Taos Toolbox 2021
by wjw on June 25, 2020
I’m very sad to announce that Taos Toolbox 2020, which had moved from June to September due to the dangers of Covid 19, has now been moved to summer of 2021.
Those accepted for this year have the option of coming next year instead, or getting a tuition refund.
The coronavirus doesn’t look as if it’s going to go away anytime soon. Neighboring states are spiking, and even with a partial reopen cases are rising in New Mexico, too. It would have been irresponsible to hold the workshop. And also very likely illegal.
Under the current restrictions I can’t have more than 5 people in a room. Even if the rules change to allow me to have 20 in our meeting room, the room itself is still too small for adequate social distancing.
Stay tuned, and please wear your masks.
I realize that there’s a lot of camaraderie and suchlike involved, but maybe you could do some of it over video chats? Might be able to do some one-on-one tutoring of the most promising, at least. Save on venue fees and hotels and travel time, use the time savings to go more in depth?
Plus, I’m sure they will all be grateful for avoiding yet another “incident”.
Don’t count on 2021. I might be a bit sceptical about 2022. From what I can see, a vaccine will probably provide some protection for a short time. You can’t keep giving everyone shots every two months. The things that will finally get this under control are social distancing and masks. Those involve the mindless masses behaving rationally. If stupid people being smart was able to bring the numbers down, a vaccine might be enough to finish the virus off. Even then, it might take years.
I think TT is best done in person. It’s not just between instructor and pupil, it’s an attempt to create a peer group that carries the work forward after the workshop is over. Spending 4-7 hours per day teaching over video is something I’m not even interested in exploring.
And yeah, I realize that counting on 2021 may be too optimistic. But maybe we’ll get a rational government in January, no?
I understand, TT is about the community as much as anything else. The friends you encounter are your friends for life. Some of the most intelligent people I have met were at Taos. They are a fantastic resource. I have always been the most intelligent person in the room. TT left me feeling a bit inadequate.
More than anything, I have been trying to slowly help people come to the realization, this will not be an easy problem to fix. It will not be solved quickly. The longer the virus is allowed to spread, the more pockets it will find to hide in. The larger the population it infects, the more chance for mutation. The more chances it gets to mutate, the better it will be at adapting to vaccination. The longer it is before the States starts acting rationally, the longer it will take to even begin to get it under control.
Possibly I am just tired and depressed. I was planning to be in Vancouver for Canada day by now. I was also planning to head off to New Zealand, New Mexico and Paris this July. Knowing it will be years before I can do any of these things again has me feeling very depressed. I am not very good at being depressed. I don’t know what depressed people do. Probably they use the word depressed a lot.
Ralf, not to bum you out even further, but there has never been a useful coronavirus vaccine for humans. Never. Although most people probably heard the word “coronavirus” for the first time in January, about 40% of the cases of “the common cold” are random coronavirus strains, and so this is something that scientists have been trying to accomplish for decades. They’ve never made one work yet.
SARS was another one, and they’ve been trying to figure out how to vaccinate for that since 2003. Still no vaccine.
All these “vaccine candidates” and “phase I trials” are just efforts to (1) pump particular companies’ stocks, (2) get fifteen minutes of fame for Random X. Scientist, Spokesweasel, or Pointdexter Q Politician, and/or (3) get huge research grants and governments throwing money at giant prepurchase plans.
So far, every single “coronavirus vaccine patent” that random idiots on Reddit have posted (“Bill Gates owns the patent rights! Kill the rich!”) have been for canine vaccines. You know, dogs. And wolves and foxes too, I suppose. Different immune systems, different possibilities. Just like we have the healthiest, most-cured rats in all of history — too bad so many of the treatments that work on rats don’t do **** for humans.
But maybe there’ll be a breakthrough and I’ll get to look back on this post with regret. Prove me wrong, guys!
And WJW, don’t look for sanity and reasonableness for as long as the news media can sell terror to a dumbed-down populace. Just look at all the bullshit surrounding hydroxychloroquine — Trump dared to mention something positive about it, so not only has the media politicized its use, they’ve even engendered at least two major scientific frauds trying to discredit it, just because they want to discredit Trump — one of which caused the CHO (sorry, I mean the WHO) to tell governments to shut down trials of the drug. Actually, three major frauds if you count the Brazil study where they were giving people doses twelve times the standard, thus causing heart-arrhythmia-related deaths, which OF COURSE was causing heart problems, because it was already well-known that the drug causes q-t interval prolongation, as does the azithromycin they were coadministering. (FFS, even *I* know that one — it’s a thoroughly-studied issue that is mentioned in every single drug-interaction warning list. It’s a lot like shoving patients’ heads underwater for three minutes and then being surprised when some of them drown.)
Chloroquine (and by extension, hydroxychloroquine) were touted as treatments right up front by China back in January, and nobody said a word against the stuff back then. It’s one of the most widely prescribed drugs in the world.
It really goes to show just how blatantly biased the media is. They’d rather see people die than let anything Trump suggests be utilized to save lives. They rely on misinformation and disinformation to gather more eyeballs and sell more ads at higher rates. It’s why the “Rope, Tree, Journalist” tee-shirt is so popular that they had to get Amazon to ban sales of it.
Comments on this entry are closed.