Saturday 20th of April 2024

an insane physician...

quackery   Responding to a question on what he thought of climate activist Greta Thunberg's criticism of his administration's climate track record, Donald Trump replied by asking how old she was and adding: 'She beat me out on Time magazine', referring to the fact the 17-year-old Swede was named Person of the Year in 2019. Speaking on Wednesday during his final press conference at Davos 2020, the US president said Thunberg should focus more on 'other countries’…



It’s quite pathetic really… An old rich guy who had become President of the “strongest” country on the planet mostly by luck and promoting simplistic hubris — because his opponent was a “devious” warrior woman, a guy who is being “impeached” for alleged carelessness — is now sharing the entire world's attention with a 17 year old girl in the Asperger’s spectrum… and he is losing. He is showing some sickly impatience…

Davos is a weird famous place… Why did I say weird? I dunno. But if my memory is correct (actually I have been assured by Jules Letambour that he read it in a semi-satirical French book) this is where Salvador Dali and Gala fell in love, in very unusual circumstances…

Gala was Russian… She was born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova (Russian: Елена Ивановна Дьяконова) to a family of intellectuals.


But In 1912, she was sent to a sanatorium at Clavadel, near Davos in Switzerland for the treatment of tuberculosis.There she fell in love with a Frenchman, Paul Éluard. They were both seventeen and both sick. In 1916, during World War I, she traveled from Russia to Paris and they married one year later. Their daughter, Cécile, was born in 1918, but Gala mistreated her somewhat.


Gala became an inspiration for many artists of the surrealist movement, including Éluard, Louis Aragon, Max Ernst, and André Breton — though the latter eventually despised her. Gala, Éluard, and Ernst for three years had a ménage à trois. In early August 1929, Éluard and Gala visited an emerging Surrealist painter in Spain, Salvador Dalí, who, according to Jules, also went to Davos when Éluard and Gala had gone back there because of tuberculosis relapse. An affair developed between Gala and Dalí, who was 10 years younger than her. Éluard and Gala remained friends.

So Davos has a history of “sick people”. Here is DW:

Davos – best-known for hosting global elites – owes a lot of its fame to a German doctor.
It was Alexander Spengler who first brought this then tiny farming village in the spotlight in the 1860s. Spengler noticed that the village's climate somehow made its people immune to tuberculosis, a deadly disease that was wreaking havoc across Europe.


As the word spread, Davos began attracting patients from across Europe. A number of hospitals sprung up, many of them catering to rich foreigners, who doled out large amounts of cash to lounge in their wide sun-kissed balconies.


It marked the beginning of Davos' tryst with the rich and famous. The first ones being Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, who stayed in Davos while his wife was treated for TB, novelist Robert Louis Stevenson and German writer Thomas Mann, who too came for his wife's treatment.


Today, Davos no longer attracts TB patients and many of its sanatoriums have been converted into luxury hotels such as Hotel Schatzalp, which is thought to have been the sanatorium Mann described in his novel "The Magic Mountain.”


But patients have not deserted the Alpine resort altogether, it's just that their illnesses have taken a modern form. Davos and some nearby towns are seeing an increase in patients suffering from burnout and depression.


"The specialty of Davos is the mountains, it's the touch of nature that you can experience here," Michael Pfaff, the chief psychiatrist at Clinica Holistica Engiadina, told DW. "The possibility to get in close contact with nature really helps people get their inner balance back.”


Davos tourism authorities are collaborating with local hospitals to come up with tailor-made offerings to promote the region's medical prowess. They plan to organize a special rehabilitation camp this summer in nearby Klosters for people suffering from burnout.

Read more:
https://www.dw.com/en/davos-medical-tourism-sparks-alarm-about-corporate-culture/a-52087478


It seems the biggest burnout patient to visit Davos now is the WHOLE PLANET. Like an insane and illiterate "physician" of the 16th century, Doctor Donald J. Trump has no idea about the condition of the patient. Doctor Donald J. Trump lives in the "let-them-have-cakes-and-make-them-bleed-with-leeches" quackzone, while praying and burning candles to the fossil fuel industry. 

As Gus has claimed before, should we be able to “feel” global warming without instrumentation, by simple observation of weather being out of kilter, of melting glaciers and ice sheets, warming of the oceans at a rate of one Hiroshima nuclear bomb exploding every second — and extremes becoming more extremes, We have about 5 (five) years before we (the little shits) hit the fan… It’s only a question of the speed setting. Are we going towards there at full bore by burning more fossil fuels or are we going to pace ourselves and limit the damage?
Say ten years… Say 2032 max...

GL


Image at top:
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-rare-book-shows-how-insane-medicine-wa...

dangerous work...

Australia bushfires: Water tanker aircraft crashes killing three

A tanker aircraft involved in Australia's bushfire battle has crashed, killing its three American crew members. It was not immediately clear why the plane crashed while it was carrying a load of fire retardant.

 

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/australia-bushfires-water-tanker-aircraft-crashes-killing-three/a-52116045

 

Condolences to the families of the crew...

the spirit of us all together...

It was during the Dada and the Surrealist 1920s movements that the spirit of the 1789 French revolution was rekindled in a very strange way, though the socialists reproached the artists of being no more than self-serving spoiled bourgeois...



The Louis Aragon Affair, started after he’s published an anti-government poem in The Red Front in 1931. Aragon was pursued in justice for having incited to the murder of the French President:

Fire on Léon Blum
Fire on Boncour Frossart Déat
Fire on the trained bears of the social democracy

This was at the cusp of the time when Aragon “became” a communist, after having been a wild idiotic surrealist:

There was one night when we were all at a house somewhere down in the country. Cowley and Josephson and Cummings, I remember, were there. Our host had an elaborately bound set of the works of Racine, and by the way of showing our contempt for this kind of “literature”, we took the volumes and tossed them into the fireplace. Then, as they went up in smoke, we all stood around and urinated on the ambers.

We’ve all been there… Not really, but infantilism is a mark of respect for the lack of respect… One of Aragon’s friends who had taught him to use news titbits as inspiration, was Vladimir Mayakovsky, a major Russian poet who eventually "committed suicide". But the Aragon affair was not seen as part of the revolutionary spirit by all. L’Humanité, the French communist newspaper, published a scathing article in February 1932:
"…. But we vigorously denounce the use of this affair by the Surrealists as a means of advertising  themselves. In place of fighting bourgeois [oppression], the Surrealists are fighting only against the [oppression] of a lyric poem…"

In the Belgian Journal des Poètes, Charles Plisnier wrote that “if Lenin were alive, he would have laughed at this little bourgeois…"

So here you have the storm in a teacup of the pseudo-philosophers from the Surrealist movement that more or less was frothed to maximum, when Breton attacked Aragon in a pamphlet called “La Misère de la Poésie” (the Misery of Poetry) and L’Humanité chose to be on Aragon’s side...

With the future of the planet in the balance at Davos, we need to do more than piss on the ambers of august classical literary works… We need to stop the fossil fuel merchants from supplying us with comforts… This is the crunch. Do we need to have a scientific surrealism mind to make the switch? Or do we need a 17 year old Asperger kid to tell us what we’re doing wrong? We should feel shame...

The future will tell us if we have taken the necessary steps to prevent a bigger catastrophe… All of us, from the bourgeois to the bogans, the bosses to the slavoes need to wake up… The fires are coming towards us.

The kids? They're already there. They know the future... They don't need Jordan Peterson to tell them "to choose their sacrifice"... But this is another story...

GL

the doomest of all...

"My gap year ends in August, but it doesn’t take a college degree in economics to realise that our remaining 1,5° carbon budget and ongoing fossil fuel subsidies and investments don’t add up...” says Greta in one of her latest tweets to Mnuchin.



A cook! OMG! We’re going to die!” says the boobied porn-gal after she popped out of her cardboard cake and realised there is a situation going on, as calmly explained by the Steven Segall character, the "cook", in “Under Siege” the movie…

Yes, we’re all going to die at some point or another… Doom thus take a relative value for different people in different situation. The plagues of frogs and of locusts of the bible were seen as punishment (small localised inconvenient doomy thingies) from god, for having misbehaved, or not eaten fish on Friday, i.e. "sinned”…. 

The Noah’s biblical floods would have to be seen as god’s first inclination to doom his own creation, except for the family of a drunk who build a cubit big boat to take the chosen animals (dinosaurs excluded) in pairs to fuck each other. The food supply would have been a major problem, but I suppose the lions did not need to kill a zebra for a feed as they would have gone to sleep on their last meal. Imagine the accounting! Millions of species to count only two of at a time… Meanwhile cleaning the poop deck daily would have kept the family very busy. Now in this Abrahamic family, was there any blacks, Chinese or Aborigines? Who knows…We only know it rained for forty days and forty nights, until the tallest mountain at the time, was spotted by one of white doves, which I guess was shot to provide a celebratory feed to the crew, with some vine leaves as a side-salad.

All others were “doomed”. Extinction is relative to the non chosen species… Fateful.

When some people were trapped by bushfire in Australia and died, they could have though they were “doomed”… Horrible. Condolences to families.

We know “doom” from the legends in the bible that tell us that “at the end of time”, sinners will spend the rest of eternity in Hell. If this isn’t "doom”, what is? The others, the winners of the good behaviour lottery will end up spending the rest of eternity in Bliss — bliss being another form of “doom-fate”, in which we are happy forever after in a white robe.

So we all freak (or suppose to) at the words “prophets of doom” used by a Donald Trump, as if he was a priest of common sense (which he isn’t) telling us like butcher Jones in Dad’s Army: “Don’t panic, don’t panic!”

So the utterance by The Donald is as meaningless as a dead snake under a stone but as frightening as a dead one… Suddenly, the word “doom” conjures ideas of finality for which we were not ready for at this stage.

So what is The Donald on about?

Presently, this lovely little planet is suffering from a climate change. A bit of a fever… Take a couple of Aspirins and come back tomorrow for the rectum thermometer measurement just in case. On this massive scale, taking the proper measurements is a Gargantuan task. But the scientists have been diligent and the prognosis is in: there is some global warming added value to the normal weather behaviour.

Of note, massive unprecedented bushfires in Australia, unprecedented wild fires in California and other places, including Spain, Portugal and France at various times, storms of the century happening daily somewhere on the planet, including Barcelona, a few extra tornadoes in the mid-west in the “wrong tornado season”, a “record” balmy winter day in New York, the polar caps melting at a rate of knots, the oceans warming at a rate of knots and the atmosphere warming at a rate of knots on a geological scale… and a few other inconvenient records, not to mention some deadly floods destroying little villages that were built so many centuries ago, that no-one can remember the level of water ever been so high. Apart from this — and the extinction of some species, due in part to this warming and our personal human need for space — there is no “doom”.

“Doom” is an exaggeration of the situation. The Donald is prone to exaggeration. We know this. So we cannot take his “prophets of doom” seriously. Not even if we are dying — drowning in a flood of the millennium — it’s only our own doom. There is question of proportion: some 15 millions Bangladeshis might die on a bad day of sea level rising spurred by a typhoon and global warming combined, while we can drink tea comfortably sitting at the terrace of a Cafe by the River Seine, watching Notre Dame in flame. Different situation and different doom for some. It could still be a question of insurance…

Insurance against global warming? Is global warming really bad? The scientists, in their blissed white coats, studying the earthly measurements in their heavenly labs, are shitting in their pants… The fever is increasing and the origin of the fever is “man-made” (anthropogenic). We know about man-made stuff, like steam engines, steel bridges and concrete Babel towers. We also know about forests having been replaced by wheat-fields harvested with arrays of big machines. You can’t stop progress…

But this progress — like all our activities, such as that of our digestive system — produces shit and rubbish as well.

Of note, burning fossil fuels create CO2, which is an atmospheric warming gas in a greater quantity that can be absorbed by our surroundings we treat as a dunny. At this stage, WE HAVE WARMED UP THE GENERAL YEARLY ATMOSPHERE ABOVE THE GOOD OLD CONTINENT OF AUSTRALIA by 1.52º Celsius. The rest of the planet has warmed up by 1.1º Celsius on average.

The modern rectum thermometer doesn’t lie. And the situation, which is not “doomesque” yet, tells us that the temperature will continue to climb…To where, I ask you? Like a doctor looking at your throat, the scientists can say with a certain amount of precision that by the end of this century (barely 80 years from now), the temp will be 5º to 6º Celsius higher than now IF WE DON’T TAKE OUR PILL. Should we bite the bullet now, and act — THAT IS TO SAY STOP ADDING CO2 IN THE ATMOSPHERE NOW — we could reduce this excess temperature to between 3º and 4º Celsius by 2100. We have not a chance at meating the Paris target by 2050.

So far no mention of doom. No mention of prophecy… Only of scientific analysis and prognosis without which the Teetering Donald could not Tweet — as scientific analysis and prognosis are at the core of his cell-phone, and also at the core of HIS WEAPONS OF DOOM, the atomic arsenal which he can launch upon us, at the flick of a red button on top of his historical hysterical walNUT desk. Scientist know. They don’t prophetise. Presidents bullshit.

So which is the doomest of all?


GL.



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