Saturday, February 23, 2019

Don't Cough in Public Please

Living in the allergy capital of the world, it is said, somehow I have basically no "allergies" anymore.

Back in the mid 1980's I had a cold, or something.  I had a sore throat and chesty cough that didn't go away for months.  I figured I had finally succomed to allergies.  Finally, I went to a doctor who prescribed an antibiotic, and in a couple weeks I was over it.

In 2008 I took a ride with a carpet installer in his small truck filled with rotten looking carpet padding.  He was coughing constantly, and often smoking.  After picking up some liquor at a liquor store, we went to a comedy club where it seemed there were a lot of sick coughing people.

About a week later I developed a chesty cough.  I figured it was allergies or something for over a month.  Finally, I went to a doctor who prescribed an antibiotic and I was over it.

I understood the bug at this time to be mycoplasma, which appears endemic in a lot of communities, as I have experienced.  Especially where people congregate in large numbers who do not generally se doctors because they do not have health insurance, OR they are somehow predisposed against modern medicine

Mycoplasma causes a minor lung infection that you can basically live with untreated.  "Walking pneumonia."  So many people do.  Some people get over it untreated, others do not, just keep on hacking away for months to years.  Untreated for years, it can lead to lung cancer.  And it is more than just one specific germ, it's a constantly mutating thing like flu.  Sometimes called NTM, Non-Tuberculosis Mycoplasma, because Tuberculosis is also a mycoplasma, but a more life threating one. When you congregate with other people who have mycoplasmas, new variations arise and get around.

I am fortunate that when I have cough or cold like illness, I can generally avoid being in public, and I think this is a very good to do.  I think it is irresponsible to be possibly spreading germs by shedding germs through coughing, sneezing, or blowing nose.  Such germs can travel up to 6 feet when someone coughs.  (One way to avoid catching germs is to avoid touch hands--where they often accumulate--to face especially around nose.  And washing hands.  There may not be much else you can do.  The person coughing should (a) stay out of public as much as possible, (b) cover their mouth with the arm, preferable the inside of the elbow.

But the USA has become a kind of Dickensian dystopia where sick people are often expected to work when sick, spreading their germs, regardless.  Often, and most especially, those without health insurance.

It is terrible also that few people are ever taught or learn the basics of personal hygene and health: how to breathe, how to have bowel movements (at least daily, responding quickly to the call, small short squeeze if needed, no long straining), how to clean the rectal area at least daily (water flowing downwards, no soap), washing hands frequently with non-drying soap, etc.  I wonder if some of the alleged benefits of certain kinds of treatment ACTUALLY come from the doctor finally explaining to you how to do these things--I had recurrent severe rectal pain until it finally sunk in that I should not use soap to clean the rectal area after a doctor advised me of this for the nth time.


Now my exposure to a constantly coughing person has been unavoidable at work.  I got a cough for a couple weeks.  Having learned my lesson, I didn't wait one month or two months.  I went to doctor and got an antibiotic and the cough was over at the end of the course.

Now I seem to have gotten another cough, but managed to get over it, by amplifying the positive and reducing the negative pressures in my life.  By ensuring enough sleep, getting to bed early, drinking enough fluids, and straight water for two hours before bedtime.  By ensuring a long gap between dinner and breakfast with absolutely no snacking allowed in between.

Perhaps I have finally developed some resistance the the bug I've had and gotten over several times with assistance before also.

But I've also learned some tricks in avoiding coughing around other people,  which I think is very worth avoiding, both in spreading bugs we've developed immunity and helping spread new variations.

The first thing I learned was that by swallowing, I could sometimes suppress coughing.

Another is a general principle, which I understand is good lung heath.

Basically, but not with any stress, attempt to keep the lungs more filled with air.  Breath in slowly and deeply.  Allowing exhales to happen, but consciously being  more on the "full lung" side than the "empty lung" side, in which you may also be slouched down, feeling ill, and coughing.

Keep breathing in, chest up (not crumpled in toward abdomen).  Note that proper breathing in requires moving the diaphram, which means extending the abdomen, aka stomach, outward, not actually trying to breath by raising the chest as such.  Also it helps to keep shoulders back.  All  those things your mother and coach and music teacher scolded you to do, but never completely explained why.  A hundred years ago people were more familiar with the basics of proper immuno-defensive breathing because they didn't have antibiotics to rely on, and TB was a leading cause of death.

Proper breathing is the best thing for helping the immune system do it's natural work, clearing the junk out of the lungs in the long term, and even in the short term suppressing coughing.  There's a natural conveyer belt of removing the junk in the lungs, and it works best with a relatively full lung.

Coughing as such is only intended as an emergency response, when something has so gummed up the natural system that it doesn't work.  This is true at birth, we all require a cough to get the lungs cleared and started.  But after that, they should mostly just work without coughing.

Disease processes hijack the coughing system, for the obvious purpose of spreading the disease.  So when we have a disease, we cough a lot, sometimes useful and needed, but also often not so.

Over the years I've tried all the cough remedies, and none of them work in the long run.  The kind that sort of work, the opioids, have a slew of side effects and when the opiod wears off, the coughing may still be there, only worse.  And that general path describes all cough remedies that have any effect at all, except perhaps hot water.  Some people praise special teas, but I've even found teas to have that "cough more" when the tea wears off kind of thing.

And, please see a general doctor (not just an allergist) and get proper treatment if you have continuing cough for more than 2 weeks.  Do not just assume it's allergies.  Even in the allergen capital, allergens go up and down.  If your cough stays the same for months, despite these variations, it's probably not just allergens, one doctor told me.

Strangely, here in the allergy capital of the world, I basically have no allergies anymore.  Every time I thought I had allergies, I had bugs.

Monday, February 18, 2019

Reverse Anti-Semitism



A friend today sends me an international news item: anti-semitic epithet shouted to professor in France.  That's ugly, all right.  But what does the Prime Minister of Israel say about Iranians:

https://therealnews.com/stories/warsaw-conferences-war-with-iran-agenda-met-with-low-level-delegations-from-european-allies

And what about that open air prison in Gaza, said to soon be uninhabitable?

****

In the beginning, the left was pretty consistent in denunciation of ethnic nationalism.  In the former Soviet Union and Satellite "Communist" countries, ethnic nationalism was forbidden.  That stricture kept the former Yugoslavia together, until Western-Country-backed revolutionaries split off Croatia and, precipitating a civil war that whose security is still established by foreign troops.

This chapter of US imperialism, is one I have the most trouble explaining to my friends.  Along with Syria.

It is very consistent, in contrast to Communist doctrine, the Capitalist countries back ethnic nationalism to resist, break up,  and destroy democracy and socialism.

So it is no wonder Putin is a friend of Netanyahu.  Russia is a counter-revolutionary capitalist country!  The only way it represents something unappreciated in the USA is that it represents a different imperial axis (China-Russia).

What the USA should be doing is tossing off the hat of Imperialism to the new fools who seem to want it.  And get ahead of the Green train instead of trying to keep it from starting.




Saturday, February 2, 2019

Empire Ending at Last?

I may have been the only one who believed, when the Temporary Government Shutdown ended, that the precipitating cause of Trump's capitulation was the need to have all hands on deck, especially at the State Department, for the unfolding coup that had been triggered in Venezuela.

Much like Bay of Pigs, the Venezuelan government did not just fall over when the US fingered it's long groomed successor as the Interim President.  There is no clause in the Venezuelan constitution which permits such a thing.  Interim Presidency could only occur in the event of the President's incapacitation, and even then it requires a co-Presidency including the Vice President.  And the idea that the determination would be made in Washington in quite a joke 90% of Venezuelans wouldn't be laughing about.

The Military did not gather around the newly "recognized" coupster, much as happened in the 2002 coup attempt against Chavez.

Given the US has endlessly engineered endings for the Bolivarian regime, since it began in 1998, it cannot be trusted with anything.  And if the US fingers a US groomed successor--in Venezuela that should be treason.

Of course, the successor immediately wants to reverse the oil nationalization of the Bolivarian regime, and steal the oil industry back to the US.

Only now, it is half owned by the Chinese and Russians, no small thanks to Washington's prior actions.

This could be the end of the world.  Or it could be the turning of a new leaf, ending the highly imperialist Monroe Doctrine, which I'd love to see.

Along with this, which virtually every child and adult understands and believes in the USA (it's about the oil, duh) there are other memes, lies, being spread officially and by bots controlled by Imperial agencies.  Along the lines of "Well...something must be done!"  These are to be summarily dismissed, on several levels.

The first might be, it's a crime against nature if the Venezuelan oil isn't being extracted to the higher degree, presumably, that a US strangehold would bring.

Actually, it's a crime against nature for any oil to be taken from the ground, that was carbon in sequestration better than humanity could devise.  I could hardly protest this, given my own country is now the largest oil extractor, or something like that.  But I certainly wouldn't protest lack of growth or even decline in Venezuelan oil production.  I would celebrate it!

As for the Venezuelans, of course, they would need to find something else to do, a universal task, freed from the resource curse, or now the effective lack of a resource curse under alleged mismanagement of the Bolivarian regime.

How to find what to do now is not really my domain, but my beliefs would suggest Communism, of which the Bolivarian regime has often been accused but never come close to being.

Neoliberalism aka "Freedom and Democracy" can only deliver the rut of 1998, or worse.


The second is that the elections were unfair.  No reasons are ever given to back this up, it is merely asserted.  Certain opposition parties boycotted the elections, which was their right, but it is not proof of anything.  Independent polls show desire to be free of US influence ranging around 90%, which is not far from Meduro's official election result of 70%, tabulated by foolproof Taiwanese machines.

There is far more evidence that the US elections were flawed, and China would be equally justified to pick an Interim President there.

Being forced to have new elections at some tight spot is not for foreign nations to call.  The US should not even, in the slightest, be involved with the evolution of governance in Venezuela.  That concept, foreign to the Imperium, is basic common sense and international law.  WHEN elections are called is a very tricky business, to be left to the people themselves, possibly by constitutional means except in dire circumstances, which is only for the very people to judge, free of foreign influence.


Acceptance of the sovereignty of other nations is basic International Law, which the US routinely violates.

This should end, and with it all phony (perhaps always rigged) claims of concern for the national leadership of other countries and its internal effects.

The whole idea that we as a State* are responsible to external unfairness, governance, or war is mistaken.  We may be generous to to individual people materially or with resettlement (acceptance of immigrants and refugees is highly admirable--and often legally required), so long as it is not to control their collective governance.

(*Except through the UN, which represents our limited responsibilities to the rest of the world.)

US actions in this regards toward many regimes in many nations who were coup'd has been abominable, and I can't think of one that was beneficial in any way to ordinary people of either nation.

The notion that we are "concerned" always strikes me as preposterous.

By the way, I don't trust people who claim they are or were from a country.  The very fact that they are near me suggests they are highly connected with the Imperium in some way and therefore unrepresentative of any but the 10% elite.

Likewise I don't trust mainstream media accounts, or even what many argue is required, "being there."  Being "there" still means in some particular places, once again, not necessarily representative or honestly represented.

What I do trust is that people have strong tendencies for both honesty and corruption everywhere.  Nowhere is there a perfect society but the best are those that prize equality and fairness above prosperity and especially growth.

The well being of the least is always the best measure.

And the less connected to The Imperium, probably, the better for both.