If A Representation Is "A Bid For Power" Then Google Already Rules The World

doxa.substack |  The other point that’s always stressed in the AI Ethics literature, is that in the hands of large, powerful, status-quo-defining entities like Google, there's a feedback loop: the models are released back into the real world, where they tend to reinforce in some way the very status quo that produced them.

This circularity of status quo => model => status quo is well covered in Cathy O'Neil's 2016 book, Weapons of Math Destruction. O'Neill is mostly concerned with the models used by Big Finance, but the principle is exactly the same — models don't just reflect the status quo, they're increasingly critical to perpetuating it. Or, to borrow words from the title of an even earlier book on financial models by Donald MacKenzie, these models are "an engine, not a camera."

Unless I've missed something major, a very big chunk of the AI Ethics work amounts to stating and restating the age-old truth that big, costly, public representations of the regnant social hierarchy are powerful perpetuators of that very hierarchy. That's it. That's the tweet... and the paper... and the conference... and the discipline.

In the formulation of Gebru's paper, large language models (“large” because they’re trained on a massive, unsanitized corpus of texts from the wilds of the internet) re-present, or "parrot," the roblematic linguistic status quo. And in parroting it, they can perpetuate it.

As people in positions of privilege with respect to a society’s racism, misogyny, ableism, etc., tend to be overrepresented in training data for LMs (as discussed in §4 above), this training data thus includes encoded biases, many already recognized as harmful...

In this section, we have discussed how the human tendency to attribute meaning to text, in combination with large LMs’ ability to learn patterns of forms that humans associate with various biases and other harmful attitudes, leads to risks of real-world harm, should LM-generated text be disseminated.1

As someone who trained as an historian, it's not at all surprising to me that what was true of the Roman Colosseum — in everything from the class-stratified seating arrangement to the central spectacle — is also true of a the massively complex and expensive public display of cultural power that is Google's language model.

Control Of The Most Powerful Politicians And Their Regulators Ensures Control By The Regulated

opendemocracy | From France to Australia to the US state of Maryland, the free press is waging a battle for survival against Facebook and Google. Besides being gushing firehoses of COVID-19 and election disinformation and QAnon conspiracies, another of Google and Facebook’s dangerous impacts is undermining the financial stability of media outlets all over the world. Where is the European Commission and the Biden administration in this fight? A lot is at stake, yet so far they have been quiet as church mice.

How do Google and Facebook threaten free press? These two companies alone suck up an astounding 60% of all online advertising in the US. With Amazon taking another 9%, that leaves a mere 30% of digital ad revenue to be split among thousands of media outlets, many of them local publications. With digital online advertising now comprising over half of all ad spending (and projected to grow further), this has greatly contributed to underfunded and failing news industries in country after country, including in Europe and the US.

Australia and Maryland

Australia’s situation is typical. Its competition commission found that, for every $100 spent by online advertisers in Australia, $47 goes to Google and $24 to Facebook,

even as traditional advertising has declined. Various studies have found that the majority of people who access their news online don’t go to the original news source, instead they access it via Facebook’s and Google’s platforms which are cleverly designed to hold users’ attention. Many users rarely click through the links, instead they absorb the gist of the news from the platforms’ headlines and preview blurbs.

Consequently, Facebook and Google receive the lion’s share of revenue from digital ads, rather than the original news sources receiving it. Note that Facebook and Google could tweak their design and algorithms to purposefully drive users to the original news sources’ websites. But they don’t.

So Australia decided to fight this duopoly with some rules of its own. A new law will require large digital media companies to fairly compensate Australian media companies for re-packaging and monetizing their proprietary news content. Media outlets around the world are watching to see how this plays out.

Google initially fought the proposal, but finally negotiated deals with Australian news publishers, beginning with media magnet Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, to pay them some compensation. But Facebook flexed its digital muscles by cutting off Australia entirely from its platform for several days, preventing Aussie news publishers as well as everyday users, including important government agencies like health, fire and crisis services, from posting, viewing or sharing news content.

The result was jarring, the proverbial ‘shot heard ‘round the world’. Facebook censored Australian users more effectively than the Chinese communist government ever could, prompting charges of ‘big tech authoritarianism’. Facebook finally relented to Australia’s requirement, in return for some vague and uncertain concessions. But the message of raw, naked platform power was unmistakably clear.

 

We Don't Even Need To Pretend Google Had To Show Obama His Location, Search, Or Browsing Histories

politico |  Few moments in the power struggle between Washington and Silicon Valley have inspired more anger and bafflement than one in January 2013, when antitrust regulators appointed by former President Barack Obama declined to sue Google.

The decision still rankles the company’s rivals, who have watched the search giant continue to amass power over smartphones, data-hoovering devices and wide swaths of the internet, unimpeded by laws meant to deter monopolies. It has fueled some lawmakers’ calls to overhaul the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that spent 19 months investigating Google’s efforts to overpower the competition — and critics say, blinked. 

The commission has never disclosed the full scope of its probe nor explained all its reasons for letting Google’s behavior slide.

But 312 pages of confidential internal memos obtained by POLITICO reveal what the FTC’s lawyers and economics experts were thinking — including assumptions that were contradictory at the time and many that turned out to be incorrect about the internet’s future, Google’s efforts to dominate it and the harm its rivals said they were suffering from the company’s actions. The memos show that at a crucial moment when Washington’s regulators might have had a chance to stem the growth of tech’s biggest giants, preventing a handful of trillion-dollar corporations from dominating a rising share of the economy, they misread the evidence in front of them and left much of the digital future in Google’s hands.

The documents also add to doubts about whether Washington is any more capable today of reining in the tech industry’s titans, despite efforts by a new generation of antitrust enforcers to turn up the heat on Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon — all of which now rank among the United States’ wealthiest companies. That will be a crucial test awaiting President Joe Biden’s regulators, including the outspoken Silicon Valley critic he plans to nominate to an open slot on the FTC’s five-person board.

Nearly a decade ago, the documents show, the FTC’s investigators uncovered evidence of how far Google was willing to go to ensure the primacy of the search engine that is the key to its fortunes, including tactics that European regulators and the U.S. Justice Department would later label antitrust violations. But the FTC’s economists successfully argued against suing the company, and the agency’s staff experts made a series of predictions that would fail to match where the online world was headed:

— They saw only “limited potential for growth” in ads that track users across the web — now the backbone of Google parent company Alphabet's $182.5 billion in annual revenue.

 

 

The Unrivaled Power Of Google's Coalition Of The Connected

newsweek |  In this extract from When Google Met WikiLeaks Assange describes his encounter with Schmidt and how he came to conclude that it was far from an innocent exchange of views.

Eric Schmidt is an influential figure, even among the parade of powerful characters with whom I have had to cross paths since I founded WikiLeaks. In mid-May 2011 I was under house arrest in rural Norfolk, England, about three hours' drive northeast of London. The crackdown against our work was in full swing and every wasted moment seemed like an eternity. It was hard to get my attention.

But when my colleague Joseph Farrell told me the executive chairman of Google wanted to make an appointment with me, I was listening.

In some ways the higher echelons of Google seemed more distant and obscure to me than the halls of Washington. We had been locking horns with senior U.S. officials for years by that point. The mystique had worn off. But the power centers growing up in Silicon Valley were still opaque and I was suddenly conscious of an opportunity to understand and influence what was becoming the most influential company on earth. Schmidt had taken over as CEO of Google in 2001 and built it into an empire.

I was intrigued that the mountain would come to Muhammad. But it was not until well after Schmidt and his companions had been and gone that I came to understand who had really visited me.

The stated reason for the visit was a book. Schmidt was penning a treatise with Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, an outfit that describes itself as Google's in-house "think/do tank."

I knew little else about Cohen at the time. In fact, Cohen had moved to Google from the U.S. State Department in 2010. He had been a fast-talking "Generation Y" ideas man at State under two U.S. administrations, a courtier from the world of policy think tanks and institutes, poached in his early twenties.

He became a senior advisor for Secretaries of State Rice and Clinton. At State, on the Policy Planning Staff, Cohen was soon christened "Condi's party-starter," channeling buzzwords from Silicon Valley into U.S. policy circles and producing delightful rhetorical concoctions such as "Public Diplomacy 2.0." On his Council on Foreign Relations adjunct staff page he listed his expertise as "terrorism; radicalization; impact of connection technologies on 21st century statecraft; Iran."

It was Cohen who, while he was still at the Department of State, was said to have emailed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to delay scheduled maintenance in order to assist the aborted 2009 uprising in Iran. His documented love affair with Google began the same year when he befriended Eric Schmidt as they together surveyed the post-occupation wreckage of Baghdad. Just months later, Schmidt re-created Cohen's natural habitat within Google itself by engineering a "think/do tank" based in New York and appointing Cohen as its head. Google Ideas was born.

Later that year two co-wrote a policy piece for the Council on Foreign Relations' journal Foreign Affairs, praising the reformative potential of Silicon Valley technologies as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Describing what they called "coalitions of the connected," Schmidt and Cohen claimed that:

Democratic states that have built coalitions of their militaries have the capacity to do the same with their connection technologies.…

They offer a new way to exercise the duty to protect citizens around the world [emphasis added].

 

 

 

If You Think Property Rights ARE Human Rights - You Are A Conservative

"If you think human rights are more important than property rights, you're not a conservative. If you think property rights ARE human rights, you are a conservative."

And second, Frank Wilhoit's: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition…There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

oxforduniversitypress |  Late in life, William F. Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is "boring," said the founding father of the American right. "Devoting your life to it," as conservatives do, "is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." With this unlikely conversation began Robin's decade-long foray into the conservative mind. What is conservatism, and what's truly at stake for its proponents? If capitalism bores them, what excites them?

As @CoreyRobin described in THE REACTIONARY MIND, that is the single factor that unites all the strains of conservativism, from Dominionism to Libertarianism to Monarchism to Imperalism: some are born to rule, others, to be ruled over.https://t.co/17jf9MVW8q

5/

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 16, 2021

In The Reactionary Mind, Robin traces conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution. He argues that the right was inspired, and is still united, by its hostility to emancipating the lower orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market; others oppose it. Some criticize the state; others celebrate it. Underlying these differences is the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality -- while simultaneously making populist appeals to the masses. Despite their opposition to these movements, conservatives favor a dynamic conception of politics and society -- one that involves self-transformation, violence, and war. They are also highly adaptive to new challenges and circumstances. This partiality to violence and capacity for reinvention have been critical to their success.

Written by a highly-regarded, keen observer of the contemporary political scene, The Reactionary Mind ranges widely, from Edmund Burke to Antonin Scalia and Donald Trump, and from John C. Calhoun to Ayn Rand. It advances the notion that all right-wing ideologies, from the eighteenth century through today, are improvisations on a theme: the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back. When its first edition appeared in 2011, The Reactionary Mind set off a fierce debate. It has since been acclaimed as "the book that predicted Trump" (New Yorker) and "one of the more influential political works of the last decade" (Washington Monthly). Now updated to include Trump's election and his first one hundred days in office, The Reactionary Mind is more relevant than ever.

Native Conquest And African Enslavement Foundational To U.S. Property Law

ssrn |  This article demonstrates that the histories of conquest and slavement are foundational to U.S. property law. Over centuries, laws and legal institutions facilitated the production of the two commodities, or forms of property, upon which the colonial economy and the United States came to depend above all others: enclosures of Native nations’ land and enslaved people. By describing the role of property law in creating markets for lands and people, this article addresses the gap between the marginal place of these histories in the contemporary property law canon and the growing scholarly and popular recognition that conquest and enslavement were primary modes of property formation in American history.

First, this article describes how the field of property law has come to omit these histories from its common understanding of what is basic to its subject by examining property law casebooks published over 130 years. For most of their history, it shows, such casebooks affirmed the racial logic of conquest and slavery and contributed to these histories’ suppression in pedagogical materials. Early treatises avowed the foundational nature of conquest, but after the first property law casebook appeared, at the time of the close of the frontier, casebooks for more than half a century emphasized English inheritance, rather than acknowledging colonization’s formative impact on the property system. In the same period, the era of Jim Crow, casebooks continued to include many cases involving the illegal, obsolete form of property in enslaved people; when they ceased to do so, they replaced them with cases on racially restrictive covenants upholding segregation. After several decades, during which the histories of conquest and slavery were wholly erased, casebooks in the 1970s began to examine these histories through a critical lens for the first time. However, the project of understanding their consequences for the property system has remained only partial and highly inconsistent.

The central part of this article focuses on the acquisition of property, which, properly understood, comprises the histories of conquest, slavery, expropriation, and property creation in America. It examines the three main theories of acquisition—discovery, labor and possession-- beginning with the United States’ adoption of the Discovery Doctrine, the international law of conquest, as the legal basis of its sovereignty and property laws. In this context, it shows that the operative principle of the doctrine was not that of first-in-time, as commonly taught, but the agreement of European nations on a global racial hierarchy. Second, it turns to the labor theory, which was selectively applied according to the hierarchy of discovery, and firmly linked ideologies about non-whites and property value. It then reframes the labor theory’s central question—property creation—as a matter of legal and institutional innovation, rather than merely agricultural labor. It examines the correlation between historical production of property value in the colonies to show how the main elements of the Angloamerican land system developed through the dispossession of nonwhites-- the rectangular survey, the comprehensive title registry, headrights and the homesteading principle, laws that racialized the condition of enslavement to create property in human beings, and easy mortgage foreclosure, which facilitated the trade of human beings and land as chattel to increase colonists’ wealth. Third, it assesses how the state organized the tremendous force required to subvert others’ possession of their lands and selves, using the examples of the strategy of conquest by settlement and the freedom quests that gave rise to the fugitive slave controversy. Its analysis highlights the state’s delegation of violence and dispossession to private actors invested in the racial hierarchy of property through the use of incentives structured by law.

This article concludes by summarizing how the laws that governed conquest and slavery established property laws, practices, and institutions that laid the groundwork for transformations to interests in land after the abolition of slavery, which I will address in a future companion article. This article aims throughout to offer a framework for integrating the study of English doctrines regulating relations between neighbors-- the traditional focus of a property law course—into an exploration of the unique fruits of the colonial experiment -- the singular American land system that underpins its real estate market and its structural reliance on racial violence to produce value.

Not All First Language Speakers Trust Gates And Fauci's Forked Tongues

NYTimes |  The coronavirus has been particularly devastating for Indigenous communities. It has killed American Indians and Alaska Natives at nearly twice the rate of white people, and inflicted a cultural crisis by killing the elders who pass down language and traditional teachings. The economic toll of the pandemic has pummeled Native economies already racked by high poverty and unemployment.

The vaccine rollout in Native communities has been a surprising source of strength, especially as vaccinations of other communities, such as Black and Hispanic Americans, continue to lag behind white populations.

Working through the Indian Health Service and long-established networks of tribally run clinics, tribes are outpacing much of the country, already giving shots to healthy adults and eligible teenagers. Some have even thrown open the doors to nontribal members inside their borders.

In all, about 1.1 million vaccines have been distributed through the Indian Health Service and 670,000 have been administered. Still, health care advocates said frustrating gaps remained. Many Indigenous people in big cities and areas without tribal health centers had struggled to find vaccines.

Now, Native health workers are desperately hoping to get through to people like Nora Birdtail, 64, one of a shrinking number of Cherokee-speaking elders. Their names are marked down in a leather notebook that was created to inscribe their importance to Cherokee heritage and culture. Today, the notebook is a register of loss — of at least 35 lives and numberless stories cut short by the virus.

Even as hundreds of elders got vaccinated, Ms. Birdtail resisted. She is vulnerable to the coronavirus from a stroke. Her job as a teacher’s aide brings her into close contact with children at the Cherokee Immersion School, where in-person classes are expected to resume soon.

But Ms. Birdtail is scared of getting vaccinated, largely because she once passed out after getting a penicillin shot years ago. The government’s legacy of medical malpractice in Indian Country — a history of coercive treatments, shoddy care, forced sterilizations and more — has also instilled a deep skepticism about taking a government-supported vaccine.

“It made me think back to the Trail of Tears, how they all got sick,” Ms. Birdtail said. “I don’t trust it.”

 

 

Trust Fauci? Demonized Trump Supporters Will Never Voluntarily Submit To Phase 3 Human Experimentation...,

nbcnews |  Vaccine holdouts could end up being the last obstacle to defeating the pandemic, and a growing effort is aimed at convincing one substantial group of skeptics: Republicans.

While efforts to combat vaccine hesitancy and access have so far been mostly focused on African Americans and Latinos, recent polls suggest the largest group of Americans either hesitant about the Covid-19 vaccine or outright opposed to it are Republicans, and efforts to reach them are only in their infancy.

Success convincing skeptical conservatives could be the difference between the United States reaching herd immunity or not. That's why a group of Republican pollsters and politicians, plus the White House, are all already working on getting the skeptics on board.

Messages targeted at minority groups were overt and discussion of hesitancy among people of color was clear. But when it comes to targeting a partisan population, appearing overtly political opens up new risks and could backfire, those working on the efforts warn.

"Vaccines are our only way out of this. If we don't have 80-plus percent of the population vaccinated before next winter, this virus is going to come back raging," Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee, told NBC News. "What worries me is if 25 percent of Republicans say they won't get vaccinated, that's going to be hard to do."

It's simple math.

Last week, a Monmouth University poll found that 56 percent of Republicans either wanted to wait and see further before getting a vaccine or said they will likely never get one, compared to just 23 percent of Democrats. Another poll, from NPR/PBS/Marist, found that 47 percent of Trump voters and 41 percent of Republicans said they will not get the vaccine when made available to them. And a Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll found the number of Republicans refusing to get the vaccine was 28 percent, while the number of Black Americans and Hispanic Americans who felt that stood at 14 percent and 12 percent respectively.

Together, those groups could leave around a quarter or more of the American population unvaccinated, while scientists now estimate herd immunity will only be reached when 70 to 85 percent of the population carry the virus's antibodies.

"You can't afford to not try to address that," Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said in an interview.

 

Trust The Experts: According To The Original Plan, We've Got 6 More Months Of Lockdown To Go...,

AIER  |  One year ago, between March 13 and 16, 2020, began what most of us would agree were the most difficult days of our lives. We thought our rights and liberties were more or less secure or could only be hobbled on the margin. We took certain things for granted, such as that our governments would not – and could not – order us to stay home, close most businesses and schools, shut down travel, padlock churches and concert halls, cancel events, much less lock down society in the name of virus control. 

This not-yet-released HHS report on COVID-19 projects an 18-month-long tsunami of nationwide disease and death. The Trump administration could’ve stemmed the tide but looked the other way until it was too late. If he had an ounce of decency, he’d resign. https://t.co/TA8iorcwW5

— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) March 18, 2020

All that changed with a federal document issued March 13, 2020, and declassified three months later. It was the lockdown guidelines. Over the following days, governors panicked. People panicked. Bureaucrats were unleashed. All the powers of the state at all levels of society were deployed not on the virus but on the people, which is all that governments can really control. The lockdowns were nearly universal, implemented around the world but for a few holdouts, one of which was in the US (South Dakota). 

A year later, most states are opening up while those still clinging to lockdowns can no longer control people. Regardless of warnings from the top that going back to normal life is too dangerous, most people have decided to be done with the whole dreadful episode. 

All year we’ve asked ourselves the question: why did this happen? Pathogens are part of life now and always have been. For the better part of a century, social and economic outcomes from new viruses were ever less disruptive. Public health had a settled consensus that disease is something to mitigate through doctor-patient relationships. Taking away people’s rights was out of the question. The last time that was tried in very limited ways in 1918 demonstrated that coercion only distracts, divides, and delays. This is why lockdowns were not attempted for another hundred years. Wisely so. 

In the severe pandemic of 1957-58, officials explicitly said: ‘‘[T]here is no practical advantage in the closing of schools or the curtailment of public gatherings as it relates to the spread of this disease.’’ It was the same in 1968-69, 2006, 2009, and 2012-13. 

Then came 2020 and SARS-CoV-2. The 24-hour news cycle and social media kicked in. Shocking images from China – people dropping dead in streets, police dragging people out of their homes or otherwise sealing whole apartment units – were blasted onto cellphones the world over. Then a part of Italy seemed to erupt. To many, it felt like a plague, and a primitive disease panic took over political culture.

Virus Variants Developed In Those With Compromised Immune Systems

NYTimes |  Growing evidence suggests that people with cancer and other conditions that challenge their immune systems may be incubators of mutant viruses.

The version of the coronavirus that surfaced in Britain late last year was shocking for many reasons. It came just as vaccines had offered a glimpse of the end of the pandemic, threatening to dash those hopes. It was far more contagious than earlier variants, leading to a swift increase in hospitalizations. And perhaps most surprising to scientists: It had amassed a large constellation of mutations seemingly overnight.

A coronavirus typically gains mutations on a slow-but-steady pace of about two per month. But this variant, called B.1.1.7, had acquired 23 mutations that were not on the virus first identified in China. And 17 of those had developed all at once, sometime after it diverged from its most recent ancestor.

Experts said there’s only one good hypothesis for how this happened: At some point the virus must have infected someone with a weak immune system, allowing it to adapt and evolve for months inside the person’s body before being transmitted to others. “It appears to be the most likely explanation,” said Dr. Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge.

If true, the idea has implications for vaccination programs, particularly in countries that have not yet begun to immunize their populations. People with compromised immune systems — such as cancer patients — should be among the first to be vaccinated, said Dr. Adam Lauring, a virologist and infectious disease physician at the University of Michigan. The faster that group is protected, the lower the risk that their bodies turn into incubators for the world’s next supercharged mutant.

 

Mass Human Experimentation Yields: Genetic "Vaccine", Contact Tracing, Molecular Drug Discovery

theconversation |  DNA and mRNA vaccines offer huge advantages over traditional types of vaccines, since they use only genetic code from a pathogen – rather than the entire virus or bacteria. Traditional vaccines take months, if not years, to develop. In contrast, once scientists get the genetic sequence of a new pathogen, they can design a DNA or mRNA vaccine in days, identify a lead candidate for clinical trials within weeks and have millions of doses manufactured within months. This is basically what happened with the coronavirus.

During the pandemic, researchers have taken full advantage of the proliferation of smartwatches, smart rings and other wearable health and wellness technology. These devices can measure a person’s temperature, heart rate, level of activity and other biometrics. With this information, researchers have been able to track and detect COVID-19 infections even before people notice they have any symptoms.

Proteins are the molecular machines that make your cells function. When proteins malfunction or are hijacked by a pathogen, you often get disease. Most drugs work by disrupting the action of one or several of these malfunctioning or hijacked proteins. So a logical way to look for new drugs to treat a specific disease is to study individual genes and proteins that are directly affected by that disease. For example, researchers know that the BRCA gene – a gene that protects your DNA from being damaged – is closely related to the development of breast and ovarian cancer. So a lot of work has focused on finding drugs that affect the function of the BRCA protein.

Oh Hell GNAW!!!! Trump Should Give Fauci And The Establishment His Short, Stubby, Middle-Finger

dailymail  | Dr Fauci tells Trump he could be a 'game changer' in the fight against COVID if he tells his supporters to get the vaccine after HALF of Republican men said they will not get the shot

• Asked whether Trump should speak to his supporters directly, given the recent poll numbers, Fauci said: 'I think it would make all the difference in the world'
• Trump, Fauci said, 'is a such a strongly popular person...it would be very helpful' 
• The government's top infectious disease expert said politics needs to be separated from 'commonsense, no-brainer' public health measures
• Trump did tell supporters at CPAC last month to 'go get your shot' 
• The other living former U.S. presidents are set to appear in two public service announcements for the vaccine alongside their wives, without Trump
• Joe Biden and other political leaders received their shots publicly to encourage Americans to get vaccinated; Trump was vaccinated privately in January

Dr Anthony Fauci has said 'wildly popular' Donald Trump could be a 'game changer' if he tells his supporters to get the COVID-19 vaccine.  

Almost half of Republican men say they will not get the vaccine when it is available to them compared with just six percent of Democrat men, according to a new poll.

Asked whether Trump should speak to his supporters directly, given those numbers, Fauci told Fox News: 'I think it would make all the difference in the world.' 

Trump, Fauci said, 'is a such a strongly popular person...it would be very helpful for the effort for that to happen.'

Fauci added: 'If he came out and said, "Go and get vaccinated. It´s really important for your health, the health of your family and the health of the country," it seems absolutely inevitable that the vast majority of people who are his close followers would listen to him.

'I think it would make all the difference in the world. He’s a very wildly popular person among Republicans.' 

Though it wasn't publicized at the time, Trump and First Lady Melania Trump got the vaccine in January before they left the White House, a Trump adviser told DailyMail.com in February. 

In a round of interviews on the morning news shows, the government's top infectious disease expert said politics needs to be separated from 'commonsense, no-brainer' public health measures.

As Far As Covid Goes - States Without Lockdowns Fared No Worse Than States With Draconian Lockdowns

AP  |  Nearly a year after California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered the nation’s first statewide shutdown because of the coronavirus, masks remain mandated, indoor dining and other activities are significantly limited, and Disneyland remains closed.

By contrast, Florida has no statewide restrictions. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has prohibited municipalities from fining people who refuse to wear masks. And Disney World has been open since July.

Despite their differing approaches, California and Florida have experienced almost identical outcomes in COVID-19 case rates.

How have two states that took such divergent tacks arrived at similar points?

“This is going to be an important question that we have to ask ourselves: What public health measures actually were the most impactful, and which ones had negligible effect or backfired by driving behavior underground?” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Though research has found that mask mandates and limits on group activities such as indoor dining can help slow the spread of the coronavirus, states with greater government-imposed restrictions have not always fared better than those without them.

California and Florida both have a COVID-19 case rate of around 8,900 per 100,000 residents since the pandemic began, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And both rank in the middle among states for COVID-19 death rates — Florida was 27th as of Friday; California was 28th.

Connecticut and South Dakota are another example. Both rank among the 10 worst states for COVID-19 death rates. Yet Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, imposed numerous statewide restrictions over the past year after an early surge in deaths, while South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, issued no mandates as virus deaths soared in the fall.

While Lamont ordered quarantines for certain out-of-state visitors, Noem launched a $5 million tourism advertising campaign and welcomed people to a massive motorcycle rally, which some health experts said spread the coronavirus throughout the Midwest.

Both contend their approach is the best.

“Even in a pandemic, public health policy needs to take into account people’s economic and social well-being,” Noem said during a recent conservative convention.

 

"Put Trust And Faith In Our Government" - Commander Cornpop Got Jokes....,

abcnews |   "Look, we know what we need to do to beat this virus. Tell the truth. Follow the scientists and the science. Work together. Put trust and faith in our government to fulfill its most important function, which is protecting the American people. No function more important. We need to remember the government isn't some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it's us. All of us. We, the people.

In the coming weeks, we will issue further guidance on what you can and cannot do once fully vaccinated to lessen the confusion, to keep people safe, and encourage more people to get vaccinated. And, finally, fifth, and maybe most importantly, I promise I will do everything in my power. I will not relent until we beat this virus.

"But I need you, the American people. I need you. I need every American to do their part. And that's not hyperbole. I need you. I need you to get vaccinated when it's your turn and when you can find an opportunity. And to help your family, your friends, your neighbors get vaccinated as well. Because here's the point.

"If we do all this, if we do our part, if we do this together, by July the 4, there's a good chance you, your families and friends, will be able to get together in your backyard or in your neighborhood and have a cookout or a barbecue and celebrate Independence Day. That doesn't mean large events with lots of people together, but it does mean small groups will be able to get together.

 

Soon, Essential Work Will Include Reporting Your Thought Crimes To The Reality Police...,

consentfactory  |  So, we’re almost a year into the “New Normal” (a/k/a “pathologized totalitarianism”) and things are still looking … well, pretty totalitarian.

Most of Western Europe is still in “lockdown,” or “under curfew,” or in some other state of “health emergency.” Police are fining and arresting people for “being outdoors without a valid reason.” Protest is still banned. Dissent is still censored. The official propaganda is relentless. Governments are ruling by edict, subjecting people to an ever-changing series of increasingly absurd restrictions of the most fundamental aspects of everyday life.

And now, the campaign to “vaccinate” the entirety of humanity against a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms or, more commonly, no symptoms at all, in over 95% of those infected, and that over 99% of the infected survive (and that has no real effect on age-adjusted death rates, and the mortality profile of which is more or less identical to the normal mortality profile) is being waged with literally religious fervor.

“Vaccine passports” (which are definitely creepy, but which bear no resemblance to Aryan Ancestry Certificates, or any other fascistic apartheid-type documents, so don’t even think about making such a comparison!) are in the pipeline in a number of countries. They have already been rolled out in Israel.

In other words, as predicted by us “conspiracy theorists,” the “temporary emergency public health measures” implemented by GloboCap in March of 2020 are still very much in effect, and then some. That said, as you have probably noticed, the tenor of things is shifting a bit, which is unsurprising, as GloboCap is now making the transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2 of the “New Normal” roll-out.

Phase 1 was pretty much classic “shock and awe.” An “apocalyptic virus” was “discovered.” A global “state of emergency” was declared. Constitutional rights were cancelled. Soldiers, police, surveillance cameras, military drones, and robot dogs were deployed to implement the worldwide police state. The masses were bombarded with official propaganda, photos of people dropping dead in the street, unconscious patients dying in agony, bodies being stuffed into makeshift morgue trucks, hospital ships, ICU horror stories, projections of hundreds of millions of deaths, terror-inducing Orwellian slogans, sentimental “war effort” billboards, and so on. The full force of the most formidable Goebbelsian propaganda machine in history was unleashed on the public all at once. (See, e.g., CNN, NPR, CNBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Forbes, and other “authoritative” sources like the IMF and the World Bank Group, the WEF, UN, WHO, CDC.)

But the “shock and awe” phase can’t go on forever, nor is it ever intended to. Its purpose is (a) to terrorize the targeted masses into a state of submission, (b) to irreversibly destabilize their society, so that it can be radically “restructured,” and (c) to convincingly demonstrate an overwhelming superiority of force, so that resistance is rendered inconceivable. This shock and awe (or “rapid dominance”) tactic has been deployed by empires, and aspiring empires, throughout the course of military history. It has just been deployed by GloboCap against … well, against the entire world. And now, that phase is coming to an end.

 

Conspiracy Deniers Are Developmentally-Arrested Infants

reportingforbeauty |   To anyone in the habit of dismissing people who are questioning, investigative and sceptical as tin foil hat wearing, paranoid, science-denying Trump supporters, the question is: what do you believe in? Where have you placed your faith and why? How is it that while no one trusts governments, you appear to trust nascent global governance organisations without question? How is this rational? If you are placing faith in such organisations, consider that in the modern global age, these organisations, as extraordinarily well presented as they are, are simply grander manifestations of the local versions we know we can't trust. They are not our parents and demonstrate no loyalty to humane values. There is no reason to place any faith whatsoever in any of them. If you haven't consciously developed a faith or questioned why you believe as you do to some depth, such a position might seem misanthropic, but in truth, it is the opposite. These organisations have not earned your trust with anything other than PR money and glossy lies. True power remains, as ever, with the people.

There is a reason why Buddhists strongly advise the placing of one's faith in the Dharma, or the natural law of life, rather than in persons, and that similar refrains are common in other belief systems. Power corrupts. And, in the world today, misplaced and unfounded trust could well be one of the greatest sources of power there is.

Massive criminal conspiracies exist. The evidence is overwhelming. The scope of those currently underway is unknown, but there is no reason to imagine, in the new global age, that the sociopathic quest for power or the possession of the resources required to move towards it is diminishing. Certainly not while dissent is mocked and censored into silence by gatekeepers, ‘useful idiots’, and conspiracy deniers, who are, in fact, directly colluding with the sociopathic agenda through their unrelenting attack on those who would shine a light on wrongdoing. It is every humane being's urgent responsibility to expose sociopathic agendas wherever they exist - never to attack those who seek to do so. Now, more than ever, it is time to put away childish things, and childish impulses, and to stand up as adults to protect the future of the actual children who have no choice but to trust us with their lives.

This essay has focussed on what I consider to be the deepest psychological driver of conspiracy denial. There are certainly others, such as the desire to be accepted; the avoidance of knowledge of, and engagement with, the internal and external shadow; the preservation of a positive and righteous self-image: a generalised version of the 'flying monkey' phenomenon, in which a self-interested and vicious class protect themselves by coalescing around the bully; the subtle unconscious adoption of the sociopathic worldview (e.g. 'humanity is the virus'); outrage addiction/ superiority complex/ status games; a stunted or unambitious intellect that finds validation through maintaining the status quo; the dissociative protective mechanism of imagining that crimes and horrors committed repeatedly within our lifetime are somehow not happening now, not 'here'; and plain old fashioned laziness and cowardice. My suggestion is that, to some degree, all of these build on the foundation of the primary cause I've outlined here.

James Corbett And Whitney Webb About To Be Defunded And Deplatformed...,

off-guardian |  James Corbett is likely not long for the YouTube world, having received his second warning his channel is on the chopping block.

There are still many platforms on which you can follow his work (detailed in the above video), most importantly his website. We do suggest you subscribe either via email or RSS. (Also here is a list of Corbett’s videos that YouTube has already removed).

For creators out there, this is a timely reminder: ALWAYS have hardcopy back-ups of your work and sign up to multiple platforms. The indy platforms are growing in both number and size. From BitChute to LBRY.tv to social networks like Gab and Parler.

Corbett is not the only independent media facing increased censorship and denial of service. Whitney Webb, a great independent researcher and journalist who has written for many outlets and runs UnlimitedHangout.com, is also in danger of having her Patreon shut down.

Likewise, in just the last few weeks, The Last American Vagabond has had both its twitter shut down and its Patreon put “on review”.

Worrying signs. It looks like we might be in for a spring cull of the alternate media herd. Rest assured, we at OffG are already looking into alternate options, should Patreon (or PayPal) decide we are also persona non grata.

Marvelous Marvin Hagler Killed By mRNA Jab (But Not According To Google Or MSM)

worldboxingnews |  Former middleweight rival Thomas Hearns has claimed Marvin Hagler’s death at the age of 66 was linked to the coronavirus vaccine he received recently. 

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A post shared by Thomas Hearns (@thomashitmanhearns)

Hearns, known as ‘The Hitman’ during his career, took to social media to report that Hagler was ‘fighting for his life in the ICU’ on Saturday. The ex-boxer also added that Hagler was there due to the ‘after-effects of the vaccine.’ 

In a sad final statement, Hearns said he believed ‘he’ll be just fine, but we could use the positive energy and Prayer for his full recovery.’ Sadly, that didn’t happen, and Hagler passed away a short time later. 

Hearns’ revelation will be a massive blow to the continued roll-out of the vaccination program. Reports in Europe of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine causing blood clots in three patients already dealt a debilitating thud as countries have paused using the UK-based jab. Social media conspiracy theories have gone into overdrive, and there will be some work to be done to assure those taking the vaccine that it’s safe.

Journalism Is Publishing What Someone Else Doesn't Want Reported, The Rest Is Public Relations....,

greenwald |  As it turns out, we did not have to wait long for the initiation of the censorship campaign aimed at Substack. It has arrived. And amazingly, the trigger for it was my criticism of the work of a front-page New York Times reporter which, as I wrote yesterday, is — like all criticisms of journalists in Good Standing and Decent Liberal Society — being recast as “abuse” and “harassment” and “violence” in order to justify the banning and outlawing of that criticism.

A long-time tech reporter at BuzzFeed who was fired by that outlet in June for serial plagiarism, Ryan Broderick, wrote an article on Wednesday night warning that Substack is now dangerously providing a platform to a “cadre of writers” which, in addition to me, includes such societal menaces as “Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, Jesse Singal, and, I’d argue, Slate Star Codex writer Scott Alexander Siskind.” He darkly notes: “There are more.” This group of writers, he says, is “focusing on culture war Twitter drama about being ‘canceled’ and trans people in bathrooms and woke college students.”

Broderick detailed how he had carefully reviewed a prior article of mine, one that examined the emergence of “tattletale culture” in the country’s largest corporate media outlets, to determine — like the good little diligent junior-high hall monitor that he is — whether it ran afoul of Substack’s terms of service rules against “doxing” and “harassment.”

That article of mine was devoted to a critique of the prevailing journalistic practices at the most powerful and influential media corporations on the planet: The New York Times, CNN, and NBC News. But to Broderick, whether that article should be banned on the grounds of harassment is a close call. While reluctantly conceding that I did not “dox” anyone, he called the article “a vicious screed” and said that the danger signs from my critiques of corporate journalists are clear: “online harassment is a constantly evolving process of boundary testing.” He lamented that Substack’s terms of service are too permissive (“One thing that worried me was how simplistic their definition of harassment was”) and insisted that Substack is soon going to have to step in and put a stop to this:

Right now most of the abuse being carried out by this group is confined to Twitter, but it stands to reason that it will eventually spill over to Substack. And dealing with people like Greenwald is going to be much harder to moderate than your average troll.

[Please permit me to pause here just a moment and marvel at the towering irony that a journalist who spent years at BuzzFeed doing absolutely nothing of value and then got fired for serial plagiarism (again: he got fired for ethical breaches by BuzzFeed) is now, with a straight face, holding himself out as the Guardian and Defender of Real Journalism. Even more amazingly, he believes he is fulfilling that role by demanding that I — not a journalist but just a “troll” who is the enemy of Real Journalism despite having more impactful scoops and journalism awards and, as I detailed yesterday, resulting persecution campaigns from governments than all of these petulant fragile babies combined — be silenced in the name of saving journalism and protecting real reporters like him and his friends from harassment].

In case Broderick’s article was not explicit enough in his demand that Substack start censoring me and others, he took to Twitter to promote his article, where he made that even clearer. He described his article this way: “I wrote about the attacks against @TaylorLorenz and the growing community of right-wing culture warriors and TERFs that are using Substack to network and organize.”

If Corporate Media Hits You It's Journalism, If You Hit Them Back, It's VIOLENCE!!!

greenwald |  The most powerful and influential newspaper in the U.S., arguably the West, is The New York Times. Journalists who write for it, especially those whose work is featured on its front page or in its op-ed section, wield immense power to shape public discourse, influence thought, set the political agenda for the planet’s most powerful nation, expose injustices, or ruin the lives of public figures and private citizens alike. That is an enormous amount of power in the hands of one media institution and its employees. That’s why it calls itself the Paper of Record.

One of the Paper of Record’s star reporters, Taylor Lorenz, has been much discussed of late. That is so for three reasons. The first is that the thirty-six-year-old tech and culture reporter has helped innovate a new kind of reportorial beat that seems to have a couple of purposes. She publishes articles exploring in great detail the online culture of teenagers and very young adults, which, as a father of two young Tik-Tok-using children, I have found occasionally and mildly interesting. She also seeks to catch famous and non-famous people alike using bad words or being in close digital proximity to bad people so that she can alert the rest of the world to these important findings. It is natural that journalists who pioneer a new form of reporting this way are going to be discussed.

The second reason Lorenz is the topic of recent discussion is that she has been repeatedly caught fabricating claims about influential people, and attempting to ruin the reputations and lives of decidedly non-famous people. In the last six weeks alone, she twice publicly lied about Netscape founder Marc Andreessen: once claiming he used the word “retarded” in a Clubhouse room in which she was lurking (he had not) and then accusing him of plotting with a white nationalist in a different Clubhouse room to attack her (he, in fact, had said nothing).  

She also often uses her large, powerful public platform to malign private citizens without any power or public standing by accusing them of harboring bad beliefs and/or associating with others who do. (She is currently being sued by a citizen named Arya Toufanian, who claims Lorenz has used her private Twitter account to destroy her reputation and business, particularly with a tweet that Lorenz kept pinned at the top of her Twitter page for eight months, while several other non-public figures complain that Lorenz has “reported” on their non-public activities). It is to be expected that a New York Times journalist who gets caught lying as she did against Andreessen and trying to destroy the reputations of non-public figures will be a topic of conversation.

The third reason this New York Times reporter is receiving attention is because she has become a leading advocate and symbol for a toxic tactic now frequently used by wealthy and influential public figures (like her) to delegitimize criticisms and even render off-limits any attempt to hold them accountable. Specifically, she and her media allies constantly conflate criticisms of people like them with “harassment,” “abuse” and even “violence.”

That is what Lorenz did on Tuesday when she co-opted International Women’s Day to announce that “it is not an exaggeration to say that the harassment and smear campaign I have had to endure over the past year has destroyed my life.” She began her story by proclaiming: “For international women’s day please consider supporting women enduring online harassment.” She finished it with this: “No one should have to go through this.” Notably, there was no mention, by her or her many media defenders, of the lives she has harmed or otherwise deleteriously affected with her massive journalistic platform.