Author: AllanHardingM

White House economic adviser, Peter Second Opinion Navarro defends the use of anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus , highlighting “the possibility” that it has therapeutic efficacy.

Demonstrating recent American generosity in times of an ally in trouble ,Trump dispatches Navarro to Boris’ bedside with a Trump Approved Elixir!

“The praises sung for American resilience in times of turmoil are ultimately paeans to the strength of American inertia.” 

OSITA NWANEVU

Excerpted from the Charles Eisenstein essay ”The Coronation” March 2020

War-on-germs thinking brings results akin to those of the War on Terror, War on Crime, War on Weeds, and the endless wars we fight politically and interpersonally. First, it generates endless war; second, it diverts attention from the ground conditions that breed illness, terrorism, crime, weeds, and the rest.

Millions of people in the modern world are in a precarious state of health, just waiting for something that would normally be trivial to send them over the edge. Of course, in the short term we want to save their lives; the danger is that we lose ourselves in an endless succession of short terms, fighting one infectious disease after another, and never engage the ground conditions that make people so vulnerable. That is a much harder problem, because these ground conditions will not change via fighting. There is no pathogen that causes diabetes or obesity, addiction, depression, or PTSD. Their causes are not an Other, not some virus separate from ourselves, and we its victims.

As one meme explains it: “Your fish is sick. Germ theory: isolate the fish. Terrain theory: clean the tank.”

For a long time we, as a collective, have stood helpless in the face of an ever-sickening society. Whether it is declining health, decaying infrastructure, depression, suicide, addiction, ecological degradation, or concentration of wealth, the symptoms of civilizational malaise in the developed world are plain to see, but we have been stuck in the systems and patterns that cause them. Now, Covid has gifted us a reset.

The crisis could usher in totalitarianism or solidarity; medical martial law or a holistic renaissance; greater fear of the microbial world, or greater resiliency in participation in it; permanent norms of social distancing, or a renewed desire to come together.

Pink slips for 20,000 school support staff in Alberta the biggest COVID-19 layoff in Canada

Those affected are education assistants, drivers, secretaries and other support staff.

TC Energy Corp. gave the go-ahead Tuesday for construction of its $8-billion US Keystone XL pipeline project, with help from the Alberta government.

The company said Alberta has agreed to invest approximately $1.1 billion US as equity in the project, which substantially covers planned construction costs through the end of 2020.

The remaining $6.9 billion US is expected to be funded through a combination of a $4.2-billion project-level credit facility to be fully guaranteed by the Alberta government and a $2.7-billion investment by TC Energy.

Court Painter has had enough of the doom & gloom however if sales tank he will revert to current affairs!

We’ve known for a long while that a great unraveling is necessary. We’ve known that something world-changing, something perhaps mythic in size, was breathing at the edges of planetary civilization. We have not been blind to the many unstable systems, clattering into one another, destabilizing each other even further.
We’ve been readying ourselves for this long moment — gathering our tools, tuning our psycho-spiritual compasses, maturing our communities and our willingness to be with unknowing. We don’t know the schedule of the great unraveling; we don’t know if the current intertwined crises of global plague and the imploding economy hint at further uncertainties just ahead, including the tempestuous inclinations of climate. We don’t know if two systems or more might come apart at the same time. We didn’t foresee how clearly this moment of unraveling would reveal immense faults in the systems that some semblance of social order has depended upon.  

Excerpted from a Friday, March 27, 2020, multi part MUSING with grateful acknowledgement to Chaos and a Collective Initiatory Journey Part 1 by Geneen Marie Haugen

 

Most of Jeff Wall’s street pictures are based on everyday situations that he has witnessed at first hand. He is particularly interested in what he calls ‘micro-gestures’: gestures that seem automatic or compulsive, and which are at the same time emblematic of tensions within society. 

Mimic detail

In the work Mimic (1982), the man walking with the woman makes an ambiguous but apparently obscene and racist gesture, holding his upraised middle finger close to the corner of his eye, “slanting” his eye in mockery of the Asian man’s eyes.

President Donald Trump was photographed reading from notes at a daily coronavirus task force press conference where the word “corona” was crossed out and replaced in his handwriting with “Chinese” to describe COVID-19.

The image appeared as Trump ramped up his description of the coronavirus as a “Chinese virus” as he was questioned about whether he considers the label to be racist.

Donald Trump has referred to the coronavirus as “the Chinese virus”, escalating racially motivated harassment of Asian Americans and deepening the US-China diplomatic spat over the outbreak.

The World Health Organization has advised against terms that link the virus to China or the city of Wuhan, where it was first detected, in order to avoid discrimination or stigmatisation.