Friday, February 4, 2022

Pending invasion Ukraine, Dvorak, Chinese synthetic caffeine, CFS, etc

Losing the ability to write with high focus over long intervals. Throw down some thoughts:

Dvorak Cell Concerto in Bm (B minor), Yo Yo Ma with Calgary Symphony points around 34.4 and 38 minutes into performance so intensely beautiful that found tears dripping down cheeks, then Dvorak follows with a simulation of a bell harmonic I used to use often in my electric guitar performance in the 70's, Dvorak somehow accomplishing this with a combination of harp and various horns, strings... attention diverted from study of measures of similarity, how much items in data sets are related, correlated, associated

....studied history of Russia, Ukraine, after reading Vladimir Putin's July 12, 2021 essay "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" trying to evaluate Putin's intellectual capability as well as character...Putin apparently has blood instinct of the Varangians, the Norsemen (primarily from present-day Sweden) who inhabited and upgraded the genetics of the locals, becoming the Kievan Rus'... an Arabic account in 922 AD writing that "I have never seen more perfect physical specimens, tall as date palms, blond and ruddy; they wear..a garment..that leaves one hand free...[with] an axe, a sword, and a knife..each keeps by him at all times" [Ahmad ibn Fadlan] and Persian Rustah, who visited Novgorod and described how the Rus' exploited the local Slavs "As for the Rus, they live on an island...harry the Slavs, using ships to reach them; ...carry them off as slaves and...sell them...they have no fields but simply live on what they get from the Slav's lands...When a son is born, the father will go up to the newborn baby, sword in hand; throwing it down, he says, "I shall not leave you with any property: You have only what you can provide with this weapon." Putin writes in his essay that "Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe. Slavic and other tribes across the vast territory – from Ladoga, Novgorod, and Pskov to Kiev and Chernigov – were bound together by one language (which we now refer to as Old Russian), economic ties, the rule of the princes of the Rurik dynasty, and – after the baptism of Rus – the Orthodox faith. The spiritual choice made by St. Vladimir, who was both Prince of Novgorod and Grand Prince of Kiev, still largely determines our affinity today." 

He continues with some adherence to history, but then begins to write with emotion coloring facts, unknown how much from his KGB training to manipulate target audiences (his own people, who he will most likely order to fight and die to invade Ukraine as I write February 4, 2022), reminding the reader of all the energy support Russia provided to Ukraine following the breakup of the USSR, criticizing Ukraine for having begun to lean to the West (rejecting Putin's 2014 attempt to put in place a Russian puppet ruler for Ukraine, Yanukovych, after which Putin annexed Crimea and implemented an armed insurrection in the Eastern Ukraine regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, where most of the Russian-speaking Ukranians live, that fighting continuing to this day, costing the lives of thousands of Ukrainians), saying Russia was "robbed," hinting that Ukrainians who reject Russian domination are Nazis, that the West is interfering for its own aims, stating ominously that "we will never allow our historical territories and people close to us living there to be used against Russia. And to those who will undertake such an attempt, I would like to say that this way they will destroy their own country."

 ...Zelensky (President of Ukraine, in yet more reality imitating art as he was elected after playing the President of Ukraine in a popular television comedy) made a serious error in responding to Putin's essay with a dismissive "Putin must have a lot of extra time on his hands"---as we saw that it was not a good move for Obama to have made fun of a possible Trump presidency...i.e., think twice before dismissing an enemy as a fool publically...Putin has been called "a killer" (by President Biden) and that is certainly correct, if by that you mean that Putin will arrange for enemies of himself or Russia to have serious accidents, or for innocent civilians who happen to be part of an operation (though I guess I should not make so much of that considering the number of non-combatants we have butchered in drone strikes over the years, but hey that gives idiots playing video games the ability to characterize themselves as soldiers with a straight face)...Putin does not act without some internal restraint though, we see himself having typically warned political enemies several times before those folks "mysteriously" encounter military-grade nerve agent in their tea...that might not sound like much restraint to the mostly effeminate population of declining America at this point, but having known true psychopaths I can assure you there is a difference, Putin using violence as a tool rather than to satisfy some demonic possession or mutated-away lack of empathy in the serial killer or the like. 

On mostly liquid/smoothy diet now, with my one remaining molar (still have a couple of premolars) on right extracted weeks ago or so. Took some synthetic caffeine, minimizing coffee intake. WalMart, like most if not all vendors in the US imports caffeine from CSPC Innovation Pharmaceutical Company in Shijiazhung, possibly the most heavily polluted industrial city in China.

I note that CSPC sends several million kilograms of caffeine annually to the US alone, where it, or the output of lesser producers, is used in Coca Cola and Dr. Pepper among other drinks, almost no synthetic caffeine being made in the US anymore--this lack of production at home is a result of the same perversion of normal human labor and craft I have railed against previously, e.g. the "chip shortage" in the US, i.e., the fact that America permits an entitled group of parasites to sit at the helm of previously world-class companies and send the technology and jobs overseas, in the process reducing America to a land of burger flippers and waiters, while training other countries like China to use the inventions of American engineers and scientists so that they can demand another ten million dollar bonus on their leeching compensation packages, having saved the cost of paying Americans, then bemoan the loss of US capability when shortages occur. 

The Nazis first synthesized caffeine in 1942, needing to keep their armed forces alert in the face of Allied embargoes presumably. Caffeine is a xanthine alkaloid which acts on the CNS. The central nervous system (CNS) is more or less the nervous system (neurons and supporting tissue) inside your head and spinal cord. The PNS or peripheral nervous system is generally neurons and structures external to the CNS structures, e.g., those nasty nociceptor cells that rudely puncture human illusions about transcendence when there is tissue damage, speaking of pain signals.  Caffeine antagonizes the adenosine neurotransmitter receptor, thereby suppressing the activity of adenosine, which normally suppresses the release of norepinephrine at adrenergic neuron synapses. "adrenergic" suggests adrenaline, which in turn suggests the fight or flight response, where you are necessarily alert and ready to fight or to run away (if you are able to run)

....in my own context, adrenergic activity overcomes, most of the time anyway, my decades-long struggle with the debilitating brain fog and fatigue associated with CFS/ME (so-called chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition affecting estimated 2.5 million Americans, a quarter million British in 2015). US physicians remain mostly ignorant of the condition, or dismiss it on the basis of the fraudulently conducted PACE trial study in the UK (White et al 2007 through 2013 publications). The main investigators in that "trial" had financial and consulting relationships with disability insurance companies (who wanted a way to avoid paying disability claims by CFS patients) which they did not reveal clearly to the participants in the trials. Also, among other anomalies, they used subjective primary analyses in an unblinded trial, used overly broad criteria for diagnosis (in other words, they made the symptoms so broad that people who had mild fatigue instead of CFS debilitating exhaustion could be included), and changed the normal ranges for fatigue and physical function after the study had begun such that patients could actually worsen during the trial therapy and nonetheless be found within "normal range" for physical function. Over 40 scientists wrote to the Lancet in 2015 (the otherwise prestigious UK medical journal) raising these concerns and others and asking for a new independent analysis of the results. 

However, the damage to patients world-wide was already done and the struggle to remove the bogus implication of the PACE study (which propagated quickly to the US and the CDC and influenced a generation of medical students) that CFS could be overcome by "positive attitude" (CBT) and slowly increasing exercise or GET, continues. GET or graded exercise therapy  is extremely tricky for a true CFS patient from my experience (if a CFS patient exceeds his daily allowance of what I call vitality, a so-called crash occurs, where the patient is completely bedridden for days with crushing exhaustion like post-viral fatigue and mental fog), I independently developed GET or graded exercise therapy many years prior to the PACE study, having been a martial artist and physical conditioning fanatic prior to the onset of CFS in 2001 or so and desperate to find some way to continue, to be able to maintain training and work somehow. I did manage somewhat until took a turn for the worse in 2011 and am hanging on by my nails as it were as I write, being boxed in more and more by worsening health and simultaneous descent of the population into near-animal status, i.e., it being more and more difficult to find normal human beings (by which I mean: intelligent, competent, courteous and desiring to help) in the medical profession or the society at large (which now are more often properly characterized as bipedal rats, an ironic observation considering the frequent use of rats in scientific studies of brain function thought to be applicable to humans).