Friday, April 09, 2021

More On The Ruling Elite And Their Narrative,Technology, And Governance Endgame(s)

indiepf |  What I’ve called the Labor, Gentry, and Elite “ladders” can more easily be described as “infrastructures”. For Labor, this infrastructure is largely physical and the relevant connection is knowing how to use that physical device or space, and getting people to trust a person to competently use (without owning, because that’s out of the question for most) these resources. For the Gentry, it’s an “invisible graph” of knowledge and education and “interestingness”, comprised largely of ideas. For the Elite, it’s a tight, exclusive network centered on social connections, power, and dominance. People can be connected to more than one of these infrastructures, but people usually bind more tightly to the one of higher status, except when at the transitional ranks (G4 and E4) which tend to punt people who don’t ascend after some time. The overwhelmingly high likelihood is that a person is aligned most strongly to one and only one of these structures. The values are too conflicting for a person not to pick one horse or the other.

I’ve argued that the ladders connect at a two-rung difference, with L2 ~ G4, L1 ~ G3, G2 ~ E4, and G1 ~ E3. These are “social equivalencies” that don’t involve a change in social status, so they’re the easiest to transitions to make (in both directions). They represent a transfer from one form of capital to another. A skilled laborer (L2) who begins taking night courses (G4) is using time to get an education rather than more money. Likewise, one who moves from the high gentry (G2) to a 90-hour-per-week job in private wealth management (E4) is applying her refined intellectual skills and knowledge to serving the rich, in the hope of making the connections to become one of them.

That said, these ladders often come into conflict. The most relevant one to most of my readers will be the conflict between the Gentry and the Elite. The Gentry tends to be left-libertarian and values creativity, individual autonomy, and free expression. The Elite tends toward center-right authoritarianism and corporate conformity, and it views creativity as dangerous (except when applied to hiding financial risks or justifying illegal wars). The Gentry believes that it is the deserving elite and the face of the future, and that it can use culture to engineer a future in which its values are elite; while the upper tier of the Elite finds the Gentry pretentious, repugnant, self-indulgent, and subversive. The relationship between the Gentry and Elite is incredibly contentious. It’s a cosmic, ubiquitous war between the past and the future.

Between the Gentry and Labor, there is an attitude of distrust. The Elite has been running a divide-and-conquer strategy between these two categories for decades. This works because the Elite understands (and can ape) the culture of the Gentry, but has something in common with Labor that sets the categories apart from the Gentry: a conception of work as a theater for masculine dominance. This is something that the Elite and Labor both believe in– the visceral strength and importance of the alpha-male in high-stakes gambling settings such as most modern work– but that the Gentry would rather deny. Gender is a major part of the Elite’s strategy in turning Labor against the Gentry: make the Gentry look effeminate. That’s why “feminist” is practically a racial slur, despite the world desperately needing attention to women’s political equality, health and well-being (that is, feminism).

The Elite also uses the Underclass in a different process: the Elite wants Labor think the Gentry intends to conspire with the Underclass to dismantle Labor values and elevate these “obviously undeserving” people to, at least, the status of Labor if not promoted above them. They exploit fear in Labor. One might invoke racism and the “Southern strategy” in politics as an example of this, but the racial part is incidental. The Elite don’t care whether it’s blacks or Latinos or “illigals” or red-haired people or homosexuals (most of whom are not part of the Underclass) that are being used to frighten Labor into opposing and disliking the Gentry; they just know that the device works and that it has pretty much always worked.

The relationship between the Gentry and Elite is one of open rivalry, and that between the Gentry and Labor is one of distrust. What about Labor and the Elite? That one is not symmetric. The Elite exploit and despise Labor as a class comprised mostly of “useful idiots”. How does Labor see the Elite? They don’t. The Elite has managed to convince Labor that the Gentry (who are open about their cultural elitism, while the Elite hides its social and economic elitism) is the actual “liberal elite” responsible for Labor’s misery over the past 30 years. In effect, the Elite has constructed an “infinity pool” where the Elite appears to be a hyper-successful extension of Labor, lumping these two disparate ladders into an “us” and placing the Gentry and Underclass into “them”.

Morgan Freeman Out'Chere Pitching The Mark Of The Beast - How Appropriate...,

thehill |  Morgan Freeman says if you trust him, you'll take his advice and get vaccinated against COVID-19.

"I'm not a doctor, but I trust science. And I’m told that, for some reason, people trust me," the "Vanquish" star says in a public service announcement released Monday by the arts advocacy group The Creative Coalition.

Freeman, 83, has played God in multiple films and is a popular choice for narrating documentaries and science specials.

“So here I am to say I trust science and I got the vaccine," he tells viewers in the PSA.

"If you trust me, you’ll get the vaccine," Freeman adds.

Morgan, I don't trust you as far as I could spit on you. First, there's your recent Russiagate foolishness and phukkery:

And then, there's that deeply disturbing personal failing from several years ago when your nasty old ass was simultaneously on those blue pills and your own step grand daughter!!! Now, low-information, short-memory, IQ-75 may have forgotten what you were up to, but these liminal views of consensus reality CANNOT UNSEE what they have seen:

Leana Wen Advocating For The Mark Of The Beast Is Just Plain Trolling

WaPo  | I think it’s time for us to extend the newfound normalcy from social settings to business operations. While the CDC guidance currently discourages vaccinated people from gathering in public places, this should be overridden if businesses can verify vaccination status. Imagine that you own a gym that used to have high-intensity exercise classes but had to stop because it’s high risk to have lots of people breathing heavily in crowded indoor spaces. You could reopen these classes if everyone attending is guaranteed to be vaccinated. Or imagine that you run a restaurant that has had to operate at 30 percent capacity to keep distancing between tables. You could establish certain nights where you serve at 100 percent capacity, if all patrons and servers are reliably known to be vaccinated.

Some entities are already exploring such possibilities, including cruise operators and a handful of colleges. By requiring proof of vaccination, they will aim for herd immunity on their ships and campuses. Not only could they return to full operation, but also they could probably give their customers and students something close to the pre-pandemic experience, with full interaction and possibly without the need for masks.

In these examples, vaccination isn’t a government-imposed requirement but a voluntary action facilitated by the private sector. Any outcry over government overreach shouldn’t focus on proof of vaccination, but rather on attempts to ban businesses from asking for it. It’s the height of hypocrisy for politicians who normally tout their support for free markets to now bar the private sector from covid-safety innovations. Why can’t businesses offer customers the peace of mind that comes with much-reduced risk from a potentially deadly disease?

Some have made the equity argument: How could vaccination policies be fair as long as some aren’t able to get shots? I am the mother of two young children, and I know they probably won’t be eligible until 2022; until then, I am happy for others to have privileges that my family can’t. This isn’t so different from, say, adults-only resorts: Just because some people can’t enjoy them doesn’t mean that no one should. In fact, the more incentives the better, because the more people vaccinated, the better we all are protected.

Throughout the pandemic, there have been polarizing terms that trigger fierce opposition. Just as we should never have invoked “lockdowns,” we need to stop debating “vaccine passports.” Instead, we should define what it is that we need to move toward normalcy: a covid-19 health screen that enables people to associate with one another free from pandemic restrictions. That’s a concept I hope most Americans can get behind.

 

Thursday, April 08, 2021

Related To Montagnier's Concern About mRNA? Extrachromosomal DNA Drives Tumor Malignancy

thescientist |   Despite being treated with drugs designed to target this gene, the patients were not getting better, and when we interrogated the genomes of their cancers after the tumors were surgically removed following treatment, we saw that they had changed. The tumors had dramatically reduced the number of copies of the targeted epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene, presumably giving them an advantage to escape the drugs, and they had evolved these genetic differences at a rate that seemed to make no sense—within just one to two weeks. 

Normally, we think of cancers evolving over many cell divisions, as the cells carrying genetic changes that provide a fitness advantage—such as an ability to resist a particular treatment—will be more likely to survive and divide. Here, we were noticing a change in the copy number of the gene within just a few generations. There was no way that we could explain how the tumors were altering their DNA so quickly. 

Even stranger, we could take any cell from the tumor, and whether it had high or undetectable protein levels of EGFR, it would give rise to a new tumor when cultured in the lab or implanted into a mouse. Each of these new tumors would then display the full spectrum of cells found in the original tumor, varied in their EGFR copy number. This makes no sense according to what we know about classical genetics. We would have expected that tumors arising from a cell with low levels of EGFR would give rise to a tumor with low EGFR levels, whereas a tumor arising from a cell with high levels of EGFR would give rise to a tumor with high EGFR levels. 

When we removed the treatment with the EGFR inhibitor from cultured tumor cells, EGFR copy number quickly rebounded, but again, not on chromosomes. When we saw this, we realized that ecDNA might explain why some cancers can become resistant to treatment so quickly, allowing tumors to evolve at a rate that far exceeds anything that could be accounted for by classical genetics. We published our results in Science in 2014, but they were not immediately accepted by the community. Although we had only studied one tumor type, glioblastoma, we began to wonder whether this might be the tip of the iceberg. 

Without realizing it, this study led us, and now others, to a series of discoveries that have changed the way that researchers view cancer in general, revealing frightening ways that tumors can evolve. We have learned that ecDNA is central to the behavior of some of the most aggressive forms of cancer, enabling remarkably elevated levels of oncogene transcription, creating new gene regulatory interactions, and providing a powerful mechanism for rapid change that can drive very high oncogene copy numbers or allow cancer cells to resist treatment. Fist tap Woodensplinter

Jean Luc Montagnier: mRNA Therapeutic A "Sorcerer's Apprentice" With Heritable Consequences..,

francesoir  |  In a letter dated March 21, 2021 published on the Nakim.org website, Professor Montagnier, Nobel Prize winner in medicine,  supports the request of Dr Seligmann and engineer Haim Yativ for the suspension of vaccination against Covid-19 judges of the Supreme Court of the State of Israel.

This letter is in support of the petition for the suspension of vaccination against covid-19 which was presented to you by MM. Yativ and Seligmann.

I am Luc Montagnier, doctor of medicine, professor emeritus at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, director of research emeritus at CNRS, Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the discovery of the AIDS virus.

I am an expert in virology, having devoted a large part of my research to RNA viruses, in particular mouse encephalomyocarditis, Rous sarcoma virus, HIV 1 and HIV 2 virus.

Considerable effort has been devoted to vaccination against the coronavirus covid-19 responsible for a global pandemic. In particular the State of Israel has organized a mass vaccination of its population so far, 49% of its total population has received two doses of Pfizer vaccine. 

First of all, I would like to stress the novelty of this type of vaccine. 

  • In conventional vaccines, the genetic information carried by viral DNA or RNA is inactivated and virus proteins are used to induce vaccine antibodies. In some cases, the virus remains alive, but is attenuated by successive passages in vitro. 
  • In the case of so-called RNA messenger vaccines, these vaccines are made from an active fraction of the virus's RNA which will be injected into the vaccinated person. It therefore penetrates the cells of the latter which will manufacture the vaccine proteins from the code of the injected RNA.
    We immediately see that this last step depends a lot on its success on the physiological state of the recipient.

I would like to summarize the potential dangers of these vaccines in a mass vaccination policy.

1. Short-term side effects  : these are not the normal local reactions found with any vaccination, but serious reactions are life threatening to the recipient such as anaphylactic shock linked to a component of the vaccine mixture. , or severe allergies or an autoimmune reaction up to cell aplasia.

2. Lack of vaccine protection  :

2.1  induction of facilitating antibodies  - the induced antibodies do not neutralize a viral infection, but on the contrary facilitate it depending on the recipient. The latter may have already been exposed to the virus asymptomatically. A low level of naturally induced antibodies may compete with the antibodies induced by the vaccine.

2.2 The production of antibodies induced by vaccination in a population highly exposed to the virus will lead to the selection of variants resistant to these antibodies. These variants can be more virulent or more transmissible . This is what we are seeing now. An endless virus-vaccine race that will always turn to the advantage for the virus.

3. Long-term effects  : Contrary to the claims of the manufacturers of messenger RNA vaccines, there is a risk of integration of viral RNA into the human genome. Indeed, each of our cells has endogenous retroviruses with the ability to reverse transcriptase RNA into DNA. Although this is a rare event, its passage through the DNA of germ cells and its transmission to future generations cannot be excluded.

“Faced with an unpredictable future, it is better to abstain. 

Professor Luc Montagnier

Pfizer And Moderna Looking To Get PAID For Their mRNA Therapeutics...,

theintercept  |  Pfizer, Moderna, and other coronavirus vaccine makers have said repeatedly that they intend to hike prices on vaccines as early as this year, as the potential need for additional booster shots and future demand could lead to an unprecedented financial windfall.

One estimate projects that if Pfizer raised the price of its coronavirus vaccine from $19.50 to $175 per dose, as one Pfizer executive recently suggested, and if every adult American were to take it, the cost would be $44.7 billion — nearly 10 percent of all U.S. drug spending.

But the federal government, which funded crucial biomedical research to develop the patented messenger RNA technology behind the leading Covid-19 vaccines, is on the verge of eliminating a legal mechanism to control the prices of key medical products, including vaccines. 

Next week, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, will wrap up a comment period to modify the rules governing the Bayh-Dole Act, a law that regulates the transfer of federally funded inventions into commercial property. Under the current interpretation of the law, the government may “march in” and suspend the use of patents developed via government-funded inventions if it determines that the products are excessively priced.

The rulemaking is the latest flashpoint in a decades long battle to control drug prices. The drug industry has fought successfully to prevent “march-in” rights in the past; the government has never managed to exercise them. But over the last year, a growing number of Republicans and Democrats, including newly appointed Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Beccera, have called for the use of march-in rights to rein in drug prices.

This supposed leverage to control prices — on coronavirus medications and dozens of other drugs whose development relied heavily on government-backed research — would be gone if the rule-change proceeds.

 

Vaccines Will Not Be Enough "We" Now Need Global Maximum Supression

theconversation |  At the end of 2020, there was a strong hope that high levels of vaccination would see humanity finally gain the upper hand over SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. In an ideal scenario, the virus would then be contained at very low levels without further societal disruption or significant numbers of deaths.

But since then, new “variants of concern” have emerged and spread worldwide, putting current pandemic control efforts, including vaccination, at risk of being derailed.

Put simply, the game has changed, and a successful global rollout of current vaccines by itself is no longer a guarantee of victory.

No one is truly safe from COVID-19 until everyone is safe. We are in a race against time to get global transmission rates low enough to prevent the emergence and spread of new variants. The danger is that variants will arise that can overcome the immunity conferred by vaccinations or prior infection.

What’s more, many countries lack the capacity to track emerging variants via genomic surveillance. This means the situation may be even more serious than it appears.

As members of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission Taskforce on Public Health, we call for urgent action in response to the new variants. These new variants mean we cannot rely on the vaccines alone to provide protection but must maintain strong public health measures to reduce the risk from these variants. At the same time, we need to accelerate the vaccine program in all countries in an equitable way.

Together, these strategies will deliver “maximum suppression” of the virus.

What are ‘variants of concern’?

Genetic mutations of viruses like SARS-CoV-2 emerge frequently, but some variants are labelled “variants of concern”, because they can reinfect people who have had a previous infection or vaccination, or are more transmissible or can lead to more severe disease.


Read more: UK, South African, Brazilian: a virologist explains each COVID variant and what they mean for the pandemic


There are currently at least three documented SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern:

  • B.1.351, first reported in South Africa in December 2020

  • B.1.1.7, first reported in the United Kingdom in December 2020

  • P.1, first identified in Japan among travellers from Brazil in January 2021.

Similar mutations are arising in different countries simultaneously, meaning not even border controls and high vaccination rates can necessarily protect countries from home-grown variants, including variants of concern, where there is substantial community transmission.

If there are high transmission levels, and hence extensive replication of SARS-CoV-2, anywhere in the world, more variants of concern will inevitably arise and the more infectious variants will dominate. With international mobility, these variants will spread.

 

Wednesday, April 07, 2021

The Rich Have Reached The Zenith Of Their Power In NYC

FT  |   The tax fight is a preamble for an upcoming mayoral election that all sides view as one of the most consequential in New York’s history. The Democratic primary, which is expected to crown the eventual winner in a city where seven out of every eight voters are Democrats, is in June. Business leaders and the wealthy have been nursing existential dread at the possibility of what one prominent property developer calls another “ideological” mayor. That is, someone in the mould of the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, who is limited to serving two terms. Two days after winning the 2013 Democratic primary, De Blasio attended a private lunch with the city’s business leaders and promptly alienated many of them. They expected he would solicit their advice and extend a hand. Instead, the mayor reprised his “tale of two cities” campaign rhetoric, and declared that he cared about the other side. “Faces dropped,” one attendee recalls. 

That divide has only deepened in the ensuing years. De Blasio’s legion of executive class critics deride him as a lazy manager who deploys politicised rhetoric to cover for his own incompetence. While the budget has increased by 35 per cent during his tenure, problems like homelessness and public housing have worsened — even before the pandemic. “The city is at a crossroads. This is truly the most important election of our lifetime and in NYC’s history,” Stephen Ross, chair of The Related Companies, and de facto king of the city’s developers, wrote to fellow business leaders last month as he urged them to join his effort to elect a business-friendly mayor. The race’s outcome, Ross wrote, will determine whether “NYC will rebound or languish”. Looming large for executives like Ross is the grim memory of the 1970s, when a fraying city ended up losing half its Fortune 500 companies — many fleeing to surrounding suburbs — and shedding more than 1m inhabitants. That era also birthed a civic movement. It was christened at a breakfast meeting at the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue in 1971 when the developer Lew Rudin and hotelier Robert Tisch hatched what would become the Association for a Better New York, a group of business leaders who aimed to step in where city government was failing. ABNY’s moguls lobbied the federal government on the city’s behalf. They also brought labour leaders into their tent.

 

I Had No Idea - May Have To Stop Whining About Covid Passports - Jes DAYYUM......,

pluralistic |  The zombie economy shambles on. Obama's loan-shark bailout and the eviction crisis let the architects of subprime buy up whole towns' worth of homes and turn them into hugely profitable slums: high-rent, low-quality deathtraps.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-housing-invitation/

Wall St landlords package rents from subprime rentals into bonds, backed by the loan-shark's guarantee: arm-breakers will evict the shit out of anyone who stops paying.

America-a land where eviction was once a rarity-now faces an eviction epidemic.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/forced-out

The foreclosure crisis was only possible because Wall St and the courts collaborated to streamline the historically complicated and time-consuming process of taking away someone's home. Same goes for the eviction epidemic.

It's a simple equation: the more loan-sharks spend on arm-breakers, the lower the expected profits.

Improvements to arm-breaking processes – cost-savings on traditional coercion or innovative new forms of terror – are powerful engines for unlocking new debt markets.

When innovation calls, tech answers. Our devices are increasingly "smart," and inside every smart device is a potential arm-breaker. Digital arm-breakers have been around since the first DRM systems, but they really took off in 2008.

That's when subprime car loans boomed. People who lost everything in the GFC still needed to get to work, and thanks to chronic US underinvestment in transit, that means owning a car. So loan-sharks and tech teamed up to deliver a new lost-cost, high-efficiency arm-breaker.

They leveraged the nation's mature wireless network to install cellular killswitches in cars. You could extend an unrepayable loan to a desperate person, and use an unmutable second stereo system to bombard them with earsplitting overdue notices.

https://edition.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/04/17/aa.bills.shut.engine.down/index.html

If they didn't pay, you could remotely cut off the ignition and send a precise location to your repo man.

Smart killswitches let you impose fine-grained control over debtors – say, enforcing a rule against driving over the county line.

https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car/

Within a decade, the bond-market for payments from subprime car drivers was edging up on $1T; not because borrowers didn't default, but because they defaulted later, and the car could be easily re-leased to another desperate person.

The zombie economy shambled on. Tech built undeletable, always-on kill-switches, lo-jacks, and spyware into an ever-expanding constellation of devices, like laptops.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/rental-company-control/478365/

Rent-to-own subprime laptops were the epicenter of innovation in digital arm-breaking. Laptops shipped with spyware for covert operation of cameras and mic and access ot files.

That went beyond repoing a laptop! Lenders could make and share covert sex-tapes of their customers!

They spied on children, plundered MP3 collections, stole passwords, read email. It was beyond the wildest dreams of analog loan-sharks.

Membership In The American Ruling Class Means Never Having To Audition, Campaign, Or Fundraise

NYTimes  |  America’s most powerful people have a problem. They can’t admit that they’re powerful.

Take Andrew Cuomo. On a recent call with reporters, the embattled Mr. Cuomo insisted that he was “not part of the political club.” The assertion was confounding because Mr. Cuomo is in his third term as governor of New York — a position his father also held for three terms. Mr. Cuomo has also served as state attorney general and as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Or think of Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence. After her appointment was announced, Ms. Haines declared, “I have never shied away from speaking truth to power.” That is a curious way of describing a meteoric career that includes stints at exclusive universities, a prestigious judicial clerkship and important jobs in foreign policy and intelligence before her appointment to a cabinet-level office overseeing a budget of more than $60 billion.

This sort of false advertising isn’t limited to Democrats. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, for instance, has embraced an image as a populist crusader against a distant “political class.” He does not emphasize his father’s career as a banker, his studies at Stanford and Yale Law School, or his work as clerk to prominent judges, including Chief Justice John Roberts. The merits of Mr. Hawley’s positions are open to debate. But his membership in the same elite that he rails against is not.

And it’s not only politicians. Business figures love to present themselves as “disrupters” of stagnant industries. But the origins of the idea are anything but rebellious. Popularized by a Harvard professor and promoted by a veritable industry of consultants, it has been embraced by some of the richest and most highly credentialed people in the world.

Examples could be multiplied, but these cases are enough to show that the problem of insiders pretending to be outsiders cuts across party, gender and field. The question is why.

Part of the explanation is strategic. An outsider pose is appealing because it allows powerful people to distance themselves from the consequences of their decisions. When things go well, they are happy to take credit. When they go badly, it’s useful to blame an incompetent, hostile establishment for thwarting their good intentions or visionary plans.

Tuesday, April 06, 2021

246 Fully "Vaccinated" Michiganders Got Covid Between January And March

FREEP  |  State health officials say 246 fully vaccinated Michiganders contracted coronavirus from January to March, and three have died. 

"These are individuals who have had a positive test 14 or more days after the last dose in the vaccine series," said Lynn Sutfin, a spokesperson for the state health department.

Some of the 246 people may ultimately be excluded from the state's tally of vaccine breakthrough cases because they may have had earlier coronavirus infections and still tested positive two weeks post immunization. 

"These cases are undergoing further review to determine if they meet other (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) criteria for determination of potential breakthrough, including the absence of a positive antigen or PCR test less than 45 days prior to the post-vaccination positive test," Sutfin said. 

Although so-called vaccine breakthrough cases are rare, and all three COVID-19 vaccines on the market are considered highly effective with efficacy rates ranging from 72% for Johnson & Johnson's vaccine to 94% and 95% for Moderna's and Pfizer's, respectively, it can happen. 

"While it is significantly less likely, it is still possible to contract the virus after being vaccinated," Sutfin said. "Studies indicate that even if vaccinated people do become ill, they are far less likely to experience severe illness requiring hospitalization or resulting in death.

"But the possibility of infection and further transmission is why we continue to encourage Michiganders to take precautions while out in public, including wearing masks, washing hands and social distancing, even after receiving the vaccine until more Michiganders have been able to be vaccinated."

Hospitalization data for 129 of the fully vaccinated cases is incomplete, Sutfin said. But for the 117 people for whom hospitalization records are known, 11 were hospitalized.

"A number of these are new cases that have been reported ... as a result of a positive test, but local health departments are either early in their investigation or have yet to begin their case investigation," Sutfin said. 

The three fully vaccinated people who died, Sutfin said, were all ages 65 and older. Two of them were within three weeks of full vaccination.


Internal Medicine Doctor Believes Elites Have Permanently Lost The Panicdemic Narrative

nakedcapitalism |  My worst nightmare concerns are starting to come true and the media will not be able to hide this for much longer. Today, I am not concerned about the SCIENCE of medicine – I am concerned about the ART of medicine.

The ART can best be summarized as encouraging patients to do the right thing for THEM. With regard to COVID 19, that would be to meet the patient at whatever level they are and find ways to encourage social distancing rules, masking and to correctly guide them on vaccine choice. It would also include encouraging them to be engaged in the healthiest behaviors possible during this time of crisis. Eat well, exercise, sleep and de-stress.

The ART is often much more important to a physician’s medical outcomes than the SCIENCE – something our society and our medical establishment has long ago forgotten. ART requires as a foundation explicit trust and honesty between a patient and the physician. There is no other way.

Yves, I appreciated your post the other day on the Christian Nationalism aspect of COVID 19. I made a comment on the post about this not just being an Evangelical problem. I even suggested in the comment that there could be issues brewing among Roman Catholics, based on what I had been hearing as a physician.

As of Easter Sunday, there are now multiple videos being widely circulated and they all speak to the issue better than I could ever type out in a comment. I have been seeing this problem slowly brewing for weeks and it has largely been completely ignored by our mainstream media.

I will state for the record officially today – the public health authorities have lost the narrative. They apparently have also lost their minds. If they think this type of behavior on the most Holy Days of the Church is not going to go unnoticed – they have rocks for brains. This kind of thuggishness is not going to help their cause in any way; rather, it will make these people dig in more. And trust me – as of this Easter Sunday AM – they are digging in. Bunker-style. A clarion call has gone out and it could not be more clear. And I am talking about Roman Catholics – not my Evangelical family – they went off the reservation long ago. Now even my Orthodox friends have taken notice.

As I have been stating over the past few days – the authorities have repeatedly allowed discredited, hypocritical and lying Hoohahs to be their voice in the national media. Outside of our big blue cities and states – NO ONE AMONG MY PATIENTS COULD GIVE A RAT’S ASS WHAT THESE PEOPLE HAVE TO SAY ANYMORE ABOUT THIS PANDEMIC. I hear this refrain constantly every day. The lying, dissembling, crying, misstatements, backtracking and hypocrisy have taken their final toll. If they are not careful, they will soon be public enemy #1.

We have made many errors as a society in the past 12 months, but probably the most important mistake is hardly ever mentioned. One which our forbears in public health, like my father, worked to eradicate for decades. It is very simple – national “one-size-fits-all” narratives and plans in public health do not now nor have they ever worked. Never have. Never will.

Harvard Epidemiologist Dr. Martin Kulldorff Censored By Twitter

lockdownskeptics |  Now that we are allowed to meet up in groups of six outside their homes, Matt Hancock is warning us not to do anything foolish, like hug one another or breach the two metre rule. “Do it safely,” he tweeted. “Don’t blow it now”.

But in fact, the people who shouldn’t “blow it” are Boris Johnson, Sir Patrick Vallance, Chris Whitty and, yes, Matt Hancock. That is the view of Martin Kulldorff, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, biostatistician and epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts, and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration.

Professor Kulldorff has told the UK Government and its scientific advisors exactly who they should be listening to and why if they want to save lives – and it doesn’t include vaccinating the entire population, including children. He said this on Twitter on March 15th – “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. Covid vaccines are important for older high-risk people and their care-takes. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children.” – and Twitter attached a health warning to his Tweet: “This tweet is misleading. Learn why health officials recommend a vaccine for most people.” Because, of course, a 22 year-old graduate in Whiteness Studies sitting in Twitter’s HQ in Silicon Valley knows much more about infectious diseases than a Harvard professor of medicine.

Speaking to me in an exclusive interview for Lockdown Sceptics, Kulldorff said:

That warning was rather silly. When making unscientific claims, media often refer to ‘health officials’ or ‘health experts’ without naming those experts. I challenge Twitter to name vaccine epidemiologists who think that everyone must get the Covid vaccine, including children and those with immunity from prior infection.

Equally strange, they even concur with my tweet when they say “most people” rather than “all people”. Right now, children are clearly not part of “most people”, since a Covid vaccine has not yet been approved for them and we know nothing about efficacy or potential adverse reaction in children. Since most children are asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic, it will be hard to show that the vaccine can reduce symptoms, hospitalisations or mortality in children, requiring a large sample size in countries that still has considerable disease spread.

I have worked with vaccines for a couple of decades, but Twitter clearly thinks that scientific discussions about these things are dangerous. Maybe social media is dangerous to those in power. I do hope that social media is dangerous to the lockdowns that have done so much damage to public health during this past year. The enormous collateral public health damage, which is being documented by Collateral Global, is something that we will continue to to live with, and die with, for many years to come. It truly is a public health tragedy of epic proportions.

The catastrophic impact of the lockdowns on public health has been exacerbated by headlines and adverts striking the fear of god into millions, making them less likely to seek medical help for non-Covid diseases.

 

You Can Travel With AIDS, Hepatitis, And Tuberculosis - But Not Without An mRNA Jab!!!

thehill |   Republicans are seizing on the intensifying debate over coronavirus vaccination passports as part of their strategy for recapturing control of Congress in 2022.

In interviews and conversations with The Hill, GOP strategists and operatives acknowledged the growing eagerness among Americans to be vaccinated against COVID-19. But many are also betting that emerging debates about so-called vaccine passports will help them play on voters’ fears of government overreach and privacy violations.

The idea of vaccine passports has gained increasing attention in recent weeks as eligibility for COVID-19 vaccinations has rapidly expanded and Americans begin to see glints of a post-pandemic normal on the horizon. The White House has indicated that it will issue basic guidelines for such programs, though it has also said that it has no plans to create a centralized, federal requirement.

Still, some of the country’s most prominent conservatives have begun to latch on to the emerging possibility of vaccine passports or certificates, seeing such proposals as an extension of their campaign to rally the GOP base in opposition to coronavirus-related restrictions like lockdown orders and mask mandates.

“It’s a political winner,” Ford O’Connell, a Florida-based Republican strategist, said. “They look at it as an all-out assault on personal freedoms and the Constitution, but also, it’s about protecting the average, ordinary Floridian who wants to live their regular day-to-day lives.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is among the Republicans who have come out early against the proposals. He criticized the idea of vaccine passports at a press conference Monday, calling it “unacceptable” for local governments or businesses to require proof of vaccination for people to “participate in normal society.”

On Friday, he signed an executive order banning any future vaccine certificate requirements in Florida, and called on the GOP-controlled state legislature to draft a bill to enshrine such a policy into law.

Republicans are hoping that their early efforts to define vaccine passports as a symbol of government overreach will help counter what Democrats see as their most powerful political weapon in the 2022 midterms: their efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic crisis.

Democrats are hoping that a massive $1.9 trillion stimulus package signed into law last month, along with a sweeping proposal to overhaul the nation’s infrastructure, will help them stave off the typical electoral shellacking that a new president’s party typically sees in the first midterms following his inauguration.

 

Vaccine Passports: Where Biosecurity State Aims - Shed - Pandemic Mitigation Pretensions...,

BMJ  |  The critical issue is not the effect that vaccine passports might have on people in general. If one wants to increase take-up, it is the effect on those individuals and communities who harbour doubts about vaccination which matters. 

Based on hard experience, such communities (ethnic minorities in particular) have reason to question whether medical and governmental authorities treat their needs as a priority and this historical distrust provides a framework for interpreting contemporary pandemic policies. [18] Members of these communities are more attuned to the possibility that such policies (including vaccination) are something done to them rather than done for them by authorities who are not of them but against them. Moreover, there are plenty of anti-vaxxers aiming to promote this view by arguing that covid measures are not a matter of public health, but of social control by a hostile elite. [19] The reality, and even the rumour, of vaccine passports for core activities serves to give substance to these fears and to give traction to the anti-vaxxers. Passports can be seen as confirming the perception that vaccination is a measure of compulsion imposed upon the community. And once people begin to regard vaccines as compulsory then the evidence suggests that this produces anger and reduces willingness to get vaccinated. [20]

All in all, there are reasons to conclude that vaccine passports for basic activities may actually undermine vaccine rollout by disincentivising the very populations who most need incentivising. Closer inspection of the Israeli “green pass” scheme serves to reinforce this message. The evidence for passes increasing vaccination uptake is weak, while suspicions of compulsion and reports of people barred from workplaces for not being vaccinated have “resulted in antagonism and increased distrust among individuals who were already concerned about infringement on citizens’ rights”. [21] By contrast, what has proved successful in Israel are basic measures of community engagement: involving trusted community leaders, taking mobile vaccination units into communities, bringing along medical experts who can answer any questions, and providing food and drink to those who attend, has proved successful in Israel. [22]

To conclude: there are many good reasons to reject any passport scheme which makes everyday social participation dependent on vaccination. There are arguments on the grounds of liberties, of equalities, and of practicalities. However, even some of the grounds used to support them (i.e. vaccine take-up) may be another reason to oppose them. At a point in the pandemic where increased engagement is critical, both in order to overcome doubts about vaccination, and to enhance the pandemic response more generally, the mere possibility of vaccine passports threatens to alienate marginalised communities still further. [23,24]

So, let’s stop discussing the use of vaccine passports as a criterion for basic social and economic participation. This is an idea with few redeeming features and even talking about introducing them may be enough to do damage.

Monday, April 05, 2021

Covid19 And The Multinational Biosecurity State

architectsforsocialhousing |  I want to start our awakening from the sleep of reason by looking at the social practices of the coronavirus crisis [to] correct the conspiracy theory of an elite with their hands … on the gears of history. Let’s [instead] look at the machine of history. We all know its name, and despite all the renewed predictions of its death it hasn’t gone away. On the contrary, it’s just going through a revolution … but its name is still the same. Capitalism.

Marx was right. When the material productive forces of society come into conflict with existing relations of production — its property relations — a period of social revolution begins. ‘With the change of the economic foundations’, he wrote, ‘the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.’ The expansion into new markets of the neoliberal capitalism that has dominated Western democracies for 40 years no longer has to accommodate liberal democracy. What we are undergoing — what we are colluding in producing — are the new political, legal and social forms for a multinational biosecurity state. And no elite, no matter how powerful, is in control of it for the simple reason that, despite immensely powerful international organisations increasingly divorced from and opposed to democratic process, capitalism is a dynamic process that develops by conflict and contradiction.

Capitalism has a grip on the world the like of which it has never had before, and as it faces the long-heralded limits to [its] expansion it is developing new forms and powers to extend that grip further over the world’s diminishing resources. But there is no single government or corporation ruling the globe, no secret society whose members sit on every cabinet and board.

The US Government is the greatest military power the world has ever seen, and the United Nations has long been superseded by far more unaccountable coalitions of state and corporate powers whose activities are largely secret and getting more so. And the power of technology to monitor and control the world’s populations is expanding at an exponential rate in both breadth and depth. But the world is not a single, supra-political block.

There is no invisible hand of the market-god ruling over us, for good or for evil; there are only devils competing for his crown. The world undergoing this revolution in capitalism remains a conflict whose battleground, now and for the immediate future, is the coronavirus crisis. What makes that conflict new for Western democracies is that the war being waged is a civil one, of governments against their own people, rather than against other countries.

By looking at how this civil war is being waged, therefore, we can begin to understand to what ends it is being fought.

Resistance To The Multinational Biosecurity State Is Musical Chairs On The Deck Of The Titanic

CTH  |   Consider if you will, the backdrop of current U.S. politics; the influence of Wall Street and the multinationals who align with globalism; the reality of K-Street lobbyists writing the physical legislation that politicians sell to Americans; and then overlay what you are witnessing as those same multinationals now attack the foundation of our constitutional republic.  All of this is CORPORATISM, a continuum that people were ignoring for decades… Now, thankfully, there is a new awakening.

In these economic endeavors President Trump was disrupting decades of financial schemes established to use the U.S. as a host for their endeavors. President Trump was confronting multinational corporations and the global constructs of economic systems that were put in place to the detriment of the host (USA) ie YOU. There are trillions at stake; it is all about the economics; everything else is chaff and countermeasures.

The road to a “service-driven economy” is paved with a great disparity between financial classes. The wealth gap is directly related to the inability of the middle-class to thrive.

Elite financial interests, including those within Washington DC, gain wealth and power, the U.S. workforce is reduced to servitude, “service”, of their affluent needs.

The destruction of the U.S. industrial and manufacturing base is EXACTLY WHY the middle class has struggled, and exactly why the wealth gap exploded in the past 30 years.

Behind this dynamic we find the international corporate and financial interests who are inherently at risk from President Trump’s “America-First” economic and trade platform. Believe it or not, President Trump is up against an entire world economic establishment.

When we understand how trade works in the modern era we understand why the agents within the system are so adamantly opposed to U.S. President Trump.

♦The biggest lie in modern economics, willingly spread and maintained by corporate media, is that a system of global markets still exists.

It doesn’t.

Every element of global economic trade is controlled and exploited by massive institutions, multinational banks and multinational corporations. Institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Bank control trillions of dollars in economic activity.

Underneath that economic activity there are people who hold the reigns of power over the outcomes. These individuals and groups are the stakeholders in direct opposition to principles of America-First national economics. Collectively known as “The Big Club”.

The modern financial constructs of these entities have been established over the course of the past three decades. When you understand how they manipulate the economic system of individual nations you begin to understand why they are so fundamentally opposed to President Trump.

In the Western World, separate from communist control perspectives (ie. China), “Global markets” are a modern myth; nothing more than a talking point meant to keep people satiated with sound bites they might find familiar. Global markets have been destroyed over the past three decades by multinational corporations who control the products formerly contained within global markets.

The same is true for “Commodities Markets”. The multinational trade and economic system, run by corporations and multinational banks, now controls the product outputs of independent nations. The free market economic system has been usurped by entities who create what is best described as ‘controlled markets’.

U.S. President Trump understood what had taken place. He used economic leverage as part of a broader national security policy; and to understand who opposes President Trump specifically because of the economic leverage he creates, it becomes important to understand the objectives of the global and financial elite who run and operate the institutions. The Big Club.

Understanding how trillions of trade dollars influence geopolitical policy we begin to understand the three-decade global financial construct they seek to retain and protect.

That is, global financial exploitation of national markets.

 

The Uniparty Is Really Struggling To Distract Its Respective Piss-Ants Constituencies...,

nbcnews  |  Republicans and corporate America are on the outs.

In the past week alone, American Airlines and computer company Dell came out strongly against GOP-led bills that place restrictions on voting in their home base of Texas. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a rising star in Republican Party, continued to take heat for nixing a bill that would have imposed a ban on transgender athletes in sports, citing the potential impact on her state's bottom line. And conservatives spent days bashing "vaccine passports" some businesses think are needed to return to normal.

And then there was Georgia, where the Republican-controlled state House narrowly voted to end a tax break worth millions that Delta enjoys on jet fuel after the airline's CEO — along with the CEO of Coca-Cola, another major Atlanta-based business — condemned new voting restrictions in the state. (The GOP-led state Senate did not take up the measure.) On Friday, Major League Baseball pulled this year's All-Star Game out of Atlanta in protest of that same law.

Republicans were outraged.

"Boycott baseball and all of the woke companies that are interfering with Free and Fair Elections," former President Donald Trump said in a statement. "Are you listening Coke, Delta, and all!"

"Why are we still listening to these woke corporate hypocrites on taxes, regulations & anti-trust?" Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., tweeted.

Such public dust-ups between businesses and members of the GOP are becoming more frequent, though the divide — possibly one of the most consequential in U.S. politics and society — is years in the making. The shift is the product of a Republican Party increasingly driven by "culture war" issues that animate a base invigorated by Trump and corporate powerhouses that are under more pressure than ever to align themselves with the left on voting rights, LGBTQ rights and anti-racist efforts.

The result is a fraying in relations between a GOP that has for years advocated for the kinds of libertarian economic policies that have widely benefited these businesses and companies that are using their might to help advance racial and social justice causes.

"We have long thought and still think of the big institutional drivers of this culture war as more in academia, the arts, the media, and corporate America has mostly sat it out until recently," retiring Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., told NBC News in an interview. He added that while he does not think of corporate America "as the biggest player yet," companies coming off the sidelines "can change the dynamic."

Sunday, April 04, 2021

Coronavirus Criminalization

off-guardian  |  Asymptomatic false-positive diagnosis is unforgivable, but one without testing for other common causes is even worse. Misdiagnosing what would have been death from old age or some other usual event with an asymptomatic false-positive Covid test is falsifying the cause of death and is literally criminal. Natural deaths seem no longer a thing. Bad science, shoddy medicine, central directives to certify COVID-19 where there is any doubt, and poor data gathering mean the crime is perfect.

The WHO cooks definitions of Pandemic, Adverse Events Following Immunisation (AEFIs), PCR tests and herd immunity like a criminal cartel.

Tossing a coin is far more diagnostically accurate than community Covid PCR testing on well persons. Ideally, there should have been a parallel influenza test for each Covid test. My experience of patients’ hospital discharge letters reveals not one influenza test result was recorded.

Our police, who under their own oath should police the criminal common law with our consent are now acting like the vigilantes of commerce. They enforce unnatural statutory law, regulations and guidelines. Where does that leave non-commercial, natural human interests? They tackle unmasked, healthy people as if they were undetonated bombs.

Since when did the spread of a cold or flulike illness become a crime? Since when did a well person become a potential suspect? The police never used to become involved in the politesse of a cough, fever or cold.

In 2019 it used to be a badge of honour to keep coming, sniffling into the office. Now it seems a crime against humanity. I am waiting for the first bona fide coryzal assault case, where the brain-washed magistrate will accept that the victim reasonably apprehended a harm from a defendant’s sniffle.

What material difference is there between terrorists and the actions of the WHO, Gates and our government?

Well, those three seem like mere terrorists, but not also another’s freedom fighter. Our government preach of how ‘hateful extremists exploit the pandemic,’ but there is no mention of themselves. Moreover, it is the questioning norm which is smeared as terrorists. What if the vaccines are killing more than Covid. Do we convict Drs. Whitty and Fauci for crimes against humanity?

In stark contrast to my first patient, I speak with my last patient, she is socioeconomically vulnerable.

In March 2020 she complained of a lump in her throat. Her urgent scan was cancelled due to ‘Covid measures’. In February 2021 she complained of multiple lumps in her throat and difficulty swallowing.

This is the mountain of disease concealed under the magic carpet of Covid. Coronavirus Regulations-sponsored NHS medical negligence is often grossly negligent, bordering on criminal.

The game is to keep the patient away and out of your zone of accountability. Like hands-free patient ping-pong.

One might conclude life on earth is impossible without Big Pharma. It has moulded the world in its own vision. The vaccine passport is likewise an inappropriate response. Particularly when viewed through the lens of another continuously, unpredictably mutating, elderly-targeting respiratory virus. Would anyone else find the prospect of a flu vaccine passport troubling?

It is not coincidence that Monsanto GMOs abduct the food chain, Farmer Gates pushes a Pharma lifestyle, and gene modification is both’s central pièce de résistance.

When Gates becomes America’s biggest owner of farmland one has confirmatory triangulation that Mother Nature is no longer boss. Most of us only need basic sanitation, an active life, family love and a natural diet to remain well.

The Biosecurity Karenwaffen Will Not Be Satisfied With Merely Shaming Or Punishing You...,

slate |   The second reason shame has been criticized is that many have conflated shame’s worth as a tool with the norms some use shame to try to uphold. The shame that accompanies sexually transmitted infections, for example, has more to do with the problematic norms around sex that remain in our society then shame itself. The shame that accompanies illness more broadly has to do with the problematic norm that assumes, falsely, that we will all remain able-bodied and healthy and that if we do not, it is linked to some form of moral or behavioral failing. In both cases, the shame isn’t the  problem—the norms are. Instead of throwing out shame, we should be more conscious of how we use it.

In spite of the current uproar against it, Americans do routinely use shame as a tool, quietly and comfortably. “We shame poor people all of the time,” said Phuong Luong, a certified financial planner and educator at Just Wealth (and also a friend). In her role as a financial planner, Luong, has helped low-income people access public services. “If you’ve ever gone into an office to apply for public benefits like welfare or food stamps, it can be a really demeaning and stressful experience,” she said. “The quality, tone, and respect in customer service between a private service and a public service is so different. And I think we make poor people jump through so many hoops to show effort and to show motivation, to get what they need.” It’s as if the process was designed to evoke shame.

But shame can work positively as a tool with people or institutions when the thing happening is in fact worth punishing, and other forms of punishment are out of reach. “In a system where formal punishment is missing, that’s when the informal mechanisms step in,” said Jacquet. You can, for example, incarcerate an individual but, “it’s much more difficult, almost impossible to take away the liberty of an entire group like Exxon Mobil,” she explained. You can, however, shame them as climate activists do when they troll oil companies on Twitter. It’s about depriving these companies of their social license and reputation, which, in many cases, they worked very hard to create.

On the individual level, Jacquet points to the policies that some states have publishing the names of residents who owe a significant sum in taxes—in California, it’s more than $100,000; in Wisconsin, it’s $5,000, but those on the top 100 list all currently owe more than $400,000—as another example of effective shaming. The late taxpayers are given letters in advance of the list’s publication, with the expectation that the threat of exposure will get them to pony up (or at least enter into a repayment plan)—and it often does. When the state of Wisconsin launched its tax-shaming program in 2006, it thought it would recoup $1.5 million in its first year of operation; the state ultimately collected 15 times that in that year.

 

Adams Didn't Give The Big Guy His 10%