The Daily Blog Open Mic – Wednesday – 11th March 2020

1. There has been reference to people involved in the Mosque massacre needing more assistance and support and counselling on the anniversary of it as memories are renewed.

   I noted a report from The Telegraph of concerns from someone with PTSD that returning to counselling in an attempt to fully recover from grief can be a mistake. The writer’s feeling was that after the initial shock and counselling, the mind can settle and ‘file away’ the trauma so that life can be resumed at a different level. Bringing it forward again can destroy that peace of mind; the writer has been left in an over-sensitised, alert and reactive state that has not been possible to settle again.
   https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/mind/seven-years-therapy-could-making-prince-harrys-trauma-worse/?li_source=LI&li_medium=li-recommendation-widget
   The writer’s experience:I wanted to tackle the symptoms: my therapist wanted the backstory. I needed lessons in self-soothing; he wanted fact-finding. This therapist was like the plumber who tells you what’s wrong with your sink then mentions he doesn’t have any tools (but still bills you)….

   Post Traumatic Stress Disorder comes with a range of excruciating symptoms from hyperarousal, anger, irrational fears, difficulty concentrating to numbness, flashbacks, suicidal thoughts and intense physical responses of reminders of the event. For this reason, “treatment is meant to be short and sharp” says trauma specialist Joshua Dickson, clinical director of Resurface UK. “Often going into too much detail will trigger a client out of their the window of tolerance and can become overwhelming, with the client often distressed or ‘re-traumatised’.

   We now know that trauma lodges itself deep in our cells and in our intestinal walls. According to Van der Kolk, trauma patients often have abnormal activation of the insula, a small region within the cerebral cortex. The insula transmits fight-or-flight signals to the amygdala when necessary. In people with trauma, these signals are firing all the time without any conscious influence.

2. A film for today? Made in 1980 The Gods Must be Crazy is a comedy with a message in a bottle, filmed in Africa which has a relevance for now.
   Trailer: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvgFqdqPIuE

3. Traitorous fascist TDB fucks, your days are numbered. The radicals are coming for you, there’s a wall with your names on it.

   • Wow, the revolution is coming?!

4. How an Italian doctor coping with Covid-19 feels about his colleagues and their efforts to cope with the virus.
   “And there are no more surgeons, urologists, orthopedists, we are only doctors who suddenly become part of a single team to face this tsunami that has overwhelmed us.
   “Cases are multiplying, we arrive at a rate of 15-20 admissions per day all for the same reason. The results of the swabs now come one after the other: positive, positive, positive. Suddenly the E.R. is collapsing.”
   Describing every available ventilator as “gold,” Macchini said the doctors and nurses working at his side are exhausted.
   “I saw the tiredness on faces that didn’t know what it was despite the already exhausting workloads they had. I saw a solidarity of all of us who never failed to go to our internist colleagues to ask, ‘What can I do for you now?’
   “Doctors who move beds and transfer patients, who administer therapies instead of nurses. Nurses with tears in their eyes because we can’t save everyone, and the vital parameters of several patients at the same time reveal an already marked destiny.
   “There are no more shifts, no more hours. Social life is suspended for us. We no longer see our families for fear of infecting them. Some of us have already become infected despite the protocols,” he said.
   Macchini noted that some of his colleagues have become infected themselves and then infected their relatives who “are already struggling between life and death.”
   https://nypost.com/2020/03/10/italian-doctor-at-heart-of-illness-shares-chilling-coronavirus-thoughts/

   Volunteers may be called for?

5. Sir Peter Gluckman leads think tank focused on critical global issues – Koi Tu – The Centre for Informed Futures
   Centre for thinking straight Koi Tu has Sir Peter Gluckman delivering wisdom and a glamour puss academic Dr Anne Bardsley. I can’t help wishing that Jane Kelsey was in her place. However if it helps us think our way forward instead of barging forward leading with the head down like a rugby player it might help.
   I’m not enthused though with these reported lines:
   Sir Peter says as a small advanced country, New Zealand can be both the “canary in the mine” to identify issues that are emerging and “the headlights to identify the road ahead”. Blah blah

   If we can just get in our mind that we are a small country that has regularly been seen to be twenty years behind other western countries, that would be a big learning. Getting a lot of soft soap from Soapy Peter G
   doesn’t bode well.
   https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2020/03/07/sir-peter-gluckman-leads-think-tank-focused-on-critical-global-issues-koi-tu-the-centre-for-informed-futures/

6. In the Raw News Feed is an item from the TOP party selling the idea of introducing UBI N O W! To keep some money and employment and business on basic rations but fit and hopeful. The problem has always been that it would be an arbitrary stab at requirements which pollies have always shied away from establishing, leaving them able to fulminate at how overfunded bennies are and choosing someone with 11 children, 7 of whom are chronically ill with l….y or whatever – fill in the space yourself so I don’t get complaints about insensitivity – and appearing to be living the life of Riley. (Don’t know about that person, he has probably gone back to Ireland where at least they have some lively songs.)

   TOP says –
   Meanwhile Labour are looking at handing wage subsidies to employers. This response appears to overlook growing numbers of contractors. TOP asks why give money to businesses when it is the people that need it?
   “Why not just give the money directly to the people and cut out the middle-man?” asks TOP Leader and economist Geoff Simmons. “This could still be targeted at regions or industries as the Government is exploring, but TOP’s preference would be to give $1,000 to all residents aged 18-65.”

   If TOP polished up their policies, and ensured that they would work for bennies, I think that they would get a lot of support from people tired of waiting for the sun to shine on their patch. Some safeguards for contractors to stop the head project organiser doing ponzi schemes with payments so at the end of the day you get the end of the day, first and last. This instead of getting regular wages and reliable work from a sensible system of business organisation. That would bring in a fair few of the real workers in NZ not the bums-on-seats.

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