I am facing the situation where I may or may not have had Covid-19 and may or may not be safe for other people to be around and I'm faced with the situation of another family member who needs care, cannot get it and, again, may or may not have it now. Someone has to take care of her and I'm the only one in my generation who has no children or grandchildren in my family and who is in relatively good health and, frankly, with more experience in doing it than my other siblings. The resource that gay uncles have been to many families is too little appreciated.
By the end of today the choice to step in will be forced by circumstances. The hospitals even here are are on the point of being overwhelmed and all of that reassuring talk about the test being available is, frankly, not true, even now. I would bet you my bank account that someone in the Trump-Kushner families, the families of his appointees, big donors to Republican-fascism were planning on profiteering off of an "American test".
One of my sisters is sewing masks so I'll probably have a couple that can be washed. I've asked for one with tie-strings and not elastic. I don't trust elastic. Thank heavens another sister had a ton of disused flannel sheets she was hoarding.
This is a situation that more and more people are going to find themselves in. This is the real-life, wide-awake thing that was the dream of small-government, libertarian, neo-confederate, free market fantasists promoted in the free press, the cabloid media, from the neo-Confederate fantasist Ted Turner, the opportunistic hustlers in 'opinion journalism' and the never ending downward spiral of right wing ideology right down to the levels of the ass kissers of the Prince of Liars in the Murdoch and Sinclair outfits.
We got here through lies freely permitted, so privileged, by the libertarian liberalism of the Warren Court and subsequent courts dominated by Republican fascists subsequently enabled by that fatally naive and wrongheaded conception of freedom.
Lies are a denial of reality at their least bad, at worst they are a conscious replacement of reality with falsehoods constructed to benefit the liars. Anyone who could have ever conceived of "freedom" or rights that encompassed the permission of lies to be told in the mass media fed to Americans, hours a day, day after day, year after year, has no right to be surprised at how bad this has gotten, especially those in such professions as the law which, at least in some instances, is alleged to be a search for truth with the goal of producing justice. This crisis is a result of many kinds of lies, from a denial of the sciences dealing with how infectious diseases arise and develop in the meat and egg industries and what happens once such diseases pass into humans and become transmissible from human to human. But that is only the primary level of lies that have made it spread around the world and to have reached the levels it has now in the United States. Some of the most dangerous are the lies that make us retain the anti-democratic features of the Constitution such as the Electoral College, the lies that permit the media to lie some of the worst people in our history into the presidency, the Senate, the House and on to the courts, the lies spread in social media which is like a brain-eating social syphilis that has gone well past the stage of producing the equivalent of dementia in a dangerous percentage of the population.
We were lied into this crisis, the lies are continuing to make it worse. If whoever is left after this does not see the role that lies play in bringing us to disaster, lies permitted, enabled and, yes, ENCOURAGED by the judicial and legal dogmas that have had full reign in this country for more than a century and which will always be a danger, this and worse will happen over and over again. And if we cannot pull out of it no one should be surprised when it comes back, worse, or when the next one comes.
And it's going to come:
It’s easy for those of us in the Western world to shake our heads at the live wildlife markets in China that appear to be the origin of the coronavirus pandemic now paralyzing the globe. Easy, that is, since such a practice is so literally quite foreign to us. (In their defense, at least, China has now banned such markets.)
But what’s more difficult is to be honest with ourselves about what kinds of pandemics we may be brewing through own risky animal-use practices. And while the new coronavirus, crippling as it is, might have a somewhat merciful case fatality rate (proportion of those infected who die) of less than 1 percent, we know that this catastrophe may be just a dress rehearsal for an even more serious pandemic that could take a more gruesome toll—akin to the 1918 global flu pandemic, which originated in Kansas and killed at least 50 million people.
When that day comes, it’s very likely that such a virus will also have its origin in humanity’s seemingly insatiable desire to eat animals, whether wild or domestic. The conditions in which we often farm animals today—crowding tens of thousands of animals wing-to-wing or snout-to-snout—serve as “amplifiers” for viral pandemics.
Indeed, the H1N1 swine flu outbreak of 2009 appears to have originated in a pig confinement operation in North Carolina. And while the H5N1 bird flu outbreak in 1997 evidently originated in Chinese chicken farms (case fatality rate 60 percent), a similar bird flu in the U.S. just five years ago led American poultry farmers to kill tens of millions of their birds to contain the outbreak, which thankfully never made the jump into the human population. And at this very moment, both India and China have announced bird flu outbreaks among their chicken factories. Similarly, these are not yet affecting human health.
I can guarantee you that the American media will never promote the truth that this kind of pandemic can come out of any state of the United States that has a meat or egg industry and the fact is all of them do. To do so would bad for the thing the thing they care about most, their profits. That is more important to them than telling the hard truth about even the most dangerous of things, to that extent, they are almost all FOX and Sinclaire.
The title of the article says "few people think about" this and I think one of the biggest reasons for that is the influence of the meat industry, the farm lobby on both the governments of quasi and alleged democracies. There have been bills being passed in legislatures and provincial governments making it illegal for people to report on the conditions in industrial farm operations, which, I have no doubt, the very courts who are all "free speech-free press" when it benefit the wealthy and the political parties that favor them will find some language to allow. That kind of moral degeneracy in the courts has been promoted by both conservatives and so-called liberals. Though the liberals are generally either of the libertarian-18th century variety or those cowed by the promiscuous recitation of the slogans and buzz-words of the civil liberties industry.
A cover-up is a lie by a different means, it accomplishes the same thing. It has the same deadly potential.
The human population is not going to become vegan so we can be certain that this is something that will come back, over and over again. Allowing lies to swamp the truth, as lies inevitably will, is a mass delusion of those with college credentials. It makes most of the stuff from the medieval scholastic intellectuals that moderns love to mock look like harmless folly by comparison.
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