Stockpile for Pandemics:pie in the sky

““We are not prepared today,” warned one critic of Sen. Susan Collins referring to her vote when the swine flu emerged. “Let’s hope we don’t need to be.” I am sure Cassandra would have fully agreed. She spoke truly but it didn’t save the situation for people concerned.

The US was long riding the tailwind of her past. Capital, capital capital was all that mattered. What is wrong with it?

“Andrew Carnegie the Steel magnate and Philanthropist was once asked which he considered the most important factor in Industry, labour, capital or brains, replied: “Which is the most important leg of a three legged stool?” While discussing progress of modern man we may ask which takes precedence: Individual, Nation or Wealth?

Individual is the least divisible living component in the make up of a nation. Nation in fact is his creature. It is also a lie in real time of history since borders of nations have been rolled back and forth since settled time of human population. Balkanization in fact demonstrates how national identity can be played with and wars have often showed the kind of mischief a ‘national card’ is able to do.(Selected from the New Millennium)”

Pandemics just showed what a lie it was to gamble on a single card of wealth. There is only one life and wealth is only in health of people. Did GOP play politics with the present debacle or made worse?

Here is March 19,2020 report in The Daily Beast:

For Maine Sen. Susan Collins,, a lifelong Republican who believes in limited government, funding for pandemic flu preparations didn’t belong in the Obama administration’s economic stimulus plan. She lobbied hard to kill the money, and as one of only three Senate Republicans supporting the package, she had a lot of leverage with an administration desperate to show bipartisan support in a global economic crisis.

President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 in February of that year. Two months later, in April, as a new influenza outbreak, H1N1, known as swine flu, got underway, Democrat David Obey, who chaired the House Appropriations committee at the time took Collins to task:

“Whether or not this influenza strain turns out to have pandemic potential, sooner or later some strain will. We are not prepared today. Let’s hope we don’t need to be.”

Where is the stockpile signed into a bill by Bill Clinton?  Only in name Not even a PPE!

benny

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Corona crisis: what next?

While Uk is waiting for Turkey to help them in their severe shortage of PPE this post may come very relevant. Especially when half baked populist demagogues assure that they shall take their country from – (one may fill one’s bogey) under their watch, great swathes of citizens are being decimated. Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Great was Rome indeed. Long past it is. Britain for long escaped from being caught out. Here is a piece I have selected from the Guardian of March,13, 2020

“Britain missed three opportunities to be part of an EU scheme to bulk-buy masks, gowns and gloves and has been absent from key talks about future purchases, the Guardian can reveal, as pressure grows on ministers to protect NHS medics and care workers on the coronavirus frontline.

European doctors and nurses are preparing to receive the first of €1.5bn (£1.3bn) worth of personal protective equipment (PPE) within days or a maximum of two weeks through a joint procurement scheme involving 25 countries and eight companies, according to internal EU documents.

The EU’s swift work has led to offers of medical equipment, including masks, overalls and goggles, in excess of the number requested, a spokesman for the European commission said. The EU is separately establishing stockpiles within member states, with the first being set up in Romania.

The development comes as anger grows over PPE shortages in Britain, with particular concerns at the weekend over stocks of full-sleeve gowns running out. The gowns are designed to resist droplets which can spread coronavirus and were shown to be highly effective at protecting medics in Italy.

A survey by the Doctors’ Association UK found that only 52% of clinicians carrying out the highest-risk procedures said they had access to the correct full-sleeve gowns, while the Guardian understands that a consignment of at least 100,000 gowns from China had to be rejected when it was found to be substandard. Other consignments thought to be gowns had been mislabelled and were other equipment.”

Each nation fails somehow or other but the writing on the wall remains: old world order is changing. We shrunk the world into a global village while population is hitting 8 billion and still growing. Unless we expand the world of cooperation globally we may not be the last one left standing. Colonizing the moon, forget it. A nation that cannot provide healthcare alike to citizens is a blight and one that shall not act decisively when the hour is come, shall fade away unwept, and shall not be missed.

There is a world of virus that has been always out there and it was meant that way. They are natural there. If we have been clever in exploiting the weak and made the countries into colonies it stands to reason the virus also shall make colonies of us. Bats for instance carry virus as Ebola has taught us. By clearing rainforests the virus for instance hitch a ride on bats for nearest human settlement in order to continue a colony among humans. Re. the present crisis it began in Wuhan, China. Corona virus was brought into a local Chinese meat market  where anything crawling or creeping is food; a pangolin in the case of Wuhan brought more than its meat. From Dec, 2019 it these were doing the rounds. Being a global village we have a pandemic and like flue it is going to live among us. Isolationism shall not make America great but their ostrich-like quality definitely will go against them. It is no hoax by democrats.

benny

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Haiku: Black Metal music

Background:

A 22-year-old man has pleaded guilty to intentionally setting fire to three African-American churches in the US state of Louisiana./Holden Matthews, 22, admitted to starting the fires to raise his profile as a “black metal” musician, prosecutors said./ He burned three Baptist churches in the Opelousas area over 10 days beginning in late March 2019-BBC news

Black metal unplugged

sent Holden raise his profile:

Burn burn burn baby!

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Haiku: Boeing 737 Max

Boeing, Phew! Boeing

For a few cents in profit

Made Screamliner Max

Benny

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Haiku:Space War USA

When star Wormwood* fell:

Bald eagle’s Space war took its toll

One third gone with it.

Benny

*And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter(Re.8:11).

 

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Haiku: purple heart-2

Draft dodgers scramble

To insult the Vet for what?

Vindman isn’t their man.

 

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Haiku: purple heart

Is my purple heart

Badge of shame in age of fraud?

Last trump for the dead.

Benny

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Science notes: Universe Through a Glass Darkly

Measured one way, the universe appears expanding at a certain rate; measured another way, the universe appears to be expanding at a different rate. And, as a new paper shows, those discrepancies have gotten larger in recent years, even as the measurements have gotten more precise.

“We think that if our understanding of cosmology is correct, then all of these different measurements should be giving us the same answer,” said Katie Mack, a theoretical cosmologist at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and co-author of the new paper.

The two most famous measurements work very differently from one another. The first relies on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB): the microwave radiation leftover from the first moments after the Big Bang. Cosmologists have built theoretical models of the entire history of the universe on a CMB foundation — models they’re very confident in, and that would require an all-new physics to break. And taken together, Mack said, they produce a reasonably precise number for the Hubble constant, or H0, which governs how fast the universe is currently expanding.

The second measurement uses supernovas and flashing stars in nearby galaxies, known as Cepheids. By gauging how far those galaxies are from our own, and how fast they’re moving away from us, astronomers have gotten what they believe is a very precise measurement of the Hubble constant. And that method offers a different H0.

“If we’re getting different answers that means that there’s something that we don’t know,” Mack told Live Science. “So this is really about not just understanding the current expansion rate of the universe — which is something we’re interested in — but understanding how the universe has evolved, how the expansion has evolved, and what space-time has been doing all this time.”

Weikang Lin, also a cosmologist at NCSU and lead author of the paper, said that to develop a full picture of the problem, the team decided to round up all the different ways of “constraining” H0 in one place.Here’s what “constraining” means: Measurements in physics rarely turn up exact answers. (Think what this would be if lifted into the field of  forensic science, No murder may be pinned on the guilty.) Instead, they put limits on the range of possible answers. And by looking at these constraints together, you can learn a lot about something you’re studying. (In legal terms it would be a technical loophole). Looking through one telescope, for example, you might learn that a point of light in space is either red, yellow or orange. Another might tell you it’s brighter than most other lights in space but less bright than the sun. Another might tell you it’s moving across the sky as fast a planet. None of those constraints would tell you much on their own, but taken together they suggest  you are looking at Mars.

In an earlier post I had posited that Scientists are looking at universe from the wrong end of the telescope. Closer home things appear reliable and Laws of Newton or Kepler can be proved. Our predicament is that of the Flying Dutchman the more he sails the coast line further eludes him. He sees only what he believes in. Having failed to understand God as the Creator of Universe, sail he must never arriving at the one article that holds everything in order. What reason! What pother!

(Ack: How the Universe Stopped Making Sense/Life Science/Space/Rafi Letzter/Oct. 11,2019)

Benny

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Bo Jo and his Brexit egg -cartoon

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Brexit Blues- Bo Jo makes a discovery

A hungry fox is desperate. He must stop his craving but how? This ambitious fox found an opening in the hollow of a tree and jumped in and having helped himself to all that his position allowed he found he was in a fix. He could not go forward nor could he back out. Aesop had an answer to the dilemma of the fox. But Bo Jo is yet to find one.

Benny

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