brownstone | On a video podcast the other day, I made
reference to the lockdown orders of March 2020. The host turned off the
recording. He said it was fine to talk about this subject but from now
on please refer to “the events of March 2020” with no specifics.
Otherwise, it will be taken down by YouTube and Facebook. He needs
those platforms for reach, and reach is necessary for his business
model.
I complied, but I was spooked. Are we really now in the position that
talking about what happened to us is verboten on mainstream venues?
Sadly, that seems to be where we headed. In big and small ways, and
throughout the culture and the whole world, we are bit by bit being
trained to forget and hence not learn and thus repeat the whole thing.
This makes no sense since nearly every public issue in play today
traces to those fateful days and the fallout thereof, including
censorship, the entrenchment of industry-government oligarchs, the
corruption of media and tech, the educational upheaval, the abuse of
courts and law, and the developing financial and banking crisis.
And yet hardly anyone wants to speak about the topic frankly. It is
too upsetting. There is too much at stake. We cannot risk being
canceled, the single greatest fear of every aspirational professional in
today’s world. Plus too many powerful people were in on it and don’t
want to admit it. It would appear that the whole subject is being
memoryholed in ways of which they all approve.
For nearly two years, or longer, respectable intellectuals knew not
to dissent from the prevailing norms and challenge the whole machinery.
This was true of Washington think tanks, which went on their merry way
from March 2020 either celebrating the “public health response” or just
remaining quiet. The same was true of the leadership of major political
parties and third parties.
Most religious leaders stayed quiet too, even as their doors were
padlocked for as long as 2 holiday seasons. Civic organizations played
along. If you thought that the job of the ACLU was to defend civil
liberties, you were wrong: they one day decided that lockdowns,
mandatory masks, and forced shots were essential to their mission.
So many were compromised over 3 years. These same people now just
want the whole subject to go away. We find ourselves in an odd position,
having experienced the biggest trauma in our lives and in many
generations and yet there is precious little open talk about it.
Brownstone was established to fill this void but we’ve become a target
as a result.
What if, bear with me now, what if the phase 3 clinical trials for mRNA therapeutics conducted on billions of unsuspecting, hoodwinked and bamboozled humans, was a new kind of research done to yield a new depth and breadth of clinical data exceptionally useful toward breaking up logjams in clinical terminology as well as experimental sample size? Vaxxed vs. Unvaxxed the subject of long term gubmint surveillance now. To what end?
Nature | Recently,
advances in wearable technologies, data science and machine learning
have begun to transform evidence-based medicine, offering a tantalizing
glimpse into a future of next-generation ‘deep’ medicine. Despite
stunning advances in basic science and technology, clinical translations
in major areas of medicine are lagging. While the COVID-19 pandemic
exposed inherent systemic limitations of the clinical trial landscape,
it also spurred some positive changes, including new trial designs and a
shift toward a more patient-centric and intuitive evidence-generation
system. In this Perspective, I share my heuristic vision of the future
of clinical trials and evidence-based medicine.
Main
The
last 30 years have witnessed breathtaking, unparalleled advancements in
scientific research—from a better understanding of the pathophysiology
of basic disease processes and unraveling the cellular machinery at
atomic resolution to developing therapies that alter the course and
outcome of diseases in all areas of medicine. Moreover, exponential
gains in genomics, immunology, proteomics, metabolomics, gut
microbiomes, epigenetics and virology in parallel with big data science,
computational biology and artificial intelligence (AI) have propelled
these advances. In addition, the dawn of CRISPR–Cas9 technologies has
opened a tantalizing array of opportunities in personalized medicine.
Despite
these advances, their rapid translation from bench to bedside is
lagging in most areas of medicine and clinical research remains
outpaced. The drug development and clinical trial landscape continues to
be expensive for all stakeholders, with a very high failure rate. In
particular, the attrition rate for early-stage developmental
therapeutics is quite high, as more than two-thirds of compounds succumb
in the ‘valley of death’ between bench and bedside1,2.
To bring a drug successfully through all phases of drug development
into the clinic costs more than 1.5–2.5 billion dollars (refs. 3, 4).
This, combined with the inherent inefficiencies and deficiencies that
plague the healthcare system, is leading to a crisis in clinical
research. Therefore, innovative strategies are needed to engage patients
and generate the necessary evidence to propel new advances into the
clinic, so that they may improve public health. To achieve this,
traditional clinical research models should make way for avant-garde
ideas and trial designs.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the conduct
of clinical research had remained almost unchanged for 30 years and
some of the trial conduct norms and rules, although archaic, were
unquestioned. The pandemic exposed many of the inherent systemic
limitations in the conduct of trials5
and forced the clinical trial research enterprise to reevaluate all
processes—it has therefore disrupted, catalyzed and accelerated
innovation in this domain6,7. The lessons learned should help researchers to design and implement next-generation ‘patient-centric’ clinical trials.
Chronic diseases continue to impact millions of lives and cause major financial strain to society8,
but research is hampered by the fact that most of the data reside in
data silos. The subspecialization of the clinical profession has led to
silos within and among specialties; every major disease area seems to
work completely independently. However, the best clinical care is
provided in a multidisciplinary manner with all relevant information
available and accessible. Better clinical research should harness the
knowledge gained from each of the specialties to achieve a collaborative
model enabling multidisciplinary, high-quality care and continued
innovation in medicine. Because many disciplines in medicine view the
same diseases differently—for example, infectious disease specialists
view COVID-19 as a viral disease while cardiology experts view it as an
inflammatory one—cross-discipline approaches will need to respect the
approaches of other disciplines. Although a single model may not be
appropriate for all diseases, cross-disciplinary collaboration will make
the system more efficient to generate the best evidence.
Over the
next decade, the application of machine learning, deep neural networks
and multimodal biomedical AI is poised to reinvigorate clinical research
from all angles, including drug discovery, image interpretation,
streamlining electronic health records, improving workflow and, over
time, advancing public health (Fig. 1).
In addition, innovations in wearables, sensor technology and Internet
of Medical Things (IoMT) architectures offer many opportunities (and
challenges) to acquire data9.
In this Perspective, I share my heuristic vision of the future of
clinical trials and evidence generation and deliberate on the main areas
that need improvement in the domains of clinical trial design, clinical
trial conduct and evidence generation.
Fig. 1: Timeline of drug development from the present to the future.
The
figure represents the timeline from drug discovery to first-in-human
phase 1 trials and ultimately FDA approval. Phase 4 studies occur after
FDA approval and can go on for several years. There is an urgent need to
reinvigorate clinical trials through drug discovery, interpreting
imaging, streamlining electronic health records, and improving workflow,
over time advancing public health. AI can aid in many of these aspects
in all stages of drug development. DNN, deep neural network; EHR,
electronic health records; IoMT, internet of medical things; ML, machine
learning.
Trial
design is one of the most important steps in clinical research—better
protocol designs lead to better clinical trial conduct and faster
‘go/no-go’ decisions. Moreover, losses from poorly designed, failed
trials are not only financial but also societal.
Challenges with randomized controlled trials
Randomized
controlled trials (RCTs) have been the gold standard for evidence
generation across all areas of medicine, as they allow unbiased
estimates of treatment effect without confounders. Ideally, every
medical treatment or intervention should be tested via a well-powered
and well-controlled RCT. However, conducting RCTs is not always feasible
owing to challenges in generating evidence in a timely manner, cost,
design on narrow populations precluding generalizability, ethical
barriers and the time taken to conduct these trials. By the time they
are completed and published, RCTs become quickly outdated and, in some
cases, irrelevant to the current context. In the field of cardiology
alone, 30,000 RCTs have not been completed owing to recruitment
challenges10.
Moreover, trials are being designed in isolation and within silos, with
many clinical questions remaining unanswered. Thus, traditional trial
design paradigms must adapt to contemporary rapid advances in genomics,
immunology and precision medicine11.
Over the weekend, I chatted with an AI specialist and got to thinking A LOT about possible applications of Large Language Models and their potential specialized uses for governance. The CIA studied Language very extensively under MKUltra as part of its larger Human Ecology project. Charles E. Osgood was a long term recipient of considerable CIA largesse. This topic was a priority for the Agency. It boggles the mind to consider what kind of clandestine leaps have taken place in this speciality through the use of contemporary computational methods.
Look at all these programs funded by the CIA's Human Ecology fund under MKULTRA. None of these scholars knew they were working for the CIA. pic.twitter.com/vTXel920Du
wikipedia | In control theory, affect control theory proposes that individuals maintain affective
meanings through their actions and interpretations of events. The
activity of social institutions occurs through maintenance of culturally
based affective meanings.
Affective meaning
Besides a denotative meaning, every concept has an affective meaning, or connotation, that varies along three dimensions:[1]
evaluation – goodness versus badness, potency – powerfulness versus
powerlessness, and activity – liveliness versus torpidity. Affective
meanings can be measured with semantic differentials yielding a three-number profile indicating how the concept is positioned on evaluation, potency, and activity (EPA). Osgood[2]
demonstrated that an elementary concept conveyed by a word or idiom has
a normative affective meaning within a particular culture.
A stable affective meaning derived either from personal
experience or from cultural inculcation is called a sentiment, or
fundamental affective meaning, in affect control theory. Affect control
theory has inspired assembly of dictionaries of EPA sentiments for
thousands of concepts involved in social life – identities, behaviours,
settings, personal attributes, and emotions. Sentiment dictionaries have
been constructed with ratings of respondents from the US, Canada, Northern Ireland, Germany, Japan, China and Taiwan.[3]
Each concept that is in play in a situation has a transient affective
meaning in addition to an associated sentiment. The transient
corresponds to an impression created by recent events.[4]
Events modify impressions on all three EPA dimensions in complex ways that are described with non-linear equations obtained through empirical studies.[5]
Here are two examples of impression-formation processes.
An actor who behaves disagreeably seems less good, especially if
the object of the behavior is innocent and powerless, like a child.
A powerful person seems desperate when performing extremely forceful acts on another, and the object person may seem invincible.
A social action creates impressions of the actor, the object person, the behavior, and the setting.[6]
Deflections
Deflections
are the distances in the EPA space between transient and fundamental
affective meanings. For example, a mother complimented by a stranger
feels that the unknown individual is much nicer than a stranger is
supposed to be, and a bit too potent and active as well – thus there is a
moderate distance between the impression created and the mother's
sentiment about strangers. High deflections in a situation produce an
aura of unlikeliness or uncanniness.[7] It is theorized that high deflections maintained over time generate psychological stress.[8]
The basic cybernetic
idea of affect control theory can be stated in terms of deflections. An
individual selects a behavior that produces the minimum deflections for
concepts involved in the action. Minimization of deflections is
described by equations derived with calculus from empirical
impression-formation equations.[9]
Action
On
entering a scene an individual defines the situation by assigning
identities to each participant, frequently in accord with an
encompassing social institution.[10]
While defining the situation, the individual tries to maintain the
affective meaning of self through adoption of an identity whose
sentiment serves as a surrogate for the individual's self-sentiment.[11]
The identities assembled in the definition of the situation determine
the sentiments that the individual tries to maintain behaviorally.
Confirming sentiments associated with institutional identities –
like doctor–patient, lawyer–client, or professor–student – creates
institutionally relevant role behavior.[12]
Confirming sentiments associated with negatively evaluated
identities – like bully, glutton, loafer, or scatterbrain – generates deviant behavior.[13]
Affect control theory's sentiment databases and mathematical model are combined in a computer simulation program[14] for analyzing social interaction in various cultures.
Emotions
According to affect control theory, an event generates emotions
for the individuals involved in the event by changing impressions of
the individuals. The emotion is a function of the impression created of
the individual and of the difference between that impression and the
sentiment attached to the individual's identity[15]
Thus, for example, an event that creates a negative impression of an
individual generates unpleasant emotion for that person, and the
unpleasantness is worse if the individual believes she has a highly
valued identity. Similarly, an event creating a positive impression
generates a pleasant emotion, all the more pleasant if the individual
believes he has a disvalued identity in the situation.
Non-linear equations describing how transients and fundamentals
combine to produce emotions have been derived in empirical studies[16] Affect control theory's computer simulation program[17] uses these equations to predict emotions that arise in social interaction, and displays the predictions via facial expressions that are computer drawn,[18] as well as in terms of emotion words.
Based on cybernetic studies by Pavloski[19] and Goldstein,[20] that utilise perceptual control theory, Heise[21]
hypothesizes that emotion is distinct from stress. For example, a
parent enjoying intensely pleasant emotions while interacting with an
offspring suffers no stress. A homeowner attending to a sponging house
guest may feel no emotion and yet be experiencing substantial stress.
Interpretations
Others' behaviors are interpreted so as to minimize the deflections they cause.[22]
For example, a man turning away from another and exiting through a
doorway could be engaged in several different actions, like departing
from, deserting, or escaping from the other. Observers choose among the
alternatives so as to minimize deflections associated with their
definitions of the situation. Observers who assigned different
identities to the observed individuals could have different
interpretations of the behavior.
Re-definition of the situation may follow an event that causes
large deflections which cannot be resolved by reinterpreting the
behavior. In this case, observers assign new identities that are
confirmed by the behavior.[23]
For example, seeing a father slap a son, one might re-define the father
as an abusive parent, or perhaps as a strict disciplinarian; or one
might re-define the son as an arrogant brat. Affect control theory's
computer program predicts the plausible re-identifications, thereby
providing a formal model for labeling theory.
The sentiment associated with an identity can change to befit the
kinds of events in which that identity is involved, when situations
keep arising where the identity is deflected in the same way, especially
when identities are informal and non-institutionalized.[24]
Applications
Affect
control theory has been used in research on emotions, gender, social
structure, politics, deviance and law, the arts, and business. Affect
Control Theory was analyzed through the use of Quantitative Methods in
research, using mathematics to look at data and interpret their
findings. However, recent applications of this theory have explored the
concept of Affect Control Theory through Qualitative Research Methods.
This process involves obtaining data through the use of interviews,
observations, and questionnaires. Affect Control Theory has been
explored through Qualitative measures in interviewing the family,
friends, and loved ones of individuals who were murdered, looking at how
the idea of forgiveness changes based on their interpretation of the
situation.[25]
Computer programs have also been an important part of understanding
Affect Control Theory, beginning with the use of "Interact," a computer
program designed to create social situations with the user to understand
how an individual will react based on what is happening within the
moment. "Interact" has been an essential tool in research, using it to
understand social interaction and the maintenance of affect between
individuals.[26]
The use of interviews and observations have improved the understanding
of Affect Control Theory through Qualitative research methods. A
bibliography of research studies in these areas is provided by David R. Heise[27] and at the research program's website.
amidwesterndoctor |One of the things I have come to appreciate as the years have
gone by is how much of what people say are not their own thoughts. The
current structure of our educational system (discussed here)
is largely about replacing critical thinking with the illusion of
intelligence, where you are seen as smart if you copy what the most
authoritative sources or voices say instead of formulating your own
opinion.
Because of this, whenever I hear someone proudly
share an argument or train of logic I have already seen numerous times,
one of the most common replies I give is “are you sure those ideas are
your own?”
If you look at this article within the context of
Oster’s previous plea and its response (both of these articles are
essentially trying to do the same thing), I believe a strong case can be
made that these were tests to see what narrative needs to be pivoted
to. Likewise, Germany’s minister of health (and a well-credentialed
scientist) finally made a limited apology
for the disastrous policies he pushed on the German people without
acknowledging the worst mistakes while simultaneously shifting the blame
for his decisions to unnamed scientists who gave him bad advice.
Similarly, let’s consider Malcom Kendrick’s recent commentary on another leading advocate of this insanity:
With
the resignation of Jacinda Ardern [two weeks ago], my thoughts were
dragged back to Covid once more. Jacinda, as Prime Minster of New
Zealand was the ultimate lockdown enforcer. She was feted round the
world for her iron will, but I was not a fan, to put it mildly. Whenever
I heard her speak, it brought to mind one of my most favourite quotes:
‘Of
all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its
victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under
robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s
cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be
satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us
without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.’ C.S. Lewis
At one point she actually said the following:
“We will continue to be your single source of truth” “Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth.’
Yet,
there are still many who believe her to have been a great and caring
leader. She certainly hugged a lot of people with that well rehearsed
pained/caring expression on her face.
In many ways
it’s remarkable that we have been able to move the dialogue this far in
just a few months, and to be honest, I would have given almost anything
for a compromise like what this article presented to have been made any
time in 2020 or early in 2021. However, any time a negotiation occurs,
you must keep in mind that whatever is initially offered is much less
than the party is willing to agree to, and the fact that something like
this is being openly offered means we are in a very strong bargaining
position.
Any type of promise or apology (especially
disingenuous ones) will not prevent what we saw happen over the last few
years from happening again. Laws, and ideally constitutional amendments
(initially at the state level and ideally at the national level) can
prevent such tragedies, and many people I have spoken to feel we have a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to correct many of the systemic issues
within medicine that have poisoned our culture.
In
my own opinion, if these people are actually sorry for what they did to
us, they would be willing to relinquish some of their power so it could
not happen again and I believe moving forward it is critical for us to
hold them to that. Anything less should not be considered acceptable
for them to be granted amnesty.
levernews | Massachusetts Democrats have a bold new proposal for prisoners:
donate your organs or bone marrow, and get as little as a couple of
months off of your sentence. The legislation, which has attracted five
cosponsors in the state House, raises major bioethical concerns for the 6,000-plus
people currently held in the Bay State’s prisons. In essence, the bill
would ask prisoners which is more important to them: their freedom, or
their organs and bone marrow.
The bill appears to go significantly
beyond other organ-donation policies for prisoners. The Federal Bureau
of Prisons says that prisoners may donate their organs while incarcerated, but only to immediate family members. In 2013, the state of Utah allowed
organ donation from prisoners who died while being incarcerated. Most
other states do not allow organ donations from prisoners at all.
The
Ethics Committee of the United Network for Organ Sharing, the nonprofit
that administers organ transplants in the United States, has panned
proposals like the Massachusetts bill. “Any law or proposal that allows
a person to trade an organ for a reduction in sentence… raises numerous
issues,” the committee says in a position statement on their website.
The legislation, HD 3822,
states, “The Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Program shall allow
eligible incarcerated individuals to gain not less than 60 and not more
than 365 day reduction in the length of their committed sentence in
[prison], on the condition that the incarcerated individual has donated
bone marrow or organ(s).”
A five-member “Bone Marrow and Organ
Donation Committee,” only one of whom is designated to be a prisoners’
rights advocate, would decide how much time off prisoners would receive
from donating organs.
There is a long history in the medical field of doctors experimenting
on and abusing prisoners, including in Massachusetts. While current
rules prohibit the state Department of Corrections from “the use of an
inmate(s) for medical, pharmaceutical, or cosmetic experiments,” in
1942, a professor at Harvard Medical School injected64 Massachusetts prisoners with cow’s blood as part of World War II military research, killing one of the subjects.
The current bill might not even be legal. According to a 2007 ABC News report
on a similar proposal in South Carolina, “It's probably going to be
considered a violation of federal law. Congress passed the National
Organ Transplant Act in 1984 that makes it a federal crime "to knowingly
acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable
consideration for use in human transplantation. It is likely 180 days
off a sentence could constitute ‘valuable consideration.’”
The ABC
News story noted another potential problem with the idea: Prisoners
have “a much higher incidence of HIV, AIDS, Hepatitis, and even
tuberculosis than the general population,” so it might not be safe to
use their organs in transplant procedures.
The Massachusetts
bill’s two sponsors, Democratic State Reps. Carlos Gonzalez of
Springfield and Judith Garcia of Chelsea, did not respond to requests
for comment. Gonzalez is the co-chair of the Joint Committee on Public
Safety and Homeland Security, which has oversight over corrections in
the state.
racket |Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times,
respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their
pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their
infamous club: Hamilton 68.
If
one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that
spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go
down as the single greatest case of media fabulism in American history.
Virtually every major news organization in America is implicated,
including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and the Washington Post. Mother Jones alone did at least 14 stories pegged to the group’s “research.” Even fact-checking sites like Politifact and Snopes cited Hamilton 68 as a source.
Hamilton 68 was and is a computerized “dashboard” designed to
be used by reporters and academics to measure “Russian disinformation.”
It was the brainchild of former FBI agent (and current MSNBC
“disinformation expert”) Clint Watts,
and backed by the German Marshall Fund and the Alliance for Securing
Democracy, a bipartisan think-tank. The latter’s advisory panel includes
former acting CIA chief Michael Morell, former Ambassador to Russia
Michael McFaul, former Hillary for America chair John Podesta, and
onetime Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol.
The Twitter Files expose Hamilton 68 as a sham:
The secret
ingredient in Hamilton 68’s analytic method was a list of 644 accounts
supposedly linked “to Russian influence activities online.” It was
hidden from the public, but Twitter was in a unique position to recreate
Hamilton’s sample by analyzing its Application Program Interface (API)
requests, which is how they first “reverse-engineered” Hamilton’s list
in late 2017.
The company was concerned enough about the
proliferation of news stories linked to Hamilton 68 that it also ordered
a forensic analysis. Note the second page below lists many of the
different types of shadow-banning techniques that existed at Twitter
even in 2017, buttressing the “Twitter’s Secret Blacklist”
thread by Bari Weiss last month. Here you see categories ranging from
“Trends Blacklist” to “Search Blacklist” to “NSFW High Precision.”
Twitter was checking to see how many of Hamilton’s accounts were spammy,
phony, or bot-like. Note that out of 644 accounts, just 36 were
registered in Russia, and many of those were associated with RT.
The Hamilton 68 tale has no clear analog in media history, which may
give mainstream media writers an excuse not to cover it. They will be
under heavy pressure to avoid addressing this scandal, since nearly all
of them work for organizations guilty of spreading Hamilton’s “bullshit”
stories in volume.
This is one of the more significant
Twitter Files stories. Each one of these tales explains something new
about how companies like Twitter came to lose independence. In the U.S.,
the door was opened for agencies like the FBI and DHS to press on
content moderation after Congress harangued Twitter, Facebook, and
Google about Russian “interference,” a phenomenon that had to be seen as
an ongoing threat in order to require increased surveillance. “I do
very much believe America is under attack,” is how Hamilton 68
co-founder Laura Rosenberger put it, after watching the tweets of Sonya Monsour, David Horowitz, and @holbornlolz.
The
Hamilton 68 story shows how the illusion of ongoing “Russian
interference” worked. The magic trick was generated via a confluence of
interests, between think-tanks, media, and government. Before, we could
only speculate. Now we know: the “Russian threat” was, in this case at
least, just a bunch of ordinary Americans, dressed up to look like a Red
Menace. Jayson Blair had a hell of an imagination, but even he couldn’t
have come up with a scheme this obscene. Shame on every news outlet
that hasn’t renounced these tales.
BAR | As the Left in the US struggles to hold to a clear ideological line
against the US empire in its proxy war using Ukraine against Russia, the
understanding of how this conflict arose has been lost amid the
discourse of needing to either present a “balanced” view of the
conflict, or to accuse anti-imperialists who indicate US/EU/NATO’s
complicity, as “Putin’s apologists.” This kind of mealy-mouthed,
spineless analysis is expected from those who always support the empire
and its bloody deeds. But these days, more and more of this criticism of
anti-imperialists is coming from some of the so-called US left. This
group is engaged in a bizarre public display of supporting Ukraine, a
display that defies logic and the facts surrounding the conflict.
As an example, the Ukraine Solidarity Network
was created by Howie Hawkins, one-time Green Party presidential
candidate and alleged leftist, and has been signed onto by dozens of
people who are prominent in some way in US progressive politics. Among
the Network’s absurd positions are their demand for reparations for the
people of Ukraine, their support for Ukraine’s right to receive as many
arms as they can without question or strings attached, and their demand
for the IMF to cancel Ukraine's debts.
Are these demands made on any basis of fact? No. When you consider
that information about actual events that led up to this conflict are
easily located with the most cursory search, there is no way that anyone
can conclude that Ukraine is the victim of some terrible crime
committed by Russia, let alone that they are owed reparations and
deserve all the weapons they could want to fight them.
What’s more, the paper trail that documents the lead-up to this
conflict includes sources that are the publications of the empire,
so-called mainstream, sources that are neither left-leaning nor anti-war
in any substantive way. This, I believe, lends a level of credibility
to their documentation that some would easily dismiss as “biased” if it
were provided in left-leaning sources.
For example, if members of the Ukraine Solidarity Networkhad bothered to look, they could have found this February 24, 2022 article from the Yale MacMillan Center, which details the scuttled negotiations to completely avoid the conflict in Ukraine.
The article pointedly notes that:
“More than anything else, it was the refusal of Ukraine to
implement the provisions of Minsk 2 – especially the provision that
would give the predominantly Russian-speaking regions a special
constitutional status – that caused Russia to threaten military action
against Ukraine. Time after time in recent weeks, Putin and Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov made it clear in meetings and press
conferences that the key to resolving the situation in and around
Ukraine was the full implementation of Minsk 2.”
An unprovoked attack on Ukraine? Even the empire admits that this is
not true, and goes further to document that the conflict could have been
avoided entirely had Ukraine simply adhered to the agreement they
signed. Furthermore, the same article confirms that the civil war
between Kiyv and those Russian-speaking regions in Ukraine - Donbas and
Luhansk - that began in 2014 was also an important factor in this
current conflict, as more than 700,000 of the people in those regions
were granted Russian citizenship while they “...for eight years now,
have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev (Kyiv
in Ukrainian) regime.”
If the Yale MacMillan Center can acknowledge the centrality of these
issues to this currency conflict, how is that these Latte Leftists
dismiss them as insignificant?
But why did Ukraine refuse to adhere to the agreements, one might
ask? This is actually an important piece of information that also has a
very clear answer if anyone is interested in knowing it. An article in Modern Diplomacy
reveals that, at least according to the former Chancellor of Germany
Angele Merkel, the leaders who signed onto the Minsk Accords who were
not representing Russia (the leaders of Germany, France, and Ukraine) never had any intention of adhering to the agreements,
as they were just a ploy to “...buy time for Ukraine. Ukraine used this
time to become stronger, as you can see today,” Merkel said, “Ukraine
in 2014-2015 and Ukraine today are not the same.”
Brownstone | Contrary to popular belief that pharmaceutical companies drove the
COVID vaccine development programs, the US FDA’s website (FDA, 2020)
reveals that the United States Department of Defence (DoD) has been in
full control of the Covid Vaccine development program since its
beginning. The DoD has been responsible for development, manufacturing,
clinical trials, quality assurance, distribution and administration,
since that time (FDA, 2020; Rees and Latypova, 2022; KEI, 2022; Medical
Defense Consortium, 2022; Rees, 2022). The major pharmaceutical
companies have been involved as “Project Coordination Teams” effectively
performing as subcontractors to the DoD. The Chief Operating Officer
for the Warp Speed vaccine program is the US Department of Defence, and
the Chief Science Advisor is the US Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS).
The Nature of Gene-based Vaccines
The true nature of the COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ has been largely
misrepresented by mainstream media, big pharmaceutical companies and
governments and is poorly understood by the population at large.
Referring to these products as “vaccines” led most people to consider
them as relatively safe and well-researched and readily accept their
widespread use. However, they are not really vaccines – they are serious
gene-based interventions which have never been deployed widely in any
population, especially never to healthy individuals including children,
infants and pregnant women. In this sense they should be considered
experimental.
COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ fall into a special class of therapeutic agents
under the US FDA Office of Cellular, Tissue and Gene Therapies’ defined
as “gene therapy products,” which involve “introducing a new or modified
gene into the body to help treat a disease” (FDA, 2018). Heretofore,
use of gene therapy products has been limited to the treatment of
usually rare, serious and debilitating disease or genetic conditions.
They have potential to cause permanent intergenerational genetic damage,
cancer and interfere with reproductive capacity.
The FDA and other drug regulatory agencies have specific rules and
guidelines to direct manufacturers in development and testing of such
products, for both preclinical (FDA, 2013) and clinical (FDA, 2015)
research. However, the FDA did not evaluate these COVID-19 “vaccines”
according to these gene therapy guidelines.
Instead, there was a concerted effort to avoid referring to them as
gene therapy products, based, in part, on the argument that the genetic
material in the COVID-19 vaccines was not intended to be incorporated
into an individual’s DNA, nor to modify gene expression. There was no
prior short-term safety information and no long-term data on which to
predict future effects. No similar therapeutic products have been
previously approved anywhere in the world. Their widespread
administration globally with no historical safety experience was an
unprecedented risk in human health.
Accelerating Development
Messenger RNA platform technology has been researched by DARPA
(Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency) since at least 2012
(McCullough, 2022). In early 2020, in the panic to develop the COVID-19
vaccines, certain critical research and development procedures were
omitted, bypassed, curtailed, or not done in a logical sequential
manner, or to established laboratory or manufacturing standards.
Although the spike protein is the active drug and is directly
responsible for the immune response, its pharmacology and toxicology
have not been studied in animals or in humans as would normally have
been required.
Other notable deficiencies include lack of critical research on
carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, genotoxicity and reproductive toxicology
in appropriate animal species. In particular, the potential for reverse
transcription of mRNA genetic material into an individual’s DNA was not
investigated. Furthermore, scale-up manufacturing was premature and
lacked adequate quality control to ensure that product made in large
batches is the same as made in smaller batches.
Without such research, the potency, mRNA integrity, presence of
contaminants and stability of the “vaccines” cannot be guaranteed. Such
oversights are directly responsible for the failure to predict the
serious adverse drug reactions and mortality which have now been
reported in association with these vaccines.
To mitigate risk, the plan in vaccine development was to use multiple
technologies, multiple facilities and redundancy. Leverage of existing
facilities would also take place. In the interest of expediency, the
plan was to avoid using traditional pathways from early development to
large-scale production. Avoidance of quality standards and guidelines
such as Good Manufacturing Practice and Good Laboratory Practice
guidelines was necessary to speed development, and conventional New Drug
Application (NDA) and Biologics License Application (BLA) approvals
were bypassed.
Instead, the process moved rapidly using compressed timelines and
overlapping stages of development towards Emergency Use Authorization
(EUA). Scale-up and large volume manufacturing was planned in parallel
with, instead of before, clinical trials which, again, may have
contravened accepted codes of Good Manufacturing Practices. These
approaches were probably a recipe for potential disaster. (Latypova,
2022; Watt and Latypova, 2022).
piratewires |Dangerous alliance. In 1787, Edmund Burke said there were “Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there [sits] a Fourth Estate
more important than they all." The notion of some vital power beyond
our government was imported to the New World, and today constitutes a
core belief of the American liberal: there is no free people, we’re
often told, without a free press independent of congress, the courts,
and our president. But throughout the 20th Century thousands of media
outlets gradually consolidated, and by the dawn of our internet era only
a few giants remained. These giants largely shared a single
perspective, and in rough agreement with the ruling class the Fourth
Estate naturally came to serve, rather than critique, power. This
relationship metastasized into something very close to authoritarianism
during the Covid-19 pandemic, when a single state narrative was written
by the press, and ruthlessly enforced by a fifth and final fount of
power in the newly-dominant technology industry.
It
was a dark alliance of estates, accurate descriptions of which were for
years derided as delusional, paranoid, even dangerous. But today, on
account of a single shitposting billionaire, the existence of the One Party’s decentralized censorship apparatus is now beyond doubt.
Altogether, the Twitter Files — an ongoing story — paint a portrait
of clear and inevitable partisan bias at one of the most dominant speech
platforms in history. A small handful of very left-wing executives, who
naturally perceived most opinion right of center as dangerous, worked
tirelessly to limit those opinions from view. Empowered to censor
“unsafe” content, and protected by a team of people who shared their
political orientation, the executives produced, in a legal and
decentralized manner, a key component of our defacto state censorship
apparatus. While we don’t know for sure this is also happening at
Google, Meta, or TikTok (which is for some reason still allowed to
operate in this country), I think it’s a safe bet we’re looking at an
industry-wide affliction.
But I do have questions.
Where
is the full list of shadow-banned accounts? Which political campaigns,
specifically, communicated with Twitter, and what specifically was taken
down? What about requests from foreign governments? What about requests
from our own government? We need to know which of our government
agencies, if any, had content removed from the platform, and we need to
know the nature of this content. Taibbi alluded to Trump’s White House
— did someone from the Trump administration request a takedown? Who made
the request? Who received the request? Was it answered? What, if
anything, was removed?
The Trump line of questioning is, in
particular, something you might assume attractive to the media, which
has waged all-out war on the populist clown king for the last seven
years. Alas, the press seems broadly disinterested. Is this because they
don’t believe the former president ever made such requests, or is their
lack of interest rather stemming from a fear of validating a major
story most of them are currently trying to frame — for their own obvious
political reasons — as not worth reading?
The
charge of shadow banning evoked uniquely loud jeering from the press,
including Charlie Warzel in particular, a man formerly of the position
“Twitter isn’t shadow banning
Republicans.” Now, in the face of evidence the company absolutely
shadow banned Republicans, the official position is we are using the
term “shadow ban” incorrectly.
It’s
a game of semantics, in which the public is dragged through the
exhausting, useless question of how much invisible speech suppression,
precisely, constitutes a “real” shadow ban, rather than the glaringly
important questions of both ethics and, frankly, safety. In the first
place, is it right to run a decentralized censorship apparatus, and to
make your rules invisible? In the second, what happens to a free country
when the bounds of acceptable speech are set by a small cabal of
unelected partisan cops? Because my sense is the answer isn’t “freedom.”
CTH | Once you change your reference point and review the Twitter File
release from a different perspective, things make sense. DHS doesn’t
operate on the backbone of Twitter, in this scenario Twitter is
operating on the backbone of DHS. The information and content on
Twitter exist, or not, by the permission and authority of the national
security state, DHS.
Influencing public opinion take on the priority dimension. Created
narratives, established by media partners, can be enhanced or throttled
(think Russiagate). Public perceptions can be uplifted or deemphasized.
Political candidates can be boosted or dismissed.
Control over the public conversation is not simply in the hands of
the Twitter ‘safety council’ executives, the platform content is shaped
by the guiding hand of the controlling interest – the government. Under
this scenario the defining of disinformation, misinformation or
malinformation by DHS/CISA takes on a new level of influence.
So why did they permit it to be sold? Again, control.
Every non-Twitter, non-DHS controlled, information and discussion
site is a watering down of the influence of Twitter. The inability to
influence a platform like Truth Social would be particularly
troublesome. So, launder the handling of the DHS platform to Elon Musk
and create the illusion of a refresh.
Twitter 2.0 now rebrands with a renewed ability to influence. Not
accidentally, a pro DeSantis shaping is part of the objective. In the
eyes of the control state, Rumble and Truth Social represent the threat
of Donald Trump. Meanwhile Twitter and YouTube represent the controlled
alternative, Ron DeSantis.
There are trillions at stake.
The ‘magic’ inside Jack’s Magic Coffee Shop is the intelligence
community ability to shape, mold and create the illusion of choice.
Remember, shaping opinion is the goal and within that dynamic some
voices must be removed, throttled and controlled, while other voices
must be amplified.
♦ Elevator Speech: Twitter is to the U.S. government
as TikTok is to China. The overarching dynamic is the need to control
public perceptions and opinions. DHS has been in ever increasing control
of Twitter since the public-private partnership was formed in
2011/2012. Jack Dorsey lost control and became owner emeritus;
arguably, Elon Musk has no idea, well, at least no more of an idea than
he does about the financial underwriting of the purchase itself.
The larger objective of U.S. involvement in social media has always
been monitoring and surveillance of the public conversation, influencing
public opinion, and then ultimately controlling the outcomes.
Tens of millions of Brazilians are on the streets in protest of their fraudulent election. Do you see those voices on Twitter?
The Twitter social media company residing on the backbone of DHS would help explain why.
kunstler | It’s hard to overstate how damaging
Twitter’s dark years of insidiously massaging public opinion have been
to this country. Open debate could have clarified the fog of deliberate
disinformation surrounding everything Covid-19. It would have been much
harder for public health officialdom to gaslight America over the origin
of the disease, and probably impossible to conceal the nefarious
operations behind the Emergency Use Authorization, the suppression of
effective early treatments, and the direct ties to drug companies’
profits. The result of that has been the broad deployment of dangerous
and deadly pseudo-vaccines that have killed millions and disabled many
more. The absence of honest debate has turned doctors into murderers and
accomplices to genocide.
The scope of this bureaucratic crime
is really outside the experience of most Americans, who never imagined
that their elected and appointed leaders would act against them with
such rank dishonesty, cruelty, and bad faith. But there it is. And if
Twitter continues to open up, the more likely that the responsible
parties will be held accountable.
Likewise, the now-pervasive
Kafka-esque program of political persecution carried out against
citizens by government officials, including the many seditious schemes
of RussiaGate; the ongoing, escalating mischief around elections; and
the use of the FBI and DOJ as a combined secret police and kangaroo
court apparatus.
You can add to all that turpitude, the
wild irresponsibility of “Joe Biden’s” open border policy, our idiotic
provocation of Russia in Ukraine, the surrender of America’s national
sovereignty to the globalist Great Re-set cabal and its tools in the
World Health Organization, and the domestic campaign by Woke Jacobins to
sexually disorder the lives of American children.
I think Elon Musk is right: the
Mainstream News Media will now face a venue where its habitual lying is
called out forcefully. You can already see The WashPo and CNN
attempt to make small shifts in their coverage of events, which double
as efforts to cover-up their past lying in the hopes that the public
won’t notice that it happened.
Nothing else so far has confronted the
Left’s crusade to overturn American life so stoutly as Elon Musk’s
reform of Twitter. It seems to be working. The Wokesters are acting like
a gang on-the-run. Pretty soon they’ll be ratting out each other to
save their skins. Reality is a harsh mistress when you’ve spent years
insulting and mistreating her.
And while the infamous Rikers Island jail complex in New York City has been the focus of media coverage for its surging number of deaths, rural and urban lockups from Tennessee to Washington to Georgia are not faring much better.
In other words, America’s jails are a mess.
“It’s hard to believe, but it seems jails are even more wretched than
usual these last few months,” said David Fathi, director of the
American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project. “Having worked
in this field for 30 years, I don’t remember any other time when there
seem to be so many large jails in a state of complete meltdown.”
Several lockups denied claims about deteriorating conditions or did not respond to requests for comment. A few, including Rikers, acknowledged problems such as infrastructure issues, detainee deaths and high staff attrition.
“We are working hard to stem the rippling effect of years of
mismanagement and neglect within our city’s jails,” a spokesperson for
the New York City Department of Correction, which runs Rikers, said in a
statement. “Turning our jails around requires a collaborative effort,
transparency and time.”
Unlike prisons, most jails are funded and managed locally, so the
problems they face can vary widely from one county to the next. While
there’s crumbling infrastructure in Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail, there’s been murky brown drinking water in Seattle’s King County Jail and overcrowding in Houston because of a backlog in the court system.
But more than a dozen employees, detainees and experts who spoke with
The Marshall Project and The Associated Press highlighted two problems
they’ve seen at jails across the country: too many people incarcerated,
and not enough guards.
“Our jail facilities are at capacity,” said David Cuevas, president
of the Harris County Sheriff’s Office deputies’ union. “It is truly not
safe.”
The twin issues of overcrowding and understaffing have plagued jails
across the country for years, and even before the pandemic many
facilities were in disarray. Yet in the months after COVID-19 hit, the number of people in local lockups plummeted.
People stayed home and committed fewer crimes. Police did not make as
many arrests. Courts reduced bail. And jails let more people go home
early. Nationally, the number of people in jail decreased by about 25% by the summer of 2020, according to data compiled by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.
newstarget | Three doctors in the armed forces have decided to blow the lid
on the United States military’s open deception concerning the negative
outcome of Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccination” on American
troops.
According to the three whistleblowers, medical billing code data
captured by the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED), which is
run by the Department of Defense (DoD), shows that rates of miscarriage,
myocarditis, cancer, Bell’s palsy, female infertility, and many other
health conditions are up big time.
Cancer rates are particularly concerning, they say, as the normal
average number of new cases per year is about 38,700, based on the time
period from 2016-2020. In 2021 after Operation Warp Speed was launched,
however, the number of new cancer cases that year rose to 114,645.
The Armed Forces Health Surveillance Branch (AFHSB) runs the DMED,
which it describes as a “web-based tool to remotely query de-identified
active component personnel and medical event data contained within the
Defense Medical Surveillance System (DMSS).”
“The database contains every International Classification of Diseases
(ICD) medical billing code for all medical diagnoses submitted by the
military for medical insurance billing,” reports explain. (Related:
Remember at the launch of Operation Warp Speed when Dr. Sara Beltrán
Ponce, MD, suffered a horrific miscarriage right after getting jabbed for the Chinese Flu?)
Neurological issues up 1,000% in military following Operation Warp Speed
The three military whistleblowers in question are Samuel Sigoloff,
Peter Chambers, and Theresa Long. Attorney Thomas Renz issued sworn
statements from these three to the courts as part of a major lawsuit.
During the first 10 months of 2021, Renz says, miscarriages alone
rose by 300 percent in the military. His hope is that the suit will lead
to an end for covid jab mandates in the military.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) is also involved, having recently hosted
“COVID-19: A Second Opinion,” a livestreamed discussion panel featuring
numerous world-renowned doctors and medical experts who offered a much
different take on the scamdemic and how the government handled it.
On February 1 of this year, Johnson wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary
of Defense Lloyd Austin. In it were the findings from a roundtable on
covid jab injuries and deaths, including data showing a 10-fold increase
in neurological issues post-Operation Warp Speed.
Johnson also revealed the following increases in other health
conditions following the mandate of covid injections in the military:
Hypertension: 2,181 percent increase
Nervous system disorders: 1,048 percent increase
Malignant neoplasms of esophagus: 894 percent increase
Multiple sclerosis: 680 percent increase
Malignant neoplasms of digestive organs: 624 percent increase
Guillain-Barre syndrome: 551 percent increase
Breast cancer: 487 percent increase
Demyelinating: 487 percent increase
Malignant neoplasms of thyroid and other endocrine glands: 474 percent increase
Female infertility: 472 percent increase
Pulmonary embolism: 468 percent increase
Migraines: 452 percent increase
Ovarian dysfunction: 437 percent increase
Testicular cancer: 369 percent increase
Tachycardia: 302 percent increase
Between the years of 2016 and 2020, there were 1,499 codes for
miscarriage reported each year. From January through October 2021 – not
even a full year – there were an astounding 4,182 miscarriages logged
into the system.
Throughout October, there have been an average of 1,564 extra deaths
per week, compared with a weekly average of just 315 in 2020 and 1,322
in 2021.
Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed
that in the week ending Oct 21, there were 1,714 excess deaths in
England and Wales, of which only 469 were due to Covid - just 27 per
cent of the total.
It is 16.8 per cent higher than normal. Deaths are also running
higher than the five-year pre-Covid October average from 2015 to 2019,
figures showed.
Health experts have warned that some of the unexplained deaths are being caused by collateral damage from the pandemic, when operations and treatments were cancelled or delayed as the health service concentrated on Covid.
The Government’s “stay at home, protect the NHS” message also left many people who needed medical treatment unwilling to bother the health service, or afraid they would catch coronavirus if they went into hospital.
The NHS is also struggling from long-term staffing issues and current shortages because of coronavirus, leading to record waits for ambulances, treatment and surgery.
Dr Charles Levinson, of the private GP service DoctorCall, which has
seen a rise in patients presenting with advanced conditions, said: “What
is driving the excess death crisis? In my view, delays in
diagnosis/treatment now and throughout the pandemic.
Begrudgingly Acknowledged Country Bangers
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When someone says they hate country music, they’re typically referring,
whether they know it or not, to the neotraditionalist “young country” that
arose in...
Body part names across cultures
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Variability in human body vocabularies. A team of linguists from
@MPI_EVA_Leipzig and @UniPassau has conducted the first large-scale
comparison of body p...
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
