epochtimes | It is too often overlooked in all the discussions about the “transition” to a net-zero emissions economy that the most consequential transition is that from democratic capitalism to feudal serfdom.
This is the conclusion of American demographer and “blue-collar Democrat” Joel Kotkin, who has highlighted that the supposedly well-intentioned green policies being adopted across the West come at enormous expense to the working- and middle-classes.
As Kotkin wrote in ‘Spiked’ earlier this year, “extreme climate measures have driven the loss of traditional blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, construction and energy, while other environmental regulations have boosted housing prices.”
Kotkin’s thesis is that the West is on the road to serfdom. Rather than maintaining our capitalist societies where a large, asset-owning middle-class underpin a stable democratic system, we are becoming stratified feudal societies.
Home and small business ownership are declining, especially among the young and the less well-off, a group of technocratic elites are establishing themselves as permanent rulers in the apparatus of the administrative state, and corporate oligarchs are coming to dominate both the economy and broader society.
his transition has been occurring for some time, but it has been accelerated by the COVID-19-inspired lockdowns and the zeal with which Western governments have thoughtlessly adopted net-zero emissions targets.
Both play out as an aggressive form of reverse Robin Hood asset stripping, taking from the poor and giving to the rich.
Australia is now officially committed to a net-zero emissions by 2050 target.
But beyond the slogan “technology not taxes,” the Australian people do not know how the government plans on achieving its newfound ambition.
The UK Treasury, by contrast, recently released a Net-zero Review report (pdf) which provides some detail of how the UK government expects to reach net-zero.
The report includes a surprisingly honest admission from the bureaucracy: “The costs and benefits of the transition to a net-zero economy will ultimately pass through to households through a range of different channels.”
It includes a helpful chart that shows that, regardless of the specific policy or mechanism, the costs of net-zero will always fall on households, that is, everyday mums, dads, and workers.
This insight is evident to many but is too often obfuscated.
medium | “I’ve
seen the classified report,” Nelson told CNN’s Pamela Brown in an
interview shortly before the June 25th “Preliminary Report on UAP” came
out. “It says basically what we thought. We don’t know the answer to
what those Navy pilots saw.”
“Now,
they know that they saw something. They tracked it. They locked their
radar onto it. They followed it. It would suddenly move quickly from one
location to another. And what the report does tell us that is public is
that there have been over 140 of these sightings, So, naturally, what I
ask our scientists to do is to see if there’s any kind of explanation
from a scientific point of view and I’m awaiting their report.”
This
summer NASA press secretary Jackie McGuinness confirmed her new boss
Nelson had directed researchers to move forward with exploring any lines
of questioning around the topic as they see fit.
“There’s
not really a lot of data and scientists should be free to follow these
leads, and it shouldn’t be stigmatized,” McGuinness said, acknowledging
that UFO research can be negatively associated with unfounded conspiracy
theories. “This is a really interesting phenomenon and Americans are
clearly interested in it so if the scientists want to investigate, they
should.”
This
is great news for large numbers of scientists who have been frustrated
about attempts to get research started because of the stigma the topic
generates. The idea that NASA itself is willing to authorize, support
and coordinate such work is revolutionary.
What Questions Did He Ask Again?
Now
you read it in the earlier breakout quote in this article, but in one
of his responses Nelson asked a series of questions. Let’s give them a
little more breathing space as we wrap up here:
What, who is out there?
Who are we?
How did we get here?
How did we become as we are?
How did we develop?
How did we civilize?
It’s worth considering that these are not the first things a public official is likely to say when questioned about the June 25 Preliminary Assessement: Undentified Aerial Phenomena,
is it? On the other hand, we know he has had the Full Monty of the
classified briefing, and probably others. We also know that if Joe Biden
wants to know what the hell is going on, he’s apt to call up Bill
Nelson.
Still,
it sure sounds like Nelson seems to be saying something with a little
more complexity than the version of human development we get taught in
high school and college. He’s asking questions that make it seem like we
had help.
Why Is He Talking Like This?
It
seems the main reason is that he believes it. That, of course, would be
refreshing and illuminating and, from what I’ve read, seen and heard,
it appears to be the truth.
But
it may also be that his age has something to do with it. Nelson turned
79 this year. He was born in World War II, fought in Vietnam, had a
lifetime of experiences that many of us will never have. He knows in his
heart that something strange is going on now, and has been for the
entire time he’s been on this Earth.
He seems ready to play his part now by saying the quiet part out loud.
Keep
it coming, Bill. Turn your teams loose on this. Tell them they can
speak truth to power. Find out some answers. Confirm what you can and
offer the best theories and interpretations that can be made about the
explanations. We’ve all been waiting a long time, too.
medium |After
Congress was briefed on the classified portion of the Pentagon’s UAP
report in June, D.C. power player and scientist Robert McGwier
participated in a panel discussion on the Canadian UFO and paranormal
radio program Spaced Out Radio and said he’d heard from an acquaintance in the closed-door session.
The briefing, he said, included the National Security Council
and members of Congress — just how many of the latter, it wasn’t clear
from McGwier’s off-air remarks during one of the show’s breaks, which
are live-streamed on YouTube
while radio listeners hear commercials. This elite audience of
Washington power brokers was privy to information that has not been
publicly released.
“Seventy
pages and 14 videos,” he said. “They got to see the good stuff.” Later
in the program, he added a caveat: “I want to make very, very clear: I
heard no classified information whatsoever.”
McGwier, affectionately known as “Bob the Science Guy,” is an academic and active member of the ufology community.
An expert in radio technology with a Ph.D in applied mathematics from Brown University, he joined the Institute for Defense Analyses Center for Communications Research,
a non-profit think tank in Princeton, N.J. in 1986. When he was hired
in 2011 to head a research center at Virginia Tech, the school noted
that McGwier’s work with the U.S. government had earned him the
intelligence community’s “highest honor” in 2002. His job at Virginia
Tech, according to the school, was to “develop strategic research
relationships within the industry and government working in the national
security sector.”
Put another way, he has connections in Washington D.C. McGwier continued:
“I
know several people who were in the National Security Council meeting,”
he said. “The best comment I heard was, ‘What we had was 40 minutes of
science fiction movies. We were all gobsmacked.’
Which
is to say, 40 minutes of video of UAPs doing their thing out over the
ocean, running circles around U.S. Navy aircraft carriers and fighter
pilots, whatever it is they do out there. Not fiction, but actual reality.
Imagine
video, then, that gives you the palpable feeling of shit getting
unnervingly real, of the world shifting beneath your feet. It’s what the
American philosopher and physicist Thomas Kuhn called in his 1962 book TheStructure of Scientific Revolutions
a “paradigm shift,” or what philosophy and religious studies professor
Jeffrey Kripal calls “the flip.” Out with the old, in with the new — and
the woo.
Make no mistake: The videos we’ve already seen, acquired and published by the New York Times (and those reportedly leaked and subsequently dribbled out by ufologist and filmmaker Jeremy Corbell)
are extraordinary, game-changing documents. They are, at this point,
probably the most famous “authentic” UFO videos ever seen by the public.
Future books on the topic will probably feature images from these
videos the way UFO books published during the 1970s and ’80s included
the famous Trent photos from McMinnville.
CDC | This data visualization presents provisional counts for drug overdose
deaths based on a current flow of mortality data in the National Vital
Statistics System. Counts for the most recent final annual data are
provided for comparison. National provisional counts include deaths
occurring within the 50 states and the District of Columbia as of the
date specified and may not include all deaths that occurred during a
given time period. Provisional counts are often incomplete and causes of
death may be pending investigation (see Technical notes)
resulting in an underestimate relative to final counts. To address
this, methods were developed to adjust provisional counts for reporting
delays by generating a set of predicted provisional counts (see Technical notes).
The provisional data presented in this visualization include: (a) the
reported and predicted provisional counts of deaths due to drug
overdose occurring nationally and in each jurisdiction; (b) a U.S. map
of the percentage changes in provisional drug overdose deaths for the
current 12 month-ending period compared with the 12-month period ending
in the same month of the previous year, by jurisdiction; and (c) the
reported and predicted provisional counts of drug overdose deaths
involving specific drugs or drug classes occurring nationally and in
selected jurisdictions. The reported and predicted provisional counts
represent the numbers of deaths due to drug overdose occurring in the
12-month periods ending in the month indicated. These counts include all
seasons of the year and are insensitive to variations by seasonality.
Deaths are reported by the jurisdiction in which the death occurred.
Several data quality metrics, including the percent completeness in
overall death reporting, percentage of deaths with cause of death
pending further investigation, and the percentage of drug overdose
deaths with specific drugs or drug classes reported are included to aid
in interpretation of provisional data as these measures are related to
the accuracy of provisional counts (see Technical notes).
Reporting of the specific drugs and drug classes involved in drug
overdose deaths varies by jurisdiction, and comparisons of death rates
involving specific drugs across selected jurisdictions should not be
made (see Technical notes). Provisional data presented in this visualization will be updated on a monthly basis as additional records are received.
CNN | America's drug epidemic is the deadliest it has ever been, new federal data suggests.
More
than 100,000 people died of drug overdoses in the United States during
the 12-month period ending April 2021, according to provisional data
published Wednesday by the US Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.
That's a new record high, with overdose deaths jumping 28.5% from the same period a year earlier and nearly doubling over the past five years.
Opioids
continue to be the driving cause of drug overdose deaths. Synthetic
opioids, primarily fentanyl, caused nearly two-thirds (64%) of all drug
overdose deaths in the 12-month period ending April 2021, up 49% from
the year before, the CDC's 's National Center for Health Statistics
found.
Drug overdose deaths rose nearly 30% in the past year, according to provisional data released by the National Center for Health Statistics. More than 100,000 people died from a drug overdose between April 2020 and April 2021, up from 78,000 the year before and nearly double the deaths five years ago.
The
Covid-19 pandemic and the rise in use of fentanyl have both been key
contributors to the rising overdose death toll, experts say.
The
latest provisional data on drug overdose deaths captures those
occurring in May 2020 through April 2021. Covid-19 killed about 509,000
people in that same timeframe, according to data from Johns Hopkins
University.
"What
we're seeing are the effects of these patterns of crisis and the
appearance of more dangerous drugs at much lower prices," Dr. Nora
Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told CNN. "In a
crisis of this magnitude, those already taking drugs may take higher
amounts and those in recovery may relapse. It's a phenomenon we've seen
and perhaps could have predicted."
But
the rise of fentanyl, a stronger and faster-acting drug than natural
opiates, has made those effects even more deadly, she said.
Increasing
use of the synthetic drug caught the attention of experts before
Covid-19 hit, but the pandemic may have exacerbated the problem.
With
international travel limited, synthetics that are easier to manufacture
and more concentrated were likely more efficient to smuggle across
borders, Volkow said.
nashvillescene |On April 7, Tyler Smith graduated from a
10-week addiction treatment program in Athens, Tenn. His family traveled
from Knoxville for the occasion and felt optimistic that, this time,
his recovery might last. At 31 years old, he told his mother Danita
McCartney that he was ready to be done with the cycle that had shaped
his life for more than a decade.
Like
many teens, Tyler partied in high school, drinking beer and smoking
weed on occasion. But the beast got its claws in him toward the end of
his senior year, when a co-worker at a restaurant — a work environment
where drugs are often found about as easily as any other ingredient —
showed him how to crush an OxyContin and snort it. He spent the next 12
years in and out of the clutches of addiction. Danita would cling to
hope where she could find it. As a young boy, Tyler had always been
deathly afraid of needles — perhaps that would at least keep him from
shooting up. It didn’t.
But Danita says there were
wonderful seasons of sobriety. Tyler loved the Grateful Dead and the
mountains. Despite it being where he was introduced to hard drugs, the
restaurant industry had made him into an excellent cook, and he
delighted in taking over the kitchen at holidays to make a meal for the
whole family.
In between those seasons, Tyler
wandered, living for short stints in various places around the country.
When he struggled, he had the support of his family, and his mother says
he found great treatment through urban rescue missions similar to the
one where she works in Knoxville. He spent time in recovery programs in
Alabama, Indiana and Florida before moving to Nashville, where he
rekindled a relationship with a young woman he’d known in high school.
He found a job at a downtown restaurant — there, again, he found drugs.
In January of this year, he survived an overdose after his girlfriend
was able to revive him. That prompted his family to send him to the
program in Athens, where he stayed for more than two months.
After
he graduated from the program, Tyler returned to Nashville and got a
job at an irrigation company, deciding to stay away from the kitchens
where he’d been unable to resist substances. He talked on the phone with
his mother frequently, never failing to end a conversation by telling
her he loved her. But on the morning of Tuesday, April 14, Danita
received the phone call she’d been expecting for years but could never
prepare for. Tyler’s girlfriend had found him dead in the living room. A
toxicology report later revealed what was in his system: meth and
fentanyl, the latter a synthetic opioid that can be 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine and lethal in doses as small as 2 milligrams.
Tyler’s
death inducted his family into a growing, grieving community — those
who have lost loved ones to a raging epidemic of drug deaths, the
majority of which have been caused by fentanyl. It’s the other epidemic,
one that has been largely overshadowed by the global COVID-19 pandemic.
But in Nashville, it’s claimed almost as many lives. From March 20,
2020 — the day of the first confirmed COVID-19 death in Nashville — to
Oct. 16, 2021, the city reported 1,113 deaths from the virus. In that
same time period, 1,070 suspected drug deaths have occurred in
Nashville. That figure includes residents, non-residents and people
whose status is unknown. According to the Metro Public Health
Department, residents have accounted for around 70 percent of all drug
deaths in Davidson County this year.
The coronavirus pandemic has made us all terribly familiar with the
notion of the so-called curve. Fentanyl deaths are still rising, and
this curve is showing no signs of flattening.
technologyreview | In a
12-by-20-foot room at a skilled-nursing facility in Menlo Park,
California, researchers are testing the next evolution of the computer
interface inside the soft matter of Dennis DeGray’s motor cortex. DeGray
is paralyzed from the neck down. He was hurt in a freak fall in his
yard while taking out the trash and is, he says, “as laid up as a person
can be.” He steers his wheelchair by puffing into a tube.
But DeGray is a virtuoso at using his brain to control a computer mouse. For the last five years, he has been a participant in BrainGate,
a series of clinical trials in which surgeons have inserted silicon
probes the size of a baby aspirin into the brains of more than 20
paralyzed people. Using these brain-computer interfaces,
researchers can measure the firing of dozens of neurons as people think
of moving their arms and hands. And by sending these signals to a
computer, the scientists have enabled those with the implants to grasp
objects with robot arms and steer planes around in flight simulators.
DeGray
is the world’s fastest brain typist. He first established the mark four
years ago, using his brain signals to roam over a virtual keyboard with
a point-and-click cursor. Selecting letters on a screen, he reached a
rate of eight correct words in a minute. Then, right before the covid-19
pandemic began, he demolished his own record, using a new technique
where he imagined he was hand-writing letters on lined paper. With that
approach, he managed 18 words per minute.
One of the people
responsible for the studies with DeGray is Krishna Shenoy, a Stanford
University neuroscientist and electrical engineer who is among the
leaders of the BrainGate project. While other brain-interface
researchers grabbed the limelight with more spectacular demonstrations,
Shenoy’s group has stayed focused on creating a practical interface that
paralyzed patients can use for everyday computer interactions. “We had
to persevere in the early days, when people said Ah, it’s cooler to do a robotic arm—it makes a better movie,” says Shenoy. But “if you can click, then you can use Gmail, surf the Web, and play music.”
Shenoy
says he is developing the technology for people with “the worst
afflictions and the most need.” Those include patients who are utterly
locked in and unable to speak, like those in the end stage of ALS.
But
if the technology allows people like DeGray to link their brain
directly to a computer, why not extend it to others? In 2016, Elon Musk
started a company called Neuralink
that began developing a neural “sewing machine” to implant a new type of
threaded electrode. Musk said his goal was to establish a
high-throughput connection to human brains so that society could keep
pace with artificial intelligence.
nature | A human brain slice is placed in a microscope to visualize nerve fibres. Credit: Mareen Fischinger
Imagine looking at Earth from space and being
able to listen in on what individuals are saying to each other. That’s
about how challenging it is to understand how the brain works.
From
the organ’s wrinkled surface, zoom in a million-fold and you’ll see a
kaleidoscope of cells of different shapes and sizes, which branch off
and reach out to each other. Zoom in a further 100,000 times and you’ll
see the cells’ inner workings — the tiny structures in each one, the
points of contact between them and the long-distance connections between
brain areas.
Scientists have made maps such as these for the worm1 and fly2 brains, and for tiny parts of the mouse3 and human4
brains. But those charts are just the start. To truly understand how
the brain works, neuroscientists also need to know how each of the
roughly 1,000 types of cell thought to exist in the brain speak to each
other in their different electrical dialects. With that kind of
complete, finely contoured map, they could really begin to explain the
networks that drive how we think and behave.
Such maps are emerging, including in a series of papers published this week
that catalogue the cell types in the brain. Results are streaming in
from government efforts to understand and stem the increasing burden of
brain disorders in their ageing populations. These projects, launched
over the past decade, aim to systematically chart the brain’s
connections and catalogue its cell types and their physiological
properties.
It’s an onerous undertaking. “But knowing all the
brain cell types, how they connect with each other and how they
interact, will open up an entirely new set of therapies that we can’t
even imagine today,” says Josh Gordon, director of the US National
Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland.
The
largest projects started in 2013, when the US government and the
European Commission launched ‘moonshot’ efforts to provide services to
researchers that will help to crack the mammalian brain’s code. They
each poured vast resources into large-scale systematic programmes with
different goals. The US effort — which is estimated to cost
US$6.6 billion up until 2027 — has focused on developing and applying
new mapping technologies in its BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing
Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative (see ‘Big brain budgets’). The
European Commission and its partner organizations have spent
€607 million ($703 million) on the Human Brain Project (HBP), which is
aimed mainly at creating simulations of the brain’s circuitry and using
those models as a platform for experiments.
royalsocietyofbiology | Understanding how memories are formed and stored is one of the great
enigmas in neuroscience. After more than a century of research, detailed
knowledge of the mechanisms of memory formation remain elusive.
In the past decade, memory research has been advanced by the study of
neuronal engrams, or networks of neurons that are incorporated into a
memory. In particular brain regions associated with memory, a neuronal
engram is theorised to consist of a subset of neurons within that brain
region that is uniquely activated by a behaviour that leads to memory
formation.
For example, when mice are trained on a simple, initial behavioural
task, a certain subset of neurons within a specific brain region will
become activated. Genetic techniques can be used to ‘tag’ this network
of neurons.
If the mouse is then placed in a different behavioural or
environmental context, and the network of neurons from the initial
behavioural task is artificially activated, the mouse will display
behaviour that it learned in the initial task[1].
The initial behavioural task triggered the incorporation of a subset of
neurons into an engram, which encoded the memory for that task.
Given the vast number of neurons in the brain, the potential
combination of neurons that could make up separate memory engrams is
virtually limitless. So the question that is key to our understanding of
the mechanisms of memory formation is: what causes the incorporation of
one neuron, but not another, into memory engrams?
Research has demonstrated that certain proteins can ‘prime’ neurons for incorporation into an engram[2].
Neurons that naturally express more of these proteins are frequently
found in memory engrams for a behaviour. Artificially inducing more of
these substances to be expressed can encourage neurons to become part of
an engram.
One substance in particular that was found to be important for priming neurons for engram incorporation is known as Arc[3].
This protein is induced rapidly by neuronal activity and regulates
levels of receptors at synapses that are critical for synaptic function
and neuronal communication.
Mice that genetically lack Arc protein are unable to form memories
that last longer than the course of a behavioural training session
(known as long-term memories), although they can learn normally at
short-term time scales. Although these experimental findings suggest
that Arc is an important piece of the memory puzzle, the mechanisms that
regulate Arc at the cellular and molecular level remain unclear.
Recently, research I conducted in the laboratory of Dr Jason Shepherd at the University of Utah[4] revealed something very surprising: Arc structurally and functionally resembles a retrovirus such as HIV. This
is the first time a neuronal protein, much less one underlying a
process as crucial as memory formation, has been shown to have a viral
structure. Evolutionary analysis from our laboratory showed that
Arc protein is distantly related to a class of retrotransposons that
also gave rise to retroviruses such as HIV.
What are Fauci and the pedophobe pediatrician smoking? That pediatrician MUST NOT HAVE kids of his own. The neo-vaccinoids were
tested on only 2,268 youngsters aged 5 to 12:
The pediatrician: “Given how infectious Delta is and other variants, everyone’s eventually going to get vaccinated or COVID.”
NO. Since the neo-vaccinoids are not sterilizing, everyone is going to get COVID, neo-vaccinoided or not.
So Stop Lying...,
Children face much less risk from the virus and
face much higher risk from the neo-vaccinoids.
Fortunately many pediatricians
understand
this and are not pushing neo-vaccinoids, which begs the question, why is the
Slate framing the decision to do so in such a net positive when the
science is far from certain?
How many parents trusted the doctors who said, with
authority, that pain is the sixth vital sign, filled the miracle opioid
Rx they were given, and had their kids turn into opioid addicts?
slate |Why
do you think there’s this disconnect that might exist between what a
vaccinated parent is willing to do for themselves and what they might be
willing to do for their kid?
One
is that you feel a sense of responsibility to your children that
sometimes feels harder than to yourself, because you’ve been taking
risks with yourself your whole life. You’ve probably made some
reasonably risky decisions in your 20s, both with respect to sexual
activity and perhaps with substances—you’re used to understanding
tradeoffs. With kids however, we’re much more restrictive. And we feel
that we could be blamed. The dangers seem much bigger and the benefits
sometimes pale in comparison.
Of
course, weighing benefits and risks of vaccines is nothing new. That’s
why families turn to their pediatricians for advice. For years, doctors
have tried to increase vaccination rates and fight hesitancy. Did this
same struggle occur with earlier vaccines?
When
the varicella vaccine got approved in the ’90s, lots of parents were
like, “Why should I vaccinate my kid against chicken pox? It’s a nothing
big, minor illness. Everybody gets it.” And for a lot of people, that’s
true. But when adults get chicken pox, it’s massively bad.
Plus, some number of babies died every year of varicella infection. It
wasn’t huge numbers, but they were real numbers.
And
just a couple of years after we really started vaccinating kids, in the
early 2000s, zero babies died of chicken pox. That’s a huge win, given
that zero babies are immunized against chicken pox. You can’t get it
until you’re 1 year of age. But by vaccinating children, we’ve protected
everyone. And now today we have like 86 percent of eligible children
vaccinated, and chicken pox has largely gone away.
You wrote about your experience
as a young pediatrician, vaccinating kids with the varicella vaccine
against chicken pox. How did you break through to skeptical parents?
I
think it’s time and effort and it’s building up trust. I would talk
about risk and benefits. In fact, this is part of what we do with
everything. When parents are like, “I want an antibiotic for my kid’s
ear infection,” I talk about these are the benefits of it and these are
the risks. It’s negotiation. It’s making sure people feel heard,
making sure that you understand what they’re going through, that it’s
not unreasonable and trying to find a solution that works.
In
your writing about varicella, I noticed that you said in 2008, only
about 34 percent of eligible adolescents were fully immunized. And by
2018, about 90 percent of kids have been vaccinated. That seems both
great, and made me think: Are we talking about immunizing kids against
COVID on a decade long timeframe? Is it going to take us 10 years?
Unless
we have mandates, yeah, I think it is because, and, to be honest with
you, we won’t get all the way there without mandates. Let’s be clear
too. I can’t win 90 percent as a pediatrician. I just own that. It’s not
going to happen. You need these to become so expected that the school
system’s requiring it. The default has to be “vaccinated,” so that most
people will do it.
self | Following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s official recommendation of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for children ages 5 to 11 last week, NPR
host Mary Louise Kelly asked Dr. Fauci for his take on how parents who
are still weighing the risks and benefits of vaccination for their newly
eligible kids should think the decision through. “Well, first of all,
we have to always respect when parents have questions, reasonable
questions about this,” Dr. Fauci said. “And what you do is you take them
to the data.”
Dr. Fauci cited evidence from the clinical trial studying the first COVID-19 vaccine for kids,
which the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration used in their
decision-making about the first pediatric COVID-19 vaccine. “This is a
study that very clearly showed a high degree of efficacy,” Dr. Fauci
said. In the trial, which included about 3,100 children who received the
vaccine and about 1,500 who received a placebo, vaccination was found
to be nearly 91% effective at preventing symptomatic cases of COVID-19.
“That is really very good for a vaccine,” Dr. Fauci said. He noted that
the study found the pediatric COVID-19 vaccine also has a very good
safety profile.
Another key data point Dr. Fauci believes parents should consider is the prevalence of COVID-19 infections among children—and
the real risks of serious illness, long-term effects, or death. “I
would tell the parents [that] although it is less likely for a child to
get a serious result from infection than an adult, particularly an
elderly adult, it is not something that’s trivial with children,” Dr.
Fauci said.
There
have been about 1.9 million reported cases of COVID-19 in children ages
5 to 11 in the U.S., including approximately 8,300 hospitalizations and
100 deaths, according to Dr. Fauci. There have also been over 2,000
cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in U.S. children, “which can
really be quite severe,” Dr. Fauci said. The rare but serious (and still
poorly understood) syndrome can cause inflammation in a variety of body
organs and systems, including the lungs, heart, kidneys, brain,
digestive system, skin, and eyes, according to the CDC.
During
the interview, Dr. Fauci also addressed another key question parents
may have: whether children who have already had COVID-19 still ought to
be vaccinated. The added protective benefit of COVID-19 vaccination in
kids who have already been infected can’t be demonstrated yet, since the
FDA just authorized the two-dose mRNA vaccine. But based on mounting data on vaccinated adults, the answer is yes, as SELF has reported.
Minorities, working class females, refugees, indentured 1099 gig-serfs - none of these people are in any kind of position to “tear each other’s faces off” in American Civil War 2.0.
The working class is the most integrated sector of America. Most of the black folk I know don’t have much interest in BLM. Most are likely to ask “What do you have to say about the violence in the hood?” None of the black folk I know have any interest in the race baiters at CNN. MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, NPR, those jokers are for idiotic comfortable white folks, the pretty people.
Most of the white working class folk I know aren’t interested in any of that gas either. They're too busy trying to get by, take care of family etc. Now find a politician that doesn’t have a platinum tongue, who walks the talk about forcing industry to come back to America, and who threatens the rich with high wages for those folk or watch your holdings get repurposed. See what happens then. Watch as the pretty people show their true colors as the real race baiters.
We’ve got a family friend who is a shift manager at a local Starbucks. The chain closed 8,000 stores in 2018 for a day of racial sensitivity training. The sensitivity trainer surveyed the group of workers at our friend’s location. They stared back at him. After a moment, everyone broke out laughing. There was nary a marginalized minority who was not represented among them.
1% Media/Social Network Activists and White kids’ co-opting movements or appropriating and spinning the utter HORROR of being poor and Black in America has precious little to do with Black Lives Matter. Conflating this with Comcast-ATT-Fox-Disney-Viacom - again monetizing poor worker deaths by cop, OR, prodding the working poor into hellish gig-serfdom, to intentionally infect vulnerable loved-ones, flip their apartments; then further break them down into homelessness - IS what Taibbi, Greenwald… basically all your HEROS studiously ignore.
“The Jackpot” is a reference to William Gibson’s The Peripheral.
Here’s the quote; I think it’s self-explanatory.
[The Jackpot] was androgenic, he said, and she knew from Ciencia Loca and National Geographic
that meant because of people. Not that they’d known what they were
doing, had meant to make problems, but they’d caused it anyway. And in
fact the actual climate, the weather, caused by there being too much
carbon, had been the driver for a lot of other things. How that got
worse and never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because
people in the past, clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all
up, then not been able to get it together to do anything about it, even
after they knew, and now it was too late.
So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic,
systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew,
figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn’t
happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming
anyway. She’d looked across the silver lawn, that Leon had cut with the
push-mower whose cast-iron frame was held together with actual baling
wire, to where moon shadows lay, past stunted boxwoods and the stump of a
concrete birdbath they’d pretened was a dragon’s castle, while Wilf
told her it killed 80 percent of every last person alive, over about
forty years. …
No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just
everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water
shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now,
collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone,
antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were
never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in
themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of
them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there. …
But science, he said, had been the wild card, the twist. With
everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a
slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one
big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more
effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what
antibiotics had done before…. Ways to print food that required much less
in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply
fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made
people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on,
deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he
said, by sufferings unimaginable. …
None of that, he said, had necessarily been as bad for very rich
people. The richest had gotten richer, there being fewer to own whatever
there was. Constant crisis bad provided constant opportunity. That was
where his world had come from, he said. At the deepest point of
everything going to shit, population radically reduced, the survivors
saw less carbon being dumped into the system, with what was still being
produced being eaten by those towers they’d built… And seeing that, for
them, the survivors, was like seeing the bullet dodged.
CTH | Many people have asked: how is the best way to stop the insanity
behind the incessant vaccine narrative? The likely best approach is to
start demanding the pharmaceutical companies have their liability
waivers removed.
If the vaccine is safe and effective, why would the U.S. government still need to provide liability waivers from adverse vaccine outcomes?
Start pressuring legislators and elected officials to force the
elimination of the waivers. Alinsky them… Make them live up to their
own narrative; their own words, their own rules. If the vaccines are
safe/effective, why do we need the waivers? If you want to get more
people vaccinated, drop the waiver moving forward.
Eliminate those liability waivers and watch how fast every vaccine
mandate is dropped, while every voice demanding vaccination goes quiet.
spiegel | Meanwhile,
a large population of the feebleminded have continued to ignore the
dangers presented by the virus and refuse to be vaccinated. Indeed, the
untenable situation in Germany’s intensive care units is primarily due
to this group. In its most recent weekly report, the RKI notes that 87
percent of adults under 60 receiving intensive care due to COVID-19 have
not been vaccinated.
"The winter will be a societal and medical challenge for Germany,
resulting from a lack of preparation, clear rules and rigor," said
Gerald Haug, president of the German National Academy of Sciences
Leopoldina. The unusually stern tone of his message is justified. Almost
no preventative measures were taken, the rules now in place aren’t
particularly rigorous, and they are hardly enforced.
The fact that
Germany is stumbling into the fall virtually unprepared is one problem.
The fact that the country has essentially been without leadership since
the September general election is another. The leadership shown – or
better, not shown – by the country’s political representatives in recent
months borders on malpractice. Hardly anyone is doing what they should
be doing in the face of a crisis like this. Angela Merkel is no longer
offering guidance. Her likely successor, Olaf Scholz, isn’t yet in
office. And even worse, the next coalition will in all likelihood
include the Free Democrats (FDP), a party which, when it comes to
measures to control the coronavirus, is far more focused on what they
don’t want than on what is necessary.
The result is that Germany’s federal politicians are pushing off
responsibility onto the states. And they are again doing what they
always do: Each state comes up with its own strategy. No coordination.
Collective negligence.
The consequences are serious. Whereas more
than half the population of Israel has received a third dose of vaccine,
the rate in Germany is just 4 percent. Despite the fact that it has
been known for some time that protection from the initial doses begins
to wane after a few months.
Back in summer, immunologists and
virologists made it clear to the German government that all elderly
people in the country and those with compromised immune systems needed
to receive a booster, which can increase protection from the virus by up
to 20 times. The Health Ministry, under the leadership of Jens Spahn,
calculated that up to 11 million people could be reached by the end of
October. It is now November, and just over 3 million have received their
booster shots. Just how outgoing Chancellery Chief of Staff Helge Braun
intends to achieve his self-proclaimed target of 20 million boosters by
the end of the year remains his secret. Preparations for the campaign
have suffered for weeks from chaotic agreements and contradictory
statements.
And it was Health Minister Spahn himself who was the source of much
of the confusion. After he – in concert with the RKI – initially
recommended booster shots after six months for the elderly, those with
weak immune systems and health-care personnel, he suddenly shifted his
approach two weeks ago. He did so in response to a discussion with his
Israeli counterpart, who has been preaching booster shots for some time.
There are now indications that boosters don’t just help at-risk
patients, but can also result in a lower virus transmission rate, thus
breaking new chains of infection.
So, Spahn also suddenly recommended that everyone get their booster shot.
The
consequence has been massive confusion in medical practices across the
country. Primary care physicians say their phone lines were suddenly
jammed and people mobbed their offices – right at the beginning of the
cold and flu season. Last Tuesday, the outraged doctors took an unusual
step. In comments to journalists in Berlin, Andreas Gassen, head of the
National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians, said that
comments from political leaders introduced "chaos" into German medical
practices. It was clear that he was talking about Spahn.
Twitter is designed in a way to mislead and distort objective reality.
This headline based on one Bloomberg opinion piece was trending on Twitter for literally *weeks*, leading many people to believe that the vaccine mandates were perfectly constitutional.
taibbi | Compared with how often you heard pundits rage about the
“insurrection,” how regularly did you hear that billionaire wealth has
risen 70% or $2.1 trillion since the pandemic began? How much did you
hear about last year’s accelerated payments to defense contractors, who
immediately poured the “rescue” cash into a buyback orgy, or about the
record underwriting revenues for banks in 2020, or the “embarrassment of
profits” for health carriers in the same year, or the huge rises in
revenue for pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Johnson &
Johnson, all during a period of massive net job losses? The economic
news at the top hasn’t just been good, it’s been record-setting good,
during a time of severe cultural crisis.
Twenty or thirty years ago, the Big Lie was usually a patriotic
fairy tale designed to cast America in a glow of beneficence. Nurtured
in think-tanks, stumped by politicians, and amplified by Hollywood
producers and media talking heads, these whoppers were everywhere:
America would have won in Vietnam if not for the media, poverty didn’t
exist (or at least, wasn’t shown on television), only the Soviets
cuddled with dictators or toppled legitimate governments, etc. The
concept wasn’t hard to understand: leaders were promoting unifying myths
to keep the population satiated, dumb, and focused on their primary
roles as workers and shoppers.
In the Trump era, all this has been turned upside down. There’s
actually more depraved, dishonest propaganda than before, but the new
legends are explicitly anti-unifying and anti-patriotic. The people who
run this country seem less invested than ever in maintaining anything
like social cohesion, maybe because they mostly live in wealth
archipelagoes that might as well be separate nations (if they even live
in America at all).
All sense of noblesse oblige is gone. The logic of our kleptocratic
economy has gone beyond even the “Greed is Good” mantra of the fictional
Gordon Gekko, who preached that pure self-interest would make America
more efficient, better-run, less corrupt. Even on Wall Street, nobody
believes that anymore. America is a sinking ship, and its CEO class is
trying to salvage the wreck in advance, extracting every last dime
before Battlefield Earth breaks out.
It’s only in this context that these endless cycles of
hyper-divisive propaganda make sense. It’s time to start wondering if
maybe it’s not a coincidence that politicians and pundits alike are
pushing us closer and closer to actual civil war at exactly the moment
when corporate wealth extraction is reaching its highest-ever levels of
efficiency.
NC | My read at this point is that we are in a pre-civil war situation,
with conservative and libertarians just itching to get on with killing
the liberals (just like sothorons were itching, by spring of 1860, for a
war to begin killing Yankees). This is the true context in which to
view the Rittenhouse trial in Kenosha. The drift into a second civil war
should properly be understood as the end result of the past 90 years
organizing by rich reactionaries against the New Deal, and their attempt
to restore the preponderance of power to capital versus labor. For all
the short termism of a financialized economy, the rich reactionaries
have had a stunning lomg game in mind, and the most impactful part is
probably going to be the creation and propagation of “law and economics”
and the (anti)Federalist Society seizure of control of the judiciary.
The drift into a second civil war is also the context in which to
view the “left’s” demands for censorship, which Taibbi, Greenwald, and a
few others have assailed repeatedly and, imho, unwisely. We must build
the cultural capacity to limit the free speech of the rich, in much the
same way the there are cultural limits on speech by military officers.
It bears repeating that the ascendancy of the reactionaries, who are now
poised to deploy the authoritarians they have cultivated within the
population, has been a 90 year project. At various points, severe
penalties and a cultural disapprobation of free speech would have
avoided the present drive to war. For example, G. Gordon Liddy and
Oliver North should never have been allowed to become stars of
right-wing TV and talk radio.
And, a subject of the British crown, Rupert Murdoch, should never
have been allowed to have control of major American media. The case of
Murdoch points to the real vulnerability we face: there is no
understanding of what a republic is, and how a republic must be
defended. Hence, Madison writing about “aristocratic or monarchial
innovations” sounds very strange to us today. But Ganesh Sitaraman, in
his excellent book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens our Republic
(2017), points out that Americans were culturally hostile and
suspicious of aristocracy and monarchy up until World War Two and the
Cold War, when the new foe to be guarded against became fascism, then
communism.
This lack of republican culture allows Gitlin, Isaac, and Kristol, in
their “An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy,” to purvey a series of
frauds on public opinion. They write, ““Liberal democracy depends on
free and fair elections, respect for the rights of others, the rule of
law, a commitment to truth and tolerance in our public discourse.” This
is certainly not untrue, but what they omit is crucial. First, this is
supposed to be a republic, not a democracy. While a republic should have
a democratic form of government, a republic is different because a
regard for the General Welfare must be balanced against individual
freedoms. There used to be a consideration of public virtue, in which
citizens were expected to abandon their self-interests when they
conflicted with the public good. For example, citizens should be
expected to wear masks and embrace vaccine requirements in a pandemic,
and any refusal or disobedience should be properly seen as an assault on
the republic.
Second, in a republic, there is a positive requirement to do good.
The exemplar of this is Benjamin Franklin, and the various
organizations he helped create: a fire company, a library, a hospital,
the American Philosophical Association, and so on. All of these resulted
in the network that fought the Revolutionary War, then attempted to
codify republicanism in the Constitution. But the compromise with
slavery was a fatal flaw.
President John Quincy Adams, in his first annual message to Congress, summarized this positive requirement to do good:
The great object of the institution of civil government
is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the
social compact, and no government, in what ever form constituted, can
accomplish the lawful ends of its institution but in proportion as it
improves the condition of those over whom it is established. Roads and
canals, by multiplying and facilitating the communications and
intercourse between distant regions and multitudes of men, are among the
most important means of improvement. But moral, political, intellectual
improvement are duties assigned by the Author of Our Existence to
social no less than to individual man.
Law journal articles on the Guarantee Clause:
Bonfield, Arthur E., “The Guarantee Clause of Article IV, Section 4: A
Study in Constitutional Desuetude”, [On the Constitutional guarantee of
the federal government that each state shall have a republican form of
government]
46 Minnesota Law Review 513 (May, 1961) https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/mlr/863/ https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/217205534.pdf
The Yale Law Journal
Vol. 97, No. 8, Jul., 1988
Symposium: The Republican Civic Tradition
[12 articles on republicanism] https://www.jstor.org/stable/i232687
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