H/T It Ain’t Holy Water
Last Saturday in Mirpur Khas, a city in Pakistan’s Sindh province, hundreds of people lined up for hours outside a park to buy subsidized wheat flour, offered for 65 rupees a kilogram instead of the current, inflated rate of about 140 to 160 rupees.
When a few trucks arrived, the crowd surged forward, leaving several injured. One man, Harsingh Kolhi, who was there to bring a five kg bag of flour home for his wife and children, was crushed and killed in the chaos.
1. Classification
People are divided into “them and us”
2. Symbolization
“When combined with hatred, symbols may be forced upon unwilling members of pariah groups…”
3. Discrimination
“Law or cultural power excludes groups from full civil rights: segregation or apartheid laws, denial of voting rights”
4. Dehumanization
“One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects, or diseases.”
5. Organization
“Genocide is always organized… Special army units or militias are often trained and armed…”
6. Polarization
“Hate groups broadcast polarizing propaganda…”
7. Preparation
“Mass killing is planned. Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity…”
8. Persecution
“Expropriation, forced displacement, ghettos, concentration camps”
9. Extermination
“It is ‘extermination’ to the killers because they do not believe their victims to be fully human”
10. Denial
“The perpetrators… deny that they committed any crimes…”
“A highly contagious ‘recombinant’ variant composed of two different BA.2 strains, the ‘kraken’ variant has quickly become the dominant form of COVID in the U.S. and is continuing to spread nationwide. Also known as XBB.1.5, the variant quickly rose to prominence as experts say it is more contagious than many of its predecessors.
‘It went from 4% of sequences to 40% in just a few weeks,’ Dr. Ashish Jha, White House COVID czar, tweeted last week. ‘That’s a stunning increase.’ Jha said the variant is likely more immune evasive, even ‘more than other omicron variants.’”
There’s nothing particularly noteworthy, and certainly nothing scary, about this new variant. Despite the hype at the beginning of the article, NBC actually makes this plain in a later paragraph where they quote the Chicago Department of Public Health commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady:2
“Arwady noted symptoms haven’t changed with the new variant, though she noted that symptoms similar to the flu are less common … ‘COVID is showing up very much like it already has. I think, if anything, we are seeing it a little bit less likely to have the more severe symptoms,’ Arwady said.
‘Definitely people get the severe symptoms still … But more often now we are seeing people … just have cold-like symptoms, less likely to have those flu-like, really feeling very sick, the high fevers.’”
“The omicron symptoms have been pretty consistent. There’s less incidence of people losing their sense of taste and smell. In a lot of ways, it’s a bad cold, a lot of respiratory symptoms, stuffy nose, coughing, body aches and fatigue … I haven’t seen anything suggesting that this new subvariant [XBB.1.5] is clearly making people sicker.”
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