Cornpop (Biden) Corrupt As Hail - And You Cain't Do A Dayyum Thing About It!!!

greenwald |  A severe escalation of the war on a free internet and free discourse has taken place over the last twelve months. Numerous examples of brute and dangerous censorship have emerged: the destruction by Big Tech monopolies of Parler at the behest of Democratic politicians at the time that it was the most-downloaded app in the country; the banning of the sitting president from social media; and the increasingly explicit threats from elected officials in the majority party of legal and regulatory reprisals in the event that tech platforms do not censor more in accordance with their demands.

But the most severe episode of all was the joint campaign — in the weeks before the 2020 election — by the CIA, Big Tech, the liberal wing of the corporate media and the Democratic Party to censor and suppress a series of major reports about then-presidential frontrunner Joe Biden. On October 14 and then October 15, 2020, The New York Post, the nation's oldest newspaper, published two news reports on Joe Biden's activities in Ukraine and China that raised serious questions about his integrity and ethics: specifically whether he and his family were trading on his name and influence to generate profit for themselves. The Post said that the documents were obtained from a laptop left by Joe Biden's son Hunter at a repair shop.

From the start, the evidence of authenticity was overwhelming. The Post published obviously genuine photos of Hunter that were taken from the laptop. Investigations from media outlets found people who had received the emails in real-time and they compared the emails in their possession to the ones in the Post's archive, and they matched word-for-word. One of Hunter's own business associates involved in many of these deals, Tony Bobulinski, confirmed publicly and in interviews that the key emails were genuine and that they referenced Joe Biden's profit participation in one deal being pursued in China. A forensics analyst issued a report concluding the archive had all the earmarks of authenticity. Not even the Bidens denied that the emails were real: something they of course would have done if they had been forged or altered. In sum, as someone who has reported on numerous large archives similar to this one and was faced with the heavy burden of ensuring the documents were genuine before risking one's career and reputation by reporting them, it was clear early on that all the key metrics demonstrated that these documents were real.

Despite all that, former intelligence officials such as Obama's CIA Director John Brennan and his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper led a group of dozens of former spooks in issuing a public statement that disseminated an outright lie: namely, that the laptop was "Russian disinformation.” Note that this phrase contains two separate assertions: 1) the documents came from Russia and 2) they are fake ("disinformation"). The intelligence officials admitted in this letter that — in their words — “we do not know if the emails are genuine or not,” and also admitted that “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.” Yet it repeatedly insinuated that everyone should nonetheless believe this:

Letter from 60 former intelligence officials about the New York Post reporting, Oct. 19, 2020

But the complete lack of evidence for these claims — that even these career CIA liars acknowledged plagued their assertions — did not stop the corporate media or Big Tech from repeating this lie over and over, and, far worse, using this lie to censor this reporting from the internet. One of the first to spread this lie was the co-queen of Russiagate frauds, Natasha Bertrand, then of Politico and now promoted, because of lies like this, to CNN. “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” blared her headline in Politico on October 19, just five days after the Post began its reporting. From there, virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count — began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of Russian disinformation.

FDA Official "Just Force These Vaccine Hesitant Negroes Or Put A Yellow Star On Them!"

projectveritas |  Project Veritas released the second video of its COVID vaccine investigative series today exposing U.S. Food and Drug Administration [FDA] economist, Taylor Lee, who was recorded calling for forced COVID vaccinations and a registry for all unvaccinated Americans.

Lee said that U.S. Government policy could emulate Nazi Germany when it comes to the COVID vaccine.

“Census goes door-to-door if you don’t respond. So, we have the infrastructure to do it [forced COVID vaccinations]. I mean, it’ll cost a ton of money. But I think, at that point, I think there needs to be a registry of people who aren’t vaccinated. Although that’s sounding very [much like Nazi] Germany,” Lee said.

“Nazi Germany…I mean, think about it like the Jewish Star [for unvaccinated Americans],” he said.

“So, if you put every anti-vaxxer, like sheep, into like Texas and you closed off Texas from the rest of the world, and you go, ‘Okay, you be you in Texas until we deal with this [pandemic].’”

Lee said that due to a large portion of the African American community being hesitant to take the COVID vaccine, the solution would be to “blow dart” on them:

Taylor Lee, FDA Economist: “I think that a lot of the time -- so there's also this issue of -- I remember reading about how with COVID [vaccine] trials, they were having an issue recruiting African American people. It was because of a different medication the government tried to do that was specifically designed to kill African Americans.”

Veritas Journalist: “Oh, so like a mistrust thing.”

Lee: “Yeah.”

Veritas Journalist: “But this thing [COVID vaccine] is safe, though.”

Lee: “We know that now, but like again, I think there is still this big mistrust and like it's deep-rooted.”

Veritas Journalist: “Yeah. Can’t blame them [African Americans].”

Lee: “I can’t. But at the same time, like, blow dart. That’s where we’re going.”

Lee affirmed that “wealthy white people” are more likely to get the COVID vaccine because they are “educated,” and added that he would be willing to force COVID vaccines upon Americans himself if needed.

“I’m gonna go door-to-door and stab everyone [with the COVID vaccine], ‘Oh, it’s just your booster shot! There you go!’”

Lee also said that FDA officials can often be political appointees rather than actual scientific experts.

“There are political appointees [at the FDA] that are generally scientific advisors or are appointed by the president or the commission…They're being paid based on if the other people are staying in power,” he said.

 

Negroes Strongly Disapprove Of Cornpop's Mr.NA NeoVaccinoid Mandate They Ain't Black!!!

yahoo |  President Biden’s net approval rating among unvaccinated black voters has dropped a stunning 17 points since he announced plans to implement a federal vaccine mandate for companies with more than 100 people, according to a new Morning Consult poll.

Biden’s favor among black voters dropped substantially between an initial poll conducted between September 6 and 8 — just before Biden’s mandate announcement on September 9 — and a second poll taken between September 18 to 20 of more than 1,000 black voters.

The second poll revealed that 71 percent of black voters approve of Biden’s performance, down 5 points since the mandate. The share who disapprove rose 7 points to 24 percent. Thirty-seven percent said they strongly approve of his performance, while 14 percent said they strongly disapprove.

The president’s net approval rating — a measure of the share who approve his job performance minus the share who disapprove — has dropped 12 percent among black voters.

Biden announced earlier this month that his administration would develop rules to compel large companies to mandate coronavirus vaccines for employees and to require weekly negative test results for any unvaccinated workers. He said the rules would be developed by the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and apply to companies with 100 or more workers.

The plan was part of a larger initiative by the Biden administration that includes requiring vaccinations for all federal employees and workers for federal contractors, as well as for health care workers in most institutions that receive Medicare or Medicaid. The administration also called on all states to mandate vaccinations for teachers and other school employees.

Thirty-eight percent of black voters who say they have not received a COVID-19 vaccine disapprove of the president’s job performance — an 11 point increase since he announced the mandate.

Black Americans are the least likely of all racial and ethnic demographics to have received a COVID-19 vaccine. According to Morning Consult, 53 percent of black adults have received the shots — a lower share than that of any other race or ethnicity.

There Was Zero Violence From Protesters In Melbourne

dailymail |  Police have fired rubber bullets, stinger grenades and pepper balls at anti-vaxx protesters stationed at Melbourne's war memorial on a third day of violent demonstrations.

Around 400 people, who have been rallying to demand an end to mandatory vaccinations for construction workers, swarmed Victoria's Shrine of Remembrance which was built to honour the state's men and women who served in the First World War.

Throughout Wednesday the mob chanted 'lest we forget' as they stood in front of the monument, some decked out in body armour and helmets in anticipation of a police attack while others urged officers not to arrest them out of 'respect for the Anzacs'.

After an hours-long standoff where police offered to let protesters leave, officers opened fire to clear demonstrators who had started pelting them with bottles.   

Victoria Police arrested 215 protesters throughout the day while two officers suffered head injuries, and one was taken to hospital with chest pains. Tap handles, golf balls, batteries and bottles were thrown at them from the shrine.  

Deputy Commissioner Ross Guenther said: 'It was completely disrespectful that the crowd ended up at the shrine, which is such hallowed ground in this great city.'

The ugly scenes came after police ordered news channels to stop broadcasting aerial images of the protests, claiming organisers were using the live feed to evade police.

Americans Need To Pay Close Attention To What Happened In Melbourne This Week

CTH  |  An inflection point has been reached in Australia with the government COVID-19 lockdowns, forced vaccinations and now, vaccine passports. What is happening today in the state of Victoria, specifically the Melbourne metropolitan area, is an outcome of more than a year of heavy-handed government rules and regulations deaf to the voices of the average man, woman or family. There is a middle class & blue-collar backlash taking place, and Americans would be wise to pay attention.

Things recently came to a head when the Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, began outlining the rules and regulations for opening society back up after almost a year of total lockdown. The always futile attempt to block the COVID-19 virus through a policy known as “COVID-ZERO” was abandoned. The new approach is to open up society and the economy by forcing everyone to take the vaccine, and then allowing only the vaccinated to participate in the economy as varying percentages of the population are double-vaxxed, and admittedly, later, booster-vaxxed.

BREAKING: Victoria police have opened fire at the Shrine #Australia pic.twitter.com/x84sWVqiVM

— SoulJar 🗣 (@slyfox__) September 22, 2021

Vaccination passports will be required to work, shop, attend events and essentially live in the New World Order Premier Andrews has created for the citizens of Victoria. The day after Andrews outlined the new rules – the working class, who have been locked down and compliant to this point, finally had enough.

Do not be naive to the fact that U.S. and Canadian government officials; those in direct ideological alignment with the leftist perspectives of government in Australia; are not paying close attention to what is happening there in preparation for when both the U.S. and Canada move to block the unvaccinated from participating in society.

The vaccination passport methods, processes and procedures being tested right now in Australia are soon to arrive in the United States. Electronic check-ins and QR codes deployed to track the movements of vaxxed and unvaxxed are being tested right now in almost all states in Australia. We The People in America are only a few weeks or months away from having to make the same decisions that middle-class Victorian workers are faced with right now. This is why you should pay attention to what is happening there.

The population of Australia (26 million) is small by comparison to the U.S. (350+ million), and as a result, the dynamic will be exponentially more explosive when it arrives here.

Socially, Americans are more geographically spread out than Australia, as most of their major population centers circle the coastline. Factually, the population of Florida or Texas is essentially equivalent to the entire population of Australia. The economy of the U.S. is also substantially larger and more diverse than down-under. However, those points only emphasize how significantly more explosive the same scenarios may become when the Biden regime attempts to follow the oppressive process now being witnessed in the Melbourne region.

Do not anticipate any support from CONservative Republican politicians.  As we have witnessed in the past two decades, there is only one overarching ideology in the Washington DC UniParty.  They too are more than comfortable with a class society where the elites are disconnected from the laws, rules and regulations they force upon the underclass.

The rust-belt of America was created by both Democrat and Republican administrations.  The globalist worldview favorable to the multinational corporations and Wall Street run through both political parties in the United States.

 

Anybody Else Wonder Why U.S. Physicians Don't Openly Rebel Against Bogus Covid Treatment Protocols?

noqreport  |  I recently had a conversation with a reasonably well informed writer who simply missed the real reasons why most practicing physicians go along with the Fauci Fraud. As a public service, I will attempt to fill in a few gaps. But first, I must define the Fraud.

There are two basic legs to the Fraud. First is the idea that the Centers for Disease Control is in any way concerned with a mission related to its name. The failure of the CDC to in any way endorse any treatment that did not emanate from its exalted halls should give us our first glint of clarity.

There are literally millions of physicians around the world, and the great bulk of them truly wish to treat their patients well. Among those are thousands of researchers, a number far in excess of those at the CDC, NIAID, NIH and other alphabet soup government agencies. The very idea that outside researchers are incapable of discovering anything useful without the help of the bureaucrats in DC is hubris of the highest order. And it prevents the CDC, FDA, or any other such agency from considering the idea that maybe, just possibly, there might be intelligent life down here. Mount Olympus cannot be threatened.

The Second Leg of the Fraud is less visible to the naked eye, but much more powerful. If I wrote this before I retired, I would be called before the Board of my group and told in no uncertain terms to “Shut T… F…. Up!” I might even be assessed a financial penalty with several zeroes after the “1.” That’s a serious impairment of my pursuit of happiness.

The reason for my group’s dislike is more than the fact that I might be an irritant. They may actually agree with what I have to say. But they simply cannot afford for me to say it. That’s right, as a practicing physician in a group, my freedom of speech can become very expensive… to the group.

My group cared for patients of all descriptions, with roughly half of them on Medicare and another batch on Medicaid. Both programs are ultimately managed by the Feds, one of the most humorless groups on the planet. They write a whole bunch of rules on how you have to document everything you do. If you didn’t document it correctly, it didn’t happen, and you won’t get paid. But that’s not the half of it.

Suppose you have one of those patients brought in by the ambulance from under the bridge. Their only clothes are the ones they are wearing, and they don’t have two nickels to rub together. It’s more than obvious that this surgery for bowel obstruction will be a charity case. Before Medicare, you’d simply write it off as your good neighbor duty. Now you don’t get a choice.

CMMS (the actual administrative agency) requires you to send a bill. Twice. Or maybe three times. Whatever it takes to turn the bill into bad debt. Then you have to send it to a collection agency. Your only alternative is for your group to bring it up in its Board meeting and declare it a write-off that gets noted in the minutes.

All this rigmarole serves no purpose, and you knew that before you got to this sentence. But CMMS has a sinister side. If you do the case for free (which you did before you spent that useless money on billing and collection), CMMS will define that as your “usual and customary” bill for an exploratory laparotomy. Since your U&C is now zero, you can’t ever bill more than that for an ex lap in the future. But what does that have to do with Ivermectin? I’m glad you asked.

U&C bills are just one of hundreds of rules that CMMS enforces. Another is “Pay for Performance.” Basically, P-f-P requires you to check a host of boxes when taking care of patients. If you didn’t get that IV antibiotic in 20 minutes before the incision, you failed P-f-P and may not get paid. The hospital won’t get paid to take care of the patient if there’s a complication. So let us suppose that you use Ivermectin to treat a COVID patient as they arrive in the hospital?

Ivermectin isn’t on the Medicare/Medicaid approved list of medications for COVID. Your hospital pharmacy will call you up and give you grief. After wasting a lot of time getting them to finally let you have it, you’ve had to cancel half of your office day.

The next day, you’ll get a visit from a coder who will tell you that you didn’t use the approved treatment protocol and put the hospital in jeopardy because you flunked P-f-P. By the way, that “coder” is the person who “helps” you use the proper ICD (billing) code for whatever the patient has in order for the hospital to make the most money. But that’s not the worst of it.

 

Anybody Else Notice How Zeynep Tufekci Got Shut Down After This Covid Data Opinion Piece?

NYTimes |  Who should get vaccine booster shots and when? Can vaccinated people with a breakthrough infection transmit the virus as easily as unvaccinated people? How many people with breakthrough infections die or get seriously ill, broken down by age and underlying health conditions?

Confused? It’s not you. It’s the fog of pandemic, in which inadequate data hinders a clear understanding of how to fight a stealthy enemy.

To overcome the fog of war, the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz called for “a sensitive and discriminating judgment” as well as “skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.” He knew that since decisions will have to be made with whatever information is available in the face of an immediate threat, it’s crucial to acquire as much systematic evidence as possible, as soon as possible.

In the current crisis, that has often been difficult.

These days, some experts grapple for answers on Twitter. They might be trying to figure out the effect of a vaccine booster shot by reverse engineering a bar chart in a screenshot from Israel’s Ministry of Health, or arguing with one another about confounding factors or statistical paradoxes.

Why this stumbling in the fog? It may seem like we’re drowning in data: Dashboards and charts are everywhere. However, not all data is equal in its power to illuminate, and worse, sometimes it can even be misleading.

Few things have been as lacking in clarity as the risks for children. Testing in schools is haphazard, follow-up reporting is poor and data on hospitalization of children appears to be unreliable, even if those cases are rare. The Food and Drug Administration has asked that vaccine trials for children aged 5 to 11 be expanded, which is wise, but why weren’t they bigger to begin with?

While the pandemic has produced many fine examples of research and meticulous data collection, we are still lacking in detailed and systematic data on cases, contact tracing, breakthrough infections and vaccine efficacy over time, as well as randomized trials of interventions like boosters. This has left us playing catch-up with emerging threats like the Delta variant and has left policymakers struggling to make timely decisions in a manner that inspires confidence.

To see the dangers of insufficient data and the powers of appropriate data, consider the case of dexamethasone, an inexpensive generic corticosteroid drug.

In the early days of the pandemic, doctors were warned against using it to treat Covid patients. The limited literature from SARS and MERS — illnesses related to Covid — suggested that steroids, which suppress the immune system, would harm rather than help Covid patients.

That assessment changed on June 16, 2020, when the results of a large-scale randomized clinical trial from Britain, one of all too few such efforts during the pandemic, demonstrated that dexamethasone was able to reduce deaths by one-fifth among patients needing supplemental oxygen and an astonishing one-third among those on ventilators.

The study also explained the earlier findings: Given too early, before patients needed supplemental oxygen, steroids could harm patients. But comprehensive data from the randomized trial showed that when given later, as the disease progressed in severity, dexamethasone was immensely helpful.

Dexamethasone has since become a workhorse of Covid treatment, saving perhaps millions of lives at little cost or fanfare. Without that trial, though, it might never have been noticed because of a problem called confounding: when causal effects of different elements can’t be considered separately. If doctors give multiple drugs to patients at the same time, who knows which drug works and which one does not? Or, if they choose which drug to give to whom, those more ill may be getting effective drugs, but the severity of their illness could end up masking the positive effect of the drug. Trials allow us to sort through all of this.

Randomized trials are not the only source of useful data. For example, it would have been difficult to quickly determine how transmissible the Delta variant is — a crucial question — without the data collected from close and systematic observation.

If a variant is spreading quickly somewhere, it might be more transmissible, or it could have simply arrived in that area early and gotten a head start. Or it might have just hit a few superspreader events. We’ve had variants appear, generating alarming headlines, that were later shown to be no more threatening than previous ones.

By Itself - Mr.NA DOES NOT Vaccinate Against Super-Covid!!! But....,

nature | These jokers created some super-covid from the worst strains of existing covid variants. (Gain of Function Research)  It’s virological and immunological <s>dual use bioweapons</s> research.  Hope none gets out of the NYC lab where they created it over a year ago. 

They then tested antibodies created from a natural Covid-19 infection - and - antibodies created by someone with an mRNA vaccine against this “gain of function” super strain of Covid-19. The super Covid was resistant to both types of antibodies. However, antibodies from someone who both was infected and recovered from a Covid-19 infection AND received an mRNA vaccination defeated the super strain of Covid-19.

 

The number and variability of the neutralizing epitopes targeted by polyclonal antibodies in SARS-CoV-2 convalescent and vaccinated individuals are key determinants of neutralization breadth and the genetic barrier to viral escape^1–4. Using HIV-1 pseudotypes and plasma-selection experiments with vesicular stomatitis virus/SARS-CoV-2 chimeras⁵, we show that multiple neutralizing epitopes, within and outside the receptor binding domain (RBD), are variably targeted by human polyclonal antibodies. Antibody targets coincide with spike sequences that are enriched for diversity in natural SARS-CoV-2 populations. By combining plasma-selected spike substitutions, we generated synthetic ‘polymutant’ spike protein pseudotypes that resisted polyclonal antibody neutralization to a similar degree as circulating variants of concern (VOC). By aggregating VOC-associated and antibody-selected spike substitutions into a single polymutant spike protein, we show that 20 naturally occurring mutations in SARS-CoV-2 spike are sufficient to generate pseudotypes with near-complete resistance to the polyclonal neutralizing antibodies generated by convalescents or mRNA vaccine recipients. Strikingly, however, plasma from individuals who had been infected and subsequently received mRNA vaccination, neutralized pseudotypes bearing this highly resistant SARS-CoV-2 polymutant spike, or diverse sarbecovirus spike proteins. Thus, optimally elicited human polyclonal antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 should be resilient to substantial future SARS-CoV-2 variation and may confer protection against potential future sarbecovirus pandemics.

Authoriteh's Restive About What You Peasants Get Up To With Synthetic Biology

FT  |  Paul Dabrowa does not know if it is illegal to genetically modify beer at home in a way that makes it glow. The process involves taking DNA information from jellyfish and applying it to yeast cells, then using traditional fermenting methods to turn it into alcohol. But he is worried that it could be against the law given that it involves manipulating genetic material. “This stuff can be dangerous in the wrong hands, so I did that in an accredited lab,” he says, adding that he himself has only got as far as making yeast cells glow in a Petri dish. For the most part Dabrowa, a 41-year old Melbourne-based Australian who styles himself as a bit of an expert on most things, prefers to conduct his biohacking experiments in his kitchen. He does this mostly to find cures for his own health issues. Other times just for fun.

In recent years the community of hobbyists and amateurs Dabrowa considers his kin has been energised by the falling cost and growing accessibility to gene-editing tools such as Crispr. This has led to an explosion of unchecked experimentation in self-constructed labs or community facilities focused on biological self-improvement.

Despite a lack of formal microbiological training, Dabrowa has successfully used faecal transplants and machine learning to genetically modify his own gut bacteria to lose weight without having to change his daily regime. The positive results he’s seen on himself have encouraged him to try to commercialise the process with the help of an angel investor. He hopes one day to collect as many as 3,000 faecal samples from donors and share the findings publicly.

Much of his knowledge — including the complex bits related to gene-editing — was gleaned straight from the internet or through sheer strength of will by directly lobbying those who have the answers he seeks. “Whenever I was bored, I went on YouTube and watched physics and biology lectures from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology],” he explains. “I tried the experiments at home, then realised I needed help and reached out to professors at MIT and Harvard. They were more than happy to do so.”

At the more radical end of the community are experimentalists such as Josiah Zayner, a former Nasa bioscientist, who became infamous online after performing gene therapy on himself in front of a live audience. Zayner’s start-up, The Odin — to which Crispr pioneer and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School George Church is an adviser — has stubbornly resisted attempts to regulate its capacity to sell gene-editing kits online in the idealistic belief that everyone should be able to manage their own DNA.

These garage scientists might seem like a quirky new subculture but their rogue mindset is starting to generate consternation among those who specialise in managing biological threats in governments and international bodies.

In 2018 the states that are signatories to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) identified gene editing, gene synthesis, gene drives and metabolic pathway engineering as research that qualifies as “dual use”, meaning it is as easy to deploy for harmful purposes as it is for good.
 

Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch - Nerds Done Nerded Up An RNA Editing CRISPR CAS-7-11

phys.org  |  Researchers at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research have discovered a bacterial enzyme that they say could expand scientists' CRISPR toolkit, making it easy to cut and edit RNA with the kind of precision that, until now, has only been available for DNA editing. The enzyme, called Cas7-11, modifies RNA targets without harming cells, suggesting that in addition to being a valuable research tool, it provides a fertile platform for therapeutic applications.

"This new enzyme is like the Cas9 of RNA," says McGovern Fellow Omar Abudayyeh, referring to the DNA-cutting CRISPR enzyme that has revolutionized modern biology by making DNA editing fast, inexpensive, and exact. "It creates two precise cuts and doesn't destroy the cell in the process, like other enzymes," he adds.

Up until now, only one other family of RNA-targeting enzymes, Cas13, has extensively been developed for RNA targeting applications. However, when Cas13 recognizes its target, it shreds any RNAs in the cell, destroying the cell along the way. Like Cas9, Cas7-11 is part of a programmable system; it can be directed at specific RNA targets using a CRISPR guide. Abudayyeh, McGovern Fellow Jonathan Gootenberg, and their colleagues discovered Cas7-11 through a deep exploration of the CRISPR systems found in the microbial world. Their findings were recently reported in the journal Nature.

Exploring natural diversity

Like other CRISPR proteins, Cas7-11 is used by bacteria as a defense mechanism against viruses. After encountering a new virus, bacteria that employ the CRISPR system keep a record of the infection in the form of a small snippet of the pathogen's genetic material. Should that virus reappear, the CRISPR system is activated, guided by a small piece of RNA to destroy the viral genome and eliminate the infection.

These ancient immune systems are widespread and diverse, with different bacteria deploying different proteins to counter their viral invaders.

"Some target DNA, some target RNA. Some are very efficient in cleaving the target but have some toxicity, and others do not. They introduce different types of cuts, they can differ in specificity—and so on," says Eugene Koonin, an evolutionary biologist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Abudayyeh, Gootenberg, and Koonin have been scouring genome sequences to learn about the natural diversity of CRISPR systems—and to mine them for potential tools. The idea, Abudayyeh says, is to take advantage of the work that evolution has already done in engineering protein machines.

"We don't know what we'll find," Abudayyeh says, "but let's just explore and see what's out there."

HHS Nurse Goes On The Record About Adverse Reactions To Mr. NA NeoVaccinoid Goo...,

projectveritas  |  [PHOENIX – Sept. 20, 2021] Project Veritas released the first video of its COVID vaccine investigative series today featuring an interview with U.S. Health and Human Services [HHS] insider, Jodi O’Malley, who works as a Registered Nurse at the local Indian Medical Center.

O’Malley told Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe about what has been going on at her federal government facility. She recorded her HHS colleagues discussing their concerns about the new COVID vaccine to corroborate her assertions:

Dr. Maria Gonzales, ER Doctor, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: “The problem in here is that they are not doing the studies. People that had [COVID] and the people that have been vaccinated -- they’re not doing any antibody testing.”

Jodi O’Malley, Insider and Registered Nurse, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: “Nope.”

Dr. Gonzales: “Everybody is quiet with that. Why?”

O’Malley: “Now, you got this guy in Room Four who got his second dose of the [COVID] vaccine on Tuesday and has been short of breath. Okay? Now his BNP is elevated. D diver elevated, ALT, all his liver enzymes are elevated. His PTPTINR is elevated.”

Dr. Gonzales: “He’s probably got myocarditis!”

O’Malley: “Yes!”

Dr. Gonzales: “All this is bullshit. Now probably myocarditis due to the vaccine.”

O’Malley: “Right.”

Dr. Gonzales: “But now, they [government] are not going to blame the vaccine.”

O’Malley: “Well and you know what -- but he has an obligation to report that doesn’t he? It happened right -- what is it -- sixty days after if you see anything?”

Dr. Gonzales: “They have got to.”

O’Malley: “But how many are reporting?”

Dr. Gonzales: “They are not reporting.”

O’Malley: “Right!”

Dr. Gonzales: “Because they want to shove it under the mat.”

O’Malley explained this conversation in detail during her interview with O’Keefe:

James O’Keefe, Project Veritas founder: “In this instance with Dr. Gonzales, what patient was she referring to? Without saying the name.”

Jodi O’Malley, Insider and Registered Nurse, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:“She was referring to a thirty-something-year-old patient that had congestive heart failure.”

O’Keefe: “Congestive heart failure? In that particular patient’s case, it was not reported?”

O’Malley: “No.”

O’Keefe: “Were there other instances that they didn’t report? Or just this one?”

O’Malley: “Yeah, many.”

O’Keefe: “How many did you see?”

O’Malley: “Oh, I’ve seen dozens of people come in with adverse reactions [to the COVID vaccine].”

…

O’Malley: “So, what the responsibility on everyone is -- is to gather that data and report it. If we’re not gathering [COVID vaccine] data and reporting it, then how are we going to say that this is safe and approved for use?”

The whistleblower also recorded Dr. Gonzales’ disagreement with another HHS doctor pertaining to the research and reporting behind the COVID vaccine:

Jodi O’Malley, Insider and Registered Nurse, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: “So how come after 18 months, we haven’t had any research? Isn’t that fishy to you?”

Dr. Maria Gonzales, ER Doctor, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: “It does -- it is fishy.”

O’Malley: “It’s super fishy.”

Dr. Dale McGee, ER Doctor, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: “It’s not that it hasn’t been done. It hasn’t been published, that’s why.”

Dr. Gonzales: “It hasn’t probably been done because the government doesn’t want to show that the darn [COVID] vaccine is full of sh*t.”

 

From A Public Health Perspective The Vaccine Mandate Is Pointless.

thexpose  |   A graduate of Yale University who also obtained a PHD at Princeton University and an MD degree from the John Hopkins University School of Medicine has published a paper in which she concludes that mandating the public to take a vaccine is a harmful and damaging act because of excellent scientific research papers which clearly demonstrate the vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission of Covid-19.

Nina Pierpont (MD, PhD) published a paper on September 9th analysing various studies that were published in August 2021 which prove the alleged Delta Covid-19 variant is evading the current Covid-19 injections on offer and therefore do not prevent infection or transmission of Covid-19.

The Doctor of Medicine explained in her published paper that vaccines aim to achieve two ends –

1. Protect the vaccinated person against the illness
2. Keep vaccinated people from carrying the infection and transmitting it to others.

However, the Doctor of Medicine writes that herd immunity will not be reached through vaccination because new research in multiple settings shows that the alleged Delta variant produces very high viral loads which are just as high in the vaccinated population compared to the unvaccinated population.

Therefore, according to Nina Pierpont (MD, PhD), vaccine mandates; such as the one now enforced in the UK for all Care Home staff, have no justification because vaccinating individuals does not stop or even slow the spread of the alleged dominant Delta Covid-19 variant.

Which leads the Doctor of Medicine to conclude that natural immunity is much more protective than vaccination because all severities of Covid-19 illness produce healthy levels of natural immunity.

Nine Pierpont (MD, PhD) cites three studies whose findings and data support her conclusions and these include a study published August 6th 2021 in the Centre for Disease Control’s (CDC) ‘Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report’, another study published August 10th 2021 by Oxford University, and a final study published August 24th 2021 which was funded by the UK Department for Health and Social Care.  Fist tap Dale.

Silly Atlantic Opinion Piece Fails To Explain Why Cornpop Bet The Ranch On A NeoVaccinoid Mandate

theatlantic |  Biden’s bet, while risky, grows more solid by the day. Republicans are making a counterargument that they believe their base wants to hear, which would be fine if their base were sufficient to wrest control of Congress from the Democrats. Biden is trying to appeal to a wider audience. Two of the most prized voting blocs in an election—suburban and independent voters—favor Biden’s vaccine-mandate plan by solid margins. They don’t see the vaccine requirement as government overreach; for them, it’s a step toward reentering a world they remember from two years ago.

“Republicans could be making a real mistake on the long-term play on this issue, especially heading into the midterms,” Rob Stutzman, a longtime Republican strategist based in California, told me. “Voters are looking at this through a personal lens, not a political lens. If I’m vaccinated, I’m really annoyed that we’ve had a second surge that was made worse because of the unvaccinated. And I’m annoyed because that means I have to put a mask back on and I have kids in school who are now at risk.”

Read: The fundamental question of the pandemic is shifting

Twenty years ago, after hijacked planes brought down the World Trade Center and blew a hole in the Pentagon, George W. Bush signed the PATRIOT Act, making it easier for the federal government to surveil Americans in the name of national security. Enough Americans were traumatized by the events of 9/11 to make that sort of encroachment on civil liberties palatable, so long as it meant the government would safeguard them from another terrorist attack. Over the years, the trade-off proved a devil’s bargain, as government watchdogs have chronicled abuses of privacy that had nothing to do with foiling another attack on U.S. soil.

Biden’s vaccine mandates are more grounded in American tradition. George Washington ordered that his Continental Army be inoculated against smallpox while fighting the British during the Revolutionary War. Schools have long required vaccinations for diseases such as polio. “Nobody wants the government to tell you what to do,” says Frank Luntz, a longtime Republican pollster who has shared some of his research on COVID-19 with the White House. “But—and this is a big but—they’re even more afraid of the government allowing people who are standing beside them, traveling with them, working with them, and partying with them to give them COVID.’’

In the Reagan era, much of Republican identity was bound up in support for business and lower taxes. But the threshold question these days for Republicans looking to rise within the party is their fealty to Donald Trump. A strong argument can be made that Biden’s plan is helpful to businesses and the larger economy, and something that, in less polarized times, Republicans might have actually embraced. People are less likely to go to a movie theater if they fear that the couple eating popcorn in the seats next to them might be unvaccinated. They are less likely to attend a conference—injecting money into both the local and national economies through airfare, hotels, car services, and meals—if others in the crowd are unvaccinated.

Masks Are For Peasants...,

washingtontimes |  If you’re among the Hollywood elite at the Emmys, you don’t need a face mask. If you’re a simple school student in most of the rest of America, you better have a face mask. Any questions?

This is the tale of two emerging societies in America: those who have to obey coronavirus restrictions and those who don’t. And guess which category you fit.

Cedric the Entertainer, the host for the evening, tried to quiet criticisms before they had a chance to brew — but was largely unsuccessful.

“No Masks at the #Emmys because rules are for the little people,” one social media poster wrote.

“The Only People Wearing Masks At the Emmys Were Servants,” another wrote.

“Is ‘science’ the reason celebrities don’t need masks at the Emmys but all the hourly employees do?” yet another wrote.

“Emmys = no masks. Our college and high school sons = masks. Where’s the outrage?” yet one more wrote.

It’s not that the Emmys’ attendees should have been forced to wear masks. It’s that everybody else in the country shouldn’t be forced to wear masks, either.

The fact some can skate on the Anthony-Fauci-recommendations-slash-mandates while others cannot shows clearly the growing two-class society in America: the thees — the Democrat voters, the socialist types, the leftist leaners — but not for me’s — the conservatives, the Donald Trump base, the tea party types, the individualists.

It’s the coronavirus version of apartheid.

“Masks are for peasants,” another wrote on Twitter.

And that very succinctly describes the attitudes from the far-left.

Only The Servants Are Wearing Masks....,

oftwominds |  Now that every financial game in America has been rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many, trust and credibility has evaporated like an ice cube on a summer day in Death Valley.

Here is America in a nutshell: we no longer solve problems, we manipulate the narrative and then declare the problem has been solved. Actually solving problems is difficult and generally requires sacrifices that are proportionate to one's wealth and power. But since America's elite are no longer willing to sacrifice any of their vast power for the common good, sacrifice is out in America unless it can be dumped on wage earners. But unfortunately for America's elite, four decades of hidden-by-manipulation sacrifices have stripmined average wage earners, and so they no longer have anything left to sacrifice.

Enter the Ministry of Manipulation, which adjusts the visible bits to align with the narrative that the problem has been fixed and the status quo is godlike in its technocratic powers. All this manipulation doesn't actually solve the problems, it simply hides the decay behind gamed statistics, financial trickery and glossy PR. The problems fester until they break through the manipulated gloss and the public witnesses the breakdown of all the systems that were presented as rock-solid and forever.

Let's take three core fields of manipulation: cost of living, Social Security and the stock market bubble. Each is a key signifier of the status quo functioning as advertised, and so manipulating them to fit the narrative is the elite's prime directive. Goodness knows what would happen if people were exposed to the unmanipulated reality, but it wouldn't be good for America's self-serving power elite.

The cost of living--the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a.k.a. inflation--is the most threadbare trash heap of manipulation currently on display. Fully 40% of the Index is based on the opinion of random people rather than easily tabulated real-world data. I refer to the government's comically wacky method of reckoning the cost of housing: ask a random bunch of homeowners what they guess they could rent their house for.

But wait, why not simply tabulate the actual rents being paid? That data is easily available, and could be made apples-to-apples by applying the methodology of the Case-Shiller housing index, which is to track the cost data of the same homes / flats over time. This would provide reliable data on the actual increase or decline in rents being paid.

Gathering actual real-world date is anathema because then the CPI would be much higher and not so easily manipulated. The same can be said of all the other tricks of manipulating the cost of living: seasonal adjustments (i.e., lop off price increases and attribute the reduction to "seasonality") and hedonic adjustments (i.e., after adjusting for the better stereo and the rear-view camera, today's $40,000 car is tabulated as "cheaper" than yesteryear's $10,000 car of the same size).

If these same adjustments were applied to the weight and height of individuals, a 6-foot tall individual weighing 200 pounds would be "adjusted" to 6 inches in height and a weight of 2 pounds. This is a slight exaggeration but not by much, as today's calculation of expenses are laughably understated in the CPI: today's cars haven't risen in cost at all according to the CPI, even as the number of work hours needed to buy a new car have skyrocketed--that is, when measured in purchasing power of wages, vehicles are much more expensive now.

Then there's healthcare, which is a weighted as light as a feather in the CPI. Healthcare-- you know, that sector which routinely bankrupts American families with bills in the tens of thousands?--is weighted as roughly equal to clothing. This is beyond absurd, but par for the CPI course of endless manipulations, all aimed at reducing the CPI so the public can be lulled into a fairyland belief that inflation has been trifling for decades, even as their paychecks buy a third less than they did a decade ago.

Where Is This Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated Policy Headed?

mises |  The official line on vaccines is that they are extremely effective at protecting against serious illness. And yet these same people are also claiming that the unvaccinated are a major threat to the vaccinated.

More specifically, President Biden claimed on September 10 that vaccine mandates were to “protect the vaccinated workers from unvaccinated workers.”

In other words, it is claimed that vaccines are remarkably effective, and that the vaccinated must also be protected from the unvaccinated. How can both claims be true at the same time? They can’t. The idea that vaccinated people are being frequently harmed by the unvaccinated is a complete fabrication, based on the promandate crowd’s own mainstream data.

As Robert Fellner points out, according to the official data,

The odds of a vaccinated person dying from COVID are 1 in 137,000.

The fatality rate for seasonal flu, meanwhile, is at least 100 times greater than that. The chance of dying in an automobile accident is over 1,000 times greater. Dog attacks, bee stings, sunstroke, cataclysmic storms, and a variety of other background risks we accept as a normal part of life are all more deadly than the risk COVID poses to the vaccinated.

Moreover, the risk of death to vaccinated people is similar to the risk of having an adverse side effect to the vaccine. And as the spokesmen for Big Pharma and the regime never tire of telling us, you shouldn’t care about having an adverse reaction, because it is so very rare and inconsequential.

So by that reasoning, vaccinated people shouldn’t worry about getting very ill from covid. Those cases are just as rare as the so, so rare cases of adverse reaction.

And yet, even after all of this, the backers of vaccine mandates are trying to whip up hysteria about how we must “protect the vaccinated,” who are in grave danger, thanks to the unvaccinated.

The level of mental and logical incoherence necessary to come to this conclusion is quite a feat.

It Doesn’t Stop the Spread

It must also be remembered that vaccination does not stop the spread of covid. 

Fellner continues:

But as [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's] Dr. Walensky explained last month, while the COVID vaccines remain incredibly effective at preventing serious illness and death, “what they cannot do anymore is prevent transmission.” This reflects the official position of the agency as well, which is why the CDC now requires vaccinated people to mask indoors and follow the same type of social distancing practices as unvaccinated people.

The official confirmation that COVID is endemic, and vaccination cannot stop transmission and thereby eliminate it in the way it could for things like polio and smallpox, makes mandates intolerable to a free society. The entire argument for mandatory vaccination originally rested on the claim that the vaccines could reliably stop transmission.

Moreover, those who are vaccinated often experience a mild form of covid when they are reinfected, which means they often spread the disease without even knowing they have it. The vaccinated also carry the same viral load as the unvaccinated, as noted last month by the UK’s Evening Standard:

While evidence demonstrates that vaccines significantly reduce hospitalisations and deaths, scientists now believe those infected by the Delta variant can still harbour similar levels of virus to those who are unvaccinated.

Previous thinking was that vaccinations would stop the spread, but now

this has been thrown into doubt and raises questions about vaccine passports … which work on the assumption that double-jabbed people are less likely to spread the virus.

Yet again, we see the notion that the vaccinated are being endangered by the unvaccinated is a fantasy of the mandate activists.

At least the CDC is being logical when it says the vaccinated should keep wearing masks. Indeed, every time we hear this from the CDC we should remind ourselves: vaccination does not stop the spread.

 

The Selfish Gene Is Actually A Crippling, Zero-Sum Theory Of Evolution

aeon  |  In late summer of 1976, two colleagues at Oxford University Press, Michael Rodgers and Richard Charkin, were discussing a book on evolution soon to be published. It was by a first-time author, a junior zoology don in town, and had been given an initial print run of 5,000 copies. As the two publishers debated the book’s fate, Charkin confided that he doubted it would sell more than 2,000 copies. In response, Rodgers, who was the editor who had acquired the manuscript, suggested a bet whereby he would pay Charkin £1 for every 1,000 copies under 5,000, and Charkin was to buy Rodgers a pint of beer for every 1,000 copies over 5,000. By now, the book is one of OUP’s most successful titles, and it has sold more than a million copies in dozens of languages, spread across four editions. That book was Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, and Charkin is ‘holding back payment in the interests of [Rodgers’s] health and wellbeing’.

In the decades following that bet, The Selfish Gene has come to play a unique role in evolutionary biology, simultaneously influential and contentious. At the heart of the disagreements lay the book’s advocacy of what has become known as the gene’s-eye view of evolution. To its supporters, the gene’s-eye view presents an unrivalled introduction to the logic of natural selection. To its critics, ‘selfish genes’ is a dated metaphor that paints a simplistic picture of evolution while failing to incorporate recent empirical findings. To me, it is one of biology’s most powerful thinking tools. However, as with all tools, in order to make the most of it, you must understand what it was designed to do.

When Charles Darwin first introduced his theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859, he had in mind a theory about individual organisms. In Darwin’s telling, individuals differ in how long they live and how good they are at attracting mates; if the traits that enhance these strengths are heritable, they will become more abundant over time. The gene’s-eye view discussed by Dawkins introduces a shift in perspective that might seem subtle at first, but which comes with rather radical implications.

The idea emerged from the tenets of population genetics in the 1920s and ’30s. Here, scientists said that you could mathematically describe evolution through changes in the frequency of certain genetic variants, known as alleles, over time. Population genetics was an integral part of the modern synthesis of evolution and married Darwin’s idea of gradual evolutionary change with a functioning theory of inheritance, based on Gregor Mendel’s discovery that genes were transmitted as discrete entities. Under the framework of population genetics, evolution is captured by mathematically describing the increase and decrease of alleles in a population over time.

The gene’s-eye view took this a step further, to argue that biologists are always better off thinking about evolution and natural selection in terms of genes rather than organisms. This is because organisms lack the evolutionary longevity required to be the central unit in evolutionary explanations. They are too temporary on an evolutionary timescale, a unique combination of genes and environment – here in this generation but gone in the next. Genes, in contrast, pass on their structure intact from one generation to the next, ignoring mutation and recombination. Therefore, only they possess the required evolutionary longevity. Traits that you can see, the argument goes, such as the particular fur of a polar bear or the flower of an orchid (known as a phenotype), are not for the good of the organism, but of the genes. The genes, and not the organism, are the ultimate beneficiaries of natural selection.

This approach has also been called selfish-gene thinking, because natural selection is conceptualised as a struggle between genes, typically through how they affect the fitness of the organism in which they reside, for transmission to the next generation. At an after-dinner speech at a conference banquet, Dawkins once summarised the key argument in limerick form:

An itinerant selfish gene
Said: ‘Bodies a-plenty I’ve seen.
You think you’re so clever,
But I’ll live for ever.
You’re just a survival machine.’

In this telling, evolution is the process by which immortal selfish genes housed in transient organisms struggle for representation in future generations. Moving beyond the poetry and making the point more formally, Dawkins argued that evolution involves two entities: replicators and vehicles, playing complementary roles. Replicators are those entities that copies are made of and that are transmitted faithfully from one generation to the next; in practice, this usually means genes. The second entity, vehicles, are where replicators are bundled together: this is the entity that actually comes into contact with the external environment and interacts with it. The most common kind of vehicle is the organism, such as an animal or a plant, though it can also be a cell, as in the case of cancer.

Cell Signaling Neither Random Or Chaotic - Just Exceedingly Complicated

quanta |  Back in 2000, when Michael Elowitz of the California Institute of Technology was still a grad student at Princeton University, he accomplished a remarkable feat in the young field of synthetic biology: He became one of the first to design and demonstrate a kind of functioning “circuit” in living cells. He and his mentor, Stanislas Leibler, inserted a suite of genes into Escherichia coli bacteria that induced controlled swings in the cells’ production of a fluorescent protein, like an oscillator in electronic circuitry.

It was a brilliant illustration of what the biologist and Nobel laureate François Jacob called the “logic of life”: a tightly controlled flow of information from genes to the traits that cells and other organisms exhibit.

But this lucid vision of circuit-like logic, which worked so elegantly in bacteria, too often fails in more complex cells. “In bacteria, single proteins regulate things,” said Angela DePace, a systems biologist at Harvard Medical School. “But in more complex organisms, you get many proteins involved in a more analog fashion.”

Recently, by looking closely at the protein interactions within one key developmental pathway that shapes the embryos of humans and other complex animals, Elowitz and his co-workers have caught a glimpse of what the logic of complex life is really like. This pathway is a riot of molecular promiscuity that would make a libertine blush, where the component molecules can unite in many different combinations. It might seem futile to hope that this chaotic dance could convey any coherent signal to direct the fate of a cell. Yet this sort of helter-skelter coupling among biomolecules may be the norm, not some weird exception. In fact, it may be why multicellular life works at all.

“Biological cell-cell communication circuits, with their families of promiscuously interacting ligands and receptors, look like a mess and use an architecture that is the opposite of what we synthetic biologists might have designed,” Elowitz said.

Yet this apparent chaos of interacting components is really a sophisticated signal-processing system that can extract information reliably and efficiently from complicated cocktails of signaling molecules. “Understanding cells’ natural combinatorial language could allow us to control [them] with much greater specificity than we have now,” he said.

The emerging picture does more than reconfigure our view of what biomolecules in our cells are up to as they build an organism — what logic they follow to create complex life. It might also help us understand why living things are able to survive at all in the face of an unpredictable environment, and why that randomness permits evolution rather than frustrating it. And it could explain why molecular medicine is often so hard: why many candidate drugs don’t do what we hoped, and how we might make ones that do.

The Computational Complexity Of A Single Biological Neuron

quanta |  Today, the most powerful artificial intelligence systems employ a type of machine learning called deep learning. Their algorithms learn by processing massive amounts of data through hidden layers of interconnected nodes, referred to as deep neural networks. As their name suggests, deep neural networks were inspired by the real neural networks in the brain, with the nodes modeled after real neurons — or, at least, after what neuroscientists knew about neurons back in the 1950s, when an influential neuron model called the perceptron was born. Since then, our understanding of the computational complexity of single neurons has dramatically expanded, so biological neurons are known to be more complex than artificial ones. But by how much?

To find out, David Beniaguev, Idan Segev and Michael London, all at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, trained an artificial deep neural network to mimic the computations of a simulated biological neuron. They showed that a deep neural network requires between five and eight layers of interconnected “neurons” to represent the complexity of one single biological neuron.

Even the authors did not anticipate such complexity. “I thought it would be simpler and smaller,” said Beniaguev. He expected that three or four layers would be enough to capture the computations performed within the cell.

Timothy Lillicrap, who designs decision-making algorithms at the Google-owned AI company DeepMind, said the new result suggests that it might be necessary to rethink the old tradition of loosely comparing a neuron in the brain to a neuron in the context of machine learning. “This paper really helps force the issue of thinking about that more carefully and grappling with to what extent you can make those analogies,” he said.

The most basic analogy between artificial and real neurons involves how they handle incoming information. Both kinds of neurons receive incoming signals and, based on that information, decide whether to send their own signal to other neurons. While artificial neurons rely on a simple calculation to make this decision, decades of research have shown that the process is far more complicated in biological neurons. Computational neuroscientists use an input-output function to model the relationship between the inputs received by a biological neuron’s long treelike branches, called dendrites, and the neuron’s decision to send out a signal.

This function is what the authors of the new work taught an artificial deep neural network to imitate in order to determine its complexity. They started by creating a massive simulation of the input-output function of a type of neuron with distinct trees of dendritic branches at its top and bottom, known as a pyramidal neuron, from a rat’s cortex. Then they fed the simulation into a deep neural network that had up to 256 artificial neurons in each layer. They continued increasing the number of layers until they achieved 99% accuracy at the millisecond level between the input and output of the simulated neuron. The deep neural network successfully predicted the behavior of the neuron’s input-output function with at least five — but no more than eight — artificial layers. In most of the networks, that equated to about 1,000 artificial neurons for just one biological neuron.

 

"Behavioral Genetics" "Social Science Genomics" - By Any Name - Race "Science" Still Turd-Frosting

newyorker |  Last summer, an anonymous intermediary proposed to Harris and Harden that they address their unresolved issues. Harden appeared on Harris’s podcast, and patiently explained why Murray’s speculation was dangerously out in front of the science. At the moment, technical and methodological challenges, as well as the persistent effects of an unequal environment, would make it impossible to conduct an experiment to test Murray’s idly incendiary hypotheses. She refused to grant that his provocations were innocent: “I don’t disagree with you about insisting on intellectual honesty, but I think of it as ‘both/and’—I think that that value is very important, but I also find it very important to listen to people when they say, ‘I’m worried about how this idea might be used to harm me or my family or my neighborhood or my group.’ ” (Harris declined to comment on the record for this piece.) As she once put it in an essay, “There is a middle ground between ‘let’s never talk about genes and pretend cognitive ability doesn’t exist’ and ‘let’s just ask some questions that pander to a virulent on-line community populated by racists with swastikas in their Twitter bios.’ ”

Harden is not alone in her drive to fulfill Turkheimer’s dream of a “psychometric left.” Dalton Conley and Jason Fletcher’s book, “The Genome Factor,” from 2017, outlines similar arguments, as does the sociologist Jeremy Freese. Last year, Fredrik deBoer published “The Cult of Smart,” which argues that the education-reform movement has been trammelled by its willful ignorance of genetic variation. Views associated with the “hereditarian left” have also been articulated by the psychiatrist and essayist Scott Alexander and the philosopher Peter Singer. Singer told me, of Harden, “Her ethical arguments are ones that I have held for quite a long time. If you ignore these things that contribute to inequality, or pretend they don’t exist, you make it more difficult to achieve the kind of society that you value.” He added, “There’s a politically correct left that’s still not open to these things.” Stuart Ritchie, an intelligence researcher, told me he thinks that Harden’s book might create its own audience: “There’s so much toxicity in this debate that it’ll take a long time to change people’s minds on it, if at all, but I think Paige’s book is just so clear in its explanation of the science.”

The nomenclature has given Harden pause, depending on the definition of “hereditarian,” which can connote more biodeterminist views, and the definition of “left”—deBoer is a communist, Alexander leans libertarian, and Harden described herself to me as a “Matthew 25:40 empiricist” (“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me’ ”). The political sensitivity of the subject has convinced many sympathetic economists, psychologists, and geneticists to keep their heads below the parapets of academia. As the population geneticist I spoke to put it to me, “Geneticists know how to talk about this stuff to each other, in part because we understand terms like ‘heritability,’ which we use in technical ways that don’t always fully overlap with their colloquial meanings, and in part because we’re charitable with each other, assume each other’s good faith—we know that our colleagues aren’t eugenicists. But we have no idea how to talk about it in public, and, while I don’t agree with everything she said, sometimes it feels like we’ve all been sitting around waiting for a book like Paige’s.”

Harden’s outspokenness has generated significant blowback from the left. On Twitter, she has been caricatured as a kind of ditzy bourgeois dilettante who gives succor to the viciousness of the alt-right. This March, after she expressed support for standardized testing—which she argues predicts student success above and beyond G.P.A. and can help increase low-income and minority representation—a parody account appeared under the handle @EugenicInc, with the name “Dr. Harden, Social Justice Through Eugenics!” and the bio “Not a determinist, but yes, genes cause everything. I just want to breed more Hilary Clinton’s for higher quality future people.” One tweet read, “In This House We Believe, Science is Real, Womens Rights are Human Rights, Black Lives Matter, News Isnt Fake, Some Kids Have Dumb-Dumb Genes!!!”

In 2018, she wrote an Op-Ed in the Times, arguing that progressives should embrace the potential of genetics to inform education policy. Dorothy Roberts, a professor of law, sociology, and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, strongly disagreed: “There’s just no way that genetic testing is going to lead to a restructuring of society in a just way in the future—we have a hundred years of evidence for what happens when social outcomes are attributed to genetic differences, and it is always to stigmatize, control, and punish the people predicted to have socially devalued traits.” Darity, the economist, told me that he doesn’t see how Harden can insist that differences within groups are genetic but that differences between them are not: “It’s a feint and a dodge for her to say, ‘Well, I’m only looking at variations across individuals.’ ”

There is a good precedent for this kind of concern. In “Blueprint,” Robert Plomin wrote that polygenic scores should be understood as “fortune tellers” that can “foretell our futures from birth.” Jared Taylor, a white-supremacist leader, argued that Plomin’s book should “destroy the basis for the entire egalitarian enterprise of the last 60 or so years.” He seized on Plomin’s claim that, for many outcomes, “environmental levers for change are not within our grasp.” Taylor wrote, “This is a devastating finding for the armies of academics and uplift artists who think every difference in outcome is society’s fault.” He continued, “And, although Blueprint includes nothing about race, the implications for ‘racial justice’ are just as colossal.” Harden has been merciless in her response to behavior geneticists whose disciplinary salesmanship—and perhaps worse—inadvertently indulges the extreme right. In her own review of Plomin’s book, she wrote, “Insisting that DNA matters is scientifically accurate; insisting that it is the only thing that matters is scientifically outlandish.” ​(Plomin told me that Harden misrepresented his intent. He added, “Good luck to Paige in convincing people who are engaged in the culture wars about this middle path she’s suggesting. . . . My view is it isn’t worth confronting people and arguing with them.”)

With the first review of Harden’s book, these dynamics played out on cue. Razib Khan, a conservative science blogger identified with the “human biodiversity” movement, wrote that he admired her presentation of the science but was put off by the book’s politics; though he notes that a colleague of his once heard Harden described as “Charles Murray in a skirt,” he clearly thinks the honorific was misplaced. “Alas, if you do not come to this work with Harden’s commitment to social justice, much of the non-scientific content will strike you as misguided, gratuitous and at times even unfair.” This did not prevent some on the Twitter left from expressing immediate disgust. Kevin Bird, who describes himself in his Twitter bio as a “radical scientist,” tweeted, “Personally, I wouldn’t be very happy if a race science guy thought my book was good.” Harden sighed when she recounted the exchange: “It’s always from both flanks. It felt like another miniature version of Harris on one side and Darity on the other.”