Tag: destruction

Weapons of Mass Destruction

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Shinichi Tetsutani's tricycle
Shinichi Tetsutani’s tricycle. Shinichi was 3 years 11 months old when fatally injured by the US bombing of Hiroshima.

The term “Weapons of Mass Destruction” goes back at least as far as 1937, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Around that time, fire bombing runs in Hamburg and Tokyo killed tens of thousands of civilians in a single night.

But American Ingenuity took it further. With the bombing of Hiroshima, we annihilated 66,000 people instantly. Another 75,000 would die from radiation injury by the end of the year. Three days later, at Nagasaki, we killed 40,000 more people instantly, and again, many others died more slowly.

Perhaps it was all about saving American lives, as (Democratic) President Harry Truman always claimed. Or perhaps, as Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, commander of the U.S. Navy’s Third Fleet, claimed in 1946, the first atomic bomb was “an unnecessary experiment…[the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.”

Happy Birthday, Covid-19

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I’d just returned from two weeks in Indonesia, with long-since-canceled plans to return in August 2020. A few months later, I learned that the Life Care Center of Kirkland … about a 15 minute drive from my house … was the US epicenter. Weeks after that, while I was traveling to Austin for business, my company became one of the first to move to all-remote work, which will continue for at least the next seven months.

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More active cases than ever in the US

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Just a quick reminder that even if you’re "bored" with Covid, dealing with reality means accepting that there are more active cases of Covid-19 in the United States today than on any other day ever. And again, that’s active cases … discounting all of the people who have recovered or died, there are more active infections today than ever before … just like almost every day since we allowed this thing to run uncontrolled throughout the country.

If you think that what we’ve done is working … that we’re "rounding the corner" … you’re just plain wrong.

And if you’re now thinking "herd immunity", we still have a ways to go before 3% of the population has been infected, and most estimates for herd immunity require that we get well into the 40% to 80% range — so it has to get 10 to 20 times as bad, and we’ve already killed the equivalent of 75 September 11th attacks.

And you know what else, even if we never got a vaccine, masks alone might be enough to beat this thing. Or maybe not, but while masks alone might not end up being the single silver-bullet, they absolutely help … without starving you of oxygen or whatever other ridiculous ideas people are bandying about these days.

Anti-mask isn’t freedom, it’s free-dumb. Anti-maskers are 75 times worse (so far) than those 19 terrorists were. It’s truly one of the most selfish and sadistic movements ever.

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Choose red, you live….

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Liquorice rolls Bulk sale at a confectioner’s. (Photo by: Andia/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

It’s a known phenomenon, but perhaps not widely known, or at least not widely enough to help a Massachusetts construction worker whose switch from red to black Twizzlers killed him.

Discussions with his family revealed he had been eating one to two “large” bags of black licorice every day for about three weeks before his heart stopped.

It’s not just Twizzlers. Licorice flavored jelly beans, and other candies, and even some Belgian beers and chewing tobaccos contain glycyrrhizic acid.

In your gut you have hundreds kinds of bacteria, as well as viruses and fungi, collectively called your microbiome. And among the bacteria are some that turn glycyrrhizic acid into glycyrrhetinic acid. In the kidneys, glycyrrhetinic acid derivatives suppress conversion of cortisol to cortisone, which regulates ion, salt, and water balances. At the end of this chain reaction, you have critically low potassium levels leading to erratic behavior by the heart and lots of other problems.

If you’re wondering why the FDA would allow even small amounts of such a chemical, remember that all rice contains arsenic, and almost all fish and shellfish contain mercury.

A spokesman for the Hershey Company, which makes Twizzlers, wrote “all of our products are safe to eat and formulated in full compliance with FDA regulations,” but also that all foods, including candy, “should be enjoyed in moderation.”

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Humans keep destroying nature

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For the second decade in a row, humanity "failed to meet a single target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems in the last decade", according to the United Nations.

“Earth’s living systems as a whole are being compromised. And the more humanity exploits nature in unsustainable ways and undermines its contributions to people, the more we undermine our own wellbeing, security and prosperity,” she said.

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