Posted on 03/07/2020 10:22:41 PM PST by foxfield
As you know, coronavirus is front and center. Yesterday for the first time I had a guy refuse to shake my hand after a speech, citing coronavirus fears. I was taken aback. You mean people can't touch anymore? I was scheduled to do a presentation at Google headquarters in April; that event was canceled yesterday, again citing fears of assembly due to the coronavirus. Isn't it amazing what society chooses to panic about? We don't panic about 50,000 people being killed by drunk drivers. We don't panic about parents still feeding their kids Lucky Charms and Cheerios even in the face of rising diabetes. We don't see supermarkets unable to sell white sugar. Fearing to assemble, to interact, to fellowship strikes at the core of functional society. In a time of extreme loneliness, this further isolates people. Suddenly every person--not just partisans--threatens our health. Paranoia isn't far behind. Interestingly, all the experts are scrambling for a vaccine to solve it. Why don't we have a national effort to boost everyone's immune system? This might be a good time to start such a campaign. An article is coming out perhaps next month in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) comparing the nutrition of grass-finished beef to fake meat. I talked with one of the scientists in charge of the research yesterday. He said it'll be earth shaking. At the very time when people need to fortify themselves with better nutrition, they're fleeing the very sustenance that guarantees the most functional immunity and buying lab-grown junk. In this panic, every other person on the planet becomes an enemy. That's a shame and has dire consequences. Here at Polyface we have lots of animals. A herd of 1,000 cows. A flock of 4,000 chickens (actually, several 1,000-bird flocks adding up to 4,000). When all of them are healthy but one dies, we know that one had a weakness. Sometimes it's even personality--a timid chicken does not get encouraged by her flock-mates. She gets picked on--hence, "the pecking order." Immunological weakness shows its ugly head on the farm all the time. And it shows itself in society. I suggest that rather than fearing every other person on the planet, canceling fellowship, and huddling in hermit life until a vaccine is discovered, how about we commit ourselves as a society to eat and live more healthily so we have a collectively better immune system? How about being intentional in how we eat, recreate, entertain, and meditate? What you ponder says a lot about your outlook on life. In the big scheme of things to fear, coronavirus doesn't have the numbers to scare. The effect is completely disproportional to the actual numbers. But when the media whips people into a frenzy with minute-by-minute paranoia pandering, people go wonky. I think the best cure for the coronavirus is to shut off the news. Perhaps we could say the best way to build your immune system with a positive outlook on life is to quit watching the news. What are you doing to boost your immune system?
Sure! Do you want to post it? You can post anything you like there ;)
The numbers they’ve got are what is being reported from states
The numbers I trust the most are out if South Korea and Japan
I disagree. The medical profession was nowhere near as advanced as it is today. Personal hygiene was not as widely practiced, nor even readily accessible, as it is today.
There is one big difference however, and that is travel is more prevalent today then it was back when the black plague ravaged humanity over a 4 year span.
There are conflicting theories of what caused the black death. The original and widely accepted theory was bacterial spread by rodent fleas. However, the newest theory is that it wasn't caused by fleas from rodents, because fleas only seek out new hosts when their current host dies off. But rodents were not dying in large numbers. The bubonic plague spreads rather slowly, at least in modern times, the black plague spread swept across Europe at enormous speed, especially given the fact that transportation was pretty undeveloped at the time.
Anyway, it is still too early to know just how bad this virus is. We will know more when warmer weather of summer takes over the northern hemisphere as to whether or not this virus will thrive in warmer weather.
Too soon to hit the panic button. Take it seriously for sure, but panic, not yet.
Thanks. I agree, and have been working on my garden which will be much larger this year...just in case.
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