Smart Cities? REALLY?!?! Mr. Greene And SPECTRE Are Coming For Your Water Peasants!!!

truthout |  Is Chester, Pennsylvania, the proverbial canary in the coal mine? Sure does look like it.

The Philadelphia suburb is trying to sell its drinking water system. “The city’s fiscal issues have been greatly exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis,” Mayor Thaddeus Kirkland wrote in an April letter to residents. “It is our hope that the fiscal problems will be of a limited duration, however, as there is a path to financial stability on the horizon.”

That “path to financial stability” is to hand over the Octoraro Reservoir and the surrounding 1,358 acres of public land to a private corporation. Water bills would almost certainly go up, because, on average, private water utilities charge 59 percent more than public utilities. The system’s public workers would be outsourced (and almost certainly paid less). And all that land could be fenced off from public use.

For what? Somewhere around $200 million. A nice chunk of change, given Chester’s longtime budget issues. But add up the headaches and rate increases that often come with privatization, plus the loss of public control and land access, and it wouldn’t be worth it.

“A lot of people around here take ownership of [the reservoir],” a nearby resident told Lancaster Online. “We’re proud of it. It would be a crime.”

Why should anyone care outside of Chester? Because vulture capitalists might be coming your way soon.

Like during the Great Recession, state and local revenues are cratering. State governments are looking at a $765 billion budget shortfall over the next three years. Rainy day funds are woefully inadequate. States can raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy — and they should. But the federal government has to send aid to states and localities rather than continue to overwhelmingly help large corporations.

Until then, companies like Aqua America — the front-runner in Chester — and the entire infrastructure privatization industry will be licking their lips. Global Water Intelligence, an industry insider rag, writes, “The inability to raise water rates … [and] an instant reduction in tax revenues for many municipalities on the back of job losses brought about by COVID-19 could accelerate acquisition opportunities for investor-owned [i.e., private] water utilities.”

How Will Cities And States Dig Themselves Out Of Their Deepening Financial Holes?

turcopelier |  The governments of the really big cities of the US were in fiscal trouble BEFORE the COVID crisis.  The Democratic Party has long governed these places and throughout that period they made promises with regard to disbursements that far exceeded expected revenues.  As an example, pensions for city employees were inflated to incredible levels.  The NY City Police Department has 40,000 employees, etc., etc.  With the rise in these obligations came massive growth in state and local taxes in these big city localities.

The near elimination of deductions for State and Local Taxes (SALT) in the Federal Income tax after 2017 was a mighty blow to rich people resident in the big cities.  The loss of the SALT deduction in federal income taxes has greatly increased the departure of the moneyed class from these places. Where are they going?  Since the US is a federal republic in which each state has its own law code and tax system, the rich can flee to states where there are much lower taxes.  Texas,  and Florida are examples.

As these people and their money depart, the tax base shrinks proportionately but the expenditures have not shrunk thus far.  The governments of these cities have not been able to face the needed abandonment of the welfare and big government models that they have built.

And now, pilgrims we have the phenomenon of COVID-19 and the devastation wrought by government forced closures upon the many thousands of small businesses that lined the streets of these cities ante-COVID.

People are being trained by "staying home" to understand that they really do not need a lot of these businesses.  They are also being made to understand that working from home is not a bad way to live.  Their employers are being taught that perhaps they do not need to carry the burden of massive rented space in towering office buildings at the city's center.

Mayor Lucas Still Tryna Secure Funding From A Central Authoritay That Has Abandoned Him...,

indymedia |  Being a god on Earth is a natural human desire, and saving someone else is the closest we’ll ever come to achieving it. All Greek mythology and every major religion that followed has really been devoted to that single premise: the hero who leads the way is half god and half human, fueled as much by pity as by power.

When the Greeks created the heroic ideal, they didn’t choose a word that meant ‘Dies Trying’ or ‘Massacres Bad Guys.’ They went with ‘heros’---"protector." Heroes aren’t perfect; with a god as one parent and a mortal as the other, they’re perpetually teetering between two destinies. What tips them toward greatness is a sidekick, a human connection who helps turn the spigot on the power of compassion. Empathy, the Greeks believed, was a source of strength, not softness; the more you recognized yourself in others and connected with their distress, the more endurance, wisdom, cunning, and determination you could tap into.

Conservatives frequently say that socialists want to have everything handed to them---that instead of complaining, they should be buckling up, showing up to work every day, and achieving something the "hard way." This seems a bit odd, considering that, all in all, achieving a complete and revolutionary overhaul of long-standing economic and social structures against the wishes of all the world’s centers of power is probably harder than, say, becoming a reasonably successful middle manager with two cars.

Our idea of what a revolution is like, how it is carried out, and who it is carried out by has been warped by our own cultural propaganda, and by the romantic Marxist propaganda of the twentieth century. We have this idea that revolutions are led by rational-minded, tea-sipping men in three-pointed hats who discuss the rights of man while burning the candle at both ends. Or we’re warped by the Marxist ideal of revolution: a rational, inevitable historical process in which the most enlightened, most sympathetic, least overdressed human beings team up with the Historical Trend itself to effect a glorious, clean revolution. In fact, revolutions are messy, ugly, gory affairs. Nowhere in our popular notion of revolutions are such factors as stupidity, bad luck, unintended comedy, and revolting madness allowed in. Yet most of the time revolutions are ‘led,’ by people we would call nutcases and who indeed were considered nutcases during their time---and in all likelihood were nutcases. While time and distance provide a romantic view of revolutions, at the time when they actually occur, they usually seem bizarre, uncalled-for, frightening, and evil to their contemporaries, which is why they almost always seem snuffed out at their inception.

Our lives and our movements today are as shaped by the political prisoners who still sit behind concrete walls as the prisons themselves invisibly shape the landscape of the world we seek to make more just. Many have had their lives either ended by the state or have been tried, convicted, and jailed for nothing more than the crime of loving their people enough to attempt a revolution in the United States.

They remain behind walls, often isolated, and at times tortured for their political beliefs. To accept this fact is to ask what ideas can be so dangerous that those who hold it in their heads must be hidden from us? To understand that these people and their circumstance do indeed exist is a necessary first step for a country whose cloak of democracy keeps us in denial. Americans believe political prisoners are a fact in countries like China, Iran, and Cuba but live the lie of the US government’s denial of the existence of US political prisoners within its borders.

We could live in a sustainable, just, free, and peaceful world. And yet we are descending into a world of perpetual wars; slavery; ignorance; overwork side by side with unemployment; vacant homes side by side with homelessness; specialization; crass materialism; contaminated food, water, and air; destitution; despair.

Since the men in the shadows are not about to change, the only hope is their removal from power---by any means necessary. Unfortunately, given these men’s cohesiveness and organizational skills, given their power over our minds, given their ability to convince the vast majority to act against its convictions and interests, given their success in establishing cross-generational dynasties, such removal presents humanity with a herculean task.

When Yippity-Yap Goes Wrong: Salt Lake City Priceless Comedy Gold....,

A Little Taste Of Martial Law In Minneapolis: Nothing To See, Get Inside, Light'Em Up!!!

Left-Wing, Non-Violent Protesters: Why Is No One Ready....?

Is This "Change the Subject" Diversion Wall St.-DC's Occupy Main Street?

Police have been recorded doing this kind of stuff for a long time and qualified immunity from prosecution has kept them out of trouble - always protected. This one happened right in the middle of the pandemic, after years of escalating economic pain culminating in the "flatten the curve" lockdown. 

You have a set of cops in Minneapolis murder a black man in broad daylight with lots of people with camera phones around. Why kill a man in broad daylight, including allowing ‘beauty pics’ of the cops? Of course they knew they were being recorded. 

The predictable outrage erupts across cities. You have news network camera crews arrested or shot at by cops. You have what sure looks like cops acting as provacateurs, breaking window, etc. It all seems very highly coordinated.  

A lot of noise about the looting of Main Street by Wall St. in the so-called pandemic bailouts has started to get traction. A lot of people are going to be unemployed and probably evicted soon. A lot of people will lose their homes in mortgage foreclosure - again. A lot of people are going to be very, very angry at DC and Wall St, if they aren’t already.

Was this all set up to get people mad and in the streets to protest in order to beat them down and take the fight out of them before the greater economic pain that’s coming starts to hit Main Street in full force? Is this Wall St./DC’s “Occupy Main Street” ?  Or is this a “change the subject” in the media moment, change the subject away from the economic crimes of the bailouts to something different and more visibly dramatic? It would be the height of naivete to pretend that this situation has simply taken on 'a life of its own’. There is DEFINITELY some orchestrating going on.  

theamericanconservative |   Darrin Manning’s unprovoked “stop and frisk” encounter with the Philadelphia police left him hospitalized with a ruptured testicle. Neykeyia Parker was violently dragged out of her car and aggressively arrested in front of her young child for “trespassing” at her own apartment complex in Houston. A Georgia toddler was burned when police threw a flash grenade into his playpen during a raid, and the manager of a Chicago tanning salon was confronted by a raiding police officer bellowing that he would kill her and her family, captured on the salon’s surveillance. An elderly man in Ohio was left in need of facial reconstructive surgery after police entered his home without a warrant to sort out a dispute about a trailer.

These stories are a small selection of recent police brutality reports, as police misconduct has become a fixture of the news cycle.

But the plural of anecdote is not data, and the media is inevitably drawn toward tales of conflict. Despite the increasing frequency with which we hear of misbehaving cops, many Americans maintain a default respect for the man in uniform. As an NYPD assistant chief put it, “We don’t want a few bad apples or a few rogue cops damaging” the police’s good name.

This is an attractive proposal, certainly, but unfortunately it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Here are seven reasons why police misconduct is a systemic problem, not “a few bad apples”:

Unexpected Consequences: Bus Drivers Refusing Co-option Into Rioter Mass Arrest

payday |  Friday evening, bus drivers in New York City and members of TWU Local 100 refused to cooperate with police in transporting arrested Justice for George Floyd protestors. 

The action comes a day after bus drivers in Minneapolis also refused to assist the police in transporting arrested protestors; shutting down the Twin Cities’ transit system. 

“I told MTA our ops won’t be used to drive cops around. It is in solidarity  [with Minneapolis’ bus drivers],” JP Patafio, vice president of TWU Local 100 told Motherboard. 

(Watch a video of one bus driver walking off the job to cheers from a crowd in Brooklyn)

Payday Report has learned that transit union leaders nationwide are instructing members not to cooperate with police in arresting protestors. 

Many union leaders have instructed their members that their union contracts protect them against being forced to work in dangerous conditions. They have informed their union members that their unions would use organizational legal resources to protect bus drivers who refuse to cooperate with the police. 

“It’s safe to say that bus drivers in a lot of places are going to be refusing work,” said one top labor leader, who wished to remain anonymous. 

For decades, transit unions, which are heavily African-American, have sought to build community alliances around environmental racism and expanding public transit communities. These community-labor alliances have helped communities to expand transit services in many areas. 

As a result of this organizing, many transit union leaders are vehemently opposed to helping with police crackdowns in communities of color.

Are The Prevailing Mainstream Narratives Shaped By Demography?

fivethirtyeight |  Trying to pin 2014 as the start of a new era is a subjective exercise, perhaps a fool’s errand. But if politics is driven by emotion and memory, so in this case is its hindsight analysis. 2014 was in my book an annus horribilis, a blur of mortality. Perhaps if Gallup had called me, I’d have told them I’d lost trust.

In June 2014, someone I knew well was murdered. In July, Eric Garner died on Staten Island, in the city where I’d just moved. In August, I remember sitting on a fluorescent-lit subway car and reading about the beheading of a journalist named James Foley by some group called ISIS. A year later, I’d have to watch his beheading video and speak with his family for a magazine story I fact-checked about the vain attempts to save him and other Americans. Michael Brown was killed in August, too. September brought another ISIS beheading video. In October, a doctor in New York City was diagnosed with Ebola — a global terror of its own kind — and I found myself thinking uncontrollable thoughts about biohazards let loose on the subway. In November, Tamir Rice was killed in my hometown, and the midterm election gave the Republicans control of the U.S. Senate — though that’s only a blip in my memory. The emotions stirred by 2014 lingered longer with me than its discrete politics.

Perhaps that’s why the themes of fear and mortality that hovered over the 2016 election made some sense to me with 2014 in the rearview mirror. It’s hard to tell how long it takes for emotional responses like mine to get into the political bloodstream of a country, but when pricked by the right needle, America’s primal worry and righteous anger bled out over an election.

Is Rioting Being Exploited As Cover For The Economic Devastation Of Controlavirus Lockdowns?

trtworld |  US President Donald Trump has been frustrated by state-level lockdown orders that have turned a humming economy into a constellation of ghost towns. The jobless rate, set to hit 30 percent within months, is an existential threat to Trump’s presidency, if elections go forward in November. It also might be an existential threat to the US as it occupies the borders it has now. Trump has declared his authority is ‘’total’’ to lift lockdowns in states, a claim that reeked of ignorance and panic. But ignorance and panic can be contagious. 

“He’s encouraging his followers to break state laws, and targeting Democratic governors and other politicians,’’ said Oregon-based journalist Jason Wilson, who has been covering the shape of radical right-wing movements in the United States. He’s referring to armed groups of Americans gathering at statehouses to protest stay-at-home orders. 

“It certainly raises the prospect of civil disorder. I would say that the country is entering its greatest period of instability and civil strife since at least the 1960s; more realistically, since the Depression and World World II. The conflict between states and the federal government raises the possibility of constitutional crisis. It’s a dark and uncertain time in this country.” 

It is easy to dismiss the lockdown protestors as clownish villains, willfully spreading the virus to each other and countless others. But the virus makes villains of us all, and a few of us are inclined to react to social distancing measures by panicking or retreating to vile racist, conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus. Even as they deny the humanity of others, saying that they themselves or strangers are worth sacrificing to the virus, they are expressing their own humanity, in particular the fragility of human reasoning skills in a crisis. Every deadly stampede starts with its first fearful footfall. 

Although they do not represent a majority of Americans, armed protestors are more convincing than unarmed protestors. In Michigan on Thursday, armed citizens rallied inside the capitol building in Lansing. That same night, the legislature voted not to renew the governor's state-of-emergency order. The state's Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who imposed one of the most comprehensive social distancing schemes, had been a target of Trump's rage online and in coronavirus briefings, where he called her that "woman from Michigan." Trump has endorsed the protests there, thinking ending lockdowns will revive the economy. The billionaire family of Trump's education secretary, Betsy Devos, sister to infamous Blackwater mercenary Erik Prince, bankrolled the lobbying group encouraging the demonstrations.

What, If Anything, Will The Riots Be Allowed To Accomplish?

theconversation |  A teenager held her phone steady enough to capture the final moments of George Perry Floyd’s life as he apparently suffocated under the weight of a Minneapolis police officer’s knee on his neck. The video went viral.

What happened next has played out time and again in American cities after high-profile cases of alleged police brutality.

Vigils and protests were organized in Minneapolis and around the United States to demand police accountability. But while investigators and officials called for patience, unrest boiled over. News reports soon carried images of property destruction and police in riot gear.

The general public’s opinions about protests and the social movements behind them are formed in large part by what they read or see in the media. This gives journalists a lot of power when it comes to driving the narrative of a demonstration.

They can emphasize the disruption protests cause or echo the dog whistles of politicians that label protesters as “thugs.” But they can also remind the public that at the heart of the protests is the unjust killing of another black person. This would take the emphasis away from the destruction of the protests and toward the issues of police impunity and the effects of racism in its many forms.

The role journalists play can be indispensable if movements are to gain legitimacy and make progress. And that puts a lot of pressure on journalists to get things right. 

My research has found that some protest movements have more trouble than others getting legitimacy. My co-author Summer Harlow and I have studied how local and metropolitan newspapers cover protests. We found that narratives about the Women’s March and anti-Trump protests gave voice to protesters and significantly explored their grievances. On the other end of the spectrum, protests about anti-black racism and indigenous people’s rights received the least legitimizing coverage, with them more often seen as threatening and violent.

OOOOO-EUX..., Don And Van - Look What Y'all Done Did!!! (CNN HQ Wrecked In ATL)

OH LAWD!!!! Who Gave Van Jones A Red Pill Live On CNN?!?!?!?!

Your People's Time Is Up If Don Lemon Is All You've Got Speaking On Your Behalf...,

mediaite |  CNN host Don Lemon hit network colleague Chris Cuomo with a monologue on Wednesday evening as riots took place in Minneapolis over the police brutality against and subsequent death of George Floyd.

As Cuomo spoke about the coronavirus pandemic, Lemon changed the subject.

“So, in that same vein, because we are talking about these viruses that are infecting America,” said Lemon. “Imagine if that was me on the ground, how you would feel as a friend, as someone I spend a lot of time with. Imagine how people around this country feel when their friends, like you, both of us are of a different background, when their friends say nothing. When they do nothing. except send out a tweet or say, ‘Oh, man, that’s terrible. I can’t believe that happens.'”

“Then when they see everyday racism, they don’t stand up for it. Imagine how that feels to people of color in this country. It feels terrible. Is that really being a friend?” he questioned, adding, “I’m not saying you specifically, you understand what I’m saying. You know what I’m saying.”

Cuomo responded, “I totally understand and, you know, the only word I can use is just hurt, it all hurts.”

“I’ve heard from so many people that I love that they’re so afraid that it’s going to be them, it’s going to be their kid, and white people roll their eyes like, ‘Come on, man. This only happens like once in a while,'” he continued. “It doesn’t have to happen that often if every time it happens in your mind it seems to go unanswered in terms of why it’s okay.”

Lemon shot back, “But that’s the problem Chris… It happens a lot. We just don’t see it. We’re just seeing from the video. This is the reason that Colin Kaepernick was taking a knee, and then people were upset. The president of the United States having the nerve to call him, and then others standing up for this sort of injustice, to call them ‘sons of bitches.’ This is why people are standing up, so that it doesn’t lead to this.”

Twin Cities Got Its Black Desk Working These Streets?

eurweb |  *The internet is convinced that Officer Jacob Pederson of the Saint Paul Police Department is the mysterious man seen in a viral video wearing all black with an umbrella and a pink gas mask breaking out windows at a Minneapolis Auto Zone on Wednesday  just before the fire broke out and the riots started. 

Pederson is being accused of inciting the chaos that erupted in the city, as the Auto Zone was the first building to burn. 

Footage of the scene shows a protester confronting the man, who then becomes hostile and quickly attempts to flee the scene while being asked if he’s a cop.

On Thursday, Twitter user @GypsyEyedBeauty tweeted a series of screenshots allegedly from Pederson’s ex-wife, and the caption read, “Here are screenshots from his ex wife confirming this is him, along with his photo.”

Real Resistance Is Not To Republican Rule, But To Donor Class Rule, And Devastation By Both Parties...,

downwithtyranny  | 1. Black Activists to Biden: If You Pick Klobuchar, We May Not Support You

On May 23, Politico wrote that "more than a dozen black and Latino strategists and activists warned in interviews that selecting Klobuchar would not help Biden excite black voters — and might have the opposite effect. Klobuchar would “risk losing the very base the Democrats need to win,” said Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, which promotes women of color in politics."

The reason given was two-fold. High in the article, in the first sentence in fact, the writer announced, "Sen. Amy Klobuchar performed abysmally among black voters in the Democratic primary."

Later, in the third paragraph, the writer said that the Black activists "pointed to Klobuchar’s poor performance among nonwhite voters during the presidential primary as well as her record as a prosecutor in Minnesota."

Adrianne Shropshire of the Clinton-connected BlackPAC is quoted in the sixth paragraph as saying, “It [the activists’ concerns about Klobuchar] comes from her performance in the primary,” and Al Sharpton is quoted as offering this explanation: “It is not her [Klobuchar’s] fault, but she is in the middle of an ongoing battle from the last few presidential races.”

The writer herself helpfully adds, "Klobuchar symbolizes a strategic division within the Democratic Party: whether to focus on winning back white, Midwestern voters who flipped to Donald Trump in 2016, or on activating voters of color who were not excited to vote."

But the article is ostensibly about "Black activists" and their rejection of Klobuchar — it says so even the headline — not about Shropshire and Sharpton's ground-cover explanation.

The writer waits until the eleventh paragraph, a place few readers will get to, before she explains the real reason the activists are concerned — namely, that Klobuchar "would risk losing the very base the Democrats need to win" — and to explain the activists' comment "as well as her record as a prosecutor in Minnesota." There the writer references a Washington Post op-ed penned by those same activists, who write:

A choice such as Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), who failed to prosecute controversial police killings and is responsible for the imprisonment of Myon Burrell, will only alienate black voters.

(Read this AP story to see all of what’s wrong with both the Myon Burrell case and Klobuchar’s handling of it.)

Despite all the obfuscation and Klobuchar-protection by Politico, the bottom line is clear: "Black activists" remember Klobuchar's record as a "tough prosecutor" of blacks and are threatening to fail to support her (and thus Biden) in November if Biden picks her for VP — a clear and open threat to his electoral chances.

In other words, progressive black activists are threatening to abandon the Democrat, Trump or no Trump, over this issue.

Joe Biden Sharted Himself: Nothing To See Over Here - Call A Black Woman To Clean Up

blackagendareport |  Black folks perform phenomenal feats of mental gymnastics and self-delusion to convince themselves that Joe Biden is on their side.

“There is a strange magical thinking afoot that equates acknowledgement of Biden’s faults with support of Trump.”

Joe Biden was always an intellectual light weight and he always had poor impulse control. He was always in the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. Now he believes the hype of the black misleadership class charlatans who make his case by claiming that he has some sort of special relationship with black people. The combination of all these attributes makes his presidential campaign one long train wreck.

A recent interview on the Breakfast Club  radio program was the occasion of his latest bizarre statement. This time he famously said, “... if you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black." He seemed to think that being overly familiar and using bad grammar gave him some sort of credibility.

Symone Sanders, his most prominent black campaign staffer, was left to clean up after him yet again and defend his stupidity by saying that he spoke in jest. The damage was bad enough that Biden had to apologize himself and said that he shouldn’t have been “a wise guy.”

“Biden believes he has some sort of special relationship with black people.”

Biden is like Donald Trump, in that he is thoroughly unqualified to be president. Yet black people are desperate to see anyone other than Trump in the White House and that is how the party establishment got away with foisting him upon them. When they aren’t trying to minimize his shortcomings, they admonish anyone who points them out. “But he’s better than Trump!” is their rallying cry lest anyone think for themselves and point out the many reasons why Biden is so problematic.

Joe Biden's First Choice For VP Amy Klobuchar Declined To Prosecute Derek Chauvin For Prior Murder

mintpressnews |  The latest example of America’s racist police brutality problem was caught on camera in Minneapolis Monday, as Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on 46-year-old African-American George Floyd’s neck for over seven minutes until he passed out and died. In its headline on its website, Minneapolis police described the event as “man dies after medical incident during police interaction,” laundering themselves of any responsibility. Chauvin continued his assault even as Floyd desperately pleaded that he could not breathe, while bystanders protested his brutality. “You’re fucking stopping his breathing there, bro,” warned one concerned passer-by. Even after passing out, Chauvin did not release pressure on his neck. Chauvin has killed multiple times before while in uniform, has shot and wounded others and is well-known to local activist groups.

Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, who Joe Biden recently asked to undergo vetting to be his running mate for November, issued a very tepid statement about the incident, describing the police killing of an unarmed black man over an alleged forged check as merely an “officer involved death,” – a copaganda word often used by police as a euphemism for “murder.”

Klobuchar also called for a “complete and thorough outside investigation into what occurred, and those involved in this incident must be held accountable.” However, this is unlikely to occur, in no small part because of Klobuchar herself and the precedent she set while serving as the state’s chief prosecutor between 1999 and 2007. In that time, she did not bring charges against more than two dozen officers who had killed citizens while on duty – including against Chauvin himself.

Chauvin was involved in a fatal accident in 2005, killed Wayne Reyes in 2006, shot another man while in uniform in 2008, and had a litany of complaints against him. To be fair to Klobuchar, the Reyes shooting happened in October 2006, as her time as state prosecutor was coming to an end and she was campaigning for the senate. By the time Chauvin’s case finally made it to a grand jury, she had relinquished her role.

Who In The World Would Concoct Something Like Airborne HIV?

SCMP  |  The novel coronavirus uses the same strategy to evade attack from the human immune system as HIV, according to a new study by Chinese scientists.

Both viruses remove marker molecules on the surface of an infected cell that are used by the immune system to identify invaders, the researchers said in a non-peer reviewed paper posted on preprint website bioRxiv.org on Sunday. They warned that this commonality could mean Sars-CoV-2, the clinical name for the virus, could be around for some time, like HIV.

Virologist Zhang Hui and a team from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou also said their discovery added weight to clinical observations that the coronavirus was showing “some characteristics of viruses causing chronic infection”.

Their research involved collecting killer T cells from five patients who had recently recovered from Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. Those immune cells are generated by people after they are infected with Sars-CoV-2 – their job is to find and destroy the virus.

But the killer T cells used in the study were not effective at eliminating the virus in infected cells. When the scientists took a closer look they found that a molecule known as major histocompatibility complex, or MHC, was missing.

The molecule is an identification tag usually present in the membrane of a healthy cell, or in sick cells infected by other coronaviruses such as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars. It changes with infections, alerting the immune system whether a cell is healthy or infected by a virus.

HIV uses the same strategy – MHC molecules are also absent in cells infected with that virus.

“In contrast, Sars does not make use of this function,” Zhang said.

biorxiv |   SARS-CoV-2 infection have caused global pandemic and claimed over 5,000,000 tolls^1–4. Although the genetic sequences of their etiologic viruses are of high homology, the clinical and pathological characteristics of COVID-19 significantly differ from SARS^5,6. Especially, it seems that SARS-CoV-2 undergoes vast replication in vivo without being effectively monitored by anti-viral immunity⁷. Here, we show that the viral protein encoded from open reading frame 8 (ORF8) of SARS-CoV-2, which shares the least homology with SARS-CoV among all the viral proteins, can directly interact with MHC-I molecules and significantly down-regulates their surface expression on various cell types. In contrast, ORF8a and ORF8b of SARS-CoV do not exert this function. In the ORF8-expressing cells, MHC-I molecules are selectively target for lysosomal degradation by an autophagy-dependent mechanism. As a result, CTLs inefficiently eliminate the ORF8-expressing cells. Our results demonstrate that ORF8 protein disrupts antigen presentation and reduces the recognition and the elimination of virus-infected cells by CTLs⁸. Therefore, we suggest that the inhibition of ORF8 function could be a strategy to improve the special immune surveillance and accelerate the eradication of SARS-CoV-2 in vivo.

Exactly What Does Come With Nextdoor's All-Expense Paid Kompromat Gubmint Vacations?

massprivatei |  Community platform Nextdoor is going to great lengths to become the go-to platform to snitch on your neighbors.

According to a CityLab article, Nextdoor is showering law enforcement with all-expenses paid vacations to their headquarters in San Francisco, California all in an effort to gain law enforcement acceptance and put police on Public Agency Advisory Councils.

"Charles Husted, the chief of police in Sedona, Arizona, couldn’t contain his excitement. He had just been accepted into the Public Agencies Advisory Council for Nextdoor, the neighborhood social networking app."

At a time when most Americans are concerned with just surviving the COVID-19 pandemic, Nextdoor views it as an opportunity to influence law enforcement and local politics.

"As part of the chosen group, he would be flown to San Francisco on President’s Day, along with seven other community engagement staffers from police departments and city offices across the country. Over two days, they’d meet at Nextdoor’s headquarters to discuss the social network’s public agency strategy. Together, the plan was, they’d stay at  the Hilton Union Square, eat and drink at Cultivar, share a tour of Chinatown, and receive matching Uniqlo jackets. All costs — a projected $16,900 for the group, according to a schedule sent to participants — were covered by Nextdoor."

Exactly what Nextdoor includes in their law enforcement paid vacations is protected by a corporate non-disclosure agreement. But you can be sure it isn't just a trip to their headquarters.

Nextdoor's excuse for influencing law enforcement and advisory councils is to allegedly "help [public agency] partners to share their expertise and experiences with each other and our product development team."

Nextdoor Was Karen's Confidential Informant Deaddrop From The Word Go!

You should never forget the political orientation of the Amy Coopers and Jean Quans of this world.  Former director Cooper will be looking for a dance gig at a local backwoods pole, her net worth having plummeted into the deep two piece and a biscuit range,  while former Mayor Quan will be opening a marijuana dispensary to prey upon and enlarge the suffering of supposed constituents in San Francisco. 

columbusfreepress |  Neighborhoods are small communities. Communities have bonds. They also have rivalries. They also have gossip and intrigue, albeit on a petty scale. Through the efforts of Mayor Jean Quan and NextDoor.com, the intelligence community and the Oakland Police Department (OPD) are now privy to these tiny pieces of personal information and the larger patters they reveal. Under the auspices of community building and public safety, the public's participation is can now be freely enlisted in the creation of a database of that information.

Through the new partnership, the OPD and the CIA now know what Oakland residents had for breakfast, who their children have a playdate with, and if their dog wanders around the block. NextDoor.com is Oakland's social media surveillance experiment.

Time will tell what the results of that experiment will be. A metropolitan police department can easily fail at social media as the New York Police Department recently showed with their social media debacle with the #myNYPD twitter campaign.

At its core, San Francisco-based Nextdoor.com is a social networking site for neighborhoods. The model pairs a social media neighborhood community center, with law enforcement and existing neighborhood watch programs. Tailored to individual neighborhoods, it allows people to virtually post lost pet notices, rate babysitters, share news and become more in touch with their immediate real world lives. Nextdoor as a company has a focus on crime, safety and virtual block watches within the neighborhood setting – a crossover between a Myspace of neighborhood associations and a Facebook for George Zimmerman groupies.

The partnership comes on the heels of the defeat of the Quan administration’s proposal to create the Domain Awareness Center intended to provide OPD with a city-wide system of real time intelligence and comprehensive city wide surveillance. That project, which draws on a grant for domestic port security, was scaled back by Oakland City Council after public outcry and was limited to the port of Oakland.

Nadia Kayyali, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, expressed concerns about Nextdoor having potential links to the scaled back Domain Awareness Center and the program’s implications for racial profiling.

At a press event featuring Mayor Jean Quan on April 24 this year, Nextdoor announced their new partnership with OPD.

The OPD's part of the Nextdoor partnership is not just public relations or community policing. As participants in the program, they take an active role in promoting the site and building the social network. On a fully integrated level, Nextdoor has created a platform that combined social media outreach with intelligence gathering.

Oakland is not the first major city to form a partnership with Nextdoor.com. Austin, Houston and Dallas, Texas all preceded it. The company is well-funded, with a string of Menlo Park venture capital firms lined up behind hopes of its success.

According to NextDoor.com's press statements, they are backed by Google Ventures, Bezos Expedition, Allen and Company, Greylock Capital Partners, and Benchmark Capital Partners. All of these firms have ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. None of these ties are secret. Nearly all are published openly by the companies themselves. As a group, these investment companies put their venture capital into tech companies and technologies that the intelligence community wishes to succeed. They profit by doing so.

What Would An Exploding Heads Day Be Without A Heaping Helping Of Weinstein?

dr.brian.keating |  In part one of our extensive conversation, we cover his Geometric Unity theory and the value of scientific theories in general.

As a mathematician and an economist, Eric is uniquely suited to understanding how ideas have contributed to human civilization — and what we’re losing out on when academia throttles them. His perspective that, “[Professors] need the freedom of a billionaire without the wealth of one,” is a spin on something Ralph Gomory, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, told him:

“The bargain was always that you weren’t going to get super rich as a professor, but you would have the freedom that came from your job. And that’s how we got great people. When we lost freedom, we stopped being able to compete effectively for the top people.”

Having Eric on the show challenged me to consider my approach to the interview. Though an expert in experimental physics, it is beneficial to be reminded about the contributions of theoretical study. His allegory that the tailor who sews on the last button of a coat shouldn’t get all the credit is powerful. Think of the creative spark, the person who sketches, then finds practical materials, the engineers who bring instruments into the equation, and all the other pieces of the puzzle.

In this interview, Eric says, “The scientific method is actually the radio edit of great science” and that is really striking. It is important to remember that the unedited version exists, even if it doesn’t make it through all the noise very often.

Different Than Penrose and Weinstein: Wolfram REALLY Mesmerized By Rule 30

dr.brian.keating |  On the philosophical front, we compared Godel to Popper and discussed computational irreducibly which arose from Stephen’s interest in Godel and Alan Turing’s work.

“Actually, there’s even more than that. If the microscopic updatings of the underlying network end up being random enough, then it turns out that if the network succeeds in corresponding in the limit to a finite dimensional space, then this space must satisfy Einstein’s Equations of General Relativity. It’s again a little like what happens with fluids. If the microscopic interactions between molecules are random enough, but satisfy number and momentum conservation, then it follows that the overall continuum fluid must satisfy the standard Navier–Stokes equations. But now we’re deriving something like that for the universe: we’re saying that these networks with almost nothing “built in” somehow generate behavior that corresponds to gravitation in physics. This is all spelled out in the NEW KIND OF SCIENCE book. And many physicists have certainly read that part of the book. But somehow every time I actually describe this (as I did a few days ago), there’s a certain amazement. Special and General Relativity are things that physicists normally assume are built into theories right from the beginning, almost as axioms (or at least, in the case of string theory, as consistency conditions). The idea that they could emerge from something more fundamental is pretty alien. The alien feeling doesn’t stop there. Another thing that seems alien is the idea that our whole universe and its complete history could be generated just by starting with some particular small network, then applying definite rules. For the past 75+ years, quantum mechanics has been the pride of physics, and it seems to suggest that this kind of deterministic thinking just can’t be correct. It’s a slightly long story (often still misunderstood by physicists), but between the arbitrariness of updating orders that produce a given causal network, and the fact that in a network one doesn’t just have something like local 3D space, it looks as if one automatically starts to get a lot of the core phenomena of quantum mechanics — even from what’s in effect a deterministic underlying model. OK, but what is the rule for our universe? I don’t know yet. Searching for it isn’t easy. One tries a sequence of different possibilities. Then one runs each one. Then the question is: has one found our universe?”

My question: that was then, what do you think now?

On the implications of finding a simple rule that matches existing laws of physics:

“I certainly think it’ll be an interesting — almost metaphysical — moment if we finally have a simple rule which we can tell is our universe. And we’ll be able to know that our particular universe is number such-and-such in the enumeration of all possible universes. It’s a sort of Copernican moment: we’ll get to know just how special or not our universe is. Something I wonder is just how to think about whatever the answer turns out to be. It somehow reminds me of situations from earlier in the history of science. Newton figured out about motion of the planets, but couldn’t imagine anything but a supernatural being first setting them in motion. Darwin figured out about biological evolution, but couldn’t imagine how the first living cell came to be. We may have the rule for the universe, but it’s something quite different to understand why it’s that rule and not another. Universe hunting is a very technology-intensive business. Over the years, I’ve gradually been building up the technology I think is needed — and quite a bit of it is showing up in strange corners of Mathematica. But I think it’s going to be a while longer before there are more results. And before we can put “Our Universe” as a Demonstration in the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. And before we can take our new ParticleData computable data collection and derive every number in it. But universe hunting is a good hobby.”

It’s awfully easy to fall into implicitly assuming a lot of human context. Pioneer 10 — the human artifact that’s gone further into interstellar space than any other (currently about 11 billion miles, which is about 0.05% of the distance to α Centauri) — provides one of my favorite examples. There’s a plaque on that spacecraft that includes a representation of the wavelength of the 21-centimeter spectral line of hydrogen. Now the most obvious way to represent that would probably just be a line 21 cm long. But back in 1972 Carl Sagan and others decided to do something “more scientific”, and instead made a schematic diagram of the quantum mechanical process leading to the spectral line. The problem is that this diagram relies on conventions from human textbooks — like using arrows to represent quantum spins — that really have nothing to do with the underlying concepts and are incredibly specific to the details of how science happened to develop for us humans.”

From the audience he responded to some questions including “what does he believe a scientific theory should be?” and “Does mathematical beauty matter at all, or is it just falsifiability?”

The Story of Rule 30

How can something that simple produce something that complex? It’s been nearly 40 years since I first saw rule 30 — but it still amazes me. Long ago it became my personal all-time favorite science discovery, and over the years it’s changed my whole worldview and led me to all sorts of science, technology, philosophy and more.

A Class of Models with the Potential to Represent Fundamental Physics

arvix |  Stephen Wolfram A class of models intended to be as minimal and structureless as possible is introduced. Even in cases with simple rules, rich and complex behavior is found to emerge, and striking correspondences to some important core known features of fundamental physics are seen, suggesting the possibility that the models may provide a new approach to finding a fundamental theory of physics.

Subjects:	Discrete Mathematics (cs.DM); General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc); High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th); Mathematical Physics (math-ph)
Cite as:	arXiv:2004.08210 [cs.DM]
	(or arXiv:2004.08210v1 [cs.DM] for this version)

Bibliographic data

[Enable Bibex (What is Bibex?)]

Submission history

From: Stephen Wolfram [view email]

[v1] Wed, 15 Apr 2020 16:23:43 UTC (108,032 KB)

Leadership By Governor Buckwheat "Do As I Say Do" Northam

politico |  Tension that began with governors versus the federal government has now trickled down, pitting officials within their own states against each other in ways that have direct implications for the fight against the virus and have already landed in the courts. Future disputes could complicate plans to respond to a resurgence, tie up urgent policy issues in legal wrangling and even risk lives. 

With cases increasing in some places and falling in others — and with a second wave predicted in the fall — the new pandemic battlegrounds will be increasingly localized. 

“Cities can't wait for the federal and state government for guidance,” said Charleston Mayor Amy Shuler Goodwin, who has continued to clash with West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, including last week over his decision to add tanning beds to the list of essential businesses. “There is not one single mayor that doesn't want all the lights back on and all the doors back open, but we need to be really careful about doing that.”

Experts say a one-size-fits-all approach for reopening is not an option — not when the number of new daily cases is changing at vastly different rates from city to city and state to state. Across many states that have started to reopen, governors have indeed prescribed economic restart plans based on regional metrics, not statewide figures. As that continues — and if the virus resurges — there could be even more openings for such disagreements. 

“We have to be making decisions that are hyper local. This is not one big epidemic, it’s multiple, small epidemics,“ said Caroline Buckee, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, during a Brookings Institution discussion on reopening plans. “And the decisions we make have to reflect the inequalities in the location in question and how reopening is going to impact the relationships between different neighborhoods.”

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has faced backlash from coastal mayors over cracking down on beach use, and the Democratic governor has allowed more than 20 of the state's 58 counties to move faster than his original plan in the face of increasing pressure — and lawsuits — from those anxious to reopen.

Things escalated in Texas last week after Attorney General Ken Paxton sent letters to counties that include metropolitan hubs Dallas, Austin and San Antonio, chastising them for stricter local requirements on masks and mass gatherings that conflict with state efforts to loosen restrictions.

“Insofar as your order conflicts with the governor’s order, it is unenforceable,”

Karenism Isn't Communism But It Sucks Just The Same....,

detroitnews |  “It’s just heartbreaking,” said Maehr, executive director of the Greater Chicago Food Depository. “They’re finding themselves in a set of circumstances where they have no income and they also have no food, and it happened in an instant.”

The number of people seeking help from her organization and affiliated food pantries has surged 60% since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which has shut down the nation’s economy and thrown tens of millions of people out of work. Across the country, worries about having enough to eat are adding to the anxiety of millions of people, according to a survey that found 37% of unemployed Americans ran out of food in the past month and 46% said they worried about running out.

Even those who are working often struggle. Two in 10 working adults said that in the past 30 days, they ran out of food before they could earn enough money to buy more. One-quarter worried that would happen.

Those results come from the second wave of the COVID Impact Survey, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for the Data Foundation. The survey aims to provide an ongoing assessment of the nation’s mental, physical and financial health during the pandemic.

There is no parallel in U.S. history for the suddenness or severity of the economic collapse, which has cost more than 36 million jobs since the virus struck. The nationwide unemployment rate was 14.7% in April, the highest since the Great Depression. While many Americans believe they will be working in the coming months, unemployed Americans – those most likely to report running out of food – aren’t as optimistic.

Overall, those who are still working are highly confident they will have a job in one month and in three months, with more than 8 in 10 saying it’s very likely. But among those who aren’t working because they are temporarily laid off, providing care during the pandemic or looking for work, just 28% say it is highly likely that they will be employed in 30 days and 46% say it’s highly likely they’ll be working in three months. Roughly another quarter say it’s somewhat likely in 30 days and 90 days.

The likelihood of unemployed people returning to work depends heavily on whether states can restart their economies without creating new surges in COVID-19 infections, said Gabriel Ehrlich, an economic forecaster at the University of Michigan. He said most layoffs are expected to be temporary. But he worries that many small businesses will fail while fewer new ones take their place, and that state and local governments won’t get federal help to avoid furloughs.

Phugg Karen, Corona, Social Distancing, An All-A-Dat Buhshidt....,

Keep Your Stinking Experts, Their Strategies, And Your Vaccines....,

HBR |  For those who believe that a vaccine for Covid-19 will end or largely contain this pandemic or who hope that new drugs will be discovered to combat its effects, there is plenty cause for concern. Instead of working together to craft and implement a global strategy, a growing number of countries are taking a “my nation first” approach to developing and distributing potential vaccines or other pharmaceutical treatments.

This “vaccine nationalism” is not only morally reprehensible, it is the wrong way to reduce transmission globally. And global transmission matters: If countries with a large number of cases lag in obtaining the vaccine and other medicines, the disease will continue to disrupt global supply chains and, as a result, economies around the world.

In the midst of this global pandemic, we must leverage our global governance bodies to allocate, distribute, and verify the delivery of the Covid 19 vaccine. We need the science — not politics — to inform the global strategy.

 Experts in epidemiology, virology, and the social sciences — not politicians — should take the lead in devising and implementing science-based strategies to reduce the risks that Covid-19 poses to the most vulnerable across the globe and to reduce transmission of this novel virus for all of us. To avoid ineffective nationalistic responses, we need a centralized, trusted governance system to ensure the appropriate flow of capital, information, and supplies.

Comments Stay Free Off-Guardian Discusses EU Vaccination Passports

off-guardian |  A  report published by the European Commission in late 2019 reveals that the EU has been looking to increase the scope and power of vaccination programmes since well before the current “pandemic”.

The endpoint of the Roadmap is, among many other things, to introduce a “common vaccination card/passport” for all EU citizens. 

This proposal will be appearing before the commission in 2022, with a “feasibility study” set to run from 2019 through 2021 (meaning, as of now, it’s about halfway through).

To underline the point: The “vaccination roadmap” is not an improvised response to the Covid19 pandemic, but rather an ongoing plan with roots going back to 2018, when the EU released a survey of the public’s attitude toward vaccines titled “2018 State of Vaccine Confidence”

 

On the back of this research, the EU then commissioned a technical report titled “Designing and implementing an immunisation information system”, on – among other things – the plausibility of an EU-wide vaccination monitoring system.

In the 3rd quarter of 2019 these reports were all combined into the latest version of the the “Vaccination Roadmap”, a long-term policy plan to spread vaccine “awareness and understanding” whilst counteracting “vaccine myths” and combatting “vaccine hesitancy”.

You can read the entire report here, but below are some of the more concerning highlights [emphasis throughout is ours]:

Comments Not Free Guardian Frets Over EU Anti-Vaxxer Coalitions

Guardian |  In front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate a politically incongruous crowd of protesters gathered on Saturday. They wore flowers in their hair, hazmat suits emblazoned with the letter Q, badges displaying the old German imperial flag or T-shirts reading “Gates, My Ass” – a reference to the US software billionaire Bill Gates.

Around the globe, millions are counting the days until a Covid-19 vaccine is discovered. These people, however, were protesting for the right not to be inoculated – and they weren’t the only ones.

For the ninth week running, thousands gathered in European cities to vent their anger at social distancing restrictions they believe to be a draconian ploy to suspend basic civil rights and pave the way for “enforced vaccinations” that will do more harm than the Covid-19 virus itself.

Walking towards the focal point of the protests down the Straße des 17. Juni boulevard, one woman said she believed the Covid-19 pandemic to be a hoax thought up by the pharmaceutical industry.

“I’d never let myself be vaccinated,” said the woman, who would give her name only as Riot Granny. “I didn’t get a jab for the flu either, and I am still alive.”

The alliance of anti-vaxxers, neo-Nazi rabble-rousers and esoteric hippies, which has in recent weeks been filling town squares in cities such as Berlin, Vienna and Zurich is starting to trouble governments as they map out scenarios for re-booting their economies and tackling the coronavirus long term.

Even before an effective vaccine against Covid-19 has been developed, national leaders face a dilemma: should they aim to immunise as large a part of the population as possible as quickly as possible, or does compulsory vaccination risk boosting a street movement already prone to conspiracy theories about “big pharma” and its government’s authoritarian tendencies?