Although covid-19 exact origins are still in dispute, it appears to be another case of the virus jumping from the animal kingdom into humans, like the bird flu or swine flu. It is almost certain it was a bat virus ingested by pangolins and passed on to humans, as Chinese medicine prizes pangolin scales (it is the only scaled mammal). It’s flesh is also prized.

Like hundreds of other extracts in Chinese medicine, this is based on unscientific, magical theory that you gain powers ingesting the beast you want to emulate. Bear bile is another prized medicine, though the active ingredient has been synthesized and there is no reason to torture bears to get it. Why this perverse fascination with destroying Nature?

A hidden positive effect of Corvid-19 is the immediate ban in China of such trade in wild life, where 900,000 pangolins were ground up and/or eaten last year. In February 2020, the Chinese government passed a law "prohibiting the illegal wildlife trade, abolishing the bad habit of overconsumption of wildlife, and effectively protecting the lives and health of the people."

George Steiner, Grammars of Creation, Yale University Press, 2001.

(George Steiner: Real presences (1989) notes here)

I

Plato maxim: in all things natural and human, the origin is the most excellent. To begin is to act essentially. But our perception now is afternoon, twilight. Century of progress liberalism -> ‘long summer of 1914’. Collapse of humaneness not from distant steppe, nazism, fascism, stalinism from within the context of civilization.

Shoah (wind out of blackness) not ‘holocaust, a technical greek designation for religious sacrifice.

Future tense came relatively late into human speech. Ability to discuss possible events on the day after one’s funeral or in stellar space in a million years. Every use of ‘to be’ is negation of mortality. Every ‘if’ sentence tells of a refusal of the brute inevitability, the despotism, of the fact. Hope and fear are supreme fictions empowered by syntax. Fear has mustard seed of hope. Hope encloses fear of unfulfilment. ‘Hope to god’.

James Clear, Atomic Habits: An easy & proven way to build good habits & break bad ones, Penguin Random House, 2018.

Rules: make obvious, fun, easy, satisfying. ie, hide 'bad' habit stimuli, see them as unpleasant, hard, unsatisfying, to break ‘bad’ habit.

-the more tasks you can handle without thinking, the more your brain is free to focus on other areas.

-little stresses compound into serious health issues.

-knowledge builds up, like compound interest. (buffett)

-if you see people as angry, unjust, selfish, you will see them everywhere.

-the more you help others, the more others want to help you. Build up connections (~ knowledge)

-not how successful you are right now. Your current trajectory rather than current results.

-fall in love with the process rather than the product. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. Your commitment to the process will determine your progress.

-true behaviour change is identity change. Start habit from motivation but stick with it because it becomes part of your identity. Must believe. Your habits are how you embody your identity. (when you write each day you embody identity of creative person.) Identity: proof in pudding. (what you do is what you are.) process of building habits is the process of becoming yourself.