LITTLE MAN! We're Goople - And We're Here To Help (What Could Possibly Go Wrong?)

bloomberg |  The technology, known as contact-tracing, is designed to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus by telling users they should quarantine or isolate themselves after contact with an infected individual.

The Silicon Valley rivals said on Friday that they are building the technology into their iOS and Android operating systems in two steps. In mid-May, the companies will add the ability for iPhones and Android phones to wirelessly exchange anonymous information via apps run by public health authorities. The companies will also release frameworks for public health apps to manage the functionality.

This means that if a user tests positive for Covid-19, and adds that data to their public health app, users who they came into close proximity with over the previous several days will be notified of their contact. This period could be 14 days, but health agencies can set the time range.

The second step takes longer. In the coming months, both companies will add the technology directly into their operating systems so this contact-tracing software works without having to download an app. Users must opt in, but this approach means many more people can be included. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android have about 3 billion users between them, over a third of the world’s population.

The pandemic has killed more than 100,000 and infected 1.63 million people. Governments have ordered millions to stay home, sending the global economy into a vicious tailspin. Pressure is building to relax these measures and get the world back to work. Contact-tracing is a key part of this because it can help authorities contain a potential resurgence of the virus as people resume regular activities.

Did The "Six Ways From Sunday" Impeachment (((Coup))) Distract Trump From Controlavirus?

nationalreview |  To the extent that impeachment was consuming the finite attention of senior policymakers in the White House and on Capitol Hill, we can only be thankful that Senate Republicans wrapped up the trial by voting down additional witnesses on January 31. Had the Democrats gotten their wish, Washington would have been consumed for additional critical weeks into February looking backward at Ukraine instead of forward at the threat of the virus.

Key health agencies within the federal government — the CDC and National Institutes of Health — were not inactive during January, but aside from a ban on foreign travel from China, there was little public leadership from the president. There were early, obvious-in-retrospect missteps such as the CDC’s botching the early coronavirus-testing kits and the FDA’s dragging its feet on approval of private testing development and inspection of equipment. While FDA red tape is a problem inherent to the agency’s design and culture, it is precisely the kind of problem that can be mitigated by the hands-on leadership of a bull-in-a-china-shop figure such as Trump. If you read the timeline on the Trump campaign’s website, which is designed to cast the federal response in the most favorable possible light, you will notice that the items before February 5 are almost all agency-level actions rather than White House actions. The White House Coronavirus Task Force wasn’t formed until January 29.

On February 4, Trump included a brief mention of the outbreak in the State of the Union address: “Protecting Americans’ health also means fighting infectious diseases. We are coordinating with the Chinese government and working closely together on the coronavirus outbreak in China. My administration will take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from this threat.” Little of the media commentary on the speech focused on that line. As late as February 19, Lester Holt and Chuck Todd of NBC moderated a Democratic debate without asking a single question about the virus.

Some voices in politics and the media (including, as Ross Douthat notes, an odd assortment of people on the right) were beginning to sound alarms about the virus in late January and early February, but they were a distinct minority. As Zeynep Tufekci details at The Atlantic, “From the end of January through most of February, a soothing message got widespread traction, not just with Donald Trump and his audience, but among traditional media in the United States, which exhorted us to worry about the flu instead, and warned us against overreaction.” Many politicians focused more on fear of anti-Asian racism than on the risk of a real health crisis. Mayor Bill de Blasio spent much of that period giving New Yorkers disastrous health advice.

Corona is a Black Light and America is a Cum-Stained Hotel Room

medium |  The corporate cronyism of America’s political system has been highlighted with a massive kleptocratic multitrillion-dollar corporate bailout of which actual Americans are only receiving a tiny fraction. Instead of putting that money toward paying people a living wage to stay home during a global pandemic, the overwhelming majority of the money is going to corporations while actual human beings receive a paltry $1,200 (which they won’t even be getting until May at the earliest) at a time of record-smashing unemployment.

America’s capitalism worship has been highlighted with Wall Street Journal headline “Dow Soars More Than 11% In Biggest One-Day Jump Since 1933” running at the exact same time as “Record Rise in Unemployment Claims Halts Historic Run of Job Growth — More than 3 million workers file for jobless benefits as coronavirus hits the economy”. Stocks are booming, Amazon is surging, and mountains of wealth are being transferred to sprawling megacorporations, while actual human beings are terrified of what the future holds.

America’s joke of a healthcare system is being highlighted as uninsured COVID-19 patients are racking up $35,000 medical bills and even insured COVID-19 patients are looking at out-of-pocket expenses in excess of $1,300. Combine this with the millions of Americans getting thrown off of employer-provided health insurance and you’re looking at a huge number of people who will avoid getting tested and avoid treatment as much as possible. Both heads of America’s two-headed one-party system have spent decades forcefully creating this dynamic.

America’s income and wealth inequality is being highlighted in a nation suffering from all of the above problems while most Americans were already unable to afford a mere $1,000 emergency expense. A one-time $1,200 payment to a population already stretched that thin guarantees that millions will be plunged into crushing debt and destitution in a nation with a historically unprecedented billionaire class raking in even more unearned wealth.

If Elites Had Led With This Nut-Shrivelling Horror, We Would All Be United In World War C!!!

SCMP |  Doctors in the central Chinese city of Wuhan plan to embark on a long-term study of

the effects of the coronavirus on the male reproductive system, building on small-scale research indicating that the pathogen could affect sex hormone levels in men.

 

Though still preliminary and not peer reviewed, the study is the first clinical observation of the potential impact of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, on the male reproductive system, especially among younger groups.

In a paper published on the preprint research platform medRxiv.org, the researchers – from Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University and the Hubei Clinical Research Centre for Prenatal Diagnosis and Birth Health – said they analysed blood samples from 81 men aged 20 to 54 who tested positive for the coronavirus and were hospitalised in January.

 

The median age of the participants was 38 and roughly 90 per cent of them had only mild symptoms. The samples were collected in the last days of their stay in hospital.

Using the samples, the team looked at the ratio of testosterone to luteinising hormone (T/LH). A low T/LH ratio can be a sign of hypogonadism, which in men is a malfunction of the testicles that could lead to lower sex hormone production.

The average ratio for the Covid-19 patients was 0.74, about half the normal level.

Testosterone is the main male sex hormone critical for the development of primary and secondary sexual characteristics including testes, muscle, bone mass and body hair. Luteinising hormone is found in both men and women, and best known for its ability to trigger ovulation.

 

 

 

It's Only An Emergency When The Elites Say It's An Emergency...,

securityreform |  On March 13, the White House declared the COVID-19 pandemic a national emergency. The profound impact of the outbreak will persist for months, and steps to contain and mitigate its effects have been hampered by congressional, presidential, and federal agency malfeasance. In every sense, the crisis is both national and an emergency. 

In that respect, the situation differs markedly from the nearly three dozen ‘national emergencies’ that the U.S. government currently recognizes. As a result of congressional indifference and the expansion of the national security state, Donald Trump today claims extraordinary emergency powers to address ‘emergencies’ that were declared as far back as 1979, or in response to issues ranging from “the anchorage and movement of vessels” to the U.S.-Mexico border. In terms of urgency, these are outliers. Most of the national emergencies that remain active are simply procedural vehicles to slap sanctions on foreign government officials. All of this begs the question: are any of these ‘emergencies’ at all relevant to the health, well-being, or livelihoods — to say nothing of the actual physical security — of the majority of Americans? When weighed against a genuine public health crisis like COVID-19, do these events even constitute emergencies, in any meaningful sense of the word? 

“... the bipartisan security framework that allows the president to declare emergencies with virtually unchecked impunity is itself a perpetuation of working-class insecurity.”

Taking a hard look at what the U.S. government considers a national emergency — and who has the power to define them[1] — says a great deal about the conditions that our government and the leaders of both parties deem to be ordinary and sustainable. The record is not encouraging. 

None of the 34 currently active national emergencies relates to the persistent crises of healthcare access, social mobility, and student debt. No emergency proclamation addresses the immanent risk of climate change. Instead, each emergency was declared by the president (Republican or Democrat) over the narrow policy preferences or political interests of the national security establishment. As it turns out, the bipartisan security framework that allows the president to declare emergencies with virtually unchecked impunity is itself a perpetuation of working-class insecurity.  

Emergencies all the way down

The U.S. has been in a state of persistent national emergency since November 1979, when President Jimmy Carter declared the first national emergency of the modern era, in response to the U.S. embassy takeover in Tehran. Following the declaration, Carter seized Iranian government assets and set off on an unsuccessful covert mission to free the U.S. diplomatic staff and intelligence operatives held captive in Tehran. Without doubt, the hostage-taking constituted an acute crisis for those involved, but compared to the steady erosion of personal dignity and economic stability caused by the austerity policies of the post-war period, such an event is hardly an emergency, and it is by no means national. 

Fast forward to the present (and several dozen ‘emergencies’ later), in February 2019, President Trump declared that “the current situation at the southern border presents a border security and humanitarian crisis that threatens core national security interests and constitutes a national emergency.” Thus, a caravan predominantly consisting of tired, hungry, and poor asylum seekers and migrants was deemed to constitute a ‘national emergency’. Meanwhile, the moral emergency presented by the ineptly mismanaged and criminal system of child detention centers that was a byproduct of this border policy was entirely ignored.

Not only do these emergency declarations signal the moral indifference of the national security establishment, they also reveal the overlap between parochial military, diplomatic, and corporate interests.

14 Million Newly Unemployed: These Peasants Have No Rights The 9% Is Bound To Acknowledge

NYTimes |  The rumor unsettled Deborah Santamaria.

A fellow janitor at 555 California Street, a 52-story office tower in San Francisco’s financial district, told her he heard that a floor of the building was being closed because a worker had contracted the novel coronavirus. At 63, Ms. Santamaria counted herself among those most vulnerable to a virus that had killed thousands worldwide and was rapidly spreading across the United States.

Her supervisor at Able Services, the contractor that employs her, reassured her that nothing was wrong, she said.

It was not until five days later that a news article appeared saying that Wells Fargo had temporarily evacuated its offices in the building after an employee had tested positive for the coronavirus.

The bank had notified building management, which alerted the cleaning contractor. But according to the employees and their union representatives, no one had told the janitors.

“I felt as if I didn’t matter,” said Ms. Santamaria, who earns $22 an hour.

While many Americans are fleeing their offices to avoid any contact with the coronavirus, low-wage janitors are sometimes being asked to do the opposite. Although millions of Californians have been ordered to shelter in place, janitors are still being asked to go into offices to battle the invisible germs that threaten public health, even as those germs, and the new, powerful cleaning solutions they are being asked to use, may endanger their own health.

They often operate without specialized protective gear. And the increasing demand for their services is adding new stress and risks.

Janitors cleaning the Amazon headquarters in Seattle complained that a new disinfectant they were asked to use made their eyes and skin burn. In San Francisco, janitors said they have been asked to clean offices without having been told that people who had or were exposed to the virus had worked there.

Janitors wonder why they are left in the dark when companies go to great lengths to ensure that the tech, finance and other workers occupying the buildings they clean are aware of the most remote possibility of coming into contact with the virus. It shows, they say, how disparities play out in a public health crisis — how their lives sometimes seem to be valued less than those of people with resources and power.

“None of our families should be treated as second-class citizens,” Olga Miranda, the president of the Service Employees International Union Local 87, told the janitors at 555 California last week. She had gathered the largely immigrant work force in a plaza in front of the building and told them to walk off the job to protest the cleaning company’s failure to notify them about the coronavirus case.

Coronapocalypse Expendables

themarshallproject |  In Houston, the massive county jail has stopped admitting people arrested for certain low-level crimes. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, people who usually spend their days fighting with each other—public defenders and prosecutors—joined forces to get 75 people released from jail in a single day. And outside Oakland, California, jailers are turning to empty hotel rooms to make sure the people they let out have a place to go.

Across the country, the coronavirus outbreak is transforming criminal justice in the most transient and turbulent part of the system: local jails. Run mostly by county sheriffs, jails hold an ever-changing assortment of people—those who are awaiting trial and cannot afford to pay bail; those convicted of low-level offenses; overflows from crowded prisons. 

Even without a global pandemic, many local jails struggle to provide adequate medical care for a population that is already high-risk: many people in jails suffer from addiction or mental illness. Some have died after lax medical care for treatable illnesses. 

“Basically, the shit hit the fan,” said Corbin Brewster, chief public defender of Tulsa County. “COVID-19 is just a magnifying glass for all the problems in the criminal justice system.” 

Local officials’ responses have run the gamut. In the crisis of the moment, some are adopting measures long urged by criminal justice reformers: declining to prosecute or freeing people who have committed drug offenses or nonviolent crimes; releasing the sick or elderly; trying to reduce the jail population. For example, officials have been temporarily transferring some at-risk detainees to housing units in Kent, Washington, which were built to house homeless people.

But others have stuck to tough-on-crime tactics or rhetoric. The sheriff in Bristol County, near Boston, argued the incarcerated would be safer locked up, as would the public. 

Because millions of people each year cycle in and out of jail, experts have long warned that these lockups have the potential to be petri dishes of infection—an assertion coronavirus will test.

Controlavirus Lockdown A Two-Piece And A Biscuit Apocalypse

nbcdfw |  Doctors at Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth say stress from the coronavirus pandemic may be linked to the six cases of child abuse they saw this week, one resulting in death.

Dr. Jayme Coffman, medical director of the CARE team at Cook Children’s, said all six cases were related to physical abuse. 

They typically consult about eight a month.

“Thursday night, we had one child admitted with unfortunately, life-threatening injuries, which they succumbed to, as well as four other children in the emergency department at the same time who were treated and released,” Coffman said. “It was like, we have to reach out to the community.”

Coffman said all of the children were 6 years old or younger. Though she said they could not say with full certainty the impacts of COVID-19 motivated the abuse, “it’s hard to think that it’s just coincidental”. 

“There’s no way for us to directly link that, but that’s the concern – are these families under more stress related to financial issues, whether it’s lost jobs or concerns for their jobs?” she said. “We also saw similar types of things happen during the recession where, in our trauma department, the most common cause of trauma death in children was motor vehicle collisions. During the recession, that changed to abusive head trauma, and I don’t want to see that again.”

Shellie McMillon, chief program officer at the Alliance For Children, described the spike in cases at Cook Children’s as heartbreaking.

“One thing we know is that educators, our school professionals are the largest group of people who report suspected child abuse and that makes sense. They’re usually with kids a good portion of the day,” McMillon said. “Now that kids are not in school, they’re at home – a lot of times, they don’t have that, what we call a trusted adult, to maybe tell about what’s going on.”

McMillon said one of the crucial things parents or caretakers should keep in mind if they are stressed is to not hesitate to ask for help.

No Doubt Whatsoever Controlavirus Deadliest Crisis Humanity Has Ever Faced! Idris Elba for Chrissakes!!!

off-guardian |  Let’s try a little thought experiment. Just for fun. To pass the time while we’re indefinitely locked down inside our homes, compulsively checking the Covid-19 “active cases” and “total death” count, washing our hands every twenty minutes, and attempting not to touch our faces.

Before we do, though, I want to make it clear that I believe this Covid-19 thing is real, and is probably the deadliest threat to humanity in the history of deadly threats to humanity.

According to the data I’ve been seeing, it’s only a matter of days, or hours, until nearly everyone on earth is infected and is either dying in agony and alone or suffering mild, common cold-like symptoms, or absolutely no symptoms whatsoever.

I feel that I need to state this clearly, before we do our thought experiment, because I don’t want anyone mistakenly thinking that I’m one of those probably Russian-backed Nazis who are going around saying, “it’s just the flu,” or who are spreading dangerous conspiracy theories about bio-weapons and martial law, or who are otherwise doubting or questioning the wisdom of locking down the entire world (and likely triggering a new Great Depression) on account of the discovery of some glorified bug.

Obviously, this is not just the flu. Thousands of people are dying from it. OK, sure, the flu kills many more than that, hundreds of thousands of people annually, but this Covid-19 virus is totally new, and not like any of the other millions of viruses that are going around all the time, and the experts are saying it will probably kill, or seriously sicken, or briefly inconvenience, millions or even billions of people if we don’t lock down entire countries and terrorize everyone into submission.

Which, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for that … this is not the time to be questioning anything the corporate media and the authorities tell us. This is a time to pull together, turn our minds off, and follow orders. OK, sure, normally, it’s good to be skeptical, but we’re in a goddamn global state of emergency! Idris Elba is infected for Chrissakes!

Sorry … I’m getting a little emotional. I’m a big-time Idris Elba fan. The point is, I’m not a Covid-denialist, or a conspiracy theorist, or one of those devious Chinese or Russian dissension-sowers. I know for a fact that this pandemic is real, and warrants whatever “emergency measures” our governments, global corporations, and intelligence agencies want to impose on us.

No, I’m not an epidemiologist, but I have a close friend who knows a guy who dated a woman who dated a doctor who personally knows another doctor who works in a hospital in Italy somewhere, and she (i.e., my friend, not the doctor in Italy) posted something on Facebook yesterday that was way too long to read completely but was a gut-wrenching account of how Covid-19 is killing Kuwaiti babies in their incubators!

Or maybe it was Italian babies. Like I said, it was too long to read.

99% of Italian Covid19 Deaths had Pre-existing Serious Illness Yet Martial Law

off-guardian |  Anything up to 99.2% of all of Italy’s recent Covid19-associated deaths could have been caused by pre-existing chronic conditions, according to a report released by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Italian Institute of Health, ISS)

The report was translated and sent to us by Swiss Propaganda Research. Their team have been doing some great work collating and translating sources of information on the coronavirus pandemic. Their daily updated thread, here, is a valuable resource to anyone trying to keep up-to-date.

There are some very important facts here, all ignored by the mainstream. 

There’s the epidemiological study done by a Japanese research group that found the case-fatality ratio to potentially be as low as 0.04% (markedly lower even than seasonal flu). 

There’s German and Chinese biologists reporting the unproven nature of Covid test kits and that they can generate “false positives”.

There’s the Italian study finding that up to 75% of positive test patients are entirely symptomless, coupled with warnings from Spanish doctors that panic and systemic overload pose a much greater threat to public health than the coronavirus.

As we said, it’s all very valuable information, and we highly recommend you read the whole thread, and check their daily updates. An excellent piece of research.

…but we mostly want to focus on their most recent update, the translation of the ISS report on the morbidity of coronavirus patients. The statistics are highly interesting. 

According to this report:

• The median age is 80.5 years (79.5 for men, 83.7 for women).
• 10% of the deceased was over 90 years old; 90% of the deceased was over 70 years old.
• Only 0.8% of the deceased had no pre-existing chronic illnesses.
• Approximately 75% of the deceased had two or more pre-existing conditions, 50% had three more pre-existing conditions, in particular heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
• Five of the deceased were between 31 and 39 years old, all of them with serious pre-existing health conditions (e.g. cancer or heart disease).
• The National Health Institute hasn’t yet determined what the patients examined ultimately died of and refers to them in general terms as Covid19-positive deaths.

Consider what these statistics mean, especially the third and final point together, followed to their logical conclusion.

99.2% of Italian Covid19-related deaths were already sick with something else, and the ISS hasn’t actually determined they died of Covid19 at all.

Controlavirus Spread Cannot Be Exponential: Real World Networks Have Limiting Structures

zdnet |  The media regularly refers to "exponential" growth in the number of cases of COVID-19 respiratory disease, and deaths from the disease, but the numbers suggest something else, a "small world" network that might have power law properties. That would be meaningfully different from the exponential growth path for the disease.

Is the spread of the respiratory infection known as COVID-19 happening in an "exponential" fashion?  

That's been the general contention of the media, which, as a public service, have explained at some length the basics of fast-growing quantities, such as disease, to hammer home how something like a virus can double in cases in a matter of days. 

However, the data on COVID-19 has a lot of puts and takes, and one of the factors not entirely considered is the graph of the infection. Graph theory has a lot to say about how phenomena can grow, such as the spread of infectious diseases. There are different graphs, or networks, of relations, and they can affect things such as the rate of propagation.  

One particular recent work calls into question the notion of the exponential growth of the disease. 

Scholars Anna Ziff and Robert Ziff, respectively of Duke University and the University of Michigan, earlier this month posted on the medrXiv pre-print server their curve-fitting exercise for COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths, both in China and in the rest of the world, titled "Fractal kinetics of COVID-19 pandemic." 

As the authors write, "in standard epidemiological analysis, one assumes that the number of cases in diseases like this one grows exponentially, based upon the idea of a fixed reproduction rate."  

But that standard epidemiological view is not born out by the data. They found that while the numbers "display large growth, they do not, in fact, follow exponential behavior." Rather, the authors observed a period of initial exponential growth, followed by what's called a "power law," which is not the same thing. 

Geometric Progession Boggles The Mind

theautomaticearth |  The most striking characteristic of the virus may be, if not should be, its exponential (or quadratic, if you will) progress once it gets hold. Ben Hunt tweeted earlier today, in reaction to Rome shutting down a quarter of the entire country, that “Italy is a time machine that shows us our future. Why do we ignore it?” But it’s not just Italy. It’s a pattern, it’s a dynamic, it’s motion. All things that regular flu is not.

COVID19 is not a point in space, it’s not standing still. You can’t look at it and compare it to anything else around today, because it moves much faster. Let’s try this vein:

I would suggest we’re looking at something like this:
Wave 0: Wuhan/Hubei (11/58.5 million people)
Wave 1: Rest of China (1.375 million people, total China 1,435)
Wave 2: Italy, South Korea, Iran (59, 51 and 81 million people)

And the next wave could well be, given their development in new cases, countries that are following the early phases of the graphs for Italy and South Korea above:
Wave 3: US, Germany, France, Spain (?!) (330, 83, 67, 47 million people)

The UK is a candidate with its 66.8 million people, but it’s either cheating (don’t test) or it may “have to wait” for Wave 4. Note: the US doesn’t have all that many cases either, but its death rate is high.

I mention the numbers of inhabitants because Wave 3 may also include some countries with fewer people (Wave 3.5?):

Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium, Netherlands (8.5, 10.1, 11.5 and 17.1 million people) are all countries with relatively small populations and relatively high numbers of new cases that may well contain the same sort of clusters that have caused the explosion in cases in Wave 1 countries. We can not predict excatly what happens, but we can see trendlines.

The virus is a time machine in the sense that whereas we can -in theory- assume that the regular flu moves in human time, COVID19 very much appears to move in virus time. Almost something you would ask a quantum theorist to look into.

Meanwhile of course you can theorize about the possibility that this is a bioweapon, but first of all that doesn’t help any patients right now, and second it’s only interesting if you can find out whether it was made on purpose or by accident, released by accident or on purpose, and was it the Chinese, the Americans, the Russians, the British, or someone else, why did they do it, why does it target which group, etc etc.

This thing plays out today, not in an imaginary future where you may have found out the who what and why. In the meantime, people are dying.

If you look at the graphs for Italy and South Korea above, you can see your future. Not in a precise way, but certainly in a general one. You can see ahead. Time machine.     

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Tyler Durden, You Know You Done F'd Up, Right?!?!

zerohedge |  So did we have a right to ask the question if there is an alternative version for the emergence of the Coronavirus pandemic, especially with hundreds if not thousands of lives at stake? Absolutely.

As for Broderick's statement that Peng was "accused falsely" we wonder how he knows this: did he speak to Peng? Did he get any comments? Did he get an official denial? No, he did not: as he writes, "BuzzFeed News has reached out to the scientist, whom it is declining to name." So, it actually turns out that it is Buzzfeed that is once again presenting a false statement as fact, something Buzzfeed has been accused of doing over and over and over.

Meanwhile, those who wonder if Dr. Zhou has any link to the possible emergence of the Coronavirus following years of experimenting with bats, we urge you to read our full article instead of relying on the hearsay of ideologically biased journalists.

Second, and contrary to the claims presented by Buzzfeed, we did not release any "personal information": Peng Zhou (周鹏) is a public figure, and all the contact information that we presented was pulled from his publicly posted bio found on a website at the Wuhan Institute of Virology which anyone with access to the internet can pull from the following URL: http://sourcedb.whiov.cas.cn/zw/rck/201705/t20170505_4783973.html, which is also the information we used.

So about Buzzfeed's allegation, which was adopted by Twitter, that somehow we incited "targeted abuse", here is what we said:

Something tells us, if anyone wants to find out what really caused the coronavirus pandemic that has infected thousands of people in China and around the globe, they should probably pay Dr. Peng a visit.

To which we then added the information obtained from his own bio page on the Institute's website:

EVERY Machine is Vulnerable to Unadvertised Behaviors (I Don't Play Guitar, I Play Electricity)

lareviewofbooks |  The past two decades have brought two interrelated and disturbing developments in the technopolitics of US militarism. The first is the fallacious claim for precision and accuracy in the United States’s counterterrorism program, particularly for targeted assassinations. The second is growing investment in the further automation of these same operations, as exemplified by US Department of Defense Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, more commonly known as Project Maven.

Artificial intelligence is now widely assumed to be something, some thing, of great power and inevitability. Much of my work is devoted to trying to demystify the signifier of AI, which is actually a cover term for a range of technologies and techniques of data processing and analysis, based on the adjustment of relevant parameters according to either internally or externally generated feedback

Some take AI developers’ admission that so-called “deep-learning” algorithms are beyond human understanding to mean that there are now forms of intelligence superior to the human. But an alternative explanation is that these algorithms are in fact elaborations of pattern analysis that are not based on significance (or learning) in the human sense, but rather on computationally detectable correlations that, however meaningless, eventually produce results that are again legible to humans. From training data to the assessment of results, it is humans who inform the input and evaluate the output of the algorithmic system’s operations.

When we hear calls for greater military investments in AI, we should remember that the United States is the overwhelmingly dominant global military power. The US “defense” budget, now over $700 billion, exceeds that of the next eight most heavily armed countries in the world combined (including both China and Russia). The US maintains nearly 800 military bases around the world, in seventy countries. And yet a discourse of US vulnerability continues, not only in the form of the so-called war on terror, but also more recently in the form of a new arms race among the US, China and Russia, focused on artificial intelligence.

The problem for which algorithmic warfare is the imagined solution was described in the early 19th century by Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, and subsequently became known as the “fog of war.” That phrase gained wider popular recognition as the title of director Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary about the life and times of former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. In the film, McNamara reflects on the chaos of US operations in Vietnam. The chaos made one thing clear: reliance on uniforms that signal the difference between “us” and “them” marked the limits of the logics of modern warfighting, as well as of efforts to limit war’s injuries.

Thieving Parasites CEO's Kicking Rocks at Levels Not Seen Since 2008

commondreams |  A record number of CEOs left their positions in October, a corporate outplacement firm reported Wednesday, the most in one month since the 2008 recession.

The news from Challenger, Gray & Christmas raised eyebrows—and concerns over a possible incoming recession—Wednesday evening at progressive news co-op The District Sentinel's radio show. 

"Maybe this means nothing, maybe this is a coincidence," said show co-host Sam Sacks. "Or maybe rich people can see the writing on the wall and are cashing out right now."

Sacks and co-host Sam Knight weren't the only ones who saw the news as possibly indicative of economic upheaval on the horizon.

"Sign of a recession?" wondered Globe and Mail reporter Paul Waldie.

According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas' report, 1,332 CEOs have already left their companies, far outstripping the total 1,257 departures by this time in 2008. A total 1,484 CEOs left their positions by the end of 2008.

Not Just Financial Vultures and Vampires Sucking the Life Out of the Commons...,

counterpunch |  Fires are raging everywhere in California these days, and firefighters are having enormous trouble keeping up. Chronically understaffed local fire departments simply don’t have the resources to handle act one of what climate change has in store for us.

California’s wealthy aren’t particularly worrying about that lack of resources — because they have more than enough of their own. They can afford to shell out up to $25,000 per day for one of the private firefighting services that are popping up in California wherever the rich call home.

In a deeply unequal America, none of this should surprise us. Public services almost always take it on the chin in societies where wealth starts furiously concentrating. Why should inequality have this impact? A little incendiary parable — on tennis — might help us understand.