Police have been recorded doing this kind of stuff for a long time and qualified immunity from prosecution has kept them out of trouble - always protected. This one happened right in the middle of the pandemic, after years of escalating economic pain culminating in the "flatten the curve" lockdown.
You have a set of cops in Minneapolis murder a black man in broad daylight with lots of people with camera phones around. Why kill a man in broad daylight, including allowing ‘beauty pics’ of the cops? Of course they knew they were being recorded.
The predictable outrage erupts across cities. You have news network camera crews arrested or shot at by cops. You have what sure looks like cops acting as provacateurs, breaking window, etc. It all seems very highly coordinated.
A lot of noise about the looting of Main Street by Wall St. in the so-called pandemic bailouts has started to get traction. A lot of people are going to be unemployed and probably evicted soon. A lot of people will lose their homes in mortgage foreclosure - again. A lot of people are going to be very, very angry at DC and Wall St, if they aren’t already.
Was this all set up to get people mad and in the streets to protest in order to beat them down and take the fight out of them before the greater economic pain that’s coming starts to hit Main Street in full force? Is this Wall St./DC’s “Occupy Main Street” ? Or is this a “change the subject” in the media moment, change the subject away from the economic crimes of the bailouts to something different and more visibly dramatic? It would be the height of naivete to pretend that this situation has
simply taken on 'a life of its own’. There is DEFINITELY some
orchestrating going on.
theamericanconservative |Darrin Manning’s
unprovoked “stop and frisk” encounter with the Philadelphia police left
him hospitalized with a ruptured testicle. Neykeyia Parker was
violently dragged out of her car and aggressively arrested
in front of her young child for “trespassing” at her own apartment
complex in Houston. A Georgia toddler was burned when police threw a flash grenade
into his playpen during a raid, and the manager of a Chicago tanning
salon was confronted by a raiding police officer bellowing that he would
kill her and her family, captured on the salon’s surveillance. An elderly man in Ohio was left in need of facial reconstructive surgery after police entered his home without a warrant to sort out a dispute about a trailer.
These
stories are a small selection of recent police brutality reports, as
police misconduct has become a fixture of the news cycle.
But the plural of anecdote is not data, and the media is inevitably
drawn toward tales of conflict. Despite the increasing frequency with
which we hear of misbehaving cops, many Americans maintain a default
respect for the man in uniform. As an NYPD assistant chief put it, “We don’t want a few bad apples or a few rogue cops damaging” the police’s good name.
This
is an attractive proposal, certainly, but unfortunately it doesn’t hold
up to scrutiny. Here are seven reasons why police misconduct is a
systemic problem, not “a few bad apples”:
payday | Friday evening, bus drivers in New York City and members of TWU Local
100 refused to cooperate with police in transporting arrested Justice
for George Floyd protestors.
Payday Report has learned that transit union leaders
nationwide are instructing members not to cooperate with police in
arresting protestors.
Many union leaders have instructed their members that their union
contracts protect them against being forced to work in dangerous
conditions. They have informed their union members that their unions
would use organizational legal resources to protect bus drivers who
refuse to cooperate with the police.
“It’s safe to say that bus drivers in a lot of places are going to be
refusing work,” said one top labor leader, who wished to remain
anonymous.
For decades, transit unions, which are heavily African-American, have
sought to build community alliances around environmental racism and
expanding public transit communities. These community-labor alliances
have helped communities to expand transit services in many areas.
As a result of this organizing, many transit union leaders are
vehemently opposed to helping with police crackdowns in communities of
color.
fivethirtyeight | Trying to pin 2014 as the start of a new era is a subjective
exercise, perhaps a fool’s errand. But if politics is driven by emotion
and memory, so in this case is its hindsight analysis. 2014 was in my
book an annus horribilis, a blur of mortality. Perhaps if Gallup had called me, I’d have told them I’d lost trust.
In June 2014, someone I knew well was murdered. In July, Eric Garner
died on Staten Island, in the city where I’d just moved. In August, I
remember sitting on a fluorescent-lit subway car and reading about the
beheading of a journalist named James Foley by some group called ISIS. A
year later, I’d have to watch his beheading video and speak with his
family for a magazine story
I fact-checked about the vain attempts to save him and other Americans.
Michael Brown was killed in August, too. September brought another ISIS
beheading video. In October, a doctor in New York City was diagnosed
with Ebola — a global terror of its own kind — and I found myself
thinking uncontrollable thoughts about biohazards let loose on the
subway. In November, Tamir Rice was killed in my hometown, and the
midterm election gave the Republicans control of the U.S. Senate —
though that’s only a blip in my memory. The emotions stirred by 2014
lingered longer with me than its discrete politics.
Perhaps that’s why the themes of fear and mortality that hovered over
the 2016 election made some sense to me with 2014 in the rearview
mirror. It’s hard to tell how long it takes for emotional responses like
mine to get into the political bloodstream of a country, but when
pricked by the right needle, America’s primal worry and righteous anger
bled out over an election.
trtworld | US President Donald Trump has been frustrated by
state-level lockdown orders that have turned a humming economy into a
constellation of ghost towns. The jobless rate, set to hit 30 percent
within months, is an existential threat to Trump’s presidency, if
elections go forward in November. It also might be an existential threat
to the US as it occupies the borders it has now. Trump has declared his
authority is ‘’total’’ to lift lockdowns in states, a claim that reeked
of ignorance and panic. But ignorance and panic can be contagious.
“He’s
encouraging his followers to break state laws, and targeting Democratic
governors and other politicians,’’ said Oregon-based journalist Jason
Wilson, who has been covering
the shape of radical right-wing movements in the United States. He’s
referring to armed groups of Americans gathering at statehouses to
protest stay-at-home orders.
“It certainly raises the
prospect of civil disorder. I would say that the country is entering its
greatest period of instability and civil strife since at least the
1960s; more realistically, since the Depression and World World II. The
conflict between states and the federal government raises the
possibility of constitutional crisis. It’s a dark and uncertain time in
this country.”
It is easy to dismiss the lockdown
protestors as clownish villains, willfully spreading the virus to each
other and countless others. But the virus makes villains of us all, and a
few of us are inclined to react to social distancing measures by
panicking or retreating to vile racist, conspiracy theories about the
origin of the virus. Even as they deny the humanity of others, saying
that they themselves or strangers are worth sacrificing to the virus,
they are expressing their own humanity, in particular the fragility of
human reasoning skills in a crisis. Every deadly stampede starts with
its first fearful footfall.
Although they do not represent a majority of Americans, armed protestors
are more convincing than unarmed protestors. In Michigan on Thursday, armed citizens rallied inside the capitol building in Lansing. That same night, the legislature voted not to renew the governor's state-of-emergency
order. The state's Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who imposed
one of the most comprehensive social distancing schemes, had been a
target of Trump's rage online and in coronavirus briefings, where he
called her that "woman from Michigan."
Trump has endorsed the protests there, thinking ending lockdowns will
revive the economy. The billionaire family of Trump's education
secretary, Betsy Devos, sister to infamous Blackwater mercenary Erik Prince, bankrolled the lobbying group encouraging the demonstrations.
theconversation | A teenager held her phone steady enough
to capture the final moments of George Perry Floyd’s life as he
apparently suffocated under the weight of a Minneapolis police officer’s
knee on his neck. The video went viral.
The general public’s opinions about protests and the social movements
behind them are formed in large part by what they read or see in the
media. This gives journalists a lot of power when it comes to driving
the narrative of a demonstration.
They can emphasize the disruption protests cause or echo the dog whistles of politicians that label protesters as “thugs.”
But they can also remind the public that at the heart of the protests is
the unjust killing of another black person. This would take the
emphasis away from the destruction of the protests and toward the issues
of police impunity and the effects of racism in its many forms.
The role journalists play can be indispensable if movements are to
gain legitimacy and make progress. And that puts a lot of pressure on
journalists to get things right.
My research has found that some protest movements have more trouble than others getting legitimacy. My co-author Summer Harlow and I have studied
how local and metropolitan newspapers cover protests. We found that
narratives about the Women’s March and anti-Trump protests gave voice to
protesters and significantly explored their grievances. On the other
end of the spectrum, protests about anti-black racism and indigenous
people’s rights received the least legitimizing coverage, with them more
often seen as threatening and violent.
mediaite | CNN host Don Lemon hit network colleague Chris Cuomo with a monologue on Wednesday evening as riots took place in Minneapolis over the police brutality against and subsequent death of George Floyd.
As Cuomo spoke about the coronavirus pandemic, Lemon changed the subject.
“So, in that same vein, because we are talking about these viruses
that are infecting America,” said Lemon. “Imagine if that was me on the
ground, how you would feel as a friend, as someone I spend a lot of time
with. Imagine how people around this country feel when their friends,
like you, both of us are of a different background, when their friends
say nothing. When they do nothing. except send out a tweet or say, ‘Oh,
man, that’s terrible. I can’t believe that happens.'”
“Then when they see everyday racism, they don’t stand up for it.
Imagine how that feels to people of color in this country. It feels
terrible. Is that really being a friend?” he questioned, adding, “I’m
not saying you specifically, you understand what I’m saying. You know
what I’m saying.”
Cuomo responded, “I totally understand and, you know, the only word I can use is just hurt, it all hurts.”
“I’ve heard from so many people that I love that they’re so afraid
that it’s going to be them, it’s going to be their kid, and white people
roll their eyes like, ‘Come on, man. This only happens like once in a
while,'” he continued. “It doesn’t have to happen that often if every
time it happens in your mind it seems to go unanswered in terms of why
it’s okay.”
Lemon shot back, “But that’s the problem Chris… It happens a lot. We
just don’t see it. We’re just seeing from the video. This is the reason
that Colin Kaepernick was taking a knee, and then people were upset. The
president of the United States having the nerve to call him, and then
others standing up for this sort of injustice, to call them ‘sons of
bitches.’ This is why people are standing up, so that it doesn’t lead to
this.”
eurweb |*The internet is convinced that Officer Jacob Pederson
of the Saint Paul Police Department is the mysterious man seen in a
viral video wearing all black with an umbrella and a pink gas mask
breaking out windows at a Minneapolis Auto Zone on Wednesday just
before the fire broke out and the riots started.
Pederson is being accused of inciting the chaos that erupted in the city, as the Auto Zone was the first building to burn.
Footage
of the scene shows a protester confronting the man, who then becomes
hostile and quickly attempts to flee the scene while being asked if he’s
a cop.
On Thursday, Twitter user @GypsyEyedBeauty tweeted a series of screenshots
allegedly from Pederson’s ex-wife, and the caption read, “Here are
screenshots from his ex wife confirming this is him, along with his
photo.”
downwithtyranny |1. Black Activists to Biden: If You Pick Klobuchar, We May Not Support You
On May 23, Politico wrote
that "more than a dozen black and Latino strategists and activists
warned in interviews that selecting Klobuchar would not help Biden
excite black voters — and might have the opposite effect. Klobuchar
would “risk losing the very base the Democrats need to win,” said Aimee
Allison, founder of She the People, which promotes women of color in
politics."
The reason given was two-fold. High in the article, in the first
sentence in fact, the writer announced, "Sen. Amy Klobuchar performed
abysmally among black voters in the Democratic primary."
Later, in the third paragraph, the writer said that the Black activists
"pointed to Klobuchar’s poor performance among nonwhite voters during
the presidential primary as well as her record as a prosecutor in
Minnesota."
Adrianne Shropshire of the Clinton-connected
BlackPAC is quoted in the sixth paragraph as saying, “It [the
activists’ concerns about Klobuchar] comes from her performance in the
primary,” and Al Sharpton is quoted as offering this explanation: “It is
not her [Klobuchar’s] fault, but she is in the middle of an ongoing
battle from the last few presidential races.”
The writer herself helpfully adds, "Klobuchar symbolizes a strategic
division within the Democratic Party: whether to focus on winning back
white, Midwestern voters who flipped to Donald Trump in 2016, or on
activating voters of color who were not excited to vote."
But the article is ostensibly about "Black activists" and their
rejection of Klobuchar — it says so even the headline — not about
Shropshire and Sharpton's ground-cover explanation.
The writer waits until the eleventh paragraph, a place few readers will
get to, before she explains the real reason the activists are concerned —
namely, that Klobuchar "would risk losing the very base the Democrats
need to win" — and to explain the activists' comment "as well as her
record as a prosecutor in Minnesota." There the writer references a Washington Post op-ed penned by those same activists, who write:
(Read this AP story to see all of what’s wrong with both the Myon Burrell case and Klobuchar’s handling of it.)
Despite all the obfuscation and Klobuchar-protection by Politico, the
bottom line is clear: "Black activists" remember Klobuchar's record as a
"tough prosecutor" of blacks and are threatening to fail to support her
(and thus Biden) in November if Biden picks her for VP — a clear and
open threat to his electoral chances.
In other words, progressive black activists are threatening to abandon the Democrat, Trump or no Trump, over this issue.
blackagendareport | Black folks perform phenomenal feats of mental gymnastics and
self-delusion to convince themselves that Joe Biden is on their side.
“There is a strange magical thinking afoot that equates acknowledgement of Biden’s faults with support of Trump.”
Joe Biden was always an intellectual light weight and he always had
poor impulse control. He was always in the conservative wing of the
Democratic Party. Now he believes the hype of the black misleadership
class charlatans who make his case by claiming that he has some sort of
special relationship with black people. The combination of all these
attributes makes his presidential campaign one long train wreck.
A recent interview on the Breakfast Club radio
program was the occasion of his latest bizarre statement. This time he
famously said, “... if you have a problem figuring out whether you're
for me or Trump, then you ain't black." He seemed to think that being
overly familiar and using bad grammar gave him some sort of credibility.
Symone Sanders, his most prominent black campaign staffer, was left
to clean up after him yet again and defend his stupidity by saying that
he spoke in jest. The damage was bad enough that Biden had to apologize
himself and said that he shouldn’t have been “a wise guy.”
“Biden believes he has some sort of special relationship with black people.”
Biden is like Donald Trump, in that he is thoroughly unqualified to
be president. Yet black people are desperate to see anyone other than
Trump in the White House and that is how the party establishment got
away with foisting him upon them. When they aren’t trying to minimize
his shortcomings, they admonish anyone who points them out. “But he’s
better than Trump!” is their rallying cry lest anyone think for
themselves and point out the many reasons why Biden is so problematic.
mintpressnews |The latest example of America’s racist
police brutality problem was caught on camera in Minneapolis Monday, as
Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on 46-year-old African-American George
Floyd’s neck for over seven minutes until he passed out and died. In its
headline on its website, Minneapolis police described the
event as “man dies after medical incident during police interaction,”
laundering themselves of any responsibility. Chauvin continued his
assault even as Floyd desperately pleaded that he could not breathe,
while bystanders protested his brutality. “You’re fucking stopping his
breathing there, bro,” warned one concerned passer-by. Even after
passing out, Chauvin did not release pressure on his neck. Chauvin has
killed multiple times before while in uniform, has shot and wounded others and is well-known to local activist groups.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, who Joe Biden recently asked to
undergo vetting to be his running mate for November, issued a very tepid
statement about the incident, describing the police killing of an unarmed black man over an alleged forged check as merely an “officer involved death,” – a copaganda word often used by police as a euphemism for “murder.”
Klobuchar
also called for a “complete and thorough outside investigation into
what occurred, and those involved in this incident must be held
accountable.” However, this is unlikely to occur, in no small part
because of Klobuchar herself and the precedent she set while serving as
the state’s chief prosecutor between 1999 and 2007. In that time, she did not bring charges against more than two dozen officers who had killed citizens while on duty – including against Chauvin himself.
Chauvin was involved
in a fatal accident in 2005, killed Wayne Reyes in 2006, shot another
man while in uniform in 2008, and had a litany of complaints against
him. To be fair to Klobuchar, the Reyes shooting happened in October
2006, as her time as state prosecutor was coming to an end and she was
campaigning for the senate. By the time Chauvin’s case finally made it
to a grand jury, she had relinquished her role.
SCMP | The novel coronavirus uses the same strategy to evade attack from the human immune system as HIV, according to a new study by Chinese scientists.
Both
viruses remove marker molecules on the surface of an infected cell that
are used by the immune system to identify invaders, the researchers
said in a non-peer reviewed paper posted on preprint website bioRxiv.org
on Sunday. They warned that this commonality could mean Sars-CoV-2, the
clinical name for the virus, could be around for some time, like HIV.
Virologist
Zhang Hui and a team from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou also said
their discovery added weight to clinical observations that the
coronavirus was showing “some characteristics of viruses causing chronic
infection”.
Their
research involved collecting killer T cells from five patients who had
recently recovered from Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. Those
immune cells are generated by people after they are infected with
Sars-CoV-2 – their job is to find and destroy the virus.
But
the killer T cells used in the study were not effective at eliminating
the virus in infected cells. When the scientists took a closer look they
found that a molecule known as major histocompatibility complex, or
MHC, was missing.
The
molecule is an identification tag usually present in the membrane of a
healthy cell, or in sick cells infected by other coronaviruses such as
severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars. It changes with infections,
alerting the immune system whether a cell is healthy or infected by a
virus.
HIV uses the same strategy – MHC molecules are also absent in cells infected with that virus.
“In contrast, Sars does not make use of this function,” Zhang said.
biorxiv | SARS-CoV-2 infection have caused global pandemic and claimed over 5,000,000 tolls1–4.
Although the genetic sequences of their etiologic viruses are of high
homology, the clinical and pathological characteristics of COVID-19
significantly differ from SARS5,6. Especially, it seems that SARS-CoV-2 undergoes vast replication in vivo without being effectively monitored by anti-viral immunity7.
Here, we show that the viral protein encoded from open reading frame 8
(ORF8) of SARS-CoV-2, which shares the least homology with SARS-CoV
among all the viral proteins, can directly interact with MHC-I molecules
and significantly down-regulates their surface expression on various
cell types. In contrast, ORF8a and ORF8b of SARS-CoV do not exert this
function. In the ORF8-expressing cells, MHC-I molecules are selectively
target for lysosomal degradation by an autophagy-dependent mechanism. As
a result, CTLs inefficiently eliminate the ORF8-expressing cells. Our
results demonstrate that ORF8 protein disrupts antigen presentation and
reduces the recognition and the elimination of virus-infected cells by
CTLs8.
Therefore, we suggest that the inhibition of ORF8 function could be a
strategy to improve the special immune surveillance and accelerate the
eradication of SARS-CoV-2 in vivo.
massprivatei | Community platform Nextdoor is going to great lengths to become the go-to platform to snitch on your neighbors.
According to a CityLabarticle, Nextdoor is showering law enforcement with all-expenses paid vacations to their headquarters in San Francisco, California all in an effort to gain law enforcement acceptance and put police on Public Agency Advisory Councils.
"Charles Husted, the chief of police in Sedona, Arizona, couldn’t
contain his excitement. He had just been accepted into the Public
Agencies Advisory Council for Nextdoor, the neighborhood social
networking app."
At a time when most Americans are concerned with just surviving the
COVID-19 pandemic, Nextdoor views it as an opportunity to influence law
enforcement and local politics.
"As part of the chosen group, he would be flown to San Francisco on
President’s Day, along with seven other community engagement staffers
from police departments and city offices across the country. Over two
days, they’d meet at Nextdoor’s headquarters to discuss the social
network’s public agency strategy. Together, the plan was, they’d stay
at the Hilton Union Square, eat and drink at Cultivar, share a tour of
Chinatown, and receive matching Uniqlo jackets. All costs — a projected
$16,900 for the group, according to a schedule sent to participants —
were covered by Nextdoor."
Exactly what Nextdoor includes in their law enforcement paid vacations
is protected by a corporate non-disclosure agreement. But you can be
sure it isn't just a trip to their headquarters.
Nextdoor's excuse for influencing law enforcement and advisory councils
is to allegedly "help [public agency] partners to share their expertise
and experiences with each other and our product development team."
You should never forget the political orientation of the Amy Coopers and Jean Quans of this world. Former director Cooper will be looking for a dance gig at a local backwoods pole, her net worth having plummeted into the deep two piece and a biscuit range, while former Mayor Quan will be opening a marijuana dispensary to prey upon and enlarge the suffering of supposed constituents in San Francisco.
columbusfreepress | Neighborhoods are small communities. Communities have bonds. They
also have rivalries. They also have gossip and intrigue, albeit on a
petty scale. Through the efforts of Mayor Jean Quan and NextDoor.com,
the intelligence community and the Oakland Police Department (OPD) are
now privy to these tiny pieces of personal information and the larger
patters they reveal. Under the auspices of community building and public
safety, the public's participation is can now be freely enlisted in the
creation of a database of that information.
Through the new
partnership, the OPD and the CIA now know what Oakland residents had for
breakfast, who their children have a playdate with, and if their dog
wanders around the block. NextDoor.com is Oakland's social media
surveillance experiment.
Time will tell what the results of that
experiment will be. A metropolitan police department can easily fail at
social media as the New York Police Department recently showed with
their social media debacle with the #myNYPD twitter campaign.
At
its core, San Francisco-based Nextdoor.com is a social networking site
for neighborhoods. The model pairs a social media neighborhood community
center, with law enforcement and existing neighborhood watch programs.
Tailored to individual neighborhoods, it allows people to virtually post
lost pet notices, rate babysitters, share news and become more in touch
with their immediate real world lives. Nextdoor as a company has a
focus on crime, safety and virtual block watches within the neighborhood
setting – a crossover between a Myspace of neighborhood associations
and a Facebook for George Zimmerman groupies.
The partnership
comes on the heels of the defeat of the Quan administration’s proposal
to create the Domain Awareness Center intended to provide OPD with a
city-wide system of real time intelligence and comprehensive city wide
surveillance. That project, which draws on a grant for domestic port
security, was scaled back by Oakland City Council after public outcry
and was limited to the port of Oakland.
Nadia Kayyali, an activist
with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, expressed concerns about
Nextdoor having potential links to the scaled back Domain Awareness
Center and the program’s implications for racial profiling.
At a press event featuring Mayor Jean Quan on April 24 this year, Nextdoor announced their new partnership with OPD.
The
OPD's part of the Nextdoor partnership is not just public relations or
community policing. As participants in the program, they take an active
role in promoting the site and building the social network. On a fully
integrated level, Nextdoor has created a platform that combined social
media outreach with intelligence gathering.
Oakland is not the
first major city to form a partnership with Nextdoor.com. Austin,
Houston and Dallas, Texas all preceded it. The company is well-funded,
with a string of Menlo Park venture capital firms lined up behind hopes
of its success.
According to NextDoor.com's press statements, they
are backed by Google Ventures, Bezos Expedition, Allen and Company,
Greylock Capital Partners, and Benchmark Capital Partners. All of these
firms have ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. None of these ties
are secret. Nearly all are published openly by the companies themselves.
As a group, these investment companies put their venture capital into
tech companies and technologies that the intelligence community wishes
to succeed. They profit by doing so.
dr.brian.keating | In part one of our extensive conversation, we cover his Geometric Unity theory and the value of scientific theories in general.
As
a mathematician and an economist, Eric is uniquely suited to
understanding how ideas have contributed to human civilization — and
what we’re losing out on when academia throttles them. His perspective
that, “[Professors] need the freedom of a billionaire without the wealth
of one,” is a spin on something Ralph Gomory, president of the Alfred
P. Sloan Foundation, told him:
“The
bargain was always that you weren’t going to get super rich as a
professor, but you would have the freedom that came from your job. And
that’s how we got great people. When we lost freedom, we stopped being
able to compete effectively for the top people.”
Having
Eric on the show challenged me to consider my approach to the
interview. Though an expert in experimental physics, it is beneficial to
be reminded about the contributions of theoretical study. His allegory
that the tailor who sews on the last button of a coat shouldn’t get all
the credit is powerful. Think of the creative spark, the person who
sketches, then finds practical materials, the engineers who bring
instruments into the equation, and all the other pieces of the puzzle.
In
this interview, Eric says, “The scientific method is actually the radio
edit of great science” and that is really striking. It is important to
remember that the unedited version exists, even if it doesn’t make it
through all the noise very often.
dr.brian.keating | On the philosophical front, we compared Godel to Popper and discussed
computational irreducibly which arose from Stephen’s interest in Godel
and Alan Turing’s work.
“Actually,
there’s even more than that. If the microscopic updatings of the
underlying network end up being random enough, then it turns out that if
the network succeeds in corresponding in the limit to a finite
dimensional space, then this space must satisfy Einstein’s Equations of
General Relativity. It’s again a little like what happens with fluids.
If the microscopic interactions between molecules are random enough, but
satisfy number and momentum conservation, then it follows that the
overall continuum fluid must satisfy the standard Navier–Stokes
equations. But now we’re deriving something like that for the universe:
we’re saying that these networks with almost nothing “built in” somehow
generate behavior that corresponds to gravitation in physics. This is
all spelled out in the NEW KIND OF SCIENCE
book. And many physicists have certainly read that part of the book.
But somehow every time I actually describe this (as I did a few days
ago), there’s a certain amazement. Special and General Relativity are
things that physicists normally assume are built into theories right
from the beginning, almost as axioms (or at least, in the case of string
theory, as consistency conditions). The idea that they could emerge
from something more fundamental is pretty alien. The alien feeling
doesn’t stop there. Another thing that seems alien is the idea that our
whole universe and its complete history could be generated just by
starting with some particular small network, then applying definite
rules. For the past 75+ years, quantum mechanics has been the pride of
physics, and it seems to suggest that this kind of deterministic
thinking just can’t be correct. It’s a slightly long story (often still
misunderstood by physicists), but between the arbitrariness of updating
orders that produce a given causal network, and the fact that in a
network one doesn’t just have something like local 3D space, it looks as
if one automatically starts to get a lot of the core phenomena of
quantum mechanics — even from what’s in effect a deterministic
underlying model. OK, but what is the rule for our universe? I don’t
know yet. Searching for it isn’t easy. One tries a sequence of different
possibilities. Then one runs each one. Then the question is: has one
found our universe?”
My question: that was then, what do you think now?
On the implications of finding a simple rule that matches existing laws of physics:
“I
certainly think it’ll be an interesting — almost metaphysical — moment
if we finally have a simple rule which we can tell is our universe. And
we’ll be able to know that our particular universe is number
such-and-such in the enumeration of all possible universes. It’s a sort
of Copernican moment: we’ll get to know just how special or not our
universe is. Something I wonder is just how to think about whatever the
answer turns out to be. It somehow reminds me of situations from earlier
in the history of science. Newton figured out about motion of the
planets, but couldn’t imagine anything but a supernatural being first
setting them in motion. Darwin figured out about biological evolution,
but couldn’t imagine how the first living cell came to be. We may have
the rule for the universe, but it’s something quite different to
understand why it’s that rule and not another. Universe hunting is a
very technology-intensive business. Over the years, I’ve gradually been
building up the technology I think is needed — and quite a bit of it is
showing up in strange corners of Mathematica. But I think it’s going to
be a while longer before there are more results. And before we can put
“Our Universe” as a Demonstration in the Wolfram Demonstrations Project.
And before we can take our new ParticleData computable data collection
and derive every number in it. But universe hunting is a good hobby.”
It’s
awfully easy to fall into implicitly assuming a lot of human context.
Pioneer 10 — the human artifact that’s gone further into interstellar
space than any other (currently about 11 billion miles, which is about
0.05% of the distance to α Centauri) — provides one of my favorite
examples. There’s a plaque on that spacecraft that includes a
representation of the wavelength of the 21-centimeter spectral line of
hydrogen. Now the most obvious way to represent that would probably just
be a line 21 cm long. But back in 1972 Carl Sagan and others decided to
do something “more scientific”, and instead made a schematic diagram of
the quantum mechanical process leading to the spectral line. The
problem is that this diagram relies on conventions from human textbooks —
like using arrows to represent quantum spins — that really have nothing
to do with the underlying concepts and are incredibly specific to the
details of how science happened to develop for us humans.”
From
the audience he responded to some questions including “what does he
believe a scientific theory should be?” and “Does mathematical beauty
matter at all, or is it just falsifiability?”
arvix |Stephen Wolfram A class of models intended to be as minimal and structureless as possible is
introduced. Even in cases with simple rules, rich and complex behavior is found
to emerge, and striking correspondences to some important core known features
of fundamental physics are seen, suggesting the possibility that the models may
provide a new approach to finding a fundamental theory of physics.
Subjects:
Discrete Mathematics (cs.DM); General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc); High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th); Mathematical Physics (math-ph)
politico | Tension that began with governors versus the federal government
has now trickled down, pitting officials within their own states
against each other in ways that have direct implications for the fight
against the virus and have already landed in the courts.
Future disputes could complicate plans to respond to a resurgence, tie
up urgent policy issues in legal wrangling and even risk lives.
With cases increasing in some places and falling in others — and with
a second wave predicted in the fall — the new pandemic battlegrounds
will be increasingly localized.
“Cities can't wait for the federal and state government for
guidance,” said Charleston Mayor Amy Shuler Goodwin, who has continued
to clash with West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, including last week over
his decision to add tanning beds to the list of essential businesses.
“There is not one single mayor that doesn't want all the lights back on
and all the doors back open, but we need to be really careful about
doing that.”
Experts say a one-size-fits-all approach for reopening is
not an option — not when the number of new daily cases is changing at
vastly different rates from city to city and state to state. Across many
states that have started to reopen, governors have indeed prescribed
economic restart plans based on regional metrics, not statewide figures.
As that continues — and if the virus resurges — there could be even
more openings for such disagreements.
“We have to be making decisions that are hyper local. This is not one
big epidemic, it’s multiple, small epidemics,“ said Caroline Buckee, an
epidemiologist at Harvard University, during a Brookings Institution
discussion on reopening plans. “And the decisions we make have to
reflect the inequalities in the location in question and how reopening
is going to impact the relationships between different neighborhoods.”
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has faced backlash from coastal mayors over cracking down on beach use, and the Democratic governor has allowed more than 20 of the state's 58 counties to move faster than his original plan in the face of increasing pressure — and lawsuits — from those anxious to reopen.
Things escalated in Texas last week after Attorney General Ken Paxton sent letters to counties that include metropolitan hubs Dallas, Austin and San Antonio,
chastising them for stricter local requirements on masks and mass
gatherings that conflict with state efforts to loosen restrictions.
“Insofar as your order conflicts with the governor’s order, it is unenforceable,”
detroitnews | “It’s just heartbreaking,” said Maehr, executive director of the Greater
Chicago Food Depository. “They’re finding themselves in a set of
circumstances where they have no income and they also have no food, and
it happened in an instant.”
The number of people seeking help from her organization and affiliated
food pantries has surged 60% since the start of the coronavirus
pandemic, which has shut down the nation’s economy and thrown tens of
millions of people out of work. Across the country, worries about having
enough to eat are adding to the anxiety of millions of people,
according to a survey that found 37% of unemployed Americans ran out of
food in the past month and 46% said they worried about running out.
Even those who are working often struggle. Two in 10
working adults said that in the past 30 days, they ran out of food
before they could earn enough money to buy more. One-quarter worried
that would happen.
Those results come from the
second wave of the COVID Impact Survey, conducted by NORC at the
University of Chicago for the Data Foundation. The survey aims to
provide an ongoing assessment of the nation’s mental, physical and
financial health during the pandemic.
There is no parallel in U.S. history for the
suddenness or severity of the economic collapse, which has cost more
than 36 million jobs since the virus struck. The nationwide unemployment
rate was 14.7% in April, the highest since the Great Depression. While
many Americans believe they will be working in the coming months,
unemployed Americans – those most likely to report running out of food –
aren’t as optimistic.
Overall, those who are still
working are highly confident they will have a job in one month and in
three months, with more than 8 in 10 saying it’s very likely. But among
those who aren’t working because they are temporarily laid off,
providing care during the pandemic or looking for work, just 28% say it
is highly likely that they will be employed in 30 days and 46% say it’s
highly likely they’ll be working in three months. Roughly another
quarter say it’s somewhat likely in 30 days and 90 days.
The
likelihood of unemployed people returning to work depends heavily on
whether states can restart their economies without creating new surges
in COVID-19 infections, said Gabriel Ehrlich, an economic forecaster at
the University of Michigan. He said most layoffs are expected to be
temporary. But he worries that many small businesses will fail while
fewer new ones take their place, and that state and local governments
won’t get federal help to avoid furloughs.
HBR | For those who believe that a vaccine for Covid-19 will end or largely
contain this pandemic or who hope that new drugs will be discovered to
combat its effects, there is plenty cause for concern. Instead of
working together to craft and implement a global strategy, a growing
number of countries are taking a “my nation first” approach to
developing and distributing potential vaccines or other pharmaceutical
treatments.
This “vaccine nationalism” is not only morally reprehensible, it is
the wrong way to reduce transmission globally. And global transmission
matters: If countries with a large number of cases lag in obtaining the
vaccine and other medicines, the disease will continue to disrupt global supply chains and, as a result, economies around the world.
In the midst of this global pandemic, we must leverage our global
governance bodies to allocate, distribute, and verify the delivery of
the Covid 19 vaccine. We need the science — not politics — to inform the
global strategy.
Experts in epidemiology, virology, and the social sciences — not
politicians — should take the lead in devising and implementing
science-based strategies to reduce the risks that Covid-19 poses to the
most vulnerable across the globe and to reduce transmission of this
novel virus for all of us. To avoid ineffective nationalistic responses,
we need a centralized, trusted governance system to ensure the
appropriate flow of capital, information, and supplies.
off-guardian | A report published by the European Commission in late
2019 reveals that the EU has been looking to increase the scope and
power of vaccination programmes since well before the current
“pandemic”.
The endpoint of the Roadmap is, among many other things, to introduce a “common vaccination card/passport” for all EU citizens.
This proposal will be appearing before the commission in 2022, with a
“feasibility study” set to run from 2019 through 2021 (meaning, as of
now, it’s about halfway through).
To underline the point: The “vaccination roadmap” is not an
improvised response to the Covid19 pandemic, but rather an ongoing plan
with roots going back to 2018, when the EU released a survey of the
public’s attitude toward vaccines titled “2018 State of Vaccine Confidence”
In the 3rd quarter of 2019 these reports were all
combined into the latest version of the the “Vaccination Roadmap”, a
long-term policy plan to spread vaccine “awareness and understanding”
whilst counteracting “vaccine myths” and combatting “vaccine hesitancy”.
You can read the entire report here, but below are some of the more concerning highlights [emphasis throughout is ours]:
Guardian | In front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate a politically incongruous crowd
of protesters gathered on Saturday. They wore flowers in their hair,
hazmat suits emblazoned with the letter Q, badges displaying the old
German imperial flag or T-shirts reading “Gates, My Ass” – a reference
to the US software billionaire Bill Gates.
Around the globe, millions are counting the days until a Covid-19 vaccine is discovered. These people, however, were protesting for the right not to be inoculated – and they weren’t the only ones.
For the ninth week running, thousands gathered in European cities to
vent their anger at social distancing restrictions they believe to be a
draconian ploy to suspend basic civil rights and pave the way for
“enforced vaccinations” that will do more harm than the Covid-19 virus
itself.
Walking towards the focal point of the protests down the Straße des
17. Juni boulevard, one woman said she believed the Covid-19 pandemic to
be a hoax thought up by the pharmaceutical industry.
“I’d never let myself be vaccinated,” said the woman, who would give
her name only as Riot Granny. “I didn’t get a jab for the flu either,
and I am still alive.”
The alliance of anti-vaxxers, neo-Nazi rabble-rousers and esoteric
hippies, which has in recent weeks been filling town squares in cities
such as Berlin, Vienna and Zurich is starting to trouble governments as
they map out scenarios for re-booting their economies and tackling the
coronavirus long term.
Even before an effective vaccine against Covid-19 has been developed,
national leaders face a dilemma: should they aim to immunise as large a
part of the population as possible as quickly as possible, or does
compulsory vaccination risk boosting a street movement already prone to
conspiracy theories about “big pharma” and its government’s
authoritarian tendencies?
benjaminstudebaker | All around us, the quarantine is beginning to die. In the United States,
the Southern states are slowly abandoning it and many Midwestern states
are planning to follow. But it’s not just Republicans. The European
states are bailing too. If you ask Democrats why states are beginning to
defect, they will tell you it comes down to greed and stupidity.
They’ll tell you the rich Republicans are greedy and the poor
Republicans are stupid. But this policy was never a good fit for either
the American or European political systems. To work, it needed a lot of
economic support from regional authorities, and it never got that
support.
For most of the last century, the social pact in America has been
pretty simple. If you’re willing to work, you get healthcare and
housing. If you’re not willing to work, you lose both. If there are no
jobs available, the government promises to create them, and to take care
of your healthcare and housing in the interim. Full employment protects
against precarity. The quarantine violates this pact by deliberately
annihilating millions of jobs. It intentionally sets about destroying
full employment.
If we’re to end full employment, there needs to be an alternative way
to provide healthcare and housing. These things will have to be
guaranteed to us regardless of employment status. That’s really
expensive. Individual US states don’t have the tax revenue to pay for
that. The European Union’s fiscal rules would ordinarily prohibit that
kind of spending. To get it, we’d need action from the federal
government and from the EU.
But nobody consulted political economists. Public health officials
conceived of the quarantine policy in a deeply naive way. For them, the
only goal was to save lives. They pursued that goal at the expense of
the social pact, with no plan to replace it. For weeks, they dismissed
any discussion of the economy as indicative of greed or stupidity,
ignoring the immense cost of their policy and the political consequences
of the cost. Any attempt to introduce complexity into the public
discussion was equated with denying the threat of the virus. Because of
this, the quarantine is going to end, and when it ends the virus will
take off again. Through their absolutism, the advocates of the
quarantine have guaranteed the very result they sought to avoid.
gilad.online | One may wonder what drives this new alliance that divides nearly every Western society? The left’s betrayal is hardly a surprise, yet, the crucial question is why, and out of the blue, did those who had been so successful in locating their filthy hands in our pockets go along with the current destruction of the economy? Surely, suicidal they aren’t.
It occurs to me that what we may be seeing is a controlled demolition all over again. This time it isn’t a building in NYC. It isn’t the destruction of a single industry or even a single class as we have seen before. This time, our understanding of Being as a productive and meaningful adventure is embattled. As things stand, our entire sense of livelihood is at risk.
It doesn’t take a financial expert to realise that in the last few years the world economy in general and western economies in particular have become a fat bubble ready to burst. When economic bubbles burst the outcome is unexpected even though often the culprit or trigger for the crash can be identified. What is unique in the current controlled demolition is the willingness of our compromised political class, the media and in particular Left/Progressive networks to participate in the destruction.
The alliance is wide and inclusive. The WHO, greatly funded by Bill Gates, sets the measures by which we are locked down, the Left and the Progressives fuel the apocalyptic phantasies to keep us hiding in our global attics, Dershowitz tries to rewrite the constitution , big Pharma’s agenda shapes our future and we also hear that Moderna and its leading Israeli doctor is ready to “fix” our genes. Meanwhile we learn that our governments are gearing up to stick a needle in our arms. Throughout this time, the Dow Jones has continued to rise. Maybe in this final stage of capitalism, we the people aren’t needed even as consumers. We can be left to rot at home, our governments seemingly willing to fund this new form of detention.
unz |The previous shift of such magnitude occurred in late 18th
century; it is called the Industrial Revolution. Then the factory
owners had begun to replace their skilled labour with inexpensive
machines, and the workers were losing their jobs, livelihoods and
self-esteem. In 1811, the workers formed the Luddite movement. The
Luddites would break into factories and smash textile machines. It
lasted until 1816, when the movement ran out of steam. The workers were
defeated, (a lot of them escaped to America), and the British
bourgeoisie prospered. It took many years until the workers regained
some of their previous positions in society, mainly due to the threat of
Communist revolution.
Now
we are coming to the new Digital Revolution, with workers being replaced
by smart computers and an AI future. Millions of office workers already
function as a human interface to the computer. You may have noticed
this as you talk with them: they are trained to avoid making decisions;
they say sentences that were scripted for them, and the decisions are
made by the computer that was programmed to do their master’s will. As
lockdown had forced millions to communicate with computers directly, a
lot of workers became superfluous.
The
process of shedding millions of workers in the existing economic system
is likely to be painful for the unemployed. The virus-blamed lockdown
and digital control allows the owners of the digital companies to carry
out the revolution with minimal risks for them. What would need an army
and police involvement against riotous unemployed workers, can be
achieved with greater ease under threat of the pandemic. The economy
will be modernized and made more efficient. Alas, for us this script
presages the fate of highly qualified weavers in 18th century England, even if we shall avoid the total AI takeover Terminator-style.
Probably
the scariest piece of news is not about the numbers of “infected”. It
is a meaningless word, for there are persistent carriers who do not
succumb to disease; the vast majority of the “infected” are
asymptomatic, meaning they aren’t sick and aren’t infectious; the number
of “infected” is in direct proportion to the number of tests; the tests
are dubious at best, and none is verified by the methods accepted in
pre-corona medicine, while the methodology approved and enforced by the
WHO can’t be described as scientific. It is not about deaths, for we do
not experience more deaths than in 2018. Moreover, in many countries,
notably in France and in Norway there are 30% fewer deaths in certain
weeks of April and May in this year than in the last year.
The scariest piece of news is that Zoom is worth more than the seven biggest airlines.
These airlines with their accumulated labour (millions of working
hours, hundreds of thousands of employees, highly trained pilots, masses
of sophisticated equipment) just can’t be worth as much as a job done
in a month by a few programmers and which can be done anew in a month.
Money and stock market prices are useful tools if they measure human
efforts; they do not that anymore. What began with bankers earning more
money in a day than a hundred qualified workers and engineers in their
lifetime, ended with the hi-tech lords earning more than a million
workers in their lifetime. It means that Money had banked on the Digital
Economy, a Union made in Hell, while the real economy came up for
grabs. Money decided that we won’t fly anymore. They, the new masters,
will fly in their private jets; the era of mass access is over. You will
get satisfied with Zoom and PornHub, instead of the real thing.
Added
to this the negative oil future price and the emission centres issuing
more and more money, trying to smother the fire with gasoline, and you
will get a picture of the coming world. There is probably no place for
you and me in this world.
economicprism | Again, this is a nasty virus. We don’t discount how contagious it
is…or its potential to cause death to the elderly and those with
preexisting health conditions. But, by all honest accounts, the
apocalyptic prophecies have not come true.
The point is the fear of the plague is proving to be much more
destructive than the actual plague. There are the immediate economic
ramifications of the lockdown orders. There are also the psychological
impacts from the loss of basic rights, freedoms, and liberty.
The American psyche, like the American economy, will not quickly
recover as lockdown orders are lifted. Something sinister has
happened. Though it has happened before.
Van Bryan, writing at Classical Wisdom, recently brought the following shrewd insight of Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, to our attention. From book IX of his Meditations…
“An infected mind is a far more dangerous pestilence than any
plague. One only threatens your life. The other destroys your
character.”
There’s mounting evidence the American character is being destroyed
by an infected mind. While some Americans have been rightly irate by
the government’s lockdown orders, there are others that love it. They
love forced hunkering. Moreover, they love the prospect of free money.
Nina rides again, sorta'
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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SeeNew
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