Betcha $1.00 Russia Doesn't Suffer A Monkeypox Epidemic

• No documented community transmission until 6th May 2022 
• Outbreak mainly (96%) been in homosexual and bisexual men (without history of travel to endemic countries) 
• Cases, history of a sexually transmitted infection (STI) in the last year (54.2%), and 10 or more sexual partners in the last 3 months (31.8%) 
• Monkeypox is being transmitted in interconnected sexual networks that sustain STI transmission
  

nakedcapitalism  |  From IM Doc at the start of the week:

Today a gay patient in his 30s showed up in the office. He is healthy and very athletic. He is a “boy” to another older gay man.

They travel the world and are into serious gay fetish play. Spanking, bondage, discipline etc.

Patient has had fever and chills and horrible headache for 3 days. A reticulonodular rash has developed but no vesicles yet. They have been playing in clubs, parties, and orgies in 4 major cities the past 2 weeks.

There are so many things in that diagnostic differential but of course monkeypox is right up there.

And of course NO TESTING IS AVAILABLE. I called all levels of health department and even CDC today. The CDC is voice mail hell. Never talked to a human. It took several hours for a health dept human but by then the patient was already gone potentially spreading the wealth everywhere. They are acting as if I was talking about the Martian Flu. Again, we have known about this two months now, and it was like I was asking for the Holy Grail. Testing? “I need to call so and so……not sure…..but I’ll get right back to you……..”. And don’t get me started about their handling of the quarantine.

I have no idea if he is really a case. Multiple tests are pending. But not monkeypox. There is apparently no blood test for that. You have to swab the vesicles. But what if we do not have vesicles yet? Or if a patient may be past the vesicular stage? Crickets.

I would like to think there is a baseline competence. But that is too much an ask right now.

Again two months all over the news and this is what we have.

We are a completely unserious nation.

Remember that IM Doc is in a wealthy destination in Flyover. Apparently the local public health officials not only think that monkeypox is exclusively a gay STD, but also that they can’t have it locally because there are no gay men in their part of the world. Did they miss Brokeback Mountain? Or the private jet landing schedule?

On top of that, the local public health officials appear unable to use a search engine. In fact, there are monkeypox tests, but as IM Doc did correctly infer, they can’t be used before the vesicles stage, which is 2-4+ days after lesions start forming. Oh, and monkeypox patients are contagious as soon as they start having lesions and potentially also during the prodome period, before rash starts.

All You Beaners Are Like Breakfast Tacos In A Bronx Bogida...,

dailymail |  As distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami, and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio - is your strength,' she said, mispronouncing the word 'bodega.'

'We are not tacos. Our heritage as Latinos is shaped by a variety of diasporas, cultures and food traditions, and should not be reduced to a stereotype,' the National Association of Hispanic Journalists said in response.

The gaffe came as President Biden's popularity among Latino voters continues to plummet. 

According to a recent Quinnipiac opinion poll found that Biden's approval rating among young Hispanic voters is around 26%. 

San Antonio is home to one of the largest Latino communities in the United States, with a population of nearly 1.5 million people that is 65 percent Hispanic or Latino, according to U.S. Census data.

In April 2021, Biden made a similar gaffe when she mispronounced the phrase: 'Si se puede' (Yes we can) to a group of farmworkers in Delano, California. 

During the same speech on Monday, Biden also made reference to a recent visit that she made to Uvalde, Texas in the wake of the May 2022 massacre at Robb Elementary School.

She said: 'I stood in front of those 21 crosses and touched the pictures of the bright, beautiful faces that would never again laugh, or open birthday presents, or tell their parents that they love them. And I knew that a piece of Uvalde would always be a part of me.' 

The first lady also touted her husband's modest gun reform law saying that the president 'will do everything he can to call on Congress to act, including on measures to ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines.'

Biden added: 'A ban on guns that only belong on the battlefield. The right to make our own decisions about our own bodies,' to rapturous applaus

 

Oh Yeah..., Happy Land Of The Free And Home Of The Brave!!!

 

‘Merica pic.twitter.com/csPvYZlYIA

— TG (@TG22110) June 27, 2022

Sum'n Jes Not Right About These Front-Running Crypto Temporary Autonomous Zones...,

technologyreview  |  Libertarian attempts to create autonomous mini-civilizations go back at least to the 1960s, but crypto is reinvigorating this old dream with a fresh infusion of cash and hype.

For an idea of what a corporate-run Bitcoin City might be like, look to a burgeoning project called Próspera, supported by the Free Private Cities Foundation in Honduras. While it’s not explicitly billed as a crypto community, a heavy emphasis on the crypto industry and the backing of heavyweight Bitcoin investors place Próspera in the same ideological milieu—a fusion of crypto evangelism and libertarian credos.

Próspera (Spanish for “prosperous”) occupies a small enclave on the Honduran island of Roatán. The developers have been handed the chance to model a society from scratch, including its own health, education, policing, and social security systems.

Honduras amended its constitution in 2013 to allow the creation of special economic zones managed by corporations and operating largely outside the country’s legal and regulatory oversight. The resulting enclaves are known in English as Zones of Economic Development and Employment (ZEDEs, pronounced “zeh-dehs”).

The decision was based on American economist Paul Romer’s proposal for charter cities—a type of special economic zone in an existing state but managed by another nation’s government. Considered one of his more outlandish ideas, they reflect his theories about how to promote foreign investment and alleviate inequality. Honduran ZEDEs are among the first tests of this concept, though Romer has held talks with some other governments.

Romer collaborated with the Honduran government at first, but they parted ways following disagreements over how his idea was being implemented. (Romer didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Próspera, which broke ground in 2020, plans to implement ultra-low taxes, outsource services typically managed by the public sector, establish an “arbitration center” in place of a court, and charge an annual fee for citizenship (either physical or e-residency) that involves signing a “social contract” the company hopes will discourage misbehavior.

When I visited the site in February, a central office was one of the few completed buildings. There was no private Próspera police force, but on the front desk was a number for Bulldog Security International, a private security company engaged by hotels on the island that consider the local police force inadequate. A pair of two-story buildings housed office workers. The rest was largely a construction site, although a residential tower block is underway.

A rendering of the future Próspera shows apartments that appear to take inspiration from the shells of the island’s indigenous conch—soft curves in pearly coral, cream, and glass. A strip of white sand separates the apartment block from the gentle lap of the Caribbean Sea.

The businesses most likely to be drawn here are those keen to escape regulation in their own countries—Próspera’s chief of staff, Trey Goff, highlights medical innovation, health tourism, and just about every facet of the cryptocurrency industry. 

“There’s an automatic degree of overlap with the crypto industry and what we’re doing,” he says. “Because they see themselves as at the forefront of financial innovation, and we want to enable that.”

 

Jordan Peterson Needs To Stick With "Clean Up Your Room" And Other Simple Nostrums...,

 

Police Protection For Cowardly Uvalde IQ-75 LARPS In Uniform?

dailybeast  |  As families in this rural town prepare to bury the 19 children and two adults gunned down in a brutal school massacre this week, they are left shell-shocked by not only the devastation the gunman wrought, but by the revelation that, as they see it, those who were sworn to protect and serve them did just the opposite.

“While those babies were in there dying, they stood there with their thumbs in their asses trying to figure out what to do,” said Roger Garza, a friend of the family of teacher Irma Garcia, who was killed by the gunman as she tried to shield her fourth-grade students.

“I mean don’t we pay them to rush in and protect people? Somebody needs to be held accountable for this,” Garza told The Daily Beast.

“We were waiting outside and yelling about how we wanted to go in and storm the classroom,” said Javier Cazares, whose fourth-grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack. “I came running and the police were in a panic trying to figure out what to do. Now we know children, including my daughter, were dying in there. That is what hurts. Knowing they could have maybe protected her and those other kids.”

Cazares wants to know why they didn’t do anything; it is a question that everyone here is asking.

“While those children sat in there with this madman, as many as 19 officers had to think about what to do,” said Ignacio Perez, who was doing his best to comfort Cazares. “I promise you these parents had a plan and were ready to act on it. Where was the bravery? In those kids. That is where it was.”

Amid the growing outrage over the botched police response, authorities in Uvalde have reportedly called in reinforcements from around the state to protect the local officers from potential threats.

The additional cops, from various agencies in other jurisdictions, will supplement Uvalde’s ranks for an unspecified period, and will also provide security for the mayor, officials with the Texas Police Chiefs Association told CBS DFW.

In the immediate aftermath of the May 24 massacre at Robb Elementary, Gov. Greg Abbott lauded the police response, insisting that officers had acted heroically and saved numerous lives. But he lashed out angrily when a different narrative later emerged, saying he was “livid” over having been “misled.” Federal agents on the scene said no one seemed to be in charge, and at one point, agonized parents waiting outside considered rushing the school themselves.

One Uvalde cop claimed there “was almost a mutiny,” telling People magazine that he and his colleagues “felt like cowards” for not storming the building earlier.

 

 

Intelligence And Wisdom Don't Scale

notesfromdisgraceland |  Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that. (George Carlin)

Things don’t look encouraging when observed at higher resolution. This is a graph of the IQ distribution. The average IQ is around 100 with 68% of population residing inside the two standard deviations range, between 85 and 115, which means that about 16% are of deep sub-average intelligence. These numbers are fairly robust across different countries in the developed world.

This distribution becomes particularly alarming when applied to a large relatively non-oppressive country. In the context of modern liberal societies, the synergy of stupidity, size, and democracy reinforces the malignant potential of the stupidity of the collective.

Transcription of these numbers to America implies that about 53 million (16%) people (entire population of France) are of sub-average intelligence, out of which 7 million (entire Bulgaria) is seriously impaired. These people are empowered to express their opinion and impose their will in the ballot box.

By mobilizing the left side of the distribution behind a single political movement – a maneuver that represents a collectivization of mediocrity — makes them even stupider by lowering their collective IQ further, and persuading them to believe in pretty much anything. When their discontent is streamlined and wrapped into a single narrative, in an electoral democratic system, these 16-percenters can become a decisive factor[2]. Empowered by their malignant stupidity, such people are capable of committing the most extreme atrocities as they have been throughout human history.

Humanity cannot outgrow its own death drive

Intelligence is not a theoretical quantity, but represents a behavioral quality of creatures in an open environment. (Peter Sloterdijk)

Humans are generally intelligent, but this individual intelligence fails to get collectivized. This has only become worse with progress and the general trend of increasing acceleration and addiction to speed. The long term has become so long that it now exceeds our capacity for statistical prediction, but the short-term has accelerated so much that snap decisions are the only decisions ever made. The stakes have become higher – short-term survival is no longer guaranteed, which leads to a shift of focus.

In the face of the urgency of short-term survival, long-term foresight collapses. This defines the tradeoff — the lower the odds of survival, the weaker the desires and capacities for grasping the long-term. As the group size increases and individuality fades away, collectivization inevitably leads to abdication of responsibilities. This leads to collective myopia, which attracts its membership and supports the group’s desire to grow. As a consequence, we no longer engage in intergenerational projects — passing the baton to the next generation is the best we can do (as a collective).  

This removal of the long-term perspective, its subversion, leaves power dominated by short-term forces, which under the capricious conditions of the market forces requires adaptive, liquid or transient strategies as a basic skill set. At a systemic level, change is taking the form of positive feedback. In conditions of general info acceleration and hypercomplexity, as conscious and rational will become unable to adjust to the trends, the trends themselves become self-reinforcing (up to the point of collapse)[3].

For years now, the Right-wing populism of the capitalist West has been tapping into the left side of the IQ distribution. This has proven to be a very successful strategy for their project. Unsurprisingly, in the most spectacular staging of abdication of collective responsibility, thus cultivated populist movement became the epicenter of insane resistance to simple measures of containment of the COVID pandemic.

At the core of the incoherent response to the pandemic – the spectacular failure of adjusting to the most straightforward problem of self-defense of the collective body – resides collective abdication of responsibility. This was a simple test of common sense, accepting the most basic measures any single human would normally have no problems accepting, but which collectively encountered resistance on a large scale (bordering on hysterical) causing, at the end, massive casualties, financial and economic damages, and unnecessary complications and extension of the pandemic. The resistance to alignment with simple and logical adjustment to an existential threat is just another illustration of the erosion of basic survival instincts caused by decades of deliberate and programmatic anti-science project and glorification of mediocrity.

In the world of infinite acceleration, humanity is spontaneously converging towards a state of maximum cognitive incompetence, a collective Dunning-Kruger effect. According to the latest statistics, there are about 41 million Q-anon believers in the United States.

However, this does not mean that capitalist democracies carry exclusive blame for the degradation of intellect and the rising rate of malignant stupidity. Rather, it is a combination of human nature and the law of large numbers. As much as Soviet-style communism pretended to have sought to divert the inevitable self-destructiveness of capitalism, it merely reinvented different and more efficient ways of self-destruction. A similar story goes with fascism. Communism’s record of ecological misconduct, which has penetrated deep into the territory of criminal, is just one of many examples of its self-destructive overdrive. Its pretended ideological attempts to be something else from what it really was were just failed diversions that merely accelerated the inevitable.

 

Der Sonnenrand IS The Spirit Of The Ukrainian People...,

newsweek  |  An official of the U.S.-led NATO alliance has told Newsweek that the coalition did not notice what appeared to be a symbol associated with Nazism on the uniform of a Ukrainian soldier featured in a since-deleted photo on NATO's official Twitter account.

The image, posted Tuesday to commemorate International Women's Day, contained four images related to the current crisis in Ukraine, where a Russian military incursion was set to enter its third week.

"All women and girls must live free and equal. This international women's day we think of the remarkable women of #Ukraine," NATO tweeted alongside a Ukrainian flag emoji. "Their strength, bravery and resilience are symbolic of the spirit of their nation #IWD2022."

The first of the four images included what appeared to be a Ukrainian servicemember bearing a "Black Sun" on the chest area of her military fatigues. The symbol, also known in German as "Schwarze Sonne" or "Sonnenrad," is rooted in Nazi occultism and has been brandished by far-right elements across the globe, including in Ukraine, where it is featured on the official logo of the National Guard's Azov Regiment.

The image first appeared to be shared on social media on February 14 by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and was later syndicated by a number of outlets and agencies, and was featured prominently on the front page of The Guardian the following day. The symbol itself, however, is not readily visible, as it is nearly the same color as the green camouflage of the soldier's uniform.

Shortly after NATO shared the image, the symbol was noted by a number of social media users and then taken down swiftly.

 

Nobody Thought The "Rules-Based" World Order Would Give Way This Fast...,

thesaker  |  So I am somewhat chagrined as I watch the speed at which this U.S.-centered financialized system has de-dollarized over the span of just a year or two. The basic theme of my Super Imperialism has been how, for the past fifty years, the U.S. Treasury-bill standard has channeled foreign savings to U.S. financial markets and banks, giving Dollar Diplomacy a free ride. I thought that de-dollarization would be led by China and Russia moving to take control of their economies to avoid the kind of financial polarization that is imposing austerity on the United States.^[2] But U.S. officials are forcing Russia, China and other nations not locked into the U.S. orbit to see the writing on the wall and overcome whatever hesitancy they had to de-dollarize.

I had expected that the end of the dollarized imperial economy would come about by other countries breaking away. But that is not what has happened. U.S. diplomats themselves have chosen to end international dollarization, while helping Russia build up its own means of self-reliant agricultural and industrial production. This global fracture process actually has been going on for some years, starting with the sanctions blocking America’s NATO allies and other economic satellites from trading with Russia. For Russia, these sanctions had the same effect that protective tariffs would have had.

Russia had remained too enthralled by free-market neoliberal ideology to take steps to protect its own agriculture and industry. The United States provided the help that was needed by imposing domestic self-reliance on Russia. When the Baltic states obeyed American sanctions and lost the Russian market for their cheese and other farm products, Russia quickly created its own cheese and dairy sector – while becoming the world’s leading grain exporter.

Russia is discovering (or is on the verge of discovering) that it does not need U.S. dollars as backing for the ruble’s exchange rate. Its central bank can create the rubles needed to pay domestic wages and finance capital formation. The U.S. confiscations of its dollar and euro reserves may finally lead Russia to end its adherence to neoliberal monetary philosophy, as Sergei Glaziev has long been advocating, in favor of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

The same dynamic of undercutting ostensible U.S aims has occurred with U.S. sanctions against the leading Russian billionaires. The neoliberal shock therapy and privatizations of the 1990s left Russian kleptocrats with only one way to cash out on the assets they had grabbed from the public domain. That was to incorporate their takings and sell their shares in London and New York. Domestic savings had been wiped out, and U.S. advisors persuaded Russia’s central bank not to create its own ruble money.

The result was that Russia’s national oil, gas and mineral patrimony was not used to finance a rationalization of Russian industry and housing. Instead of the revenue from privatization being invested to create new Russian means of protection, it was burned up on nouveau-riche acquisitions of luxury British real estate, yachts and other global flight-capital assets. But the effect of sanctions making the dollar, sterling and euro holdings of Russian billionaires hostage has been to make the City of London too risky a venue in which to hold their assets – and for the wealthy of any other nation potentially subject to U.S. sanctions. By imposing sanctions on the richest Russians closest to Putin, U.S. officials hoped to induce them to oppose his breakaway from the West, and thus to serve effectively as NATO agents-of-influence. But for Russian billionaires, their own country is starting to look safest.

For many decades now, the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury have fought against gold recovering its role in international reserves. But how will India and Saudi Arabia view their dollar holdings as Biden and Blinken try to strong-arm them into following the U.S. “rules-based order” instead of their own national self-interest? The recent U.S. dictates have left little alternative but to start protecting their own political autonomy by converting dollar and euro holdings into gold as an asset free from political liability of being held hostage to the increasingly costly and disruptive U.S. demands.

U.S. diplomacy has rubbed Europe’s nose in its abject subservience by telling its governments to have their companies dump their Russian assets for pennies on the dollar after Russia’s foreign reserves were blocked and the ruble’s exchange rate plunged. Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and other U.S. investors moved quickly to buy up what Shell Oil and other foreign companies were unloading.