First At Visioncircle, Then Here In 2011 And Again In 2014

JoSS | This work was supported in part by Department of Defense, the Office of Naval Research(ONR), United States Navy Grant No. 9620.1.1140071, NSF IRI9633 662 and the NSF IGERT 9972762 for research and training in CASOS. Additional support was provided by CASOS - the center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems at Carnegie Mellon University. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Department of Defense, the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, or the U.S. government.

Abstract: Given the increasing threat of terrorism and spread of terrorist organizations, it is of vital importance to understand the properties of such organizations and to devise successful strategies for destabilizing them or decreasing their efficiency. However, intelligence information on these organizations is often incomplete, inaccurate or simply not available. This makes the study of terrorist networks and the evaluation of destabilization strategies difficult. In this paper, we propose a computational methodology for realistically simulating terrorist networks and evaluating alternative destabilization strategies. We proceed to use this methodology to evaluate and conduct a sensitivity analysis of the impact of various destabilization strategies under varying information surveillance regimes. We find that destabilization strategies that focus on the isolation of individuals who are highly central are ineffective in the long run as the network will heal itself as individuals who are nearly structurally equivalent to the isolated individuals "move in" and fill the communication gaps.

Introduction
For reasons of national security it is important to understand the properties of terrorist organizations that make such organizations efficient and flexible, and based on this understanding devise successful strategies to destabilize such organizations or curtail their efficiency, adaptability, and ability to move knowledge and resources. The assessment of destabilization strategies poses a number of key challenges. What does the underlying organization look like? Does it evolve? What strategies inhibit or effect the evolutiuon so that the organization is destabilized? In this paper, we provide an approach to assessing destabilization strategies that draws on work in organization science, knowledge management and computer science.

Terrorist organizations are often characterized as cellular organizations composed of quasi-independent cells and distributed command. In a sense, this is a non-traditional organizational configuration; hence, much of the knowledge in traditional organizational theory, particularly that focused on hierarchies or markets, does not apply. To be sure, lessons can be learned from the work on distributed and decentralized organizations that provides some guidance. This work demonstrates that such structures are often adaptive, useful in a volatile environment, and capable of rapid response [1] [2]. In other words, we should expect terrorist organization to adapt, and adapt rapidly. This suggests, that in general, they should be difficult to destabilize; however, the traditional organizational literature provides little guidance on how to destabilize the organization.

In general, the organization's form or design profoundly influences its performance, adaptability, and ability to move information [3]. It follows that organizations can be destabilized by altering their design. The one caveat here, is that organizations, particularly more distributed and decentralized ones, are continually evolving [4]. Terrorist organizations are often characterized as dynamic networks in which the connections among personnel define the nature of that evolution. This suggests that social network analysis will be useful in characterizing the underlying structure and in locating vulnerabilities in terms of key actors.

In general, organizations evolve as they face unanticipated changes in their environment, rapidly evolving technologies, and intelligent and adaptive opponents. Over the past decade, progress has been made in understanding the set of factors that enable adaptation and partially validated models of adaptive networks now exist [5]. A key result is that, in the short run, there appears to be a tradeoff between adaptivity and extremely high performance in organizations [6]. This suggests that forcing an organization to adapt should reduce its performance. Thus, even if an actor is no longer key, the mere isolation of that actor may be sufficient to be disruptive. However, to assess this a model of organizational change and network healing is needed.

Since the destabilization of terrorist networks could inhibit their ability to effect harm, there is a profound need for an approach that would allow researchers to reason about dynamic cellular networks and evaluate the potential effect of destabilization strategies. To be useful, such an approach must account for the natural evolution of cellular networks. This situation is further complicated by the fact that the information available on the terrorist network is liable to be incomplete and possibly erroneous. Hence, destabilization strategies need to be compared and contrasted in terms of their robustness under varying levels and types of information error. In other words, it would be misleading to judge destabilization strategies in terms of their impact on a static an unchanging network [7].

These problems suggest the need for a new methodological approach. In this paper, we provide an approach based on the use of a multi-agent network model of the co-evolution of the network of "observers" (the blue network) and the "terrorists" (the red network) in which the observers can capture only partial data on the underlying covert network and the covert network evolves both naturally and in response to attacks by the observers. This approach builds off of organization theory and social network theory, as well as machine learning and dynamic network analysis. Specifically, we have developed a computational model of dynamic cellular organizations and used it to evaluate a number of alternative strategies for destabilization of cellular networks.

It is important at the outset to note that this examination of destabilization strategies is highly exploratory. We make no claims that the examination of destabilization strategies is comprehensive, nor that the types of "error" in the data that intelligence agencies can collect is completely described. Further, our estimate of the structure of the covert network is based on publicly available data much of which is qualitative and requires interpretation. Thus, this work should be read as a study in the power of an empirically grounded simulation approach and a call for future research. Further, we restrict our analysis to a structural or network analysis and focus on what does the covert network look like, how does its structure influence its performance and ability to pass information, how does it evolve, how can its evolution be altered (its behavior destabilized) through interventions focused on the nodes, and what interventions should be taken given the level of fidelity in the information that we have. Admittedly, in this complex arena there are many other factors that are critical, but they are beyond the scope of this study. Thus, from a straight social network perspective, this study suggests the types of methodological issues that will emerge when working with dynamic large scale networks under uncertainty.

To ground this paper, a short case description is provided of Al Qaeda with the focus on the network structure. In these two descriptions we draw on both military and organizational theory. This is followed by a discussion of the intelligence agencies engaged in anti-terrorist activity and the possible data and errors in said data. Our intent is to demonstrate, at a fairly high level, the context and the resultant information and modelling problems, not to provide a full analysis for intelligence or military operations. As good science often emerges from attacking hard real world problems, we are trying to provide sufficient detail to understand the basis for the problems that research must address, rather than simply provide a high theoretical description of general data problems. This is followed by a brief discussion of the applicability of traditional social network analysis and the need to take a dynamic network perspective. We then describe a computational model of terrorist organizations as dynamic evolving networks, and anti-terrorist bodies with emphasis on their information collection and destabilization strategies. A virtual experiment is used to examine destabilization strategies and the results are then discussed.

Russia: Gas Station With Nuclear Weapons That Has Mastered The Complete Nuclear Fuel Cycle

nuclear-news  |  The plutonium for this was produced from uranium during the operation of other nuclear power plants and recovered from the used fuel assemblies through reprocessing.

MOX fuel is manufactured from plutonium recovered from used reactor fuel, mixed with depleted uranium which is a by-product from uranium enrichment.

“Full conversion of the BN-800 to MOX fuel is a long-anticipated milestone for the nuclear industry. For the first time in the history of Russian nuclear power, we proceed to operation of a fast neutron reactor with a full load of uranium-plutonium fuel and closed nuclear fuel cycle,” said Alexander Ugryumov, Senior Vice President for Research and Development at TVEL JSC.

“This is the original reason and target why the BN-800 was developed, and why Rosatom built the unique automated fuel fabrication facility at the Mining and Chemical Combine. Advanced technologies of fissile materials recycling and re-fabrication of nuclear fuel will make it possible to expand the resource feed-stock of the nuclear power, reprocess irradiated fuel instead of storing it, and to reduce the volumes of waste.”

​The unit is a sodium-cooled fast reactor which produces about 820 MWe. It started operation in 2016 and in 2020 achieved a capacity factor of 82% despite having an experimental role in proving reactor technologies and fuels.

Died Suddenly: Zeta Potential And Covid-19

amidwesterndoctor |   One mission of this Substack has been to bring the concept of zeta potential to the awareness of the general public as I believe it is critical for understanding many different diseases including COVID-19 and both spike protein and non-spike protein vaccine injuries. A detailed summary of the concept can be found here:

The Forgotten Side of Medicine

What Makes All Vaccines So Dangerous?

In the first part of this series, I discussed how diseases frequently emerge that before long affect many people, and how in many cases conventional medicine cannot acknowledge what happened. Instead, these diseases will often be labeled as “syndromes…

When a substance is mixed in water, it has three options, not mix with it (typically either floating to the top or settling to the bottom), dissolve like salt, or form a colloidal suspension. Stable colloidal suspensions are typically finely dispersed microparticles and as that stability is lost, the particles clump together in larger and larger agglomerations which eventually will separate out from the surrounding water.

The colloidal stability of biological solutions however is mostly overlooked in modern physiology (other systems like Chinese medicine through blood stasis hold a greater focus to it). When the colloidal stability of a living organism is sufficiently impaired, severe diseases, such as those created by blood cells clumping together and impairing circulatory function can occur (similarly early researchers showed malaria causes death by creating severe blood clumping in the largest blood vessels, something Pierre Kory has also observed occurs in critically ill patients via IVC ultrasound immediately preceding their deaths).

A key factor that determines if colloidal solutions clump together or remain dispersed is the balance of electrical charges present (positive charges agglomerate, negative charges disperse). Zeta potential provides a way to model this immensely complex balance and explains why tiny amounts of positive ions with high charge densities (e.g. aluminum) are capable of agglomerating colloidal suspensions (e.g. sewage or blood), and why microstrokes often follow injections of these substances (similarly, poor zeta potential increases the viscosity of the blood, and when it is improved, a variety of cardiovascular or circulatory disorders also improved).

When COVID-19 started, I realize that many of the unusual symptoms reported by colleagues were identical to what I would have associated with an agent severely impairing the zeta potential of the body as so many different fluid circulations appeared to be impaired or showing signs of agglomeration (e.g. the frequent blood clots). After some research, I concluded the spike protein had the most likely electrical composition to account for these facts, at which point I became extremely apprehensive over vaccine designs which mass produced spike protein within the body (much of what is now known about the spike protein’s toxicity was not known then).

In Fleming’s previously mentioned presentation which discussed the prion domain within the vaccine spike protein, he also provided one of the best examples I have seen of how a small amount of a zeta potential reducing agent can rapidly cause blood cells to clump together. This was done by showing the immediate effects of each of the spike protein vaccines on healthy blood.

The South African researchers quoted earlier in this article likewise observed the same phenomena:

Blood incubated with spike protein showed erythrocyte agglutination, despite the very low concentration of the spike protein. An increase in platelet hyperactivation, membrane spreading, platelet-derived microparticle formation were noted due to spike protein exposure.

Further as detailed here, this clumping is also consistently seen on the blood smears of vaccinated individuals:

This rapid clumping process is most likely what causes sudden death immediately following vaccination in susceptible individuals, such as this recent example where this ardent advocate of vaccination died 7 minutes after receiving the new booster in the pharmacy.

As we circle back to Died Suddenly and the abridged version presented here, consider the scenes where the blood of these deceased individuals is shown (I am putting this video in again here so you don’t need to scroll up).

 

 

The Future Is Here Already: It's Just Not Evenly Distributed...., (Nor Will It Ever Be)

NPR  |  Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee still remembers the first cell he cultured: It was an immune cell from a mouse, and he had grown it in a petri dish. As he examined it through a microscope, the cell moved, and Mukherjee was fascinated.

"I could sense the pulse of life moving through it," he says. "You suddenly realize that you're looking at the basic, fundamental unit of life and that this blob that you're seeing under the microscope — this glimmering, refulgent blob of a cell — is the basic unit that connects us and plants and bacteria and archaea and all these other genera and taxa across the entire animal and plant kingdoms."

As an oncologist, cell biologist and hematologist, Mukherjee treats cancer patients and conducts research in cellular engineering. In his new book, The Song of the Cell, he writes about the emerging field of cell therapy and about how cellular science could one day lead to breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer, HIV, Type 1 diabetes and sickle cell anemia.

Mukherjee has a particular interest in T cells — a type of white blood cell and part of the immune system activated to fight disease. He's been treating patients in India who have certain types of cancer with genetically engineered T-cell variants, and the results have been striking: "One day the cancer's there. The next day the cancer is virtually gone, eaten up by these T cells," he says.

Siddhartha Mukherjee: Can We Reimagine Our Approach To Treating Disease?

Genetically engineered T cells, known as CAR [chimeric antigen receptor ] T cells, have become a staple in the treatment of certain kinds of leukemias, lymphomas and blood cancers. But, Mukherjee says, the cells have not yet proven effective in combatting the solid tumors, like those associated with lung and prostate cancer. His hope is that further research might change that.

"It's hard for me to convey the excitement that's sweeping through the whole field of cell biology ... the kind of headiness, giddiness, the madness, the psychic power that grips you once you get into the field," Mukherjee says.

---

Interview highlights

On using CAR-T cell therapy to treat Emily, a child with leukemia

[The treatment is] we extract the T cells from the from a patient's body. And then we use a gene therapy to basically weaponize them, to activate them and weaponize them against the cancer. We grow the T-cells in flasks in a very, very sterile chamber. And then ultimately when the cells have grown and activated, we re-infuse them into the patient's body. So it's sort of gene therapy plus cell therapy — given back to a patient.

In Emily's case, she was about 7, I think, when she was first treated. She had a complete response. She also had a very terrifying course. When the T cells get activated, they release an incredibly inflammatory cascade, sort of like, as I say in the book, it's sort of like soldiers on a rampage. And you can get so much of a rampage of T cells killing cancer that body goes berserk, it can't handle this kind of attack. Now, Emily, fortunately, was treated with a medicine to dampen down that attack so that she ultimately survived. She was the first child treated with this therapy to survive and serves an icon for this kind of therapy. ... She still is alive today and applying to colleges, I hear.

The UniParty Blocked Douglas McGregor From A Trump Appointment

TAC  |  No serious person in Washington can say they were not warned of the impact of their power-lust in expanding NATO. But the lie continues. The top foreign policy leaders who spoke up over the years against the destructive interventions were ignored.

William Burns, Biden's director of the CIA—the agency charged with knowing how other nations will act and react—has had a ringside seat on Russian and NATO policy for more than 30 years. In 1990, Burns served under Secretary of State James Baker in a planning role during the period when Baker made the pledge to Russia that NATO would not advance past the borders of the newly reunited Germany.

Burns's career as an anointed cardinal of the Deep State is well documented. In fact, he is a bit of a legacy. Burns's father, a major general in the Army, was deeply involved in intelligence work and served Reagan and Bush I on the Disarmament Councils. Burns himself was a Clinton appointee in 1995 when he wrote, while serving as counselor for political affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, that "hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here."

The intensity of Russia's antipathy to the expansion of NATO toward their border, and Ukraine in particular, was accentuated in a 2008 report by Burns—at that time U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation—to Bush II Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: "Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests." 

Even if Biden’s CIA director was not able to bring his extensive experience to bear this year, others in the State Department knew full well how Russia would react to open moves to add Ukraine to the membership rolls of NATO. Yet Victoria Nuland, mandarin in the neocon ranks of the foreign policy establishment and State Department, in 2013 boasted that the U.S. had spent more than $5 billion promoting pro-Western "civil society" groups in Ukraine since the end of the Cold War.

In 2014 the United States assisted, if not outright directed, a coup d'état against an elected government in Ukraine because that government wanted friendly relations with Russia—a larger neighbor with a shared history stretching back centuries. The Deep State could not tolerate that friendship. An infamous leaked call between then Assistant Secretary of State Nuland and former U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt discussing helping "midwife" the February 2014 revolution can be heard here. University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer gave a 2015 lecture in which he warned about the problems and dangers wrought by the 2014 U.S.-engineered Ukraine crisis.

After numerous rebuffed Russian diplomatic overtures to resolve the dangers posed by an unfriendly and NATO-armed Ukraine, Russia did act—as Kennan, Burns, and others predicted. The Russians moved in 2014 to defend their southern border. By supporting local Russian-speaking separatists, Russia was able to secure Crimea, a peninsula that had been central to the Russian Navy for 300 years. Did they go further? No. Did they start a full-on war?  No. But they did as they had promised and moved to defend their nation’s southern front. As Professor John Mearsheimer pointed out in a June 6, 2022, lecture, there was a long list of provocations by the U.S. and NATO leading up to that.

ANY Chance Rochelle Bersoff-Walensky's Daddy's Thumb Was On The Scale Of The CDC Director's Selection?

profilesinsuccess  |  Ed’s wife, Marilynn, was beside him every step of the way through the BTG journey. In fact, several years before they married, she left CTEC and became Ed’s first employee at BTG. “She’s my moral compass,” he says. “Through all the ups and downs, she’s always kept me on the straight and narrow, and is an exceptional judge of character. She’s got this sense about her, and she keeps me grounded.” Ed is also grounded by his remarkable daughters—one a research physician and professor at Harvard Medical School, and the other a practicing physician in DC who successfully treated one of the anthrax patients. “As proud as my parents were of me when I showed them my speech at the White House, I’m equally proud of my daughters,” says Ed.

Ok I'll weigh in. The question for me isn't whether it's okay to express schadenfreude wrt Walensky. It's how can we pressure her, as executor of a family trust whose $ comes from her father's role in Titan Corporation, to pay reparations to Titan's torture victims in Abu Ghraib

— Justin Feldman (@jfeldman_epi) October 23, 2022

Ed’s engagement in the business community has remained strong in the wake of selling BTG. In 2006, he joined with a team of investors to form a Special Purpose Acquisition Corporation, raising $126 million in the public market to purchase a civilian government contractor called ATS Corporation. Ed served as CEO of ATS, leading it to flourish until it was sold in 2010 to Salient Technologies, Inc.

Ed then shifted his focus full-time to his participation in nonprofit and for-profit boards—commitments he has prioritized since 1984.  Using his “Seven P’s” as guiding beacons, he has served as a Board member, Advisor, or Committee member of over fifty organizations, including Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology, the Northern Virginia Technology Council, the Technology Work Group of the Virginia Economic Recovery Commission, and Holy Cross Hospital.

Education, as well, has remained a passion for Ed, and although full-time academic teaching never became the focal point of his career, he taught mathematics at NYU and Kingsborough Community College. During his tenure at NASA, he taught similar courses at Boston University and Northeastern University. Later on, he continued to teach at American University, the University of Maryland, and George Mason University. He served as President of the Board of Directors of the Northern Virginia Community College Educational Foundation, as well as on the Board of Trustees at Virginia Commonwealth University. One of his greatest honors came when he was asked to serve on the Board of Trustees at New York University, his Alma Mater, and more recently, he was invited by Governor Terry McAuliffe to serve on the Board of the Virginia 529 Program. “It’s a lot of fun,” he says. “We have to think about how you finance a college education, and what the return on capital for that education will look like in 20 years.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Ed underscores the importance of commitment as a foundation for laying out the Seven P’s. “Nothing is easy,” he says. “Don’t flounder. Figure out what you want to do and then go do it. And when you face setbacks, remember you have two choices. You can go back to bed and hide, or you can go to work and put on a brave face. Those moments will be your waypoints, and I hope you choose to do what you have to do, rather than what you might want to do in that moment.”

Beyond that, Ed has found that the Seven P’s tend to lead people to that ideal ground where altruism and self-interest intersect. “Self-interest is fine, but never at the expense of others,” he says. “Altruism is wonderful, but you can’t have a mission without money. I think the real value set is all about pursuing something of importance, but in a business-like way so you ensure you have the resources to actually accomplish it.”

From his days delivering papers and playing street ball in Manhattan, to his introduction of President Bill Clinton at the White House, to his legacy of leadership throughout the DC business community, Ed’s astounding accomplishments are the projection of the mission sense that has always guided him—a pixel-precise vision he hopes the entire country will reclaim with time. “When I graduated from college and started work at NASA, every single person in that organization—and across the U.S.—was aligned and motivated in our goal to make it to the moon,” he reflects. “Now, I attribute our national sense of malaise to the fact that we’ve lost our mission sense as a country. Everyone needs that object called mission—the new moon that inspires them to write their future, and then go out and live it.”

Ukronazis Let The Cokehead In Kiev Live - Because He Fronts Western Cash

waisworld |  Today, in the middle of the biggest military operation undertaken during this war by the Ukrainians, about which nothing, bizarrely, is reported in the Western press, the official spokesman of Zelensky, Oleksiy Arestovich, published a remarkably passionate (possibly not sober) diatribe against Ukrainian nationalists on the same Russian-language Telegram feed where he publishes Zelensky's daily briefings (which I read every day), among other things blaming them (Ukrainian nationalists) for the Russian invasion.

Some excerpts:

"The ‘patriotic forces' of Ukraine (as they proudly call themselves) have never gained more than 1.5% in elections.

"The [Ukrainian] people are gray, but wise. The people understand that these comrades should not be entrusted with state power under any circumstances. In general, in none. There is simply no such case.

"Yesterday, I noted with true satisfaction how wise our people are--watching the reaction of the ‘patriotic spirit' to the creation of the Political Center of the Russian militant opposition to the Putin regime, headed by Ilya Ponamarev.

"I didn't fully understand before how you can be headless and narrow-minded at the same time. They managed to show me, bravo.

"I got a sensual understanding of how Ukrainian statehood has been f***d up until now--over and over again, for several hundred years in a row.

"It's very simple--they allowed ‘this' and ‘these' [Ukrainian nationalists] to make real state decisions.

"The reaction is simple:

"--‘we don't need opposition to Putin here, f*** off to the Russian Federation, and we will close ourselves up here in the Motherland, we will love each other and write.'

"These, God forgive me, motherf*****s [I struggle to translate the colorful and fundamentally untranslatable Russian obscenity "dolboeb"--CS], are the quintessence of eternal Ukrainian defeats.

"You say--‘motherf*****s' is too strong. These are volunteers, activists, patriots.'

"Yes. These are volunteers, activists, patriots. And--mother****s.

"It's good that not all volunteers, activists and patriots are morons.

"I would even say that the morons are in the minority.

"It seems to you, and most importantly--to them, that there are a lot of them. It's an illusion.

"They are just loud. And they are noisy because the weakest screams the loudest.

"These are jerky, weak-willed, extremely selfish creatures, shriveled up in a strange mixture of hatred and envy for each other and a terrible resentment for the rest of the environment.

"The political center of militant opposition to Putin in Ukraine is influence. Our influence on the Russian Federation.

"Only a mother**** can voluntarily renounce influence.

"They renounce. Everything is logical.

"At one time, Skoropadsky [the puppet Hetman of Ukraine at one point, appointed by German occupiers during WWI, a weird reference--CS] was ashamed to wipe his boots on this audience. As a result, we got here the Kiev Cheka, and a little later--the Holodomor.

"We could have become Finland. Instead we became a republic of the USSR.

"Today we have Putin's invasion, because it is this herd that poisons Ukraine and deprives it of real strength and influence--a small, farm herd trying to escape from reality under the plausible pretext of ‘patriotism'.

"They decided that they had a monopoly on patriotism here.

"What do they have the right to determine here--what is patriotism and what it should be.

"Idiots, complete idiots.

"To remove the sign--with Bulgakov [great Russian writer--Master and Margarita--born in Kiev--CS]--is to pinch off some of your influence.

"To close the Bulgakov Museum is to tear off a piece of influence from oneself.

"To abandon the Russian language [Arestovich, like Zelensky, is a native Russian speaker--CS] by the method of total bans is to lose influence--on our main enemy.

"Exactly in this way, exactly under these slogans and from this picture of the world, the largest military grouping in Europe, which we inherited in 1991, was destroyed.

"All these dreams of isolation from the enemy, with whom we have thousands of kilometers of a common border--and without natural obstacles (!), hundreds of years of common history and an eternal desire to devour us--nothing more stupid, infantile and helpless can be imagined.

"They have not just imagined--they are trying to make it a strategy and still impose on us. And this is good.

"It doesn't even occur to them, dumb-headed, in their frog fuss (once, the need is puffed up) that their weakness and inability to influence real events are directly related to the voluntary rejection of influence--through the constant desire for isolation.

"Influence is the ability to cause a backlash.

"If you seek to break the feedback from the main adversary, you are not affected.

"You create ideal conditions for the enemy to influence you.

"The snail strategy humiliates Ukraine. It demonstrates that Ukraine has the brains of a snail.

"I won't allow it. I need a Ukraine that plays across the entire chessboard. Affects Moscow, Vladivostok, Beijing, Washington, and the Martian settlement of Mask. And only in this way will Ukrainian culture rise and be realized. Only in this way the Ukrainian language will become fashionable--and studied. Only in this way will they want to imitate us. Isolation is not imitated. Strength is imitated."

https://t.me/O_Arestovich_official/2533

An odd thing indeed to appear in such an official channel. One thing we don't see in the Western press is the remarkable diversity of Ukrainian society, which is made up of different cultures, languages, and points of view, some of them very eccentric. Zelensky and most of his team are Russian speakers from the East, and as I have written before, they were elected on a platform of compromise and peace with Russia, a sharp break from the confrontational policies of the previous US-sponsored regime. The tension between Zelensky's party and the nationalist factions in Ukrainian politics is huge, and as I have written before, Zelensky is constrained in his actions by these elements. The nationalist factions have little support among the people (as Arestovich emphasizes in the quoted post) but they have a great deal of muscle--they possess various far-right militias, which were used to overthrow the Yanukovich government in 2014, and which can be used to overthrow Zelensky. So you might imagine that Zelensky has a gun to his head. I think these elements keep relatively quiet and line up behind Zelensky only because Zelensky controls the pipeline of Western aid, without which the country would collapse in a few minutes. But this can change in a flash.

I'm not sure what this weird Telegram post portends--is a rupture coming between Zelensky and Ukrainian nationalists? It's hard to say; the proximate subject of this post is a relatively minor issue (in the context of a big war)--whether or not to harbor the Russian dissident Ilya Ponamarev. I have been afraid for a long time that Zelensky might meet his end at the hands of his own nationalists.

It is possible that the current military situation is causing this stress.  There is a media blackout in the West, which was requested by Ukraine, so we're not reading about it, but there are a lot of dramatic events occurring right now on the ground. Yesterday, for example, it is reported that Ukrainian commandos, in a large force, attempted to storm the Zaporozhia nuclear power plant just before the UN inspectors arrived, and large-scale Ukrainian attacks are going on in the outskirts of Kherson, some of them achieving significant breakthroughs according to Russian sources. Weird we don't read about it in our press.

Arestovich himself is a, well, strange figure. To say the least. He was himself involved in far right (but not Ukrainian nationalist) causes, and was even some kind of follower of Dugin at one point (there is a video from the early 2000s where Arestovich appears on a panel with Dugin at one of Dugin's "Eurasianism" conferences). Arestovich was the deputy head of the far-right group "Bratstvo" at one point, an organization described by its founder (the even stranger Dmytro Korchynsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmytro_Korchynsky ) as the "Orthodox Taliban" [!!]. Arestovich's professional background is in acting, then psychology, a student of psychology and astrology, and oddly seems to have found work as a military advisor [!], then military intelligence officer, then propagandist. See: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine-president-adviser-arestovych/

JE comments:  This is the head-scratcher of the day.  What exactly is Arestovich trying to achieve?  Even more confusing, his interpretation of how things got to this point makes no sense.  It all seems to hinge on Arestovich's notion of "influence," but how?  That the ultra-nationalists rejected Russian culture itself (as in Bulgakov), thus sparking the invasion?  Or that they are destroying the moral influence they have in this war (hence Moscow, Beijing, Washington), which undermines the Ukrainian military effort?

Zelensky needs the martial zeal of the ultra-nationalists, but he also has to keep them from turning against him.  A screed like this one from Arestovich may be many things, but smart politics isn't one of them.

Kerch Bridge Was Blown Up By Her Majesty's Secret Service Saboteurs

svpressa.ru  |  It is extremely important, of course, to understand what happened on the Crimean Bridge and how it happened. To stop this from happening in the future. But it is equally important to determine who did it.

Pay attention to how cleanly everything was done. The truck, loaded to the brim with explosives, did not just drive unhindered onto the bridge. Its appearance there was precisely synchronized with the movement of a huge freight train loaded with fuel across the bridge. And the explosion itself, it seems, happened exactly at the moment when the train and the truck, going in parallel directions and at the same speeds, caught up. In those moments, the distance between them became simply negligible for such a powerful charge that was set in motion.

And one more, in my opinion, important detail. If the destruction of part of the Crimean Bridge began with the explosion of a truck loaded with explosives, then definitely not an ordinary truck was involved there. But one that was equipped in a special way. Because among our opponents there are definitely neither martyrs nor Captains Gastello [reference to Soviet pilot Nikolay Gastello — S]. At least, nothing like this has been observed on the Russian–Ukrainian front before.

So the driver of the truck definitely had to get out of the cab in time to survive. Jumping, for example, from the roadway into the waters of the Kerch Strait. Where he may have already been expected by those who really needed it [the sabotage — S].

But in this case, to complete the operation, the truck itself had to be equipped in such a way that at the final stage of sabotage it could be controlled remotely. Suppose, from a foreign vessel passing in visual range from the bridge. Or from a foreign reconnaissance aircraft, the likes of which have been stalking that area for a long time.

So far, of course, this is just speculation. But if it is confirmed in the main, there will be a hell of lot of questions for the organizers of the protection and defense of the Crimean Bridge from the Rosgvardiya and the FSB. With the appropriate organizational consequences for those officials who for years have been bravely telling us that even a mosquito would not fly over the strategic object they were guarding without a permission from Moscow.

We will certainly be assured that this simply spectacularly organized and impeccably carried out sabotage at one of the most carefully guarded facilities in Russia is the work of exclusively Ukrainian saboteurs. Most likely, subordinate to the Main Directorate of Intelligence (GUR) of the Ukraine. But is it?

Because if such skilled people really work in the GUR, what prevented them from putting the Crimean Bridge out of action even earlier? For example, at the height of the holiday season on the peninsula. Then the size of the disaster would look even more impressive. At least in public space.

Therefore, most likely, someone much more experienced and qualified in sabotage work has almost definitely joined the efforts of the GUR in this direction in recent weeks and months. It seems that we have the right to assume who exactly that was.

In order to come to the, most likely, correct conclusions, we will try to analyze several facts.

As early as April 23, 2022, that is, exactly two months after the start of the Russian special operation, the RIA Novosti news agency, citing sources in the Armed Forces of the Ukraine, has reported that at least two groups of specialists in sabotage and guerrilla war from the British Special Air Service (SAS) had arrived to that country from the city of Hereford. The headcount of the first one was at least 8–10 people. How many in the second one was not known then.

At that time one could only guess about the tasks of the British saboteurs. But it has long been known that people who serve in the SAS are considered to be among the most highly qualified in the world in organizing coups d’etat, mass protest rallies, contract killings of political figures, recruiting agents, including those in the highest echelons of power, preparing terrorist attacks.

“These are not ordinary special forces, these are intellectuals, each group always has an ideologue, one might say a professor, and the rest are specialists in their fields… With a high degree of probability, these specialists have arrived in order to improve the skills and efficiency of the Ukrainian special services in coordinating the activities of sabotage groups in the territories of the Ukraine controlled by the Russian troops,” an employee of a Russian law enforcement agency has added during a conversation with a RIA Novosti correspondent.

It is also known that the SAS special forces previously participated quite effectively in the Korean War, in the conflict in Northern Ireland, in the war between Great Britain and Argentina over the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands, in the events in the Persian Gulf and in NATO’s Afghanistan campaign. And in all those cases their main tasks were destruction of enemy headquarters, command posts, railway junctions, ammunition and weapons depots, and so on.

Most often, their own combat aircraft were guided onto those objects. However, when faced with opposition from a powerful air defense system (and the presence of such near Russia’s Crimean Bridge is no secret) or when the chosen target was small, special forces of that special service entered into action.

In June of this year, the presence of British saboteurs in the Ukraine was confirmed in the West. American investigative journalist Seth Harp published his correspondence with a mercenary from the U.S. who said that special forces soldiers of the British Special Air Service (SAS) were fighting in the Ukraine. And even, he said, were suffering losses from “friendly fire” of inexperienced soldiers from the Ukraine. “We have lost a British SAS sniper. The fighter advanced to the position, but the Ukrainian APC turned him into dust, since no one warned its crew,” the mercenary told investigator Harp.

In June, the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of the Ukraine reported that for some reason it managed to obtain detailed technical documentation on the Crimean Bridge. Logically, this was necessary in order to calculate in advance the most vulnerable points of Russia’s main bridge from the point of view of saboteurs.

Finally, on August 15, Ukrainian MP Aleksey Goncharenko [Ukrainian spelling: Oleksiy Honcharenko — S] boasted that Kiev had held talks with British defense minister Ben Wallace at the NATO summit in June about a plan to destroy the Crimean Bridge. And he confirmed that with photographs taken at the negotiating table. Those indicated that the then–Prime Minister Boris Johnson was also sitting at the table that day. That is, that happened at the top-most level.

Meanwhile, the very fact of such negotiations in London could indicate only one thing: Britain, together with the Ukrainians, was preparing to participate in the destruction of the Crimean Bridge in the most direct way. Otherwise, what else was there to be discussed in its capital?

And what means for such a sabotage could the British possess in the Ukraine? The specialists from SAS. No one else to carry out such a delicate matter.

On August 17, it was suggested both in Russia and in the West that the SAS was involved in the events in our Kursk Oblast—a “warm up” before the Crimean Bridge operation. On that day, power transmission towers located near the villages of Pryamitsyno and Lyubitskoye, 44 kilometers from each other, and leading to the Kursk nuclear power plant were blown up. That threatened great technological troubles at the nuclear power plant. But Russian personnel managed to prevent the worst. Yet those who did it could not be detained. Which proved once again: people with the highest sabotage and reconnaissance skills were working against us.

It was only now, apparently, that it was Crimean Bridge’s turn for the close tandem of the SAS and the GUR.

Why Did Russian Forces Retreat In Kharkiv And Kherson?

MoA  |  Neither the explanation of too few men, nor the explanation of too few MLRS systems or ammunition which may explain the Kharkov success hold up for the Kherson region.

During the summer Russian troops were pulled from the Kharkov region and send to the south to defend the Kherson regions. There are lots of Russian units in the area including many artillery systems. And while the Ukrainians have damaged some bridges that cross the Dnieper the Russian forces have enough ferry equipment to keep up the supplies. Most of the previous Ukrainian attacks were defeated rather easily.

I thus find it hard to explain the current situation.

My current 'feel' is that the Russian forces have orders from high above to conserve forces and to let go of land and retreat when the pressure becomes big enough and severe Russian casualty numbers are likely.

Why were such orders given? What are the plans behind them?

I don't really know.But I am sure will find out when Russia opens the new phase of the war.

The weather has become quite bad in Ukraine with rain making the passing over fields with tanks etc nearly impossible. That is why the attack in the south was pushed along a road. In two month the ground in Ukraine will likely be frozen.

The Russian military leadership seems to believe that the Ukrainian operations will cease soon and that the mobilized reinforcements that are starting to come online will be able to decisively change the picture as soon as the winter comes.

Another potential reason behind the order to conserve forces and to not hold onto territory at any price may be political. The Russian public was starting to get a bit tired of the war but after the losses in the Kharkov region the TV pundits pushed for winning the war. That allowed Russia's president to launch the mobilization of reservists. The further losses since may be designed to allow for more political measures.

The law that will allow for the four regions to return to Russia after a hundred years of being part of Ukraine today passed the upper house of Russia's parliament:

According to the documents, the DPR and the LPR will retain their status as republics after joining Russia and Russian will be their official language. The Kherson and Zaporozhye regions will also join Russia as constituent entities and will continue to be called "regions." The borders of the republics and regions will be the same as those that "existed on the day of their creation and accession into Russia." International accords specify that their borders with other countries will be regarded as Russia’s state borders. At the same time, under the constitutional laws, the DPR and the LPR are joining Russia under the 2014 borders enshrined in their constitutions.

President Putin will now have to sign the new law to enact it. The heads of the DPR and LPR have already signed laws ratifying treaties on joining Russia.

With the laws enacted the Special Military Operation will become a war to prevent attacks on Russian grounds and to retake the parts of Russia that are currently under Ukrainian occupation.

I expect that the gloves which Russia was still wearing during recent operations will come off.

What About Maurits Cornelis Escher?

mcescher  | Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) is one of the world’s most famous graphic artists. His art is admired by millions of people worldwide, as can be seen by the many websites on the internet.

He is born in Leeuwarden as the fourth and youngest son. After five years the family moves to Arnhem, where he spends most of his youth. After he has failed his final exam, and after a short interlude in Delft, M.C. Escher starts with his lessons in architecture at the School of Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem.
Already after a week he informs his father that he wants to quit his architecture lessons and focus on studying graphic arts. He is supported in this by his teacher Samuel Jesserun de Mesquita, to whom he has shown his drawings and linocuts.

After completing his school, he travels for a long time through Italy, where he meets his wife Jetta Umiker and whom he marries in 1924. They go to Rome, where they live until 1935. During these 11 years M.C. Escher travels every year through Italy where he makes drawings and sketches that he later uses in his studio for his lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings.

For example, the background in the lithograph Waterfall (1961) comes from his Italian period. The trees that are reflected in the woodcut Puddle(1952) are also the same trees that he uses in his woodcut Pineta by Calvi, made in 1932.

During the time that he lives and works in Italy, he makes beautiful, also more realistic works such as the Castrovalva litho in which one can see already his fascination for perspective: close, far, high and low. Likewise is the lithograph Atrani, a small town on the Amalfi coast in Italy, which he makes in 1931 and comes back in his masterpieces Metamorphosis I and II.

He is most famous for his so-called impossible drawings, such as Ascending and Descending and Relativity, but also for his metamorphoses, such as Metamorphosis I, II and III, Air and Water I and Reptiles.

During his lifetime, Escher made 448 lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings and more than 2000 drawings and sketches. Just like some of his famous predecessors – Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer and Holbein – Escher is left-handed.
In addition to his work as a graphic artist, he illustrates books, designs carpets and banknotes, stamps, murals, intarsia panels etc.
M.C. Escher is fascinated by the regular geometric figures of the wall and floor mosaics in the Alhambra, a fourteenth-century castle in Granada, Spain, which he visits in 1922 and 1936.

During his years in Switzerland and throughout the Second World War, he works with great energy on his hobby. He then makes 62 of the 137 symmetrical drawings he will make in his life. He also expands his hobby by using these symmetrical drawings for cutting wooden balls.

He plays with architecture, perspective and impossible spaces. His art continues to amaze and wonder millions of people around the world. In his work we recognize his excellent observation of the world around us and the expression of his own fantasy. M.C. Escher shows us that reality is wonderful, understandable and fascinating.

Was Louis Wain Mentally Ill? Or, Was He Accessing An Unusual Perceptual Modality?

flashbak  |  Louis Wain (5 August 1860 – 4 July 1939) was an English artist and diagnosed schizophrenic who made a name from drawing self-conscious, trippy and anthropomorphic cats and kittens. At the peak of his powers, he cranked out 1500 original paintings and sketches of cats every year. They were copied by the million. In Christmas 1903, you could buy 13 new Louis Wain books. He illustrated more than two-hundred books and had sixteen very successful Christmas annuals. “He made the cat his own,” said the author H.G. Wells. “He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world.” He was elected president of the National Cat Club, of course. “Louis Wain was on all our walls some 15 to 20 years ago,” wrote politician Ramsay MacDonald in 1925. “Probably no artist has given a greater number of young people pleasure than he has.”

A cat that has “lived a life of ease, seeing nobody and nothing beyond its mistress, will exhibit the most striking characteristics of its mistress. Another cat will, perhaps, show itself in the highest degree suspicious, taking after its master or mistress again; while a fourth, that has had to fight his way, will quarrel and rush at everything; and a fifth, that has been allowed to roam the country, will ruffle up its straw, get underneath its bed to hide right out of sight, and nothing but force will move it.”

– Wain – the November 1889 issue of Cassell’s Magazine on what he had learned from judging cat shows.

Wain was 24 when he sold his first drawing of cats to The Illustrated London News. Called ‘A Kitten’s Christmas Party’, the picture portrayed 150 cats doing all manner of humanistic things – holding a ball, sending invitations, playing games and making speeches. Spread over two pages, it was an instant hit. A few years earlier he’d sold his first picture: a  drawing of bullfinches. He drew more birds and animals with little success. And then came the catharsis. At age 23, Wain fell ill. Peter, a black-and-white cat, would sit on his bed. Wain passed the time by sketching his pal and handing the sketches to his wife, Emily. One picture featured 150 cats, each one doing its own thing. Success was his. Then tragedy struck. Three years after their marriage, Emily died.

How this changed Wain, we cannot be certain. But he never remarried and his mental health deteriorated. Despite huge commercial success, by the 1920’s Wain was broke. In 1924 he was committed to the pauper ward of London’s Springfield Mental Hospital. He continued to drew cats, experimenting with new styles and colours.

In 1925, his plight became common knowledge. A public appeal was made that raised £2,300. The money enabled Wain to move to the Bethlem Royal Hospital.

In 1930 Wain was transferred to Napsbury Hospital, near St Albans. Exhibitions of his work were held in London in 1931 and 1937, as well as a memorial exhibition shortly after his death.

 

 

Sensory Experience As Shortcut In A Multi-Modal User Interface

meaningfulparticipation |  The case against reality by Donald D. Hoffman Subtitled “How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes”

• Multimodal user interface (MUI) theory*: MUI theory states that “perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world.”

Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.

I take my perceptions seriously, but not literally.

startling “Fitness-Beats-Truth” (FBT) theorem, which states that evolution by natural selection does not favor true perceptions—it routinely drives them to extinction. Instead, natural selection favors perceptions that hide the truth and guide useful action.

Space, time, and physical objects are not objective reality. They are simply the virtual world delivered by our senses to help us play the game of life.

Physics and evolution point to the same conclusion: spacetime and objects are not foundational. Something else is more fundamental, and spacetime emerges from it.

Our senses report fitness, and an error in this report could ruin your life. So our senses use “error-correcting codes” to detect and correct errors. Spacetime is just a format our senses use to report fitness payoffs and to correct errors in these reports.

we differ from rocks in two key respects. First, we experience sensations. Second, we have “propositional attitudes,” such as the belief that rocks don’t have headaches we also have meaning, problem solving capability and enactors

Like a rock, we have bona fide physical properties. But unlike a rock, we have conscious experiences and propositional attitudes. Are these also physical? If so, it’s not obvious: What is the mass of dizziness, the velocity of a headache, or the position of the wonder why Chris won’t call?

Our failure to envision a mechanism does not preclude one. Perhaps we’re not clever enough, and an experiment will teach us what we can’t surmise from an armchair. After all, we invest in experiments because they often repay us in surprise.

Sperry’s explanation was simple and profound. When you fixate on the cross in KEY + RING, the neural pathways from eye to brain send KEY only to the right hemisphere, and RING only to the left. If the corpus callosum is intact, the right hemisphere then tells the left about KEY, and the left tells the right about RING, so that the person sees KEY RING.

What false assumption bedevils our efforts to unravel the relation between brain and consciousness? I propose it is this: we see reality as it is.

::Perception is always relative to WII. WII creates the context and filter for our perception::

::Placebo as example of reality models making reality::

beauty is a perception of fitness payoffs on offer,

The predictions of evolution about beauty are surprising but, as we will see in chapter nine, its predictions about physical objects are disconcerting: objects, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder and inform us about fitness—not about objective reality.

U.N. Spokesman Thanks Russia For Overcoming Secret NATO Operation To Take Zaporizhzhia

Head of UN mission to #Zaporozhye thanks the Russian Federation for keeping his team safe from attacks from Zelensky regime forces, who tried to stop the inspection team from reaching the plant.

"I'm glad the Russian military did what they had to do to keep our inspectors safe," pic.twitter.com/TUtsbupSAg

— Citizen Journalists (@citizenjournos_) September 1, 2022

sonar21  |  The title sums it up in a nutshell. The intelligence services of the U.K. and the United States put together a plan and directed Ukraine to carry it out–i.e., capture the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant from the Russians on the very day that UN Inspectors were scheduled to arrive. This was a highly coordinated operation. (See Andrei Martyanov’s piece on U.S. role in planning the Kherson offensive.) For example, David Ignatius, a reliable shill for the CIA, wrote a piece in the Washington Post–Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Is More Than Just Bravado. His cheerleading for Ukraine is no mere coincidence on the same day that the Ukrainian Army gambled and lost at Zaporizhzhia (warning, this is behind a firewall):

As Ukraine mounts a new counteroffensive in the southern part of the country, Zelensky’s bravado risks setting expectations too high. In truth, Ukraine probably won’t liberate its territory this year, or even next. Still, as Ukrainian forces push toward the Black Sea coast, Zelensky is delivering a defiant response to President Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukraine is not a real country. Not only can Ukraine survive, it also can regain some of its occupied land.

The best defense is a good offense, as military strategists have argued for centuries. And if Ukraine’s drive toward the coast succeeds, it will restore the country’s economic viability by relieving pressure on its port city of Odessa. Moreover, it could threaten Russia’s occupation of Crimea by cutting into the land bridge that connects to the Russian-controlled Donbas region in the east.

The Ukrainian attempt to capture the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant consisted of two river crossings–1: seven speed boats carrying up to 60s that landed 3 kilometers northeast of the ZNP and 2: two barges launched several miles south of the ZNP manned by Ukrainian airborne forces.

The Russian Ministry of Defense provides an accurate summary of the action:

On the morning of September 1, the Kiev regime attempted a major provocation to disrupt the arrival of IAEA expert working group at Zaporozhye nuclear power plant.

At 6:20 a.m., seven fast-moving motorboats landed on the coast of Kakhovskoye reservoir, three kilometres northeast of Zaporozhye NPP, with two sabotage groups of up to 60 people in total.

The sabotage groups were detected and blocked in the drop-off area by Russian National Guard units guarding the territory of Zaporozhye NPP.

A unit of the Russian Armed Forces and helicopters of the army aviation arrived to reinforce Russian Guard troops in order to suppress an attempt to enter the nuclear power plant and destroy Ukrainian saboteurs.

At about 7:00 a.m., units of the Russian Armed Forces prevented another attempted landing to seize a nuclear power plant.

A few kilometres from Zaporozhye NPP near Vodyanoye, an attempt was made to land a tactical airborne assault by AFU two self-propelled barges from Nikopol. Two self-propelled barges carrying tactical airborne assault of AFU are sunk as a result of the Russian Armed Forces’ shelling.

As of 8:00 a.m., the Kiev regime has blocked the passage of IAEA expert mission from controlled territory to Zaporozhye NPP.

Ukrainian artillery is shelling the territory of Zaporozhye NPP, the meeting place of IAEA mission with Russian specialists near Vasil’evka, as well as the route of their movement to Energodar. Four shells exploded 400 metres from the 1st unit of Zaporozhye NPP.

If Ukraine had pulled this off it would have been a major black eye for the Russians and would have put the nuclear plant back in Ukrainian hands. It would have marked the first serious victory in this war for Ukraine. If, if, if. There is an old saying, “If ifs and buts were candy and nuts it would be Christmas every day.” Christmas did not come for Ukraine. They got their ass handed to them.

The Billions In Profit Are Conspicuously Obvious, But Seriously Folks Pfizer Jes Phukkin With Y'all...,

dailymail |  Joe Biden has been re-infected with COVID after taking an anti-viral drug that leaves patients running a 40 per cent risk of flare-up of the virus shortly afterwards.

Taking Paxlovid leaves COVID sufferers in danger of testing positive for the virus again very quickly after clearing their initial infection. 

When Paxlovid came to market in December 2021, studies from Pfizer indicated that only 1-2 percent of patients who took the drug tested positive for Covid again shortly after finishing their dosage. 

But other experts say the rapid reinfection rate is closer to 40 per cent, and that Paxlovid can cause this issue by suppressing patients' immune systems too early, meaning their own bodies are unable to get a handle on COVID.  

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a prominent cardiologist and professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University Hospital tweeted: 'I think this was predictable.'

He continued: 'The prior data suggesting 'rebound' Paxlovid positivity in the low single digits is outdates and with BA.5 is likely 20-40% or even higher.'

In a memo released by the White House, Dr. Kevin O'Connor said that the president will continue to isolate, just like he did when he first tested positive on July 21. 

Dr. O'Connor also said that the president would not be prescribed Paxlovid again. The president's doctor earlier noted that it was likely that the president was infected with the BA.5 variant. 

In June, a Mayo Clinic study showed that five percent of adults who had taken the drug tested positive again for Covid within 30 days, according to the New York Times. 

The majority of those who experienced rebound symptoms occur within two to eight days.  

Some experts have said that the current treatment cycle of taking three pills twice a day for five days is too short a time period to clear Covid from the patient's body. 

The conclusion of the Mayo Clinic study was that extending the time period of the course of Paxlovid was unnecessary. 

The authors of the study conceded in their findings that immunocompromised people were unrepresented in the study.  

Also in June, the president's chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, experienced rebound Covid-19. In his case, he did take a second round of Paxlovid. 

Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator, has denied that the Paxlovid rebound numbers are nearly 50 percent. 

The doctor maintained that the actual percentage of reinfections is 'in the single digits.'

Dr. Jha said: 'When people have rebound, they don’t end up in the hospital. They don’t end up particularly sick.' 

He added: 'Paxlovid is working really well at preventing serious illness, rebound or no rebound, and that’s why he was offered it. And that’s why the president took it.

Canadian Military In Ukraine Pursuing A "Great White Reset"

johnhelmer  |   “Freeland is not acting alone,” comments the Canadian source. “She’s tried hard to bring everyone into her project [to succeed to the prime ministry], but she can’t get the neo-Confederates to settle down and wait for the project to come to fruition , with her at helm, of course.  They’re impatient for the Great White Reset; she needs the Galician dream fulfilled… The military is fine with Canadians, including active and retired service members fighting over there. They are not even pitching a fit about Canadian weapons stocks being emptied in order to be sent over there.”

“If you talk to any of them, they all pretty much have the same mentality. Whatever the West, as they define it, says — white, Christian, capitalist, Anglo, pro-US — goes. The can only see themselves, their career advancement, their ideas of what the country is fighting for within that framework. So they are increasingly upset by even the shallowest semblance of ‘multi-culturalism’ as represented in Ottawa by [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau and to a degree, Freeland.”

“From what I’ve seen, the evidence of mutiny became apparent when the ‘trucker protest/ freedom convoy’ came up against the government’s activation of the Emergencies Act this winter.  From what I’ve heard, the military chiefs flat-out refused to back [Minister of Public Safety Marco] Mendicino, [Justice Minister and Attorney-General David]  Lametti, and [Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill] Blair, and Freeland, while active and retired  officers openly sided with the  neo-Confederates who were getting support from the US. It seems that the contradiction here is that the officer corps, heavily committed to the anti-Russia track that cuts across Canadian party lines, is heavily politicized and infected by the neo-Confederate faction in the US. They don’t appreciate what they see as Trudeau’s ‘communism’, and believe that the charges against Cadieu are an expression of it.”

“This is deeply concerning as there can be no doubt that these people know, or strongly believe, that they have the full backing of at least some elements of the US security state, not to mention ‘thin blue line’ law enforcement, militia groups, etc. It’s fascism versus fascism.”