife-consumption-ban-intl-hnk/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/health/coronavirus-washington-spread.html

https://travel.gc.ca/destinations/united-states?utm_source=united-states&utm_medium=social-twitter-travel-eng&utm_content=2020-03-06&utm_campaign=CAAupdate#health

in fact, the canadian government has quietly issued a travel warning to the united states (along with warnings to china, iran and italy), which it claims is already experiencing community spread.

and, just to solidify the point - there are now several cases in canada of people catching the case in the united states, including one in colorado and one in las vegas. 

this would seem to provide support for the hypothesis that the virus is running wild in america, right now.

https://www.clickondetroit.com/health/2020/03/06/coronavirus-latest-testing-monitoring-numbers-in-michigan/

i'll get to this when i do the reviews.

but, i spent some time around 4:00 on friday morning helping an elderly man on woodward avenue outside of the diner, and he may still be there right now, pull a cup out of his wheelchair, so he could piss in it on the side of the road.

this man appeared to be both terminally ill and chronically homeless.

and, it didn't make me sad. it made me angry. why wasn't this man in a fucking hospital? why was he asking good samaritans passing by in the middle of the night to volunteer as nurses? 

i spend a lot of time in these areas of detroit. i see the kinds of people that can't get care, and it makes me want to fucking break something.

so, i have no delusions about the delivery system in that country, and am not hesitant in my analysis at all.

zero deaths in canada, guys. zero. 0. nada. zilch. nil.

if the administration doesn't shift away from this quarantine policy soon, it's going to wake up to an actual public health emergency that it could have and should have avoided by simply following the science.

again: compare the data in the united states to the data in canada, the uk, germany, norway, denmark ...

the closest comparison to what we're seeing in the united states is in iran - a country suffering from years of devastating sanctions that specifically target the health industry.

why is that?

is it because of the hyper-capitalist nature of the system in america?

so, let's understand this properly - this is less of a health care crisis, and more of a crisis in the economic system in the united states. it's not the virus that's killing people, it's capitalism that is killing people.

it seems like the media, and the democratic party, together, are attacking trump from the right on this - they want more backwards policies that don't work, more ignorance, more stupidity....

it's like a competition to see who can be the most retarded.

what do they need to do?

1) they need to end these counter-productive quarantines, that are just facilitating the spread of the disease.

2) they need to offer free testing to anybody who wants one.

3) they need to set up some kind of system of financial support to anybody that needs to take some time off work.

the smug attitude demonstrated in this article is not helpful, especially considering that the point that they're making is actually wrong.

it is true that mutations happen all of the time, and they're not always successful. a mutation is indeed just an error in transcription. sometimes, a mutation may have a positive effect on the organism's ability to survive and reproduce (in which case we'd say the organism is evolving), and sometimes the mutation may have a negative effect, and actually harm the organism's ability to survive and reproduce. most of the time, a mutation won't make much of a difference at all.

the reason that the issue of mutation is concerning in the united states is that the health care system is inaccessible to such a large percentage of the population, which means you're going to have thousands of people catching and spreading this disease (and probably already do.) outside of the understanding of health care professionals.

the trump administration seems to think you deal with this by quarantining people. if you just stop people with the disease from moving around, you should easily stop it, right? so that's why there's only a few deaths - the quarantine is working! but this is a retarded argument that health care professionals in every other country in the world will instantly reject as anti-science. quarantining people isn't actually likely to actually work and, worse, it generates large amounts of fear. i'd have a greater fear of getting quarantined than i would of dying of this, so if i thought i was going to end up quarantined, i'd avoid going to the doctor. so, what health care professionals everywhere else in the world will tell you is that you want to strenuously avoid policies that promote quarantine (except as an absolute last resort, with an extremely potent virus - which is not this.) because it just acts as a disincentive to get tested, which just spreads the virus even more. the argument you're hearing from the administration on this is completely backwards; the policy of quarantining is just another reason to think that the number of cases is likely dramatically under-reported, and is even probably one of the causes of that under-reporting. 

so, how do you deal with this? what you want to do is make it as easy as possible to get tested, and ensure that the disruption to people's lives is as little as possible. you want incentives to come to the hospital to get treated, not incentives to stay at home or go to work and let the thing run out of control.

how often do flu viruses mutate into different strains? well, why do you think you need a new shot every year? and, why do you keep getting it, even after your immune system has defeated it? so, the answer is fairly often - often enough that you have to keep taking flu shots.

we don't have data on how fast this thing is going to mutate, and that's really the mistake the article is making. if the inaccessibility of the american health care system means it ends up circulating in the population like the flu and ends up mutating at about the same rate as the flu (a rough guess, based on nothing.), then we could very well see the country act as an incubation area, and be in a situation where the rest of the world is playing catch up to these different strains that keep mutating in the american workforce, because it can't get access to basic care.

and, that is a real concern to look at it - regardless of how this smug article from the msm frames the issue.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/07/health/coronavirus-mutations-analysis/index.html

the political spectrum in the united states is just beyond absurd.

so, apparently, having a basic understanding of statistics, and insisting on following data and science, means you must be a republican, nowadays. democrats, on the other hand, insist on anti-science hysteria and conspiracy theories. talk about a party reversal.

no, i'm not actually a republican - i'm a communist. you don't listen.

but, if you want to understand my comments about the coronavirus and fear of it being used to take away people's rights, the text you want to start with was written by the most vicious right-winger of them all, naomi klein, and is called the shock doctrine.

and, what i'm actually calling on is for the forces of the left to flip the situation over, and use the coronavirus as a shock doctrine to increase coverage and reduce costs.

....and then the heat turns on, as soon as i posted about it.

fucking cops....

so, i was about to get going this afternoon when i crashed hard for about 12 hours or so. am i up? i don't know. i feel oozy, still.

it's gotten very cold in here, all of a sudden, it feels like it's well below 20. but, like, i don't even want to get out of bed to check. the cold air tends to make me bedridden because i don't want to get out of the blanket. it almost feels like there's an air conditioner running, which would be pretty depressing. i fucking hate air conditioners....they should be banned, outright. everywhere...

i'm kind of stuck. the heaters make the air brutally dry in here, which i don't like.....but i can't stand the cold air, either.

i'm going to make some eggs, i think. finish those dishes. i can get the temperature up in here that way. 

but, what does the thermometer say?

19 degrees. yeah. i'm going to have to send an email...

this is such an absurd, cynical, backwards position.

if there's a lesson to be learned from this, it's how far behind we are in transitioning off of carbon, and how much work we have to do, quickly, to get off of it.

is our infrastructure reliant on oil? yes. would another 1973 create a lot of problems? yes. does that mean we should increase our reliance on the thing that's causing all of these problems? no. of course not. that's fucking ridiculous.

what it means is that we have a lot of work to do in converting the infrastructure, and we should be pushing the state to do it.

https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/corbella-why-im-hoping-the-railway-blockades-drag-on-a-few-more-months