Sunday, January 23, 2022
Causeway To Half Moon Island Traps Motorists at Unusual High Tide
Friday, October 8, 2021
Me and Jesus and the Grass Cutter
I heard male voices outside my kitchen window. I surmised that someone had come to cut the wild grass that had been growing all summer in the backyard next door. My cat got lost in the tall grass.
I put in earplugs, and then my earmuff industrial noise protection over the head unit. I could still hear the loud gas powered lawn mowers the two men used. Then came the leaf blowers. I had something outside in my sun oven but thought I'd just wait until the landscape workers left and I didn't face any noise.
I looked out the front window and saw the two men getting back in a black truck I had seen them get their equipment from. So, I went out the back door.
As I walk up the side walk to the sun oven a young man came back around the front and opened the neighbor's gate.
I said, "Hi."
"Hi," he said as he moved to the back.
He turned with a concerned look and I wondered what his concern was. He was in his twenties and bald with a big beard. He had on a white tank top.
"I just want to tell you how the Lord Jesus has changed my life," he said looking at me.
What?
Please allow me to introduce myself....
I thought of passing politely on the subject and congratulating the young man, but, I didn't.
I took the bait.
"Jesus never existed," I said. "The whole thing is a story."
Thursday, September 23, 2021
Wuhan Scientists Planned To Release 'Chimeric Covid Spike Proteins' Into Bat Populations Using 'Skin-Penetrating Nanoparticles' - by Tyler Durden (Zero Hedge)
18 months before the pandemic, scientists in Wuhan, China submitted a proposal to release enhanced airborne coronaviruses into the wild in an effort to inoculate them against diseases that could have otherwise jumped to humans, according to The Telegraph, citing leaked grant proposals from 2018.
New documents show that just 18 months before the first Covid-19 cases appeared, researchers had submitted plans to release skin-penetrating nanoparticles containing “novel chimeric spike proteins” of bat coronaviruses into cave bats in Yunnan, China.
They also planned to create chimeric viruses, genetically enhanced to infect humans more easily, and requested $14million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) to fund the work.
The bid was submitted by zoologist Peter Daszak of US-based EcoHealth Alliance, who was hoping to use genetic engineering to cobble "human-specific cleavage sites" onto bat Covid 'which would make it easier for the virus to enter human cells' - a method which would coincidentally answer a longstanding question among the scientific community as to how SARS-CoV-2 evolved to become so infectious to humans.
Daszak's proposal also included plans to commingle high-risk natural coronaviruses strains with more infectious, yet less deadly versions. His 'bat team' of researchers included Dr. Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as well as US researchers from the University of North Carolina and the US Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center.
Darpa refused the contract - saying "It is clear that the proposed project led by Peter Daszak could have put local communities at risk," while warning that Daszak hadn't fully considered the dangers involved in enhancing the virus via gain-of-function research, or by releasing a vaccine into the air.
Grant documents show that the team also had some concerns about the vaccine programme and said they would “conduct educational outreach … so that there is a public understanding of what we are doing and why we are doing it, particularly because of the practice of bat-consumption in the region”.
Angus Dalgleish, Professor of Oncology at St Georges, University of London, who struggled to get work published showing that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had been carrying out “gain of function” work for years before the pandemic, said the research may have gone ahead even without the funding.
“This is clearly a gain of function, engineering the cleavage site and polishing the new viruses to enhance human cell infectibility in more than one cell line,” he said. -Telegraph
As the Telegraph aptly notes (and you'll never hear from Maddow, Lemon or Hayes), Daszak is the same guy behind a letter published in The Lancet last year which ruled out the lab leak hypothesis, and temporarily stifled debate on the origins of Covid-19.
"For more than a year I tried repeatedly to ask questions of Peter Daszak with no response," said Viscount Ridley, who has co-authored an upcoming book on the origin of Covid-19, and has repeatedly implored the House of Lords to dig deeper into the origins of the pandemic. "Now it turns out he had authored this vital piece of information about virus work in Wuhan but refused to share it with the world. I am furious. So should the world be," he added.
"Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) proposed injecting deadly chimeric bat coronaviruses collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology into humanised and ‘batified’ mice, and much, much more."
The documents, released by an international consortium of scientists known as 'Drastic Research,' were authenticated by a former Trump administration official. According to the group, "The actual DEFUSE Proposal Documents will be published in due course."
"Given that we find in this proposal a discussion of the planned introduction of human-specific cleavage sites, a review by the wider scientific community of the plausibility of artificial insertion is warranted," Drastic said in a statement.
Enhanced MERS?
One anonymous World Health Organization (WHO) scientist told The Telegraph that Daszak's grant proposal shockingly proposed plans to enhance the more deadly MERS (Middle-East Respiratory Syndrome).
"The scary part is they were making infectious chimeric Mers viruses," said the source, adding "These viruses have a fatality rate over 30 per cent, which is at least an order of magnitude more deadly than Sars-CoV-2."
"If one of their receptor replacements made Mers spread similarly, while maintaining its lethality, this pandemic would be nearly apocalyptic."
Just remember, the initial cover story started with 'bat soup.'
Sunday, January 31, 2021
Hellas: Sophie, The Moon, and Me - We all fall down
I was thinking of Venus rising with the sun as I had observed in days last week. I could see the sun was lighting the horizon to the southeast as I look out my kitchen window. I went online to see what the sky charts showed. I saw the eastern sky and southern skies had no Venus. I moved the view around to the west. The Moon was bright to the west northwest. I thought of going out to the front porch, but I'd have to unlock the front door and step out into the cold.
I decided to go up the front stairs. I was thinking of the stairs the narrator in "A Voyage to Arturus" went up went he was getting ready for his journey into the sky. He looked out a window at each level. I looked out the window on the second floor after pulling back the yellow curtain. But, the Moon was through a screen and textured. I went up the next flight of stairs holding on to the railing. I was in the dark. I pulled back the curtain and looked through the wiggly old glass to the bright, cold moon.
"Pale Hecarte who rules the night," I remembered from some pagan character, or, Shakespeare.
I turned around and went down the stairs in the dark backwards, and holding on to the rail. I remembered a nurse online warning, "you are one fall away from a nursing home."
I had climbed up to observe the Moon, not to sacrifice myself in worship.
Later that morning I read that a 34 year old woman who created dance music was living in Greece and had also gone up to look at the same full moon. Sophie tripped and fell and died. Requiescat in pace et amore.
We were not looking at the moon at the same time. The reports say she fell at about 4 am Greek time which must be about four hours ahead of my US Eastern Standard Time.
SOPHIE, the influential British producer who molded electronic music into bracingly original avant-garde pop, died in an accidental fall Saturday morning (January 30), a representative confirms. SOPHIE, who was 34, died at roughly 4 a.m. in Athens, Greece, where the artist had been living. In a statement, the labels Transgressive and Future Classic wrote: “True to her spirituality she had climbed up to watch the full moon and accidentally slipped and fell. She will always be here with us.”
SOPHIE emerged on the European club circuit in the early 2010s, breaking out with a string of inventive, house-adjacent singles including 2013’s “Nothing More to Say.” Next single “Bipp,” a stark and disembodied anthem, signalled a new direction and brought international acclaim, both from dance DJs and in the year-end lists of music publications across genres. Subsequent tracks “Lemonade” and “Hard” mixed distinctive vocals and abrasive sound design into SOPHIE’s music, forging a tactile twist on pop. SOPHIE’s 2014 collaboration with PC Music founder A.G. Cook and Quinn Thomas, QT’s “Hey QT,” embodied the new form, a hyperactive sugar rush of unashamedly euphoric hooks.
The 2015 compilation PRODUCT collected these singles and added new music such as “Just Like We Never Said Goodbye,” which pointed to yet another phase of innovation. In 2018, SOPHIE—who prefers not to use gendered or nonbinary pronouns, according to one representative—released a debut album proper, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, prominently featuring SOPHIE’s own vocals. Until then, the producer’s identity was kept mysterious, but in press around the debut, SOPHIE stepped into the frame of videos and photo shoots, coming out as trans. The record was widely hailed as a landmark in forward pop music, earning a Best Dance/Electronic Album nomination at the 2019 Grammys and recognition in album of the decade lists the following year.
SOPHIE’s outsize influence on pop and electronic music stems from not only this solo discography but also an expansive collaborative catalog. This repertoire includes productions for Vince Staples, Madonna, and, prominently, Charli XCX, who said in 2019: “There are very few artists who make me feel something up my core and make me wanna cry. Justice and Uffie made me feel something when I was 14, and I didn’t really have that feeling again until I met Sophie. I felt this rush of: Fuck, this is the coolest shit I have ever heard.” Advertisement
In a statement, SOPHIE’s representative wrote: “At this time respect and privacy for the family is our priority. We would also ask for respect for SOPHIE’s fanbase, and to treat the private nature of this news with sensitivity.”
This article was originally published on Saturday, January 30 at 6:52 a.m. Eastern. It was last updated the same day at 7:40 a.m. Eastern.
Whatever Happened to the Spartacist League ? (Notes From Underground) 26 January 2021
Whatever Happened to the Spartacist League ?
Years ago when I was a member of the Toronto branch of the Bolshevik Tendency, the assignment I hated most was having to go to [Spartacist League] Trotskyist League forums. We were banned from meetings of the Internationalist Socialists and whatever the Mandelites were calling themselves, but we were allowed into TL meetings. Unfortunately…
We were required to sit at the back of the meeting in designated seats. After the presentation, we got to make one intervention (3 minutes although the time limit only seemed to apply to us), following that numerous TL members and supporters would shriek abuse at us (we were supposedly racists, anglo-chauvinists, cop-lovers, dubious elements, quitters, etc. etc.). Then at the end, we were herded out to prevent us from talking to anyone who was actually crazy enough to have come to this meeting in the first place (I suppose that included us too).
And they were always on a Saturday night.
Sustained by coffee and cigarettes, very energetic were the TL…and the rest of their international tendency. Among the first to arrive at an event, the last to leave. Always the most annoying: New issues of Workers Vanguard, Spartacist Canada, Spartacist, Women and Revolution, Black History and the Class Struggle, a pamphlet or two, and always always on sub-drives or so it seemed.
Workers Vanguard came out every two weeks for as long as I remember, until last year. In April, the ICL posted on its web site that the frequency of WV would be …irregular. That has turned out to be a bit of an understatement; it has been over seven months since an issue of WV has appeared.
On October 30, a new SL item appeared on the site: A perfunctory “Don’t Vote for the Democrats” leaflet which could easily have been written by a new member of the Spartacus Youth League (does that still exist?), but nothing since then to indicate to regular readers that Biden won the election and has since been sworn in as president, or that a motley crew of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building on January 6th. Odder too is that the SL does not appear to have written a single word on the uprising that took place after the police murder of George Floyd (or even the murder itself – if I’m wrong, please let me know)
A quick scan through the International Communist League web site and the pattern is the same. Some sections have not had a new item on their pages for almost a year. The Canadian section’s most recent post dates to October, but is a reprint of a leaflet from August about a ten-day strike. It too is of a generic variety of Spart cliches. You can’t help but think, something is going on.
In 2017, the ICL-FI published a long document, “The Chauvinist Hydra” which seemed to consist mostly of a lot of trashing of various sections on the national question. Spartacist leader James Robertson died in 2019. His passing was marking by a brief notice and then months went by before a more substantial obit was published. It’s temping to believe that there’s a power struggle taking place in the group which has paralysed the organization, but that it would have prevented them from publishing across their international tendency to this degree is difficult to accept. The Internationalist Group, led by former WV editor Jan Norden speculates the group is on the verge of collapse, but they wrote that in MAy of 2020. I suppose it’ll all come out in the wash.
But seriously, whatever happened to the Spartacist League?
Thursday, January 28, 2021
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