The Lies Are Conspicuously Obvious To The Casual Observer...,

themostimportantnews |   Don’t you hate it when what you get turns out to be far different from what you were promised?  In this article, I am only going to share facts that have been documented by corporate media sources.  These facts are going to upset a lot of people, because they prove that much of what we had been promised didn’t turn out to be true.  So many people that I know were convinced that if they just got their two shots they would be 100 percent protected for the rest of their lives and they would never have to be concerned about getting COVID ever again.  In addition, most Americans still seem to believe that if a high enough percentage of the population gets their shots COVID will be defeated and the pandemic will be brought to an end.  Unfortunately, all of those assumptions have turned out to be dead wrong.

If you don’t want to believe me, perhaps you will believe the CEO of Pfizer.  This week, he admitted that “fully vaccinated” people will need a third shot of the vaccine within 12 months…

And of course lots of people are still getting sick after being fully vaccinated.  According to the CDC, so far there have been almost 6,000 documented cases of people being infected after getting two shots, and dozens of them have died…

At this point we just don’t know how effective the vaccines will be, but the New York Times is assuring us that we don’t have anything to be concerned about…

“I use the term ‘scariants,’” said Dr. Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif., referring to much of the media coverage of the variants. “Even my wife was saying, ‘What about this double mutant?’ It drives me nuts. People are scared unnecessarily. If you’re fully vaccinated, two weeks post dose, you shouldn’t have to worry about variants at all.”  

 To me, Dr. Eric Topol’s statement was exceedingly irresponsible, especially considering some of the studies that have come out lately.  Here is just one example…

 In this article, I haven’t even discussed all of the side effects that we have been witnessing.  A few days ago, the FDA issued an unprecedented order regarding the Johnson and Johnson vaccine because it was causing blood clots in a number of cases…

I am glad that the FDA decided to step in, but the order came too late for this guy…

Kwestins About The Panic-demic Got Asked - But Went Entirely Unanswered

thewrap  |  On Tuesday, Tucker talked about what he argued has been a severe miscommunication problem from medical science leaders regarding the vaccines, in particular messaging that suggests people’s lives cannot meaningfully change even after they’ve received the vaccine — which actually we’ll concede is a good point. Tucker also brought up the pause in distribution of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine following a tiny fraction of people who developed a blood clot disorder after taking it.

This led him to say, “It is possible, in fact, that this vaccine is more dangerous than they’re indicating it is.”

And then later in the rant, he appeared to suggest that the vaccines may not work at all, and that it’s possible that a conspiracy of some sort might be covering that up. If you don’t believe us, here is what he said, verbatim:

“Experts say it is not entirely clear when it will be considered okay for people who are fully vaccinated to stop wearing masks. At some point, no one is asking this but everyone should be, what is this about? If vaccines work, why are vaccinated people still banned from living normal lives? Honestly, what’s the answer to that, it doesn’t make any sense at all. If the vaccine is effective there’s no reason for people who’ve received a vaccine to wear masks or avoid physical contact. So maybe it doesn’t work and they’re simply not telling you that. Well you’d hate to think that especially if you’ve gotten two shots but what’s the other potential explanation? We can’t think of one.”

Yes, Tucker actually said this. Perhaps it was just a rhetorical device, but if so, he didn’t say that was the case.

 

 

Representative Jim Jordan asked Dr. Fauci when the COVID mitigation would be considered successful? When exactly would Americans be permitted to recapture the rights the government has taken away? What exactly are the metrics that define success?…. 

 

 

Jordan continued to press him for a specific number. But, as Fauci started to give a response, the next committee member began to speak, thanking Clyburn. “I’d like my question answered!” Jordan shouted, in response to which Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) yelled: "You need to respect the chair and shut your mouth!”

 

WHO Finally Gave Up The Aerosol Transmission Booty - Will Truth Now Enter Permissible Discourse?

nature |  On 28 March 2020, two months after the WHO had declared COVID-19 a global health emergency, the agency broadcast a public-health message on Twitter and Facebook. “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne,” it said, labelling claims to the contrary as misinformation. But evidence quickly established that the virus is transmitted by air, and researchers roundly criticized the agency.

The WHO updated its advice on SARS-CoV-2 transmission three months later, acknowledging the possibility that airborne transmission might occur in some community settings. Airborne transmission in “crowded and inadequately ventilated spaces over a prolonged period of time with infected persons cannot be ruled out”, the updated advice says.

Yuguo Li, a building environment engineer at the University of Hong Kong, says that he is disappointed it took the WHO and other health authorities so long. “We would have saved a lot of people” if airborne transmission was recognized earlier, he says.

A WHO spokesperson says the agency has mentioned the importance of ventilation since early in the pandemic.

Others say that the WHO’s position still doesn’t go far enough. “Airborne transmission is dominant,” says environmental epidemiologist Joseph Allen at Harvard University’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. That’s why building controls such as ventilation and air filtration make sense, he says.

The WHO and other health authorities have failed to clearly prioritise measures to improve indoor air quality to reduce the chance of catching COVID-19, says Jose-Luis Jimenez, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “They don’t emphasize how important it is,” he says. What the WHO needs to say is “fact, it goes through the air,” says Jimenez, “we breathe it in.”

A stark message from the WHO would ensure that national health authorities take notice, says Jimenez. Australia, the Netherlands and some other nations still do not acknowledge in their public statements that airborne transmission has a significant role in spreading the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

By the start of this year, concerns over ventilation had reached boiling point. Hundreds of health-care workers, scientists, engineers and occupational health-and-safety experts signed open letters calling on government officials in Canada, the United States, Australia, Colombia and the United Kingdom to address, among other things, poor indoor air quality. These concerted campaigns all urged local or national governments to take steps to reduce airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

One of the problems is that governments and businesses are still spending millions of dollars on surface disinfection, says Jimenez, despite evidence that it is rare for SARS-CoV-2 to pass from one person to another through contaminated surfaces. By contrast, few countries have invested in measures to improve indoor air quality.

 

mRNA Therapeutics Useless For Immunosuppressed Mubab (Biologics) Users

NYTimes |  For more than a year, Dr. Andrew Wollowitz has mostly been cloistered inside his home in Mamaroneck, N.Y.

As medical director of emergency medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, Dr. Wollowitz, 63, was eager to help treat patients when the coronavirus began raging through the city last spring. But a cancer treatment in 2019 had obliterated his immune cells, leaving him defenseless against the virus, so he instead arranged to manage his staff via Zoom.

A year later, people in Dr. Wollowitz’s life are returning to some semblance of normalcy. His wife, a dancer and choreographer, is preparing to travel for work at Austria’s National Ballet Company. His vaccinated friends are getting together, but he sees them only when the weather is nice enough to sit in his backyard. “I spend very little time in public areas,” he said.

Like his friends, Dr. Wollowitz was vaccinated in January. But he did not produce any antibodies in response — nor did he expect to. He is one of millions of Americans who are immunocompromised, whose bodies cannot learn to deploy immune fighters against the virus.

Some immunocompromised people were born with absent or faulty immune systems, while others, like Dr. Wollowitz, have diseases or have received therapies that wiped out their immune defenses. Many of them produce few to no antibodies in response to a vaccine or an infection, leaving them susceptible to the virus. When they do become infected, they may suffer prolonged illness, with death rates as high as 55 percent.

Most people who have lived with immune deficiencies for a long time are likely to be aware of their vulnerability. But others have no idea that medications may have put them at risk.

“They’ll be walking around outside thinking they’re protected — but maybe they’re not,” said Dr. Lee Greenberger, chief scientific officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, which funds research on blood cancers.

The only recourse for these patients — apart from sheltering in place until the virus has retreated — may be to receive regular infusions of monoclonal antibodies, which are mass-produced copies of antibodies obtained from people who have recovered from Covid-19. The Food and Drug Administration has authorized several monoclonal antibody treatments for Covid-19, but now some are also being tested to prevent infections.

 

Global Panicdemic Teaches Nurses They're Expendable Resources For Corporate Profit

FT |  When Silvia, a 33-year-old Italian nurse, received a bonus worth less than €500 after months battling one of Europe’s worst coronavirus outbreaks, she wondered if it “was a joke”. She had worked on a busy Covid-19 ward of a hospital in the city of Genoa throughout the crisis, putting her health on the line and missing out on time with her young daughter “from a sense of duty and love for the job”. The one-off bonus from the Italian health ministry announced late last year was “almost insulting for those of us who had spent months on the frontline risking our lives”, said Silvia, who declined to give her full name. Silvia’s disillusionment points to the scale of the challenge for pandemic-hit governments around the world as they grapple with the question of how, and whether, to reward staff who endured the most searing experience of their professional lives. In many cases, the discussions have forced governments to acknowledge longstanding grievances from healthcare workers about their pay and conditions. The ability to retain and recruit staff will also play a vital role in determining how strongly not just health systems, but national economies, emerge from the crisis.

Chris James, senior OECD health economist, said the focus had already shifted from worries over the availability of hospital beds and ventilators in the early phase of the pandemic to anxieties over staffing levels. “Moving forward, one of the big discussion points among OECD countries is how do we make sure health systems can be stronger in future waves of Covid and meet any other emerging threat,” he said. “The health workforce is at the centre of that.” Demand for healthcare workers exceeded supply long before the pandemic struck, said Anita Charlesworth, chief economist for the Health Foundation, a UK-based charity. This was fuelled by a global commitment to achieve universal health coverage and the rapid spread of diseases such as cancer and diabetes as nations industrialise and prosper. Charlesworth pointed to a World Health Organization estimate that Europe would have a shortfall of 1.5m nurses by the end of the decade. The global estimate would be 13.5m. “If we’re going to be more resistant to the shocks of emerging infectious diseases we’re going to need a bigger buffer,” she said.

Does Nikole Hannah-Jones Channel Ronald McDonald Or Pennywise?

wsws |  The wealth and privilege of the leading proponents of racialism demonstrate the reactionary character of identity politics. It is entirely divorced from the real concerns and experiences of the working class. Fearful of a unified workers’ movement, the ruling class seeks to sow artificial racial divisions among workers through the promotion of identity politics. Additionally, middle class layers seeking a bigger slice of the pie see identity as a means of advancing their own wealth and social position.

The American ruling class is terrified of the growth of a working-class movement. The fight against police violence, racism, and poverty can only be waged through the building of a socialist movement, independent of the capitalist parties, that unifies workers on their common class interests.

New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, lead author of the Times’s “1619 Project,” was paid $25,000 for an online Zoom lecture given to the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication.

Through a Freedom of Information request, the right-wing news outlet Campus Reform obtained documentation detailing Hannah-Jones’s terms of compensation for the February 19 lecture. Additionally, the documents revealed that Hannah-Jones was partnered with the Lavin Agency, a talent agency that is “the world’s largest intellectual talent agency, representing leading thinkers for speaking engagements personal appearances, consulting, and endorsements,” according to its website. Hannah-Jones’s relationship with the agency suggests she regularly schedules events and is paid for them.

Part of the agreement between Hannah-Jones and the University of Oregon dictated that the lecture, titled “1619 and the Legacy That Built a Nation,” could not be recorded and redistributed. However, a promotional flyer advertised a discussion on “the lasting legacy of Black enslavement on the nation—specifically, how Black Americans pushed for the democracy we have today.”

News of the lecture came days after Hulu announced that it partnered with production studio Lionsgate and billionaire Oprah Winfrey to create a docuseries based on the 1619 Project. In a statement, Hulu said the project was a “landmark undertaking…of the brutal racism that endures in so many aspects of American life today.”

Patrisse Khan-Cullors "Works" As Corporate Woke Makeup - Why Surprised She Lives That Way Too?

jonathanturley |   We recently discussed the move by Twitter to block the tweet of sports journalist Jason Whitlock criticizing the BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors for purchasing a $1.4 million home in a secluded area of Los Angeles.  A self-professed Marxist, Cullors has reportedly purchased four homes worth more than $3 million and has looked at real estate investments in places like the Bahamas.  As with the censoring of a New York Post article on the Hunter Biden laptop story, Twitter was criticized for the censoring of the story and later said it was a mistake. Now, Facebook has reportedly blocked the underlying New York Post report about the controversy.  In the meantime, BLM itself insists that the controversy is little more than terrorism from white supremacists.

Various conservative sites reported this week that Facebook users could not share the link to a story that shed light on Cullors’ multi-million-dollar splurge on homes. Fox News reported that “an error message appears whenever users try sharing the article on their personal Facebook page or through the Messenger app.”

Cullors has not denied the purchase or the real estate investments, including in her statement below to the controversy. The story was widely circulated because Cullors has long insisted that she and her BLM co-founder “are trained Marxists. We are super versed on, sort of, ideological theories.”  She has denounced capitalism as worse than Covid-19.

Critics like Nick Arama of RedState pointed out: “[I]t’s interesting to note that the demographics of the area are only about 1.4% black people there. So not exactly living up to her creed there.”

Moreover, the head of New York City’s Black Lives Matter chapter called for an independent investigation into the organization’s finances in the wake of the controversy.

The New York Post and other publications reported that Cullors is eyeing expensive properties in other locations, including the Bahamas.  However, I noted earlier that there is no evidence that this money came from BLM, which has reportedly raised almost $100 million in donations from corporations and other sources. Indeed, Cullors seems to have ample sources of funds. She published a best selling memoir of her life and then a follow up book.  She also signed a lucrative deal with Warner Bros to develop and produce original programming across all platforms, including broadcast, cable and streaming. She has also been featured in various magazines like her recent collaboration with Jane Fonda.

Politics Restructured So Corporations CanTreat Citizens As Natural Resources To Be Used For Profit

TCH |  The people behind the JoeBama administration do not need to step on the hot-button issue of ‘vaccine passports’ because they already have ideological allies working on the issue.  Remember that phone call with 100 multinational corporations a few days ago?  Why would a Marxist government need to engage in an issue highly charged with politics, when they can just farm-out the same outcome to their Marxist corporate allies?

Hopefully people can see what is happening here.

There are trillions at stake.  Those trillions need to engage in control mechanisms to retain their position.  The multinational corporations know how financially lucrative COVID compliance is.  Those same multinationals are setting up the parameters for control in the exact same manner the U.S. government would.  The ideological multinationals and the ideological JoeBama administration are working in concert.

Multinationals do not like capitalism because within the process of capitalism they do not have control over the financial outcomes.  Capitalism breeds competition; multinationals abhor competition, they are totalitarian in ideology and want the entire pie under their control.  Multinational corporations do not like capitalism; underline it, emphasize it, do not forget it.

Capitalism is based on the principles of a free market.  Multinationals do not want a free market, they want a controlled market.  Their efforts toward a vaccine passport are an example of yet another control they can manipulate for maximum financial benefit.  It really is that simple…..

…. Meanwhile the crew of totalitarians behind JoeBama know they can benefit from their corporate allies.  The multinationals will pay the politicians for control and the politicians will construct defensive legislative outcomes that protect the multinationals.  That is what is happening in exponentially increasing sunlight.

Unfortunately the multinationals are also the funding mechanism for the UniParty.  Democrats and Republicans both benefit from the financial process of payments by the multinationals for control of legislative outcomes.   This is the entire purpose of K-Street.   In third-world countries we call bribery of elected officials “corruption”; however, in the United States we call bribery of elected officials “lobbying”, the process is exactly the same.

In a slightly nuanced outline of the same type of Government and Multinational merging, Glenn Greenwald has a solid article explaining why and how the corporate world is using “false wokeness” as a tool for expanded financial benefit.

Bill Gates The World's Public Health Czar Staunchly Defends Big Pharma Pandemic Profits

TNR  |  In April, Bill Gates launched a bold bid to manage the world’s scientific response to the pandemic. Gates’s Covid-19 ACT-Accelerator expressed a status quo vision for organizing the research, development, manufacture, and distribution of treatments and vaccines. Like other Gates-funded institutions in the public health arena, the Accelerator was a public-private partnership based on charity and industry enticements. Crucially, and in contrast to the C-TAP, the Accelerator enshrined Gates’s long-standing commitment to respecting exclusive intellectual property claims. Its implicit arguments—that intellectual property rights won’t present problems for meeting global demand or ensuring equitable access, and that they must be protected, even during a pandemic—carried the enormous weight of Gates’s reputation as a wise, beneficent, and prophetic leader.

How he’s developed and wielded this influence over two decades is one of the more consequential and underappreciated shapers of the failed global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Entering year two, this response has been defined by a zero-sum vaccination battle that has left much of the world on the losing side.

Gates’s marquee Covid-19 initiative started relatively small. Two days before the WHO declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced something called the Therapeutics Accelerator, a joint initiative with Mastercard and the charity group the Wellcome Trust to identify and develop potential treatments for the novel coronavirus. Doubling as a social branding exercise for a giant of global finance, the Accelerator reflected Gates’s familiar formula of corporate philanthropy, which he has applied to everything from malaria to malnutrition. In retrospect, it was a strong indicator that Gates’s dedication to monopoly medicine would survive the pandemic, even before he and his foundation’s officers began to say so publicly.  

This was confirmed when a bigger version of the Accelerator was unveiled the following month at the WHO. The Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator, or ACT-Accelerator, was Gates’s bid to organize the development and distribution of everything from therapeutics to testing. The biggest and most consequential arm, COVAX, proposed to subsidize vaccine deals with poor countries through donations by, and sales to, richer ones. The goal was always limited: It aimed to provide vaccines for up to 20 percent of the population in low-to-middle-income countries. After that, governments would largely have to compete on the global market like everyone else. It was a partial demand-side solution to what the movement coalescing around a call for a “people’s vaccine” warned would be a dual crisis of supply and access, with intellectual property at the center of both.

Gates not only dismissed these warnings but actively sought to undermine all challenges to his authority and the Accelerator’s intellectual property–based charity agenda. 

“Early on, there was space for Gates to have a major impact in favor of open models,” says Manuel Martin, a policy adviser to the Médecins Sans Frontières Access Campaign. “But senior people in the Gates organization very clearly sent out the message: Pooling was unnecessary and counterproductive. They dampened early enthusiasm by saying that I.P. is not an access barrier in vaccines. That’s just demonstratively false.”

Few have observed Bill Gates’s devotion to monopoly medicine more closely than James Love, founder and director of Knowledge Ecology International, a Washington, D.C.–based group that studies the broad nexus of federal policy, the pharmaceutical industry, and intellectual property. Love entered the world of global public health policy around the same time Gates did, and for two decades has watched him scale its heights while reinforcing the system responsible for the very problems he claims to be trying to solve. The through-line for Gates has been his unwavering commitment to drug companies’ right to exclusive control over medical science and the markets for its products.

 

Wokeism Seems Parasitic To Hard Won Black Civil Rights In America...,

andrewsullivan  |  If we were going to construct a test-case for how dysfunctional our politics have become, it would be hard to beat the transgender issue. It profoundly affects a relatively minuscule number of people in the grand scheme of things, and yet galvanizes countless more for culture war purposes. It has become a litmus test for social justice campaigners, who regard anyone proposing even the slightest qualifications on the question as indistinguishable from a Klan member. It has seized the attention of some of the most extreme elements among radical feminists, who in turn regard any smidgen of a compromise on the rights of women as a grotesque enforcement of patriarchy. 

Worse, it has now excited the Christianist right, who see the recognition of trans rights as an effort to destroy the sexual binary that is at the core of almost all orthodox faith. And it has become a Twitter phenomenon, where all reasonable arguments go to die. If you are an opinion writer, you really do have to be a masochist to even want to dabble in the debate. And the mainstream media is, at this point, completely unreliable as a source of balance or information. They openly advocate the most extreme critical theory arguments about sex and gender as if they were uncontested facts and as if the debate can be explained entirely as a function of bigotry vs love. (A recent exception to this, though tilted clearly from the start in one direction, is this explainer from the NYT last night.)

Big global stories — for example, a high court case in Britain that found that minors under 16 are not developmentally capable of making the decision to take puberty blockers — are routinely ignored. Check out this video from the Washington Post. It doesn’t even gesture at fairness: no presentation of counter-argument; instant attribution of bigotry for anyone deemed in disagreement.

And the issue has recently become, even more emotively, about children — how they are treated, how the medical world deals with them, amid complicated arguments about specific treatments, their long-term effects, and genuine scientific disputes. And all of this is taking place with far too few reliable, controlled studies on transgender individuals, as children and adults, or on medical interventions. A lot of the time, we’re flying blind.

I’ve been trying to think these things through for the past few years. I used to think trans rights were a no-brainer. Of course I supported them. And I still do. I believe trans people when they tell the stories of their lives; I empathize because I’m human, and the pain and struggle of so many trans people is so real; and perhaps also because being gay helps you see how a subjective feeling can be so deep as to be an integral part (but never the whole) of your identity. 

Equally, however, I have some reservations. I trust biology on the core binary sexual reproductive strategy of our species, without which we would not exist, and which does not cease to exist because of a few variations on the theme (I’m one of those variations myself). I do not believe that a trans woman or a trans man is in every way indistinguishable from a woman or a man. If there were no differences, trans women and trans men would not exist as a separate category. I do not buy the idea that biological sex is socially constructed, or a function of “white supremacist” thought, for Pete’s sake. I further believe that no-one should be excluded from this or any debate; and that “lived experience” cannot replace “objective reality”, although it can often help complicate and explain it.  

In our current culture, this somewhat complicated stance is anathema. For some trans activists, especially the younger more thoroughly woke ones, I am simply evil, beset by phobias, and determined to persecute and kill trans people, or seek their genocide. I wish this were a caricature of their views, but it isn’t. For some radical feminists, my empathy for trans women, and concern for their welfare, is regarded as a function of my misogyny and hatred of women, often wrapped up in some anti-gay, misandrist bile. I wish I were exaggerating here as well. The proportion of people in this debate who seem psychologically unstable, emotionally volatile and personally vicious seems larger than usual.

But we can no longer avoid the subject. There is now a flood of bills in state legislatures designed to ban medical procedures for minors who appear to be trans, and to ensure fairness between trans girls and girls in school sports, and a few that are even more extreme. Lines have been drawn. The woke establishment — all major corporations, the federal government, the universities, all cultural institutions, the mainstream media and now the medical authorities — are unequivocally on the side of anything the trans activists want. Amazon won’t even sell some books presenting one side of the case, while they still sell Mein Kampf. K thru 12 education now routinely tells children that biological sex is a spectrum (it isn’t) and they can choose where to fit.

 

Paying Woke-Tax To Read About Press Disintermediation By Substack

NYTimes  |  Danny Lavery had just agreed to a two-year, $430,000 contract with the newsletter platform Substack when I met him for coffee last week in Brooklyn, and he was deciding what to do with the money.

“I think the thing that I’m the most looking forward to about this is to start a retirement account,” said Mr. Lavery, who founded the feminist humor blog The Toast and will be giving up an advice column in Slate.

Mr. Lavery already has about 1,800 paying subscribers to his Substack newsletter, The Shatner Chatner, whose most popular piece is written from the perspective of a goose. Annual subscriptions cost $50.

The contract is structured a bit like a book advance: Substack’s bet is that it will make back its money by taking most of Mr. Lavery’s subscription income for those two years. The deal now means Mr. Lavery’s household has two Substack incomes. His wife, Grace Lavery, an associate English professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who edits the Transgender Studies Quarterly, had already signed on for a $125,000 advance.

Along with the revenue the Laverys will bring in, the move is good media politics for the company. Substack has been facing a mutiny from a group of writers who objected to sharing the platform with people who they said were anti-transgender, including a writer who made fun of people’s appearances on a dating app. Signing up two high-profile transgender writers was a signal that Substack was trying to remain a platform for people who sometimes hate one another, and who sometimes, like Dr. Lavery, heatedly criticize the company.

Feuds among and about Substack writers were a major category of media drama during the pandemic winter — a lot of drama for a company that mostly just makes it easy to email large groups for free. For those who want to charge subscribers on their email list, Substack takes a 10 percent fee. “The mindshare Substack has in media right now is insane,” said Casey Newton, who left The Verge to start a newsletter on Substack called Platformer. Substack, he said, has become a target for “a lot of people to project their anxieties.”

Substack has captivated an anxious industry because it embodies larger forces and contradictions. For one, the new media economy promises both to make some writers rich and to turn others into the content-creation equivalent of Uber drivers, even as journalists turn increasingly to labor unions to level out pay scales.

This new direct-to-consumer media also means that battles over the boundaries of acceptable views and the ensuing arguments about “cancel culture” — for instance, in New York Magazine’s firing of Andrew Sullivan — are no longer the kind of devastating career blows they once were. (Only Twitter retains that power.) Big media cancellation is often an offramp to a bigger income. Though Substack paid advances to a few dozen writers, most are simply making money from readers. That includes most of the top figures on the platform, who make seven-figure sums from more than 10,000 paying subscribers — among them Mr. Sullivan, the liberal historian Heather Cox Richardson, and the confrontational libertarian Glenn Greenwald.

This new ability of individuals to make a living directly from their audiences isn’t just transforming journalism. It’s also been the case for adult performers on OnlyFans, musicians on Patreon, B-list celebrities on Cameo. In Hollywood, too, power has migrated toward talent, whether it’s marquee showrunners or actors. This power shift is a major headache for big institutions, from The New York Times to record labels. And Silicon Valley investors, eager to disrupt and angry at their portrayal in big media, have been gleefully backing it. Substack embodies this cultural shift, but it’s riding the wave, not creating it.

 

When Keeping It Woke Goes Wrong: Threatening Merriweather's Job Got Jane Doe's Ass Kicked

I'm gonna use discrimination to get what I want. from r/trashy

slate  |  Last month, a conservative panel of judges on the 6^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the First Amendment grants professors a right to intentionally misgender trans students in class. The decision, authored by Donald Trump-nominee and Mitch McConnell protégé Amul Thapar, had a triumphant tone: Thapar depicted himself as a champion of free speech combatting the “classroom thought police” at modern universities who seek to turn their campuses into “enclaves of totalitarianism” by prohibiting discrimination against LGBTQ students.

The facts tell a much more nuanced story than Thapar’s simplistic tale of academic freedom versus totalitarianism. The case centers on professor Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio. In 2018, Meriwether misgendered a trans student, known in litigation as Jane Doe, in class; she asked that use her correct pronouns and honorifics in the future, but he refused. The university found Meriwether in violation of its nondiscrimination policy, which requires professors to use students’ preferred pronouns. Meriwether refused to comply with the policy, and following an investigation, the university placed a “written warning” in his file noting his noncompliance. The professor, backed by the viciously anti-trans law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, then sued—dragging Jane Doe into the center of a years-long legal dispute that she desperately wished to avoid.

I recently corresponded with Doe over email about the case, including its effect on her own freedom of expression and academic experience. We spoke on the condition that I use the pseudonym Jane Doe to preserve her privacy. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mark Joseph Stern: How did you feel when professor Meriwether first misgendered you?

Jane Doe: At first, I thought it was a mistake, either mix-up of words or a miscue based on my clothes or appearance. When it is the latter, it is particularly painful; it makes you feel ugly or that your body is broken. But, at the time, there was no way for professor Meriwether to know that I am transgender. All my documents and school records reflect my correct name and female gender marker.

The 6^th Circuit wrote the following about your reaction to professor Meriwether’s refusal to acknowledge your gender identity because of his religious beliefs: “Doe became hostile—circling around Meriwether at first, and then approaching him in a threatening manner: ‘I guess this means I can call you a cunt.’ Doe promised that Meriwether would be fired if he did not give in to Doe’s demands.” Is this account accurate?

This account is only partially accurate. I approached professor Meriwether after the first class session to let him know that he mistakenly referred to me as male and ask that he refer to me as female in the future. He refused. I showed him my driver’s license to further prove that I am female. He refused again. It was degrading to have to debate with my professor whether I am female and entitled to the same treatment as my peers simply because professor Meriwether believed that I was transgender (it was not until I filed an internal complaint with Shawnee that I disclosed that I am transgender). Professor Meriwether’s persistent refusal to treat me with the same respect he afforded other students was upsetting. Although I made the remark quoted in the opinion, I was not threatening or hostile.

 

 

Nancy Pelosi Is A Ridiculous Clown Inside, Outside, Upside Down....,

thehill  |  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says in a new interview that she would have put up a fight had she encountered rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

"Well, I'm pretty tough. I'm a street fighter," Pelosi told USA Today while acknowledging that some rioters intended to harm her. "They would have had a battle on their hands."

Pelosi joked that she had a weapon on her in the form of her stilettos.

"I would have had these," she said while lifting up her foot, according to USA Today.

Pelosi, along with former Vice President Mike Pence, was one of the main targets of rioters who stormed the Capitol building on Jan. 6 as Congress met to certify the election results.

During the incident, rioters broke into the Speaker's office, destroying and stealing various items in the process.

Pelosi told USA Today that rioters were "setting out" to hurt her if security had not quickly evacuated her from the House chamber.

A Missouri man pictured holding a broken piece of her nameplate is among those who have been charged over their roles in the breach.

 

Inwardly Wokeness Is A Weapon, Outwardly Wokeness Is A Disguise

greenwald  |  The British spy agency GCHQ is so aggressive, extreme and unconstrained by law or ethics that the NSA — not exactly world renowned for its restraint — often farms out spying activities too scandalous or illegal for the NSA to their eager British counterparts. There is, as the Snowden reporting demonstrated, virtually nothing too deceitful or invasive for the GCHQ. They spy on entire populations, deliberately disseminate fake news, exploit psychological research to control behavior and manipulate public perception, and destroy the reputations, including through the use of sex traps, of anyone deemed adversarial to the British government.

But they want you to know that they absolutely adore gay people. In fact, they love the cause of LGBT equality so very much that, beginning on May 17, 2015 — International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia — they started draping their creepy, UFO-style headquarters in the colors of the rainbow flag. The prior year, in 2014, they had merely raised the rainbow flag in front of their headquarters, but in 2015, they announced, “we wanted to make a bold statement to show the nation we serve how strongly we believe in this.”

Who could possibly be opposed to an institution that offers such noble gestures and works behind such a pretty facade? How bad could the GCHQ really be if they are so deeply committed to the rights of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people? Sure, maybe they go a little overboard with the spying sometimes, and maybe some of their surveillance and disinformation programs are a bit questionable, and they do not necessarily have the highest regard for law, privacy and truth. But we know that, deep down, these are fundamentally good people working within a fundamentally benign institution. Just look at their flamboyant support for this virtuous cause of social justice.

Large corporations have obviously witnessed the success of this tactic — to prettify the face of militarism and imperialism with the costumes of social justice — and are now weaponizing it for themselves. As a result, they are becoming increasingly aggressive in their involvement in partisan and highly politicized debates, always on the side of the same causes of social justice which entities of imperialism and militarism have so effectively co-opted.

Corporations have always sought to control the legislative process and executive branch, usually with much success. They purchase politicians and their power aides by hiring them as lobbyists and consultants when they leave government, and those bought-and-paid-for influence-peddlers then proceed to exploit their connections in Washington or state capitals to ensure that laws are written and regulations enforced (or not enforced) to benefit the corporations’ profit interests. These large corporations achieve the same goal by filling the campaign coffers of politicians from both parties. This is standard, age-old K Street sleaze that allows large corporations to control American democracy at the expense of those who cannot afford to buy this influence.

But they are now going far beyond clandestine corporatist control of the government for their own interests. They are now becoming increasingly powerful participants in highly polarizing and democratic debates. In the wake of the George Floyd killing last summer, it became virtually obligatory for every large corporation to proclaim support for the #BlackLivesMatter agenda even though many, if not most, had never previously evinced the slightest interest in questions of racial justice or policing.

 

There Is Nothing Like Spending A Ton On Wunderwaffen

The Research and Technology Protection Program wants everyone to know that aliens ARE real. The UFO’s on FLIR are totally NOT a subsurface maritime-launched UAV. The US DOESN'T have those, but if they did, the Navy might want to introduce them without breaking the law on special access programs. Hypothetically, such limited hangouts could force adversaries to re-think their combat doctrine, potentially delaying future offensives in the South China Sea.  There is nothing like spending a ton on wunderwaffen to plant a kernel of doubt in your adversaries, and convince yourself that conflict is anything but a crapshoot.

It's Not Supposed To Be Possible For RNA To Modify DNA

The central dogma of molecular biology is “DNA makes RNA makes proteins" but a quick read of this paper says different, and, the data are probably good. Moreover, Richard Young and Rudolf Jaenisch have been pioneers in the later phase of modern molecular biology. Bottomline, you'd have to be a total fooking fool to get injected with any of that mRNA therapeutic goop. Strongly recommend downloading the pdf as the technical Karenwaffen is shitting its anti-vax implication panties about now and agitating for censorship of the paper.

biorxiv  |  Prolonged SARS-CoV-2 RNA shedding and recurrence of PCR-positive tests have been widely reported in patients after recovery, yet these patients most commonly are non-infectious^1–14. Here we investigated the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 RNAs can be reverse-transcribed and integrated into the human genome and that transcription of the integrated sequences might account for PCR-positive tests. In support of this hypothesis, we found chimeric transcripts consisting of viral fused to cellular sequences in published data sets of SARS-CoV-2 infected cultured cells and primary cells of patients, consistent with the transcription of viral sequences integrated into the genome. To experimentally corroborate the possibility of viral retro-integration, we describe evidence that SARS-CoV-2 RNAs can be reverse transcribed in human cells by reverse transcriptase (RT) from LINE-1 elements or by HIV-1 RT, and that these DNA sequences can be integrated into the cell genome and subsequently be transcribed. Human endogenous LINE-1 expression was induced upon SARS-CoV-2 infection or by cytokine exposure in cultured cells, suggesting a molecular mechanism for SARS-CoV-2 retro-integration in patients. This novel feature of SARS-CoV-2 infection may explain why patients can continue to produce viral RNA after recovery and suggests a new aspect of RNA virus replication.

Introduction

Continuous or recurrent positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR tests have been reported in patients weeks or months after recovery from an initial infection^1–14. Although bona fide re-infection of SARS-CoV-2 after recovery has been reported lately¹⁵, cohort-based studies with strict quarantine on subjects recovered from COVID-19 suggested “re-positive” cases were not caused by re-infection^16,17. Furthermore, no replication-competent virus was isolated or spread from these PCR-positive patients^1–3,5,6,12. The cause for such prolonged and recurrent viral RNA production is unknown. As positive-stranded RNA viruses, SARS-CoV-2 and other beta-coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV-1 and MERS employ an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase to replicate their genomic RNA and transcribe their sub-genomic RNAs^18–20. One possibility is that SARS-CoV-2 RNAs could be reverse-transcribed and integrated into the human genome, and transcription of the integrated DNA copies could be responsible for positive PCR tests.

Endogenous reverse transcriptase (RT) activity has been observed in human cells, and the products of reverse transcription have been shown to become integrated into the genome^21,22. For example, APP transcripts have been shown to be reverse-transcribed by endogenous RT, with resultant APP fragments integrated into the genome of neurons and transcribed²². Human LINE-1 elements (~17% of the human genome), a type of autonomous retrotransposons, are a potential source of endogenous RT, able to retro-transpose themselves and other non-autonomous elements such as Alu^21,23.

Results

Expression of viral-cellular chimeric transcripts in infected cultured and in patient-derived cells is consistent with genomic integration of viral sequences

To investigate the possibility of viral integration into virus infected cells we analyzed published RNA-Seq data from SARS-CoV-2-infected cells for evidence of chimeric transcripts, which would be indicative of viral integration into the genome and expression. Examination of these data sets ^24–30 (Fig. S1a-b) revealed a substantial number of host-viral chimeric reads (Fig. 1a-c, S1c). These occurred in multiple sample types, including cells and organoids from lung/heart/brain/stomach tissues, as well as BALF cells directly isolated from COVID-19 patients (Fig. 1c). Chimeric read abundance was positively correlated with viral RNA level across the sample types (Fig. 1c). Chimeric reads generally accounted for 0.004% - 0.14% of total SARS-CoV-2 reads across the samples, with a 69.24% maximal number of reads in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid cells derived from severe COVID19 patients and near no chimeric reads from patient blood buffy coat cells (corresponding to almost no total SARS-CoV-2 reads). A majority of chimeric junctions mapped to SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid (N) sequence (Fig. 1d-e). This is consistent with the finding that nucleocapsid (N) RNA is the most abundant SARS-CoV-2 sub-genomic RNA³¹, and thus is most likely to be a target for reverse transcription and integration. These analyses support the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 RNA may retro-integrate into the genome of infected cells resulting in the production of chimeric viral-cellular transcripts.

 

St. Vincent Evacuation A Vaccine Passport Mic Drop

nakedcapitalism |  As the use of vaccine passports snowballs around the world, concerns about their potential reach and implications are growing.

Vaccine passports (or passes or certificates) are being rushed through around the world, including in places where most people have not even been able to get a vaccine yet. They are being touted as a way of jump-starting the global economy by providing a means for people to prove their vaccinated status, allowing them to travel, shop, go to the gym, attend sporting and cultural events and conduct other indoor activities. Countries like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore have already introduced vaccine passports in the last couple of months.

Of course, the use of the word “passport” is deceptive. “Passport” implies a document endorsed by a state that establishes citizenship and guarantees diplomatic protection. A traditional passport does not require the bearer to participate in a vaccine program, although immunity certificates have existed for diseases such as Yellow Fever. Another difference is that a vaccine passport is likely to come in the form of a digital document. The potential scope of its application is also far broader than that of a normal passport. It could be required not only to establish identity and vaccine status at national borders but also to travel, access public buildings and basic services within one’s own country of residence.

In countries that already have an established national health service, such as the UK and Israel, the vaccine passport has been mandated at state level. In the US tech and health-care companies are firmly in the driving seat. At least 17 alternative programs are currently under development. As for the EU, it has proposed issuing “digital green certificates” that would allow EU residents to travel freely across the 27-nation bloc by the summer as long as they have been vaccinated, tested negative for COVID-19 or recovered from the disease. It’s worth noting that the EU has been studying the feasibility of creating a common EU vaccination card since early 2019.

International Initiatives

There are also initiatives taking place internationally such as the Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group, whose partners include WHO, UNICEF, ITU and the European Commission. The group “is focused on establishing key specifications, standards and a trust framework for a digital vaccination certificate to facilitate implementation of effective and interoperable digital solutions that support COVID-19 vaccine delivery and monitoring, with intended applicability to other vaccines.”

Another initiative is the CommonPass digital health app being developed by the Commons Project Foundation (CPJ), which was founded by the Rockefeller Foundation and is supported by the World Economic Forum. The CommonPass is both a framework and an app that “will allow individuals to access their lab results and vaccination records, and consent to have that information used to validate their COVID status without revealing any other underlying personal health information.”

Then there’s ID2020, a nongovernmental organization that advocates for digital IDs for the billion undocumented people worldwide and under-served groups like refugees. In 2019, ID2020 launched a new digital identity program in collaboration with the government of Bangladesh and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). It is now involved in the Good Health Pass Collaborative, “an open, inclusive, cross-sector initiative, bringing together leading companies and organizations from the technology, health, and travel sectors”.

Pause for Thought

Some of these initiatives are already being piloted by companies, including airlines, and local or regional authorities. All Nippons Airways has started a test of the CommonPass on its flights from Tokyo Haneda to New York. Last week New York unveiled its Excelsior pass, which is based on technology from IBM. Other states are likely to follow suit. France has also just completed a month-long trial of a health passport app for Air France passengers travelling to Martninique and Guadeloupe.

The speed at which these initiatives are being rushed out should give pause for thought. Just as with contact tracing apps, the rollout is haphazard and rife with conflicts of interest. The technology is unproven and the privacy issues are glaring. Below are seven reasons why I believe vaccine passports should worry us. Perhaps you can think of more.

Speaking Of Fools' Errands And Taking Membership Fees From Pissants....,

dailymail  |  Black reporter LOCKED OUT of Twitter for criticizing BLM founder's $1.4 million home purchase blasts big tech for making movement a 'sacred cow despite its financial grift'

• Patrisse Cullors, 37, has bought an expansive property in Topanga Canyon
• The district in which the BLM founder will now live is 88% white and 1.8% black
• Critics accused her of abandoning her social justice and activist roots
• Sports journalist Jason Whitlock was among those remarking on her purchase
• Twitter on Friday locked him out of his account in response to his tweet
• Whitlock told DailyMail.com he remains blocked by the social media network
• Twitter is demanding he delete his tweet linking to a celebrity real estate blog
• Whitlock says he remains 'in Twitter jail, because I won't post bail' 
• The action is the latest draconian step in censorship by the Silicon Valley firm

Have You Discovered The Beginning That Now You Seek The End?

 vanityfair  |  No wonder we’ve entered a new era in Silicon Valley, with the tech elite having their own period of sex, drugs, and rock and roll—often without the rock, the roll, or even the sex. Last year, a number of rich founders began experimenting with microdosing drugs to make it through the day, as two people with knowledge of these habits have told me, by taking tiny amounts of MDMA and LSD, and a long list of psilocybin mushrooms to help take the edge off, but not so much that you’re seeing tie-dyed dolphins or 3D cartoon characters chasing you down Market Street. For Musk, the pressures of being at the top led the board of Tesla to worry about the founder’s use of Ambien to get to sleep each night after the “excruciating” toll running Tesla had taken on him.

Some have even begun building their own microdosing labs, hiring chemists and pharmaceutical scientists to make bespoke batches of hallucinogens to pop like Skittles when reality gets a little too real. During the pandemic, I’ve heard of founders going to far-off places to experiment with ayahuasca, peyote, and the new drug of choice, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a synthetic drug that one person told me was “like doing 10 years of psychotherapy in five minutes.”

Then there’s the body hacking, which first made its way into the mainstream in 1984 by way of the sci-fi subculture novel Neuromancer but has since leapt off the page and into Palo Alto, where everyone seems to want to outdo their cohorts by pushing their bodies to extremes. You’ve got the Dorseys of the world bragging about how little they eat each day, the Zuckerbergs boasting of killing their own food, and an army of nerds now wearing every tracking device imaginable—from rings that follow your sleep to real-time sugar monitoring devices you inject into your arm—and then experimenting with all forms of starvation and sleep habits to show how in control they are of their bodies. There’s intermittent fasting, working under infrared heat lamps, calculating ketones, and working with “DIY surgeons” to implant magnets and microchips.

“I think this is all a result of a complete detachment from authenticity by these tech founders. They present a version of themselves that isn’t real, and then, when they look in the mirror, they see how inauthentic they really are, and the only way they can handle the illusion they’ve created is through drugs,” said one Silicon Valley insider who often spends time with the biohacking-obsessed ultrarich. “It’s all synthetic and it’s all an illusion.” The pandemic only heightened this, with people slipping into more extreme activities in their quest for control.

One Silicon Valley founder who sold his company to Google years ago told me that the year that followed the sale—when he had gone from an average American worrying about paying rent each month to seeing seven zeros at the end of his bank account—was one of the most miserable times of his life. “You think it’s going to solve all these problems,” the founder told me, “but it just creates so many more issues, both psychologically and existentially. You don’t know what to do with yourself anymore.” For Hsieh, the only thing he could do was run away from his demons and the reality in which he found himself imprisoned.

 

Has It Dawned On You Yet Why Google And Microsoft Have Indian CEO's?

buzzfeed  |  For more than a year, India’s government first cut off and then throttled internet access to Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir after unilaterally withdrawing the disputed region’s autonomy. Facebook executives reportedly shielded members of India’s ruling party from the platform’s hate speech rules to protect the company’s business interests. Right-wing trolls have used social media platforms to harass women who they say offended their religious sensibility. Hindu nationalists have repeatedly taken offense to original shows that Netflix and Amazon have produced, claiming that the platforms were offending Hindu gods and promoting “love jihad,” a conspiracy theory that accuses Muslim men of converting Hindu women. In 2020, rioters used Facebook Live to incite violence in Delhi. Last month, India’s government threatened to jail Twitter executives for not complying with an order to block hundreds of accounts, many of which were critical of the government, and Delhi police briefly threw a young climate activist in jail after charging her with sedition for editing a Google Doc.

I love tech. But watching it intersect with a Hindu nationalist government trying to crush dissent, choke a free press, and destroy a nation’s secular ethos doesn’t feel like something I bought a ticket to. Writing about technology from India now feels like having a front-row seat to the country’s rapid slide into authoritarianism. “It’s like watching a train wreck while you’re inside the train,” I Slacked my boss in November.

---

In the physical world, it seemed like things were spiraling out of control. At the end of 2019, protests about the controversial new citizenship law roiled the nation. In January 2020, masked goons unleashed violence at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, whose students and staff are frequently branded by the ruling party as “anti-national.” Soon after, communal riots rocked New Delhi, the city I live in. More than 50 people died. But still, millions of Indians could freely voice their opinions online, at least when the government didn’t shut down their internet.

This February, it felt like the walls finally closed in. In the final week of that month, India’s government imposed draconian rules that gave it the last word over what social media platforms will leave up, what streaming services will show, and what news websites will publish. It might also require messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal to break their encryption so that it can track who texted whom.

Social media companies are now required to take down anything the government deems problematic within three days, and anything that law enforcement is unhappy with within 36 hours. Platforms must also hand over people’s information to law enforcement agencies if they ask for it. If the platforms fail to comply, their local staff can be prosecuted, and companies could lose their protection from being held liable for content that people post.

If anyone in India takes offense to any scene in any show or any movie on any streaming service, they can file a complaint. If a service doesn’t respond or give a satisfactory explanation, the person who complained can appeal to the federal government, which can then compel services to censor, edit, or take down the content.

This Is A Fool's Errand - But That's Not Going To Stop Them From Trying

robbreport |  It might be an exaggeration to say BioViva CEO Liz Parrish believes death is optional, but for her, Asprey’s goal of living to 180 shows a distinct lack of ambition. “If you can reach homeostasis in the body,” Parrish says, “where it’s regenerating itself just a little bit faster than it’s degrading, then what do you die of? An accident or natural disaster, probably. There’s no expiration date at 90 or 100 years old.”

Tall, blond and fit, Parrish cuts a strikingly youthful figure at 49—one that might convince you to order whatever she’s having. But, like Asprey, she has received criticism from the longevity research community for becoming “patient zero” in her own experimental drug trial, aimed at halting aging at the cellular level. In 2015, Parrish underwent telomerase and follistatin gene therapies in Bogotá, Colombia. The procedures involved receiving around a hundred injections of a cocktail of genes and a virus modified to deliver those new genes into her body’s cells. The objective was to prevent age-related muscle loss and lengthen her telomeres: the “caps” at the end of our chromosomes. Scientists have identified their unraveling as not only a marker of aging but also a potential cause of age-related decline.

Parrish told the media about her clandestine experiment and has published periodic updates on her condition in the five years since, and she reports that she has indeed increased her muscle mass and lengthened her telomeres. Parrish’s punk-rock approach stems from her conviction that the medical-research community—both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and researchers who aren’t business-minded—is moving too slowly, with too much red tape, when it comes to advancing aging therapeutics. But gene therapy is a relatively new area of medicine that brings with it a host of new risks, including cancer, severe immune reactions and infections caused by the viral vector used to deliver the drug.

Parrish downplays such worries. “There may be risks,” she tells Robb Report. “But the known risk is that you’re 100 percent likely to die. So you have to decide for yourself if the potential benefit outweighs that.”

Humans have always aspired to find the fountain of youth, so people might be skeptical about the fact that anti-aging technologies are working now,” says British investor and businessman Jim Mellon. “But the fact is that this is finally happening, and we need to seize the moment.” Mellon cofounded Juvenescence, a three-year-old pharmaceutical company that’s investing in multiple technologies simultaneously to increase the odds of bringing winning products to market.

Mellon, 63, has made his fortune betting on well-timed investment opportunities, and he predicts that a new “stock-market mania” for life extension is just around the corner. “This is like the internet dial-up phase of longevity biotech,” he enthuses. “If you’d invested in the internet in the very early days, you’d be one of the richest people on the planet. We’re at that stage now, so the opportunity for investors is huge.” According to a report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, he’s not wrong: The market for technologies to increase human life span is projected to grow sixfold to $610 billion in just the next five years.

 

Culture WAR! What Is The Gentrified Karenwaffen Good For? Absolutely Nothing....,

oftwominds  |  Those who lived through The Cultural Revolution are reticent about revealing their experiences. Even in the privacy of their homes in the U.S., their voices become hushed and their reluctance to give voice to their experiences is evident.

The unifying thread in my view is the accused belonged to some "counter-revolutionary" elite --or they were living vestiges of a pre-revolutionary elite (children of the landlord class, professors, etc.)--and it was now open season on all elites, presumed or real.

What generates such spontaneous, self-organizing violence on a national scale? My conclusion is that cultural revolutions result from the suppression of legitimate political expression and the failure of the regime to meet its lofty idealistic goals.

Cultural revolutions are an expression of disappointment and frustration with corruption and the lack of progress in improving everyday life, frustrations that have no outlet in a regime of self-serving elites who view dissent as treason and/or blasphemy.

By 1966, China's progress since 1949 had been at best uneven, and at worst catastrophic: the Great Leap Forward caused the deaths of millions due to malnutrition and starvation, and other centrally planned programs were equally disastrous for the masses.

Given the quick demise of the Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom movement of open expression, young people realized there was no avenue for dissent within the Party, and no way to express their frustration with the Party's failure to fulfil its idealistic goals and promises.

When there is no relief valve in the pressure cooker, it's eventually released in a Cultural Revolution that unleashes all the bottled-up frustrations on elites which are deemed politically vulnerable. These frustrations have no outlet politically because they're threatening to the status quo.

All these repressed emotions will find some release and expression, and whatever avenues are blocked by authorities will channel the frustrations into whatever is still open.

A Cultural Revolution takes the diversity of individuals and identities and reduces them into an abstraction which gives the masses permission to criticize the abstract class that "deserves" whatever rough justice is being delivered by the Cultural Revolution.

As the book review excerpt noted, the definition of who deserves long overdue justice shifts with the emergent winds, and so those at the head of the Revolution might find themselves identified as an illegitimate elite that must be unseated.

I submit that these conditions exist in the U.S.: the systemic failure of the status quo to deliver on idealized promises and the repression of dissent outside "approved" (i.e. unthreatening to the status quo) boundaries.

What elite can be criticized without drawing the full repressive powers of the central state? What elite will it be politically acceptable to criticize? I submit that "the wealthy" are just such an abstract elite.

To protect itself, a repressive status quo implicitly signals that the masses can release their ire on an abstract elite with indistinct boundaries--a process that will divert the public anger, leaving the Powers That Be still in charge.

But just as in China's Cultural Revolution, central authorities will quickly lose control of conditions on the ground. They will maintain the illusion of control even as events spiral ever farther from their control. The falcon will no longer hear the falconer.