This site provides accurate numbers in an accessible format: Worldometer.
I have it set for USA, but all countries are available. The number of cases and deaths is very low compared to seasonal flu.
A major unit of psycholinguistics that I have not seen described: convertations
When we consider psycholinguistics from the point of view of interpersonal communication (especially psychologically rich communication) we can identify a unit of communication that springs from the working memory as it indexes deeper and more extensive information stored elsewhere in the mind/brain.
This unit of communication is used to start a conversation and then maintain it.
For example, my partner recently had a performance review at her job. This morning I asked her about it. When I asked her, I intended to start a conversation. Along with my intention, I knew a few things:
- that she would be interested in the topic
- that she would have new information
- that I knew a good deal about it but not as much as her
- that we would almost certainly engage in a conversation that is of practical as well as psychological interest to both of us
In raising the subject, I held an amorphous notion in my working memory roughly described by the text just above. I embarked on the subject with a pointed yet open-ended question, “So how is the job review going…”
That question signaled in my mind, and it turns out in may partner’s as well, that I wanted to converse with her about her job review.
I want to call what I did there the initiation of a convertation,(which is the word conversation with a “t” in place of the “s”). I am using a special term because I want to isolate and describe it as a psycholinguistic unit of major importance to both speech and psychology.
I submit that a convertation, which the above is merely a single example of, is a major psycholinguistic unit; a major piece of psychology and language both together and separately.
A convertation springs from the working memory where it appears as an index of much more. Many convertations could be described as “gambits,” but gambits are only one type.
Loosely speaking, a convertation includes an intention, a purpose, somewhat defined content, and open-endedness. In the example above:
- My intention was to converse with my partner, listen to her speak, enjoy the morning, have fun talking with her, and find out how her job review was going.
- My purpose was to get new information and assess how the review was affecting her and if I had any role to play in it.
- The content (once it began) of now our convertation was the job review and my partner’s psychological responses toward it. Less important but also significant were my psychological responses to hers.
- The open-endedness could be anything sparked by the original premise of the convertation.
In the case above, everything went smoothly. My partner was not stressed by the review. It seemed to be going well. I felt some relief but was not surprised. At some point, we began a discussion of why her employer did the review the way they did. Lastly, I said our talking constituted a good example of what I mean by convertation.
Convertations can be fruitful and very pleasant as in the above example. Or they can be fraught with dangerous misunderstandings, misplaced emotions, psychological and linguistic harm.
Sometimes a convertation constitutes an entire conversation. Sometimes a convertation is a sub-unit of a larger conversation. If you isolate convertations and view them as units in themselves, sharper distinctions can be made about how and why people speak to each other.
The Secret Speech of General Chi Haotian
This speech should be read by everyone interested in China. Draw your own conclusions about how much it has to do with recent events. Chi Haotian was the defense minister of China from 1993-2003. An excerpt from his speech can be found just below. Be sure to read the whole speech. More information about it is provided at the link below.
…Conventional weapons such as fighters, canons, missiles and battleships won’t do; neither will highly destructive weapons such as nuclear weapons. We are not as foolish as to want to perish together with America by using nuclear weapons, despite the fact that we have been exclaiming that we will have the Taiwan issue resolved at whatever cost. Only by using non-destructive weapons that can kill many people will we be able to reserve America for ourselves. There has been rapid development of modern biological technology, and new bio-weapons have been invented one after another. Of course, we have not been idle, in the past years we have seized the opportunity to master weapons of this kind. We are capable of achieving our purpose of “cleaning up” America all of a sudden. When Comrade Xiaoping was still with us, the Party Central Committee had the perspicacity to make the right decision not to develop aircraft carrier groups and focus instead on developing lethal weapons that can eliminate mass populations of the enemy country.
From a humanitarian perspective, we should issue a warning to the American people and persuade them to leave America and leave the land they have lived in to the Chinese people. Or at least they should leave half of the United States to be China’s colony, because America was first discovered by the Chinese. But would this work? If this strategy does not work, then there is only one choice left to us. That is, use decisive means to “clean up” America and reserve America for our use in a moment. Our historical experience has proven that as long as we make it happen, nobody in the world can do anything about us. Furthermore, if the United States as the leader is gone, then other enemies have to surrender to us.
Biological weapons are unprecedented in their ruthlessness, but if the Americans do not die then the Chinese have to die. If the Chinese people are strapped to the present land, a total societal collapse is bound to take place. (The Secret Speech of General Chi Haotian)
I have posted the translation found on J.R. Nyquist’s blog because this version contains parts left out of other versions I have seen, particularly Chi’s introductory discussion of an online survey.
As far as I have been able to determine, this translation is an accurate rendition of a real speech given to high-level Communist Party leaders.
Below are some quotes from Sun Tzu:
“The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.”
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”
“Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”
― The Art of War
Moving image of brain neurons firing in real-time captured by UCB researchers
Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have built a high-speed camera that can capture actual brain signals as they occur.
…The new imaging technique combines two-photon fluorescence microscopy and all-optical laser scanning in a state-of-the-art microscope that can image a two-dimensional slice through the neocortex of the mouse brain up to 3,000 times per second. That’s fast enough to trace electrical signals flowing through brain circuits. (High-speed microscope captures fleeting brain signals)
A strong argument that coronavirus was bio-engineered and escaped the Wuhan lab
The following article makes a strong case that the coronavirus (COVID19) was a bio-engineered pathogen created at the Chinese Wuhan BSL-4 lab and that it most likely escaped from the lab due to negligence.
This report is the product of a collaboration between a retired professional scientist with dozens of peer-reviewed publications and 30 years of experience in genomic sequencing and analysis, who worked at the Theoretical Biology Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and later helped design several ubiquitous bioinformatic software tools, as well as a former NSA counterterrorism analyst. It considers whether the Wuhan Strain of coronavirus (COVID-19) is the result of naturally emergent mutations against the possibility that it may be a bio-engineered strain – directly altered by genetic manipulation, subject to artificially-guided evolutionary selection, or both – most likely released into the public by accident since China’s rate of occupational accidents is about ten-times higher than America’s, and some twenty-times more than Europe’s, the only other regions with high-level virology labs.
Raising the odds of an accidental release, researchers from China’s only BSL-4 lab in Wuhan were reported to have particularly sloppy field research methods, being both bled and peed on by local bats that host coronaviruses remarkably similar to the Wuhan Strain COVID-19. And they’ve also been reported to smuggle used research animals out of their labs, selling them for cash on the street. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in mid February the Chinese Ministry of Science sent out a directive to all its labs emphasizing the important of carefully handling bio-infectious agents and alluding to slack oversight and past lapses, even mentioning coronaviruses specifically. (Logistical and Technical Exploration into the Origins of the Wuhan Strain of Coronavirus (COVID-19))
There are good links and a video available in front of and within the above article.
I vastly prefer the hypothesis that the virus was negligently released from China’s Wuhan BSL-4 lab. And there is good circumstantial evidence for this.
But there is also good circumstantial evidence that the virus was deliberately released by the CCP as payback for losing the trade war. Either way, gross negligence or deliberate hostility, the Communist Party of China at the very least owes the world a real and thorough explanation, a real apology, and probably very massive reparations.
If the virus was an act of war against the entire global community, I don’t know what to say or what will happen next.
How the Dalai Lama was used, or almost
I know nothing about the details reported below, but Frank Parlato has been covering NXIVM for a long time and has many insights into what happened in the group. I think his story is worth reading:
As readers know, NXIVM conducted “human potential and ethics” seminars in Albany and elsewhere.
Keith Raniere is the company’s founder. Clare and Sara Bronfman (two of heiresses of the Seagram’s fortune) started investing with Raniere around 2003.
By 2007, the Bronfman sisters invested more than $100 million in commodities, real estate and in litigation to sue adversaries who were preventing NXIVM from reaching its full potential.
Some of their investment was aimed at indicting adversaries, including one of Raniere’s harem members who left the NXIVM group. (The Inside Story of the Coupling of the Dalai Lama and Nxivm Sex Cult Leader Keith Raniere)
