I am so fucking terrified

I am having trouble marshalling my thoughts and I’m having a hard time telling my physical from my emotional sensations.

I don’t want to leave the house, but we’re going to go shopping.

I don’t want to make someone else sick. The winnowing fan hasn’t come close yet and I don’t want it to. I want to walk a golden path through this because I deserve it. I want to catch it to burn off my sins. I want to catch it to spare ones that I love, as if the virus knows that kind of math.

The math of dreams and denial; the math of a sick thought burning a furrow through my nerves.

I need sugar, and flour, and toilet paper, and I don’t know what we’re going to find at the store.

 

8:23 am – we shopped during the old people’s hour, and it was okay, but there is no sugar, no flour and no toilet paper.

from the Nib today…. this

but Kima has no bones

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165 million year old fossil octopus from France.

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Isn’t this wonderful? I’m not a fan of the show; merely its surfaces and cultural impact, to the extent that I wrote a desperately bad original filk tune about it, which I’m not even going to bother to renounce since I have no idea what someone more savvy than a girl like I might do with it. Anyway, I likes it, and there were distinct choices that went into its makeup that show comfort and skill.

little machines

HSV-1-EM.png

Herpes virus

HPV16, which causes cancer

"coronavirus"

Coronavirus

Electronmicrograph of "Foot-and-mouth disease virus"

Electron photomicrograph of Foot and Mouth (aphthovirus)

Mimivirus svg.svg

Mimivirus

electron micrograph depicting morphologic variants of "Orf virus"

Parapoxvirus

Negatively stained transmission electron micrograph of "Molluscum contagiosum virus" virions

Molluscum contagiosum virus

Cowpea mosaic virus

Virions-Electron micrograph of CaMV virions.png

Cauliflower mosaic virus

An electron micrograph showing a portion of a bacterium covered with viruses

Viral bacteriophages attaching to a bacterial cell wall

An electron micrograph of the virus that caused Spanish influenza

Recreated 1918 flu virus

Ebola

Marburg

SARS virion.gif

SARS

MERS-CoV electron micrograph3.jpg

MERS

Electron micrograph of Hepacivirus C purified from cell culture. Scale bar& = 50 nanometres

Hepatitis C

Electron microscopic image of two Epstein-Barr virus virions (viral particles) showing round capsids (protein-encased genetic material) loosely surrounded by the membrane envelope

Epstein Barr virus

Rotavirus.jpg

Rotavirus

 

 

 

all over the world

this is our Health care right now

 

Her twitter handle is ER Shit Magnet

She works as an ER Nurse in a big city in the US

 

Coded a COVID-19 symptoms patient. In his 20’s. We didn’t have enough gear or time to find PPE so 2 nurses were compressing him without masks on while the doc slammed on a PAPR without the fan to intubate. Bloody emesis sprayed on the staff.

Takaya the wolf was shot dead by a hunter

Screen caps of Dr. Josh Lerner’s home page on Facebook, forwarded by Amanda Guinzburg @Guinz on twitter

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Will the pandemic produce its own corona baby boom generation?

asked Michael Balter on twitter

That is the funniest question, all those assumptions.

 

NOT

VOLUNTARILY

 

The birth rate will go up in some places, actually a lot in some places, but they won’t be places where the survival rate of the children is likely to be very high, because of future pandemics, the social chaos brought on by the current pandemic, and climate change, which is not likely to back off just because we’re all having a horrible year. What you’re doing, when you’re being a hypothetical god of ideas looking at a screen upon which moves a nineteen year old Bengali woman who looks forty and has three kids in the ground already, is demonstrating readiness to be calmly philosophical about real human suffering, which I suppose is a great psychological advantage in this dress rehearsal for the fucking end times.

Anywhere there exists effective birth control, civic order, and interpersonal alternatives to the standardized hegemonic heterosexual-congress-while-married rules with which lovers of liberty must inevitably come into conflict, (ha ha, a little levity in the midst of this panorama of disease, greed and contempt) the birth rate’s gonna plummet. It will blip in a couple of years due to pent up demand and glue for new marriages for the sudden crop of ‘fuck I’m in my 30’s, a parent and I /we lost a partner’ 2nd marriages we’ll see over the next three years.

I believe industrialized world women who up until last Christmas were planning children are going to watch the slow motion chaos of the US response and think, no, I don’t think so. They will watch the global economy collapse and realize that they have a choice about whether they want to bring their kids into this mess or not. Especially after what I imagine will be more than one mass murder event in a major American hospital, when masked gunmen walk in and kill everyone they can find to ‘start a race war’ or ‘stop the hoax’ or whatever toxic bullshit youtube’s spun them up on.

As things go bad, we’re going to see the children of single parents who’ve died during the pandemic disappear into child trafficking, sex and cooking and agricultural slavery, and many women will say, if they have a choice, that they don’t want to make food for Moloch, the devouring god that modern capitalism always was before it became too big to fail. They won’t want to be forced into sex work to feed their children. And as the welfare state implodes, there will be fewer and fewer opportunities, so why bring a child into that? The wealth transfer from the older generations who are dying in higher numbers for this pandemic  will come in the form of property, which is great, but there won’t be any cash, so nothing to start a new life with.

Also, modern men are trash. They do not know how to give head, they are unclean, jealous, spendthrift, cowardly, lazy and a sack of wet mice does better on an LSAT. Why would any woman in her right fucking mind want a child with one?

There won’t be any decent pre-natal care because there already aren’t enough obstetricians and up to four percent of them will die in the next eighteen months since the US is having such shitty outcomes for coronavirus when it gets to ARDS. After that, we’ll have a vaccine, yippee! With more than a 15% refusal rate, because it is imbedding a chip into us! Boo. And then after that, the general strikes, the food riots, more wars, and then – the real pandemic, which has yet to arise.


Could be Tennessee, could be Indonesia, could be China, could be Canada. We don’t know where the next one is coming from, and it will be coming into a world stronger in some ways in its response than today, but in many other ways weaker. We’re not coming back from this. Mass unemployment, structural unemployment on a scale not seen before in industrialized societies, will be a continuing feature of life, because pandemics will force so many people to stay home for at least one fifth of the next decade.

Also, this pandemic is leaving kids under five alone.  If you think the next one will be so kindly, Atropos would like a word.

Atropos, from a mosaic from the House of Theseus in Paphos

So no; there won’t be a baby boom. But isn’t it pretty to think that capitalism, after having shit on women in general and women of colour in particular, expects us feeeemales to do our duty to throw babies on Moloch’s pyre. Now why the fuck would any sensible woman do that. seriously

 

why