Right To Left

So, everybody getting sick and dying as Covid-19 spreads its way around the world is just making it all up, and it's all just a hoax so Gates can pull off his global reset plans?

Sure it's posturing. Does that make it okay then? The gradual adoption of liberal, woke rhetoric and buzzwords by the new breed of managers in the CIA and the growing realization that young, woke liberals have no reason to fear getting drafted and sent off to a foreign war anymore, means that war, imperialist policies and foreign policy in general, is off the table for centrist posers calling themselves 'the left' today. But, make no mistake about it! For any American liberals whose hopes are just slight advances in wages and a public healthcare system; these goodies cannot be paid for by an increasingly indebted nation that has depended on stealing the wealth of resentful poorer nations of the global south.

Okay Mr. Lomborg, you can't fool anyone anymore with your "climate is always changing" storyline. Fact remains that regardless of excuses based on recent past climate conditions, we haven't had atmospheric CO2 levels anywhere near the present 420 ppm since before the Pleistocene started 2.5 million years ago. So it's a brand new world, since earth's climate hasn't adapted to the recent carbonizing of the atmosphere we've done, let alone adapt to what we end up with 50 or 100 years from now! And how many times in the past has Not Being Worried been the greatest problem and the cause of a society's breakdown and collapse?

And who said I'm arguing with people who say climate change is fake? That's who you are arguing with! I barely give deniers any attention unless they come at me these days. Because if they can't see the evidence of shrinking natural habitats, species extinctions, and ocean die-offs, they can't be reasoned with anyway..... at least not until their houses are on fire! * years ago, our most popular and common fish - cod and salmon are almost unaffordable and extremely rare today. What more evidence do we need, than dwindling numbers of the fish that were so abundant 500 years ago, that John Cabot thought his ship was running aground when they crashed into a large, dense school of cod fish! Evidence is available all around us today, unless we are deliberately looking away and pretending it doesn't exist. Now, as for your objections to my take on the climate issue, it's because you good liberal woke greenies who think we can save the environment and save capitalism at the same time. That's a more difficult argument to present, since both sides with money in the debate don't want it up for consideration...for obvious reasons! And this green tech and green innovation story of solving global warming I believe, is the most dangerous fantasy today...not the deniers! Because the fantasy you and other good liberals share, will just waste precious time and resources polluting the planet with the residues of extracting rare earth minerals for all of these nice, new, clean, green devices! More than 100 years ago now, the Austrian philosopher - Rudolph Steiner, stated that It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism… Those words have never been more true than they are today! Now that we have a political/economic system that rewards and elevates the most sociopathic, reckless and shortsighted people in society! Too many people (you included) think they got all the answers....whether the subject is covid or climate change or foreign wars (take your pick). My politics started radically shifting 20 years ago after I became aware that climate change was real and also that there was no way to resolve climate destruction with an economic system that cannot function unless it can keep growing and expanding continuously. So, I've got a lot of moles to whack, because I realized right from the start, that I was on a side that is marginalized and unfunded by corporate and political benefactors. For supporting evidence of our dismal future prospects, I have a few mostly retired scientists and analysts, who paid the price for refusing to be bought off by corporate interests.

Yes, but that shows that the left you are referring to here, is not even close to a real left that is developing in the shadows of a failing system that is about to collapse, with or without help from real leftists who will have to try to build socialist communities from the ashes of this decrepit system, or face some kind of common extinction! The institutions you refer to as 'left' above, are organizations like the World Economic Forum, where the real rulers of this world gather together in Switzerland (except during pandemic interruptions) and plot out how to maintain control of everything and receive maximum profits for it. These are hardly leftists, but merely dishonest operatives who skillfully use language to cause people to believe things that are untrue. A nice quick example appeared on my Twitter timeline early this morning from a favorite account - Aisha Ahmad - a Pakistani lawyer working on her Phd while attending Oxford University, regarding this bizarre CIA recruitment commercial: If it doesn't show, the text of the CIA commercial are: "I am a woman of color" "I am a cisgender millennial" "I have been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder" "I am intersectional" Aisha Ahmad has another Twitter thread asking followers whether the following quote is from AOC or the CIA. Each one is tough to guess! And that should tell you a thing or two about how easily ruling classes coopt language and use it to coopt the AOC's and other either fake or unprincipled posers pretending to be 'left.' For one thing, anyone really on the left is by default Anti-War! And that's why the CIA and other three letter Pentagon agencies are so bent on coopting their language....just as they coopt the language of the right.....which they have completely in their hip pocket anyway!

If you bothered reading this or any other post I've written, you would already be aware that I am not with Gates Foundation or other billionaire dogooders, who want to save the world and make a shitload of money while they're at it! How many die from these vaccines....any of them? vs how many die from Covid-19? It takes a pretty high level of stupidity and trust in the intelligence and abilities of our political and corporate leaders to believe in a conspiracy theory that global political and business leaders can turn pandemics on and off like a light switch! And are bent on forcing you to have a vaccine!

You know very well that there are more than two sides here! Not every issue....likely most issues, don't fit within the continually shrinking liberal vs conservative Overton window. * on that; I am with the "extreme" environmentalists who demand that total lifecycle carbon footprints be accounted for with ALL energy systems, and proposed "clean" energy "solutions." So, yes the green tech alternatives like windmills, solar panels, lithium batteries etc., all come with high initial toxic effects on the environment because they are relying on rare earth minerals we've been hearing so much about in the news lately. I can't accept "science" that has become less and less credible over time, like the correlations with sunspot activity and "Maunder Minimum," which used to be tossed up all the time to explain climate change, but whose explanatory power recedes as temps keep warming during years when sunspot activity is very low! Simple fact is that these may have been plausible explanations in 1900, when CO2 levels were still below 300 ppm. But with latest readings at Manua Loa hitting 420 (albeit we are at about the annual carbon maximum), explanations that worked during times when there was much less GHG's in the atmosphere are no longer sufficient. Even worse, the full affects of our 400+ world will not fully be realized for centuries....even if CO2 increases stopped right now! Based on past times of global warming, when the Arctic Ice Cap melted and even most of the Antarctic except for the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, have not been fully felt by the Earth's climate cycles........yet! The rate of sea level rise itself is accelerating. That should put those 3 mm numbers.....wherever you got them from, don't account for an exponential increase, nor does it tell us which ocean is being measured. Because sea levels vary around the world, and so does their rise and fall! New study finds sea level rise accelerating

First off, just in case, I wasn't intending for my post to sound offensive. But the main advocates of invoking the "too many people" arguments on environment crises, resource and energy shortages etc., comes from the population reduction lobby who don't factor in that some....like the average American, use many times as much energy as the majority of people in the world, including growing capitalist states copying our bad examples like Brazil, India and China. The most recent offenders have been the green capitalists, who starting with Al Gore, have moved governments and media to focus on rising carbon emissions as personal failings, rather than failures of government...especially corporate-controlled government policy. As for "Our population globally is still expanding," that is only true globally, in the sense that it takes time for falling birth rates (yes, birth rates are falling everywhere in the world!) And this was happening before 2020 - our year of glorious Covid! Even in the US, birth rates are falling! Not quite as bad as Canada's now Japan-like collapse in birth rates, but also below replacement rate of population. And so, to balance bad demographics, our immigration policies are used to steal people from other countries; some of which, like Ukraine, are in a steeper decline also. Nevertheless, by the end of this century, the declining birth rates globally will mean that world population will fall, instead of grow, in the next century....if we have a next century! One of the reasons why birth rates are in decline in the west and in rapidly industrializing third world nations, is believed to be partly because of pollution and environmental toxins, like the plastic residue - phthalates....which have become ubiquitous all over the planet...especially in the oceans, but found everywhere...even Antarctica! So, as of now, the continent of Africa is the only one with a growing population, that is projected to keep growing until the end of the century. So, as long as we are run by capitalist economics, we will not handle bad demographics very well.... just ask Japan! If we had socialist economies, producing essential and necessary products first, instead of luxuries...especially for the rich who have too much money to spend, then maybe we would be able to deal with all of the crises coming at us in the 21st century. But, as long as we run with fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants capitalism, everything will just keep building until it all blows up at some point in the future!

BLM's regional chapters are all independent and don't answer to a central authority. But, the founders of the Movement For Black Lives: Patrice Cullours, Alecia Garza and..........I'm forgetting the third now, have had generous corporate and foundation grants dumped over them, and no doubt the donors intended for them to reign in radicals all across America and just run a more limited operation, doing protests and marches and maybe making up a DSA committee or something. But, with everything going on, nobody can control what's going to happen on the streets, and that makes a lot of businessmen who want wave BLM banners and claim a show of support nervous, because they want a nice, respectable BLM movement that won't break windows, throw stuff at CNN reporters and cameras etc..

So what does that prove! Prior to the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster, BP was running an ad campaign calling itself "Beyond Petroleum." And then they doubled down on the crude because major banks and hedge funders were telling them that there wasn't enough money in putting solar panels on the roof. I've heard Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt) talk about masters of disaster she wrote about in her book on rightwing scientists, and yes, many of them appear to be more motivated by ideology than money! The first line of global warming deniers began as deniers for the tobacco industry, helping them with their claims that there was no connection between second hand smoke and lung cancer......until the cig makers decided their position was untenable and started settling the class action lawsuits! Most of the climate changing believin greens are not alarmists, but I am! And I think the scientists who veer towards the less lucrative alarmist edge have more legitimacy, because their longstanding claims that Co2 levels, global average temperature and sea levels are rising exponentially, keeps gathering more and more supporting evidence every year. The problem is that actually doing something about the crisis can't be accommodated with business as usual capitalism! And even green libs just want a modified constant growth capitalism, not the end of it, like I believe has to be done!

1. India has never had a nationwide lockdown policy, and the lockdowns that have occurred have been by state governments, with the federal - Modi Government opposing them...saying they are over-reacting (just like deniers over here). Uncannily similar to Trump's America and the Bolsonaro response in Brazil, which has just topped 400,000. 2. India has a younger population than Canada or the US, and a much warmer climate. So, Modi assumed that because of the relatively low infection and death numbers at the start of the pandemic, they were home-free, until their superspreader political rallies and religious festivals in March got started! 3. Okay, why not Sweden then! Since you're always on Worldometer, I dare you to look up the current Swedish numbers and compare them to similar Scandinavian neighbors like Norway, Finland and Denmark. Norway even closed their borders with Sweden because of their growing infection rates last year. According to the Covid-19 dashboard kept up by Johns Hopkins University, both Norway and Finland have less than 1000 dying from Covid-19, Denmark 2,500. while Sweden has over 14,000 dead. Yet for some reason, Sweden is the go-to example rightwingers and libertarian anarchists cite, along with Texas and Florida, as proof that lockdowns and closures don't work. That's why they want an apples and oranges set of comparisons.

While deniers grab for the most dubious claims made by disingenuous self-proclaimed experts who take money from energy companies and other sources who figured out quickly that serious efforts to prevent climate change, and even the half-assed measures our governments have been willing to do in recent times, will hurt the profit numbers of big oil and allied industries who want cheap energy while paying no consequences for the environmental impacts. Back 15 or so years ago, the so called 'skeptics' like Anthony Watts were claiming that sea levels weren't really rising because of some sea level gauges along the coast of Australia, were found to be slowly sinking over time......or some bullshit! But, there's always a fallback position, and now it's 7 inches per century. Unless sea level rise is accelerating, like CO2 levels and average temperatures. Then, there might be a case to be made that we can expect sea levels to rise faster and higher than the most alarming projections 25 or 30 years ago, when Al Gore was in full swing! And when was the last time sea levels went down? Current sea level rise is after all not exaggerated, in fact the opposite case is more plausible. Observational data and changing conditions in such places as Greenland suggest if there's a real problem here it's underestimation of future sea level rise. IPCC synthesis reports offer conservative projections of sea level increase based on assumptions about future behavior of ice sheets and glaciers, leading to estimates of sea level roughly following a linear upward trend mimicking that of recent decades. In point of fact, observed sea level rise is already above IPCC projections and strongly hints at acceleration while at the same time it appears the mass balance of continental ice envisioned by the IPCC is overly optimistic (Rahmstorf 2010 ). https://skepticalscience.com/sea-level-rise.htm

I can't be bothered anymore with these morons, who are just going to try to shout down anyone who tells them the obvious: we're in the middle of a pandemic with NO end in sight! Because little or no effort has been made in either Canada or the US to try to eradicate this new disease before it spreads through the whole country. Instead, what we get is 'we need to FLATTEN the curve.... meaning cut infection and fatality rates just enough so that hospitals aren't overcrowded and the media starts talking about other things. As for family, my in-laws teenage daughter (about 16) got sick back in February for a short time and then was released. She has been doing the zoom-chat homeschooling system ever since. Because she has apparently been caught up in the group known as Long Covid or long haul covid cases. In her case, when she first came down with flu-like symptoms before going to the hospital, the first clear covid warning sign was losing her sense of smell. That may have been an early indicator of what was to come: severe headaches (someone who never had headaches before), occasional blurred vision, losing mental focus, frequent joint pains and chest pains....I may be missing a few, but it's not going away, at least not YET after more than two months since she got sick. Now, her symptoms, however long they last, are not nearly as severe as what some people have gotten after a bout with Covid-19. And since it's estimated that one out of seven Covid-19 cases that require hospitalization become long covid sufferers, all of the clowns living in denial, and more important - those in positions of responsibility, in government, are ultimately responsible for grossly underestimating the dangers the entire world population faces...except of course for the few countries that realized that an unknown disease with unknown effects needed to be eradicated as quickly as possible, regardless of money and economic numbers! And now that even official government spokesmen are admitting that the ages of those being hospitalized along with the deaths of those struck by new Covid variants is getting younger, it would be a good time to recall that during the last global pandemic, a little over 100 years ago, the second and third waves of the misnamed "Spanish Flu" disproportionately killed young people, who may have got sick from the first outbreak, but were making up most of the deaths later, until it finally ended near the end of the year 1920! And, add on that since it was a flu outbreak, once it was over, most of the survivors, except for those with other medical conditions recovered and got on with their lives. If we end up with thousands and then millions of disabled who can no longer work or function normally, then every nation like Canada and the US that decided to just wait for vaccines to take care of the problem, will be permanently disabled as a society and culture!

Let's check in on these fans a month from now! Because many of these fans in India have caused shortages and overcrowding in hospitals across India and likewise round the clock burials and cremations now after attending these crowded annual festivals in March: India’s deadly COVID-19 surge rooted in crowded super-spreader events India’s death toll from COVID-19 has surpassed 200,000 as a virus surge sweeps the country, rooted in so-called super-spreader events that were allowed to happen in the months after India thought it had the pandemic under control. Now India is enduring its darkest chapter yet, with mass funeral pyres, burials and a collapse of the health system compounded by shortages of oxygen, ventilators, and hospital beds. Fueling the catastrophe were a series of crowded events, like mass rallies by politicians such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi, religious holidays and pilgrimages on the River Ganges, where people relaxed their vigilance and didn’t wear masks or keep their social distance. The health ministry on Wednesday reported 3,293 deaths in the last 24 hours, bringing India’s total fatalities to 201,187. The deaths and the confirmed cases of 17.9 million are thought to be undercounts. Now the surge is sending its health system toward collapse. Hospitalizations and deaths have reached record highs. Patients are suffocating because hospitals are using up their oxygen supplies. Fires at overwhelmed crematoriums are lighting up night skies. Muslim, Christian and other religious minorities who don't practice cremation, face a similar problem as the Hindu majority: India infections top 18 million as gravediggers work round the clock India has reported 147.2 deaths per million, the Reuters global COVID-19 tracker shows, while Brazil and the United States reported figures of 1,800 and 1,700 respectively. However, medical experts believe India’s true COVID-19 numbers may be five to 10 times greater than the official tally. Of course they are! Just from the numbers of deaths, burials and cremations, the real Indian Covid-19 death toll would be more like one or two million. And it's not over there yet! And, the new variants (may still be some undiscovered or unrecognized in India) will be on their way here, if the selfish 'Not My Problem' crowd wants to consider our future. These new and multiplying Covid variants will become more and more vaccine resistant, or resistant to the vaccines in use today. It will shape up as a neverending battle unless Covid-19 and future disease outbreaks are dealt with at the source......wherever that may be in the world! Any highly contagious diseases will be on our doorstep in a short time, and then it becomes all of our problem!

Then maybe you would prefer Fully Automated Luxury Communism. As envisioned by Aaron Bustani: A different kind of politics for a new kind of society--beyond work, scarcity and capitalismIn the twenty-first century, new technologies should liberate us from work. Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness—for everyone. Technological advance will reduce the value of commodities—food, healthcare and housing—towards zero.Improvements in renewable energies will make fossil fuels a thing of the past. Asteroids will be mined for essential minerals. Genetic editing and synthetic biology will prolong life, virtually eliminate disease and provide meat without animals. New horizons beckon.In Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani conjures a vision of extraordinary hope, showing how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of 9 billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology, and establish meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society merely heralds the real beginning of history. Now personally, I'm not a member of that club, which sounds like they have been inspired by the first Star Trek series of what life would be like in the 25th century. I wonder if Star Trek creator - Gene Rodenberry was a secret communist! Because the original Star Trek had no examples of money or currency exchanges of any kind...living in a world of free or at least near free energy and everything you want and need can be created in a flash in a "replicator" machine, which is programmed to build 3D copies of everything from food to tools and guns....whatever fits in the microwave oven-size replicator can be constructed by a machine that sets up all of the atoms needed to construct the materials in an instant. Who needs factories and assembly lines when you have this kind of technology! But, my own position is to be highly skeptical of all promises made about new tech and proposed innovations, because they are accompanied by often unforeseen environmental consequences or placing excessive demands on scarce exotic "rare earth" minerals, whose extraction and refinement carry large environmental costs. (this is the key problem with so called green tech like high efficiency lithium batteries, solar panels and windmills). That all depends on where you were living 500 years ago! There were few contagious diseases of any kind before the age of animal husbandry-where farmers started living in close proximity to the animals they were harvesting for meat, milk and eggs. Crowded farms, with animals and their wastes in too close proximity to people, in China and other nations of the Far East are considered one of the main reasons for annual flu outbreaks that spread around the world. And in more recent times, large rural and urban populations living in places with often contaminated water supplies is the main vector for disease spread. But back, half a millennia ago, there was a sizable gap between the life spans of peasants and the small professional and ruling classes that owned almost everything. So, in feudal times in Europe, before the bubonic plagues of the 14th and 16th centuries, the "better" classes who were considered important enough to have their births and deaths recorded in the local church registry were surprisingly close to the average today. This modernist notion that their lives were all "nasty, brutish and short" is figured by estimating and factoring in infant mortality and early childhood mortality figures, since very young children and newborns are the most vulnerable to sickness than older children and adults. So, old age may have come a little earlier to most people than today. But this notion that few if any lived past 40 is absurd! And it's worth noting that life spans shrunk most at the start of the industrial revolution in England in the late 1700's, when millions of English men and women were forced off the farms by "the closing of the commons" and lived hellish Hobbesian existence in London, Manchester and other factory towns where they had lousy food, polluted water and foul air to breathe, and maybe they were lucky to make it past their 40th birthdays, but those who live closer to nature always live better than those stuck in an artificial urban environment...even the cleaner ones we have today! Now, I got to ask what kinds of vaccines were they developing back in the 15th century? Cut to the chase, since in spite of enormous outbreaks in the tropics - Brazil and India, you still think Covid-19 can't handle being with us when it's hot outside. And if you can breathe without possibly spreading any pathogens, then you never need to wear a mask at all! But, if you're going to throw a tantrum about both simple protective gear like masks and advise against any vaccines developed also, you're a complete idiot! I'm sure you'll change your tune if you get sick and can't breathe, and want to be rushed into a hospital emergency room! And I'm not the one who's planning out rules for Covid passports and ID cards. That's where my skepticism kicks in, because I don't believe any vaccine is going to last long enough to stop the spread of this disease everywhere, so new hybrid variants will come along every few months for the extended future and the vaxxes will be like flu shots that have to be renewed when the next outbreak happens! In the meantime, I just see masks and vaccines as better than doing nothing at all, which is pretty much all the rightwing has to offer! Just let the weak get sick and die off (unless they are among the weak) and everyone else, get out there and jump-start the economy that my stock portfolio depends on!

The equator runs right through Amazonia. And two cities right on the Amazon River - Manaus and Belem- at the mouth of the Amazon Delta have been among the worst hit places in Brazil! It has a lot more to do with how government functions, how much trust people have in government officials and institutions, and how much of an effort they are willing to put into eradicating contagious diseases. And in Brazil, for all its wealth and rich business leaders in Rio and Sao Paulo, almost nothing is offered for the poor and afflicted, whom the Bolsonaro Government made no efforts to make vaccinations available. All they got is from international aid agencies. And this is the richest (but extremely unequal) nation in South America! Bolsonaro is called the southern Trump for a number of reasons, but one of them could be that they were stupid and ignorant enough to attend their own super-spreader rallies and both got sick and had to be hospitalized for Covid-19....where obviously, they got the best healthcare available to anyone in their respective nations. And also on the same page, both of these assholes are so selfish, they didn't miss a beat after they recovered, and went back to insisting everyone else just wait for herd immunity to eliminate the problem!

Yes, and just as some environment 'extremists' say climate won't negotiate with any government leaders in the world, same thing with diseases! Problem with the No Vaccine crowd is that they are also mostly the No Lockdowns, No Mask and Social Distancing Crowd too! That's why the Trump/Bolsonaro solution last year that so many rightwingers are running away from today was to do nothing, some people will die, too bad, once we have 'herd immunity' then we'll be okay! But, what we've got is a virus that does damage that is not typical of the cold and flu viruses we've experienced before. The phenomena of 'Long Covid' or 'longhaulers' who continue having body aches and other pains, inflammations, 'brain fog' or other mental and psychological impairments, seems to continue on for weeks and months afterward. If a significant number of these long covid cases have permanent disabilities, then we are looking at costs to society that will finish the job on our economies that already ballooning debt levels already started two years ago! The big flaw in the thinking of people who were trying to downplay and minimize climate change 20 years ago, was trying to peg it as a phenomena that is exactly like Planet Earth experienced many times during the past....they don't usually mention the connection with extinctions. And similarly, right from the start of Covid-19, when we were getting the news about how fast and unusual this new viral plague was as it spread in China, US leaders and other uber-capitalists were writing it off as something like a flu virus....that will pass and we can just go on as normal, with or without vaccines. Instead, we got a new plague that no disease experts have a clear idea on how far it will spread, how lethal it can become as it makes its way around the whole world. The lack of willingness of greedy capitalist leaders and corporate "innovators" like Bill Gates, to advocate change or at least temporarily suspend internationally enforced patent laws that provide the patent holders with monopolies over production and distribution, is why Covid-19 is really blowing up big right now in India, in spite of its large, relatively young population! Since the international corporate regime has been set up to distribute vaccines at huge markups in price, with no exceptions, most of the world's people will not have any vaccines unless China can ramp up production enough to cover the rest of the world. Because the US, England and the nations they control, like India - are following the directives of international corporate overlords and restricting Covid vaccines to those who can pay! And with no serious effort being made to distribute any vaccines to the rest of the world, that means we are in a permanent pandemic, that will rise and fall but remain with us over the long haul, as it mutates, shifts and changes over the coming years, unless there is a complete shutdown of all travel for a very long time. Goodbye Globalization..... I know I won't miss you!

Are you advocating genocide? How do you plan to reduce "our" population? Certainly, population numbers all over the world are reducing right now, with a pandemic and an already existing trend of declining birth rates for a whole range of possible reasons(including increasing infertility caused by increasing environmental toxins), all over the world. But, the main reason CO2 and other GHG levels are still increasing in the atmosphere is because the drive to industrialize the last 'undeveloped' mostly pastoral nations in the world, starting with China and India, but even extending into Africa now. Turning the world's population of approx. 7.8 billion people from farmers and herders mostly growing their own food, into urbanized consumers living in industrialized cities means a huge shift towards more and more people producing increasing emissions and other air and water pollution...that rarely gets discussed because of all the focus on carbon emissions. Just sayin, there are other problems, but simple people enjoying the fruits of their own labour isn't one of them.

Meanwhile, in the world's current covid hotspot - India, the *official death rate has topped 200,000 and with more sick and backlogged hospitals, and oxygen shortages, the numbers are likely to keep climbing for awhile before international attention focuses on the big flareup with new and even more deadly viral variants. *unless opposition and/or international agencies make an effort to actually give an accurate count of how many have died so far, most observers are going to be stuck with the ballpark figure of real covid death rates being 2 to 5 or even 10 times the official numbers provided by the government, because of a huge increase in uncategorized deaths. This is even worse than the fudging suspected in New York, Florida and California earlier on in the pandemic. APRIL 28, 2021COVID in India India did relatively well at the start of the pandemic, prompting the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi to claim at the beginning of March that the country was in Covid-19’s “endgame”. Today, however, the Covid situation in India, and Delhi in particular, is absolutely dire. State governments in Delhi and Mumbai are now scrambling to reconstruct the temporary Covid facilities they had decommissioned earlier, in the belief that the pandemic had been brought under control. However, in the space of just 12 days, India’s Covid infection rate doubled to 17%, reaching 30% in Delhi. Hospitals have filled to capacity, with most beds occupied by the young; in Delhi, 65% of cases are under 40 years old. Six hospitals in Delhi have run out of oxygen completely and medical authorities say other hospitals have just a few hours of supplementary oxygen supply left. A crematorium east of Delhi had to build funeral pyres in its parking lot to deal with demand. Mortuaries are at full capacity and bodies are left to decompose at home. A number of people have died while waiting for oxygen, and more than 99% of all intensive care beds are full. The New Delhi High Court has ordered the government to divert oxygen from industrial use to hospitals treating Covid patients. Indian railways said it now has special trains specifically designed to carry liquid oxygen and oxygen cylinders, named the “Oxygen Express”. Thousands of Covid beds are also being created in train carriages. India reported a global record of 349,691 new cases on Sunday April 22nd, a record increase for the fourth consecutive day, and 2,767 people dead, as the surge hit the world’s second-most populous country (India has nearly 1.4 billion people). The country’s brittle health care system is now in a state of collapse, lacking the ICU beds and supplementary oxygen needed for seriously ill patients. read the rest at Counterpunch: https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/04/28/covid-in-india/ So, who's next, as this new disease and its spinoffs ravage the whole world? Or will we be back to the closed up, isolated kind of living that occurred for years and even decades at a time, when the bubonic plague was reeking havoc throughout Europe, Asia and Africa centuries ago?

MY guess is once we've gone through under provincial government-enforced health protocols and laws once, then watched them eased off again when the health officials told us we were "flattening the curve" and the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic was behind us.............only to see almost identical restrictions come back again in the fall, when infection rates started rising.............rinse and repeat.........now we're in the "Third Wave" and at least I'm not hearing talkingheads yammering on about 'flattening the curve' again this time! Some monkeys working in high places may have figured out that this disease has become even more contagious, especially among younger people, and possibly more lethal, so now it's back into lockdown again........except it's not really a lockdown here in Ontario. The lockdown rules for stores and most workplaces are only slightly different than they were before. I'm imagining a cabinet meeting in Queens Park asking their panel of experts: how do we do as little as possible and make it look like we are accomplishing something? Like it or not, dealing with a pandemic looks a lot like dealing with any issues that require changes or major alterations to economic activity and how people move about! There are no loopholes around setting up and maintaining a 3 or 4 week real lockdown, without doing it early, when it's realized just how serious and fast-spreading the new contagion is, than to follow the examples of China, Taiwan, South Korea and New Zealand, which instituted slightly different versions of a hard lockdown without exceptions. It's when you make stupid exceptions like closing international borders and bridges to traffic (how most plebes travel), while airports are full of people traveling on international flights all over the world! Because doing a 9-11 landing all the commercial jets in a lockdown would impact the people who count to the ruling class! That's when people get pissed off and refuse to cooperate, and start thinking up or repeating a whole range of conspiracy theories about the disease being fake.....being a scam to restrict us for various reasons, and then to take a vaccine, the longer a disease outbreak goes on and little seems to change, the less people from all beliefs and backgrounds will cooperate...even if we end up with bodies lying in the streets!

We'll see what you have to say when the new hybrid strains metastasizing in India that are filling hospitals and killing off younger people and other large populations that aren't dealing with the pandemic (Brazil) make their way back to England and America! Their controls over vaccine production and distribution ensure their access to large supplies, BUT how effective will they be on new variants that are developing because these greedy bastards have shown such little interest in fighting the spread of contagious new diseases in far flung places! We'll find out in the fall that Covid-19 won't be over for anyone, anywhere! And they better get back to practicing proper public health practices during major disease outbreaks: lockdowns, screening, testing and tracing the spread of the disease through our populations. Some assholes in decision-making positions of power decided that quickly creating and selling new vaccines, along with the development of herd immunity to the infectious agents, would take care of the problem all by themselves. And that's why we've had a half-hearted almost useless strategy of dealing with Covid-19 right from the start here! In Ontario, we're in our third wave of the pandemic now and supposedly we're all in lockdown, and that's supposed to solve the problem until the vaccines arrive. But our 'lockdowns' if you can call it that, are as porous as swiss cheese! Walk into a supermarket or a Walmart, and aside from having clothing sections, furniture and appliances taped off, everything is the same as it was before the lockdown! And occasionally a low-paid part time staffer is tasked with mumbling a few quick questions as you enter the store, but even that isn't consistent. Real lockdowns would be much more intrusive and constraining, but at least after 3 or 4 weeks, the health authorities would have traced all those who likely have the disease and contained the spread. If our governments - fed and provincial had the guts to shut everything down for a few weeks, as in China, South Korea, Taiwan...even New Zealand, we would have also been able to re-open everything after a month on lockdown, with or without vaccines!

Or we will all be dead!

Well, putting our cards on the table, where I pull away from the scientific consensus is where they can be shown as being behind the curve...one of the complaints and motivators behind the anonymous *Sam Carana blogger and real life scientists such as Guy McPherson for being climate doomers is because they've been frustrated for years at growing divide between alarming new evidence and the public statements from NOAA and the annual climate summits, which make future predictions that are always behind the curve on arctic temperatures, global temperature increases, rising CO2 levels, rising sea levels etc.. So many of the changes predicted by the IPCC..which has all of the deniers who go into panic on even the most conservative predictions is that changes predicted for the end of this century, such as "blue ocean events" in the Arctic Ocean (complete summer melting of ice) is getting very close, based on the loss of Arctic ice in recent decades. Maybe it's not as quick as Sam Carana predicted 10 years ago, but it's coming our way long before 2090, even by the more recent IPCC statements. My guess would be that, although Sam Carana was doing a lot of research on 'positive feedback effects' in nature...such as how methane and CO2 releases from stored carbon locked in ice, cold water and forests and plant life, would cause a surge in warming that inspired the Clathrate Gun Hypothesis a number of years ago, as an explanation of sudden rapid glacier collapses during the Quarternary period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis But some skeptics of a rapid blue ocean event back then, like Gaia Theory creator - James Lovelock, pointed out that there are both positive and negative environmental feedback effects, and reasoned that at some point, some of those negative counter-reactions should be expected. So, as was discovered after the rapid retreat of ice between 2005 and 2010, the Northern Atlantic Ocean temperatures dropped significantly because of all of the ice passing by Greenland and Norway, and this caused a brief period of colder winters again that helped add to ice in the Far North. The long term prognosis is not good for a cold Arctic that will maintain its ice and cold environment for the many creatures living in the far north have evolved to adapt to over thousands and millions of years! Now, on the other hand, if *Sam Carana, Guy McPherson (who predicts most of us will be dead on a suddenly hot planet by 2030) are too alarmist and reaching too far, the generously funded so called skeptics who promote notions that this is all just a few little bumps along the road, and either deny any connection between rising CO2 levels( and other GHG's) and rising global average temperatures, or say temps aren't increasing enough or as much as expected, or some other bullshit reason to carry on with business as usual! These clowns are all over the map when it comes to their beliefs and their science. One fascinating oddball is Bjorn Lomborg, who as far as anyone can tell, never contends with accepted evidence of climate change or connections between rising temperatures and rising CO2 emissions, but presents a case that it's too late to do anything about it, so we just have to adapt to a changing world. Worth noting that the same oil, gas and coal-funded sites that promote denial have interviews of Lomborg and quote him extensively when it comes to his opposition to standard mitigation strategies like cutting use of carbon fuels. My beef with standard global warming narratives and the way they're presented in MSM is that carbon emissions and warming are presented as the one and only environmental crisis, at a time when we are already living in a mass extinction period, according to the numbers of probable extinctions and population die-offs noticed by biologists studying a whole range of plants and animals. The first to go...as in all extinctions, are the largest animals on land and in the oceans. So, the whales are facing near term extinction because of warming, declines in sea life they feed off of and the accumulations of more and more plastic residues in the oceans. Next, elephants, rhinos, hippos, and large apex predators - lions, tigers, polar bears will go extinct in the wild in the coming decades. In times past, many of these species shrunk in size during warming events, and grew larger when the earth became colder again. But, the changes now are happening too rapidly for any creatures that are well adapted for very specific climates to deal with.

Too bad you didn't read the Canada News Media story I posted, or opened the link to read the rest of it, which tries to take a wide-angle view of Canada's vaccine and drug acquisition problems without much commentary. So, like it or not, I added my commentary! When I read this Van Exan saying:" I see red! And so should every Canadian and every citizen of Planet Earth who doesn't want to be bled dry by corporate profiteers trying to grind us down for everything we have and can earn in the future! Because, although they won't attack the system of globalization, that was presented to the public as "Free Trade" 40 years ago, and we got hammered on an almost daily basis about how and why tariffs and duties needed to be eliminated or reduced drastically. Those of us who worked in industries on both sides of the border that were declared "less competitive" found that factories owned by industrialists with itchy fingers, just waiting to outsource their operations to some non-union paradise with no or few regulations of any kind ( first Mexico and the Deep South), and plants in Canada and the "Rust Belt" states, were just left to rot, because mere dumb factory workers were demanding too much money and the owners wanted a workaround. And the nightmare never ended! As recently as the Trump Administration in the US, when the steel industry was declared 'essential for national security', mills are still poorly run, almost completely unregulated, and allowed to be sold off to foreign black market operators: https://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/ukraine-money-laundering/ Now, even though the mostly social media fights happening now between some of the bastards who run global capitalism may seem off-topic, they may be one more example of how the wheels of globalization are coming off the wagon in a time when disease has played a role in damaging supply lines and threatening operations including Big Pharma, which have assets involved in producing products scattered across several nations. So, for the first time that I can recall, the bastards that run this world are taking their personal fights out in the open. They've noticed that their real profit margins (excluding soon to be worthless central bank loans) are not growing and only under wishful thinking scenarios will meet future expectations. So, we got the CEO of Apple (whatever his name is) attacking Spock Zuckerberg, and uber-narcissist Elon is engaging in a dirty fight with richest ugly nerd in the world - Bezos. So, maybe this loose, mutually beneficial cooperative arrangement the global elites have been carrying out since the age of globalization began, and are able to keep their beefs and disputes behind closed doors, is now coming to an end! So, the only way to carve out and try to expand their fiefdoms is to go to war with each other....just like the lords of little fiefdoms of Europe back in the Middle Ages. Unless they have pushed too fast and too hard for most people not to notice, the drive towards increased generic drug production that these bastards...which include Bill Gates all of a sudden as a 'voice of reason': Bill Gates Doubles Down On Opposition To "Open Vaccine" Movement I didn't know Bill Gates had such a large stake in all this, but at a time when the COVAX system was created to supposedly get vaccines to everyone in the world, Gates has to hope that MSM brainwashing will prevent us all from learning that the US is hoarding their supplies...barely exporting 3 million doses and claiming to finally send out 60 million doses of the foreign Astra Zenica vaccine that were impounded because of questions over safety standards at a production facility near Baltimore. So, that's what Canada gets to celebrate soon. We'll be taking our chances on those AZ vaccines, and of course hope any potential risks vastly outweigh the dangers of a Covid-19 infection. While the real apprentice to the global empire - England..as the Canada News article noted, is the only other nation that appears to be allowed to hoard vaccines it produces. India, the largest drug and vaccine manufacturer is in the middle of the worst disease outbreak in the world, and yet they are forced to export vaccine shipments that are under contract to foreign drug companies! https://www.axios.com/biden-share-astrazeneca-coronavirus-vaccine-doses-233bb5b2-db11-423e-9a34-0c18a4959fec.html This is the kind of situation that causes uprisings, revolts and revolutions, and the monopolists may be sounding like they are hitting the panic button now because they know that if conditions don't vastly improve for the vast lower classes of India real soon, there will be a revolution of some kind or other that will sweep that Hindu fascist - Modi and his flag-waving grifters out of power completely and will not accept a close copy from the degraded Congress Party. "May you live in interesting times," is a rough translation of what we're told is an ancient Chinese curse. I suspect times are going to get real interesting for all of us in the coming months and years!

https://canadanewsmedia.ca/why-canada-is-at-the-mercy-of-vaccine-nationalism-during-the-covid-pandemic-national-post/ Currently, Canada has two major manufacturing facilities for vaccines, a Sanofi Pasteur facility in Toronto and a GlaxoSmithKline facility in Ste. Foy, Quebec. But both facilities have existing contracts with little spare capacity and aren’t equipped to make the leading COVID-19 candidates. You were saying? As Canada scrambles with the rest of the world to secure vaccines, one major issue has been this country’s lack of domestic production. It is an issue that will leave Canada at the mercy of vaccine nationalism until at least the end of 2021. Israel’s success as the world leader of the vaccine race appears to have been because it paid more for doses and agreed to share health data. Other countries leaving Canada behind are using vaccines from China or Russia that have not even been considered for use here. And some have approved candidates that Canada has purchased, but not yet approved. The U.K. is using the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has not yet been approved in Canada, and both Britain and the U.S. have another advantage in their plan; they manufacture vaccines on their home soil. Canada’s Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are manufactured in Europe and both have supply chains that see different components of the vaccine created in different parts of the continent before coming together in so called fill and finish facilities. When the European Union mused about imposing export restrictions they had the power to shut down Canada’s vaccine deliveries completely. Canada’s only link in the vaccine chain is as a customer for now, giving it no leverage with major companies. Meanwhile, Pfizer reduced shipments for the last month as it upgraded its Belgium manufacturing facility, but the reductions were deeper in Canada with less than half of our expected shipments arriving. Robert Van Exan, who has decades of experience in Canada’s pharmaceutical industry and is president of his own consultancy, Immunization Policy and Knowledge Translation, said for far too long the country was a hostile space for manufacturers. “A lot of companies closed down pharmaceutical manufacturing in this country, because the environment was totally toxic to them,” he said. The strikes against Canada, Van Exan said, included weaker patent protections and price controls that cut into company profit. Prior to the pandemic, the Liberal government moved to reduce pharmaceutical prices further with changes to the pricing system for patented medicines, drawing criticism from industry. The government exempted COVID vaccines from that new process, but it remains in place for other medicines. https://canadanewsmedia.ca/why-canada-is-at-the-mercy-of-vaccine-nationalism-during-the-covid-pandemic-national-post/ Well, what can I say besides Fuck You, Robert Van Exan! This and other greedy asswipes in big pharma expect to be allowed to squeeze more and more profits from the sick and desperate around the world. If you want reasons why health and medicine should not be set up for "free enterprise" profit-taking, that's it! Back when Mulroney was in power in Ottawa, he doubled the life of patents -- extended from the traditional 7 to 14 years. And now they're immortal...just like our corporations that rule over us! This is why it will be impossible to get vaccine doses to the entire world's populations, who are not going to be able to cough up enough money demanded by big pharma now! The end result is permanent, neverending pandemics that the rich will write off as afflictions of the poor, as they did throughout the middle ages in Europe, when nobody could be bothered building adequate water and waste management systems for the cities across Europe, even when the technology was available. why pay taxes so the unwashed rabble can drink clean water? I've been telling a few conservatives here, gnashing their teeth, circling menacingly, unsure of who to attack first.....condemning both big business and big government out of opposite sides of their mouths, that the conspiracy they're all looking for is hiding right in plain sight! It's not about the Chinese or Pfizer creating a covid virus to spread around the world and make everyone stay home and put on a mask and shudder - take their vaccines before they go out again... NO, the billionaires and the drug companies they control knew that at some point, a brand new, fast-spreading disease would pop up somewhere...as it has all throughout history, and now, they would have all the tools to profit from the whole world's miseries: international patent law that provides them monopolies over production and pricing of new vaccines and medicines needed to treat the new illness. Their only miscalculation is that Covid-19 has exceeded their expectations and is causing so much havoc around the world, and will continue to do so this year, that the wealth destruction that will be realized when government-backed currencies are bankrupt, because their governments can't backstop all of the debts piling up and being pushed along for future suckers to deal with! There will be spikes in inflation...whether it's recognized or not -- food prices and necessary commodities will go shooting up as more and more holders of worthless assets can't get paid back a fraction of what they are owed. There will be food shortages, famines, a breakup of those long supply chains and outsourcing will be a thing of the past finally! I'm sure the executives at Pfizer and other pharma rackets, the FAANGS, and the big banks, who will repeat the 1930's and end up as the holders of vast tracts of land and real estate, will all be in hiding, to try to avoid mobs of dispossessed to take revenge on. The richest will be in hiding, but top level employees have to run the shop. They can't all run businesses by making zoom calls with each other. At first, the future will be looking like a return to the Great Depression. And then it will start looking like the Dark Ages, as resources become more scarce and 'civilization' becomes lost, just as much of it did after the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century.