Author: ABN

HAND SANITIZERS: GOVT SHOULD BE MAKING THESE BY THE TRAINLOAD & DISTRIBUTING WIDELY

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Hand sanitizers are the simplest way to stop transmission of the coronavirus.

In whichever ways work best, these should be made and distributed widely, even given away.

As of today, hand sanitizers are unavailable in my locality and online. A friend who works at the Post Office says they have only a limited supply in the office and not nearly enough to supply letter carriers and rural deliverers.

“Essential workers” come in contact with many members of their communities. This makes them susceptible to the disease as well as potential vectors of it if they become infected.

All “essential workers” should be well-supplied with hand sanitizers in quantities sufficient for their work and also their homes. Household members of essential workers are clearly a major source of disease transmission to essential workers and through them entire communities.

I went on about this because I do not see this issue being discussed at CDC briefings or anywhere in government pronouncements. And also, because I see the problem first-hand.

Supplying all essential workers and their family members with hand sanitizers is a simple and inexpensive way to stop transmission of this virus. If you know someone with a real say in this, please speak to them. This is a simple need that can easily be taken care of and may save more lives than ventilators.

Grossly under-reporting COVID19 is tantamount to an act of war

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

The UK government believes China lied about it’s COVID19 disease and mortality statistics, thus misleading the entire world.

British officials are quietly accusing China of spreading disinformation about their success with the virus while simultaneously downplaying its number of cases  “by a factor of 15 to 40 times.”

Boris Johnson’s government is reportedly furious with China and believes it could have 40 times more coronavirus cases than it claims

No one who knows the Chinese Communist Party has believed otherwise. The CCP has been a lying parasite on the world trade system since it entered the WTO. Having lost the trade war, which would have merely rationalized their trade positions, the CCP then covers up the worst virus attack the world has seen since the Spanish Flu.

Covered it up or created it. It is reasonable to suspect the CCP either created or bred COVID19 in its Wuhan BSL-4 lab and then advertently or inadvertently released it, knowing it would spread throughout the world.

This letter to Nature argues that COVID19 was not manufactured in a lab: The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.

Maybe that’s good science and maybe it’s even true that the virus was not “the product of purposeful manipulation” of the splice and dice kind, but it still could have been found in nature and bred in a lab for high contagiousness and enough lethality to paralyze the world.

I am not a virologist and the above is speculation. Furthermore, I am not trying to sensationalize what has happened. I am saying it’s a simple fact that not telling the world the truth about your own epidemic will cause a worldwide pandemic. And that is tantamount to an act of war.

An unnamed British official said “there has to be a reckoning when this is over.” A very nice way to say the CCP is finished. I pray there will not be kinetic war, but something dire is going to happen. The CCP’s handling of COVID19 is sinister, aggressive, hostile, and unforgivable.

First they came for “inner” Mongolia, but the world said nothing. Then they came for Tibet, Falun Gong, Tiananmen Square, the Uighurs, and Hong Kong, and the world still said nothing.

Relevant: The Coronavirus and the Culture War

EDIT: 4 Ways China Gains from the Coronavirus Pandemic

A major unit of psycholinguistics that I have not seen described: convertations

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

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.