“With the requirement of quarantine in Britain, the time one needs to reserve for traveling to Manchester from much of Europe is two weeks, just like in the 17th century.”
—Lukasz Stanek*
from the Financial Times today, 2020-09-14:
The chief executive of the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer has warned that not enough Covid-19 vaccines will be available for everyone in the world to be inoculated until the end of 2024 at the earliest.
Adar Poonawalla, chief executive of the Serum Institute of India, told the Financial Times that pharmaceutical companies were not increasing production capacity quickly enough to vaccinate the global population in less time.*
*a link – see a note on notes and links
“to observe without evaluating”* / Jiddu Krishnamurti
from an archived Wikipedia entry:
from an archived Wikipedia entry:
Krishnamurti held that outside of strictly practical, technical matters, the presence and action of choice indicates confusion and subtle bias: an individual who perceives a given situation in an unbiased manner, without distortion, and therefore with complete awareness, will immediately, naturally, act according to this awareness – the action will be the manifestation and result of this awareness, rather than the result of choice. Such action (and quality of mind) is inherently without conflict.
He did not offer any method to achieve such awareness; in his view application of technique cannot possibly evolve into, or result in, true choicelessness – just as unceasing application of effort leads to illusory effortlessness, in reality the action of habit. Additionally, in his opinion all methods introduce potential or actual conflict, generated by the practitioner's efforts to comply. According to this analysis, all practices towards achieving choiceless awareness have the opposite effect: they inhibit its action in the present by treating it as a future, premeditated result, and moreover one that is conditioned by the practitioner's implied or expressed expectations.
Krishnamurti stated that for true choicelessness to be realized, choice – implicit or explicit – has to simply, irrevocably, stop; however, this ceasing of choice is not the result of decision-making, but implies the ceasing of the functioning of the chooser or self as a psychological entity. He proposed that such a state might be approached through inquiry based on total attentiveness: identity is then dissolved in complete, all-encompassing attention. Therefore, he asserted that choiceless awareness is a natural attribute of non-self-centered perception, which he called “observation without the observer.”
Accordingly, Krishnamurti advised against following any doctrine, discipline, teacher, guru, or authority, including himself. He also advised against following one's own psychological knowledge and experience, which he considered integral parts of the observer. He denied the usefulness of all meditation techniques and methods, but not of meditation itself, which he called “perhaps the greatest” art in life; and stated that insight into choiceless awareness could be shared through open dialogue.*
in light of the call for non-self-centered perception, “observation without the observer,” see Who am I?*
*a link – see a note on notes and links
“In my seventy-plus years from 1946 to now, the chorus of fear-mongering bullshit has never ceased—only grown louder. The joke is on us. We're the clowns. Ha Ha Ha.” / caption: book excerpt below; image: WBUR*
*a link – see a note on notes and links
In this year of plague and depression, the most powerful nation in human history has become a sad amalgam of laughingstock, cautionary tale and pariah. Roughly 170,000 Americans are dead, in large part due to a near-total abdication of federal leadership, https://t.co/PZ6aT9qUaF
— James Wooten (@rantonstupidity) August 22, 2020
article: archived*
from the unrolled thread:
In this year of plague and depression, the most powerful nation in human history has become a sad amalgam of laughingstock, cautionary tale and pariah. Roughly 170,000 Americans are dead, in large part due to a near-total abdication of federal leadership, a decades-long evisceration of the social safety net, and a health care and economic system built on a bedrock of racial and class discrimination.
What a powerful sentence this is.“Even by the standards of an administration that has spent the better part of four years alternating between ineptitude and cruelty, it is a truly spectacular failure – a failure so fundamental it will live on as a schism between generations: those who knew life before ... ““ ... the pandemic, those who didn’t.”On television, the President of the United States is hawking miracle cures – something about blasting the body with light and disinfectant. Later in the day, a parade of public health experts will be forced to appear on the news networks to plead with people not to drink bleach.“Farcical as the whole thing is, it is also a fitting distillation of the Trump era – a spectacle of callousness and cartoonish incompetence that dominates a single news cycle before the next spectacle obliterates it from memory.”But in reality, most of the lasting carnage of this year exists in a kind of negative space – all the victims who died alone and afraid, who never received public mourning; all the weddings and birthday parties and graduation ceremonies cancelled; all the vast and hidden toll ...“... of domestic abuse and mental-health crises exacerbated by this half-year and counting of purgatory.
There will likely never be a full accounting of all that was lost this year, all that was wasted, only the crushing knowledge that it never had to be this way.”“But the Trump presidency is neither an anomaly nor an endpoint of some temporary misguided turn. It is impossible to frame the current administration outside a lineage that includes the racist Tea Party and Birther movements, the illegal wars of the Bush era, the rise of ...”“ ... Fox News and the general hyper-partisan slide of the American right wing that dates back at least to the Reagan administration.”“One way or another, there’s a different America waiting on the other side of this year – either a country that puts communal survival ahead of individual self-interest, or one that slowly slinks away from relevance as it stumbles from disaster to disaster, its insulated few ...”“... oblivious to the suffering of the rest.”• • •
source*
*a link – see a note on notes and links
Sundays, Christmas, and New Year are when human-generated seismic noise is lowest / source: Science News*
note the seismic quiet of lockdown, quiet as a normal Sunday, with Sundays quieter than New Year’s Day
endless doing – beyond what must be done to be and let be – does endless harm: harm to being thought of as human and to being thought of as not
no being need do more than need be done to be and let be
no one need do more than be and let be, delighting in being* and in doing only what must be done to live and let live with love, compassion, joy, and equanimity
Chrystia Freeland: Canada’s finance minister – assumed office August 18, 2020*
continuous service as a Liberal MP from November 24, 2013*
continuous service as a Liberal MP from November 24, 2013*
2020-08-24:
Freeland's 'Plutocrats' book gives insight into her possible approach as Canada's finance ministerhttps://t.co/c6dEOgKMzv pic.twitter.com/8xWvgk09f2
— CP24 (@CP24) August 23, 2020
*a link – see a note on notes and links
Pearl barley – pot barley further processed to remove some or all of the bran – is “similar to wheat in its caloric, protein, vitamin and mineral content, though some varieties are higher in lysine.”*
Barley ranks fourth among grains in quantity produced worldwide, behind maize, rice, and wheat.*
*a link – see a note on notes and links
“Good advice is a bit like a bowl of [Brussels] sprouts at a dinner party. You don’t
always fancy taking some for yourself, but you’re happy to pass it on
to others.” —Mark Rice-Oxley
from Melissa Pejrano, Piacenza, Italy:
For a soft decline in population, advance the rights of women. Eliminate forced marriage, have an age of marriage of 18, provide for the education of girls, make sure the workplace is accessible, safe, and comfortable for women, and that they get equal pay for equal work, make available reproductive health services, including birth control, support women who choose not to marry and/or choose not to have children, set up retirement systems so that their children aren’t people’s retirement systems. Women who are self-respecting, socially and financially independent, and able to choose how many children they have, tend to have smaller families than those who aren’t in this fortunate position.*