The Real Culture War Is A Battle Between What People Need vs What Money Wants

GodsSpies |   “The news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class—the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn’t want you to know something, it won’t be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up.”
— George Carlin, quoted here

It's going to be interesting to see, in the next five to fifteen years, the methods the rich must use to keep their power when the climate crisis hits with full and majestic force. The coming chaos and revolutionary fervor that suffering millions and billions will bring to the table will each be world-historical in scope. What under those conditions will the powerful do, the very very few, to keep the very many from taking control? Whatever the result, none of our governments will survive in their current form.

Keep in mind, revolutions are not orderly, and this one almost certainly won't be well led. Yes, from time to time, the world kicks out a George Washington, fit for the challenge of his time, a man who willing to fortify the republic he helped to build rather than just profit from it.

And yes, from time to time the world kicks out a Napoleon or Vespasian, a man fit to rule his time well, at least for the most part, even if that rule is decidedly autocratic.

But most of the time the world kicks out masters of chaos, egomaniacal destroyers and opportunists, people like Alcibiades of Athens, or Ronald Reagan, people who gain power in disgruntled times, and through their actions make the world worse for everyone. Reagan took a struggling country, the proto-neoliberal nation of the Carter years, a nation steeped in stagflation, and set in fatal motion the wealth machine that will soon destroy us all, including the machine itself.

If we don't get off of fossil fuel in time, the rich will suffer with the rest of us the destruction they will cause. Our leaders won't contemplate any measure that reduces their power, and we won't contemplate forcing them to leave. Under those constraints, the problem has no solution.

The rich won't stand down. Will the people stand up? On that one question hangs all of the rest of this tale.

 

Government Punishment Of Disinformation Is Fundamentally Antithetical To Democracy

tabletmag  |  The unavoidable problems with censoring disinformation have predictably plagued recent laws, including those touted as restricting pandemic-related disinformation in order to protect public health. As the Economist reported in February 2021, “Censorious governments are abusing ‘fake news’ laws,” invoking the pandemic as “an excuse to gag reporters” and to silence critics of pandemic-era policies. In February 2020, Amnesty International noted that Singapore’s 2019 law against “online falsehoods and manipulation” was “repeatedly used to target critics and political opponents.” The Singaporean government could not deny this, but instead claimed that the law’s consistent enforcement against opposition party members was a “coincidence.” To the contrary, these patterns necessarily result from restrictions on such a vague, broad category of speech, even in democratic regimes.

That is why the American Civil Liberties Union brought a 2020 lawsuit challenging disinformation laws that the government of Puerto Rico had recently passed for the asserted purpose of protecting public health and safety. One such law makes it a crime to share “false information” about the government’s post-pandemic emergency and curfew orders with the intent to cause “confusion, panic, or public hysteria.” Shortly after the law went into effect, the Puerto Rican government charged a prominent clergyman with allegedly disseminating false information on WhatsApp about a rumored executive order to close all businesses. In fact, only a short time later, the governor did issue such an order.

Even beyond the speech that disinformation laws directly stifle, these laws also suppress incalculable amounts of important expression, including information about the pandemic that could literally be a matter of life or death. That’s because the laws deter scientists and other experts from providing information to journalists, and journalists are in turn deterred from conveying information to the public, for fear of transgressing—or being charged with transgressing—the laws’ blurry boundaries. The ACLU’s complaint in the Puerto Rico case was filed on behalf of two prominent investigative journalists, who explained that “developing stories on matters of immense public concern are often complex, contentious, and murky,” and thus “inadvertent inaccuracies are inevitable even in the most thoroughly vetted reporting.”

Throughout the pandemic, we have witnessed constantly evolving and shifting views among expert individuals and agencies, as they steadily gather and analyze additional data. Yesterday’s life-endangering “disinformation” can and has become today’s life-protecting gospel. Recall, to cite only the most obvious example, the CDC’s changing edicts about mask-wearing.

Inherently subjective disinformation restrictions can easily be wielded for ulterior purposes, including to promote partisan interests. Consider, for instance, recent evidence that the Biden administration has been pressuring social media companies to restrict content that purportedly purveys disinformation about COVID, in light of allegations that the actual concerns may well involve politics at least as much as public health. Republican members of Congress have claimed that platforms have restricted “conservative” posts on issues related to the pandemic in response to pressure from administration officials, even though the posts contained no factual misrepresentations and simply conveyed perspectives with which the administration disagreed. Whether or not these claims are factually correct, it is true that the concept of disinformation is so open-ended that it could be deployed against particular communications for partisan reasons.

The inevitable manipulability of restrictions on disinformation is well illustrated by YouTube’s recent removal of a video for violating its “medical misinformation policy.” The video, which had been posted by New York Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, was of an August 2021 news conference in which she announced a lawsuit challenging New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s “vaccine passport” as an invasion of privacy and an unreasonable mandate on small businesses. Although Malliotakis supports vaccination, she believes that the mandate constitutes government overreach—a position that the Supreme Court might well end up sharing. After Malliotakis appealed YouTube’s removal, the company said that it was “taking another look” and ultimately reinstated the video, thus underscoring the inherent elasticity of the misinformation concept. Whether or not YouTube actually had a good-faith health reason for its initial removal of the video, the fact remains that the vague policy can easily be invoked as a pretext, masking other motives.

All the more reason, then, to be suspicious of even sincere attempts by public and private authorities to prevent the harm that disinformation can cause. Recall that Southern officials based their libel lawsuits against activists and journalists during the civil rights movement on the dissemination of inaccurate information. What we learned in that era is that disinformation is unavoidable in any vigorous discussion of fast-breaking public issues, and that making it punishable by law can only inhibit democratic debate. It’s time we relearn that lesson.

The Vaccine Mandate Has Taught Elites "In The Future Go Straight To Coercion!"

FT |  Vaccine mandates are not incurring a vicious public backlash, at least not yet. Almost a month has passed since President Joe Biden announced that most US workers would have to be vaccinated or frequently tested. Street protests are real but containable. Resignations from work are at modest levels. The governor of California even feels emboldened to require vaccines for school children….

If it holds, the public’s grudging tolerance of mandates will have eye-opening lessons. For one, people are hopeless predictors of their own future behaviour. Surveys had suggested a rash of job-quitting in the event of employer mandates (just as they had implied that France, whose vaccination rate is pulling ahead of Britain’s, would be a laggard). Public opinion data does not just inform the election predictions of speculative columnists. It is also an important basis of government policy. If the science has a systemic blind spot for the future, for what people think they would do in hypothetical scenarios, it has distorted governance.

Another conclusion is that partisanship has its uses… It is a sign of the most dire civic rot that people base even their approach to personal health on their tribal fealties. But it also means that Biden’s mandate is mostly alienating those who were never going to vote for him anyway. The very bifurcation of America can empower as well as curb a leader.

Of all the inferences to be drawn from the elusive backlash, the last is the most far-reaching. In fact, after five years of anti-elite politics, from Brazil to the Philippines, it feels transgressive to express this thought: in the end, people want to be led.

A truism, possibly? Or something more unpleasant? More:

The public has already supplied an example of what we might call enlightened docility. Imagine being told in 2016 that, in four years, there would be vast support for a lockdown with no peacetime precedent, prescribed by an invisible expert class. Next to coercion of that scale and nature, the mandates are laissez-faire. I say all this with the jitters of a man carrying a vase in a greased hand across a stone floor.

No, not concerning at all! In a way, the whole process resembles the neoliberal playbook: (1) Degrade public health by underfunding and corruption, (2) watch it fail in a very public test, and (3) replace it with coercion. Best of all, in future you can go directly to coercion!

When The State Decides You Are The Enemy They Can Do Whatever They Want To You

ianwelsh |   Everyone remember the Panama papers? A leak of bank records showing that the ultra-rich are hiding massive wealth, tax-free and often breaking the law to do so?

A rather weak set of laws designed to allow tax avoidance by rich people, at that.

Found out the other day that the reporter who broke the Panama Papers story was killed by a car bomb.

Coincidence, no doubt.

You may recall the Ferguson protests, started after another black man was killed by a cop. They were a big deal.

Since then six of the Ferguson protest leaders have died: two inside burnt cars, three by suicide, one an overdose.

Coincidence, no doubt.

Then there was a high ranked pimp, who flew important men like Bill Clinton and Bill Gates and Prince Andrew in his private jet and provided under-age women for sex. The first time he was indicted he was let off because the prosecutor was told to back off, as he belonged to intelligence. The second time, influence not having worked, he “committed suicide” in prison.

I used to work in life insurance. There’s an adage, backed up by lots of studies, that people who are worth more dead than alive tend to die a lot more than the actuarial tables would suggest for someone of their age and health.

Coincidence, no doubt.

The simplest fact of modern life is elites kill and impoverish other people in order to make money and secure their power. You are seeing it in the pandemic, where Billionaire wealth has spiked 60% and vaccine companies refuse to share their “intellectual property” while planning to sell Covid booster shots in perpetuity. Actually wiping out Covid would close pharma money, but if it stays around, it’s golden.

Meanwhile, all the small and medium businesses closing has lead to a vast buying opportunity for those with lots of money, and private equity is moving big into buying up distressed homes.

It’s just business, baby. Your death, or homelessness, well, it’s someone else’s profit opportunity.

Anybody Else Notice How Zeynep Tufekci Got Shut Down After This Covid Data Opinion Piece?

NYTimes |  Who should get vaccine booster shots and when? Can vaccinated people with a breakthrough infection transmit the virus as easily as unvaccinated people? How many people with breakthrough infections die or get seriously ill, broken down by age and underlying health conditions?

Confused? It’s not you. It’s the fog of pandemic, in which inadequate data hinders a clear understanding of how to fight a stealthy enemy.

To overcome the fog of war, the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz called for “a sensitive and discriminating judgment” as well as “skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.” He knew that since decisions will have to be made with whatever information is available in the face of an immediate threat, it’s crucial to acquire as much systematic evidence as possible, as soon as possible.

In the current crisis, that has often been difficult.

These days, some experts grapple for answers on Twitter. They might be trying to figure out the effect of a vaccine booster shot by reverse engineering a bar chart in a screenshot from Israel’s Ministry of Health, or arguing with one another about confounding factors or statistical paradoxes.

Why this stumbling in the fog? It may seem like we’re drowning in data: Dashboards and charts are everywhere. However, not all data is equal in its power to illuminate, and worse, sometimes it can even be misleading.

Few things have been as lacking in clarity as the risks for children. Testing in schools is haphazard, follow-up reporting is poor and data on hospitalization of children appears to be unreliable, even if those cases are rare. The Food and Drug Administration has asked that vaccine trials for children aged 5 to 11 be expanded, which is wise, but why weren’t they bigger to begin with?

While the pandemic has produced many fine examples of research and meticulous data collection, we are still lacking in detailed and systematic data on cases, contact tracing, breakthrough infections and vaccine efficacy over time, as well as randomized trials of interventions like boosters. This has left us playing catch-up with emerging threats like the Delta variant and has left policymakers struggling to make timely decisions in a manner that inspires confidence.

To see the dangers of insufficient data and the powers of appropriate data, consider the case of dexamethasone, an inexpensive generic corticosteroid drug.

In the early days of the pandemic, doctors were warned against using it to treat Covid patients. The limited literature from SARS and MERS — illnesses related to Covid — suggested that steroids, which suppress the immune system, would harm rather than help Covid patients.

That assessment changed on June 16, 2020, when the results of a large-scale randomized clinical trial from Britain, one of all too few such efforts during the pandemic, demonstrated that dexamethasone was able to reduce deaths by one-fifth among patients needing supplemental oxygen and an astonishing one-third among those on ventilators.

The study also explained the earlier findings: Given too early, before patients needed supplemental oxygen, steroids could harm patients. But comprehensive data from the randomized trial showed that when given later, as the disease progressed in severity, dexamethasone was immensely helpful.

Dexamethasone has since become a workhorse of Covid treatment, saving perhaps millions of lives at little cost or fanfare. Without that trial, though, it might never have been noticed because of a problem called confounding: when causal effects of different elements can’t be considered separately. If doctors give multiple drugs to patients at the same time, who knows which drug works and which one does not? Or, if they choose which drug to give to whom, those more ill may be getting effective drugs, but the severity of their illness could end up masking the positive effect of the drug. Trials allow us to sort through all of this.

Randomized trials are not the only source of useful data. For example, it would have been difficult to quickly determine how transmissible the Delta variant is — a crucial question — without the data collected from close and systematic observation.

If a variant is spreading quickly somewhere, it might be more transmissible, or it could have simply arrived in that area early and gotten a head start. Or it might have just hit a few superspreader events. We’ve had variants appear, generating alarming headlines, that were later shown to be no more threatening than previous ones.

Isn't It Ironic How Quiet The Topic Of Natural Immunity Has Been Kept?

theorganicprepper  |  The most frustrating thing to me, the past year and a half, has been the constantly changing narrative and the dismissal of formerly well-understood scientific truths. Natural immunity is one of those concepts from freshman biology that many seem to completely disregard these days.

I think this is a natural effect of the “cult of expertise” we have in the United States. Seemingly, anyone with specific credentials is automatically deferred to, regardless of how competent they are… or more insidiously, where their financial interests lie.

I’ve gotten into some discussions with medical professionals about whether people who have recovered from the disease need to be vaccinated. These conversations would have been seen as utterly ridiculous three years ago. However, now, it seems, we all need to relearn freshman biology. So I’d like to review the concept of natural immunity to help organize my thoughts and maybe help others that feel like their heads are in a whirl.

I’ve got my old college biology textbook-Life: The Science of Biology, by Purves, Sadava, Orians, and Heller. I’ve got the sixth edition, published in 2001, so it’s about 20 years old. I also have a newer college biology textbook because I’m a big nerd. It’s Campbell Biology, by Reece, Urry, Cain, Wasserman, Minorsky, and Jackson, published in 2014. Both textbooks detail how our immune systems work, and both say pretty much the same thing.

Our bodies have two major ways of defending against disease.

Our innate defenses are things like our skin and mucus. We’re born with these, and they make it difficult for various pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, and multicellular parasites to enter our bodies. Our bodies also have an immune system that recognizes and attacks any infectious agents that make it past our innate defenses.  

Our immune system is really sophisticated, and in healthy individuals, it works pretty well. Suppose some kind of pathogen makes it past the body’s innate defenses and begins infecting cells within the host. In that case, the host’s body will, in turn, start producing antibodies that will specifically attack the invading pathogen. The host body will continue producing antibodies until either the host dies or the invading cells die, and the patient’s body can return to normal.

The best part is, even after the active infection is over, the host’s body will retain the memory of the antibodies it produced during the infection. So if the formerly infected person reencounters the pathogen, the body will immediately have the antibodies to kill the pathogen. They rarely get sick gain, and if they do, it’s generally very mild.

Even the incredibly pro-vaccine Wall Street Journal had an article on this recently.

Usually, the WSJ leaves their articles up on the Opinion Page for about a week. However, within twenty-four hours, WSJ buried this article on natural immunity. Jeff had a great article about alternative media just the other day. This definitely feeds into his narrative about how much good info is getting buried right now.

Anyway, the WSJ article discusses mucosal immunity vs. internal immunity. The author (a neurologist) states that while vaccines stimulate internal immunity, they do nothing to address mucosal immunity. The viruses don’t penetrate the host’s organs, which is why most vaccinated people don’t get really sick. But, the viruses still live and reproduce in mucus-lined mouths and nasal passages. That is why vaccinated people with no symptoms are still spreading Covid like crazy. However, those of us that have recovered have both mucosal and internal immunity.

In case you needed further proof of the efficacy of natural immunity.

An Israeli study showed recently that vaccinated people were 13 times as likely to become infected and 27 times as likely to have symptomatic infections as people with natural immunity. 

Alex Berenson posted this information on Twitter on August 25, and the platform permanently banned him on August 28. However, medical professionals are starting to make noise about it, such as Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard epidemiologist. Hopefully, more people begin to listen.

 

Across The Board Mainstream Media Just Lied About Ivermectin In Oklahoma

Admitting some really safe, and inexpensive treatments like Invermectin have great value would diminish fear and slam the brakes on expensive treatments. I do not know this hypothesis to be true, but if there ever is a strong perception that the most influential members of the American medical community plus much of the media has decided that allowing Americans to suffer and die because otherwise it just opens a can of worms regarding activities in 2020, well, what will be found? Under such a hypothesis, “leaders” may be shocked that it is September 2021 and they still can’t move out of the trenches they dug even while all kinds of countries concern themselves with treating the sick effectively.

reason |  KFOR, an Oklahoma news channel, reported last week that rural hospitals throughout the state were in danger of becoming overwhelmed by victims of a very specific poisoning: overdoses of ivermectin, an anti-parasite drug promoted by vaccine skeptics as a possible treatment for COVID-19.

The story went viral, and was seized upon by the mainstream media. But its central claim is substantially untrue.

The meat of the story is a series of quotes from an Oklahoma doctor, Jason McElyea, who appears to attribute overcrowding at local hospitals to a deluge of ivermectin overdoses.

"The ERs are so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and be treated," McElyea told KFOR's Katelyn Ogle.

The story ran under the headline: "Patients overdosing on ivermectin backing up rural Oklahoma hospitals, ambulances." It was quickly picked up by national news outlets, such as Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and the New York Daily News. Numerous high-profile media figures, including MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, tweeted about ivermectin overdoses straining Oklahoma hospitals—the implication being that the right-wing embrace of a crank COVID-19 cure was dangerous not only for the people who consumed it but for the stability of the entire medical system.

It was a story that appeared to confirm many of the mainstream media's biases about the recklessness of the rubes. But it's extremely misleading. There is, in fact, little reason to believe a purported strain on Oklahoma hospitals is caused by ivermectin overdoses; one hospital served by the doctor quoted in the KFOR article released a statement saying it has not treated any ivermectin overdoses, nor has it been forced to turn away patients.

This is yet another example of the mainstream media lazily circulating a narrative that flatters the worldview of the liberal audience, without bothering to check on any of the details. Additional reporting was sorely needed here, and has now completely undermined the central point of the story.

 

Worse Than Horse Deworming Paste - CDC And Media Again Caught Prevaricating And Propagandizing

nakedcapitalism  |  Last Friday, the CDC published “Outbreak Associated with SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617.2 (Delta) Variant in an Elementary School — Marin County, California, May–June 2021” (“Outbreak”). This got a lot of play in the Northern California press, with a good deal of reporting done (or at least original stories written), because the study was led by Marin County Public Health, and they with other California epidemiologists and experts wrote the study up and then submitted it to the CDC, which accepted it. Good for them! However, there is a question “Outbreak” does not ask, and that the press did not ask. Carefully avoiding spoilers — though few NC readers will be surprised at the plot twist — I will first quote the “Outbreak” on the incident. Then I will switch into media critique mode, and present the headlines from Northern Califonia. After that, I will present the implications drawn from the outbreak by the press (which are more broad spectrum than the headlines). Finally, I will give the unasked question from “Outbreak” a thorough airing, and conclude.

Here is what “Outbreak” says in the “Investigation and Findings” section:

The outbreak location was an elementary school in Marin County, California… Each grade includes 20 to 25 students in single classrooms. Other than two teachers, one of whom was the index patient, all school staff members were vaccinated (verified in California’s Immunization Registry). The index patient became symptomatic on May 19 with nasal congestion and fatigue. This teacher reported attending social events during May 13–16 but did not report any known COVID-19 exposures and attributed symptoms to allergies. The teacher continued working during May 17–21, subsequently experiencing cough, subjective fever, and headache. The school required teachers and students to mask while indoors; interviews with parents of infected students suggested that students’ adherence to masking and distancing guidelines in line with CDC recommendations (3) was high in class. However, the teacher was reportedly unmasked on occasions when reading aloud in class. On May 23, the teacher notified the school that they received a positive result for a SARS-CoV-2 test performed on May 21 and self-isolated until May 30. The teacher did not receive a second COVID-19 test, but reported fully recovering during isolation.

The index patient’s students began experiencing symptoms on May 22. During May 23–26, among 24 students in this grade, 22 were tested…. Twelve (55%) of the 22 students received a positive test result, including eight who experienced symptom onset during May 22–26. Throughout this period, all desks were separated by 6 ft. Students were seated in five rows; the attack rate in the two rows seated closest to the teacher’s desk was 80% (eight of 10) and was 28% (four of 14) in the three back rows…

On May 22, students in a another classroom, who differed in age by 3 years from the students in the class with the index case and who were also ineligible for vaccination began to experience symptoms. The two classrooms were separated by a large outdoor courtyard with lunch tables that were blocked off from use with yellow tape. All classrooms had portable high-efficiency particulate air filters and doors and windows were left open. Fourteen of 18 students in this separate grade received testing; six tests had positive results. Investigation revealed that one student in this grade hosted a sleepover on May 21 with two classmates from the same grade. All three of these students experienced symptoms after the sleepover and received positive SARS-CoV-2 test results. Among infected students in this class, test dates ranged from May 24 to June 1; symptom onset occurred during May 22–31.

So that’s the outbreak. Here are the headlines:

• CDC: Unvaccinated Marin County teacher caused big COVID-19 outbreak in school San Francisco Chronicle
• CDC study finds unvaccinated Marin Co. teacher infected 22 elementary school students with COVID ABC7
• CDC report confirms unvaccinated Marin County teacher was source of Delta variant outbreak KTVU
• CDC study shows unvaccinated teacher started Delta COVID outbreak at Marin school KSBW
• One Unvaccinated Teacher In Marin School Seeded COVID Outbreak That Infected Over a Dozen Students, Their Siblings, and Parents SFist
• How 1 unvaccinated Marin County teacher started a delta variant outbreak: CDC study KRON4

There is a unanimity of opinion by the headline-writing editors that the source of the problem was the index case: the unvaccinated teacher. Indeed, that’s without justification — that is, is not only a matter of aghastitude — given the “Implications for Public Health Practice” in the Summary section of “Outbreak”:

Vaccines are effective against the Delta variant, but transmission risk remains elevated among unvaccinated persons in schools. In addition to vaccination, strict adherence to multiple nonpharmaceutical prevention strategies, including masking, are important to ensure safe school instruction.

(I presume the Summary is tacked on to the submitted study by CDC.) Now let’s turn to the bodies of the stories, where there is a broader spectrum of opinion than in the headlines.

Fully Vaccinated P-Town Poof-Dahs Done Phukked Up The Whole Elite Vaccine Narrative...,

abcnews  |  A week after the crowds descended upon Provincetown, Massachusetts, to celebrate the Fourth of July -- the holiday President Joe Biden hoped would mark the nation's liberation from COVID-19 -- the manager of the Cape Cod beach town said he was aware of "a handful of positive COVID cases among folks" who spent time there.

"We are in touch with the Health Department and Outer Cape Health Services and are closely monitoring the data," Alex Morse told reporters.

The announcement wasn't unusual with roughly half of the country still unvaccinated and flare-ups of the virus popping up in various states.

But within weeks, health officials seemed to be on to something much bigger. The outbreak quickly grew to the hundreds and most of them appeared to be vaccinated.

As of Thursday, 882 people were tied to the Provincetown outbreak. Among those living in Massachusetts, 74% of them were fully immunized, yet officials said the vast majority were also reporting symptoms. Seven people were reported hospitalized.

The initial findings of the investigation led by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, seemed to have huge implications.

Before Provincetown, health officials had been operating under the assumption that it was extraordinarily rare for a vaccinated person to become infected with the virus. And if they did, they probably wouldn't end up passing it on to others, such as children too young to qualify for the vaccine or people who were medically vulnerable.

The idea that vaccines halt transmission of the virus was largely behind the CDC's decision in May suggesting vaccinated people could safely go without their masks indoors and in crowds, even if others were unvaccinated.But that assumption had been based on studies of earlier versions of the virus. Delta was known for its "hyper-transmissibility," or as one former White House adviser put it "COVID on steroids.

"What has changed is the virus," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert and Biden's chief medical adviser.

When a vaccinated person gets infected with delta -- called a "breakthrough infection" -- "the level of virus in their nasopharynx is about 1,000 times higher than with the alpha variant," Fauci said in an interview Wednesday with MSNBC.

All indications now are that the Provincetown outbreak investigation is among the pieces of new evidence behind the CDC's decision to ask Americans to once again put on their masks indoors, even if they are vaccinated.

 

 

STL's Replacement Negroe Epidemiologist Can't Peddle His BS To Rowdy STL Crowd...,

stltoday  |  St. Louis County’s acting health director says the rumor is true: He gave someone the middle finger on his way out of the council meeting on the mask mandate Tuesday night.

But in a letter to County Councilwoman Rita Heard Days sent Wednesday, Dr. Faisal Khan said he did it after a string of racist provocations from Republican politicians like Councilman Tim Fitch and a boisterously anti-mask audience pushed him past his limit.

“I have never been subjected to the racist, xenophobic and threatening behavior that greeted me in the County Council meeting last night,” he wrote, after noting he’s been in public health for 25 years.

Fitch and others blamed for stoking racism and xenophobia dismissed Khan’s allegations as baseless. Fitch also said Khan was trying to provide political cover for County Executive Sam Page, who called for the mask mandate.

“The entire letter is another desperate attempt at deflection and diversion by Sam Page,” Fitch said in an interview. “Dr. Khan knew he was in trouble for (giving the middle finger) and this was an opportunity to put that on someone else.”

Khan appeared at the meeting as the council was considering a move to terminate the mask mandate as unlawful and unnecessary, which it would do despite the rising threat of the delta variant. During the debate, dozens of people, some of whom held signs with anti-mask messages, filled the council chambers to cheer on the action and jeer the mandate’s defenders.

Khan said the trouble began as soon as he took the podium with a “dog-whistle” question from Fitch, looking to emphasize Khan’s foreign background.

As he spoke, Khan said he also endured harassment from Republican politicians Paul Berry and Mark McCloskey, who sat close behind him in the audience.

Berry was an unsuccessful candidate for county executive in 2020; McCloskey, who is running for U.S. Senate, gained notoriety with his wife, Patricia, for brandishing firearms at protesters last year. Both McCloskeys attended the council meeting.

Political Management Of The Oligarchic Gerontocracy Is Fed Up With Disobediant/Non-Compliant Pissants...,

taibbi  |  On This Week With George Stephanopoulos this past Sunday, a gathering of Washington poo-bahs including Chris Christie, Rahm Emmanuel, Margaret Hoover, and Donna Brazile — Stephanopoulos calls the segment his “Powerhouse Roundtable,” which to my ear sounds like a Denny’s breakfast sampler, but I guess he couldn’t name it Four Hated Windbags — discussed vaccine holdouts. The former George W. Bush and Giuliani aide Hoover said it was time to stop playing nice:

If you’re going to get government-provided health care, if you’re getting VA treatment, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, anything — and Social Security obviously isn’t health care — you should be getting the vaccine. Okay? Because we are going to have to take care of you on the back end.

Brazile nodded sagely, but Emmanuel all but gushed cartoon hearts.

“You know, I’m having an out of body experience, because I agree with you,” said Obama’s former hatchet man, before adding, over the chyron, FRUSTRATION MOUNTS WITH UNVACCINATED AMERICANS:

I would close the space in. Meaning if you want to participate in X or Y activity, you gotta show you’re vaccinated. So it becomes a reward-punishment type system, and you make your own calculation.

This bipartisan love-in took place a few days after David Frum, famed Bush speechwriter and creator of the “Axis of Evil” slogan, wrote a column in The Atlantic entitled “Vaccinated America Has Had Enough.” In it, Frum wondered:

Does Biden’s America have a breaking point? Biden’s America produces 70 percent of the country’s wealth — and then sees that wealth transferred to support Trump’s America. Which is fine; that’s what citizens of one nation do for one another… [But] the reciprocal part of the bargain is not being upheld…

Will Blue America ever decide it’s had enough of being put medically at risk by people and places whose bills it pays? Check yourself. Have you?

I’m vaccinated. I think people should be vaccinated. But this latest moral mania — and make no mistake about it, the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” PR campaign is the latest in a ceaseless series of such manias, dating back to late 2016 — lays bare everything that’s abhorrent and nonsensical in modern American politics, beginning with the no-longer-disguised aristocratic mien of the Washington consensus. If you want to convince people to get a vaccine, pretty much the worst way to go about it is a massive blame campaign, delivered by sneering bluenoses who have a richly deserved credibility problem with large chunks of the population, and now insist they’re owed financially besides.

There’s always been a contingent in American society that believes people who pay more taxes should get more say, or “more votes,” as Joseph Heller’s hilarious Texan put it. It’s a conceit that cut across party. You hear it from the bank CEO who thinks America should thank him for the pleasure of kissing his ass with a bailout, but just as quickly from the suburban wine Mom who can’t believe the ingratitude of the nanny who asks for a day off. Doesn’t she know who’s paying the bills? The delusion can run so deep that people like Margaret Hoover can talk themselves into the idea that Social Security — money taxpayers lend the government, not the other way around — is actually a gift from the check-writing class.

In the last decade or so I had the misfortune of watching this phenomenon rise within both parties. After 2008, the “We’re pulling the oars, so we should steer the boat” argument dominated the GOP. Offshoots of Ayn Rand-ian thinking about ubermenschen producers and their dubious obligation to society’s masses of parasitic looters provided talking points both for TARP recipients (who insisted America needed to be invested not just in their survival but their prosperity) and the Tea Party. Remember Rick Santelli on CNBC, calling for a referendum on whether or not we should “subsidize the losers’ mortgages” or whether we should “reward the people who carry the water, instead of drink the water”?

Once Again For The Slow Students Diversity/Sensitivity Training Is A CIA Invention..., (REDUX 10/20/20)

newyorker  |   The invention of the sensitivity-training group is often traced to a specific evening: Lewin was running a workshop for teachers and social workers in Connecticut, where he had been hired by the state to help address racial and religious prejudice. After the participants had left, a few stragglers returned and asked to be permitted to sit in on the debriefings, and Lewin agreed. Though it was initially awkward to have the participants present, Lewin realized that the setup led to frank and open conversations. He saw the transformative possibilities of uninhibited feedback in the real time of the group session, and established the idea of the corporate T-group—shorthand for sensitivity “training group”—at the National Training Laboratory, in Bethel, Maine. His inroads into social engineering could also be put to less conciliatory purposes; Lewin was a consultant for the Office of Strategic Services and developed programs to help recruit potential spies.

The T-group, which was sometimes called “therapy for normals”—rather insensitively by today’s standards but with the intent of destigmatizing the practice—was a therapeutic workshop for strangers which would take place in a neutral locale and promote candid emotional exchange. A typical T-group session would begin with the facilitator declining to assume any active leadership over the session, a move that would surprise and disconcert the participants, who would collectively have to work out the problem of how to deal with a lack of hierarchy or directives.

It sounds simple enough, but the experience could be deeply unsettling, even life-changing, for some. As one contemporary witness of the Bethel N.T.L. workshops remarked, “I had never observed such a buildup of emotional tension in such a short time. I feared it was more than some leaders and members could bear.” The T-group promised an antidote to the oppressions of Dale Carnegie-style insincerity that dominated the business world, and, crucially, the sessions seemed to provide a glimpse of a reality in which it was finally possible to know how one was really perceived.

the prize for the “toughest encounter seminar that had been ever convened at Esalen” went to one run collaboratively by George Leonard and Price Cobbs. Leonard was a white psychologist from the South, whose youthful encounter with the terrified eyes of a Black prisoner surrounded by a white mob instilled in him a lifelong commitment to fighting racism. He implored Cobbs, an African-American psychiatrist who was co-authoring the book “Black Rage,” to come to Esalen to collaborate. They organized a storied, twenty-four-hour-marathon racial-sensitivity workshop between Black and white participants that became rancorous: “the anger rolled on and on without end” and “interracial friendships crumbled on the spot.” Finally, Anderson relates how, as the sun was beginning to rise, an African-American woman was moved to spontaneously comfort a crying white woman, and this shifted the tenor of the entire session. Though the episode could easily be read less sunnily, as another troubling instance of the oppressor requiring comfort from the oppressed, the facilitators purportedly deemed it a success. Cobbs spoke to Leonard and declared, “George, we’ve got to take this to the world.”

Cobbs’s career encapsulates the shift of sensitivity training from its literary roots to corporate argot. He was sparked by early epiphanies about Black anger and injustice, inspired by reading Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. He admired the plot of “Invisible Man,” for instance, because “the unnamed main character’s sense of his own invisibility fans his ultimate rage into flames of self-expression. . . .” Cobbs credited Lewin’s research as a key precedent when he went on to found Pacific Management Systems, a training center for T-group leaders, and he played a role in the spinoff of diversity training from sensitivity training. His years of advising African-American businesspeople formed the basis of his guide, from 2000, “Cracking the Corporate Code: The Revealing Success Stories of 32 African-American Executives.”

In her provocative history “Race Experts,” from 2002, the scholar Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn examines Cobbs’s career as part of the larger story of how “racial etiquette” and sensitivity training “hijacked” and banalized civil-rights discourse. Quinn persuasively maintains that “sensitivity itself is an inadequate and cynical substitution for civility and democracy—both of which presuppose some form of equal treatment and universal standard of conduct,” and neither of which, of course, the U.S. has ever achieved.

Empire Made Entirely Of Disinformation Blocks Declassification Of Covid Origins Investigation

townhall |   By a vote of 216 to 207 Tuesday evening, Democrats in the House of Representatives blocked consideration of a bill that would require the Director of National Intelligence to declassify information related to the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, specifically information about any role the Wuhan Institute of Virology may have played in the pandemic's outbreak.

FLOOR ALERT: @HouseDemocrats blocked @HouseGOP requests to declassify intelligence on the origins of COVID-19 & #ChineseCommunistParty's subsequent cover-up. The Senate UNANIMOUSLY passed the bill 5⃣5⃣ days ago...what is the Speaker afraid of? #HoldChinaAccountable pic.twitter.com/uOzbadQ41q

— House Rules Republicans (@RulesReps) July 20, 2021

The COVID-19 Origin Act was introduced in the U.S. Senate by Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Mike Braun (R-IN) and passed unanimously in May. 

Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) brought the COVID-19 Origin Act to the House floor for consideration with Reps. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) and Darin LaHood (R-IL) explaining its importance shortly before Democrats voted down the measure Tuesday night.

"The best disinfectant is sunlight and that's what we can provide today," Wenstrup explained of the COVID-19 Origin Act. "The bill first establishes that we must identify the precise origins of COVID-19 because it is critical for preventing a similar pandemic in the future."

"I cannot stress enough that this bill is not controversial by any means," Wenstrup continued. "In fact, it passed the Senate in May with unanimous consent — not one senator objected. Not Senators Ted Cruz or Rand Paul, not Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. If those four members can get on board with this bill, should not we be able to do the same?"

Empire Made Entirely Of Disinformation Fights Disinformation

caitlinjohnstone |   The weirdest thing about the Biden administration tasking itself with the censorship of “disinformation” on social media is that the United States is the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is built upon a foundation of disinformation, maintained by disinformation, and facilitated by disinformation.

If the propaganda engine of the US-centralized empire ceased actively deceiving the public about the world, it would collapse immediately. There would be mass unrest at home and abroad, status quo politics would be abandoned, alliances and coalitions would crumble, leaders official and unofficial would be ousted, and US unipolar hegemony would end.

The only thing keeping this from happening is the vast amounts of wealth and energy which are poured into continuously deceiving the people of America and its allies about what’s really going on in their nations and political systems, and in the world as a whole.

Getting people believing they live in separate, sovereign nations which function independently from one another, instead of member states within a single undeclared empire which moves as one unit on the international stage.

Getting people believing they control the fate of their nation via the democratic process, when in reality all large-scale politics are scripted puppet shows controlled by a plutocratic class who owns both the politicians and the media outlets which report on them.

Getting people believing they are part of a virtuous rules-based international order which opposes totalitarian regimes to spread freedom and democracy, instead of a tyrannical empire that works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates.

And above all, manufacturing the illusion that the oppressive, exploitative imperialist status quo is normal.

Talk About "Race Relations" Deflects Mass Consciousness From The Political Economy

taibbi |  Combating racism becomes a convenient alternative to attacking inequality and inequality, even those inequalities that appear or the manifest themselves as racial disparities. Because the struggle against racism is exactly parallel to the struggle against terrorism… It can go on forever, because the enemy is an abstraction that you can define however you want to define it, at the moment that you wanted to find it.

DiAngelo’s not the first person to do this. There was a woman named Peggy McIntosh who going back to the eighties had the “knapsack of privilege,” or some shit like that. I know people who have had careers at racial sensitivity trainings, and the people that I know, in my world — the people who came out of the movement actually came out of anti-Klan politics, or rather left politics in the seventies, and they started doing this stuff. It makes sense in the same way that people who were graduate students in the late sixties and early seventies who were left theory-inclined people got into the Frankfurt School. That became the cornerstone of their academic careers.

Well, that’s what’s happened in the anti-racism or the racial sensitivity training world. And one of the things that’s happened over time is that the material incentives — and it’s funny, pardon this aside, but it’s funny how many political-economy-oriented leftists we encounter who apply critical political economic thinking to every domain in the world — outside the movement that they’re operating in. So the material incentives evolved, and changed over time. And some of my friends who have done this work have said to me that they used to do it for community groups, used to do it for unions and so forth and so on. Then, as the material incentives change, they want to build and do more for corporations, or for local governments who were under consent decrees.

So this becomes part of the thing. You’re under a consent decree for actual discrimination. One of the remedies that’s likely to be imposed as part of the decree is that you submit to this training. And we see it all the time now. Even the insurgencies within NGOs, right? Where the staff or whatever is going batshit crazy about how the leadership of the organization is all racist, sexist, whatever. And one of the first calls is to bring in some minor-league version of Robin DiAngelo to do the racial sensitivity training. So in that sense, it’s taken hold as part of what I’ve often described as the broader political economy of race relations.

How About Schools Teach Every Student To Read, Write, And Calculate At Grade Level?

WaPo  |  This week at the Oklahoma State Department of Education building, I was schooled in how the stealthy, well-orchestrated movement against teaching honestly about America’s racist history operates. It is fast and furious and determined to steamroll over truth in education.

But Monday morning, one Black woman and a Black high school student tried to hold the line. Though they were on the losing side of that steamroll — this is Oklahoma, after all — their courage and resistance in the face of white supremacy deserve to be celebrated.

The occasion was consideration of item 8(b) on the Oklahoma Board of Education’s meeting agenda: emergency rules for implementing a bill passed in May by the Republican-controlled state legislature limiting what students in the state can be taught on race and gender. Notice of the item was publicly posted only last Friday, giving educators and advocates next to no time to organize a response. The actual rules, too, were made available just minutes before the meeting. They included chillingly harsh penalties, such as teacher suspensions and district defunding, for instruction that makes any individual feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”

Carlisha Williams Bradley arrived knowing she would cast one of the most consequential votes of her professional life. The only Black member of the board, she wondered whether she would be removed from her position for pushing back. But the education advocate and former executive director of Tulsa Legacy Charter School spoke truth: that the right-wing’s current bête noire, “critical race theory” — which the legislature claimed to be responding to — means merely the examination of laws and legislation that uphold racism and oppression. Oklahoma’s new education law and harsh punishment, she said, would serve only to generate fear in teaching an accurate history of the United States.

“We are robbing students of the opportunity to have a high-quality education,” Williams Bradley said.

The Efficacy Of A Drug Being Promoted By "Right Wing Figures" Worldwide - WTF?!?!?!

Guardian |  The preprint study on the efficacy and safety of ivermectin – a drug used against parasites such as worms and headlice – in treating Covid-19, led by Dr Ahmed Elgazzar from Benha University in Egypt, was published on the Research Square website in November.

It claimed to be a randomised control trial, a type of study crucial in medicine because it is considered to provide the most reliable evidence on the effectiveness of interventions due to the minimal risk of confounding factors influencing the results. Elgazzar is listed as chief editor of the Benha Medical Journal, and is an editorial board member.

The study found that patients with Covid-19 treated in hospital who “received ivermectin early reported substantial recovery” and that there was “a substantial improvement and reduction in mortality rate in ivermectin treated groups” by 90%.

But the drug’s promise as a treatment for the virus is in serious doubt after the Elgazzar study was pulled from the Research Square website on Thursday “due to ethical concerns”. Research Square did not outline what those concerns were.

A medical student in London, Jack Lawrence, was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction. He first became aware of the Elgazzar preprint when it was assigned to him by one of his lecturers for an assignment that formed part of his master’s degree. He found the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised.

It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and Covid-19 through a thesaurus to change key words. “Humorously, this led to them changing ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ to ‘extreme intense respiratory syndrome’ on one occasion,” Lawrence said.

The data also looked suspicious to Lawrence, with the raw data apparently contradicting the study protocol on several occasions.

“The authors claimed to have done the study only on 18-80 year olds, but at least three patients in the dataset were under 18,” Lawrence said.

“The authors claimed they conducted the study between the 8th of June and 20th of September 2020, however most of the patients who died were admitted into hospital and died before the 8th of June according to the raw data. The data was also terribly formatted, and includes one patient who left hospital on the non-existent date of 31/06/2020.”

The Delta Variant Narrative Eloquently Makes The Case For A Malfeasant Elite Agenda

Data show that:
Experimental mRNA Therapeutic Jabs REDUCE: symptoms, hospital admissions, and fatalities.

Data also show that:
The mRNA jabbed STILL become: infected; symptomatic; infectious; even super spreaders.

So what exactly does the planned vaccination passport aim to achieve other than a backdoor around lockdown protections and to create a two tiered political economy with no genuine biosecurity utility - only seething interpersonal resentment?

Polio vaccine gives a rough approximation of “sterilizing immunity.” You can fight off any infections by the polio virus for pretty much the rest of your life.

The state of the art Coronavirus ‘mRNA Therapeutics’ are showing a steep drop off in effectiveness after six to eight months. Even with that, vaccinated individuals can and do catch Covid and spread Covid.

Have you ever heard or read of someone who has had a polio vaccination giving it to anyone else afterward?

Even when people are willing to get the coronavirus ‘mRNA jab,’ most of the working class in this country cannot afford the opportunity costs of getting the ‘jab.’ No health ‘care,’ no paid, or even unpaid time off to recover from the after effects many experience from having had the shots, etc.

For some as yet unspecified reasons, the American Health Establishment has massively bungled its handling of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Even now, the ‘vaccinated’ are told that they do not need to mask in public, even when the evidence says otherwise; even when they can be the disease vectors that ignite new ‘hot spots’ of infection - simply by not staying masked in public.

I am highly suspicious of the nature of the “bungling” in evidence in Britain and America.

I suspect now that a decision was made to let the disease run wild so as to “cull the herd.” Having survived an infection last year, I've become emotionally detached from the demographic sub-populations targetted for Covid 'culling,’

Some years ago, I would more openly profess my Malthusian predilections. However, now that I can plainly see a cull being effected by Elites via nullification of the Social Contract - I'm much less sanguine about the prospects for population control and much clearer about the utility of plague for human livestock management. 

NYTimes |  Those who have been inoculated against the coronavirus have little to worry about. Reports of infections with the Delta variant among fully immunized people in Israel may have alarmed people, but virtually all of the available data indicate that the vaccines are powerfully protective against severe illness, hospitalization and death from all existing variants of the coronavirus.

Even a single dose of vaccines that require two shots seems to prevent the most severe symptoms, although it is a flimsier barrier against symptomatic illness — making it an urgent priority to give people second doses in places like Britain that opted to prioritize first doses.

“When you have populations of unvaccinated individuals, then the vaccines really can’t do their jobs,” said Stacia Wyman, an expert in computational genomics at the University of California, Berkeley. “And that’s where Delta is really a concern.”

Britain’s experience with the Delta variant has highlighted the importance not just of vaccination, but the strategy underlying it. The country ordered inoculations strictly by age, starting with the oldest and carving out few exceptions for younger essential workers, outside of the medical profession.

 

 

General Oliver Otis Howard Was A White Union General And Head Of The Freedmen's Bureau

WSWS  |  New York Times Magazine staff writer and 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones announced in an exclusive interview on “CBS This Morning” with co-host Gayle King that she was rejecting an offer of tenure from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).

Instead, Hannah-Jones explained that she would accept a tenured professorship at Howard University in Washington D.C. as the Knight Chair in Race and Reporting at the Cathy Hughes School of Communication.

Hannah-Jones will join writer Ta-Nehisi Coates (who wrote We Were Eight Years in Power about the Obama administration) in founding the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard. The center will be financed with $20 million from the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation and an anonymous donor.

According to a university press release, the new center “will focus on training and supporting aspiring journalists in acquiring the investigative skills and historical and analytical expertise needed to cover the crisis our democracy is facing.”

The 1619 Project was published by the New York Times in August 2019 and has been promoted with millions of dollars in funding and a school curriculum developed by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. It falsely roots American history in an enduring racial conflict between blacks and whites.

Hannah-Jones’ lead essay, for which she won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, argued that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery against the British monarchy and that President Abraham Lincoln was little more than a garden-variety racist. 

The response of preeminent American historians Gordon Wood, James McPherson, James Oakes, Clayborne Carson, Victoria Bynum and others exposed the New York Times' effort to reinterpret American history. The World Socialist Web Site, in addition to interviewing these historians, has thoroughly refuted the falsifications of the 1619 Project and the lead essay written by Hannah-Jones.

Her other writings have descended into outright racism against whites. The historical falsifications which she promotes and her limited journalistic record since beginning to write for the Times in late 2014—just 23 articles—would certainly qualify as red flags in her application for tenure.

The Lie And The Cover-up Only Ever Magnify The Heinousness Of The Crime...,

medialens  |  As we have pointed out since Media Lens began in 2001, a fundamental feature of corporate media is propaganda by omission. Over the past week, a stunning example has highlighted this core property once again.

A major witness in the US case against Julian Assange has just admitted fabricat­ing key accusati­ons in the indictment against the Wikileaks founder. These dramatic revelations emerged in an extensive article published on 26 June in Stundin, an Icelandic newspaper. The paper interviewed the witness, Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, a former WikiLeaks volunteer, who admitted that he had made false allegations against Assange after being recruited by US authorities. Thordarson, who has several convictions for sexual abuse of minors and financial fraud, began working with the US Department of Justice and the FBI after receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution. He even admitted to continuing his crime spree while working with the US authorities.

Last summer, US officials had presented an updated version of their indictment against Assange to Magistrate Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser at the Old Bailey in London. Key to this update was the assertion that Assange had instructed Thordarson to commit computer intrusions or hacking in Iceland. 

As the Stundin article reported:

‘The aim of this addition to the indictment was apparently to shore up and support the conspiracy charge against Assange in relation to his interactions with Chelsea Manning. Those occurred around the same time he resided in Iceland and the authors of the indictment felt they could strengthen their case by alleging he was involved in illegal activity there as well. This activity was said to include attempts to hack into the computers of members of [the Icelandic] parliament and record their conversations.

‘In fact, Thordarson now admits to Stundin that Assange never asked him to hack or access phone recordings of MPs.’

Judge Baraitser’s ruling on 4 January, 2021 was against extradition to the US. But she did so purely on humanitarian grounds concerning Assange’s health, suicide risk and the extreme conditions he would face in confinement in US prisons.

The Stundin article continued:

‘With regards to the actual accusations made in the indictment Baraitser sided with the arguments of the American legal team, including citing the specific samples from Iceland which are now seriously called into question.

‘Other misleading elements can be found in the indictment, and later reflected in the Magistrate’s judgement, based on Thordarson’s now admitted lies.’

The Stundin article further details Thordarson’s lies and deceptions, including mispresenting himself as an official representative of WikiLeaks while a volunteer in 2010-2011, even impersonating Assange, and embezzling more than $50,000 from the organisation.

By August 2011, Thordarson was being pursued by WikiLeaks staff trying to locate the missing funds. In fact, Thordarson had arranged for the money to be sent to his private bank account by forging an email in Assange’s name. That month, Thordarson sought a way out by contacting the US Embassy in Iceland, offering to be an informant in the case against Assange.