venturebeat | I’ve been enjoying the peek into our metaverse future that Amazon Prime Video is delivering each week with airings of The Peripheral streaming show.
As I noted when the series debuted, it’s an example of how the world is science fiction is becoming more science and less fiction.
And the recent sixth episode of the show feature the addition of
Alexandra Billings, a trans actress who plays the inspector Ainsley
Lowbeer in the show.
The show is Prime Video’s top show, and, to paraphrase the first line from Herman Narula’s book Virtual Society,
I believe that one day it will be watched by a person without a body.
That’s because The Peripheral depicts what it’s like to move between
different worlds and to inhabit the bodies of others.
And for a trans actress like Billings, this brings to mind the notion
that your physical body may not matter in a future where digital and
physical seamlessly interact. Billings has been a trailblazer for LGBTQ+
representation, and she recently made history when she starred on
Broadway as Madam Morrible in Wicked, the first time a trans actress has
portrayed a traditionally cis female role.
I talked to her about the significance of the role in The Peripheral,
where she plays a trans person in the future. The show is based on a
novel by William Gibson, who coined the term cyberspace, and it was produced by Westworld
creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan. It’s a complicated story that
moves around in time and explores whether the digital world is real or
not. And the show is different from the book, as it uses Gibson’s story
as a jumping off point for ideas about our future. And that gives
Billings some interesting leeway to play Lowbeer as a trans person in
the show.
Lowbeer is a character who polices the border between a physical
reality and the virtual world. And she is like a messenger from the
future for us. And she can teach us how to think about topics like
transhumanism. Lowbeer’s character is pretty unique, and I think anyone thinking about the metaverse should consider watching The Peripheral.
MoA | The Biden administration is spewing ridiculous fear mongering propaganda:
Wow. Biden at a Dem fundraiser tonight: “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis.” He says Putin is “not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical,” nuclear or biological weapons because his military is underperforming.
Fact is that Putin has not talked about the "potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons." Not. At. All.
On September 21 Putin announced a partial mobilization of reservists. In his TV speech he mentioned nuclear weapons only with regards to 'Western' threats of using them.
Also for the record: Russia has signed and ratified the Biological
Weapons Convention which prohibits the development, production,
acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use of biological weapons. Russia
has also signed and ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention. In
November 2017 it destroyed
its last (Soviet) chemical weapons as mandated by the convention. It is
the U.S. that still has not destroyed its chemicial weapons.
All the war mongering talk and reports about Russia's alleged threat of
nuclear weapon use in Ukraine is totally unfounded. That 'western'mediasuddenlyengageinit shows that it is part of a well directed propaganda campaign.
RT | Western “half-wits” from “stupid think tanks” are
leading their countries down the road of nuclear armageddon with their
hybrid war against Moscow, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev
wrote on his Telegram channel on Tuesday. Endlessly funneling weapons
and support to Ukraine while pretending not to be directly involved in
the conflict will not work, added the deputy chair of the Russian
Security Council.
The “security guarantees” proposal unveiled by Kiev on Tuesday was “really a prologue to the Third World War,”said Medvedev, calling it a “hysterical appeal” to Western countries engaged in a proxy war against Russia.
If the West continues its “unrestrained pumping of the Kiev regime with the most dangerous types of weapons,” Russia’s military campaign will move to the next level, where “visible boundaries and potential predictability of actions by the parties to the conflict” will be erased and the conflict will take on a life of its own, as wars always do, Medvedev argued.
“And then the Western nations will not be able to sit in their
clean homes, laughing at how they carefully weaken Russia by proxy.
Everything will be on fire around them. Their people will harvest their
grief in full. The land will be on fire and the concrete will melt,” Medvedev wrote, before citing a Bible verse from Revelations 9:18.
“Yet
still the narrow-minded politicians and their stupid think tanks,
thoughtfully twirling a glass of wine in their hands, talk about how
they can deal with us without entering into a direct war. Dull idiots
with a classical education,” Medvedev wrote.
His comments were prompted by Kiev’s publication of a “security treaty”
proposal, developed under the tutelage of former NATO secretary-general
Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The draft envisions the US and its allies
guaranteeing Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders with weapons, ammunition,
financial assistance and training, as well as committing to maintain
sanctions against Russia for as long as Kiev wants, and handing over any
confiscated Russian property to Ukraine.
FT | “We do not like to get left behind when it comes to new technology,” she said.
The promise of cryptocurrencies as a wealth builder has been supercharged by celebrity endorsements, sponsorships and advertising.
Prominent black Americans including the musicians Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg, the boxer Floyd Mayweather, the actor Jamie Foxx and the film-maker Spike Lee have promoted crypto to their communities.
Lee appeared in commercials for crypto ATM operator Coin Cloud last year, saying that “old money is not going to pick us up; it pushes us down” and “systematically oppresses”, whereas digital assets are “positive, inclusive”.
Last month, Jay-Z announced a partnership with former Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey to launch a “Bitcoin Academy” literacy programme in the Brooklyn public housing complex where he grew up.
Such celebrity endorsers have faced heavy criticism for getting paid to sell high-risk investments to people who may not have the resources to weather crypto’s volatility.
“Ninety-eight per cent of these cryptocurrencies were not designed to do anything other than extract money from people’s bank accounts,” said Najah Roberts, a former financial adviser and the founder of cryptocurrency education centre Crypto Blockchain Plug.
“This is not ‘get rich quick’,’’ Roberts added. “There are massive targeting ads that are targeting our community.”
Bellanton said it is not adverts but the prospect of financial freedom, a lack of the investment minimums common for mutual funds, and a feeling that the blockchain distributed ledger is more transparent than big banks that draws in first-time investors.
“The reason that minorities at a higher rate than others are adopting crypto is precisely because if you’re not already rich, it’s way cheaper to send [USD Coin, a stablecoin asset] than to send a wire,” said Brian Brooks, chief executive of blockchain company Bitfury, at the Aspen Ideas Festival last month. “It’s just cheaper.
The entire system is cheaper and faster. It doesn’t have all these entry barriers where you can only get it if you’re already rich.”
Despite the risk of losses, many black investors are staying invested in the market. Dennis McKinley, 41, has been buying the dip against the advice of his financial adviser. He said his crypto coins now constitute roughly 30 per cent of his overall portfolio, held alongside equities.
“Young black America is just now getting to a point where we have the amount of freedom to have the opportunity to invest in alternative strategies besides just real estate,” said McKinley, a small-business owner in Atlanta. “I think that it’s important to learn and get out there.”
gilbertdoctorow | As the USA and Europe have each day piled on new sanctions against
Russia, the awareness of a ‘total war’ situation has penetrated the
consciousness of Russia’s leadership and the tone of public discourse
about the war has hardened noticeably in recent days. Talk shows which I
follow regularly have changed course yet again from what I reported a
week ago. On the Vladimir Solovyov evening programs, the bearer of grim
expectations about war prospects, Mosfilm general director Karen
Shakhnazarov, has disappeared, his place taken by others who take the
conversation in a wholly different direction, including fierce
denunciations of unpatriotic personalities within Russia. Still other
newcomers are presenting their own half-baked speculations on how the
entire Russian economy and society has to be reorganized to respond to
the new realities of a total permanent break with the West. While the
Putin government remains resolutely pro-business and
pro-entrepreneurship, though with a heavy dose of state direction of the
economy, the new panelists in talk shows denounce free markets as just
one more manifestation of the West’s hijacking in the 1990s Russia’s
domestic political economy. Still other panelists on the Russian talk
shows are talking about purging the government and all public
institutions of Liberals, who are synonymous with Fifth Column traitors
and have no place in Russian society under conditions of a war for the
country’s survival.
As BBC and other Western journalists have remarked, Vladimir Putin
addressed the issue of the Fifth Column in a televised speech yesterday
that was otherwise dedicated to the increases in pensions and social
benefits that he just announced to counteract negative results of the
newly imposed Western sanctions. In the BBC interpretation, the scum and
traitors denounced by Putin are the oligarchs. These are the people who
live there, meaning in the West, either physically or just mentally,
while earning their money in Russia.
However, this identification with the oligarchs only shows how little
Western news organizations, Western think tanks and Western government
leaders know about Russia and about what makes it tick. No, oligarchs
were not in the sights of Vladimir Putin yesterday: it was the multitude
of little traitors to the country and its people who have in recent
weeks come out of the woodwork and taken flight in an attempt to avoid
having to publicly take sides in the conflict and so lose their fortunes
and/or their social standing.
The broad Russian public has been utterly shocked at the departure of
a good many stars in the entertainment industry, the kind of folks who
in the West are images on the covers of People magazine and of
the yellow press more generally. Veteran singer Alla Pugacheva and her
husband Galkin have been darlings of Russian television and music halls
across the country for decades. They are known to have quietly flown to
Israel, where so many of their friends from show business and from high
society have already found refuge earlier still. Then there is one of
the two leading television news presenters, Sergey Briullov, host of The
News of the Week on Saturday nights. Sergey carries a British as well
as Russian passport; his family is based in their home in England and
his children study there. About a week ago, Briullov disappeared from
Russia and eventually surfaced in Brazil, where he says he is doing a
film project about the Brazilian attitude to the Ukraine-Russia War. No
one is fooled for a moment about the fact that Briullov is just one
more traitor to his homeland, and comments on the Russian portals bear
this out daily.
No, Messrs BBC News, it is not oligarchs whose behavior if not their
very existence has embittered the middle and lower class Russians during
the current war. Those middle and lower classes constitute the 70% of
the population which backs Putin through thick and thin. It is the
smaller fish of Fifth Column populations who exist in much greater
numbers: as, for example, Russian lawyers who have homes near the
Champs Elysees and split their time between France and their law offices
in Moscow, whence the money from their servicing oligarchs comes. Then
there is the intelligentsia, the university dons, the occupants of often
important offices in government and private public institutions who
loathed Putin from his first election to the presidency in 2000 and have
never relented. Their contempt for the broad Russian public, which they
see as the great unwashed, as a herd of animals, was never well hidden,
and this contempt is now being reciprocated on Russian state television
and on the internet.
All of these fissures in Russian society are being deepened and
discussed on Russian media as a result of the ongoing war for survival.
If Russia is becoming a much less free society, that is a direct result
of Western pressure. But there is nothing new under the sun. This was
precisely one of the key arguments in favor of détente as opposed to
confrontation during the 1990s.
veteranstoday | I have often reported that the U.S., more specifically the Pentagon,
operates several bioweapons labs in Ukraine. The last time I reported on
this was on January 27. The U.S. has always refused international
inspections of its labs, so no one knows what they are researching in
these labs. But we can assume that Russian special forces will take a
closer look at these labs in the coming days.
And this seems to be exactly a can of worms. A tweet was published on
Twitter about this and the user was immediately blocked. I won’t go
into the content of the tweet, which can still be found in an Internet
archive. If you are interested, you can view it here [1].
My point is that Twitter was so quick to delete a tweet and its
author merely because he pointed out that there are U.S. bioweapons labs
in Ukraine and that it looks like their capture is one of the important
targets of the Russian military operation.
The US Army regularly produces deadly viruses, bacteria, and toxins
in direct violation of the UN Convention on the prohibition of
Biological Weapons. Hundreds of thousands of unwitting people are
systematically exposed to dangerous pathogens and other incurable
diseases.
Biowarfare scientists using diplomatic cover test man-made viruses at
Pentagon bio laboratories in 25 countries across the world. These US
bio-laboratories are funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency
(DTRA) under a $ 2.1 billion military program–
Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP) and are located in
former Soviet Union countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, the Middle
East, South East Asia, and Africa.
Biowarfare scientists under diplomatic cover
Among the set of bilateral agreements between the US and Ukraine is
the establishment of the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine (STCU)
– an International organization funded mainly by the US government
which has been accorded diplomatic status.
The STCU officially supports
projects of scientists previously involved in the Soviet biological
weapons program. Over the past 20 years the STCU has invested over $285 million in
funding and managing some 1,850 projects of scientists who previously
worked on the development of weapons of mass destruction.
The US personnel in Ukraine work under diplomatic cover.
364 Ukrainians died from Swine Flu
One of the Pentagon laboratories is located in Kharkiv, where in
January 2016 at least 20 Ukrainian soldiers died from Flu-like virus in
just two days with 200 more being hospitalized. The Ukrainian government
did not report on the dead Ukrainian soldiers in Kharkiv.
As of March 2016, 364 deaths have been reported across Ukraine (81.3 %
caused by Swine Flu A (H1N1) pdm09 – the same strain which caused the
world pandemic in 2009).
ready.gov | Nuclear explosions can cause significant damage and casualties from
blast, heat, and radiation but you can keep your family safe by knowing
what to do and being prepared if it occurs.
A nuclear weapon is a device that uses a nuclear reaction to create an explosion.
Nuclear devices range from a small portable device carried by an individual to a weapon carried by a missile.
A nuclear explosion may occur with or without a few minutes warning.
Fallout is most dangerous in the first few hours after the detonation
when it is giving off the highest levels of radiation. It takes time
for fallout to arrive back to ground level, often more than 15 minutes
for areas outside of the immediate blast damage zones. This is enough
time for you to be able to prevent significant radiation exposure by
following these simple steps:
GET INSIDE
Get inside the nearest building to avoid radiation. Brick or concrete are best.
Remove contaminated clothing and wipe off or wash unprotected skin
if you were outside after the fallout arrived. Hand sanitizer does not
protect against fall out. Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth, if
possible. Do not use disinfectant wipes on your skin.
Go to the basement or middle of the building. Stay
away from the outer walls and roof. Try to maintain a distance of at
least six feet between yourself and people who are not part of your
household. If possible, wear a mask if you’re sheltering with people who
are not a part of your household. Children under two years old, people
who have trouble breathing, and those who are unable to remove masks on
their own should not wear them.
STAY INSIDE
Stay inside for 24 hours unless local authorities provide other instructions. Continue
to practice social distancing by wearing a mask and by keeping a
distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who not part
of your household.
Family should stay where they are inside. Reunite later to avoid exposure to dangerous radiation.
Keep your pets inside.
STAY TUNED
Tune into any media available for official information such as when it is safe to exit and where you should go.
Battery operated and hand crank radios will function after a nuclear detonation.
Cell phone, text messaging, television, and internet services may be disrupted or unavailable.
HOW TO STAY SAFE IN THE EVENT OF A NUCLEAR EXPLOSION
Prepare NOW
Identify shelter locations. Identify
the best shelter location near where you spend a lot of time, such as
home, work, and school. The best locations are underground and in the
middle of larger buildings.
While commuting, identify appropriate shelters to seek in the event of a detonation. Due to COVID-19, many places you may pass on the way to and from work may be closed or may not have regular operating hours.
Outdoor areas, vehicles, mobile homes do NOT provide adequate shelter. Look for basements or the center of large multistory buildings.
Make sure you have an Emergency Supply Kit
for places you frequent and might have to stay for 24 hours. It should
include bottled water, packaged foods, emergency medicines, a hand-crank
or battery-powered radio to get information in case power is out, a
flashlight, and extra batteries for essential items. If possible, store
supplies for three or more days.
If you are able to, set aside items like soap, hand sanitizer that contains at least 60 percent alcohol, disinfecting wipes, and general household cleaning supplies
that you can use to disinfect surfaces you touch regularly. After a
flood, you may not have access to these supplies for days or even weeks.
Keep in mind each person’s specific needs, including medication. Don’t
forget the needs of pets. Obtain extra batteries and charging devices
for phones and other critical equipment.
Being prepared allows
you to avoid unnecessary excursions and to address minor medical issues
at home, alleviating the burden on urgent care centers and hospitals.
Remember
that not everyone can afford to respond by stocking up on necessities.
For those who can afford it, making essential purchases and slowly
building up supplies in advance will allow for longer time periods
between shopping trips. This helps to protect those who are unable to
procure essentials in advance of the pandemic and must shop more
frequently. In addition, consider avoiding WIC-labeled products so that
those who rely on these products can access them.
Survive DURING
If warned of an imminent attack, immediately get inside the
nearest building and move away from windows. This will help provide
protection from the blast, heat, and radiation of the detonation.
When you have reached a safe place,try to maintain a distance
of at least six feet between yourself and people who are not part of
your household. If possible, wear a maskif you’re sheltering with
people who are not a part of your household. Children under two years
old, people who have trouble breathing, and those who are unable to
remove masks on their own should not wear them.
If you are outdoors when a detonation occurs take
cover from the blast behind anything that might offer protection. Lie
face down to protect exposed skin from the heat and flying debris. Avoid
touching your eyes, nose, and mouth, if possible. If you are in a
vehicle, stop safely, and duck down within the vehicle.
After the shock wave passes, get inside the nearest, best shelter location for protection from potential fallout. You will have 10 minutes or more to find an adequate shelter.
Be inside before the fallout arrives. The highest outdoor radiation levels from fallout occur immediately after the fallout arrives and then decrease with time.
Stay tuned for updated instructions from emergency
response officials. If advised to evacuate, listen for information about
routes, shelters, and procedures.
If you have evacuated, do not return until you are told it is safe to do so by local officials.
nature | Researchers in South Africa are racing to track the concerning rise
of a new variant of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The
variant harbours a large number of the mutations found in other
variants, including Delta, and it seems to be spreading quickly across
South Africa.
A top priority is to follow the variant more closely
as it spreads: it was first identified in Botswana earlier this month
and has since turned up in a traveller arriving in Hong Kong from South
Africa. Scientists are also trying to understand the variant’s
properties, such as whether it can evade immune responses triggered by
vaccines and whether it causes more or less severe disease than other
variants do.
“We’re flying at warp speed,” says Penny Moore, a
virologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South
Africa, whose lab is gauging the variant’s potential to dodge immunity
from vaccines and previous infections. There are anecdotal reports of
reinfections and of cases in vaccinated individuals, but “at this stage
it’s too early to tell anything”, Moore adds.
“There’s a lot we
don’t understand about this variant,” Richard Lessells, an
infectious-diseases physician at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in
Durban, South Africa, said at a press briefing organized by South
Africa’s health department on 25 November. “The mutation profile gives
us concern, but now we need to do the work to understand the
significance of this variant and what it means for the response to the
pandemic.”
A World Health Organization (WHO) expert group will
meet on 26 November, and will probably label the strain — currently
known as B.1.1.529 — as a variant of concern or variant of interest,
Tulio de Oliveira, a bioinformatician at the University of
KwaZulu-Natal, said at the briefing. The variant will probably be named
Nu — the next available letter in the Greek alphabet naming system for
coronavirus variants — if it is flagged by the WHO group.
Researchers
also want to measure the variant’s potential to spread globally —
possibly sparking new waves of infection or exacerbating ongoing rises
being driven by Delta.
Changes to spike
Researchers
spotted B.1.1.529 in genome-sequencing data from Botswana. The variant
stood out because it contains more than 30 changes to the spike protein —
the SARS-CoV-2 protein that recognizes host cells and is the main
target of the body’s immune responses. Many of the changes have been
found in variants such as Delta and Alpha, and are linked to heightened
infectivity and the ability to evade infection-blocking antibodies.
The
apparent sharp rise in cases of the variant in South Africa’s Gauteng
province — home to Johannesburg — is also setting off alarm bells. Cases
increased rapidly in the province in November, particularly in schools
and among young people, according to Lessells. Genome sequencing and
other genetic analysis from de Oliveira’s team found that the B.1.1.529
variant was responsible for all 77 of the virus samples they analysed
from Gauteng, collected between 12 and 20 November. Analysis of hundreds
more samples are in the works.
The variant harbours a spike
mutation that allows it to be detected by genotyping tests that deliver
results much more rapidly than genome sequencing does, Lessells said.
Preliminary evidence from these tests suggest that B.1.1.529 has spread
considerably further than Gauteng. “It gives us concern that this
variant may already be circulating quite widely in the country,”
Lessells said.
Vaccine effectiveness
To understand the
threat B.1.1.529 poses, researchers will be closely tracking its spread
in South Africa and beyond. Researchers in South Africa mobilized
efforts to quickly study the Beta variant, identified there in late
2020, and a similar effort is starting to study B.1.1.529.
Moore’s
team — which provided some of the first data on Beta’s ability to dodge
immunity — has already begun work on B.1.1.529. They plan to test the
virus’s ability to evade infection-blocking antibodies, as well as other
immune responses. The variant harbours a high number of mutations in
regions of the spike protein that antibodies recognize, potentially
dampening their potency. “Many mutations we know are problematic, but
many more look like they are likely contributing to further evasion,”
says Moore. There are even hints from computer modelling that B.1.1.529
could dodge immunity conferred by another component of the immune system
called T cells, says Moore. Her team hopes to have its first results in
two weeks.
“A burning question is ‘does it reduce vaccine
effectiveness, because it has so many changes?’,” says Aris Katzourakis,
who studies virus evolution at the University of Oxford, UK. Moore says
breakthrough infections have been reported in South Africa among people
who have received any of the three kinds of vaccines in use there, from
Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer–BioNTech and Oxford–AstraZeneca. Two
quarantined travellers in Hong Kong who have tested positive for the
variant were vaccinated with the Pfizer jab, according to news reports.
One individual had travelled from South Africa; the other was infected
during hotel quarantining.
Researchers in South Africa will also
study whether B.1.1.529 causes disease that is more severe or milder
than that produced by other variants, Lessells said. “The really key
question comes around disease severity.”
Yesterday morning I read back to back dissertations on the Green Economy and the Green New Deal from the Brookings (neoliberal fascist) and Open Democracy (center left) respectively. These got me thinking about the overarching objectives of the entire Great Reset Operation, the tools it has employed over the past three years for human livestock management, and, its endlessly escalating opposition to MAGA or Brexit nationalism.
In the area of endless escalation, the abrupt impoverishment of tens of millions via unnecessary quarantines and lockdowns, billowing political and interpersonal polarization fast approaching civil war/race war, and the use of engineered biological agents (which presumably can be ratcheted up to increasing levels of contagiousness and lethality) - all point toward an endgame that is far more drastic than anything currently countenanced in the mainstream narrative. We're not talking here about a "new normal", instead, we're talking about mass starvation, everyone against everyone ultraviolence, and when austerity gets REALLY severe, cannibalism.
Central Banks are fighting a battle they will lose. Conventional (easy cheap oil) peaked in 2005. To compensate for that we smash rocks and suck out the oil --- we steam oil out of sand - and we drill miles beneath the ocean for oil. The EROEI from those extractive methods is very low. At the moment, we still have enough high energy return oil to subsidize those methods so
civilization continues. (with greatly reduced travel, disrupted supply chains, and massive amounts of stimulus to help cope with the low EROEI oil mix.
The global
economy does NOT like low energy return oil because it leaves less to
run the world. In 2019 shale oil was peaking so the stop-gap, make-work party was ending. At that time, political elites began handwaving toward Universal Basic Income and Modern Monetary Theory to prep us for what we are experiencing now. They trotted out pasty and uncharismatic Greta Thunberg to exhort us about shutting down the planet.
Meanwhile and in parallel we get the MAGA man and his competing exhortations to take America back to 1954 along every politically expedient metric. At that point, in his "greatest economy ever" spiel, he could point to a periodic glut and claim 'we are
swimming in oil'. A glut does not mean we have found more oil - it
simply means producers are pumping their reserves out faster. They
usually do this when prices are low as they need
the cash flow to pay the bills so they need to push our more volume. The truth is that there is very little new oil being
found. What would you do if you were on your last tank of gas? Of
course you would ration it.
Enter Covid and the Great Reset. Covid was created in a lab to provide cover for the collapsing energy availability "new normal". Covid has provided mimetic cover under authority of science for central banks to roll out MMT UBI Helicopter
Money. In addition, we are being groomed to accept
lockdowns. Anyone who resists is met with a big fine, arrest and in
some countries beatings. Your neighbour will be told by the
authorities to rat on you going forward. Why? Because when the Central Banks and their puppet politicians lose control of this situation they will enact martial
law -- a total lockdown. (the police state pincer movement)
For a time there may be food delivery pacification to those in the most extreme condition, but like stimulus checks and the MMT UBI, these will stop in fairly short order too. Politicians will promise 'the deliveries will resume in a couple of
days'. Like good sheep, you will trust these sock puppet rascals and wait... and wait...
and wait... and when you realize there is
no food coming you will be too weak and exhausted to do anything. In any event there will be nothing you can do - there will be no food
because the system has collapsed.
This will be for your own good. Resisting is futile. Nobody wants
extreme violence and cannibalism. You and your family will lie down
and wait to die from starvation.
taiwannews | Video has surfaced allegedly shot from inside the instant
"hospital" hastily constructed in Wuhan appearing much more like a
prison than a center to care for sick patients.
On Monday (Feb. 3), Communist China claimed to have completed the
Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan to house 1,000 of the city's residents
infected with the novel coronavirus (2019nCoV). The rapid construction
of the hospital was widely trumpeted by Chinese state-run mouthpieces
and parroted by Western media outlets as an example of the Chinese
Communist Party's (CCP's) superior ability to quickly respond to crises,
while a de-emphasis was placed on the initial slow response that
arguably allowed the virus to mushroom out of control.
However, the dissident organization Himalaya Global released a video
on its Twitter page Monday which was apparently secretly filmed by a
Chinese contractor inside the new facility. The video starts with the
contractor introducing the Spartan interior of Ward 1.
The man starts out by ominously saying, "Once you are in, you can't
get out." He then asserts that patients would be better off staying at
home than checking into the new compound.
The camera then focuses on the tiny windows that he said would be
used to serve food to patients. In the background, another man can be
heard saying that "the dead will be removed from that door."
biorxiv | We are currently witnessing a major epidemic caused by the 2019 novel
coronavirus (2019- nCoV). The evolution of 2019-nCoV remains elusive.
We found 4 insertions in the spike glycoprotein (S) which are unique to
the 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses. Importantly,
amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identity or similarity to
those in the HIV-1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag. Interestingly, despite the
inserts being discontinuous on the primary amino acid sequence,
3D-modelling of the 2019-nCoV suggests that they converge to constitute
the receptor binding site. The finding of 4 unique inserts in the
2019-nCoV, all of which have identity /similarity to amino acid residues
in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be fortuitous in
nature. This work provides yet unknown insights on 2019-nCoV and sheds
light on the evolution and pathogenicity of this virus with important
implications for diagnosis of this virus. Fist tap Rohan.
biospace |More than 80 people have died from the coronavirus in China. The Chinese government is turning to a drug developed by AbbVie for HIV patients as a potential treatment for the outbreak that has reached the shores of the United States.
AbbVie said it was donating more than one million dollars’ worth of
Aluvia, a combination of lopinavir and ritonavir as an ad-hoc treatment
for pneumonia that is associated with the outbreak. The Chinese
government suggested last week that taking two lopinavir/ritonavir pills
and inhaling a dose of nebulized alpha-interferon twice a day could
benefit these patients, Reuters reported. There are more than 2,000
known cases of the coronavirus in China. The illness has caused parts of
China to grind to a halt as health officials seek to contain the spread
of the virus.
The decision to use AbbVie’s medicine came after a noted respiratory
expert at Peking University First Hospital in Beijing said he was given
the HIV drugs to fight the virus after he contracted it following a
visit to Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in central China where the
virus is thought to have originated. Wan Guangfa came down with the
virus after interacting with coronavirus patients. He told China News
Week that the HIV treatments worked for him.
The coronavirus family
includes the common cold as well as viruses that cause more serious
illnesses, such as SARS that spread from China to more than a dozen
countries in 2002-03 and killed about 800 people. Also, the virus is
similar to Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which developed
from camels. The virus infects the lungs, and symptoms start with a
fever and cough. It can progress to shortness of breath and breathing
difficulties leading to pneumonia.
biorxiv | We also noticed that the only Asian donor (male) has a much higher
ACE2-expressing cell ratio than white and African American donors (2.50%
vs. 0.47% of all cells). This might explain the observation that the
new Coronavirus pandemic and previous SARS-Cov pandemic are concentrated
in the Asian area. (damn homie, are you PHUKKED?!?!?!?!)
A novel
coronavirus (2019-nCov) was identified in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China
in December of 2019. This new coronavirus has resulted in thousands of
cases of lethal disease in China, with additional patients being
identified in a rapidly growing number internationally. 2019-nCov was
reported to share the same receptor, Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2
(ACE2), with SARS-Cov. Here based on the public database and the
state-of-the-art single-cell RNA-Seq technique, we analyzed the ACE2 RNA
expression profile in the normal human lungs. The result indicates that
the ACE2 virus receptor expression is concentrated in a small
population of type II alveolar cells (AT2). Surprisingly, we found that
this population of ACE2-expressing AT2 also highly expressed many other
genes that positively regulating viral reproduction and transmission. A
comparison between eight individual samples demonstrated that the Asian
male one has an extremely large number of ACE2-expressing cells in the
lung. This study provides a biological background for the epidemic
investigation of the 2019-nCov infection disease, and could be
informative for future anti-ACE2 therapeutic strategy development.
Severe
infection by 2019-nCov could result in acute respiratory distress
syndrome (ARDS) and sepsis, causing death in approximately 15% of
infected individuals1,2.
Once contacted with the human airway, the spike proteins of this virus
can associate with the surface receptors of sensitive cells, which
mediated the entrance of the virus into target cells for further
replication. Recently, Xu et.al., modeled the spike protein to identify
the receptor for 2019-nCov, and indicated that Angiotensin-converting
enzyme 2 (ACE2) could be the receptor for this virus3. ACE2 is previously known as the receptor for SARS-Cov and NL634–6.
According to their modeling, although the binding strength between
2019-nCov and ACE2 is weaker than that between SARS-Cov and ACE2, it is
still much higher than the threshold required for virus infection. Zhou
et. al. conducted virus infectivity studies and showed that ACE2 is
essential for 2019-nCov to enter HeLa cells7. These data indicated that ACE2 is likely to be the receptor for 2019-nCov.
The
expression and distribution of the receptor decide the route of virus
infection and the route of infection has a major implication for
understanding the pathogenesis and designing therapeutic strategies.
Previous studies have investigated the RNA expression of ACE2 in 72
human tissues8.
However, the lung is a complex organ with multiple types of cells, and
such real-time PCR RNA profiling is based on bulk tissue analysis with
no way to elucidate the ACE2 expression in each type of cell in the
human lung. The ACE2 protein level is also investigated by
immunostaining in lung and other organs8,9.
These studies showed that in normal human lung, ACE2 is mainly
expressed by type II and type I alveolar epithelial cells. Endothelial
cells were also reported to be ACE2 positive. However, immunostaining
analysis is known for its lack of signal specificity, and accurate
quantification is also another challenge for such analysis.
The
recently developed single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-Seq) technology
enables us to study the ACE2 expression in each cell type and give
quantitative information at single-cell resolution. Previous work has
built up the online database for scRNA-Seq analysis of 8 normal human
lung transplant donors10.
In current work, we used the updated bioinformatics tools to analyze
the data. In total, we analyzed 43,134 cells derived from normal lung
tissue of 8 adult donors. We performed unsupervised graph-based
clustering (Seurat version 2.3.4) and for each individual, we identified
8~11 transcriptionally distinct cell clusters based on their marker
gene expression profile. Typically the clusters include type II alveolar
cells (AT2), type I alveolar cells (AT1), airway epithelial cells
(ciliated cells and Club cells), fibroblasts, endothelial cells and
various types of immune cells. The cell cluster map of a representative
donor (Asian male, 55-year-old) was visualized using t-distributed
stochastic neighbor embedding (tSNE) as shown in Fig. 1b and his major cell type marker expressions were demonstrated in Fig.2. Fist tap Dale.
alt-market | But what do globalists have to gain directly from a coronavirus pandemic beyond simple chaos that can be exploited?
Interestingly, a representative from Johnson and Johnson, one of the
companies that may end up designing a "vaccine" for the Cronavirus,
suggested during Event 201 that a "centralized" global economic
authority in charge of funding and procuring vaccines for various
nations in crisis was an option for solving the pandemic.
Gee, that sounds strangely similar to what globalists have been demanding
for many years now, and the pandemic just happens to offer a perfect
excuse for the creation of such a one-world financial authority. They
might claim that such a system would be temporary according to the life
of the pandemic, but this will be a lie.
In terms of the economic effects, even if the virus were to stay
primarily in China, the Chinese economy is, in basic terms, the largest
in the world; it is the biggest exporter/importer and it is central to
the now interdependent global economy. If China's economy goes down,
even for a short time, this will send shockwaves through all other
national economies and supply lines.
The globalist establishment has created the largest financial bubble
in modern history through central bank stimulus, inflating a highly
unstable artificial rally in markets while also creating new highs in
national debt, corporate debt and consumer debt. The economic
fundamentals have been sending alarms for the past two years, and the
'Everything Bubble' is showing signs of implosion. It is only a matter
of time before the farce collapses by itself. The globalists need
scapegoats, but they also need an event or wave of events so distracting
that people will not be able to discern what really happened.
The reason why globalists want a collapse is simple - They need
crisis in order to manipulate the masses into accepting total
centralization, a global monetary system and global governance. They
are also rabid believers in eugenics and population reduction. At the
very least, a global pandemic is a useful happenstance for them; but the
timing of the coronavirus event and their highly accurate "simulation"
only three months ago also suggests their potential involvement, as it
comes right as the implosion of the Everything Bubble was accelerating.
Consider this: Even if a pandemic does not kill a large number of
people, it still disrupts international travel, it disrupts exports and
imports, it disrupts consumer behavior and retail sales, and it disrupts
domestic trade. If it does kill a large number of people, and if the
Chinese government's response is any indication, it could result in
global martial law. With many economies including the US economy
already in a precarious balancing act of historic debt vs. crashing
demand and useless central bank repo market intervention, there is
little chance that the system can withstand such a tsunami.
Make no mistake, the crash has already begun, whether the virus hits
the US hard or not. The only question is, will this be the trigger
event that accelerates the collapse process that is already in motion?
CDC is closely monitoring an outbreak of respiratory illness caused
by a novel (new) coronavirus (termed “2019-nCoV”) that was first
detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China and which continues to
expand. Chinese health officials have reported more than a thousand
infections with 2019-nCoV in China, including outside of Hubei Province.
Infections with 2019-nCoV also are being reported in a growing number
of international locations, including the United States, where 5 cases in travelers from Wuhan have been confirmed in four states (AZ, CA, IL, WA) as of January 26, 2020.
Source and Spread of the Virus
Chinese health authorities were the first to post the full genome of the 2019-nCoV in GenBankexternal icon, the NIH genetic sequence database, and in the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAIDexternal icon)
portal, an action which has facilitated detection of this virus. On
January 24, 2020, CDC posted in GenBank the full genome of the 2019-nCoV
virus detected in the first U.S. patient from Washington state. The
virus genetic sequence from the patient in Washington is nearly
identical to the sequences posted from China. The available sequences
suggest a likely single, recent emergence from a virus related to bat
coronaviruses and the SARS coronavirus. The available sequence
information does not provide any information about severity of
associated illness or transmissibility of the virus.
Early on, many of the patients in the outbreak in Wuhan, China
reportedly had some link to a large seafood and animal market,
suggesting animal-to-person spread. However, a growing number of
patients reportedly have not had exposure to animal markets, and there
is evidence that person-to-person spread is occurring. At this time,
it’s unclear how easily or sustainably this virus is spreading between
people. Learn what is known about the spread of newly emerged coronaviruses.
Illness Severity
Both MERS and SARS have been known to cause severe illness in people.
The complete clinical picture with regard to 2019-nCoV is still not
fully clear. Reported illnesses have ranged from infected people with
little to no symptoms to people being severely ill and dying. Learn more
about the symptoms associated with 2019-nCoV.
There are ongoing investigations to learn more. This is a rapidly
evolving situation and information will be updated as it becomes
available.
Outbreaks of novel virus infections among people are always of public
health concern. The risk from these outbreaks depends on
characteristics of the virus, including whether and how well it spreads
between people, the severity of resulting illness, and the medical or
other measures available to control the impact of the virus (for
example, vaccine or treatment medications).
Investigations are ongoing to learn more, but person-to-person spread
of 2019-nCoV is occurring. Chinese officials report that sustained
person-to-person spread in the community is occurring in China.
Person-to-person spread in the United States has not yet been detected,
but it’s likely to occur to some extent. It’s important to note that
person-to-person spread can happen on a continuum. Some viruses are
highly contagious (like measles), while other viruses are less so. It’s
important to know this in order to better assess the risk posed by this
virus. While CDC considers this is a very serious public health threat,
based on current information, the immediate health risk from 2019-nCoV
to the general American public is considered low at this time.
Nevertheless, CDC is taking proactive preparedness precautions.
What to Expect
More cases are likely to be identified in the coming days, including
more cases in the United States. Given what has occurred previously with
MERS and SARS, it’s likely that person-to-person spread will continue
to occur. It would not be surprising if person-to-person spread in the
United States were to occur. Cases in healthcare settings, like
hospitals, may also occur.
bbc | The death toll from a newly-discovered coronavirus in China has risen to 41 on the day of the Lunar New Year.
Another 15 deaths in Hubei province, where the outbreak began, were announced on Saturday.
Health
officials are struggling to contain the outbreak as millions of people
travel for the Chinese new year, one of the most important events. Many
festivities have been cancelled.
There are now more than 1,200 confirmed cases in China.
The virus has also spread to Europe, with three cases confirmed in France. The UK is investigating a number of suspected cases, with officials trying to trace around 2,000 people who have recently flown to the UK from Hubei province.
Australia has also confirmed several cases in Melbourne and Sydney, joining a handful of countries treating patients.
The coronavirus, previously unknown to science, causes severe acute
respiratory infection with symptoms including a fever and cough. There
is no specific cure or vaccine.
Based on an earlier report of the
fatalities, when just 17 were dead, most of the victims appeared to be
older people, many with pre-existing medical conditions.
But one of the dead in the most recent update was a doctor at a hospital in Hubei, China Global Television Network reported.
PNAS | Most technologies are made
from steel, concrete, chemicals, and plastics, which degrade over time
and can produce harmful ecological and health side effects. It would
thus be useful to build technologies using self-renewing and
biocompatible materials, of which the ideal candidates are living
systems themselves. Thus, we here present a method that designs
completely biological machines from the ground up: computers
automatically design new machines in simulation, and the best designs
are then built by combining together different biological tissues. This
suggests others may use this approach to design a variety of living
machines to safely deliver drugs inside the human body, help with
environmental remediation, or further broaden our understanding of the
diverse forms and functions life may adopt.
ABSTRACT
Living
systems are more robust, diverse, complex, and supportive of human life
than any technology yet created. However, our ability to create novel
lifeforms is currently limited to varying existing organisms or
bioengineering organoids in vitro. Here we show a scalable pipeline for
creating functional novel lifeforms: AI methods automatically design
diverse candidate lifeforms in silico to perform some desired function,
and transferable designs are then created using a cell-based
construction toolkit to realize living systems with the predicted
behaviors. Although some steps in this pipeline still require manual
intervention, complete automation in future would pave the way to
designing and deploying unique, bespoke living systems for a wide range
of functions.
Most modern technologies are constructed
from synthetic rather than living materials because the former have
proved easier to design, manufacture, and maintain; living systems
exhibit robustness of structure and function and thus tend to resist
adopting the new behaviors imposed on them. However, if living systems
could be continuously and rapidly designed ab initio and deployed to
serve novel functions, their innate ability to resist entropy might
enable them to far surpass the useful lifetimes of our strongest yet
static technologies. As examples of this resistance, embryonic
development and regeneration reveal remarkable plasticity, enabling
cells or whole organ systems to self-organize adaptive functionality
despite drastic deformation (1, 2).
Exploiting the computational capacity of cells to function in novel
configurations suggests the possibility of creating synthetic morphology
that achieves complex novel anatomies via the benefits of both
emergence and guided self-assembly (3).
Currently,
there are several methods underway to design and build bespoke living
systems. Single-cell organisms have been modified by refactored genomes,
but such methods are not yet scalable to rational control of
multicellular shape or behavior (4).
Synthetic organoids can be made by exposing cells to specific culture
conditions but very limited control is available over their structure
(and thus function) because the outcome is largely emergent and not
under the experimenter’s control (5). Conversely, bioengineering efforts with 3D scaffolds provide improved control (6⇓–8),
but the inability to predict behavioral impacts of arbitrary biological
construction has restricted assembly to biological machines that
resemble existing organisms, rather than discovering novel forms through
automatic design.
Meanwhile, advances in computational search and 3D printing
have yielded scalable methods for designing and training machines in
silico (9, 10) and then manufacturing physical instances of them (11⇓–13). Most of these approaches employ an evolutionary search method (14)
that, unlike learning methods, enables the design of the machine’s
physical structure along with its behavior. These evolutionary design
methods continually generate diverse solutions to a given problem, which
proves useful as some designs can be instantiated physically better
than others. Moreover, they are agnostic to the kind of artifact being
designed and the function it should provide: the same evolutionary
algorithm can be reconfigured to design drugs (15), autonomous machines (11, 13), metamaterials (16), or architecture (17).
Here,
we demonstrate a scalable approach for designing living systems in
silico using an evolutionary algorithm, and we show how the evolved
designs can be rapidly manufactured using a cell-based construction
toolkit. The approach is organized as a linear pipeline that takes as
input a description of the biological building blocks to be used and the
desired behavior the manufactured system should exhibit (Fig. 1).
The pipeline continuously outputs performant living systems that embody
that behavior in different ways. The resulting living systems are novel
aggregates of cells that yield novel functions: above the cellular
level, they bear little resemblance to existing organs or organisms.
tomluongo | Tulsi Gabbard has stones. She has the kind of stones born of a life dedicated to the cause of serving others.
She is the direct opposite of Hillary Clinton, for whom all causes serve herself and her enormous narcissism and pathology.
So seeing Gabbard go directly after Hillary Clinton after her debate
performance the other evening where she explicitly called out both the New York Times and CNN (the hosts of the debate) for the hit jobs on her puts to rest any idea she’s someone else’s stalking horse.
Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a ...
PAUL JAY:So very dangerous times. And now we
haven’t even talked about in this whole conversation the issue of
climate change. There was a time in ’07-’08 when even finance seemed to
get what a danger this was. Then the crash comes. And now it’s, like,
it’s not even on the political agenda.
RANA FOROOHAR:Well, you know, the only, I
would argue the only reason finance cared about climate change in
’07-’08 is that we were having an oil boom. And whenever oil prices go
up, finance gets more interested in green technologies because they
suddenly seem to make sense economically. If you think about wind, you
know, I don’t know the exact figures, but wind power, say, costing, you
know, the equivalent of $40 a barrel of oil, or whatever the equivalent
would be. Those technologies become more cost effective as the price of
oil soars. And so that’s why you saw a lot of interest. But then when
oil, which is very cyclical, right, very volatile, when it tanks you see
all the money flow out of the sector, out of the clean energy sector.
And I expect that’s how it would be now.
It’s too bad, because, you know, we haven’t really talked about what
are the alternatives to this financial, financialized capitalism. One of
the kind of amazing, like, duh, low-hanging fruit things that we could
do is have a green stimulus program. Joe Stiglitz has talked about this,
many others have talked about it. It would be the easiest, quickest,
smartest way to actually create some real growth in the economy,
transition off of fossil fuels. You know, just, just implementing the
best technologies available today in all homes and schools,
institutions, would create so many jobs and so much growth that it could
really help jumpstart the economy in a true ground-up way.
PAUL JAY:There’s no better example of the
complete irrationality of this system that that would even make Wall
Street money. I mean, capitalists would make money out of a new green
economy. But the politics of it is you’re going to have to take on the
Koch brothers. There’s a lot of money being made now in war. I should
say getting ready for war, and wars. And as rational as that is, and it
wouldn’t even be anti-capitalist. Like, you could have a big green
economy. People could make money out of it.
RANA FOROOHAR:And in fact, China—
PAUL JAY:You can, you can, and China’s to some extent doing it.
RANA FOROOHAR:China’s, is starting to try
and do this. I mean, I have a lot of, you know, issues with China,
policy-wise. But one thing that they’ve been very smart on is making
these green technologies, green batteries, solar panels, wind, making
these strategic sectors and really connecting the dots between workers,
businesses, funders, job creators, et cetera.
PAUL JAY:So get into the heads of these people who are making these decisions.
RANA FOROOHAR:Do I have to?
PAUL JAY:They have kids. They have
grandkids. They got to live in this world. I know they’re making an orgy
level of money. But they’ve made it. And I know I’m not suggesting that
there’s ever an end of wanting to make money. I’ve asked people who
have ridiculous amounts of money, why are you still trying to make more
money? And it comes down to because that’s who I am, and what else am I
going to do. I mean, there’s some that decide to start giving it away
and do philanthropy. And, but even then are still very concerned about
making more and making more. But more importantly, how do, do you ask,
how do these people go home at night and not be concerned about climate
crisis, and war, and financial meltdown? How do we not worry about that?
RANA FOROOHAR:You know, I think it’s, it’s a
worry that if it exists, it gets kind of tucked in the back pocket
some, somewhere. One thing I’ve been hearing from a lot of very wealthy
people these days, since the election, actually, is that they all have
escape plans. You know, I mean, there was a very interesting story,
actually, in the New Yorker by Evan Osnos who I knew, actually, when he
was a reporter in China. And he covered the ways in which rich people
are buying up ranches in New Zealand and creating bunkers in the
Bahamas, or wherever they’re going, thinking that they’re somehow going
to be able to avoid the apocalypse when it comes. There’s actually a
business that operates in New York. It’s a boat that will come, you can
apparently pre-buy, this sounds like the biggest scam in history to me,
but you can pre-buy tickets if there’s some political crisis or some
danger moment, and they’ll come and pick you up and whisk you up the
Hudson.
Now, you know, which rich people think there’s going to be their seat
waiting when there’s a real problem, I don’t know. But I think that
that that goes to this idea that the wealthy have come to believe,
frankly like, you know, the French, perhaps, in the 18th century that—
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
