Our What?

May 3,  2020

Day 43

2 New cases. 3 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases is 85%. Two Zeroes on the board.

Two weeks from now will be the time to watch for new cases numbers to rise as the ‘freedom’ of Level 3 facilitates a higher level of transmission. Until then we’re living on Level 4’s dime.

 

Toady it rained off and on as I worked my way through parts of several projects in the workshop. I made more progress on the ‘grouting’, did another load of laundry and cleaned off the old workbench. This allowed me to move all the parts and pieces of the ‘in progress’ from various horizontal surfaces to the newly swept wide open table top that has been the ‘go to’ workbench in the shipping container for four years. Returning to the space after a lunch of homemade tomato soup and hot roll and butter I discovered there is a small leak from somewhere behind the washing machine. Add another project to the list. Will tackle that on first thing tomorrow as the plumbing needs to be bullet proof. Still and all, there was slow progress on a number of fronts and I am happy.

During lunch Valerie read to me an entry from a fascinating blog she discovered (the author had ‘liked’ one of her posts and she visited his blog as a courtesy and found an intriguing and thoroughly well researched site that I am sharing here.

BEWARE THE WAR IS GETTING UGLIER

I have yet to read any of his work, but on the strength of what I listened to and what Valerie has related to me of some of his earlier posts, I think you may find yourself surprised and also more ‘in the picture’ as to where the west stands with regard to China, and vice versa.

 

 

In the illustration above the west is represented by the guy and China is the girl. (I mention this only because it can be looked at either way.) It is my contention that the west must work hard to reverse this. In order to stave off disaster and economic, if not actual, subjugation, we must create a world in which the west is the one asking, “What relationship?” Failure to do so will condemn our children and our children’s children to a future so bleak that I balk at even trying to imagine it.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mercedes-benz-china-gaffe/mercedes-benz-apologizes-to-chinese-for-quoting-dalai-lama-idUSKBN1FQ1FJ

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/03/21/china-says-dalai-lama-reincarnation-must-comply-chinese-laws/

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/when-china-rules-the-world

 

This is the reality we face and the peril we ignore. It isn’t coming, it’s already here.

 

 

 

I keep saying that I won’t be around to see the worst and Valerie smiles and says, “unless you are reborn into it.” So I’m going to do what I can, where I am, with what I have…to change the future. (Which, at present, isn’t what it used to be.) Wish me luck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t Insult the Cook

April 28, 2020

Day 38

First day of Alert Level 3 in New Zealand. The numbers for today are…

3 New cases. 34 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases is 82%. (18% to go.) 258 infected people remaining.

 

 

Anyone reading this know how to make aspirin? A nail? Plastic? Could you build an internal combustion engine from scratch? Make antibiotics? A solid state transistor? A battery of any type? Paper? Glue? Ink? Could you build a printing press and publish a blog the old fashioned way? Do you know how to grow wheat? Harvest it? Grind the grain into flour? Build a windmill? Make candles? Dress a hog? Tan a hide? Breed horses? Break a horse? Ride a horse? Do any of you know why an airfoil generates lift and how?

One hundred years ago the era of the horse was coming to a close and the era of the automobile was just a quarter of a century old. Humans had been flying airplanes for 17 years and Robert Goddard, one of the fathers of modern rocketry, had just written a letter to the Smithsonian Institution in which he proposed photographing the moon and planets by using fly-by probes. Penicillin was 8 years from being invented and the Spanish Flu Pandemic, during which 675,000 Americans were killed, had been over for a year.

Ten years from now what will people say when they look back at everything that is happening this year? Will the Covid-19 Pandemic that led to the second Great Depression be the lead story? Or will it be the first test launches of SpaceX’s Starship rocket? Will there be a settlement on Mars? Will Taiwan exist as a nation or will it have be violently crushed and then silently absorbed in the greatest act of revisionist history ever undertaken by any nation in the world?

What does the rest of the year hold for us? A gradual return to the way we were? A readjustment of the blinders we grew used to in the previous two decades when we ceded manufacturing to China? Will the food chain of the world be broken? What conflicts will arise out of the chaos and shortages to come? Will the progressives of the world win out as the baby boomers die off? Will socialism rise to prominence until it runs out of other people’s money? Will you be speaking Chinese in a re-education camp?

In fifty years few people will remember witnessing the first landing of men on the moon. Those who do will not be able to say publicly that it wasn’t Chinese taikonauts, but American astronauts who took those first steps. Such behaviour will result in imprisonment, slave labor and ultimately, death, as transplantable organs will still be cheaper to harvest than to grow in labs. The future that I write of will be fact and the past I was part of will be erased. Right now 1,400,000,000 people on this planet are already part of that world. The rest of us are closer to it that we think. Don’t believe this? When you try to boycott China, you’re going to see the extent to which we’ve become reliant on them. They know this. Depend upon it. Their attitude at this juncture in history can best be summed up by an old saying of theirs that goes, ‘If you want your dinner, don’t insult the cook’. This is what we have to contend with now and it is what we will have to contend with should we attempt to reclaim our treasure from the Chinese dragon.

In his novel Time Enough for Love, Heinlein (Yes, Robert Anson again) says, “Human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

I contend that countries should be able to do the same. The tale of Covid-19 and surviving its aftermath without selling our souls has yet to be written, but if it was, I’m betting the moral of the story will be, for individuals as well as nations, to do their own cooking.

 

Honeymoon

One hundred words for Friday Fictioneers based on the photo prompt below from Jean L. Hays. Thank you for reading. Yes, you. Aloha, D.

 

 

On a golden beach that bordered a green and rolling land, newlyweds Cam and Val explored flotsam and jetsam and quietly savored the feel of their clasped hands. They found a child’s toy bulldozer in the sand, took it as a sign and set up their tent on the spot. He built a driftwood fire as the sun set and stars rose out of a darkling sea into sable sky. Sourdough bread dipped in olive oil, wine and grilled kebabs was dinner, contentment their dessert.

That night as they slept, softly entwined, the moon looked down on them and smiled.

 

 

McMurdo Countdown: Objects in Mirror…

Before you dismiss this 100 word story for Madison Woods’ FridayFictioneers as the usual science fiction spores attack crap, take a good  long look at the picture that inspires this week’s entry and then listen well. This is how my father died. He breathed in a spore in a desert in Arizona which lodged in his lung and produced a fungus called Aspergillus. It entered his brain via his circulatory system and grew, disrupting balance and coordination which prompted immediate brain surgery to remove what the doctors thought was a tumor. What they found instead was a plant and when they saw the extent to which its tendrils had merged with healthy brain tissue they closed him up and began years of what we jokingly came to call Roundup therapy. Four years, one kidney and many hospital stays for drug induced dementia later, Alan won the battle but lost the war. Weakened by the long campaign to rid his brain and body of the fungi, he succumbed to heart failure and passed. I have absolutely no doubt that he is in a better place than where he spent his last few years.

We humans tend to think we are the masters of our world, lords of creation and shapers of our collective destinies.

We are not.

We are fragile and we are, in the inevitable end, food for the real masters.

Keep your eyes open. The future is happening all around you.

Sweet dreams, D.

8 August 0800

This is all we know.

Mutated Aspergillus fungi. Rapid cytoplastic streaming. Inhaled spores grow into Labyrinthulmycota colonies. Blood/brain barrier breach. Explosive growth. Blindness, cranial overpressure, sudden death. Launched at high velocity from bursting skulls, spores spread faster than victims can be isolated.

Seven billion souls. Six continents. Five days.

How long would the extreme cold and the stormy ocean surrounding Antarctica keep it at bay?

For a while.

Three hours ago the headaches started. Sight fades as realization dawns. We are the disease. Slime is the cure.

Too late for us.

One.

Last words?

History tailgates.

Zero.