Guardian | Leading vaccine scientists are calling for a rethink of the goals of
vaccination programmes, saying that herd immunity through vaccination is
unlikely to be possible because of the emergence of variants like that
in South Africa.
The comments came as the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca acknowledged that their vaccine will not protect people against mild to moderate Covid illness
caused by the South African variant. The Oxford vaccine is the mainstay
of the UK’s immunisation programme and vitally important around the
world because of its low cost and ease of use.
The findings came from a study involving more than 2,000 people in South Africa.
They followed results from two vaccines, from Novavax and Janssen,
which were trialled there in recent months and were found to have much
reduced protection against the variant – at about 60%. Pfizer/BioNTech
and Moderna have also said the variant affects the efficacy of their
vaccines, although on the basis of lab studies only.
All the vaccines, however, have been found to protect against the most severe disease, hospitalisation and death.
South Africa’s health minister, Zweli Mkhize, said in comments
reported by Reuters on Sunday that the country would suspend use of the
Oxford jab in its vaccination programme while scientists advised on the
best way to proceed.
Shabir Madhi, professor of vaccinology at the University of the
Witwatersrand who has been chief investigator on a number of vaccine
trials in South Africa, including the Oxford one, said it was time to
rethink the goals of mass Covid vaccination.
technologyreview | The eureka
moment was when the two scientists determined they could avoid the
immune reaction by using chemically modified building blocks to make the
RNA. It worked. Soon after, in Cambridge, a group of entrepreneurs began setting up Moderna Therapeutics to build on Weissman’s insight.
Vaccines
were not their focus. At the company’s founding in 2010, its leaders
imagined they might be able to use RNA to replace the injected proteins
that make up most of the biotech pharmacopoeia, essentially producing
drugs inside the patient’s own cells from an RNA blueprint. “We were
asking, could we turn a human into a bioreactor?” says Noubar Afeyan,
the company’s cofounder and chairman and the head of Flagship
Pioneering, a firm that starts biotech companies.
If so, the
company could easily name 20, 30, or even 40 drugs that would be worth
replacing. But Moderna was struggling with how to get the messenger RNA
to the right cells in the body, and without too many side effects. Its
scientists were also learning that administering repeat doses, which
would be necessary to replace biotech blockbusters like a clotting
factor that’s given monthly, was going to be a problem. “We would find
it worked once, then the second time less, and then the third time even
lower,” says Afeyan. “That was a problem and still is.”
Moderna
pivoted. What kind of drug could you give once and still have a big
impact? The answer eventually became obvious: a vaccine. With a vaccine,
the initial supply of protein would be enough to train the immune
system in ways that could last years, or a lifetime.
A second
major question was how to package the delicate RNA molecules, which last
for only a couple of minutes if exposed. Weissman says he tried 40
different carriers, including water droplets, sugar, and proteins from
salmon sperm. It was like Edison looking for the right filament to make
an electric lamp. “Almost anything people published, we tried,” he says.
Most promising were nanoparticles made from a mixture of fats. But
these were secret commercial inventions and are still the basis of
patent disputes. Weissman didn’t get his hands on them until 2014, after
half a decade of attempts.
When he finally did, he loved what
he saw. “They were better than anything else we had tried,” he says. “It
had what you wanted in a drug. High potency, no adverse events.” By
2017, Weissman’s lab had shown how to vaccinate mice and monkeys against
the Zika virus using messenger RNA, an effort that soon won funding
from BioNTech. Moderna was neck and neck. It quickly published results of an early human test of a new mRNA influenza vaccine and would initiate a large series of clinical studies involving diseases including Zika.
Pivoting
to vaccines did have a drawback for Moderna. Andrew Lo, a professor at
MIT’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering, says that most vaccines lose money.
The reason is that many shots sell for a “fraction of their economic
value.” Governments will pay $100,000 for a cancer drug that adds a
month to a person’s life but only want to pay $5 for a vaccine that can
protect against an infectious disease for good. Lo calculated that
vaccine programs for emerging threats like Zika or Ebola, where
outbreaks come and go, would deliver a -66% return on average. “The
economic model for vaccines is broken,” he says.
NYTimes | For months, far-right activists have rallied against masks and lockdowns
imposed during the coronavirus pandemic. Now some protesters have
shifted their focus to the Covid-19 vaccine.
One of the
protesters, a 48-year-old actor whose first name is Nick and who asked
that his last name not be published because of death threats the group
had received, said he did not believe that any of the protesters were
part of previously established anti-vaccine groups in the state. “This
has all stemmed as a result of this whole Covid-19 crisis,” he said. “It
started with the mask wearing and evolved to now being concerned over
the vaccine. It’s all about civil liberties.”
The
lead organizer, Jason Lefkowitz, 42, a stand-up comic and server at a
Beverly Hills restaurant, said the catalyst for the stadium protest was the death of Hank Aaron, the baseball legend who died at the age of 86 on Jan. 22.
Mr.
Aaron was vaccinated for the coronavirus in Atlanta on Jan. 5, and
anti-vaccine activists, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have seized on
his death to draw a link. The Fulton County medical examiner has said
there was no evidence that he had an allergic or anaphylactic reaction
to the vaccine.
“I’m not a violent
person,” Mr. Lefkowitz said. “Nobody in my group is violent or physical
or anything, but there’s a lot of people that don’t want to take this
vaccine or be forced into it.”
No one
was arrested, but city officials, including the police chief, were
disturbed by the symbolism and the global headlines — that a small group
of vaccine opponents had temporarily shut down one of the country’s
largest vaccination sites and were walking and chanting mask-free among
older residents waiting in their cars for their vaccine appointments.
“The
optics of it is that it appeared that the protesters were able to
symbolically interfere with that line, and I think that we have a
greater public responsibility to ensure that that symbolism is not
repeated,” Chief Michel R. Moore told the Los Angeles Police Commission
at a virtual meeting.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to upend American lifein new and unpredictable ways, we seek an understanding ofhow DHS is preparing for and mitigating potential homeland security threats from bad actors, such as violent extremists in the United States and abroad, who may seek to exploit vulnerabilities stemming from this metastasizing crisis.
To that end, we would like to know how the Office of Threat Prevention and Security Policy is coordinating DHS prevention efforts to account for the evolving threat landscape under the specter of COVID-19. Recent media reports have highlighted how white supremacist extremists across the world are discussing ways to take advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to advance violent ends, including, in some cases, accelerating society toward mass violence by sowing chaos.
ISIS, too, appears to be interested in exploiting the crisis: in the March 19, 2020,issue of the ISIS magazine Al-Naba’, an editorial urged adherents to leverage the pandemic to free prisoners from the “prisons of the polytheists and the camps of humiliation,” arguing that Western countries’ security forces are preoccupied with the crisis and their financial resources are being drained.
Federal law enforcement entities have published similar warnings. The Federal Protective Service, under DHS,released an intelligence brief, entitled “White Racially Motivated Violent Extremists Suggest Spreading the Coronavirus,” warning that white supremacist extremists have discussed the “obligation” to spread COVID-19 to law enforcement and minority communities.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s field office in New York reportedly released an alert warning local police agencies that white supremacist extremist groups were encouraging members to intentionally spread the virus to police officers and Jews.
Extremists have, of course,long made calls to violence against vulnerable groups. However, as the uncertainty, fears, and anxiety engendered by this pandemic strain our social fabric in many ways, we must renew our efforts to guard against vulnerabilities that bad actors may exploit.The Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violencestates that DHS will “counter terrorists and violent extremists’ influence online” and “develop prevention frameworks... to identify and respond to individuals at risk of mobilizing to violence.”
We seek to understand how this framework is being implemented across the Department in light of the reports highlighting extremists’ interest in exploiting the current crisis here and abroad. To that end, we respectfully request an overview of the Department’s efforts to address and prevent any exploitation of the COVID-19 pandemic by violent extremists, including any efforts with foreign partners. In addition, we ask to receive any products that DHS has disseminated to state, local, tribal, and territorial partners regarding this threat. We look forward to continuing our partnership with you in tackling these serious issues. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.
theadvocate | Kerr said he was done serving a system that doesn't care about people like him.
"You have no idea how hard it is to put a uniform on in this day and age with everything that's going on," he said.
"My
entire life has been in the service of other people ... y'all entrust
me to safeguard your little ones, your small ones, the thing that's most
precious to you, and I did that well. I passed security clearance in
the military ... but that has allowed me to see the inner workings of
things."
The videos show a man who professed he was upset by the state of society: “I’ve had enough.”
Clyde Rudolph Kerr III was many things.
"Rudy" was a son of New
Orleans, his dad the famed New Orleans jazz trumpeter and educator
Clyde Kerr Jr., who passed away in 2010. Both men were St. Augustine
High School Purple Knights.
Kerr was a soldier who served in
Afghanistan and Iraq, a lawman, and a hero to the students at St.
Genevieve School, where he was a school resource officer. Kerr joined
the Lafayette Parish Sheriff's Office in June 2015 and had served as a
patrol deputy and SWAT team member before joining the school resource
officer program, according to a statement from the agency.
“My
heart goes out to Deputy Kerr, his immediate family and to all of the
brothers and sisters he has at the sheriff’s office. We will do
everything in our power to support our employees as we all grieve,”
Sheriff Mark Garber said in the statement.
Todd Dwyer and Kerr
became friends after working at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Police Department together in the early 2000s. Kerr would visit the
Dwyers’ home every week, playing with their 8 and 4-year-old children,
cooking out or dreaming up his next big plan. Kerr was disciplined but
also had an infectious energy, the kind of guy everyone wanted to know
and be friends with, his friend said.
“No matter where he was in the world, what was going on, everybody was always smiling who was around him,” Dwyer said.
The
construction safety specialist said Kerr was the friend he went to for
difficult conversations and hard truths — about race, politics, religion
and the world their children were growing up in. Dwyer said the men
didn’t keep secrets from one another. He and his wife noticed a shift in
Kerr in the last two weeks, but the lawman was never explicit about
taking his life.
The alliance of the American left with right-wing nationalist
national security and surveillance state officials since 2016 in
fighting ‘fascists’ seems inexplicable in ideological terms. The reason?
The national security and surveillance states are corporate-state
amalgams that exist to enforce an imperial world order. The attempted
U.S. coup in Bolivia was to control lithium for liberal, green EVs
(Electric Vehicles). The U.S. coup in Venezuela that is still under way
is to control oil. The build-out of the surveillance state domestically
is to secure control of domestic politics by and for capital. This is
fascism.
One of the many good arguments against George W. Bush’s 2003 war
against Iraq was that combat forces turn into reactionary armies when
they return home. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was a
veteran of the first Gulf War. The militia movement of the early 1990s
was made up of veterans of U.S. dirty wars in Central America and the
first Gulf War. Veterans returning from W. Bush’s Iraq fiasco were
unable to find meaningful employment during the Great Recession. What
this meant practically is a choice between becoming a cop or stocking
shelves at Target for minimum wage.
Those most capable of inflicting harm amongst the Capitol invaders
appear to be those who had military training combined with an alleged
willingness to use it. That a lot of cops appeared sympathetic to the
invaders more likely than not ties to real or imagined shared experience
in the military. The militarization of the police includes the
psychology of seeing others as enemy combatants, as well as a duty to
commit violence for imagined right. This is manifested in varying
solidarities including class and the residual detritus of American
history, including race. What is missing from assertions of what people
‘are,’ fascist, racist, etc., is any notion of relative power.
Consider: do liberals really believe that the U.S. is trying to
restore democracy in Bolivia or Venezuela by ousting democratically
elected leaders and replacing them with hard-right pawns of the U.S.?
Why then would the CIA care about democracy in the U.S.? The CIA brought Saddam Hussein to power in Iraq. The CIA helped install Pinochet in Chile. The CIA ousted Mosaddeq in Iran and Arbenz
in Guatemala. While it is a large and complex organization, some fair
proportion of everything dark and evil that has taken place since 1948
can be laid at its feet.
The point: between the alliance of corporate and state interests
reflected in the Iraq War and the Wall Street bailouts, and the CIA’s
long history of destroying functioning democracies for the benefit of
American business interests, lies the approximate locus of American
power. Few of the players involved in these machinations are motivated
by ideology. One of Howard Zinn’s contributions in A People’s History is
his explication of the economic motives that powerful people and
organizations hide with ideological explanations of their actions. In
other words, what people are, e.g. racist, fascist, does little to
explain history.
Now that Donald Trump is out of power, what do the liberal opponents
of fascism intend to do to disentangle the corporate from political
power that defines it? One of the early answers is to redefine it
as exclusively the province of authoritarian leaders. In fact, the
Nazis based much of their political economy on the American model. The
Americans provided eugenics, slavery, genocide, the legal framework for
Nazi race laws, and an industrial model that motivated some fair portion
of German militarism. In the present, the Americans have mass
incarceration, a militarized police force, a large and intrusive
surveillance apparatus, political police (FBI) and a public-private
domestic spying operation.
reviewjournal | If you’ve got enough money, acres upon acres
of undeveloped land and an “innovative technology,” you soon could form
a new local government in Nevada.
When Gov. Steve Sisolak last month announced
his plan to launch Innovation Zones in Nevada to jump-start the state’s
economy by attracting new tech companies, the details of how those
zones would operate proved scarce.
According to a draft of the proposed
legislation, obtained by the Review-Journal but not yet introduced in
the Legislature, Innovation Zones would allow tech companies like
Blockchains, LLC to effectively form separate local governments in
Nevada, governments that would carry the same authority as a county,
including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and justice
courts and provide government services, to name a few duties.
Sisolak pitched the concept in his State of
the State address as his plan to bring in new companies that are at the
forefront of “groundbreaking technologies,” all without the use of tax
abatements or other publicly funded incentive packages that had
previously helped Nevada bring companies like Tesla to the state.
During his speech last month, Sisolak
specifically named Blockchains, LLC as a company that had committed to
developing a “smart city” in the area east of Reno that would run
entirely on blockchain technology, once the legislation passes.
The draft, which could change before it’s
unveiled as a formal bill, provides the first look into the details
behind the concept.
The draft language of the proposal says that
the traditional local government model is “inadequate alone to provide
the flexibility and resources conducive to making the State a leader in
attracting and retaining new forms and types of businesses and fostering
economic development in emerging technologies and innovative
industries.”
It adds that this “alternative form of local government” is needed to aid economic development within the state.
Not like Modi's HinduNazi white-shirts with their big ass-whopping sticks and his policy of doing away with government purchase of produce at guaranteed rates - might engender any "disaffection" against his preposterous naked predatory imperial government?
NYPost | Greta Thunberg accidentally shared a message showing she was getting told what to write on Twitter about the ongoing violent farmers’ revolt in India — sparking a police investigation and a political firestorm, according to reports.
The 18-year-old left-wing eco-activist shared — and then quickly
deleted — a message that detailed a list of “suggested posts” about the
ongoing protests, according to the posts that were saved by Breaking 911.
The list gave a series of tips on what to post, asking her to also
repost and tag other celebrities tweeting about it, including pop star Rihanna.
Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg posted a document to Twitter containing tweets that she was told to post and actions she should take regarding the current protests in India. She quickly deleted the tweet. pic.twitter.com/ruEfp4Ypg1
As well as the Twitter storm, the “toolkit” she shared also suggested highlighting planned demonstrations at Indian embassies.
The campaign material and social media template was created by
Canada’s Poetic Justice Foundation, which claims to be a grassroots
group creating “events to provoke, challenge and disrupt systemic
inequities and biases,” Times Now said. The group’s website confirms it is “most actively involved in the #FarmersProtest.”
The group then shared to Facebook a series of screenshots of the posts it appears to have gotten celebrities to share.
After deleting the list, Thunberg then shared a supposedly newer “toolkit” and a message saying, “We stand in solidarity with the #FarmersProtest in India.”
India’s foreign ministry issued a rare statement accusing “foreign
individuals” and celebrities of “sensationalism” and “trying to enforce
their agenda.”
Delhi police on Thursday confirmed that it had launched “a criminal case against the creators of the ‘Toolkit document'” that Thunberg shared.
“The call was to wage economic, social, cultural and regional war
against India,” police said of the plot supposedly taken up by the
celebs.
The force filed a First Information Report (FIR) — a preliminary
formal investigation — with a specialist cyber-crimes squad leading the
investigation, according to NDTV.
“Preferences are optional and subject to constraints, whereas constraints are neither optional nor subject to preferences.”
By this he means: many investors factor their assumptions around how
governments will impact their plans on what turn out to be policy preferences. But what actually happens, and what actually does impact their activities will be shaped by constraints, not preferences.
Said differently, a lot of capital gets allocated on what people think governments want to do, but what actually matters is what is preventing or constraining the government from doing what they want to do.
The five big constraints on governments are: political, economic, financial, geo-political and legal/constitutional.
Seen in this light, even if true, that governments wanted to impose a
totalitarian communist regime globally, surely they are constrained
from doing so. Right? RIGHT? They can’t just fscking do it.
But… all kinds of things I thought governments couldn’t just come out
and do over the last year…. well they just came right out and did it.
And just to really mess with my head, Papic added two wildcard constraints to his list: terrorism and pandemics.
The problem is, those wildcards, they aren’t wildcard constraints – they’re wildcard enablers.
Those two wildcards seem to have the ability to trump all normal
constraints. Every one of those constraints went out the window because of the wildcards.
Where does that leave us?
Speaking for myself, I’m losing my moorings as I no longer have any clear idea what, if any, policy constraints exist anymore.
So I have no grounding in the arena of what’s possible, how
arbitrarily policy makers can act, what’s to stop them from simply
confiscating my wealth (except for my crypto), or nationalizing the business I’ve built up over 22 years, and doing the same to everybody else. This is Canada. We’re generally meek as fuck here.
Second passport and expat strategies won’t work if, as per the “World
Debt Reset Program” outlined in the conspiracy theory, this happens
simultaneously everywhere. Granted that seems farfetched, but the
boundaries of the word “farfetched” have shifted dramatically since all
this began.
The question I keep coming back to is “What’s to stop them from trying it?” One of my first articles that I wrote on my old blog said that:
“The ultimate goal of the State is to cultivate
absolute dependency on it by its subjects. This is because until this
happens there is a real danger that those governed will one day wake up
and realize that the State is not only entirely unnecessary but actually
malignant; a malevolent force actively impoverishing society to the
benefit of it’s elites”
I think nation states do know this, and that the continuous iteration
of failed policies painted all of them into a corner vis-Ã -vis the
global economy and the financial system as we know it. As Daniel
Dimartino Booth observed in a recent George Gammon podcast, (paraphrasing) “The central banks were screwed. They needed something like COVID because the financial system was coming unglued”.
Understanding that there is a real incentive for nation states to
move in a drastic direction, combined with a conspicuous absence of
restraints, is taking a huge psychological toll on the populace. As
hypernormalization runs wild, a type of mass psychosis sets in which has
been manifesting in rabid polarization, hysterical cancel culture,
Reddit-driven stonk manias and myriad tribes of neo-Flagellants.
Something’s gotta give, but at the same time, I’m really worried that something’s about to give.
NYTimes | As a former
overseas operative who has struggled both on the side of insurgents and
against them, the past few days have brought a jarring realization: We
may be witnessing the dawn of a sustained wave of violent insurgency
within our own country, perpetrated by our own countrymen. Three weeks
ago, it would have been unthinkable that the United States might be a
candidate for a comprehensive counterinsurgency program. But that is
where we are.
Overrepresented among
the ranks of angry but ordinary citizens who stormed the Capitol on Jan.
6 were others, hardly ordinary, committed to violent extremism:
the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, “Christian”
national chauvinists, white supremacists and QAnon fantasists, among
others. Some of these groups may have planned their incursion in
advance, but they could not have breached the Capitol if not for the
wave of populist anger that swept them forward and over the barricades.
Given
impetus and, they believed, political cover by former President Donald
Trump, the capering idiots who filmed themselves in the Capitol seemed
to think they were untouchable. They may be easy to identify and arrest
now, but there are others — well armed, dangerous and now forewarned —
who had a glimpse of what may be possible in the political environment
Mr. Trump created.
There has long
existed in this country a large, religiously conservative segment of the
population, disproportionately (though not entirely) rural and
culturally marginalized, that believes with some reason it is being
eclipsed by a politically and culturally ascendant urban coalition of
immigrants, minorities and the college-educated secular elites of tech
and mainstream media. That coalition, in their eyes, abridges their
religious freedoms, disparages and ‘cancels’ their most cherished
beliefs, seeks to impose ‘socialism’ and is ultimately prepared to seize
their guns.
This, in very general terms, is the core segment of the nation that has
been unified, championed and politically energized by Donald Trump.
Bridging the urban-rural cultural and
political gap with facts, tolerance and empathetic sincerity is a vital
national project, but one which has become effectively impossible. The
sincere belief, reportedly held by a majority
of Republicans, that the Democrats stole the recent national election
through massive fraud has taken the longstanding fears and resentments
of a large section of our fellow citizens to a new and qualitatively
different level.
In context, their
fury is understandable. If I believed as they do, I would be marching
with them. The Big Lie perpetrated by Mr. Trump and his allies in the
political class and among large elements of the right-wing media,
preposterous as it may be, will have incalculable implications not just
for long-term political comity in this country, but also for national
security.
The violent demonstrations
feared for Inauguration Week, in the face of extraordinary security
precautions, didn’t materialize. Relatively few of our citizens would
embark on a program of sustained violence in any case. But if popular
anger has crested, left in its wake is a bitter, simmering restiveness,
one that will provide a nurturing environment for the worst among us —
the extremists who seek a social apocalypse. Their numbers may be
relatively small, but even a small slice of a nation of over three
hundred million is substantial. Without a program of effective national
action, they and their new adherents are capable of producing endemic
political violence of a sort not seen in this country since
Reconstruction.
The challenge facing
us now is one of counterinsurgency. Though one may recoil at the
thought, it provides the most useful template for action, which must
consist of three elements.
NYTimes | The Senate Intelligence Committee will
examine the influence of Russia and other foreign powers on
antigovernment extremist groups like the ones that helped mobilize the
deadly attack on the Capitol last month, the panel’s new chairman said
in an interview this week.
As the
executive branch undertakes a nationwide manhunt to hold members of the
mob accountable, Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virgina, said it would
be vitally important for the influential committee to do a “significant
dive” into antigovernment extremism in the United States, the ties
those groups have to organizations in Europe and Russia’s amplification
of their message.
With the power-sharing agreement
between Democrats and Republicans in place, Mr. Warner took over this
week as the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after four
years as its vice chairman. In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Warner
outlined his priorities, such as the spread of disinformation, the rise
of antigovernment extremist groups, Chinese domination of key
technologies, Russia’s widespread hacking of government computer
networks and strengthening watchdog protections in the intelligence
agencies.
The White House has ordered
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to work with the
Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. on a new analysis of the
threat from domestic extremist groups and the support they receive from
foreign powers or overseas organizations.
The issue is a difficult one for the
intelligence community. By law, the most influential agencies, including
the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, are not allowed to collect
information domestically. But Avril D. Haines, the director of national
intelligence, has some oversight of the intelligence arms of the F.B.I.
and the Department of Homeland Security, which can collect information
domestically. Other intelligence agencies look at foreign attempts to
influence American groups.
While
preliminary work by Ms. Haines’s office is underway, administration
officials said that analysis was unlikely to be completed before April.
But there appears to be significant interest in moving quickly on the
issue in the Senate. At Ms. Haines’s confirmation hearing last month, a number of lawmakers raised the subject of domestic extremist groups.
The
Senate Intelligence Committee will examine both white supremacist
groups on the right, and antifascist, or antifa, groups on the left,
though Mr. Warner was quick to say that the danger the groups posed was
not the same. “I don’t want to make a false equivalency argument here,”
he said, “because the vast preponderance of them are on the right.”
narrativesproject | On February 1st, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez hosted an Instagram live-stream
where she discussed her experience during the Capitol breach of January
6th. This morning the hashtag #AOClied began trending on Twitter.
Here’s part of the transcript*
*with filler words removed
And
I go back to scrolling through lunch options for what we're gonna
order, when all the sudden I hear "Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!" on my
door. And then I hear these huge violent bangs on my door and then every
door going into my office. Just "Bang! Bang!" [phone falls down] Shoot,
see look I'm banging it over again [laughs]. "Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!"
like someone was trying to break the door down. And there were, there
was no voices, there were no yells, no one saying who they were, nobody
identifying themselves, and just "Boom! Boom! Boom!" And I just get up
like this and I run over to the legislative office, and I run over to
Gee [the legislative assistant]. And Gee just looks at me back, and he
just goes "Hide! Hide! Run and Hide!" And so I, I run back into my
office, I slam my door, there's another kind of like back area to my
office, and I, I open it and there's a closet and a bathroom, and I jump
into my bathroom and I close the door, and I just keep hearing these
"Bang! Bang! Bang!" and I jump into my bathroom and I close the door and
then I realize that I, the bathroom was the wrong choice, I, I
should've jumped into the closet and so I start opening the the, the, I
start opening the door to the bathroom so that I can—oh sorry you guys
can't hear me [adjusts phone].
So I start, I hear these "bang bang
bangs" and I start opening the door to my office and I start opening
the door to my bathroom and I'm gonna run across to the closet—sorry you
guys said I was a little bit muffled so let me repeat this part a
little bit over again. Sorry this is a little bit hard to hear guys I'm
trying to like, as you know my phone keeps falling.
And so
basically I go into the back and there's a bathroom and then there's a
closet, and I jump into the bathroom and I immediately realize that I
shouldn't have gone into the bathroom I should've jump in the closet,
and so I, I open the door when all of the sudden I hear that whoever was
trying to get inside got into my office. And then I realized that it's
too late, that it's too late for me to get into the closet, and so, I
tried to kind of, I go back in and I, I hide back in, in the bathroom
behind the door and then i just start to hear these yells of "Where is
she?! Where is she?!" And I just thought to myself, "They got inside."
And so I hide behind my door [stands up against the wall] like this.
Like I'm here, and the bathroom starts going like this [gestures to her
front] like the bathroom door's behind me or rather in front of me and
I'm like this, and the door hinge is right here [sits back down]. And I
just hear "Where is she?! Where is she?!" And this was the moment where I
thought everything was over.
And the weird thing about moments
like these is that you lose all sense of time. In retrospect, maybe it
was 4 seconds. Maybe it was 5 seconds, maybe it was 10 seconds, maybe it
was 1 second, I don't know. It felt like my brain was able to have so
many thoughts in that moment between these screams and these yells of
"where is she, where is she" and so I go down and I just. I mean I
thought I was going to die. And I had a lot of thoughts. You have a lot
of thoughts [laughs] I think when you're in a situation like that, and
also one of those thoughts that I had was—I just happen to be a
spiritual person and be raised in that context and I really just felt
like if this is the plan for me, then people will be able to take it
from hear. I had a lot of thoughts, but that was the thought that I had
about you all. I felt that [voice wavers] if this was the journey that
my life was taking, that I felt that things were going to be ok. And
that I had fulfilled my purpose.
So far, this account
sounds like a violent attacker is hunting the Congresswoman, and that
she was within inches of her life. However, she continues:
Anyways,
sorry you guys [wipes both eyes]. So anyways, as I'm hiding in this
bathroom. I'm hiding in this bathroom, hearing these yells of these men,
or just this a man. Just one man going "where is she, where is she," I
start to look through the door hinge to see if I can see anything, and
there's like a door here and like another door here so I'm like, I'm
like trying to look through like two door hinges and so I look through
this door hinge and I see this white man in a black beanie bump just
open the door of personal office and come inside the personal office and
yell again "Where is she?!"
And. I have never been quieter in my
entire life. I was just, I don't even know if I held my breath but I was
just, here, behind there [gestures door hinge] and I just start sliding
down. And then all of a sudden my staffer Gee yelled out, and he, he's
like, "Hey hey hey hey it's ok, come out! Come out!" So, I'm like, I
don't know so deeply rattled, I'm still processing the end of my life
when I come out, and I come out, and this man is a Capitol police
officer.
The second part of this account clarifies that
the Congresswoman was incorrect in thinking it was an intruder.
However, it is not the part of the story that people have focused on.
This is because “I incorrectly thought I was in danger” is a much less
compelling story than “I was moments from being murdered.”
persuasion | Censorship is about who has the power to censor, and what checks are
placed upon that power. Right now, tech companies have all the power,
and they exercise it as a like-minded cartel. When we see Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez and Ted Cruz voice similar concerns over what happened to
WallStreetBets last week, we should realize that the politics of this
issue in the post-Trump era will no longer divide along an axis of Left
and Right, but of insider and outsider.
Elizabeth Warren, when
she started landing blows against Wall Street after the 2008 financial
crisis, met with President Obama’s economics adviser, the former
treasury secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers. He presented her
with a choice: “I could be an insider or I could be an outsider,” she
recalled in her 2014 memoir, A Fighting Chance. “Outsiders can
say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them.
Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas.
People—powerful people—listen to what they have to say. But insiders
also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.”
.@AOC bringing back her social media crash course for members of Congress. Here's what lawmakers took away from it at the 2019 session: https://t.co/daHysbxKIc
Occasional Cortex Fans tell themselves that AOC is positioning herself as an insider: “I will show you how to develop a base and raise money without going through Pelosi or the DNC.” They delude themselves into believing that she is the most interesting politician around right now.
It’s
precisely this insider-protection scheme that the internet and social
media have most disrupted. Insiders are massively powerful but few in
number. Outsiders have always been numerous but unorganized. Social
networking and online organizing have given the outsiders real power to
effect change, and finally register their disgust at the way incompetent
elites protect each other. The elites of Big Business, Big Media, Wall
Street, and Washington are terrified of this, and will leverage any
censorship power to keep the outsiders at bay.
The Real “Big Lie”
After
the storming of the Capitol building on Jan. 6, we heard a lot about
the “Big Lie” perpetrated by Trump and his allies that the election was
“stolen.” In reality, this narrative never got far. It was rejected by
the media (including Fox News), thrown out by the courts, labeled by
social networks as “disputed,” and dismissed by politicians, including
Trump’s own vice president. Yes, some far-right groups like the Proud
Boys and Oath Keepers came to Washington to commit acts of violence, but
they were roundly denounced. For a Big Lie to be successful, it has to
have buy-in from the people in power, moneyed interests, the
narrative-framers in the media generally, all of whom have to benefit
from the lie and therefore repeat it.
But what issue could
possibly unite all of these constituencies? For several years, elites in
the media, government, and now finance have denounced social media as a
tool for propaganda, disinformation and hate. Social media was to blame
for the Russian disinformation that supposedly elected Trump in 2016.
Social media was fingered as the main culprit in an “insurrection” that
attempted to overthrow an election. And now, WallStreetBets is accused
without evidence of spreading hate and misinformation. We’ve even been
told that social media is worse than cigarettes.
What
all of our elites have in common is a reason to fear social media.
Legacy media hates social media for disrupting their business models and
competing with them for influence. Wall Street has just learned that
organized social networks can threaten their control of the Monopoly
board. The party in power benefits from increased censorship and
repression of political dissent by labeling it “hate speech” and
“disinformation.” Ironically, the tech oligarchs benefit the least from
the censorship they impose, but the threat of break-up keeps them in
line.
If there is a Big Lie in American politics right now, it is
the idea that censorship of social media is necessary to save
democracy. In his book The Square and the Tower,
the historian Niall Ferguson describes the age-old tension between
hierarchies and networks—between the rulers in the Tower and the people
in the Square. The last thing that the rulers want to see when they look
down is a teeming throng in the Square. And nobody benefits more than
the rulers from malleable censorship rules that are easily weaponized to
restrict, disrupt, or disband the Square. What the insiders fear is not
the end of democracy, but the end of their control over it, and the
loss of the benefits they extract from it. Ultimately, the battle over
speech is just one aspect of a broader war for power amid a growing
political realignment that is not Left versus Right, but rather insider
versus outsider. Thanks to social media, the outsiders are threatening
to replace who’s in the Tower, and the insiders have never been more
scared.
TAC | Let's not attribute to malice that which can be explained by an insecure elite stumbling back into a tenuous grasp on power.
There is a real question worth asking here, and it lies at the heart
of our current political dysfunction: why do the people in power, in
government and beyond, consistently act in a way that makes them look
like part of some vast left-wing conspiracy? Why are tectonic policy
shifts at the state level being arranged around the transfer of power at
the federal? Why did the media and big business suddenly change their
tune on the miracle date of January 20?
I think the answer is fairly simple, and a lot less nefarious than some of the alternatives.
We
hear a lot of talk these days about “the politics of fear,” and it’s
almost exclusively directed at the right (and almost exclusively in
ridiculous ways): the only reason anyone possibly could have voted for
Donald Trump is that they’re conditioned to fear Xi Jinping, or Jack
Dorsey, or black people; the only reason to oppose progressive social
policies is a fear of homosexuals, or of women, or of men who think
they’re women; the only reason to reject the candidates of Wall
Street—whose names are always tagged with a big, dark capital “D”—is
fear that our backwards way of life will be ravaged by Kamala Harris’
lizard-people overlords; et cetera, et cetera, until it becomes apparent
that the only possible explanation for any of the left’s electoral
failures is some deep terror ingrained in the minds of half the voting
public.
But it’s worth talking too about the fear that drives the left.
There’s the obvious example of the pandemic—the hysteria that left most
of Blue America hunkered down like it was a nuclear apocalypse, only to
bravely emerge from their bunkers in droves on November 3. That’s the
same kind of fear that underlies the really fanatical climate stuff. But
there’s another kind too, and it essentially boils down to a fear of
opposition, a fear of not being in power.
It’s a function of our
adversarial politics: when you see no way of working with someone, when
you can find no common ground, when the stated goals of that person go
against everything you believe, you’re probably going to be terrified of
any situation in which that person has power and you don’t. And it’s
not fear of the extremes, either—call me an optimist, but I don’t think
there are many people stupid enough to sincerely believe that Donald
Trump is a fascist. We live in a world where four years of
sometimes-successful administration by a scattershot, moderate
conservative puts the fear of God in about 80 million people.
So
why does everything change the second 45 gives way to 46? It doesn’t
require Don Jr.’s hypothetical nefarious plot. All it requires is that
people in positions of power—the people who are terrified of losing
those positions—act exactly as we would expect them to act under the
influence of that terror. That doesn’t just mean Democratic governors
who overplayed their hands, and then rethought their moves the second
they stepped into a post-Trump world. It means the huge companies that,
for the first time (and likely the last time) in a long time, didn’t
have a buddy in the White House and now are ready to dive back into the
game. It means the legacy media that went through a well-earned hell
over the past five years, and now get a little breathing room to lob
softball questions at a friendly politician. It means every American who
subscribes to the progressive culture and narrative that dominate our
institutions, who worried just for a moment that maybe they wouldn’t
always be in control.
AP | Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden and an ongoing
target for conservatives, has a memoir coming out April 6.
The
book is called “Beautiful Things” and will center on the younger
Biden’s well publicized struggles with substance abuse, according to
Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Acquired in the fall
of 2019, “Beautiful Things” was kept under wraps even as Biden’s
business dealings became a fixation of then-President Donald Trump and
others during the election and his finances a matter of investigation by
the Justice Department.
“Beautiful
Things” was circulated among several authors and includes advance
praise from Stephen King, Dave Eggers and Anne Lamott.
“In
his harrowing and compulsively readable memoir, Hunter Biden proves
again that anybody — even the son of a United States President — can
take a ride on the pink horse down nightmare alley,” King writes in his
blurb. “Biden remembers it all and tells it all with a bravery that is
both heartbreaking and quite gorgeous. He starts with a question:
Where’s Hunter? The answer is he’s in this book, the good, the bad, and
the beautiful.”
In a snippet
released by Gallery, Biden writes in his book, “I come from a family
forged by tragedies and bound by a remarkable, unbreakable love.”
The
president and first lady released a statement Thursday saying, “We
admire our son Hunter’s strength and courage to talk openly about his
addiction so that others might see themselves in his journey and find
hope.”
During one of last fall’s presidential debates, Joe Biden defended his son from attacks by Trump.
“My
son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a
drug problem,” the Democratic candidate said. “He’s overtaken it. He’s
fixed it. He’s worked on it, and I’m proud of him. I’m proud of my son.”
TAC | I read the files on Hunter Biden’s laptop. They paint a sleazy picture
of multi-million dollar wire transfers, potential money laundering, and
possible tax evasion. They raise serious questions about the judgment
and propriety of Jim Biden, the president-elect’s brother, and Joe
himself. Call it smoke not fire, but smoke that should not be ignored.
The files were supplied to TAC by a known source previously established to have access.
Joe Biden is lucky a coordinated media effort kept Hunter out of the campaign. The FBI has had the laptop since 2019, when they subpoenaed
the files in connection with a money laundering investigation. Federal
investigators also served a round of subpoenas on December 8, a month
after the election, including one for Hunter Biden himself. While the
legal thrust of the investigation by the federal prosecutor in Delaware
is taxes, the real focus seems to be on Hunter’s Chinese connections.
This all comes after the FBI has had over a year to examine some of the
same files TAC looked at.
In the final weeks before the election, Hunter’s laptop fell into Republican hands. The story went public in the New York Post,
revealing that Hunter Biden introduced his father, then vice president,
to a top executive at Ukrainian energy firm Burisma less than a year
before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into
firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company. The meeting is
mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser
to the board of Burisma, sent Hunter Biden about a year after Hunter
himself joined the Burisma board at a salary of $83,000 a month with no obvious work duties past making such introductions.
Nice
work if you can get it, and to get it your dad better be vice
president. If all that alone does not meet the test of impropriety, we
need a new test. Hunter Biden’s value to clients was his perceived
access to the White House. His father Joe was at least a passive
participant in the scheme, maybe more than that.
The
problem was many Americans never heard this story. Twitter led a social
media charge to not allow the information online. After years of
salivating over every bit of Trump family gossip, the mainstream media
claimed the Biden story did not matter, or was Russian disinfo. Surveys suggest the information could have swung the election if voters had known about it. One survey showed that enough people in battleground states would have changed their votes to give Trump 311 electoral votes and reelection.
No
mind, really. As soon as it became clear Joe Biden was going to win,
the media on all sides lost interest in the laptop. The story became
about the story. It devolved into think pieces about the Orwellian role
of social media and some online giggling about the sex tapes on the
laptop. But our short attention spans have consequences. The laptop
still has a lot to tell us.
Hunter’s laptop was chock-a-block with video that appears to show Hunter
smoking crack while engaged in a sex act with a woman, as well as
numerous other sexually explicit images. There’s evidence there that
Hunter spent money on escorts, some $21,000 on cam sites, big plays on all sorts of depravities.
There is also Joe’s car insurance information, Hunter’s SSN, pages of
call logs, and lots of email addresses, bank account numbers, and
personal information of prominent people. None of the material is
encrypted, just dumped on a standard MacBook Pro using the password
“Hunter02.” The machine was regularly connected to the internet and
might as well have had an electronic sign on it saying “My dad is
important, here’s what you’ll need to blackmail me and others to get to
him.”
caitlinjohnstone | Remember when Americans shook the earth with massive protests
demanding an end to the police state and the entire liberal
establishment just kept saying “I hear you, I agree with you” and then
did absolutely nothing to even reduce police brutality? It’s important
to remember such lessons.
People would ask me “Why are you
supporting Black Lives Matter Caitlin?? Don’t you see all the
corporations and corporate Dems support it? Why would they do that if it
didn’t serve them?” This is why they did it. Empty words of support can defuse a situation far easier than open opposition.
Imagine
if all the plutocrats, pundits and politicians had just yelled at the
BLM protesters and admonished them to stop? It would have only turned
people against them with far more aggression, and it would have exposed
the fact that they are the enemy. It’s much more effective to say “I
hear you, I agree with you” with no intention of taking any real action.
And
really this is all institutions like the Democratic Party exist to do:
defuse left populism and crush grassroots activism not with opposition,
but with empty words of agreement that have no intention of action
behind them. They’re just a bottomless pit that tricks people into
pouring their energy into it, thereby stopping all leftward movement.
A
kid who doesn’t want to clean their room will tell their parents “No! I
don’t wanna!” A very clever kid who doesn’t want to clean their room
will say “Yes! I’ll get on that right away” and then enjoy hours of
peace and relaxation without parental nagging, and without
cleaning. It’s the exact same way with the powerful. It’s much more
efficacious for them to pretend to be on your side than expose the fact
that they’re not. In the end the result is the same: the kid doesn’t
clean their room. But they don’t get the kind of pushback they’d get if
they said no.
Manipulators are good at manipulation. The people
who make their way to the top in a corrupt system are manipulators. You
can’t take their words at face value, mustn’t mistake vapid placation
for victory. They’ll happily give you a mountain of words in exchange
for your real treasure.
Commenter at Naked Capitalism called Amfortas the Hippie dropped this today, I'm copying it here apropos of nothing in particular....,
Anecdote on the vibe in north houston 2-3-2021…feels very germane to this part of the zeitgeist: cousin calls, and says he’s coming up…same worry in his voice as a year ago, when he came out here to hide from the pandemic and correlated uncertainty. (he stayed til late april).
This time, his worry is civil unrest, violence, insurrection.
He’s a self-described “manwhore”…never nailed down…having numerous women all over texas that he breezes though and stays with for a while when work brings him near(he’s a roofer and tree expert and heavy equipment operator…with ample talent in all of them). The women in question are all divorcees, and seem happy with the arrangement: playing happy married to a hot guy who leaves before he becomes a chore.
Anyway…lately, he’s been hanging around north houston…where we’re both from. Woodlands, magnolia, tomball, etc.
He lives in his truck on a spread of pineywoods he inherited…and gets a hotel room off and on, for a week at a time. He spends a lot of time in bars, beer joints, dancehalls and clubs. It is this part of his life where we find the Doom: he says the clubs, etc are at best ¼ populated…and that the ratio of men to women is, at best, 3 to 1. of course this is the pandemic, and all…we both understand that…although he chafes at the mandates more than I do.
The scary part is the sentiments of the remaining men in these stag halls: “f&&k it…i ain’t doing this any more…they’ve screwed us all…” etc.
the way he puts it:”they’re tired of everything…the pandemic, the half-assed attempts at mitigating the pandemic, the economic results of those half-assed attempts, the lack of material support to mitigate the half-assed mitigations…and on and on in that vein…”
I interject: “so…blue balls, combined with hopelessness and angst”
him:”exactly!”
so I ask what he thinks will become of this mood/vibe…
“While it’s a relief to see
briefings return, particularly with a commitment to factual information,
the press can’t really do its job in the briefing room if the White
House is picking and choosing the questions they want,” one White House
correspondent told The Daily Beast. “That’s not really a free press at all.”
“It
pissed off enough reporters for people to flag it for the [White House
Correspondents Association] for them to deal with it,” another source
reportedly said.
While Obama’s deputy press secretary Eric Schultz calls the move
“textbook communications work” designed to ensure that Biden’s press
secretary has answers ready instead of having to “repeatedly punt
questions”, clearly the reporters on the job feel differently.
“The
requests prompted concerns among the White House press corps, whose
members, like many reporters, are sensitive to the perception that they
are coordinating with political communications staffers,” writes the Beast.
Having questions in advance would indeed be a good way to help
insulate press secretary Jen Psaki (for whom liberals are already developing an unwholesome celebrity crush)
from hard questions. This would avoid sticky situations like when Psaki
deflected inquiries about treasury secretary Janet Yellen’s conflict of
interest with the Citadel controversy by babbling about Yellen being the first woman in her position and claiming that receiving $800,000 in speaking fees from that company is no reason for her to recuse herself.
So
this is just one more item on the steadily growing pile of fake things
about this administration. Everything about it is phony. This is the
Astroturf Administration.
mondediplo | Worrying about the crisis of authority is what liberals do these days in
the United States. Older concerns, like the economic problems of
blue-collar whites, have become a subject for liberal sneering, but
restoring the rightful hierarchy of credentialed expertise has become a
matter of real moral urgency. ‘Respect Science’ say the signs and stickers you see in liberal neighbourhoods. Respect expertise. Respect hierarchy. Know your place.
Foreign policy, it is said, must be reclaimed by the foreign policy ‘community’. Central bank policy must be protected
from the influence of farmers. From the consensus views of the relevant
professions there can be no dissent, at least not in public. ‘Doubt,’ I
read recently in the Washington Post,
‘is a cardinal virtue in the sciences ... But it can be disastrous in
public health, where lives depend on people’s willingness to trust those
same experts.’ Therefore it has to be kept quiet, if not removed from
view altogether — a thought-suppressing logic that can be extended into
any field of knowledge you care to mention.
This essay is not a brief for free speech absolutism or an effort to
rationalise conspiracy theory or an attack on higher learning. It is
about the future of the Democratic Party, the future of the left, and
here is the suggestion I mean to make: the form of liberalism I have described here is inherently despicable.
A democratic society is naturally going to gag when it is told again
and again in countless ways, both subtle and gross, that our great
national problem is our failure to heed the authority of traditional
elites.
Worse, when those traditional elites come together with unprecedented
unanimity to insist their high rank proves their correctness and
justifies their privilege ... when they say we are in a new cold war
against falsehood ... when the news media dumps its neutrality and
likens itself to superheroes and declares it is mystically attuned to
truth and legitimacy ... when they do those things and then get the biggest news story of the decade fabulously wrong, a society like ours is going to spot the hypocrisy. And we are going to resent it.
Which is to say that the effect of all this moral judgmentalism has
been the opposite of what was intended. To spend four years scolding
people in the shrillest notes of moral hysteria was perhaps the perfect
recipe for convincing Trump supporters to redouble their dedication to
this deluded and prejudiced man. It is well known that shaming people
for failing to live up to your personal high standards of Covid hygiene
is not a good strategy for changing their behaviour. Multiply that
dynamic by 300 million and you’ve got America in the age of Trump. Ten
per cent of a nation energetically scolding the other 90%.
If historians still exist in 30 years, they will look back upon these
last four years with disgust and bewilderment. Disgust when they
contemplate the loud, vain ignoramus who sat in the White House scarfing
hamburgers and spinning conspiracy theories on Twitter while Covid
burned through the nation.
But when they look at liberals, they will shake their heads with
disbelief. How could they have thought it was wise to try to enlist the
great economic and cultural powers of our time — the masters of Silicon
Valley — to try to censor our opponents? Ira Glasser, the old ACLU
chief, relates
how liberal academics embraced speech codes because they ‘imagined
themselves as controlling who the codes would be used against’. What
these well-meaning liberals didn’t understand, he continued, was that
‘speech restrictions are like poison gas. It seems like it’s a great
weapon to have when you’ve got the poison gas in your hands and a target
in sight, but the wind has a way of shifting — especially politically —
and suddenly that poison gas is being blown back on you.’
As Glasser’s metaphor suggests, this cannot end well. The mob attack
on the Capitol frightened us all. But for Democrats to choose censorship
(via the monopolists of Silicon Valley) as the solution to the problem
is a shocking breach of faith. There are many words one might use to
describe a party that, over the last 30 years, has shown itself
contemptuous of working-class grievances while protective of the
authority of the respected... but ‘liberal’ isn’t one of them.
antiwar | The Department of Homeland Security issued on Wednesday a nationwide terror
alert lasting until April 30. The alert warns of potential terrorist attacks
from Americans who are “ideologically motivated” and have “objections
to the exercise of government authority and the presidential transition, as
well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.”
The language used in this alert suggests that millions of Americans are potential
terrorists. Second Amendment supporting, antiwar, anti-tax, anti-politics, anti-militarization,
pro-life, and anti-Federal Reserve activists certainly have “objections
to the exercise of government authority.” They are certainly viewed by
the political class and its handmaidens in big tech and the mainstream media
as ideological extremists. Anyone who gets his news from sources other than
mainstream media or big tech, or who uses certain “unapproved” social
media platforms, is considered to have had his grievances “fueled by false
narratives.” For something to be considered a false narrative, it need
only contradict the “official” narrative.
The "domestic terrorist” alert is the latest sign that activities
on January 6 on Capitol Hill, like the attacks of September 11, 2001, are being
used to advance a long-standing anti-liberty agenda. Legislation expanding the
federal government’s authority to use its surveillance and other unconstitutional
powers against “domestic terrorists” is likely to soon be considered
by Congress. Just as the PATRIOT Act was written years before 2001, this legislation
was written long before January 6. The bill’s proponents are simply taking
advantage of the hysteria following the so-called insurrection to push the bill
onto the congressional agenda.
Former CIA Director John Brennan recently singled out libertarians as among
the people the government should go after.
This is not the first time libertarians have been smeared. In 2009, a federally-funded
fusion center identified people who supported my presidential campaign, my Campaign
for Liberty, or certain Libertarian and Constitution parties candidates as potentially
violent extremists.
The idea that libertarianism creates terrorists is absurd. Libertarians support
the non-aggression principle, so they reject using force to advance their political
goals. They rely instead on peaceful persuasion.
Libertarianism is being attacked because it does not support just reforming
a few government policies. Instead, it presents a formidable intellectual challenge
to the entire welfare-warfare state.
Reuters | BGI Group, the world’s largest genomics company, has worked with China’s
military on research that ranges from mass testing for respiratory
pathogens to brain science, a Reuters review of research, patent filings
and other documents has found.
The review,
of more than 40 publicly available documents and research papers in
Chinese and English, shows BGI’s links to the People’s Liberation Army
(PLA) include research with China’s top military supercomputing experts.
The extent of those links has not previously been reported.
BGI
has sold millions of COVID-19 test kits outside China since the
outbreak of the new coronavirus pandemic, including to Europe, Australia
and the United States. Shares of BGI Genomics Co, the company’s
subsidiary listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange, have doubled in price
over the past 12 months, giving it a market value of about $9 billion.
But
top U.S. security officials have warned American labs against using
Chinese tests because of concern China was seeking to gather foreign
genetic data for its own research. BGI has denied that.
The
documents reviewed by Reuters neither contradict nor support that U.S.
suspicion. Still, the material shows that the links between the Chinese
military and BGI run deeper than previously understood, illustrating how
China has moved to integrate private technology companies into
military-related research under President Xi Jinping.
The
U.S. government has recently been warned by an expert panel that
adversary countries and non-state actors might find and target genetic
weaknesses in the U.S. population and a competitor such as China could
use genetics to augment the strength of its own military personnel.
BGI
has worked on PLA projects seeking to make members of the ethnic Han
Chinese majority less susceptible to altitude sickness, Reuters found,
genetic research that would benefit soldiers in some border areas.
Elsa
Kania, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American
Security think tank, who has provided testimony to U.S. Congressional
committees, told Reuters that China’s military has pushed research on
brain science, gene editing and the creation of artificial genomes that
could have an application in future bioweapons. She added that such
weapons are not currently technically feasible.
BGI’s pattern of collaboration with the Chinese military was a “reasonable concern to raise” for U.S. officials, said Kania.
weforum | In Davos we hear so much about the enormous promises of technology – and
these promises are certainly real. But technology might also disrupt
human society and the very meaning of human life in numerous ways,
ranging from the creation of a global useless class to the rise of data
colonialism and of digital dictatorships.
Automation will soon eliminate millions upon millions of jobs,
and while new jobs will certainly be created, it is unclear whether
people will be able to learn the necessary new skills fast enough.
Suppose you are a fifty-years-old truck driver, and you just lost your
job to a self-driving vehicle. Now there are new jobs in designing
software or in teaching yoga to engineers – but how does a
fifty-years-old truck driver reinvent himself or herself as a software
engineer or as a yoga teacher? And people will have to do it not just
once but again and again throughout their lives, because the automation
revolution will not be a single watershed event following which the job
market will settle down, into a new equilibrium. Rather, it will be a
cascade of ever bigger disruptions, because AI is nowhere near its full
potential.
Old jobs will disappear, new jobs will emerge, but then the new
jobs will rapidly change and vanish. Whereas in the past human had to
struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really
big struggle will be against irrelevance. And it is much worse to be
irrelevant than exploited.
Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a
new “useless class” – people who are useless not from the viewpoint of
their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic
and political system. And this useless class will be separated by an
ever-growing gap from the ever more powerful elite.
This danger can be stated in the form of a simple equation, which
I think might be the defining equation of life in the twenty-first
century:
B x C x D = AHH!
Which means? Biological knowledge multiplied by computing power multiplied by data equals the ability to hack humans, ahh.
If you know enough biology and have enough computing power and data, you
can hack my body and my brain and my life, and you can understand me
better than I understand myself. You can know my personality type, my
political views, my sexual preferences, my mental weaknesses, my deepest
fears and hopes. You know more about me than I know about myself. And
you can do that not just to me, but to everyone.
WaPo | The
particular targets of the GameStop crowd are hedge funds and short
sellers. Here, a couple of definitions may be useful. Generally
speaking, a hedge fund is a small-to-medium-size company that makes
money by choosing smart investments. There is nothing nefarious about
this. To the contrary, if you don’t like too-big-to-fail banks that get
backstopped by taxpayers, small-enough-to-fail hedge funds ought to be celebrated.
If you worry about complex financial conglomerates with corrupting
conflicts of interest, single-purpose investment boutiques are simpler
and healthier. On the online forums where the GameStoppers congregate,
you read complaints about hedge funds being bailed out during the crisis
of 2008. Actually, banks, brokers, insurers, mortgage providers, money
market funds and even car companies got rescues. Hedge funds got
nothing.
What
about short sellers? These are specialists who research stocks that
might go down, sometimes because bosses are illegally covering up bad
news about their companies. When short sellers identify a case of fraud
or similar, they borrow and sell the stock, hoping to buy it back at a
lower price later. Again, there is nothing evil about this. To the
contrary, it’s a way of keeping prices honest. A market without short
sellers is like a political system without investigative journalists.
This,
however, is not how GameStoppers see things. They have gone after a
short seller named Andrew Left, hacking into his social media accounts,
sharing his personal information online, ordering dozens of pizzas to be
delivered to his home in the middle of the night, and texting his
children with threatening and profane language, according to the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps not surprisingly, Left has announced he will stop playing the game. Irrational stock prices will be that much likelier.
The
worry is that the GameStoppers will now target others. Short sellers
operate in the open: You can check short-selling volumes for any given
stock on Yahoo.
By whipping up frenzied buying of a heavily shorted company,
speculators can cost the shorts billions and maybe put them out of
business. Already, GameStoppers are buying other beaten-down companies,
such as cinema giant AMC. A Goldman Sachs index of heavily shorted
stocks is up sharply this month because the shorts have been routed.
Hedge
funders and short sellers are out to get rich: They are certainly not
angels. But there is a difference between trading based on evidence and
research and trading based on conspiracy theories and mob tactics. Over
the past week, it’s been tempting to celebrate the colorful rebels —
they represent the democratization of finance, the revenge against the
fat cats. Now it is time to remember that truth matters.
Celebrating 113 years of Mama Rosa McCauley Parks
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*February 4, 1913 -- February 4, 2026*
*Some notes: The life of the courageous activist Mama Rosa McCauley Parks*
Mama Rosa's grandfather Sylvester Ed...
Monsters are people too
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Comet 3I/Atlas is on its way out on a hyberbolic course to, I don't know
where. I do know that 1I/Oumuamua is heading for the constellation Pegasus,
and ...
Remembering the Spanish Civil War
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This year marks the 90th anniversary of the launch of the Spanish Civil
War, an epoch-defining event for the international working class, whose
close study...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
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(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
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With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
them convicted and jailed is going to do too much better than your run of
the mill ...
