Today, @CDCDirector said: "The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least 4 comorbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with and yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron."
CDC | Among 1,228,664 persons who completed primary vaccination during
December 2020–October 2021, severe COVID-19–associated outcomes (0.015%)
or death (0.0033%) were rare. Risk factors for severe outcomes included
age ≥65 years, immunosuppressed, and six other underlying conditions.
All persons with severe outcomes had at least one risk factor; 78% of
persons who died had at least four.
What are the implications for public health practice?
Vaccinated persons who are older, immunosuppressed, or have other
underlying conditions should receive targeted interventions including
chronic disease management, precautions to reduce exposure, additional
primary and booster vaccine doses, and effective pharmaceutical therapy
to mitigate risk for severe outcomes. Increasing vaccination coverage is
a critical public health priority.
futurism | David Bohm’s influence extends beyond
physics to embrace philosophy, psychology, religion, art, and
linguistics. Interestingly, his ideas have been received more
enthusiastically by the arts community than by the scientific
establishment. The Tibetan Master Sogyal Rinpoche once remarked that
there are striking parallels between Bohm’s model of the universe and
the Buddhist *bardo* teachings, as they both “spring from a vision of
wholeness.”
Bohm had
doubts about the theory of quantum mechanics and its ability to fully
explain the workings of the universe. Despite having written a classic
textbook on quantum mechanics, Bohm, agreed with Albert Einstein that
“God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” While working on plasmas at
the Lawrence Radiation laboratory in California in the 1940s, Bohm
noticed that once electrons were in a plasma (which has a high density
of electrons and positive ions), they stopped behaving like individual
particles and started behaving like a unit. It seemed as if the sea of
electrons was somehow alive. He thought then that there was a deeper
cause behind the random nature of the subatomic world.
Bohm
came up with an idea of the quantum potential to suggest that subatomic
particles are highly complex, dynamic entities that follow a precise
path which is determined by subtle forces. In his view the quantum
potential pervades all space and guides the motion of particles by
providing information about the whole environment.
For
Bohm, all of reality was a dynamic process in which all manifest
objects are in a state of constant flux. By introducing the concepts of “implicate order” and “explicate order”,
Bohm argued that the empty space in the universe contained the whole of
everything. It is the source of explicate order, the order of the
physical world, and is a realm of pure information. From it, the
physical, observable phenomena unfold, and again, return to it. This
unfolding of the explicit order from the subtle realm of the implicate
order, and the movement of all matter in terms of enfolding and
unfolding, is what Bohm called the Holomovement.
Bohm believed that although the universe appears to be solid, it is, in
essence, a magnificent hologram. He believed in the “whole in every
part” idea, and just like a hologram, each part of physical reality
contained information about the whole.
Bohm was not the only scientist who
arrived at this conclusion. In neuroscience, Karl Pribram, who was
working on the functioning of the brain, concluded that memories are
encoded not in specific regions of the brain, but in patterns of nerve
impulses that crisscross the brain in the same way that patterns of
laser light interference crisscross the area containing a holographic
image. Together, Bohm and Pribram worked on developing the so called
“Holonomic Model” of the functioning of the brain.
Bohm
believed that his body was a microcosm of the macrocosm, and that the
universe was a mystical place where past, present, and future coexisted.
He postulated the existence of a realm of pure information (the
implicate order) from which the physical, observable phenomena unfold.
Unlike classical physics where reality is viewed as particles of
separate, independent elements, Bohm proposed that the fundamental
reality is the continuous enfoldment (into the implicate order) and
unfoldment (of the explicate order) from the subtle realms. In this
flow, matter and space are each part of the whole.
In stark contrast to Western ways of thinking about the nature of reality as external and mechanistic, Bohm considers our separateness an illusion
and argues that at a deeper level of reality, we, as well as all the
particles that make up all matter, are one and indivisible. For Bohm,
the “empty space” is full of energy and information. It’s a hidden world
of the implicate order, also known as the “Zero Point Field” or the
“Akasha”.
archive |MISHLOVE: You're very well known in
psychology
and in neuropsychology as the developer of the holographic or
holonomic
model of the brain. Can you talk about that a little bit, and how
it
relates to the mind -- or rather, to the mind-body process? I have to
be
on my toes with you today. PRIBRAM: Yes. The holonomic brain theory
is based
on some insights that Dennis Gabor had.
He was the inventor of the hologram, and he obtained the Nobel Prize
for
his many contributions. He was a mathematician, and what he was trying
to do was develop a better way of making electron micrographs, improve
the resolution of the micrographs. And so for electron microscopy he
suggested
that instead of making a photograph -- essentially, with electron
microscopes
we make photographs using electrons instead of photons. He thought
maybe
instead of making ordinary photographs, that what he would do is get
the
interference patterns. Now what is aninterference pattern?
When light strikes, or when electrons strike any object, they scatter.
But the scatter is a funny kind of scatter. It's a very well regulated
scatter. For instance, if you defocus the lens on a camera so that you
don't get the image falling on the image plane and you have a blur,
that
blur essentially is a hologram, because all you have to do is refocus
it.
MISHLOVE: Contained in the blur is
the actual
image.
PRIBRAM: That's right. But you don't
see it as
such. Soone of the main principles ofholonomic brain
theory,
which gets us into quantum mechanics also, is that there is a
relationship
here between what we ordinarily experience, and some other process or
some
other order, which David Bohm calls the implicate,
or enfolded, order, in which things are all distributed
or
spread -- in fact the mathematical formulations are often called spread
functions -- that spread this out.
MISHLOVE: Now what you're talking
about here
is the deep structure of the universe, in a way. Beneath the subatomic
level of matter itself are these quantum wave functions, so to
speak,
and they form interference patterns. Would I be wrong in saying it
would
be like dropping two stones in a pond, the way the ripples overlap? Is
that like an interference pattern?
PRIBRAM: That's certainly the way
interference
patterns work, yes.
MISHLOVE: And you're suggesting
that at that
very deep level of reality, something is operating in the brain itself.
PRIBRAM: Well, no. In a way, that's
possible, but
that's not where the situation is at the moment. All we know is that
the
mathematical descriptions that we make of, let's say, single-cell
processes,
and the branches from the single cells, and how they interact with each
other -- not only anatomically, but actually functional interactions --
that when we map those, we get a description that is very similar to
the
description of quantum events.
MISHLOVE: When you take into
account that there
are billions of these single cells operating in the brain.
PRIBRAM: That's right. And the
connections between
them, so there are even more; there are trillions of connections
between
them. They operate on the basic principles that have been found to also
operate at the quantum level. Actually, it was the other way around.
The
mathematics that Gabor used, he borrowed from Heisenberg and Hilbert.
Hilbert
developed them first in mathematics, and then Heisenberg used them in
quantum
mechanics, and Gabor used them in psychophysics, and we've used it in
modeling
how brain networks work.
MISHLOVE: So in other words, in the
brain,when
we look at the electrical impulses traveling through the neurons, and
the
patterns as these billions of neurons interact, you would say that that
is analogous, I suppose, or isomorphic to the processes that are going
on at the deeper quantum level.
PRIBRAM: Yes. But we don't know that
it's a deeper
quantum level in the brain.
MISHLOVE: That may or may not be
the case.
PRIBRAM: Analogous isn't quite the
right word;
they obey the same rules. It's not just an analogy, because the work
that
described these came independently. An analogy would be that you take
the
quantum ideas, and see how they fit to the data we have on the brain.
That's
not the way it happened. We got the brain data first, and then we see,
look, it fits the same mathematics. So the people who were gathering
these
data, including myself, weren't out to look for an analogous process. I
think it's a very important point, because otherwise you could be
biased,
and there are lots of different models that fit how the brain works.
But
this is more based on how the brain was found to work, independent of
these
conceptions.
MISHLOVE: Independent of any model.
PRIBRAM: Yes, essentially independent
of any model.
MISHLOVE: So you've got a
mathematical structure
that parallels the mathematical structures of quantum physics. Now what
does that tell us about the mind?
PRIBRAM: What it tells me is that the
problems
that have been faced in quantum mechanics for the whole century --
well,
since the twenties --
MISHLOVE: Many paradoxes.
PRIBRAM: And very many paradoxes --
that those
paradoxes also apply at the psychophysical level and at the neuronal
level,
and therefore we have to face the same sets of problems. At the same
time,
I think what David Bohm is doing is showing that some of the classical
conceptions which were thought not to apply at the quantum level,
really
do apply at the quantum level. Now, I'm interpreting Bohm; I'm not sure
he would want to agree to my interpretation of what he's doing. But to
me that seems to be what is going on. So that the schism between levels
-- between the quantum level, the submicroscopic almost, subatomic
level
and what goes on there, and the classical, so-called uncertainty
principle
and all of that -- that all applies all the way along; but you've got
to
be very careful in -- how should I put it? You've got to apply it to
the
actual data, and not just sort of run it over.
MISHLOVE: To the average layman,
why would they
be interested in this? Is there some significance to people in
their
everyday lives, or in their workaday worlds, in the business of
life?
PRIBRAM: Sure, and this is the critical
thing --
that if indeed we're right that these quantum-like phenomena, or the
rules
of quantum mechanics, apply all the way through to our psychological
processes,
to what's going on in the nervous system -- then we have an explanation
perhaps, certainly we have a parallel, to the kind of experiences that
people have called spiritual experiences. Because the descriptions
you
get with spiritual experiences seem to parallel the descriptions of
quantum
physics. That's why Fritjof Capra wrote The Tao of Physics,
why we have The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and all of this sort of
thing
that's come along. And in fact Bohr and Heisenberg already knew;
Schroedinger
talked about the Upanishads, and Bohr used the yin and yang as
his
symbol. Because the conceptions that grew out of watching the quantum
level
-- and therefore now the neurological and psychophysical level, now
that
it's a psychological level as well -- seem to have a great deal in
common
with our spiritual experience. Now what do I mean by spiritual
experience?
You talked about mental activity, calling it the mind. That aspect of
mental
activity, which is very human -- it may be true of other species as
well,
but we don't know -- but in human endeavor many of us at least seem to
need to get in contact with larger issues, whether they're cosmology,
or
some kind of biological larger issue, or a social one, or it's
formalized
in some kind of religious activity. But we want to belong. And that is
what I define as the spiritual aspects of man's nature.
ineteconomics | Napoleon Bonaparte asked, “What is history but a fable agreed upon?”
Graeber and Wengrow come in to shake off the spell of prevailing fables —
not as armchair theorists snatching ideas from thin air but as
reviewers and synthesizers of a plethora of tantalizing recent
discoveries, along with the work of neglected thinkers who (hello,
feminist scholars) who drew ire for their attention to glaring
inconsistencies in the established narratives. In doing so, they recover
frameworks for the way ancient peoples experienced their world that
help us to see that we could be organizing ourselves – socially,
economically, politically — on principles much different from those that
seem inevitable today. This is heartening.
Among the propositions of Graeber and Wengrow are these:
We barely have the language to express what our remote ancestors were up to 95% of the time.
The Agricultural Revolution wasn’t a revolution at all. The real story is much more complex – and interesting.
Ancient
peoples lived with a rich variety of social and political structures,
even varying according to the season. (Very flexible, those folks).
Humans aren’t just pawns on a chessboard of material conditions. We’ve been actively experimenting from the get-go.
Inequality in large-scale human communities isn’t inevitable, nor is it a product of farming. Ditto, patriarchy.
Past societies that valued women were happier places to live. (Duh).
We can do better. We have done better.
The authors begin by pointing out that eighteenth-century theories of
human history were partly a reaction to critiques of European society
offered by indigenous observers. Consider Kandiaronk, a Wendat chief so
skilled in debate he could easily shut down a Jesuit, who blew the minds
of listeners with penetrating insights on authority, decency, social
responsibility, and above all, freedom. Kandiaronk’s critiques,
presented in a dialogue form by the Baron de Lahontan in 1703, sparked a
whole genre of books voicing criticisms from a “primitive” outsider.
Graeber and Wengrow illuminate how profoundly these products influenced
Enlightenment thought and helped give rise to social and political
experiments (including the U.S. Constitution), as well as defensive
strategies to discount such perspectives (also including the U.S.
Constitution).
Madame de Graffigny’s epistolary novel of 1747, “Letters from a
Peruvian Woman” (1747) tells the story of an Incan princess who rails
against the inequality she observes in French society – particularly the
ill-treatment of women. This volume, in turn, helped shape the thinking
of the economist A.R.J. Turgot, who responded by insisting that
inequality was inevitable. He outlined a theory of social evolution
posited as progress from hunters to pastoralism to farming to urban
commercial civilization that placed anybody not at the final stage as a
vestigial life form that had better get with the program. Turgot’s
scheme of social evolution started popping up in lectures of his buddy
Adam Smith over in Glasgow, and eventually worked its way into general
theories of human history proposed by several of Smith’s influential
colleagues such as Adam Ferguson.
The new default paradigm formed the lens through which Europeans
viewed indigenous peoples the world over; namely as childish innocents
or brutal savages living in deplorable static conditions. Everybody was
to be sorted according to how they acquired food, with egalitarian
foraging societies banished to the bottom of the ladder. The Kandiaronks
causing anxiety by pointing out the grotesque conditions of so-called
civilization — from the large numbers of starving people to the need for
two hours for a Frenchman to dress himself — could now be dismissed.
This mindset became prevalent in the emerging field of archaeology,
where practitioners churned out biased interpretations of ancient
societies that rendered them non-threatening to the modern, capitalist
way of life.
Teleological history was the name of the game, and scholars played it endlessly.
Quora | Göbekli
Tepe is a phenomenal time capsule of discovery and insight. We are
faced with an untouched, and relatively intact window into a culture
that has refused to be forgotten. Göbekli Tepe stands as a reminder
that there is grand folly in making any final determinations about who
we are, how we lived and where we came from. Göbekli Tepe also shows
that there is profound arrogance to call any prior culture, a primitive
culture, by any measure or standard. History books will need a complete
rewrite as well as Wikipedia's various citations on ancient history.
Sadly some of this data is 20 years old and is still not cited nor put
in the proper context.
I have posted on this subject before: What are the most fascinating known unknowns?. I hope to give more details on this amazing discovery with Some
information that is not yet easily available (on the internet) or
otherwise Peer Reviewed published (Eg: Beer/Bread production, Written
Language/Symbols, Plant domestication). However none of this data is
unannounced or otherwise proprietary unreleased data. Please see notes
at the end of the paragraphs for more detail.
Most
of this data is still being uncovered and thus will be published in
Peer Review publications when appropriate. Some of this data comes
directly from Professor Klaus Schmidt, the chief Researcher and
Archeologist on site, in updates to academics that are following his
work. Professor Schmidt came to Turkey in 1978, but it wasn't until
1994 that he felt sure enough of the data he collected to begin to
publish. Professor Schmidt is academically quite conservative and faced
the undesirable task of putting archaeology on notice that general
assumptions held very tightly were, just wrong. It took him many years
of checking and then rechecking before he would publish his discoveries
as he knew they were highly controversial. Thus it may be a few years
before we see some of what I mention here fully published and accepted.
This is an early view and have no doubts is very, very controversial.
Warning: I have a clear bias here that I must warn the reader about. I feel very, very strongly that academia has not given proper encomium, citation, commendation and tribute for Professor Schmidt and his 30 years of work at Göbekli Tepe. I feel rather strongly that this position of academia
has caused many discoveries of similar magnitude to be stunted by
little to no funding. Please forgive a bit of cheerleading for what I
believe is one of the most important discoveries in human history.
All Too Human
I
must point out that one of the most difficult things about Göbekli Tepe
has been the Historians and Archaeologists that have invested so much
into a paradigm of human development, that they found it nearly
impossible to accept the realities that Göbekli Tepe presented. This has
hampered progress, funding and peer review of Göbekli Tepe. This shows
how even the most empirical Researchers and Scientists are all too human
and fall prey to the fear of a rewriting of history to a more accurate
context. It is my profound hope that Göbekli Tepe helps to change this
point of view in some material way.
Here are just some of the new insights Göbekli Tepe has produced:
openculture | Every pet owner knows that animals love to play, but laughter seems
reserved for humans, a few apes, and maybe a few birds good at mimicking
humans and apes. As it turns out, according to a new article published in the journal Bioacoustics, laughter has been “documented in at least 65 species,” Jessica Wolf writes at UCLA Newsroom.
“That list includes a variety of primates, domestic cows and dogs,
foxes, seals, and mongooses, as well as three bird species, including
parakeets and Australian magpies.” This is a far cry from just a few
years ago when apes and rats were the “only known animals to get the
giggles,” as Liz Langley wrote at National Geographic in 2015.
Yes, rats laugh. How do scientists know this? They tickle them, of
course, as you can see in the video just above. (Rat tickling, it turns
out, is good for the animals’ well being.) The purpose of this experiment was to better understand human touch — and tickling, says study author Michael Brecht, “is one of the most poorly understood forms of touch.”
Laughter, on the other hand, seems somewhat better understood, even
among species separated from us by tens of millions of years of
evolution. In their recent article, UCLA primatologist Sasha Winkler and UCLA professor of communication Greg Bryant describe how “play vocalizations” signal non-aggression during roughhousing. As Winkler puts it:
When we laugh, we are often providing information to
others that we are having fun and also inviting others to join. Some
scholars have suggested that this kind of vocal behavior is shared
across many animals who play, and as such, laughter is our human version
of an evolutionarily old vocal play signal.
Generally, humans are unlikely to recognize animal laughter as such
or even perceive it at all. “Our review indicates that vocal play
signals are usually inconspicuous,” the authors write. Rats, for
example, make “ultrasonic vocalizations” beyond the range of human
hearing. The play vocalizations of chimpanzees, on the other hand, are
much more similar to human laughter, “although there are some
differences,” Winkler notes in an interview. “Like, they vocalize in both the in-breath and out breath.”
Why study animal laughter? Beyond the inherent interest of the topic —
an especially joyful one for scientific researchers — there’s the
serious business of understanding how “human social complexity allowed
laughter to evolve from a play-specific vocalization into a
sophisticated pragmatic signal,” as Winkler and Bryant write. We use
laughter to signal all kinds of intentions, not all of them playful. But
no matter how many uses humans find for the vocal signal, we can see in
this new review article how deeply non-aggressive play is embedded throughout the animal world and in our evolutionary history. Read “Play vocalisations and human laughter: a comparative review” here.
nbcnews | Simmering tensions over Covid vaccines are boiling over in online communities.
Joe
Rogan's fans are responding to criticism of the podcast host's fringe
medical stances with fatphobic and antisemitic remarks, which have only
intensified after YouTube personality Ethan Klein criticized him for
spreading Covid vaccine misinformation.
The
dispute between Rogan, who has been embraced by conservative figures
for questioning Covid vaccine safety, and Klein, whose fanbase is
largely progressive, highlights how growing agitation over the pandemic
in online circles is quickly turning into all-out internet warfare.
Known
for his contrarian and often unfounded opinions on medicine, Rogan has
pushed vaccine hesitancy on his show "The Joe Rogan Experience," which
reaches an estimated 11 million listeners per episode. The widely criticized talk show was the most popular podcast on Spotify in 2021.
YouTube took down a recent episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience" on Monday for violating the platform's community guidelines,
which forbids misinformation related to elections, Covid-19 and
vaccines. The episode is still available on Spotify, which struck a
multiyear deal to license the show in 2020.
Rogan's audience is now lashing out online, claiming unfair censorship.
When
Klein, who helms multiple podcasts under the YouTube channel H3H3
Productions, criticized Rogan’s fringe medical stances on Tuesday, he
was met with intense backlash from Rogan’s fans. His channel, which he
shares with his wife Hila Klein, has 6.3 million subscribers on YouTube.
Its sister channel H3 Podcast has 3 million subscribers.
"Joe
Rogan, who lives on elk meat, egg yolk, and human growth hormone, with
lungs full of tar, thinks he's healthier than everyone," Klein tweeted Tuesday, criticizing Rogan's "carnivore diet."
He
also criticized Rogan for taking multiple medications when he tested
positive for Covid, despite bringing anti-vaxxers on his show.
thefreethoughtproject | Those paying attention to the current situation regarding the
establishment’s control on the narrative around Covid-19, have watched
as anyone — including esteemed experts in the field — are censored into
oblivion for attempting to put forth information that challenges the
status quo. For the first time in recent American history, merely
talking about alternative treatments for a disease is met with mass
censorship by big tech. This is diametrically opposed to actual
“science” and the opposite direction in which a free society should be
moving.
One of the people who has been censored the most is Robert W Malone
MD, MS who is one of the inventors of mRNA & DNA vaccines. Dr.
Malone has been outspoken about the way the establishment system is
handling, or rather mishandling, the covid crisis.
His Twitter account had grown to over a half million followers last
week before the platform decided that his alternative views on the
pandemic were a danger to the narrative. So they banned him.
Instead of standing up for the free exchange of ideas by experts —
which is how science works — the left cheered for Malone’s censorship,
calling him a kook while celebrating the tools of tyrants.
Before Donald Trump came into office and caused mass hysteria over
Russia, the left used to stand for freedom of speech. However, the
flamboyant tyrant in the White House quickly eroded their respect for
rights. Then, in 2020, Covid-19 arrived and the censorship campaign
switched into overdrive.
The left — armed with their militant “fact checkers” whose opinions
are wielded like swords against anyone who challenges the official
narrative — became the regime of authoritarian information controllers.
After all, if you challenge their messiahs like Dr. Fauci, you challenge science itself — facts be damned.
So what happened? Why did the left go from championing free speech for years — even supporting the speech of neo-nazis
— to rabidly demanding the silencing of those who attempt to challenge
team doom? Dr. Malone and others have a theory, and it’s called mass
formation psychosis.
“When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other
and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense,
we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a
leader or series of events on one small point just like hypnosis, they
literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere,” explained Malone
on a recent interview with Joe Rogan.
Malone then described how “leaders” can exploit this situation: “And
one of the aspects of that phenomenon is that the people that they
identify as their leaders, the ones typically that come in and say you
have this pain and I can solve it for you. I and I alone. Then they will
follow that person. It doesn’t matter whether they lied to them or whatever. The data is irrelevant.”
The more employees of large media corporations attack Joe Rogan, the more his audience grows. The two individuals with the largest audiences happen to be the two people most hated by corporate media because they can't be controlled or ordered around:https://t.co/kjgUQRwWIs
zerohedge | When the last hour of the podcast was coming to its conclusion as I
was finishing an 8 mile run, a thought dawned on me: this interview with
Malone is now officially out there and, no matter how much anyone tries to censor it, it can’t be taken back.
As we all know, nowadays when you make it on JRE, you’ve officially “made it”.
Putting
aside the obvious irony of Twitter attempting to ban somebody and the
person in question going viral as a result, I also thought about how,
despite the fact that Malone’s opinions put him at odds with the
mainstream media (who would never dare to have him on), Joe Rogan
launched him past the usual media suspects and into the real “mainstream”.
I then thought to myself that in 2022, the mainstream media as we know it today (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, etc.) is going to be forced to change its narrative on Covid.
“It’ll never happen,” you’re thinking to yourself, right? Let me explain.
* * *
The idea of the media being forced to change its tune on Covid is something I touched upon a couple of days ago when I wrote about the Omicron variant and how the media is creating a mass hysteria mountain out of a mole hill.
But
after listening to Dr. Robert Malone‘s well reasoned arguments,
delivered for three straight hours, concisely and calmly, it became
clear to me that the entire mainstream media machine could wind up
falling at the hands of content creators like Joe Rogan.
It’s an interesting little piece of game theory, when you think about it.
Rogan generates so many views and has grown so quickly - strictly because he
allows open dialogue, civil discourse and approaches things with honest
intent – that there is no financial incentive to de-platform him. Ever
notice how YouTube apparently had no problem taking down Rogan’s interview with Malone, but hasn’t banned Rogan’s channel from the site yet?
rwmalonemd | It is starting to look to me like the largest experiment on human
beings in recorded history has failed. And, if this rather dry report
from a senior Indiana life insurance executive holds true, then Reiner
Fuellmich’s “Crimes against Humanity” push for convening new Nuremberg trials starts to look a lot less quixotic and a lot more prophetic.
Here is what lit me up in this report from The Center Square contributor Margaret Menge.
“The
head of Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica said the death
rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age
people.
“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have
seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the
company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this
week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”
OneAmerica
is a $100 billion insurance company that has had its headquarters in
Indianapolis since 1877. The company has approximately 2,400 employees
and sells life insurance, including group life insurance to employers in
the state.
Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge,
huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but
“primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of
companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.
“And
what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth
quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were
pre-pandemic,” he said.
“Just to give you an idea of how bad that
is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase
over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.””
So, what is driving this unprecedented surge in all-cause mortality?
“Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths,
Davison
said.“What the data is showing to us is that the deaths that are being
reported as COVID deaths greatly understate the actual death losses
among working-age people from the pandemic. It may not all be COVID on
their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.””
AT
A MINIMUM, based on my reading, one has to conclude that if this report
holds and is confirmed by others in the dry world of life insurance
actuaries, we have both a huge human tragedy and a profound public
policy failure of the US Government and US HHS system to serve and
protect the citizens that pay for this “service”.
IF this holds
true, then the genetic vaccines so aggressively promoted have failed,
and the clear federal campaign to prevent early treatment with
lifesaving drugs has contributed to a massive, avoidable loss of life.
AT
WORST, this report implies that the federal workplace vaccine mandates
have driven what appear to be a true crime against humanity. Massive
loss of life in (presumably) workers that have been forced to accept a
toxic vaccine at higher frequency relative to the general population of
Indiana.
FURTHERMORE, we have also been living through the most
massive, globally coordinated propaganda and censorship campaign in the
history of the human race. All major mass media and the social media
technology companies have coordinated to stifle and suppress any
discussion of the risks of the genetic vaccines AND/OR alternative early
treatments.
technologyreview | The first person to write about the “metaverse” was Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, but the concept of alternative electronic realms, including the “cyberspace” of William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, was already well established.
In
contrast to what we typically think of as the internet, a metaverse is a
3D immersive environment shared by multiple users, in which you can
interact with others via avatars. A metaverse can, with the support of
the right technology, feel like real life, with all the usual elements
of work, play, trade, friendship, love—a world of its own.
Perhaps
the best-known prototype metaverse is the online virtual world Second
Life, whose very name implies an alternate existence. Other games might
also be said to be metaverses in their own right: World of Warcraft,
Everquest, Fortnite, Animal Crossing. Each of these offers its own
version of an immersive world, although they don’t quite have the
ability to completely take over your senses. Most users experience these
games from the outside looking in: screens front and center, with
speakers on the sides. Actions are mediated by a keyboard, mouse,
trackpad, or game controller instead of players’ hands and feet.
Technology
is starting to change that. High-density screens, virtual-reality
goggles and glasses, surround sound, and spatial audio are putting more
genuinely immersive experiences within reach. Cameras are gaining 3D
capabilities, and single microphones are giving way to microphone arrays
that capture sound with better depth and position. Augmented reality,
which overlays virtual objects onto a video feed of the real world,
provides a bridge between purely virtual and analog or real experiences.
There is progress toward adding a sense of touch, too, in the form of
multitouch screens, haptic technologies, control gloves, and other
wearables. Wraparound environments like Industrial Light and Magic’s
Stagecraft are within reach only to certain industries for now but may
see wider use as technology follows the typical curve of adoption and
commoditization.
technologyreview | The
computer scientist Alvy Ray Smith cofounded both Lucasfilm’s computer
graphics division and Pixar Animation Studios. For those achievements
alone, he is one of the most important technological innovators in
cinema since at least the end of the Second World War. But Smith is not a
Hollywood guy, and his intriguing, foundational new book A Biography of the Pixel is not a Tinseltown book. There are only the slightest morsels of gossip (Steve Jobs was a difficult man to work with—confirmed!),
and the only marquee celebrity who appears in Smith’s story with any
frequency is George Lucas. Smith isn’t interested in fame. He’s chasing
more profound themes, arguing in effect that the great project he was
part of—the invention and development of computer graphics—is far more
important than anything that ever happened in Hollywood.
Smith
is what used to be called a “graybeard” in computer programming circles.
He’s from that generation of engineers and coders who watched the
digital age rise from the swamps of secret military projects and the
space program to conquer the world. He has spoken machine language. He
marveled at the first crude graphics to exhibit motion on
green-and-black screens. And he was among the first to demonstrate the
newfound ability of a stylus to trace a smooth curve of digital “paint.”
In A Biography of the Pixel,
Smith’s aim is to set down clearly the trajectory of two important,
intertwined stories. The first story is the development of computer
images, from origin to digital ubiquity. There are, in Smith’s telling,
many names, places, and breakthroughs missing from the record, and he
has taken on the job of adding them back in with an engineer’s eye for
precision. The second story, unfolding in parallel, is about the impact
of those images—a transformative force Smith calls “Digital Light.” It
encompasses basically everything we experience through screens, and he
argues convincingly that it is among the most important innovations in
human communication since the first simple depictions of daily life were
etched on the walls of caves.
The humble pixel
As
Smith demonstrates repeatedly, far too much credit has been allowed to
slide to the supposed wizardry of individual geniuses. The reality is a
muddy, overlapping history of groups of inventors, working by turns in
competition and in collaboration, often ad hoc and under considerable
commercial or political pressure.
Thomas Edison and France’s
Lumière brothers, for example, were great promoters and exploiters of
early film technology. Both exhibited full systems circa 1895 and were
happy to claim full credit, but neither built the first complete system
of camera, film, and projector all (or even mostly) on their own. The
real answer to the question of who invented movies, Smith writes, is a
“briar patch” of competing lineages, with parts of the system developed
by erstwhile partners of Edison’s and similar parts by a handful of
French inventors who worked with the Lumières.
Among the
crucial figures relegated to history’s dustbin were William Kennedy
Laurie Dickson (an odd European aristocrat who designed and built the
first movie camera for Edison) and Georges Demenÿ (whose design was
copied without credit by the Lumières). Smith shows perhaps too much of
his exhaustive work in rescuing these convoluted origin stories—there
are similarly tangled muddles at every major stage in the development of
computers and graphics—but his effort to set the historical record
straight is admirable.
The main drawback of all this wrangling
with the egos and avarice of several generations of forceful men (they
are, alas, virtually all men) is that it sometimes distracts Smith’s
focus from his larger theme, which is that the dawn of Digital Light
represents such a rare shift in how people live that it deserves to be
described as epochal.
Digital Light, in Smith’s simplest
definition, is “any picture composed of pixels.” But that technical
phrase understates the full import of the “vast new realm of
imagination” that has been created by its rise. That realm encompasses
Pixar movies, yes, but also video games, smartphone apps, laptop
operating systems, goofy GIFs traded via social media, deadly serious
MRI images reviewed by oncologists, the touch screens at the local
grocery store, and the digital models used to plan Mars missions that
then send back yet more Digital Light in the form of jaw-dropping images
of the Red Planet’s surface.
notesfromdisgraceland |The abject hovers at the boundary of
what is assimilable, thinkable, but is itself unassimilable which means
that we have to contemplate its otherness in its proximity to us but
without it being able to be incorporated. It is the other that comes
from within (so it is part of ourselves) that we have to reject and
expel in order to protect our boundaries[3].
The abject is a great mobilizing mechanism. While the state of being abject is threatening to the self and others, the operation of abjecting involves rituals of purity that bring about social stability. Abjection seeks to stabilize, while the abject inherently disrupts[4].
When the mass of the excluded increases to
a size impossible to ignore, they trigger rituals of abjection, which
work themselves into identity politics.The repulsion and efforts to distance from the excluded — the abjection – which reinforces the self-awareness of the social standing of regular folks, are in conflict with the attraction by the powers the abject population enjoys and exudes. They are the power bottoms
in this relationship as they define the location, robustness and
porousness of the boundaries of the enclosure. Fascination with the abject’s power pulls the viewers in, while they remain at arm’s length because of the threats the abject exert.
This
makes the excluded a tool that drives the wedge between different
social groups and prepares the population for political usage of the abject as leverage.
Objectifying minorities has been
institutionalized in America since its inception — from slavery and Jim
Crow to ghetto and hyperghetto, prisons, wars, opioids, and other tools
of soft and hard marginalization. However, with the rise of the white
underclass in the second half of the 20th century, American ideology has become highly nuanced around the questions of exclusion.
To a large extent, the Right wing has
stuck to its white supremacists roots of yesteryear (either in a
closeted form or explicitly) while centrists, both Left and Right, have
shown greater initiative in modernizing the process. However, when it
came to exclusion of the white underclass, the problem proved to be more
difficult. Complicated by globalization, technology, the decline of
American manufacturing, weaning off conventional energy sources and the
general decay of demand for labor, low-skill jobs have been disappearing
irreversibly, and the ranks of white underclass grew unstoppably
together with their discontent.
Social outcasts and minorities are
relatively easy to objectivize. Permanently excluded – criminals, drug
addicts, homeless – they have already been cast out. The residual, white
precariat, which has always been perceived as a building block of this
country’s social fiber, remains still on the inside, but unable to get
reintegrated within the context of modern developments.
In a white dominated/ruled society the marginalization of the excluded
white subproletariat has been a political hard sell. They grew in size
and have acquired a sense of entitlement minorities never could. Their
sudden political awareness, no matter how fragile, has become an
expression of pleasurable transgressive desires. As a new center of
social subjectivity, they draw their power from this position, which
serves as an inspiration for their own identity politics.
The emergence of 21st century Right-wing populism represents the biggest innovation on that terrain. Right-wingers now recognize the abject
as a source of political leverage and, instead of exclusion, their
program revolves around subjectivizing them. Voluntarily casting oneself
as abject — identification with the white subproletariat – has
become a quest for authenticity, aimed at acquiring a stigma in order
to become a credible voice of the marginalized. This is the core of the
modern populist abject gambit.
rwmalonemd | As many of you know, I have spent time researching and speaking about
mass psychosis theory. Most of what I have learned has come from Dr.
Mattias Desmet, who realized that this form of mass hypnosis, of the
madness of crowds, can account for the strange phenomenon of about
20-30% of the population in the western world becoming entranced with
the Noble Lies and dominant narrative concerning the safety and
effectiveness of the genetic vaccines, and both propagated and enforced
by politicians, science bureaucrats, pharmaceutical companies and legacy
media.
What one observes with the mass hypnosis is that a large
fraction of the population is completely unable to process new
scientific data and facts demonstrating that they have been misled about
the effectiveness and adverse impacts of mandatory mask use, lockdowns,
and genetic vaccines that cause people’s bodies to make large amounts
of biologically active coronavirus Spike protein.
These
hypnotized by this process are unable to recognize the lies and
misrepresentations they are being bombarded with on a daily basis, and
actively attack anyone who has the temerity to share information with
them which contradicts the propaganda that they have come to embrace.
And for those whose families and social networks have been torn apart by
this process, and who find that close relatives and friends have
ghosted them because they question the officially endorsed “truth” and
are actually following the scientific literature, this can be a source
of deep anguish, sorrow and psychological pain.
It is with those
souls in mind that I included a discussion of the mass formation theory
of Dr. Mattias Desmet during a recent talk I gave in Tampa, Florida to
an audience of about 2,000. As I looked out into the audience and
spoke, I could see relief on many faces, and even tears running from the
eyes of stoic men.
Unknown to me, someone recorded the speech and
appended the vocal track to a series of calming images of natural
landscapes, producing a video that has gone viral throughout the world.
A link to the video, as well as some notes to clarify and supplement
the talk are appended below. Many have told me that they find it very
healing. I hope it may help you also.
NYTimes | You may remember a 2019 story about how Senator Amy Klobuchar once ate a salad with a comb.
According to the article, an aide purchased a salad for Klobuchar at an
airport. Later, when the senator wanted to eat her salad on the plane,
she discovered that there were no utensils available. After berating the
aide, Klobuchar retrieved a comb from her purse and (somehow) ate her
salad with it. When finished, she handed the comb to her aide with
orders to clean it.
The comb story was
part of a larger narrative about the senator’s treatment of her staff,
which Klobuchar bravely tried to spin into evidence of her exactitude.
You have to admire the effort, but the senator’s defense was useless.
Nobody came away thinking that her mistake was in having high
expectations. Her mistake was in doing something gross in front of
multiple witnesses. That image was indelible. You couldn’t read the
story without imagining the comb, a hair perhaps still caught in its
teeth, plunging into an oily airport salad. Like all disgusting stories,
it had a contaminating effect. Now the anecdote was in you, the voter.
The taste of the comb was upon your own tongue, and you had no choice
but to resent Klobuchar for putting it there.
The
episode belongs to a list of disgust-related political scandals: the
pubic hair on the Coke can, the stain on the blue Gap dress. On a recent
weekend I passed a truck in Queens with a giant bumper sticker that
said, “Any Burning or Disrespecting of the American Flag and the driver
of this truck will get out and knock you the [expletive] OUT.” This was a
perfect Haidt litmus test. A liberal might walk past the truck and
think some version of: This guy — and it’s definitely a guy — has an
anger problem. A conservative might walk past the truck and think: This
guy — and it’s definitely a guy — must really love our country. As Haidt
put it: “There are people for whom a flag is merely a piece of cloth,
but for most people, a flag is not a piece of cloth. It has a sacred
essence.” If a person views the American flag as a rectangle of fabric,
it is unfathomable to be disgusted by its hypothetical desecration. If a
person views the flag as a sacred symbol, it is unfathomable to not
feel this way.
These two types of
human — which broadly map onto “liberal” and “conservative,” or
“relatively disgust-insensitive” and “relatively disgust-sensitive” —
live in separate moral matrices. If it seems bizarre that disgust
sensitivity and politics should be so closely correlated, it’s important
to remember that disgust sensitivity is really measuring our feelings
about purity and pollution. And these, in turn, contribute to our
construction of moral systems, and it is our moral systems that guide
our political orientations.
To ward
off disgust, we enact purity rites, like rinsing the dirt from our
lettuce or “canceling” a semipublic figure who posted a racist tweet
when she was a teenager. We monitor the borders of mouth, body and
nation. In “Mein Kampf,” Adolf Hitler described Jews as like “a maggot
in a rotting body” and “a noxious bacillus.” Another category of
humankind consistently deemed repulsive is women; to take one of several
zillion illustrations, one reason long skirts were a dominant fashion
in Western Europe for centuries, according to the fashion historian Anne
Hollander, was to conceal the bottom half of the body and by extension
its sexual organs. Mermaids aren’t just a folkloric figure but the
expression, Hollander argues, of a horrified disgust at the lower female
anatomy, which is seen as amphibiously moist and monstrous.
But
purification rites may also be healthful (washing your hands) or
ritually significant (baptism). We will never disentangle ourselves from
the instinct to purify, even as we name different reasons for doing it:
justice, patriotism, progress, tradition, freedom, public health, God,
science. Beneath it all will be a confused omnivore, stumbling upon a
dewy mushroom in the forest — with no clue what will happen if she eats
it.
theatlantic | The Brooklyn Nets have
officially ended their tug-of-war with Kyrie Irving over the star point
guard’s vaccination status. And Irving, who has refused to get a
COVID-19 shot, is unquestionably the winner.
The
rapid spread of the coronavirus’s Omicron variant has left gaps on
rosters across the NBA. Because positive tests had rendered so many
players ineligible, the Nets finally buckled to Irving, who had not
played this season because New York City’s vaccine mandate for certain indoor facilities
had banished him from home games. To let Irving on the court now, even
just for away games, is a drastic turnaround for a team that had
sidelined him rather than deploy him part-time. After he cleared the NBA’s COVID-19 protocols on Tuesday, Irving will be eligible to play for the Nets when they travel to Indiana to face the Pacers on January 5.
This
resolution of the Nets’ high-profile dispute with Irving is part of a
larger problem in professional sports: Confronted with this latest virus
surge, both the NBA and the NFL have essentially waved the white flag.
They are easing their health rules and sending conciliatory signals to
players who have refused to get COVID-19 shots.
Both
leagues had adopted a range of health protocols that strongly
encouraged vaccination. But now the leagues are choosing instead to cede
to the forces of capitalism. Short-term financial concerns are
dictating that even as Omicron spreads, games must go on. And if that
means holding vaccinated and unvaccinated players to the same standards,
the leagues will do it.
After the CDC issued new guidelines Monday that will shorten quarantine times for anyone who tests positive for the coronavirus, the NBA announced
that players who test positive will have to isolate for only six days,
rather than 10, if they have no symptoms. The NFL and the NFL Players
Association quickly announced
that players with positive test results can return after five days.
Stunningly, the two leagues’ abbreviated new quarantine timelines apply
to both vaccinated and unvaccinated players.
Until
now, the NFL had rightly made a point of imposing additional burdens on
unvaccinated players. For example, unvaccinated players had to undergo
daily testing and, when the team traveled, could not fraternize with
anyone but team personnel. These rules reflected the greater risk that
unvaccinated players pose to others. The rules also created strong
incentives: Among NFL players, the policy helped produce a vaccination
rate of more than 94 percent—far higher than the rate for all American adults. (The rate for NBA players is even better: at least 97 percent.)
NYTimes | With
Omicron sweeping the world at alarming speed, governments are
scrambling to figure out how to contain it in the face of significant
public pressure against reimposing harsh restrictions on daily life,
curbing holiday celebrations and deepening the economic pain wrought by
two years of pandemic.
A new British
report shows that booster doses are less effective against Omicron than
previous variants, and their effectiveness wears off faster — within 10
weeks. Vaccine makers are trying to adjust their shots to target
Omicron.
In
addition to concerns that a fourth shot in less than a year could
actually weaken immunity, some experts said Israel’s government had
still not made the most of other options, such as vaccinating more of
the unvaccinated or giving a third shot to about a million eligible
citizens who have so far not received one.
Along
with the generally sparse knowledge about Omicron, the effect of a
fourth dose against the new variant is also unknown. But the country’s
medical experts point to waning immunity in those 60 or older, who were
the first to receive the third shot starting in August.
Israeli
researchers from the Health Ministry and several academic institutions
presented data to the advisory team that made the recommendation for the
fourth shot on Tuesday. The presentation, obtained by The Times, showed
a doubling of the rate of infection from Delta among the 60-plus age
group within four or five months of the third shot.
There was no clear indication of reduced efficacy against severe illness.
Israel
has confirmed a few hundred cases of Omicron, but officials say the new
variant is much more widespread, and could overtake Delta as the
dominant variant in the country within two or three weeks.
Table 4: Other variants (=delta) andomikron in over 12y olds vs. vaccination status:
Delta vs. Omikron (n = 90k cases & 41k cases since Nov 22nd = 1st Danish Omikron case)
No Jab (unvaxxed): 24 vs. 9% 1 Jab: 3 vs. 2% 2 Jabs 63 vs. 72% 3 Jabs (boostered) 11 vs. 18%
Unvaxxed to vaccinated cases – delta : 24% to 76% – omikron 9% to 91%
Danish vax rate for population >12y is around 81% (i.e. 19% unvaxxed)
= for delta vaxnated are slightly underrepresented (i.e. neo-vaccinoid seems to protect against infection/ being a transmitter by a small amount)
=for omikron the vaxnated are over-representedvs. their population percentage. – is it the age-skew? – are the vaxnated more risk-taking? – does the neovaccinoid make one more susceptible to infection? – are unvaxxed avoiding getting tested (counter intuative as it would give 7months valid green pass)
Who knows, but any claim to blame the unvaxxed for the transmission numbers has no basis in Danish data (Denmark having highest daily per-capita testing in the world = free PCR tests).
From the same report regarding hospitalizations (Table 5) – omikron hospitalized number is still rising – but omikron patients in ICU remains under 5 & has been there the last 2-3 weeks without change) – table 6: 99.2% of omikron cases have not required hospitalisation (skewing young, but nonetheless, Danish has free health care, so no disincentives to treatment)
rwmalonemd | Before you vaccinate your child, which is irreversible and
potentially permanently damaging, find out why 16,000 physicians and
medical scientists around the world signed a declaration publicly
declaring that healthy children should NOT be vaccinated for COVID-19.
On behalf of these MDs and PhDs, I have published a clear statement
outlining the scientific facts behind this decision.
My
name is Robert Malone, and I am speaking to you as a parent,
grandparent, physician and scientist. I don’t usually read from a
prepared speech, but this is so important that I wanted to make sure
that I get every single word and scientific fact correct.
I stand
by this statement with a career dedicated to vaccine research and
development. I’m vaccinated for COVID and I'm generally pro-vaccination.
I have devoted my entire career to developing safe and effective ways
to prevent and treat infectious diseases.
After this, I will be posting the text of this statement so you can share it with your friends and family.
Before
you inject your child - a decision that is irreversible - I wanted to
let you know the scientific facts about this genetic vaccine, which is based on the mRNA vaccine technology I created:
There are three issues parents need to understand:
The
first is that a viral gene will be injected into your children's cells.
This gene forces your child’s body to make toxic spike proteins. These
proteins often cause permanent damage in children’s critical organs,
including
Their brain and nervous system
Their heart and blood vessels, including blood clots
Their reproductive system
And this vaccine can trigger fundamental changes to their immune system
The most alarming point about this is that once these damages have occurred, they are irreparable
You can’t fix the lesions within their brain
You can’t repair heart tissue scarring
You can’t repair a genetically reset immune system, and
This vaccine can cause reproductive damage that could affect future generations of your family
The second thing you need to know about is the fact that this novel technology has not been adequately tested.
We need at least 5 years of testing/research before we can really understand the risks
Harms and risks from new medicines often become revealed many years later
Ask yourself if you want your own child to be part of the most radical medical experiment in human history
One final point: the reason they’re giving you to vaccinate your child is a lie.
Your children represent no danger to their parents or grandparents
It’s actually the opposite. Their immunity, after getting COVID, is
critical to save your family if not the world from this disease
In
summary: there is no benefit for your children or your family to be
vaccinating your children against the small risks of the virus, given
the known health risks of the vaccine that as a parent, you and your
children may have to live with for the rest of their lives.
The risk/benefit analysis isn’t even close.
As a parent and grandparent, my recommendation to you is to resist and fight to protect your children.
Rejuvenation Pills
-
No one likes getting old. Everyone would like to be immorbid. Let's be
careful here. Immortal doesnt include youth or return to youth. Immorbid
means you s...
Death of the Author — at the Hands of Cthulhu
-
In 1967, French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes wrote of
“The Death of the Author,” arguing that the meaning of a text is divorced
from au...
9/29 again
-
"On this sacred day of Michaelmas, former President Donald Trump invoked
the heavenly power of St. Michael the Archangel, sharing a powerful prayer
for pro...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
