Catastrophic Contagion Scenario - Here They Come Again

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. 

Biden DOJ Backing Norfolk Southern’s Bid To Block Lawsuits

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.

 

Precision Scheduled Railroading: A Capitalist Disaster With Consequent Mass Niggerization

NC  |  In this post, I will not cover what has been well-covered elsewhere: The derailment itself (50 cars, 20 of which carried toxic materials, 14 of those vinyl chloride), the subsquent fire, which burned for three days, the ultimate “controlled release” of the poisonous gas, the toxicity of vinyl chloride, the effects of the poison on locals, their pets, and their streams, or the arrest of the reporter who asked questions at Governor DeWine‘s presser. On the bright side, Norfolk Southern donated $25,000 to community shelters. NS is also funding a hotline to a toxicologist at an environmental consulting firm. The EPA has a timeline.

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.

Steel Wheels on Steel Rails

Steel wheels on steel rails inherently produce 85-99% less friction than rubber truck tires on roads; the contact point of a wheel to the rail is about the size of a dime. Hence the inherent advantage of rail over trucks for moving goods:

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.

I don’t have a documented connection to 32N’s classification and PSR, but it seems pretty obvious. Here from 49 CFR § 174.310 – “Requirements for the operation of high-hazard flammable trains”:

(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. 

Which Industry Sectors Are Working With OpenAI?

You will find more infographics at Statista

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.

The Tasks AI Should Take Over According To Workers

You will find more infographics at Statista

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."

The Application Of Machine Learning To Evidence Based Medicine

 

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 bedside^1,2. 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 domain^6,7. 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.

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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.

Hollar At Y'Boy When The "Stochastic Terrorism" Body Count Approaches The Fentanyl Body Count...,

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.

 

For Slow Folks: If Diesel Doesn't Get To The Pump, Neither Does Gasoline...,

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."

Does Any Rational American Care What Zombie J. Puppet Prattles About....?

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.”

Based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 400,000 Americans work two full-time jobs. In September 2022, 4.9% of all the more than 164 million US workers held two or more job positions, over 7.7 million workers.

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.

Captagon A Big Part Of Why Ukro-Nazis Are Willing Cannon Fodder

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.

 DNR-Kräfte fanden Labors in der Nähe von Mariupol, in denen "Kriegs"-Drogen für ukrainische Nationalisten hergestellt wurden, berichtet RIA Novosti pic.twitter.com/PjZuDfPfSW

— Xx (@Xx17965797) March 6, 2022

“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.

 

What Is Captagon?

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.

 

The Douche-Nozzles Ruling You Are Either Mentally Retarded - Or - They Just Plan To FUCK YOU!

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.

 

A LOT Of Your Elites Are Excited About Climate Change

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.

If Everyone Is King Then No One Is King

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.

— Dan Price (@DanPriceSeattle) March 25, 2021

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.

Only A Masochistic Cuck Would Consider Fighting And Dying For This....,

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?

Covid Is Turning Out To Be A Fiendishly Clever Jackpot Biological Weapon After All....,

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.

 

The Billions In Profit Are Conspicuously Obvious, But Seriously Folks Pfizer Jes Phukkin With Y'all...,

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.

More Shady Connections Than Hunter Biden And Jeffrey Epstein Combined...,

Click on the image below to watch the video on Bitchute.

Meet Nathan Wolfe (5 mins)

expose-news  |   Dr. Nathan Wolfe was a founding citizen of Ghislaine Maxwell’s TerraMar Project; a member of the Edge Foundation; a self-proclaimed “virus hunter” whose area of research is zoonotic diseases with a special focus on bats; with links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth Alliance; who previously bungled epidemic responses while selling pandemic insurance; whose company Metabiota which is funded by Rosemont Seneca, Google, The Skoll Foundation, among others, was awarded a sub-contract with the US Military’s DTRA program for work in Ukrainian biolabs.

A few days before the end of March Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marija Zakharova published a timeline of US-Ukraine bioresearch headed “BioBiden.”  Of the 23 timeline points she listed, Nathan Wolfe or organisations associated with him – Metabiota and Global Viral – were explicitly mentioned in 8 of them:

• 2007 – US DoD employee Nathan Wolfe founded Global Viral Forecasting Institute (subsequently – Global Viral), a biomedical company. The mission stated in the charter is non-commercial study of transborder infections, including in China.
• 2014 – Metabiota, a private commercial organisation specialising in the study of pandemic risks is detached from Global Viral. Neil Callahan and John DeLoche, employees of Hunter Biden’s company Rosemont Seneca Partners are appointed to the board of Metabiota. Global Viral and Metabiota begin to get funding from the US Department of Defence.
• 2014 – Metabiota shows interest in Ukraine and invites Hunter Biden to “assert Ukraine’s cultural & economic independence from Russia”.
• 2014 – Metabiota and Burisma Holdings begin cooperation on an unnamed “science project in Ukraine”.
• 2014 – Metabiota, Global Viral and Black & Veatch Special Projects begin full-fledged cooperation within the US DoD programmes.
• 2014-2016 – Implementation of Metabiota and US DoD contracts, including a $300,000 project in Ukraine.
• 2016 – former US Assistant Secretary for Defence Andrew Weber is appointed head of Metabiota’s global partnerships department.
• 2016 – EcoHealth Alliance, a Global Viral founder Nathan Wolfe’s structure, is engaged in the study of bat-transmitted coronaviruses at the research centre in a Wuhan laboratory, China.

Considering the accusation is US political elites’ involvement in the military biological activity in Ukraine, it perhaps indicates Moscow has identified Nathan Wolfe as a person of interest in what Zakharova termed “this truly diabolical plan.”

Read more: Russian Foreign Ministry Releases Alleged “BioBiden” Timeline of US Bioresearch in Ukraine, The Gateway Pundit, 29 March 2022

Meet Nathan Wolfe

“If an alien visited Earth, they would take some note of humans, but probably spend most of their time trying to understand the dominant form of life on our planet –microorganisms like bacteria and viruses.”

Nathan Wolfe, Business Continuity and The Pandemic Threat Robert A Clark (2016)

From 1999 to 2006 Wolfe conducted research as a postdoctoral student and then as an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University.  There he worked with American epidemiologist Donald Burke, who suspected that the practice of hunting bushmeat in Africa had exposed a source of HIV. Based in Cameroon, Wolfe studied the local hunters and their hunting practices.  In 2004 he and his colleagues found that 1% of bushmeat hunters were infected with the simian foamy virus – a virus that is closely related to HIV and carried by nonhuman primates.

In 2006 he joined the department of epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He began pursuing ways to monitor, predict, and prevent animal-to-human transfer of viruses and conducted projects in Africa and Southeast Asia. In China, he collaborated with scientists to investigate wet markets (food markets that sell live animals) as a source of zoonoses (diseases from wild animals).

Read more: Nathan Wolfe, Britannica