There are dangerous, highly infectious variants of covid out there. Despite some progress, we’re not out of the epidemiological woods yet. People who refuse the covid vaccination because of their willingness to believe absurd anti-vax fairy tales–vaccines will “change your DNA”, vaccines will “interfere with your pregnancy”, vaccines will “make you ill”, vaccines will “magnetize” (!) you–are endangering lives. People will die as a result of these lies.
But there are those who are essentially too lazy, too uninformed to get the vaccine. Youngest adults are least likely to be vaccinated, and their interest in shots is declining, CDC finds. Yet the danger of covid is still quite alive! …It’s very simple. Whatever native, innate intelligence these kids have is woefully eroded by the mind-numbing of social media, by the hypnosis of Instagram and Facebook and SnapChat et al, and of course young people, on average, were never known for doing extensive research (yes I know about the exceptions), nor for thinking deeply about consequences. If they were doing their due diligence on this health crisis they would know that serious covid is on the rise among young people and they would know that NO, the pandemic is not over, we’re just making SOME gains–we’re making those gains because of…that’s right…VACCINATIONS. You know, the vaccinations the young people are stupidly not getting.
Anyone not bothering or refusing the vaccine is endangering lives. Not just their own.
https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/24/tech/laser-cloud-seeding-mci/index.html Using lasers for weather control. Might work to some extent. “Professor Wolf reckons lasers could be used to “repair” the weather, reducing the occurrence of hurricanes, thunderstorms, flooding, and drought….How does laser actually affect the weather?…It can create new clouds where there are none, by inducing condensation: naturally occurring water vapor is condensed into droplets, and ice crystals form, mimicking the natural process that creates clouds.” – that’s just one example. It can induce lightning and other effects.
The above article is from 2015, but the general idea is very relevant to 2021. Consider the “heat dome” which is now cranking up temperatures west of the Rockies, and in the Southwest, to crazy heights.
You’ll be feeling it, alright. It’s going to get ugly. Elderly or health-compromised without air conditioning may die, in this situation. Doctors are warning of serious burns from concrete and asphalt heat. The terrible drought in the west will be aggravated, making out of control wildfires an inevitability. Don’t leave your dog outside very long, in this weather, it’s liable to die.
The nature of the dome suggests the need for weather control of some kind. (Cue frightened shrieks from Qanon and other fringe paranoia-spawners). Note the part about the dome being held in place by high pressure systems above. Could some orbital or high altitude use of particle beams or lasers “puncture” such a high-pressure cap? Could they cause it to become unstable through heating or other effects and make it shift away? It’d be like puncturing a blister. If I do a sequel to my novel Stormland, it’ll be in there. . .
The spiders, it was later realized, were not reacting to flooding, they were warning of the invasion coming on the subspace webs…Recently, in real life, it was discovered that, like bees, spiders in colonies can communicate in simple ways. So, they’ve been talking and talking and showing…but we don’t listen. “Oh certainly, we are sometimes adversaries, but we have no wish to see our planet fall to an invasive species. These invaders, as we well remember from 65 million years ago, can spread amongst us quite quickly. Only the willingness of the dinosaurs to sacrifice themselves to the fight kept the things in check. We had some of the surviving invaders wrapped in webs–for in those days we were each bigger than kangaroos–and they went dormant, deep underground. But now they stir, sensing their fellows arriving…Hey, Seven-Leg, dude, they’re not listening…perhaps we should just spread out and eat them, at least that way…oh, okay, private council…”
I am going to hope I’m forgiven by the New York Times for just flat-out pasting in their review, here, of a very significant book by Nathaniel Rich which ‘presents humanity’s war against nature in vivid detail, with nature nearly defeated. “It was a costly victory, however,” he writes. “The prize was civilizational collapse.”’
(reviewed by) Dahr Jamail
SECOND NATURE
Scenes From a World Remade
By Nathaniel Rich
On average, an American man puts 85 man-made chemicals into his body every day, while an American woman takes in nearly twice that amount.
Rich tourists pay top dollar for disaster tours to gawk at New Orleans’s Katrina-devastated Lower Ninth Ward, where the people who have remained struggle to survive.
In Aspen, Colo., dogs fly in private jets to “Billionaire Mountain” to join their owners in multimillion-dollar homes for two weeks of the year.
Cattle exposed to DuPont’s toxic chemicals drool uncontrollably and birth stillborn calves. Their teeth turn black, and blood gushes from their noses, mouths and rectums. When they are cut open, they are found to be filled with giant tumors, collapsed veins and green muscles.
A genetically engineered rabbit in France glows green. Meat made from cells harvested from an unborn sheep is being grown in a lab. There is an artist who has undergone multiple surgeries to grow a human ear on his forearm, and a life-size human ear grown from cow cartilage cells has been implanted on the back of a lab mouse.
Biotech is being used to bring back extinct species, despite the fact it is unable to achieve perfect replication, setting the stage for mutated versions of passenger pigeons or woolly mammoths. “We would go exactly as far as the technology allowed, and strain to go further,” Nathaniel Rich proclaims in “Second Nature,” a book chock-full of scenes such as these, an unwavering look at our increasingly dystopian world.
Rich presents humanity’s war against nature in vivid detail, with nature nearly defeated. “It was a costly victory, however,” he writes. “The prize was civilizational collapse.”
Flowing and deeply researched prose paints scene after scene of the ubiquitous entropy that is gaining momentum.
As devastating as the darkness is, however, Rich illuminates those acting on behalf of life itself. The lawyer representing the cattle farmer against DuPont revealed how many of those same chemicals are in all of us, and in 2018 filed a class-action lawsuit against DuPont and two other companies on behalf of every person in the country who had been exposed.
Uninhabited areas of the Lower Ninth Ward are now populated with rabbits, egrets, pelicans, hawks, possum, coyotes, owls, falcons and alligators as nature wastes no time reasserting itself.
A Japanese scientist studying a strange species known as the “immortal jellyfish,” whose life cycle reverses just as it seems to near its end, reminds us that learning to love nature is mandatory for our evolution as humans.
Rich offers all this while also never taking his gaze off the accelerating climate crisis. NASA has warned, as my own research has shown, that Arctic permafrost soil contains 1,400 to 1,850 gigatons of organic carbon, most of it located in the top 10 feet of quickly thawing soil. This layer is melting at least 70 years ahead of what were thought to be worst-case scenarios, rapidly releasing this carbon to join the 850 gigatons already in the atmosphere.
Humans living in our industrial age tend to resist information deleterious to their continued “progress,” yet Rich manages to fluently and empathetically depict in a digestible way the predicament in which we now find ourselves. The weight of the book is carried by deeply humanistic and nuanced stories of those whose lives have been devastated and those fighting for justice on their behalf, alongside those playing God with nature via biotechnology and chemistry.
In “Second Nature,” Rich articulately, sometimes even brutally, evinces how the onus is upon all of us to respond morally while simultaneously living with a reality that Dr. Frankenstein knew quite well: A monster set loose becomes a threat to our own existence.
Dahr Jamail is the author of “The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption,” a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award in 2020.
SECOND NATURE Scenes From a World Remade By Nathaniel Rich 288 pp. MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
I just cannot bear libertarianism. I could tolerate it better if we weren’t in an ecological emergency, on several levels–not just climate change–and libertarians are anti-regulatory weasels. And they use “statist” as an insult. As if a libertarian society would not be a state. A “state” as applied to a nation does not imply any particular governmental style, you ignorant putz. The society could be communist, libertarian, anarcho-syndicalist, as laissez faire as you like and as long as you have borders and any government whatsoever it’s still a state.
Libertarians are amazingly unaware of the inherent irony of libertarianism: they’re against people controlling them but if they don’t regulate industry and big biz and etc then power devolves to whoever has the money and they USE that power and they become “centrist” with them at the center: government by oligarchy. A monarchy of money.
‘Political conservatives are more likely to believe untrue news reports than liberals are, researchers reported Wednesday.It’s the latest in a series of studies that show people on the political right tend to not only be targeted by fake news, but to believe it’s correct...
Conservatives were a little less likely to believe stories that were actually true, the researchers found. “It’s tempting to try and read this as evidence that conservatives are more biased or somehow psychologically predisposed to misperceptions. We can’t say that,” Garrett said.It might be that conservatives are being targeted more. “We have evidence the media environment is shaping peoples’ misperceptions,” he added. “Our data suggests that the composition of the media environment is playing a great role now.”‘
