catastrophiccontagion | The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in partnership with WHO and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, conducted Catastrophic Contagion, a pandemic tabletop exercise at the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in Brussels, Belgium, on October 23, 2022.
The extraordinary group of participants consisted of 10 current and
former Health Ministers and senior public health officials from Senegal,
Rwanda, Nigeria, Angola, Liberia, Singapore, India, Germany, as well as
Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The exercise simulated a series of WHO emergency health advisory
board meetings addressing a fictional pandemic set in the near future.
Participants grappled with how to respond to an epidemic located in one
part of the world that then spread rapidly, becoming a pandemic with a
higher fatality rate than COVID-19 and disproportionately affecting
children and young people.
Participants were challenged to make urgent policy decisions with
limited information in the face of uncertainty. Each problem and choice
had serious health, economic, and social ramifications.
levernews | A looming Supreme Court decision could end up making it easier for
the railroad giant whose train derailed in Ohio this month to block
lawsuits, including from victims of the disaster.
In the case
against Norfolk Southern, the Biden administration is siding with the
railroad in its conflict with a cancer-stricken former rail worker. A
high court ruling for Norfolk Southern could create a national precedent
limiting where workers and consumers can bring cases against
corporations.
The lawsuit in question, filed initially in a
Pennsylvania county court in 2017, deals with a state law that permits
plaintiffs to file suit against any corporation registered to do
business there, even if the actions that gave rise to the case occurred
elsewhere.
In its fight against the lawsuit, Norfolk Southern is
asking the Supreme Court to uphold the lower court ruling, overturn
Pennsylvania’s law, and restrict where corporations can be sued,
upending centuries of precedent.
Oral arguments in the case were held last fall, and a ruling is expected from the Supreme Court in the coming months.
If
the court rules in favor of Norfolk Southern, it could overturn
plaintiff-friendly laws on the books in states including Pennsylvania,
New York, and Georgia that give workers and consumers more leeway to
choose where they take corporations to court — an advantage national
corporations already enjoy, as they often require customers and
employees to agree to file litigation in specific locales whose laws
make it harder to hold companies accountable.
Limiting lawsuits is exactly what the American Association of
Railroads (AAR), the industry’s primary lobbying group, wants. The
organization filed a brief on the side of Norfolk Southern in the case,
arguing that a ruling in favor of the plaintiff would open up railroads
to more litigation.
It is also apparently what the Biden administration wants — the Justice Department filed its own brief in favor of Norfolk Southern.
Should
Norfolk Southern prevail, the company could use the ruling to challenge
other lawsuits on the grounds that they’re filed in the wrong venue,
said Scott Nelson, an attorney with the Public Citizen Litigation Group,
which filed a brief backing the plaintiff in the Pennsylvania case.
Such
a decision could affect lawsuits filed by residents exposed to
hazardous chemicals as the result of accidents in other states — such as
the East Palestine, Ohio, derailment disaster, which occurred five
miles west of the Pennsylvania state line.
Rather, I shall begin from the very concrete (“for want of a nail…”)
and move to the very abstract: From the wheel, to the truck, the cars,
the firm (Norfolk Southern), and the owners.
Compared to truck – its main competitor – train is cheaper (in the US it’s 4 cents vs 20 cents
per ton-mile), more efficient (the record-breaking train was 682 cars
and 4.5 miles long carrying 82,000 metric tons of ore), and more
sustainable (one ton of freight can be moved over 470 miles on just a
single gallon of diesel fuel).
However, if you want that advantage to be real and not just
theoretical, you’ve got to maintain all that steel in good working
order; after all, when things go wrong with a train that’s 4.5 miles
long, they can go very, very wrong. Norfolk Southern adopted Precision
Scheduled Railroading (see NC here, and alert reader Upstater, here) in 2019 (“average train speed increasing by 10%”), achieving a record operating ratio of 60.4%
in 2022[3]. In so doing, it threw away the inherent advantage of rail.
Specifically, in the East Palestine disaster, it did not maintain its
steel wheels.
Due to NS intimidating (or corrupting) the regulators, train 32N was
not classified as a “high-hazard flammable train,” despite its obviously
hazardous and flammable cargo. Such a classification would have
affected both its speed and its route (possibly not through East
Palestine). From Lever News:
Though the company’s 150-car train in Ohio reportedly burst into
100-foot flames upon derailing — and was transporting materials that
triggered a fireball when they were released and incinerated — it was
not being regulated as a “high-hazard flammable train,” federal
officials told The Lever.
Documents show that when current transportation safety rules were
first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and
limited regulations governing the transport of hazardous compounds. The
decision effectively exempted many trains hauling dangerous materials —
including the one in Ohio — from the “high-hazard” classification and
its more stringent safety requirements.
(2) Speed restrictions. All trains are limited to a
maximum speed of 50 mph. The train is further limited to a maximum speed
of 40 mph while that train travels within the limits of high-threat
urban areas (HTUAs) as defined in § 1580.3 of this title, unless all
tank cars containing a Class 3 flammable liquid meet or exceed the DOT
Specification 117 standards, the DOT Specification 117P performance
standards, or the DOT Specification 117R retrofit standards provided in
part 179, subpart D of this subchapter.
No railroad company dedicated to increasing average train speed by
10% through PSR would ever want to comply with that statute (which also
imposes restrictions on the routes to be followed and allowable cars).
Railroad Owners
Here are the owners of the NS:
No doubt they are very happy with the Operating Ratio that NSR achieved through NSR.
statista | While OpenAI has really risen to fame with the release of ChatGPT in
November 2022, the U.S.-based artificial intelligence research and
deployment company is about much more than its popular AI-powered
chatbot. In fact, OpenAI’s technology is already being used by hundreds
of companies around the world.
According to data published by the enterprise software platform Enterprise Apps Today,
companies in the technology and education sectors are most likely to
take advantage of OpenAI’s solutions, while business services,
manufacturing and finance are also high on the list of industries
utilizing artificial intelligence in their business processes.
Broadly
defined as “the theory and development of computer systems able to
perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual
perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between
languages” artificial intelligence (AI) can now be found in various
applications, including for example web search, natural language
translation, recommendation systems, voice recognition and autonomous
driving. In healthcare, AI can help synthesize large volumes of clinical
data to gain a holistic view of the patient, but it’s also used in
robotics for surgery, nursing, rehabilitation and orthopedics.
statista | While there are, especially in industries like manufacturing, legitimate fears that robots and artificial intelligence
could cost people their jobs, a lot of workers in the United States
prefer to look on the positive side, imagining which of the more
laborious of their tasks could be taken off their hands by AI.
According to a recent survey by Gartner,
70 percent of U.S. workers would like to utilize AI for their jobs to
some degree. As our infographic shows, a fair chunk of respondents also
named some tasks which they would be more than happy to give up
completely. Data processing is at the top of the list with 36 percent,
while an additional 50 percent would at least like AI to help them out
in this.
On the other side of the story, as reported by VentureBeat:
"Among survey respondents who did not want to use AI at work, privacy
and security concerns were cited as the top two reasons for declining
AI." To help convince these workers, Gartner recommends "that IT leaders
interested in using AI solutions in the workplace gain support for this
technology by demonstrating that AI is not meant to replace or take
over the workforce. Rather, it can help workers be more effective and
work on higher-value tasks."
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.
Clinical trial design
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.
asiatimes | With key assistance from China, Mexico is keeping at crisis level the flow of fentanyl into the United States.
At least 70,000 Americans, mostly between the ages of 18 and 35, have
died after ingesting fentanyl pills so far this year. That’s close to
the 71,000 dead out of more than 100,000 drug fatalities in 2021 and a
big jump from 57,000 deaths the year before. Millions of pills have
illicitly passed through the US southern border in recent years.
In 2020, US President Joe Biden declared a “whole of government”
campaign to stem the opiate flood into the country. However, the illicit
flood of drugs continues unabated due to Washington’s inability to
persuade – or pressure – China and Mexico to halt their roles in it. In
particular:
China won’t stop criminal gangs from providing the chemicals used in Mexico to manufacture fentanyl.
Mexico won’t fully crack down on illicit industries that make and transfer the finished product to the US.
Relations between Mexico and the United States have long stumbled
over differing views of the cross-border drug problem. Mexico
traditionally blames America’s insatiable appetite for narcotics, while
the US regards Mexico as irretrievably crippled by massive corruption
that lets criminal narcotics traffic flourish.
Almost two years into his term, Biden has fashioned an excuse to
explain the massive traffic: Victims of drug use are afraid to
acknowledge their addiction.
“We’re looking at continuing to make progress because we know there’s still a ways to go,” Biden said Thursday.
“We’re not going to let stigma drive us anymore,” he added. “We’re going to go where we need to go to help people thrive.”
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkus has reassuredly claimed that the border is “secure.”
Taking a less boastful view, Drug Enforcement Administration chief
Anne Milgram said the administration had been overly focused on heroin
commerce, even as Mexican traffickers made and shipped more fentanyl
than heroin. “It is a new, deeper, more deadly threat than we have ever
seen, and I don’t think that the full extent of that harm was
immediately seen,” she said.
Unable to get sufficient help from either Mexico or China to stem the
flow, the Biden administration instead is focusing on educational
efforts to curb drug use. Rahul Gupta, director of the White House’s
Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the government is
concentrating on “expanding care” for addicts and on taking “harm
reduction” measures to expand access to medical counseling and care.
Newsweek | Diesel inventories in the U.S. have not been so low since 2008, with the Energy Information Administration (EIA) reporting that, as of October 14, the country had 25.4 days left of distillate supplies—which include diesel, jet fuel and heating oil.
The supply crunch is particularly severe in the East Coast, according to analysts who previously talked to Newsweek.
Mansfield Energy, a major fuel supply and logistics company based in Georgia and operating in every U.S. state, wrote in a recent news release that the "East Coast fuel markets are facing diesel supply constraints due to market economics and tight inventories."
According to the fuel supply company, extremely high diesel prices—which have surged due to low inventories combined with high demand—are concentrated in the North East, while supply outages are currently hitting the Southeast.
These shortages, write Mansfield Energy, are due to a combination of
"poor pipeline shipping economics and historically low diesel
inventories."
Mansfield Energy identified the most acute shortages to be in these seven states:
Alabama
Georgia
Maryland
North Carolina
South Carolina
Tennessee
Virginia
These
seven states have been given an Alert Level 4 by the fuel supply
company "to address market volatility," while the entire Southeast was
moved to Code Red, which requires a 72-hour notice for fuel deliveries
when possible "to ensure fuel and freight can be secured at economical
levels."
"Normally, East Coast markets would have about 50 million
barrels of supply in storage throughout the market—and sometimes much
more," wrote Mansfield Energy in a news release published on October 27.
"This
year, however, the East has less than 25 million barrels on hand. That
means that when bulk traders go to pull their inventories, they may not
find much left in the tank. For East Coast fleets, then—now is the
critical time to make sure your supplier has a plan for the winter to
keep your equipment running. Outside the East Coast, markets could face
some challenges, but most of the biggest issues will be concentrated
eastward."
Guardian | Millions of Americans are currently working two or more jobs in order to make ends meet, as global inflation and corporations jacking up prices have sent prices of food, gas, housing, health insurance and other necessities soaring in the past year.
Cashe
Lewis, 31, of Denver, Colorado works two jobs and is currently trying
to find a third job to cover the recent $200 monthly rent increase to
her apartment. She works days as a barista at Starbucks, but claims it’s
been difficult to get enough hours even with taking extra shifts
whenever she can due to scheduling cuts as part of the crackdown on union organizing by management.
At night she works at a convenience store because the hours are reliable, and works six days a week, often 16 hours a day.
“I’m
exhausted all the time,” said Lewis. “On the one day I have off a week,
I donate plasma for extra money. I’m literally selling my blood to eat
because I have no choice.”
Her partner suffers
from epilepsy and can’t work full-time hours because of it. Even with
insurance, their medication is expensive and she spends about half of a
two-week paycheck at Starbucks to cover the health insurance premiums.
Over
the past five years, she has struggled with homelessness, and was
previously fired from her job for sleeping in her car behind her place
of employment.
“All of my friends and family
work multiple jobs as well, just trying to keep our heads above water.
Nothing is affordable and the roadblocks set up to keep people in the
cycle of poverty benefit the most wealthy members of our society,” added
Lewis. “We aren’t living, we’re barely surviving and we have no choice
but to keep doing it.”
More Americans have been working two or more jobs over the past few decades, according to data
from the US census, with women more likely than men to have multiple
jobs and multiple jobholders most prevalent among low-wage workers.
Laura
Richwine of Omaha, Nebraska, works two jobs, one in fraud prevention
and the other doing administrative work, and had previously been working
three jobs to keep up with hefty medical bills she’s been facing since
being hit by a car in 2014.
“It’s
rough and I barely have any energy to keep up with much else,” said
Richwine. “I’ve got a bachelor’s degree and have been working for over
10 years, but up until this year I had never had a job that paid more
than $15 an hour. Many places around me still only offer Nebraska
minimum wage, which is $9 an hour. You can hardly even buy food with
that amount.”
Though US census data estimates these rates and numbers to be much higher, at 7.8% in the most recent year where data is available, 2018, about 13 million workers, while BLS data at the time estimated 5.0% of the workforce holding multiple jobs.
Both data sets are considered an underestimate of the number of multiple jobholders in the US labor market due to constrictions on what is defined as a multiple jobholder and the lack of data on self-employment, such as gig workers.
dailyveracity | Captagon is a drug that first came to prominence during the Islamic State’s terror wave throughout the middle east. Since 2014, the drug reportedly reemerged
within Ukraine, fueling neo-nazi terrorists who have used the meth-like
substance on the battlefield to overcome the fear of death, becoming
what some people call “zombie soldiers.”
The Donetsk People Republic (DPR) recently uncovered drug
laboratories where ‘combat drugs’ have reportedly been developed ii
village of Sopino near Mariupol, and administered to the Azov
Battalion. Sputnik reported.
“You start taking him somewhere, and they’re laughing. They don’t
feel anything, no pain or anything. They’re like zombies.” describes a
Donbas soldier.
A DPR soldier alleged that the drugs, which are a combination of
Captagon, as well as other amphetamines, cause “stupidity and courage”
among the Ukrainian neo-nazis who are said to lose all fear of death
when taking the substance.
Some of the neo-nazis who were high on the drug, admitted to killing
fellow Ukrainian citizens, saying “I understood that I was shooting at
civilians, but I was high on drugs, I was following orders”
Captagon, before being banned throughout the western world, was first
manufactured in 1961 as an alternative to amphetamine and
methamphetamine—used at the time to treat narcolepsy, fatigue, and the
behavioral disorder “minimal brain dysfunction.”
Since, the illegal manufacturing of the substance exploded throughout
eastern Europe and the Middle East, and is said to have fueled ISIS
throughout their terror campaign across the middle east.
The ‘Combat Drug’ has since become a staple for the Neo-Nazi Azov
Battalion, who is said to manufacture the substance and administer it to
combatants who then are said to stay up for days without fatigue.
The Azov soldiers have gone through Ukraine, torturing, beating, and
killing Ukrainian civilians. It has been reported that the Ukrainian
soldiers have killed their own, indiscriminately, while laughing and
cheering.
Newsweek | In the past three months, investigators across Europe have
intercepted thousands of Captagon pills, an amphetamine-based drug
popular with the Islamic State militant group. Nicknamed "the jihadists'
drug," Captagon keeps users awake for long periods of time, dulls pain
and creates a sense of euphoria. According to one former militant who spoke to CNN
in 2014, ISIS "gave us drugs, hallucinogenic pills that would make you
go to battle not caring if you live or die." Given similar testimony
from other fighters, experts say it seems likely that the hallucinogenic
pills the militant took were Captagon.
Invented in Germany in the
1960s to treat attention and sleep disorders, and highly addictive,
Captagon was banned throughout most of the world in the 1980s.
On
May 10, Dutch investigators said they had discovered a drug lab the
previous month that was churning out Captagon pills, and they were
looking for two suspects associated with the lab. In March, Greek police
confiscated more than 600,000 Captagon pills in a raid and arrested
four people for allegedly manufacturing the drug.
Greek and Dutch police haven't said the Captagon stashes they found were destined for ISIS fighters.
Captagon is one of the brand names for the drug fenethylline, a combination of amphetamine and theophylline
that relaxes the muscle around the lungs and is used to treat breathing
problems. A German company first synthesized fenethylline in 1961, and
when it discovered the drug improved alertness, doctors began
prescribing it to treat narcolepsy and attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder. Though generally without side effects, says Dr. Raj Persaud, a
fellow at the London-based Royal College of Psychiatrists, overuse can
cause extreme depression, tiredness, insomnia, heart palpitations and,
in rare cases, blindness and heart attacks. In the 1980s, when the
drug's addictiveness became clear, the United States and the World
Health Organization listed it as a controlled substance, and it is now
illegal to buy and sell throughout most of the world.
Nevertheless,
fenethylline remains popular in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi
Arabia, where more Captagon is consumed than in any other country in the
world.
Though Islamic law forbids the consumption of alcohol and other drugs,
many users there see Captagon as a medicinal substance. In October 2015,
Lebanese authorities arrested a Saudi prince at the Beirut airport
after two tons of cocaine and Captagon pills, which sell for roughly $20
per pill in Saudi Arabia, were found on a private plane.
Once manufactured in Eastern Europe, Turkey and Lebanon, according to Columbia University's Journal of International Affairs,
Captagon is now predominantly made in Syria. The Syrian conflict has
allowed for illicit activities to flourish, and many fighters there know
the benefits of using the drug.
The use of drugs in war has a
long history. The ancient Greeks, the Vikings, U.S. Civil War soldiers
and the Nazis all relied on drugs—wine, mushrooms, morphine and
methamphetamines, respectively—to get them through the horror of battle.
"The holy grail that armies around the world have been looking for is a
drug that gives people courage," says Persaud, and Captagon comes
close. "It doesn't give you distilled courage, but it gives you a
tendency to want to keep going and impaired judgment, so you don't
consider whether you're scared or not," he says. "You feel euphoria. You
don't feel pain. You could say it's courage without the judgment." For a
fighter in a war so brutally waged, the benefits of that are clear.
RT | The US will not be able to replace Russian uranium in the event of an
import ban, Assistant Secretary of Energy Kathryn Huff has warned,
saying Washington must develop enrichment capabilities domestically.
"Worldwide, there's not enough capacity to replace that gap from trusted sources," Huff told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday, adding that it was the US’s responsibility to “encourage and incentivize that enrichment and conversion capability” on American soil.
Huff
told the Examiner that US reliance on Russian-sourced uranium posed
unique energy security and national security risks, and noted that
Russia still provides about 20% of the low enriched uranium at existing
US reactors.
“We have the largest nuclear fleet in the world,
and we currently do not have the capability to provide fuel for all of
our reactors,” she said, claiming that Russia is “no longer a trustworthy source of our fuel, and we need to find alternatives here and build up that supply chain.”
Russia reportedly accounted for 16.5% of the uranium imported into
the US in 2020 and 23% of the enriched uranium needed to power the
country’s commercial nuclear reactors. Currently there is nowhere else
to turn to fill the gap if uranium imports are banned, Huff said.
Legislation
before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee would indeed
ban Russian uranium imports, just as Congress previously banned imports
of Russian fossil fuels following the launch of Moscow’s military
offensive in Ukraine in February.
Huff, who has a PhD in nuclear engineering, said a "tiger team" at the energy department was currently strategizing how to expand the domestic supply chain.
US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has also previously called Washington's reliance on imports from Moscow a "vulnerability" for economic and national security.
The
US maintains the capacity to mine uranium, but relies heavily on Russia
for enrichment. Kick-starting the domestic uranium industry is not a
simple process, the department said previously, given that the country
has only one commercial enrichment facility remaining — a plant run by
British-German-Dutch consortium Urenco in New Mexico.
They’re excited about the arctic being open for shipping and drilling.
They’re excited about future archeological expeditions to places that will become accessible due to climate change.
Like all the land below the ice in Antarctica.
They’re excited about their investments in farmland and water rights paying off.
They’re excited about water becoming more valuable than oil.
In fact, quite a few large companies are positioning themselves to profit off of “big water”.
They’re excited about Montana becoming great wine country.
They’re excited about the coast line changing and creating more opportunities for development.
They’re excited about public private partnerships for the infrastructure to protect the places they decide to protect.
They’re excited about the opportunities to redesign cities to handle “chronic inundation”, “induced seismicity” and “heat challenged districts”.
These people absolutely see themselves as winners in climate change. They see no reason to stop making profits off the activities that are driving climate change because they see no reason to stop accelerating climate change. They’re looking forward to the world to come.
They might acknowledge that there isn’t as much room for people like us in the future. But as long as they can keep shifting the idea of responsibility to suburban moms and soy eating college activists they’ll be happy to continue funding environmental goals that don’t achieve anything for the environment.
They’ll always be able to find another Greta Thunberg to scold them while looking suitably young and idealistic. And most people will fall for it because they want their actions to mean something. Because who could believe that our leaders know they’re destroying our world and that they don’t care.
caityjohnstone | Wealth
is a zero-sum game, as is its good friend power. The more power
everyone else has, the less power our current rulers would have over us.
This is why so much energy goes into ensuring that votes have as little
effect as possible on the operations of the state and making sure
everything stays the same no matter what the public wants.
Imagine
if ordinary people started having as much influence over the direction
human civilization will take as war profiteers, oil tycoons, globalized
wage slavers and Silicon Valley plutocrats. Imagine if the working class
had enough disposable income to begin funding grassroots political
campaigns, building their own media networks, or even funding think
tanks and NGOs to advance their own interests like plutocrats do today.
Imagine if everyone could afford to work less and relax more, and
finally start learning about what’s really going on in the world.
Wealth is meaningless if everyone is wealthy. Power is meaningless if everyone has power. The kings of our day have a vested interest in keeping everyone poor and powerless, because if everyone is king, then no one is king.
This
is why our status quo systems work the way they work, and this is why
you see a convergence of interests from such groups as corporate
plutocrats, plutocrat-owned politicians and media, the arms industry,
and military and intelligence agencies. These groups all have a vested
interest in preserving the status quo and the ability to put that agenda
in place, so they’ve fallen into a natural, de facto alliance with each
other toward that end.
It’s why we’ve seen a historic upward transfer of wealth
during the Covid pandemic, with billionaires raking in trillions while
ordinary people struggle with unemployment and soaring prices. And it’s
why that transfer of wealth has been happening for decades
since long before Covid. In a system where money is power and power is
relative, a ruling class naturally emerges which needs to suppress the
wealth and power of its subjects in order to continue to rule.
Workers around the world: lost $3.7 trillion in the pandemic Billionaires around the world: gained $3.9 trillion in the pandemic
It's the biggest one-year wealth transfer in history, yet somehow barely anyone is talking about it.
Rulers
do not historically give up their rule voluntarily, so we can expect
this continual pattern of wealth obstruction via wealth extraction to
continue until people get tired of being kept poor and powerless by
those who benefit from their poverty and disempowerment and use the strength of their numbers to force the emergence of a more equitable system. We can also expect our rulers to do everything in their power to prevent this from happening, including propagandizing the public into accepting the status quo and believing that anything better is impossible.
Drastic
change in the not-too-distant future does seem to be inevitable,
though, if only because we’re headed toward environmental collapse or
nuclear winter if we don’t rise to the revolutionary occasion first.
Humanity’s self-destructive patterning is in a race with our better angels, and right now it’s anybody’s race.
CTH | It is hard to think the unthinkable – but there comes a time when
there’s nothing else for it. People raised to trust the powers that be –
who have assumed, like I once did, that the State, regardless of its
political flavour at any given moment, is essentially benevolent and
well-meaning – will naturally try and keep that assumption of
benevolence in mind when trying to make sense of what is going on around
them.
People like us, you and me, raised in the understanding that we are
free, that we have inalienable rights, and that the institutions of this
country have our best interests at heart, will tend to tie ourselves in
knots rather than contemplate the idea those authorities might actually
be working against us now. I took that thought of benevolent,
well-meaning authority for granted for most of my life, God help me. Not
to put too fine a point on it, I was as gullible as the next chump.
A couple of years ago, however, I began to think the unthinkable and
with every passing day it becomes more and more obvious to me that we
are no longer being treated as individuals entitled to try and make the
most of our lives – but as a barn full of battery hens, just another
product to be bought and sold – sold down the river.
Let me put it another way: if you have been driving yourself almost
demented in an effort to think the best of those in charge – those in
senior positions in government, those in charge of the great
institutions of State, those running the big corporations – but finding
it increasingly impossible to do so … then the solution to the problem
might be to turn your point of view through 180 degrees and accept,
however unwillingly, that we are … how best to put this … being taken
for a ride.
When you find a stranger’s hand on your wallet, in the inside pocket
of your jacket … rather than trying to persuade yourself he’s only
making sure it doesn’t fall out … it might be more straightforward to
draw the conclusion you’re in the process of being robbed.
Once the scales fall from a person’s eyes, the resultant clarity of
sight is briefly overwhelming. Or it is like being handed a skeleton key
that opens every locked door, or access to a Rosetta Stone that
translates every word into a language instantly understood.
Take the energy crisis: If you’ve felt the blood drain from your face
at the prospect of bills rising from hundreds to several thousands of
pounds while reading about energy companies doubling their profits
overnight while being commanded to subsidise so-called renewables that
are anything but Green while listening to this politician or that renew
their vows to the ruinous fantasies of Net Zero and Agenda 2030 while
knowing that the electricity for electric cars comes, in the main and
most reliably, from fossil fuels if you can’t make sense of it all and
just know that it adds up to a future in which you might have to choose
between eating and heating then treat yourself to the gift of
understanding that the powers that be fully intend that we should have
less heat and less fuel and that in the planned future only the rich
will have cars anyway. The plan is not to fix it.
The plan is to break it, and leave it broken. If you struggle to
think the best of the world’s richest – vacuous, self-obsessed A-list
celebrities among them – endlessly circling the planet on private jets
and super yachts, so as to attend get-togethers where they might
pontificate to us lowly proles about how we must give up our cars and
occasional holiday flights – even meat on the dinner table … if you
wonder how they have the unmitigated gall … then isn’t it easier simply
to accept that their honestly declared and advertised intention is that
their luxurious and pampered lives will continue as before while we are
left hungry, cold and mostly unwashed in our unheated homes.
Here’s the thing: if any leader or celeb honestly meant a word of their sermons about CO2 and
the rest, then they would obviously lead by example. They would be
first of all of us willingly to give up international travel altogether …
they would downsize to modest homes warmed by heat pumps. They would
eschew all energy but that from the sun and the wind. They would eat,
with relish, bugs and plants. They would resort to walking, bicycles and
public transport.
If Net Zero and the rest was about the good of the planet – and not
about clearing the skies and the beaches of scum like us – don’t you
think those sainted politicians and A-listers would be lighting the way
for us by their own example? If the way of life they preach to us was
worth living, wouldn’t they be living it already? Perhaps you heard Bill
Gates say private jets are his guilty pleasure.
And how about food – and more particularly the predicted shortage of
it: the suits and CEOs blame it all on Vladimir Putin. But if the
countries of the world are truly running out of food, why is our
government offering farmers hundreds of thousands of pounds to get out
of the industry and sell their land to transnational corporations for
use, or disuse unknown? Why aren’t we, as a society, doing what our
parents and grandparents did during WWII and digging for victory? Why is
the government intent on turning a third of our fertile soil over to
re-wilding schemes that make life better only for the beavers? Why
aren’t we looking across the North Sea towards the Netherlands where a
WEF-infected administration is bullying farmers off their land
altogether, forcing them to cull half the national herd.
Those Dutch farmers are among the most productive and knowledgeable
in the world, holding in their heads and hands the answers to all manner
of questions about how best to produce food, and yet their government
is so intent on scaring them out of the business that a teenage boy in a
tractor, taking part in a protest to defend ancient rights and
traditions, was fired on by police.
Why do you think it matters so much, to the government of the second
most productive population of farmers in the world, to gut and fillet
that industry? Why? Why have similar protests, in countries all across
Europe and the wider world, been largely ignored by the mainstream media
– a media that would have crawled on its hands and knees over broken
glass just to report on a BLM protester opening a bag of non-binary
crisps. Why the silence on the attack on farming?
WSWS | At each of the three press conferences held during Biden’s illness,
White House COVID Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha and Press
Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated this statement of surrender to
the virus, while stating that all Americans will inevitably be infected
with COVID-19.
On July 21, Jean-Pierre stated, “Look, we knew this
was going to happen. As Dr. Jha said… at some point, everyone is going
to get COVID.” The following day, Dr. Jha said bluntly, “This virus is
going to be with us forever.” On Monday, July 25, Jean-Pierre repeated,
“As we have said, almost everyone is going to get COVID.” Numerous
articles in the bourgeois press and segments on the broadcast news
outlets parroted these same talking points.
Finally, on Wednesday
Biden tested negative for COVID-19 and ended his isolation. Visibly
unwell, coughing repeatedly, his voice still deep from the infection,
and stumbling over his words more than usual, Biden gave a lying and
cynical 10-minute speech to a group of maskless, cheering staffers in
the Rose Garden, in which he portrayed vaccines and Pfizer’s antiviral
Paxlovid as magical “tools” that nullify the dangers of perpetual mass
viral transmission.
In the course of his speech, Biden referred to God three times and
“prayers” once. He made no reference to the rising daily death toll from
COVID-19, the impacts of Long COVID, viral evolution, mask mandates,
airborne transmission, or other critical concerns about the pandemic
raised by leading scientists. On the same day as Biden’s speech, 801
Americans officially died from COVID-19 and the seven-day average of
daily new deaths rose to 440, up 67 percent from the trough reached on
June 21, while hospitalizations approached 44,000, a three-fold increase
in the past three months.
Biden stated early in his speech, “the
reality is that BA.5 means many of us are still going to get COVID even
if we take the precautions. That doesn’t mean we are—we were doing
anything wrong. Unfortunately, this COVID is still with us, as it has
been for two and a half years.”
Later, he falsely claimed: “Over
the past 18 months, my administration has left no stone unturned in our
fight against this pandemic. None. We brought down deaths by nearly 90
percent since I took office because of the help of all the people in
this Rose Garden. Businesses and schools responded. Grandparents are
hugging their kids and grandkids again.”
In reality, due to the
abandonment of mitigation measures during last winter’s Omicron BA.1
surge, the seven-day average of daily new deaths reached 2,654 per day
on February 1, 2022, only 13 percent less than the daily death toll when
Biden was inaugurated. Despite the roll-out of life-saving vaccines,
over 610,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 since Biden took office,
39 percent more deaths than took place under Trump. Over 200,000 parents
and grandparent caregivers have been killed by COVID-19 in the US, the
majority under Biden, whose relentless pursuit of school reopenings led
to mass viral transmission among children and their families.
Biden
declared, “You can now prevent most COVID deaths. And that’s because of
three free tools my administration has invested in and distributed this
past year: booster shots; at-home tests; easy-to-use, effective
treatments.” He reiterated this, stating, “You can live without fear by
doing what I did: Get boosted, get tested, and get treatment.”
All
of Biden’s claims about the pandemic are false and unscientific, meant
to serve as soporifics to disarm the public in the face of the looming
dangers that lie ahead. His administration’s pragmatic pursuit of a
vaccine- and Paxlovid-only strategy, combined with its refusal to stop
viral transmission, has set American society on a course towards
disaster.
dailymail | Joe Biden has been re-infected with COVID
after taking an anti-viral drug that leaves patients running a 40 per
cent risk of flare-up of the virus shortly afterwards.
Taking
Paxlovid leaves COVID sufferers in danger of testing positive for the
virus again very quickly after clearing their initial infection.
When Paxlovid came to market in December 2021, studies from Pfizer indicated
that only 1-2 percent of patients who took the drug tested positive for
Covid again shortly after finishing their dosage.
But
other experts say the rapid reinfection rate is closer to 40 per cent,
and that Paxlovid can cause this issue by suppressing patients' immune
systems too early, meaning their own bodies are unable to get a handle
on COVID.
Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a
prominent cardiologist and professor of medicine and surgery at George
Washington University Hospital tweeted: 'I think this was predictable.'
He
continued: 'The prior data suggesting 'rebound' Paxlovid positivity in
the low single digits is outdates and with BA.5 is likely 20-40% or even
higher.'
In a memo released by the
White House, Dr. Kevin O'Connor said that the president will continue to
isolate, just like he did when he first tested positive on July 21.
Dr.
O'Connor also said that the president would not be prescribed Paxlovid
again. The president's doctor earlier noted that it was likely that the
president was infected with the BA.5 variant.
In June, a Mayo Clinic study showed that
five percent of adults who had taken the drug tested positive again for
Covid within 30 days, according to the New York Times.
The majority of those who experienced rebound symptoms occur within two to eight days.
Some experts have said that the current
treatment cycle of taking three pills twice a day for five days is too
short a time period to clear Covid from the patient's body.
The conclusion of the Mayo Clinic study was that extending the time period of the course of Paxlovid was unnecessary.
The authors of the study conceded in their findings that immunocompromised people were unrepresented in the study.
Also
in June, the president's chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci,
experienced rebound Covid-19. In his case, he did take a second round of
Paxlovid.
Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the
White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator, has denied that the
Paxlovid rebound numbers are nearly 50 percent.
The doctor maintained that the actual percentage of reinfections is 'in the single digits.'
Dr. Jha said: 'When people have rebound, they don’t end up in the hospital. They don’t end up particularly sick.'
He
added: 'Paxlovid is working really well at preventing serious illness,
rebound or no rebound, and that’s why he was offered it. And that’s why
the president took it.
Kitty, I Farted
-
Hello Loves
In France, ChatGPT is phonetically similar to *Chat, Je pete, *which means
female cat (kitty), I farted. New programs are worrying over jobs ...
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
-
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
-
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
-
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 ...