So, it's been months since Disqus would function normally when/if you clicked on a post. Comments which haven't been abundant since the heyday a decade ago have since utterly died. This morning I finally rolled up my sleeves and manually reinserted disqus into the old-fangled site html and it should now be functioning normally in all formats and all browsers including mobile. Didn't wind up losing anything so I'll count it a win.
Hopefully, with the world about to burst into flames - diehards will have a thing or two to say about a thing or two over the next few days.
michaelpsenger |The scars that have been left on all of us by the response to
COVID are incomprehensibly varied and deep. For most, there hasn’t been
enough time to mentally process the significance of the initial
lockdowns, let alone the years-long slog of mandates, terror,
propaganda, social stigmatization and censorship that followed. And this
psychological trauma affects us in myriad ways that leave us wondering
what it is about life that just feels so off versus how it felt in 2019.
For those who were following the real data, the statistics
were always horrifying. Trillions of dollars rapidly transferred from
the world’s poorest to the richest. Hundreds of millions hungry.
Countless years of educational attainment lost. An entire generation of
children and adolescents robbed of some of their brightest years. A
mental health crisis affecting more than a quarter of the population.
Drug overdoses. Hospital abuse. Elder abuse. Domestic abuse. Millions of
excess deaths among young people which couldn’t be attributed to the
virus.
But underneath these statistics lie billions of
individual human stories, each unique in its details and perspectives.
These individual stories and anecdotes are only just beginning to
surface, and I believe that hearing them is a vital step in processing
everything that we’ve experienced over the past three years.
I
recently sent out a query on Twitter as to how people had been affected
by the response to COVID at an individual level. The conversation that
emerged is a luminating and haunting reflection of what each of us
experienced over the past three years.
Which aspect of the response to COVID affected you most at a personal level?
vice | The
U.S. Navy says that releasing any additional UFO videos would “harm
national security” and told a government transparency website that all of the government’s UFO videos are classified information.
In
a Freedom of Information Act request response, the Navy told government
transparency site The Black Vault that any public dissemination of new
UFO videos “will harm national security as it may provide adversaries
valuable information regarding Department of Defense/Navy operations,
vulnerabilities, and/or capabilities. No portions of the videos can be
segregated for release.”
The
Black Vault was seeking all videos “with the designation of
‘unidentified aerial phenomena.’” This is an interesting response from
the Navy because, often, military agencies will issue a so-called GLOMAR response,
where they neither confirm nor deny that the records (in this case
videos) exist, and refuse to say anything more. In this response, the
Navy is admitting that it has more videos, and also gives a rationale for releasing three previous UFO videos.
“While
three UAP videos were released in the past, the facts specific to those
three videos are unique in that those videos were initially released
via unofficial channels before official release,” it said. “Those events
were discussed extensively in the public domain; in fact, major news
outlets conducted specials on these events. Given the amount of
information in the public domain regarding these encounters, it was
possible to release the files without further damage to national
security.”
It’s
true that the three videos—which were leaked to former Blink-182 singer
Tom DeLonge and the New York Times—didn’t originally come out via
official means. But in recent years, the Pentagon has regularly talked
about UFOs, and earlier this year it showed additional clips from UFOs to Congress.
The military has seemingly wanted to tell the public and Congress that
UFOs are very much real and a threat, and that it needs more funding to
determine what they are and, perhaps, protect us against them. But it
continues to hold the videos close to the vest.
pureflamencobarcelona | She was born in a shack in the Somorrostro. Her father was Francisco
Amaya “El Chino”, a poor guitarist who played in taverns day and night
to earn a living. When she was only four years old she started going out
at night with her father to help him. She was just a little gypsy girl
by then. Her father played the guitar and Carmen danced and singed.
After that, they asked for money or took the coins that the audience
have thrown to the floor. At the same time, she appeared in some
theatres which lacked any prestige. José Sampere, a businessman, was the
first one in being interested on her and took her to the most known
Spanish Theatre of Barcelona. However, the problem was that she wasn’t
allowed to work legally due to her age so the officially date of birth
may not be the real one according to some researches about the artist.
Her name appeared for the first time printed in the Expo Barcelona 1929
thanks to Sebastián Gash, a sharp critic who watched her and talked
about her in the weekly newspaper Mirador: “Imagine a 14 years old gypsy
sitting in a chair on the tablao, Carmencita remained impassive,
statuary, noble with a racial elegance, inscrutable, absent, not paying
attention of what is happening around her, alone with her inspiration,
with a very hieratic actitude to allow her soul to raise until
inaccessible areas. And suddenly, a jump. And the gypsy dances.
Indescribable. Soul. Pure sole. The feeling made real. Movements of
twist in right angle, pure geometry.
In that time also Vicente Escudero watched her dancing and said that
Carmen Amaya will make a revolution in the flamenco dance because she
mixed two styles: the old female dancer and the frenetic foot tapping of
the male dancers. In 1935 she was hired by Carcellé who presented her
in the Coliseum in Madrid. That was maybe her only national recognition.
The world of cinema also noticed her. She performed a small role in La
hija de Juan Simón. Later, she worked in María de la O, along with
Pastora Imperio.
The 18th July 1936 Carmen and her family were in the Zorrilla
Theatre in Valladolid working in the company of Carcellé. In that moment
their economy was in good shape and they bought their first car. They
had to go to Lisbon to enforce a contract but the car was confiscated
and they couldn’t go there until November. After some setbacks they
embarked to America in a ship that took 15 days to cross the Atlantic.
They arrived to Buenos Aires and the triumph of Carmen Amaya and her
family went beyond expectations.
They went there just for four weeks and stayed there nine months
due to the fact that every time that Carmen performed in the theatre a
lot of people attended and the tickets were sold two months before the
show. As a proof of the popularity of the artist in the South-American
country we can find a theatre with her own name: the Theatre Amaya.
In America Carmen Amaya met a lot of famous people of her time. She
was in Hollywood a couple of times filming some movies and the cinema,
music and culture celebrities wanted to watch her dancing. The musician
Toscanini went to watch her once and said that he had never seen an
artist with that rhythm and fire before. She was constantly improvising.
Her compass was solid and she possessed a prodigious sense of the
rhythm with a rigorous tempo that was exact in all her movements. Anyone
has ever span like her, so fast and perfect. In America she met
Roosevelt, the president of the United States and in Europe she even met
the Queen of England.
She didn’t come back to Spain until 1947 and she did it as a
worldwide star. Her stay in America turned her into a professional and
famous artist. Lot of stories hard to believe were told about her as the
anecdote of the fried fish in the luxury suite of the Waldorf Astoria.
In that time her flamenco dance was the best one. She stood out not
only for her art but also for the wonderful personality that won
everyone she met. She was also very generous. It seems that during her
stay in America the dancer had a sentimental relationship with Sabicas
who declared before his death he dated Carmen for nine years and they
broke up in Mexico.
In 1952 she married the guitarist Juan Antonio Agüero, a member of
her company, a man from a distinguished family from Santander who wasn’t
gypsy. They lived an authentic love story, with an intimate wedding. In
1959 Carmen lived another exiting moment in her life when the ceremony
of the inauguration of the fountain Carmen Amaya was celebrated in the
seafront promenade in Barcelona located in the neighbourhood
Somorrostro, the same fountain and the same place she lived in as a
child years before. The last ten years of her life she was surrounded of
lots of people and almost sanctified, not only by the audience but also
by her colleagues. Her genius was instinctive, wild, far from the
academic styles. When she performed for the last time in Madrid, Carmen
Amaya was deathly sick; she had a renal failure that stopped the
elimination of toxins from her body. The doctors couldn’t find any
solution to her problem.
The sickness made worse in the filming of “Los Tarantos” in the
spring of 1963. She had to dance barefoot with an unbearable cold. She
always put on her coat when the filming stopped and they didn’t repeat
any scene. Despite these drawbacks, Carmen remained strong and began the
summer tour. However, the 8th of August while she was working in
Gandía, Carmen didn’t finish her performance. She was performing when
suddenly she said to Batista: “Andrés, let’s finish”.
That was the end of the dancer Carmen Amaya, who got inspiration
from the street, the family and the gypsy blood and revolutionized the
flamenco dance. With her way of dancing, Carmen Amaya showed that for
her the flamenco was feeling, soul and passion. Her dancer came from the
anger and the violence retained with an amazing speed and strength.
Still today she is a model of the flamenco dance.
Even if Carmen is remembered for her dance she also sang. In fact,
her father thought at first that she was better in singing than in
dancing. She had a dark and hoarse voice, typical of the gypsy sing. A
good example of her way of singing can be seen in “La reina del embrujo
gitano”. Recordings on slate records 1948-1950 collects a good sample
of her abilities as a flamenco singer, accompanied by two guitarists
from her dynasty, Paco and José Amaya, as does “En familia”.
thesaker | Since it is impossible to change the terms of breeding, we must
accept there will always be different rules for different classes of
humans.
Do not believe in anything they are telling you about equality or
democracy. In America and Europe, if you have superior pedigree or test
an IQ above 135, you are exempt from homework, tests and schools. Those
mindless activities are for the serfs. You get your audition with the
master breeders and they’ll make things happen. Think of it as
diplomatic clearance. There are no barriers and no checks.
Also, there is less bureaucracy. If a university or school wants you,
they will fabricate a reason, don’t worry. Like a sports stipend or a
fake prize, a large family donation or a fat recommendation letter. In
Chile and Argentina I hear they call this corruption ‘getting a
fast-pass’, as in ‘a fast-pass for American Disneyland’. It means that
you can skip the lines and that long waiting hours do not apply to you. I
like that. I will use ‘fast-pass’ from now on.
In China, there is a fast-pass system called bao-song
(package-sent). It means forget school and grades, this kid you must
admit. It comes with a minor catch though. The student cannot choose his
major, the state does. As if his family cared. But this sounds very
British, doesn’t it? In good-old Oxbridge, it doesn’t really matter what
subject you master in, as long as you get… your Master. Every nation
has its fast-pass lane.
After centuries of selection, most breeders encounter severe defects
and inadequacies in their stock. Oh forces of darkness. In one old
German castle town’s youth hostel, the masters stop-watched us
candidates recite pointless word-lists and tested us for reaction time
and unnatural pathology and thought-crime. In a Chinese university, they
passed around a tape measure and measured our head circumference,
because for some reasons the masters believed that head-size mattered
and that 24 5/8 inches meant that you needed your caps custom-made.
Who could forget such an examination? If you stroll the campuses of
Todai or Beida,… you have never seen so many large heads in one place.
They look like aliens. Can’t be made unseen. This is the result of
excessive over-breeding. Same at Harvard University. Have you ever seen
the head-sizes of Ted Kennedy or Noam Chomsky?
All our nation‘s top mental clinics and laboratories are adjunct to
our top universities. The master breeders suffer from the worst mental
abnormalities and defects, from horrible misanthropy to psychopathy.
Then there is the plague of schisms with these people. Schismatic
persons can easily turn into traitors and backstabbers. Like Leon
Trotsky or Leo Tolstoy.
There is also a lot of old money corruption, because degenerates like
our Karl-Theodor pay a lot of money to get into top universities, but
are unintelligent.
All these details and head-scratching at the top levels goes over the
heads of the general population. The general population is abused six
ways from Sunday. For example, the elite sociopaths tell the general
population through literature and media and the education system that
the working and underclasses surely are the most debauched. But that
cannot be true, if you really think about it: First, the working classes
are too busy working. Next, nine tenths of the general population have
only access to one tenth of all females. The rulers may be fewer in
numbers, but they own everything, and they are the worst abusers,
torturers and tyrants – by far and in between.
The sociopaths that rule us are the most unimaginably cruelest and
most abusive towards all human beings, but especially towards women,
children and the pure and healthy races, who are completely unaware of
the master breeders’ satanic schemes. The majority of the people do not
grasp the human hierarchy and their own enslavement. They are stuck in
evolution like chimpanzees or zebras.
NPR | Anyone who's been to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African
American History and Culture will speak of its elevator ride through
time, which takes visitors from the present day to the 15th century and
kicks off the first exhibit, Slavery & Freedom. With the
launch of a new virtual platform, visitors can now travel on the
elevator down to that exhibit without ever leaving their homes.
The Searchable Museum,
launched Thursday, transforms the artifacts, stories, and interactive
experiences of the physical exhibit into a digital platform where
museumgoers can take it in at their own pace.
Eventually, the museum plans to bring all of its exhibits online. The next exhibit, Making a Way Out of No Way, will go online this spring.
"History,
despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived — but if faced with
courage, need not be lived again, " echoes Angelou's voice as a video
plays, showing images from the past 600 years of Black history.
While
nothing quite matches seeing or touching certain artifacts in person,
the digital museum will provide an inside look into some previously
off-limits areas. Visitors can, for the first time, go inside the Point
of Pines Slave Cabin, one of two remaining slave cabins on Edisto
Island, South Carolina, with a 3-D virtual tour.
Unlike other Smithsonian museums, the NMAAHC has required timed-entry passes to enter the site almost exclusively since it opened in 2016. Though these timed tickets are still free of charge, they can be snapped up pretty quickly: Many tickets
for December have already been claimed. (During the pandemic, plenty of
Smithsonians have followed suit, requiring timed entry passes to avoid
overcrowding.)
The virtual project has new elements, like
videos, podcasts, and behind-the-scenes looks at the research behind the
exhibits. One section, called "Lesser-Known Stories," captures stories that have been largely ignored throughout history — like the story of Nathan "Nearest" Green, the first known Black master distiller, who taught Jack Daniel how to make Tennessee whiskey; or the story of the largest known mass suicide of enslaved people, an act of resistance at Igbo Landing.
"This
ongoing project provides a chance for Americans to realize our shared
past, bringing the unique museum experience to their homes and on their
phones," Kevin Young, the museum's director said in a press release.
"Allowing the public to virtually revisit the originating struggle for
American freedom in the 'Slavery and Freedom' exhibition reminds us of
the centrality of the African American journey to the American
experience—a story of triumph, resilience and joy over the centuries."
The site will also include links to related content elsewhere online, like a time-lapsed video of more than 31,000 slave ships during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, between 1514 and 1860.
"This is just the start," Young told The Washington Post. "We're looking right now at phase two and stories we can tell next."
You can resume activities that you did prior to the pandemic.
You can resume activities without wearing a mask or staying 6 feet
apart, except where required by federal, state, local, tribal, or
territorial laws, rules, and regulations, including local business and
workplace guidance.
If you travel in the United States, you do not need to get tested before or after travel or self-quarantine after travel.
You do NOT need to get tested before leaving the United States unless your destination requires it.
You still need to show a negative test result or documentation of recovery from COVID-19 before boarding an international flight to the United States.
You should still get tested 3-5 days after international travel.
You do NOT need to self-quarantine after arriving in the United States.
If you’ve been around someone who has COVID-19, you do not need to stay away from others or get tested unless you have symptoms.
However, if you live or work in a correctional or detention facility
or a homeless shelter and are around someone who has COVID-19, you
should still get tested, even if you don’t have symptoms.
NYTimes |As medical and social
advances mitigate diseases of old age and prolong life, the number of
exceptionally long-lived people is increasing sharply. The United Nations estimates that there were about 95,000 centenarians in 1990
and more than 450,000 in 2015. By 2100, there will be 25 million.
Although the proportion of people who live beyond their 110th birthday
is far smaller, this once-fabled milestone is also increasingly common
in many wealthy nations. The first validated cases of such
“supercentenarians” emerged in the 1960s. Since then, their global
numbers have multiplied by a factor of at least 10, though no one knows
precisely how many there are. In Japan alone, the population of supercentenarians grew to 146 from 22 between 2005 and 2015, a nearly sevenfold increase.
Given these statistics, you might expect
that the record for longest life span would be increasing, too. Yet
nearly a quarter-century after Calment’s death, no one is known to have
matched, let alone surpassed, her 122 years. The closest was an American
named Sarah Knauss, who died at age 119, two years after Calment. The
oldest living person is Kane Tanaka, 118, who resides in Fukuoka, Japan.
Very few people make it past 115. (A few researchers have even
questioned whether Calment really lived as long as she claimed, though
most accept her record as legitimate based on the weight of biographical
evidence.)
As the global population
approaches eight billion, and science discovers increasingly promising
ways to slow or reverse aging in the lab, the question of human
longevity’s potential limits is more urgent than ever. When their work
is examined closely, it’s clear that longevity scientists hold a wide
range of nuanced perspectives on the future of humanity. Historically,
however — and somewhat flippantly, according to many researchers — their
outlooks have been divided into two broad camps, which some journalists
and researchers call the pessimists and the optimists. Those in the
first group view life span as a candle wick that can burn for only so
long. They generally think that we are rapidly approaching, or have
already reached, a ceiling on life span, and that we will not witness
anyone older than Calment anytime soon.
In
contrast, the optimists see life span as a supremely, maybe even
infinitely elastic band. They anticipate considerable gains in life
expectancy around the world, increasing numbers of extraordinarily
long-lived people — and eventually, supercentenarians who outlive
Calment, pushing the record to 125, 150, 200 and beyond. Though
unresolved, the long-running debate has already inspired a much deeper
understanding of what defines and constrains life span — and of the
interventions that may one day significantly extend it.
The theoretical limits
on the length of a human life have vexed scientists and philosophers
for thousands of years, but for most of history their discussions were
largely based on musings and personal observations. In 1825, however,
the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz published a new mathematical model of mortality,
which demonstrated that the risk of death increased exponentially with
age. Were that risk to continue accelerating throughout life, people
would eventually reach a point at which they had essentially no chance
of surviving to the next year. In other words, they would hit an
effective limit on life span.
Instead,
Gompertz observed that as people entered old age, the risk of death
plateaued. “The limit to the possible duration of life is a subject not
likely ever to be determined,” he wrote, “even should it exist.” Since
then, using new data and more sophisticated mathematics, other
scientists around the world have uncovered further evidence of
accelerating death rates followed by mortality plateaus not only in
humans but also in numerous other species, including rats, mice, shrimp, nematodes, fruit flies and beetles.
In
2016, an especially provocative study in the prestigious research
journal Nature strongly implied that the authors had found the limit to
the human life span. Jan Vijg, a geneticist at the Albert Einstein
College of Medicine, and two colleagues analyzed decades’ worth of
mortality data from several countries and concluded that although the
highest reported age at death in these countries increased rapidly
between the 1970s and 1990s, it had failed to rise since then,
stagnating at an average of 114.9 years. Human life span, it seemed, had
arrived at its limit. Although some individuals, like Jeanne Calment,
might reach staggering ages, they were outliers, not indicators of a
continual lengthening of life.
scitechdaily | In a paper published today (January 13, 2021) in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science,
the researchers cite more than 150 scientific studies and conclude,
“That we are already on the path of a sixth major extinction is now
scientifically undeniable.”
Among the paper’s co-authors is Daniel Blumstein, a UCLA professor of
ecology and evolutionary biology and member of the UCLA Institute of
the Environment and Sustainability.
Because too many people have underestimated the severity of the
crisis and have ignored experts’ warnings, scientists must continue
speaking out, said Blumstein, author of the 2020 book “The Nature of
Fear: Survival Lessons from the Wild” — but they also must avoid either
sugarcoating the overwhelming challenges or inducing feelings of
despair.
“Without fully appreciating and broadcasting the scale of the
problems and the enormity of the solutions required, society will fail
to achieve even modest sustainability goals, and catastrophe will surely
follow,” he said. “What we are saying is frightening, but we must be
both candid and vocal if humanity is to understand the enormity of the
challenges we face in creating a sustainable future.”
The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions, each accounting for a
loss of more than 70% of all species on the planet. The most recent was
66 million years ago. Now, the paper reports, projected temperature
increases and other human assaults on the environment mean that
approximately 1 million of the planet’s 7 million to 10 million species
are threatened with extinction in the coming decades.
Blumstein said that level of damage could occur
within the next several decades; an extinction affecting as many as 70%
of all species — like the earlier mass extinctions cited in the paper —
could potentially occur within the next few centuries.
One of the major trends discussed in the paper is the explosive
growth of the planet’s human population. There are now 7.8 billion
people, more than double the Earth’s population just 50 years ago. And
by 2050, the figure is likely to reach 10 billion, the scientists write,
which would cause or exacerbate numerous serious problems. For example,
more than 700 million people are starving and more than 1 billion are
malnourished already; both figures are likely to increase as the
population grows.
Population growth also greatly increases the risk for pandemics, the
authors write, because most new infectious diseases result from
human–animal interactions, humans live closer to wild animals than ever
before and wildlife trade is continuing to increase significantly.
Population growth also contributes to rising unemployment and, when
combined with a hotter Earth, leads to more frequent and intense
flooding and fires, poorer water and air quality, and worsening human
health.
Before May 2020, M1 consists of (1)
currency outside the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve Banks, and the
vaults of depository institutions; (2) demand deposits at commercial
banks (excluding those amounts held by depository institutions, the U.S.
government, and foreign banks and official institutions) less cash
items in the process of collection and Federal Reserve float; and (3)
other checkable deposits (OCDs), consisting of negotiable order of
withdrawal, or NOW, and automatic transfer service, or ATS, accounts at
depository institutions, share draft accounts at credit unions, and
demand deposits at thrift institutions.
Beginning May 2020, M1
consists of (1) currency outside the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve
Banks, and the vaults of depository institutions; (2) demand deposits at
commercial banks (excluding those amounts held by depository
institutions, the U.S. government, and foreign banks and official
institutions) less cash items in the process of collection and Federal
Reserve float; and (3) other liquid deposits, consisting of OCDs and
savings deposits (including money market deposit accounts). Seasonally
adjusted M1 is constructed by summing currency, demand deposits, and
OCDs (before May 2020) or other liquid deposits (beginning May 2020),
each seasonally adjusted separately.
For more information on the
H.6 release changes and the regulatory amendment that led to the
creation of the other liquid deposits component and its inclusion in the
M1 monetary aggregate, see the H.6 announcements and Technical Q&As posted on December 17, 2020.
Suggested Citation:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US),
M1 Money Stock [M1SL],
retrieved from FRED,
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis;
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL,
April 27, 2021.
About those "rulers of BLM" - Never forget that Obama is the poster child and his cousin Warren Buffett is the money behind Black Lives Matter. Once you understand these basic facts, you can transcend the useless idiocy of talking in terms of "left" and "right", communist, fascist, conservative, progressive, etc..., rather, you can maintain laser-focus on who is doing the behavior and what their concrete-specific objectives can be discovered to be.
There
is, however, another version of events, in which the heartfelt
dedication to racial justice is only the forward-facing side of a more
complicated movement. Behind the street level activism and emotional
outpouring is a calculated machinery built by establishment money and
power that has seized on racial politics, in which some of the biggest
capitalists in the world are financially backing a group of
self-described “trained Marxists”—a label that Cullors enthusiastically
applies to herself and the group’s other co-founders.
These
bedfellows, whose stories and fortunes are never publicly presented as
related, are in reality intertwined under the umbrella of a fiscal
sponsor named the International Development Exchange. A modestly endowed
West Coast nonprofit with origins in the Peace Corps—which for decades
supported local farmers, shepherds, and agricultural workers across the
Global South—IDEX has, in the past six years, been transformed into two
distinct new things: the infrastructure back end to the Black Lives
Matter organization in the United States and also, at the very same
time, an investment fund vehicle driven by recruited MBAs and finance
experts seeking to leverage decades of on-the-ground grantee
relationships for novel forms of potentially problematic lending
instruments . And it did so with help from the family of one of the most
famous American billionaires in history—the Oracle of Omaha
himself.
About the police, as currently
configured, these economic burdens have been determined to be obsolete and a decision has been taken to do away with
their current barely governable configuration. Part of the War on Drugs
was to keep cops from policing their own neighborhoods. Even if they
live in the city they serve, they cannot work in the jurisdiction they
live in, as it may create a conflict of interest. Police not knowing
residents is policy, not accident.
Many police,
firefighters/EMTs, and other city employees do not live in the cities
that employ them. As the ratio of local residents working for a city
steadily declines, so does the performance of that city’s government.
It’s a terrible situation, made demonstrably worse by state laws that
struck down residency requirements for city employees statewide, in
contravention of home rule guarantees. State preemption of local control
is destroying municipal governments throughout numerous states. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.
With
the military, it seems odd that progressives are just now waking up to
the idea that an all-volunteer force somehow may mysteriously end up
with a disproportionate number of right-wing members. Maybe we have a
similar phenomenon with police. So I would suggest a draft not only for
the military but also for local police. Everyone at a young age should
experience one or the other, or maybe both, for a few years. Then
perhaps we could have informed discussions and dispense with most of the
righteous ranting.
We should also dispassionately
consider how dangerous a police officer’s job actually is – compared to a
truck driver, carpenter, farmer and host of other jobs…. hint, you will
find that a cops level of danger in their job does not make the top ten
list. And as for stopping crime, the police are
really, really bad at it. According to FBI stats, only 4% of major
crimes reported to police end in someone being convicted of a
crime and only half of all major crimes are reported. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.
If
we are actually concerned with public safety, with crime control, with
having a public institution who’s mandate is actually to serve and
protect the citizenry, then we need to design a whole new system from
the ground up. Trying to reform the policing system we have into doing
what we want it to do is doomed to fail. We need to start with a system
that is accountable to the populace it serves, and that is designed
specifically to provide security to that populace. We should not waste another moment trying to reform a
system that was designed for entirely different purposes than to protect
and serve the public.
So all the soap opera and
machismo pushed by cops – that their job is so tough and dangerous –
reduces to mush when held to the light of evidence. Continuing in that
vein, by and large, police officers are exceptionally well-paid for the
minimal qualifications required to get the job. Moreover, there are the
power and prestige attractions associated with being narratized as
heroic first responders and all that folderal. When you take into
consideration official overtime pay, and the pay available for
moonlighting, policing is one of the few remaining occupations in which a
certain demographic with nothing more than a high-school diploma can
realistically achieve a 6 figure income. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.
This is why
police have so little difficulty parting with the 6-8% annual vigorish
to their “fraternal orders”. The fraternal lodges are the real command
and control systems for police departments. The chief of police is
typically a bureaucratic figurehead whose job it is to run interference
with politicians – and to a limited degree – the public.
In the interest of supporting citations – I offer the following link - but recommend a google search on – fop brad lemon tow lot scandal
This
is a wonderful mid-sized urban anecdote of most of the moving parts
involved with the structure of power, prestige, and accountability in
contemporary policing. Abusive policing is concentrated among a
relatively small proportion of police officers. The majority of U.S.
police probably spend their entire careers without any incidence of
corruption or brutality. The problem is that police
abuse is protected, unconditionally, resulting in either no or
disproportionately low consequences for their actions. What results is
that some naturally violent or naturally corrupt people will seek out
police careers because it allows them to fulfill these desires without
consequence. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.
There’s an endemic debate over what people are saying when they refer
to ‘the west’. Is the west defined by its whiteness, its wealth, its
liberal democracy? Should we call it the ‘highly developed countries’,
the ‘advanced economies’, the ‘first world’, or the ‘global north’? I
think most of these terms misses what is distinctive about this set of
places. The countries we think of as ‘western’ are all countries where
Catholicism was once dominant but is now in varying levels of retreat.
Western countries are ‘post-Catholic’.
Catholicism
has certain distinctive effects on a place. Crucially, Catholicism
situates politics as subordinate to morality. In medieval Catholic
states, the monarch derives authority from the pope or from divine
right. This means the monarch’s legitimacy depends on the monarch having
the right moral orientation. In other parts of the world, politics and
morality were more heavily enmeshed. In the Byzantine Empire, the
emperor was supreme in both religious and temporal matters. In the
Islamic world, the caliph combined both political and religious
authority. In China, different dynasties embraced and promoted the
teachings of many different schools of thought at varying points. It was
only in the Catholic west that politics and morality were firmly
separated, with the former rendered clearly subordinate to the latter.
Are
corporations now deriving their "authoriteh" from the rump
"professional" class mediocrities comprising the
diversity-inclusion-equity clergy? Can the ecclesiastical congregation
of diversity-inclusion-equity offer absolution? Or merely economic cancellation...,
Given the weakness of post-Catholic morality - the only pervasive corporate values I see nowadays boil down
to Overton's Window of permitted discourse - and - expected prompt and
unquestioning compliance on the part of economically captured consumers. The pretend ethics of
diversity-inclusion-equity have been quickly and none too subtly
supplemented by "trust the science" indoctrination and compliance. If
our corporate feudal lords can only police what we say or have ever
said, that only scratches the surface of intended moral orthodoxy. If they can
police what we do in ways that extend down to our genomes, then the post-Catholic corporatism has transcended the wildest fantasies of the pre-reformation Holy Roman Church.
The
government can't police your intentions or your expressions or your
behaviors anywhere near as well as corporations with amorphous
community standards and big data, algorithms, and inexpensive filipino and
south asian comment moderators.
Did you happen to see Warren Buffett's cousin and
the diversity commander-in-chief peddling some highly suspect
"trust the science" theocracy just last sunday on teevee? When everything's said and done, if
we can't persuade you to comply, we've got some community standard
digital passports coming your way here shortly so that you can show and
prove your true belief in a way that the penitents of old never previously had to do in their confessionals...,
Forbes | At a concert you usually come with your ticket, either electronic or
physical, and stand ready to have it scanned. Now imagine going to that
same show and, while someone is scanning your ticket, they also ask for
your vaccine ID. So you pull it up on your phone and let them scan it,
too, allowing the venue to verify you’re up to date on your Covid-19
vaccine. It’s only then that you are allowed to see the show.
This isn’t a far-fetched scenario. A group of businesses from the
healthcare sector are banding together to create digital vaccine ID
cards that verify Covid-19 vaccination status. In the future these
cards, which can be stored on smartphones and other digital devices, may
be required to gain entry into restaurants, bars, schools and
airplanes. It’s a step that might be necessary in order to reopen the
economy as quickly as possible.
“Hopefully, we can quickly bring people who are vaccinated back into
the workplace,” says Joan Harvey, president of care solutions at
Evernorth. Evernorth is one of the groups working to develop these ID
cards, along with Mitre, Cerner, Epic, Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, Oracle,
Salesforce, The Commons Project and other major companies. Together
they’re forming the Vaccination Credential Initiative, which plans to
create an accessible, secure way to prove Covid-19 vaccination status.
These SMART health cards
will be an encrypted vaccine record that can be stored in any digital
wallet. For those that don’t have smartphones, says Brian Anderson,
chief digital health physician at Mitre, the vaccine records can “easily
be stored on a paper QR code.”
Though some of the companies that have joined the coalition have
never worked together before, representatives say that they’ve been
united by a desire to end the pandemic as soon as possible. For example,
Cerner and Epic, two of the largest competing electronic medical
records companies in the country, have both joined the coalition and are
working together to create an ID card that will easily integrate with
both of the company’s platforms. “A pandemic has an incredible
catalytic power to bring together nontraditional partners,” Anderson
says, “partners that might otherwise be competitors.” And while the
coalition is made up of companies from the private sector, they’re also
working closely with the government, he adds.
Vaccine ID cards aren’t a new idea. Several countries already require
proof of vaccination against diseases like yellow fever before
travelers are allowed to enter. Even right now, healthcare workers who
have gotten the Covid-19 vaccine have a white piece of paper that lists
the date of vaccination. But vaccine ID cards like this “would be on a
completely different scale,” says Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious
disease physician. It could be the first time that proof of vaccination
is required to do things that were previously mundane, like eat at a
restaurant or go to work. Of course, Kuppalli says, “I think there are a
lot of ethical issues that we have to think about before we go down
this path.”
R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin at
Madison, agrees that there are several ethical hurdles that could arise.
While public and private entities could make proof of vaccination a
condition of entry, she says, there will always be exceptions. “Private
employers could make vaccination a general requirement for employees in
at-will states,” she says, “but there would have to be exceptions for
employees who are medically contraindicated, those who are disabled and
unable to take the vaccine, and possibly for those with a religious
objection.”
deagel |There have been many questions about the countries forecast specially the one focusing
on the United States of America (USA). They won't be answered one by one but
below you can find some explanation, thoughts and reflections. We are going to
keep this as short as possible.
The majority of the economic and demographic data used in the making of
the
forecasts is widely available by institutions such as the CIA, IMF, UN,
USG,
etc. You can see the most relevant data at every single country's page.
There is a tiny part of data coming from a variety of shadow sources
such
as Internet gurus, unsigned reports and others. But all these sources
are from
the internet and are of public domain for at least a minority. For
example, several years
ago Dagong, the Chinese ratings agency,
published a report analyzing the physical economy of the States
comparing it with those of
China, Germany and Japan. The conclusion was that the US GDP was
something
between $5 to $10 trillion instead of $15 trillion as officially
reported by the
USG. We assume that the official data, especially economic, released by
governments is fake, cooked or distorted in some degree. Historically it
is well
known that the former Soviet Union was making up fake statistics years
before
its collapse. Western as well as other countries are making up their
numbers
today to conceal their real state of affairs. We are sure that many
people out
there can find government statistics in their own countries that by
their own
personal experience are hard to believe or are so optimistic that may
belong to
a different country.
Despite the numeric data "quantity" there is a "quality" model which has not a
direct translation into numeric data. The 2014 strain of Ebola has a death rate
of 50-60% but try to imagine what would happen if there is a pandemic of Ebola
with hundreds of thousands or millions infected with the virus. So far the few
cases of Ebola-infected people have "enjoyed" intensive healthcare with
anti-viral and breathing assistance but above all with abundant human support by
Physicians and nurses. In a pandemic scenario that kind of healthcare won't be
available for the overwhelming number of infected leading to a dramatic increase
of the death rate due to the lack of proper healthcare. The "quality" factor is
that the death rate could increase to 80-90% in a pandemic scenario from the
stated 50-60% rate. The figure
itself is not important what is relevant is the fact that the scenario can
evolve beyond the initial conditions from a 50% death toll to more than 90%. By
the way, no pandemic or nuclear war is included in the forecast.
The key element to understand the process that the USA will enter in the
upcoming decade is migration. In the past, specially in the 20th
century, the
key factor that allowed the USA to rise to its colossus status was
immigration
with the benefits of a demographic expansion supporting the credit
expansion and
the brain drain from the rest of the world benefiting the States. The
collapse
of the Western financial system will wipe out the standard of living of
its
population while ending ponzi schemes such as the stock exchange and the
pension
funds. The population will be hit so badly by a full array of bubbles
and ponzi
schemes that the migration engine will start to work in reverse
accelerating
itself due to ripple effects thus leading to the demise of the States.
This
unseen situation for the States will develop itself in a cascade pattern
with
unprecedented and devastating effects for the economy. Jobs offshoring
will
surely end with many American Corporations relocating overseas thus
becoming
foreign Corporations!!!! We see a significant part of the American
population
migrating to Latin America and Asia while migration to Europe -
suffering a
similar illness - won't be relevant. Nevertheless the death toll will be
horrible. Take into account that the Soviet Union's population was
poorer than
the Americans nowadays or even then. The ex-Soviets suffered during the
following struggle in
the 1990s with a significant death toll and the loss of national pride.
Might we
say "Twice the pride, double the fall"? Nope. The American standard of
living is
one of the highest, far more than double of the Soviets while having
added a services economy that will be gone along with the financial
system. When
pensioners see their retirement disappear in front of their eyes and
there are
no servicing jobs you can imagine what is going to happen next. At least
younger
people can migrate. Never in human history were so many elders among the
population. In past centuries people were lucky to get to their 30s or
40s. The American downfall is set to be far worse than the Soviet
Union's one. A confluence of crisis with a devastating result.
The Demographic crisis in the former Soviet Union countries has extended for
over two decades, if we accept that it ended early in this decade (2010s). The
demographic crisis will hit the World in the near future and is projected to
last between three and eight decades more or less depending on technological
breakthrough and environmental issues. The aftermath is more likely a frozen
picture with the population numbers staying the same for a very, very long
period of time. The countries forecast population numbers do reflect
birth/deaths but also migratory movements. Many countries are going to increase
their gross population due to immigration while their native population may
shrink.
Over the past two thousand years we have witnessed the Western civilization
built around the Mediterranean Sea shifting to Northern Europe and then by the
mid 20th century shifting to an Atlantic axis to finally get centered into the
States in the past 30 years. The next move will see the civilization being
centered in Asia with Russia and China on top. Historically a change in the
economic paradigm has resulted in a death toll that is rarely highlighted by
mainstream historians. When the transition from rural areas to large cities
happened in Europe many people unable to accept the new paradigm killed
themselves. They killed themselves by a psychological factor. This is not
mainstream but it is true. A new crisis joins old, well known patterns with new
ones.
Sorry to disappoint many of you with our forecast. It is getting worse and worse
every year since the beginning of the pre-crisis in 2007. It is already said
that this website is non-profit, built on spare time and we provide our
information and services AS IS without further explanations and/or guarantees.
We are not linked to any government in any way, shape or form. We are not a
death or satanic cult or arms dealers as some BS is floating around the internet
on this topic. Take into account that the forecast is nothing more than a model
whether flawed or correct. It is not God's word or a magic device that allows to
foresee the future.
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