When Reality Imitates Art

When Reality Imitates Art

While the pandemic has left many with a bleak perspective on the future, scientists recently discovered that fans of movies and series like “Contagion” or “The Walking Dead” are having an easier time coping with the new realities, New York Post reported.

In a new study, lead author Coltan Scrivner and his team surveyed more than 300 people about the types of movies they like to watch. They then asked them about their experiences during the pandemic and how they coped.

Their findings showed that people who occasionally saw a horror film or an end-of-the-world movie were less upset about the current crisis, while those who enjoyed “prepper movies” – movies in which society crumbles – were more resilient during a calamity.

Scrivner told the Guardian that movies about pandemics – like “Contagion” – make people more familiar with quarantines, supply shortages and dubious information about miracle cures.

“You’ve seen it a hundred times in the movies, so it doesn’t catch you off-guard so much,” said Scrivner.

China: Genocide By IUD

CHINA

Genocide By IUD

China is sterilizing hundreds of thousands of Uighur women to reduce its Muslim population even as it is encouraging women of the Han majority to bear more children, an Associated Press investigation found.

Officials have subjected hundreds of thousands of these women to pregnancy checks, forced use of intrauterine devices, birth control pills, shots to prevent pregnancy, sterilization and abortion over the past four years.

“Performance targets…Target 1: target population for intrauterine contraception device placement 524 people…Target 2: [target] population for sterilizations 14,872 people.”

Those quotes come from official Chinese documents that detailed plans to sterilize as much as a third of women from Uighur and other minority groups between the ages of 18 and 49 in the far-western province of Xinjiang, where a large Uighur community resides, according to Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, writing in Foreign Policy. He said China was perpetrating demographic genocide, a cultural extermination combined with a campaign of “ethno-racial supremacy.”

It began in 2017, when there was an unprecedented crackdown on the minority group, with hundreds of thousands thrown into prisons and camps for “signs of religious extremism” such as traveling abroad, praying or using foreign social media, the AP wrote in previous articles. Authorities launched “dragnet-style” investigations to root out parents with too many children, even those who gave birth decades ago.

One former teacher drafted to work as an instructor at a detention camp told the AP: It started with flag-raising assemblies at her compound at the beginning of 2017, where officials made Uighur residents recite “anti-terror” lessons. They chanted, “If we have too many children, we’re religious extremists…That means we have to go to the training centers.”

In some areas, women were ordered to take gynecology exams after the ceremonies, they told the news outlet. In others, officials outfitted special rooms with ultrasound scanners for pregnancy tests.

Fast-forward three years: Currently, the Chinese government is using the mass detention in internment camps both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply, the AP wrote. “Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.”

The campaign is working: Birth rates in the mostly Uighur regions of Hotan and Kashgar plunged by more than 60 percent from 2015 to 2018, the latest figures available, the AP wrote. Across the Xinjiang region, birth rates continue to plummet, falling nearly 24 percent last year – compared to just 4.2 percent nationwide. In some Uighur counties, 2018 saw more deaths than births. In others, they have either leveled off to almost zero or the data is being withheld, Foreign Policy wrote.

Meanwhile, state-sponsored hackers have been secretly implanting malware into the Uighur population’s smartphones, collecting location data as well as DNA, voiceprints, facial scans and other personal data to transform Xinjiang into a virtual police state, the New York Times wrote. And China didn’t stop collecting or using the data at its borders: It followed the Uighurs into exile in 15 other countries.

The communist authorities also arrested and imprisoned hundreds of imams over the past few years, robbing the community of its leaders as the Chinese state prepared stricter measures, Voice of America reported.

In response to the allegations by the AP, the New York Times, Foreign Policy and other outlets, China said they are “fabricated” and “fake news”: They stress that the government treats all ethnicities equally and protects the legal rights of minorities. Chinese officials have said in the past that the new measures are merely meant to be fair, allowing both Han Chinese and ethnic minorities the same number of children, the AP wrote.

President Donald Trump recently signed the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020, which would punish violations of human rights with sanctions, CNN explained. American officials have also cautioned US companies against working with Chinese businesses that might rely on Uighur forced labor or other abuses, reported Politico.

Even so, writing in the Guardian, Uighur expert Sean Roberts of George Washington University argued that the US has always tacitly – or possibly even explicitly – sanctioned China’s persecution of the Uighurs. China’s ongoing campaign against the Uighurs, Roberts wrote, “has never been a response to a terrorist threat, real or imagined – but a narrative of Islamist terrorism founded in the US-led ‘war on terror’ that has always served as its convenient justification.”

In the New Republic, the urgency of the group’s plight led editors to use the headline, “Uighur Lives Matter.” The conservative National Review thought more than sanctions were necessary to stop what was going on in concentration camps deep in China’s interior.

“Never again” used to mean something. Maybe it will again.

A Mysterious Power Failure In My Office

There is an old saying from ancient Greece as follows:

      "It takes a great mind to comprehend the obvious."

       I installed a new internet system in my home office a few weeks ago, It has "all the bells and whistles including a back up modem that switches me to cell phone towers if the Xfinity internet goes down. It is super fast which makes me more efficient and productive when I work. It has an advanced battery that would keep me online for 12 hours if we had a catastrophic power failure.

       Early yesterday morning there was a big pop. It went dead. I did all normal recovery procedures and nothing worked. I assumed that Xfinity was doing maintenance to the entire system. Late in the morning it was still dead. I talked to 5 different Xfinity customer service reps after playing "the 800  number shuffle." On try #6, I insisted that they send out a tech. My whole afternoon was lost waiting for the tech to arrive. He arrived late in the afternoon. He turned on the high-powered battery. Power came back on. He left. The battery kept going off. Fortunately the tech was still downstairs doing post-service paperwork. I brought him back up. He did a further investigation. He discovered that a light switch had to be turned on to provide power to the battery, The tech who did the installation never saw this. I had been running on battery power for weeks.

Iran: Plausible Deniability

IRAN

Plausible Deniability

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said Sunday that Israel is not “necessarily” responsible for every mysterious incident in Iran, after a series of fires and gas leaks broke out at Iranian plants, Reuters reported.

On Saturday, a fire broke out at a power station in the southwestern city of Ahvaz, Al Jazeera reported. On the same day, a chlorine gas leak in the southeastern province of Khuzestan sickened 70 workers, according to the Associated Press.

The recent incidents follow a blaze that significantly damaged the Natanz nuclear facility Thursday. Authorities initially said the damage was minor but admitted Sunday that the fire was caused by a powerful bomb, the New York Times reported.

The Natanz site is one of the several Iranian facilities monitored by inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog.

The damage has set back Iran’s nuclear program by months, and intelligence officials suspect that Israel was responsible.

Meanwhile, Iranian authorities have warned they would retaliate against any country that carries out attacks on its facilities, including nuclear plants.

How I Arrived At An Estimate Of Up To 1,500,000 deaths Due To Coronavirus In The US

Dear Readers:

     I hate guns and loud noises. I do not want to see any person get hurt. The book The Great Influenza had a profound impact on me. Dr. Seth Shostak introduced me to the book and the author John Barry. This book has become my guide as to what is happening with this pandemic and what will happen next fall and winter.

        My son is a scientist. I could not produce the rigorous statistical analysis that he would need to write a paper putting forth this projection. I could not produce a medical paper that would satisfy my wife and medical colleagues that such a death rate was possible.

      I have learned the great value of common sense in almost 72 years on earth. 102 years ago the world had roughly 1.4 billion people. We now have some 7.5 billion people. The population has increased 5.36 times. The US had roughly 103,208,000 people in 1918. We now have roughly 330,000,000 people. Our population has increased 3.2 times. If we take the Spanish flu death rate of 675,000 and multiply it by 3.2 we get a result of 2,160,000 possible deaths.

      Many of my readers including those with medical and scientific training will protest that such a projection is unrealistic. After all, we have far superior technology and medical capabilities now than we had 102 years ago. My doctor wife will point to many patients she knows who were saved now and would have died 102 years ago. This is a fair comment.

        The technology also works against us. In 1918 passenger flights were unheard of. Today we have thousands of jet airliners carrying people all over the world. This rapid mobility allows faster spread. We also have a failure of political will in this country and in Brasil.

        There is all this optimism about a vaccine being developed quickly. Every time there is a new trial of a coronavirus vaccine, there is big media fanfare. Medical professionals who develop vaccines as their life work are much more pessimistic. They talk about a timeline of up to 4 years to have an effective vaccine ready. It might not take this long. It will not happen this year. There is also talk that the population will gain herd immunity. We have no proof this will happen with coronavirus.

      If we follow the history presented in The Great Influenza, we can expect a very bad second wave next fall.

       Balancing all these factors, I reduced the possible 2,160,000 death toll in the US down to 1,500,000 deaths. It is only an educated guess.

        Before I leave you, let us talk for a second about possible world death tolls. The world population has increased 5.6 times from 1918 until now. John M. Barry went on the record with an estimated death toll of 100 million worldwide from the Spanish flu. Let your imagination go to work here and multiply 100 million by 5.6.

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"Get Ready For The Darkest Winter Of All Time"

      Yesterday I heard a brilliant podcast of the coronavirus outbreak. It came from Stratfor (Rane Group), This is a private intelligence agency. Here is the link:

https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/rane-insights-preparing-second-wave-amid-sea-data

    If any of you are serious about listening to it and get password hassles, please contact me.

    A few words in the middle of the talk caught my attention. A speaker started to talk about the Black Death (bubonic plague pandemic that ended in 1350-sime 670 years ago.) You can imagine how primitive life was all those centuries ago. Communications were word of mouth. (They did not even have printing presses then.) Medicine and science were very primitive. I could go on for a long time with all the deficiencies.

     Despite these you had two distinct groups of people who had vastly different outcomes as follows:

1) Those who believed that the disease was spread by close human contact. These people fled to the countryside and had a high survival rate.

2) Those who did not believe that the disease was spread by close human contact. These people stayed in the towns and cities. They gathered in large groups. They drank in pubs(bars). Their death rate was in the millions.

       Fast forward 670 years. You have some people who wear masks,  believe in social distancing, and avoid big crowds. You have others who refuse to wear masks and social distance. Now it is a rallying point for those with conservative political views and an anti-science attitude. We have a definite lack of political will in this country.

   Elena is optimistic and believes that a vaccine will be developed and ready to administer right after the presidential election in November. I am not so optimistic. The vaccine will not come until the middle part of 2021 or later.

      I have a prediction on the total number of US coronavirus deaths before a vaccine is available for mass immunizations- +/-1,500,000. I see a similar death rate for Brasil.

Lessons Learned 670 Years Ago Could Help Us To Survive Coronavirus Now

DeCimarron is a book about the black plague that ended in 1350. Those who believed that the plague was spread by person to person contact fled to the countryside and survived. Those who did not believe that the disease was spread by person to person contact stayed in the cities and towns. They drank in bars, They gathered in big groups, They died in massive numbers. 670 years later we are making the same mistakes by disavowing marks and social distancing. There are words from a Peter, Paul, and Mary song from the 1960's that apply here:as follows:

"When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?"