About These Known Unknowns?

aier |  Now begins the grand effort, on display in thousands of articles and news broadcasts daily, somehow to normalize the lockdown and all its destruction of the last two months. We didn’t lock down almost the entire country in 1968/69, 1957, or 1949-1952, or even during 1918. But in a terrifying few days in March 2020, it happened to all of us, causing an avalanche of social, cultural, and economic destruction that will ring through the ages.

There was nothing normal about it all. We’ll be trying to figure out what happened to us for decades hence.

How did a temporary plan to preserve hospital capacity turn into two-to-three months of near-universal house arrest that ended up causing worker furloughs at 256 hospitals, a stoppage of international travel, a 40% job loss among people earning less than $40K per year, devastation of every economic sector, mass confusion and demoralization, a complete ignoring of all fundamental rights and liberties, not to mention the mass confiscation of private property with forced closures of millions of businesses?

Whatever the answer, it’s got to be a bizarre tale. What’s truly surprising is just how recent the theory behind lockdown and forced distancing actually is. So far as anyone can tell, the intellectual machinery that made this mess was invented 14 years ago, and not by epidemiologists but by computer-simulation modelers. It was adopted not by experienced doctors – they warned ferociously against it – but by politicians.

Let’s start with the phrase social distancing, which has mutated into forced human separation. The first I had heard it was in the 2011 movie Contagion. The first time it appeared in the New York Times was February 12, 2006:

If the avian flu goes pandemic while Tamiflu and vaccines are still in short supply, experts say, the only protection most Americans will have is “social distancing,” which is the new politically correct way of saying “quarantine.”

But distancing also encompasses less drastic measures, like wearing face masks, staying out of elevators — and the [elbow] bump. Such stratagems, those experts say, will rewrite the ways we interact, at least during the weeks when the waves of influenza are washing over us.

The Governance Paradigm When Human Interaction Is Fundamentally Suspicious And Politically Contagious

strategic-culture |  In Tempetes Microbiennes, Patrick Zylberman, a professor of History of Health in Paris, detailed the complex process through which health security, so far at the margins of political strategies, was sneaking into center stage in the early 2000s. The WHO had already set the precedent in 2005, warning about “50 million deaths” around the world caused by the incoming swine flu. In the worst-case scenario projected for a pandemic, Zylberman predicted that “sanitary terror” would be used as an instrument of governance.

That worst-case scenario has been revamped as we speak. The notion of a generalized obligatory confinement is not warranted by any medical justification, or leading epidemiological research, when it comes to fighting a pandemic. Still, that was enshrined as the hegemonic policy – with the inevitable corollary of countless masses plunged into unemployment. All that based on failed, delirious mathematical models of the Imperial College kind, imposed by powerful pressure groups ranging from the World Economic Forum (WEF) to the Munich Security Conference.

Enter Dr. Richard Hatchett, a former member of the National Security Council during the first Bush Jr. administration, who was already recommending obligatory confinement of the whole population way back in 2001. Hatchett now directs the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a very powerful entity coordinating global vaccine investment, and very cozy with Big Pharma. CEPI happens to be a brainchild of the WEF in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Crucially, Hatchett regards the fight against Covid-19 as a “war”. The terminology – adopted by everyone from President Trump to President Macron – gives away the game. It harks back to – what else – the global war on terror (GWOT), as solemnly announced in September 2001 by Donald “Known Unknowns” Rumsfeld himself.

Rumsfeld, crucially, had been the chairman of biotech giant Gilead. After 9/11, at the Pentagon, he got busy aiming to blur the distinction between civilians and the military when it came to GWOT. That’s when “generalized obligatory confinement” was conceptualized, with Hatchett among the key players.

As much as this was a militarized Big Pharma spin-off concept, it had nothing to do with public health. What mattered was the militarization of American society to be adopted in response to bioterror – at the time automatically attributed to a squalid, tech-deprived al-Qaeda.

The current version of this project – we are at “war” and every civilian must stay at home – takes the form of what Alexander Dugin has defined as a medical-military dictatorship.

Hatchett is very much part of the group, alongside ubiquitous Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), very close to WHO, WEF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. chapter of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Further applications inbuilt in the project will include all-around digital surveillance, sold as health monitoring. Already implemented in the current narrative is the non-stop demonization of China, “guilty” of all things Covid-19-related. That is inherited from another tried and tested war game – the Red Dawn scheme.

Is Nature Magazine A Powerful Enforcer Of The DISC?

strategic-culture |  Amidst the storm of controversy raised by the lab-origin theory of COVID-19 extolled by such figures as Nobel prize winning virologist Luc Montagnier, bioweapons expert Francis Boyle, Sri Lankan Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith and the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, an elaborate project was undertaken under the nominal helm of NATURE Magazine in order to refute the claim once and for all under the report ‘The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2’.

This project was led by a team of evolutionary virologists using a line of reasoning that “random mutation can account for anything” and was parroted loudly and repeatedly by Fauci, WHO officials and Bill Gates in order to shut down all uncomfortable discussion of the possible laboratory origins of COVID-19 while also pushing for a global vaccine campaign. On April 18, Dr. Fauci (whose close ties with Bill Gates, and Big Pharma have much to do with his control of hundreds of billions of dollars of research money), stated:

“There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve. And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”

I think at this moment, rife as it is with speculative arguments, confusion and under-defined data, it is useful to remove oneself from the present and look for higher reference points from which we can re-evaluate events now unfolding on the world stage.

In order to do this, let us begin by asking a new series of questions:

What is Nature Magazine exactly? Is it truly an “objective” platform for pure scientific research untainted by the filth of political agendas? Is this standard-bearer of “proper method”, which can make or break the career of any scientist, truly the scientific journal it claims to be or is there something darker to be discovered?

As I presented a part of this story in my previous installment in this series The Rise of Optical Biophysics and Clash of the Two Sciences, a very old battle has been waged around political systems but also what sort of scientific paradigms will shape our future.

A State-by-State Look At Coronavirus In Prisons

themarshallproject |  Since March, The Marshall Project has been tracking how many people are being sickened and killed by COVID-19 in prisons and how widely it has spread across the country and within each state. Here, we will regularly update these figures counting the number of people infected and killed nationwide and in each prison system until the crisis abates.

By May 13, at least 25,239 people in prison had tested positive for the illness, a 25 percent increase from the week before.

Much of the remarkable recent growth in coronavirus cases has been due to a handful of states—Ohio, Tennessee, Arkansas, Michigan, North Carolina among them—that began aggressively testing nearly everyone at prisons where people had become sick. This spate of testing would suggest that coronavirus had been circulating in prisons in much greater numbers than known, and that in the many states where tests have not been prevalent, far more people may have been carrying it than were initially reported.

The first known COVID-19 death of a prisoner was in Georgia when Anthony Cheek died on March 26. Cheek, who was 49 years old, had been held in Lee State Prison near Albany, a hotspot for the disease. Since then, at least 372 other prisoners have died of coronavirus-related causes. By May 13, the total number of deaths had risen by 23 percent in a week.

Given the huge differences in how many people are being tested in prisons for the virus, the effects of the pandemic have varied widely between different state prison systems. The first reported cases began popping up in Massachusetts and Georgia on March 20. By the end of April, some states like Nebraska, Idaho and Maine still had not identified any confirmed cases of sick prisoners. Here, you can choose to view the data for any state prison system and see how the numbers compare. For a summary of the number of cases in facilities run by the federal Bureau of Prisons, choose the “Federal” option.

Harmonious Society Censorship Prefigures All Against All Political Violence

opendemocracy |  It is difficult to say if it was our friends that miscalculated the scope of the censorship, or if it was the Chinese government that miscalculated the scope of the new epidemic. For the reality quickly got lost, perhaps to everyone, under close surveillance of domestic reporting of the virus. After returning to the UK in January, a large part of my daily routine has been saving Chinese news reports and key commentaries on the virus through clusters of screenshots rather than simply saving the links. This was because ‘disharmonious’ web content would be soon deleted without a trace and during January articles related to the epidemic were censorship targets. In fact, due to the 8 hour time difference between China and the UK, it was not uncommon for me to wake up in the morning, only to find that half of the articles passed on by friends had already been removed or their access denied. To be sure, some of the censored content may have been fake news, but it was also evident that what remained in circulation adhered to the party-line.

More importantly, COVID-19 exposed an often-ignored character of how censorship works when it is effectively ‘constitutionalised' in the political system. Its ubiquity in governing rationales means that censorship is not necessarily centrally coordinated but is a layered practice. That is, censorship becomes a tool wielded at the discretion of multiple authorities and can be discriminately applied in accordance to local needs. For example, compared to many other less affected cities, in the early phase, Wuhan’s local media was subject to stringent censorship. According to a corpus study of Chinese official newspapers carried out by a media studies’ scholar at Hong Kong University, between 1 January and 20 January 2020, coronavirus was only reported four times by Wuhan local newspaper Chutian Dushi Bao, of which two were rebuking ‘rumours’ and two were news releases by the local health bureau. On 20 January, the day before President Xi Jinping publicly acknowledged the seriousness of the outbreak and 3 days before the Wuhan lockdown, local news was still celebrating that 20,000 free tickets to key tourist sites been handed out to the public with the expectation of a tourist surge during the Spring Festival holiday.

A key difference between democratic and non-democratic states in the response to COVID-19 does not hinge on lockdowns, but on what has been discussed and done to mitigate the various knock-on effects of lockdowns. For example, in the days following the UK’s lockdown in late March, discussion, and sometimes protests, on the welfare of different social groups filled mainstream news outlets: the impact of children with special needs, individuals in care homes, domestic violence, mental health and concerns for safety-nets for the self-employed. Of course many of these issues remain unresolved or only partially resolved, but this ‘explosion’ of public expression of concerns made many underlying social issues visible from the start.

In contrast, few such (pre-emptive) discussions on the social consequences of lockdown could be found in Chinese media. If one types in ‘domestic violence’ (家庭暴力) and ‘coronavirus pneumonia’ (新冠肺炎, the common way for Chinese media to refer to the COVID-19 pandemic) onto China’s search engine Baidu, the results are predominately news reports on the increase of domestic violence in the UK, US, Japan and other countries. Reports on domestic violence in China in the context of the pandemic were scarce. Of course, Baidu as the main Chinese search engine has long been criticised for manipulating research results, bowing to political and commercial pressure. Thus this might not be a fair representation of what has been discussed or done about domestic violence in China during the lockdown. But this perhaps further underlines my point. That is, social controversies within China are censored out of public sight, and thus out of public mind.

The true danger of political censorship, however, lies not simply in the absence of certain discussions, but in the nurturing of social acquiescence to this silence. For example, similar to other countries, medical staff were soon heralded as the contemporary ‘heroes’ in China. Images of the medical profession on posters paying tribute to them were predominantly male, yet published lists of medical staff volunteering to join the front line were largely female. I wrote a post on Chinese social media questioning this aspect of gender inequality. The response was mixed. While some commented that this was an ‘interesting point’, others disapproved of my ‘making a fuss’. One such criticism came from my own cousin, who, along with his wife, were front-line doctors. He believed that everyone was or should be preoccupied with fighting the disease. So why should I ‘distract’ this concentration with ‘the trivial matter of gender equality’? My cousin’s rationale echoes China’s development strategy over the last 40 years. That is, China has been exceptionally good at identifying one goal (e.g. fighting coronavirus) and concentrating the whole nation’s resources into achieving that goal (e.g. speedy reallocation of financial and human resources into the health system). Wider social discussions are considered as but a distraction. In fact, there is almost a ‘pragmatic’ argument for no discussion: even if issues were raised, given limited government resource and under-developed societal services, there is no capacity to address these problems anyway. So what’s the point of discussion?

Coincidence Theory: 2012 Official EU Storyboard For The Controlavirus Pandemic

To Believe In Non-Violence Is To Exist At The Whim Of Those Who Believe In Violence

ianwelsh |  A sea change happened in the 60s and 70s: one where the legitimacy of violence was rejected by the left, and violence was gifted to the right. The end of the draft and the left wing hatred of all violence meant that the left gave the military to the right wing. Cops have always been right wing, of course, but the draft had meant that the rank and file military included many left wingers. It also meant that people on the left had violent skills, taught courtesy of the military.

That ended. Meanwhile the right, including the most far right, encouraged their people to join the military and the policy, to learn the skills and to make sure those institutions were run by right wingers from top to bottom.

So there are two likely reasons the Michigan legislature gave into violence. One: they think that right wing violence is legitimate. Two, they don’t trust the police or national guard to stop right wingers they sympathize with and support.

Meanwhile only two parts of the left believe they have a right to be violent: Antifa, and the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers have taken to armed escort of legislators they support.

Those who disarm; those who believe fanatically in non-violence, always exist at the whim of those who believe in violence and are good at it.

This is the position the left has put itself in in America and many other countries: disarmed, bad at violence, with no influence over the violent organs of the state and almost no tradition or skill in violence in the few organs it still has influence over (like some unions.)

Some of this weakness was caused by the right: as with their gutting of unions in the 80s. But much of it is because the left both believes that violence is always wrong and that it is ineffective.

Michigan is the fruit of those beliefs.

And, children, history is a record of violence often working. Sometimes non-violence works, yes, sometimes it even works very well. But effective violence, especially if it is perceived as legitimate, is also a winning strategy.

Are We More Than Ripples In The Fine Structure Of SpaceTime Geometry?

PCOTG | The other day, at a meeting here, the following lines were read: "Let us take the Sermon on the Mount and try to understand what it means. As was said before, in the last talk, "religion"—as it is called—that is, as the psychological ideas taught by Christ about the individual evolution of man and his transformation into a new man are usually called—is concerned with the development of essence after personality has been formed. A man in whom a rich personality has been formed by experience, education and interests, is a "rich man" in personality. But essence remains poor. For it to develop, personality must become passive." This was not understood, but it is very important that everyone in the work should understand what this paragraph means. It means that religion in the real sense—and we only know Christianity  ourselves—refers to the third stage of a man, the making of personality passive so that essence can grow. I must repeat again that the inner meaning of the Gospels has nothing to do with life. Their teaching starts at the point where personality has been formed already in a man and refers to this third stage of possible development. A man must first of all become developed as regards personality by the action of life.

This work is sometimes called a second education. It is for those who are looking for a second education. The first education is an education that life gives us; and this is absolutely necessary. The better a person is educated by means of life, the more he learns, the more intelligent he is, the more experienced he is, the more he knows about people, and about affairs, the more he knows about manners, the better he can express himself, the more he is able to use the different sides of life, the
better for him. This is the first education. This forms personality. We have said before that man consists of different centres and each of these has different parts; these centres and parts should be well furnished and the better furnished they are with inscriptions on rolls, the better forhim.

But a point comes in a man's development where, as was said before, he feels empty, and it is at this stage that the teaching of the Gospels and all this work comes in. I do not know whether any of you have ever thought about this very deeply. But it is quite possible that some of you who have done your duty in life often wonder what it is exactly you are doing, what the meaning of it all is. Speaking in this personal way for a moment I would like to ask you this question: Do you think that life and the meanings that it affords us are enough and have you felt that in some way life does not quite give you what you expected?

I am not saying that life is meaningless; it has obviously many meanings. But have any of you come to the point of feeling a certain meaninglessness even in those interests that you follow and try to hold on to? Why I am saying this is because if life afforded us our full meaning then there would be no point, in fact, no meaning, either in what the Gospels talk about or in what this system talks about. If you are quite content with the meanings that life affords, quite selfsatisfied, then there is no point in trying to understand what this system teaches, and, let me add, there is no point in your trying to understand what Christ's teaching really means. Now, if man were nothing but a well-formed personality and this were his end, then we might very well believe in all those doctrines of humanitarianism and other scientific ideas that say that man is nothing but a creature turned towards external life and having to adapt himself as intelligently as possible towards it. But if you have followed what has been said in this letter about the idea of man in this system you will see that the development of personality is merely a stage, and an absolutely necessary stage, towards a further stage.

It is directly comparable with the formation of a mass of food round a seed, as in the case of a nut. The nut has an essential part in it—namely, the seed itself that can grow—but it cannot grow until it is surrounded by a mass of nourishing material, just as an egg has a seed in it surrounded by a mass of yolk, and so on. Take the latter example: how can a chicken grow unless it has all the substances surrounding it for it to feed on? And remember that it grows inside the egg-shell and finally emerges a complete chicken and this complete chicken has been made out of the substances that the living germ has attacked and eaten. Now the fate of acorns is one thing, but the fate of oak-trees is a different thing, and, as was said, man surrounded by personality resembles an acorn and suffers, as it were, the same fate as the acorn, unless he begins to grow, and growth in a man corresponds to what we are calling the third stage in a man after personality has been formed round essence. If we take man at this second stage where essence is surrounded by personality he is just like an acorn, maybe a larger or a smaller acorn, but nothing but an acorn. He is perhaps very important; he has learnt many things; he feels he knows; he is, in short, full of personality, and that is his level, and at that level he suffers, not really a proper human fate, but the fate of an undeveloped organism, the fate of a person who is not yet fully-grown, just as an acorn is not a fully-grown tree. And unless we understand very clearly about this third stage—namely, the development of an acorn into a tree by its living essence or seed feeding on the substances formed round it—we shall never understand, as I said before, what this work is about, nor shall we understand what the Gospels are about.

Is There An Erotic Christian Religion?

Erotic Christianity |  Tantra is generally understood less in terms of ‘sex’ than in terms of power or energy. That is, it is a series of teachings and techniques aimed at awakening, harnessing, and utilizing the spiritual power believed to flow through the entire cosmos and the human body.”10

We cannot, however, avoid noticing that the embrace of the lawless power is very much in tune with the Gnostic attack on the god of the law who binds his dupes to the Earth, preventing consumption of the fruit, and who works through the lowest level of created existence, manifest in the unredeemed genitals that under normal circumstances, waste seed or push it into unhappy reproductions of unredeemed souls. It is also important to recognize then that in Tantra’s consciousness of kundalini (the serpent), we may see the Gnostic itinerary placed firmly within the human body, as it may be supposed members of Gnostic groups did as well, judging by what we have seen. Much of what the heresiologists took to be crazy physics, cod theology, perverted scripture, and barmy creation structures were almost certainly taken by the cognoscenti of the movement as codes and metaphors for physical practices coupled to a nascent psychology—as Carl Jung recognized and strongly believed.

The whole drama of the Gnostic creation and redemption myths can be seen as taking place not in the objective, arguably illusory, universe, or even beyond it in spatial terms, but chiefly within the awakened being of the Gnostic, wherein paradise is in the genitals, the unknown Father is accessed through the crown of the head, and the serpent-Sophia redeems the seed that comes from on high and brings it back up the spinal column (tree) through the aeons, corresponding to the “cakkras” (chakras) to its source, from which the precious pearl of creation has dripped to the lower regions, governed by a dark ignorance, enslaved to the cycle of birth and death. The way to eternal life is up, and it takes a lot of courage to make the journey; the world doesn’t want you to do it. The world wants you to do as you’re told. The world wants you scared, for your “own good” (an offer we are not meant to refuse). Hence the Tantrik master is a hero and his mistress a heroine, for she in-personates Shakti, as he in-personates for her Shiva, whose symbol is the erect shiva lingam. Now perhaps we can see what the worship of Simon and Helen was all about, once we remove the skin of eighteen hundred years of orthodox smothering.

Gordan Djurdjevic has written most effectively concerning the Tantric use of decadence as a spiritual technique for ascending from the lowest cakkra (chakra) (“wheel” or “flower”), the mūlādhāra, at the genitals, to the highest cakkra where supreme joy awaits the successful practitioner: “According to Tantric theory, the semen, which in its original state [and situated at the top of the head], has ambrosial properties, turns into poison when it reaches the lower parts of the body [cf. the Demiurge and the unredeemed seed] specifically the genitals. For this situation to be remedied, the semen needs to be brought back to the top of the head.”11

Practices for achieving this have involved the voluntary retention of semen and imaginary rechanneling of its essence up the spine, and even sucking back the combined fluids from the vagina after quite extraordinary yogic training. These practices are generally regarded as later developments of Tantric practice. The Kaula method is thought to be the most ancient. Oral consumption of semen (bindu), menstrual blood (rajas), and vaginal sexual fluids (yonitattva) conferred divine status on participants. Such may account for the claims of Simonians that their followers possessed eternal life. Walter O. Kaelber’s account of Vedic asceticism in ancient India informs us how “Male seed is also capable of generating spiritual rebirth and immortality.”12 Understood from this perspective, Ireneaeus’s and Epiphanius’s taunts fired at Gnostics’ belief in their eternal life register as the carping of ignoramuses. It is an ancient belief of the Indian subcontinent that loss of semen contributes to disease, aging, and premature death, for semen is life and the promise of fertility.

The North Indian Tantric tradition of the Nāth Siddhas, credited with developing hatha yoga, considered that while bindu carried immortality, its perpetual dripping from the crown depletes energy by its being consumed in the stomach’s digestive fire or through ejaculation, which, to be at its holiest, must rather be fertile of the spinal lotuses opening them up to induce spiritual awakening as the spirit rises home. Analogies (at least) with Gnostic claims for “realized resurrection in the body” can hardly go unnoticed. Tantriks hold that oral consumption offers rejuvenation as well as enlightenment, for the nectar of the gods is also the elixir of immortality, amrita, or the divine liquor soma, giving the drinker “eternal life in heaven on earth.”13

We may also wonder about the tendency in Gnostic thought to emphasize Jesus’s other body, which watches the crucifixion at a distance in the Nag Hammadi Apocalypse of Peter and in The Second Treatise of the Great Seth.14 Normally attributed to the heresy of Docetism (Jesus only appears as human), the emphasis on Jesus’s being outside of his body may also be attributed to a common store of ideas implicit in Tantra, wherein the gross body conceals a subtle body, and a goal of alchemy is to refine the subtle from the gross. Thus, the subtle body extends invisibly from the genitals via the spine to the crown of the head. When we consider the spine in terms of the Barbelite tree, we may be able to make fresh sense of the following utterance of Jesus in the Apocalypse of Peter, which might as well have been called the awakening of Peter:

He whom you saw on the tree, glad and laughing, this is the living Jesus. But this one into whose hands and feet they drive the nails is his fleshly part, which is the substitute being put to shame, the one who came into being in his likeness. But look at him and me. But I, when I [Peter] had looked, said, “Lord no one is looking at you. Let us flee this place.”

No one is looking at the spiritual body. That was the Gnostics’ complaint, so preoccupied with flesh were the fleshly materialists that they failed, from the Gnostic point of view, to see what was really happening: the spiritual glory of the living Jesus, not the death of the fleshly tunic. In worshipping the man, they blinded themselves to themselves. The last words of the Apocalypse are: “When he [Jesus] had said these things, he [Peter] came to himself.” That is the point. He came to himself. John 3:14 seemed to Gnostics to give the game away: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness: even so must the Son of man be lifted up.” For Tantriks, of course, the primal spiritual energy is the snake coiled at the base of the spine. Was Tertullian, I wonder, cognizant of this idea when, in Adversus Valentinianos (II.76), he mercilessly parodied the supposed esoteric “wisdom” of the Valentinians’ serpent: To sum up, the dove used to reveal Christ; the serpent used to tempt him. The former from the first was the herald of divine love; the latter from the first was the thief of God’s image. Therefore, innocence by itself can easily both recognize and exhibit God. Wisdom by itself can rather attack and betray him.

Now, let the serpent hide himself as much as he can; let him twist his entire wisdom into the windings of his lairs. Let him live deep in the ground, push into dark holes, unroll his length coil by coil; let him slither out—but not all of him at once, the light-hating beast. Our dove, however, has a simple home, always in high and open places toward the light since this symbol of the Holy Spirit loves the sunrise, the symbol of Christ. Just so, truth blushes at nothing except being hidden away, because no one is ashamed to listen to her, to learn to recognize as God the one whom nature has already pointed out to him as God, the one whom he sees daily in all his works.

For Tantriks, who would easily qualify for Tertullian’s lesson, kundalinī śakti is the microcosmic correspondent of the Great Goddess, whose divine partner Shiva has his esoteric home on the top of the human head. One can hear Tertullian’s reaction to this: “Microcosmic correspondent! Microcomic, more like!” Heresy, remember, began in Eden, so the Carthaginian lawyer would have no truck with the idea that when Shiva and Shakti appear separate, the world appears illusory, pain-ridden: the world of ordinary people whom, Tertullian asserts, Christ came to save, not with esoteric subtleties (“for the serpent was more subtle than any beast in the field”), but with the truth delivered plainly. But the Gnostic might reply to the Tertullian tirade: “Did not the dove whom you say is the Holy Spirit alight upon the top of Jesus’s head at the baptism, when Jesus emerged from the waters below, and was not the voice heard: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”?

In his book Kālī’s Child, Jeffrey J. Kripal urges us not to see Tantra as a philosophical, text-based school, but as a “dirty path” to ontological truths that are as terrifying as they are profound.”15 Djurdjevic quotes Alexis Sanderson on the benefits of decadent rejection of rules of purity: “The conscientiousness essential to the preservation of purity and social system was to be expelled from his identity by the Tantric Brahman as impurity itself, the only impurity he was to recognize, a state of ignorant self-bondage through the illusion that purity and impurity, prohibitedness and enjoinedness were objective qualities residing in things, persons and actions.”16

Tantra is quintessentially about a kind of marriage, and the sādhāna (sexual rite) is often today performed within otherwise conventional marriages. As we shall see when we investigate Valentinian practices, a kindred setting was enjoyed among Valentinians enjoined to celebrate a kind of mystical marriage involving something like an alchemy of the bodies of the married couple that thoroughly internalized the idea of marriage while transforming it into its spiritual essence. In Tantra, it is the human body that is the setting and the means of achieving gnosis. And when we speak of alchemy, we shall be on the right lines to consider what is intended by a base metal that can be transformed into gold, for as the alchemists have never ceased repeating, the first matter of the Great Work is something universally diffused, but universally unvalued. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, but the world knew him not.

Who is he? What is he?  

Knuckleheads Have No Place In The Endless Ocean Of Space

popularmechanics |  Is NASA really working on . . . a warp drive? An internal feasibility report suggests the agency might be, or at least that the idea of traveling through folded space is part of the NASA interstellar spaceflight menu. 

The Alcubierre drive works like a physics version of a classic party trick. The spaceship sits in spacetime while science pulls the fabric from in front of it to behind it, like a tablecloth pulled out from under a full spread of dishes. White explains:

“The concept of operations as described by Alcubierre is that the spacecraft would depart the point of origin (e.g. earth) using some conventional propulsion system and travel a distance d, then bring the craft to a stop relative to the departure point. The field would be turned on and the craft would zip off to its stellar destination, never locally breaking the speed of light, but covering the distance in an arbitrarily short period of time just the same.”

Alcubierre’s theory dates to 1994, and physicists have used it as a jumping-off point for further discussion ever since. By creating a kind of pocket world where a spaceship can operate seemingly outside of physics, the laws of physics can be sidestepped—or so the theory goes. 

What’s the paradox? White describes it this way: “When the energy density is initiated, the choice in direction of the +x-axis is mathematically arbitrary, so how does the spacecraft ‘know’ which direction to go?” Sci-fi has solved this paradox by inventing a “stable wormhole,” but White can’t fly a deus ex machina to Alpha Centauri.

Watch A Woman Get Pregnant By Music On Youtube - She's Wasn't Ready...,

Curiously Satisfying...,

To return to Hebrews, the writer goes on to say: ' ... it is impossible to please God without faith' (xi.6). That is, it is impossible without the basis or foundation of faith, which makes it possible for a man to think beyond the evidence of his senses and realise the existence of invisible scale and understand psychological meaning. To realise scale means to realise that there are different levels of meaning. Literal meaning is one thing, psychological or spiritual meaning is another thing - although the words used are the same. For example, we saw that the word yeast used in the incident quoted indicated two levels of meaning. The disciples took it on the lower level and were told it was because their faith was little. Their thinking was sensual.

They had difficulty in thinking in a new way on another level. And their psychological thinking was so weak just because they were based on sense and not on faith. Thus sense and faith describe two ways of thinking, not opposites, not antagonistic, but on different levels. For without the perception of scale and levels, things are made to be opposite when they are not so, and Man's mind is split into 'either - or', which leads to endless confusions and mental wrangles and miseries. The writer goes on to say: 'Nobody reaches God's presence until he has learned to believe that God exists and that He rewards those that try to find Him' (xi.6). It is apparent that if scale is behind all things, if order is scale, and if to set in order is to set in scale then what is higher and what is lower must exist. To everything there must be an above and a below. A man who cannot perceive scale, visible and invisible, as did that centurion by means of his psychological understanding due to his great faith, will be shut to the intuitions that only faith opens out to every mind that hitherto has been asleep in the senses and the limited world revealed by them.

The chief preliminary voluntary act - and it needs to be lifelong in its voluntaryness - towards the inner spirit, the source and conveyor of meaning, is that of affirmation. Only by this act does all that is outward, external and dead become connected with what is internal and alive. This is the chief of all psychological acts. It is the preliminary and at the same time the continually renewable act whereby psychology, in the deepest sense - (that is, the science of personal evolution) begins. The final goal of it, far ahead, is the unity of oneself. Man becomes gradually united through himself with himself and not merely with what he accidentally has become and believes himself to be. Affirmation is not by argument but by understanding. Negation leads always to an inner deprivation and so to an increasing superficiality, impatience, loss of meaning, and violence. One can always deny. What is easier? One can always follow the path of negation, if one evades all acts of understand-
ing as sentimental or as scientifically and commercially valueless.

For St. Augustine and many more before and after him, the sick, the deaf, and the dead in the Gospels are the sick and deaf,  and the dead within. And in speaking of the two blind men who, sitting by the way side as Jesus was passing, cried out and asked that their eyes might be opened, he asks if we can really suppose that this is merely an account of a miraculous event concerning two physically blind men? Why does it say that the crowd try to restrain them, and that they fight against it and insist on attracting the attention of Jesus? 'They overcame the crowd, who kept them back, by the great perseverance of their cry, that their voice might reach the Lord's ears. . . . The Lord was passing by and they cried out. The Lord stood still and they were healed. For the Lord Jesus stood still and said, What will ye that I shall do unto you? They said unto him, That our eyes may be opened.' (Matthew xx.30-34) The blind here are those who cannot see but wish to see. Augustine says they are those who are blind in their hearts and realise it. Like the deaf, like the sick and the dead, the blind are a certain kind of people. They are, in this case, people in a certain inner state, knowing they are blind, and wishing to see clearly. 'Cry out among the very crowds', he says, 'and do not despair.' Who are these two blind men who know they cannot see but who recognise the spiritual meaning typified in the person of Jesus - what individual functions of the soul are shewn here that struggle with the crowd of commonplace meanings and thoughts and finally, by their own determination, receive their power of vision? 'If two or three are gathered together in my name . . . ' said Christ (Matthew xviii.20). What two sides of ourselves must first take part that our eyes may be opened - that is, our understanding? Why two, to make it effective?  Nicoll The Mark

DISC: Why Black Holes Instead Of Dark Energy Stars?

consciousnessanduniverse |  A recent study has suggested that dark energy stars may be an alternative to black holes. The term “dark energy star” was coined by George Chapline when he proposed that gravitational collapse of objects with masses greater than a few solar masses should lead to the formation of a compact object called dark energy star with a much larger vacuum energy. The study may be viewed in the context of another paper which states that the important question concerns whether dark energy is a completely new physical entity or one which we already know, namely a gravitational energy within the vacuum of a closed gravitating system that has long been known to be a negative energy. It remains to be seen whether scientists currently analyzing the data gathered by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) will provide evidence that dark energy stars exist. EHT is a virtual Earth-sized telescope aimed to measure the size of the emission regions of two supermassive black holes, Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way and M87 in the center of the Virgo A galaxy.

 We know that dark energy is embedded in space, counteracting gravity. The way gravity and antigravity are interacting in my mind is somehow related to time. With the understanding that time’s arrow is perspectival,   I  picture the negative-energy particles of the dark sector traveling backwards from the future somehow meeting at the intersection of past and future those positive-energy particles traveling forward in time as if they both were traveling the same distance in their determination to meet. That is how I see a cosmic coincidence unfolding, with matter and dark energy densities being of precisely the same order in the present times. Lastly, I imagine a phantom energy to be something that appears to have no physical reality and still is ultimately real. Raising the concept of a divide begs the question of what lies on the other side and what circumstances enable its crossing. The modified gravity approach as an alternative to dark energy is the focus of research and may be the 

key to unifying both components of the dark sector, a path to solving the coincidence problem.

DISC: Why No Science Of Unexplained Aerial Phenomena?

Vox |  The Pentagon recently released three videos of UFOs recorded by the Navy — one taken in 2004 and the other two in 2015. The videos, which first leaked a couple of years ago, show … well, it’s not exactly clear. 

There are various objects — two of which look like aircraft — spinning through the sky and moving in ways that defy easy explanation. As the images bop across the screen, you can hear the pilots’ excitement and confusion in real time as they track whatever it is they’re seeing. 

I’m not what you would call a UFO enthusiast, but the videos are the most compelling I’ve ever seen. They seem to confirm, at the very least, that UFOs are real — not that aliens exist, but that there are unidentified objects buzzing around the sky.

Now, do I think aliens are real? Yeah, probably. Are they flying spaceships into our atmosphere? Who the hell knows?

The best anyone can say is that there’s a non-zero chance that some of these UFOs were made by non-human hands, and that, I’d argue, is reason enough to talk about them. But it’s barely cracked the news cycle. Even in a pandemic, you’d think we’d have a little time for UFO talk. 

So in an attempt to force a UFO conversation into the public discourse, I contacted Alexander Wendt, a professor of international relations at Ohio State University. Wendt is a giant in his field of IR theory, but in the past 15 years or so, he’s become an amateur ufologist. He wrote an academic article about the political implications of UFOs in 2008, and, more recently, he gave a TEDx talk calling out the “taboo” against studying UFOs.

Wendt is about the closest thing you’ll find to a UFO expert in a world in which ufology isn’t a real science. Like other enthusiasts, he’s spent a lot of time looking at the evidence, thinking about the stakes, and theorizing about why extraterrestrials would visit Earth in the first place.

In this conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity, we discuss why scientists refuse to take UFOs seriously, why he thinks there’s a good chance ETs are behind the aircraft in those videos, and why he believes the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be the most significant event in human history.

Once Thought Impossible Rotating Detonation Rocket Engines A Fait'Accompli

eurekalert |  A University of Central Florida researcher and his team have developed an advanced new rocket-propulsion system once thought to be impossible.

The system, known as a rotating detonation rocket engine, will allow upper stage rockets for space missions to become lighter, travel farther, and burn more cleanly.

The result were published this month in the journal Combustion and Flame.

"The study presents, for the first time, experimental evidence of a safe and functioning hydrogen and oxygen propellant detonation in a rotating detonation rocket engine," said Kareem Ahmed, an assistant professor in UCF's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering who led the research. 

The rotating detonations are continuous, Mach 5 explosions that rotate around the inside of a rocket engine, and the explosions are sustained by feeding hydrogen and oxygen propellant into the system at just the right amounts. 

This system improves rocket-engine efficiency so that more power is generated while using less fuel than traditional rocket energies, thus lightening the rocket's load and reducing its costs and emissions.

Mach 5 explosions create bursts of energy that travel 4,500 to 5,600 miles per hour, which is more than five times the speed of sound. They are contained within a durable engine body constructed of copper and brass. 

The technology has been studied since the 1960s but had not been successful due to the chemical propellants used or the ways they were mixed.

Ahmed's group made it work by carefully balancing the rate of the propellants, hydrogen and oxygen, released into the engine.

"We have to tune the sizes of the jets releasing the propellants to enhance the mixing for a local hydrogen-oxygen mixture," Ahmed said. "So, when the rotating explosion comes by for this fresh mixture, it's still sustained. Because if you have your composition mixture slightly off, it will tend to deflagrate, or burn slowly instead of detonating." 

Ahmed's team also had to capture evidence of their finding. They did this by injecting a tracer in the hydrogen fuel flow and quantifying the detonation waves using a high-speed camera.

"You need the tracer to actually see that explosion that is happening inside and track its motion," he said. "Developing this method to characterize the detonation wave dynamics is another contribution of this article."

New Method For Fabricating Single Atom Transistors A Shortcut To Quantum Computing Hardware?

scitechdaily |  To fabricate single-atom and few-atom transistors, the team relied on a known technique in which a silicon chip is covered with a layer of hydrogen atoms, which readily bind to silicon. The fine tip of a scanning tunneling microscope then removed hydrogen atoms at selected sites. The remaining hydrogen acted as a barrier so that when the team directed phosphine gas (PH₃) at the silicon surface, individual PH₃ molecules attached only to the locations where the hydrogen had been removed (see animation). The researchers then heated the silicon surface. The heat ejected hydrogen atoms from the PH₃ and caused the phosphorus atom that was left behind to embed itself in the surface. With additional processing, bound phosphorous atoms created the foundation of a series of highly stable single- or few-atom devices that have the potential to serve as qubits.

Two of the steps in the method devised by the NIST teams — sealing the phosphorus atoms with protective layers of silicon and then making electrical contact with the embedded atoms — appear to have been essential to reliably fabricate many copies of atomically precise devices, NIST researcher Richard Silver said.

In the past, researchers have typically applied heat as all the silicon layers are grown, in order to remove defects and ensure that the silicon has the pure crystalline structure required to integrate the single-atom devices with conventional silicon-chip electrical components. But the NIST scientists found that such heating could dislodge the bound phosphorus atoms and potentially disrupt the structure of the atomic-scale devices. Instead, the team deposited the first several silicon layers at room temperature, allowing the phosphorus atoms to stay put. Only when subsequent layers were deposited did the team apply heat.

“We believe our method of applying the layers provides more stable and precise atomic-scale devices,” said Silver. Having even a single atom out of place can alter the conductivity and other properties of electrical components that feature single or small clusters of atoms.

The team also developed a novel technique for the crucial step of making electrical contact with the buried atoms so that they can operate as part of a circuit. The NIST scientists gently heated a layer of palladium metal applied to specific regions on the silicon surface that resided directly above selected components of the silicon-embedded device. The heated palladium reacted with the silicon to form an electrically conducting alloy called palladium silicide, which naturally penetrated through the silicon and made contact with the phosphorus atoms.

In a recent edition of Advanced Functional Materials, Silver and his colleagues, who include Xiqiao Wang, Jonathan Wyrick, Michael Stewart Jr. and Curt Richter, emphasized that their contact method has a nearly 100% success rate. That’s a key achievement, noted Wyrick. “You can have the best single-atom-transistor device in the world, but if you can’t make contact with it, it’s useless,” he said.

Fabricating single-atom transistors “is a difficult and complicated process that maybe everyone has to cut their teeth on, but we’ve laid out the steps so that other teams don’t have to proceed by trial and error,” said Richter.

With The DNI Declassifications - Even Coffee-Boy Papadopoulos Gets The Final Two Of His Fifteen Minutes...,

greatgameindia |  According to a secret transcript that was just declassified, one of the spies the FBI deployed against George Papadopoulos said that Israelis and U.S. Jews are “all f—ing spies,” referred to them as “f—ing c—suckers,” and said they should all be executed. The declassified transcript published on Tuesday revealed a “confidential human source” (CHS) from the FBI quoted as saying that Israeli Mossad spies need to be fucking kicked out of USA.

The 206-page transcript captured conversation between Papadopoulos and an unidentified CHS, seemingly across one continuous episode on November 26, 2016. George Demetrios Papadopoulos is a former member of the foreign policy advisory panel to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

On October 5, 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI agents about the timing and the possible significance of his contacts in 2016 relating to U.S.–Russia relations and the Donald Trump presidential campaign. He served twelve days in federal prison, then was placed on a 12-month supervised release.

The FBI claimed to have begun surveillance of the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016. Papadopoulos told the Daily Caller that the CHS is named Jeffrey Wiseman.

Last year, one of the most high-profile Israeli spy network in the US was brought down by American intelligence. This secret high-society elite group was recently exposed on the global stage with the arrest of the sex-trafficking kingpin Jeffrey Epstein.

Although, Epstein is portrayed as just another billionaire pedophile, he was actually a high-class Israeli spy. He used perverted sexual desires as a cover to corrupt and infiltrate higher echelons of power in government and businesses (including in India). This is the source of political sex-scandals and video-tapes which surface now and then when someone refuses to obey orders.

Flynn Was Not Unmasked - He Was The Target Of The Investigation

Dailymail |  President Trump's acting chief of national intelligence has declassified a list of former Obama administration officials said to be involved in the 'unmasking' of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Richard Grenell, the acting Director of National Intelligence, paid a visit to the Justice Department headquarters last week in Washington, DC, and brought a list of former Obama aides with him, ABC News is reporting. They remain a secret from the general public. 

'Unmasking' is the procedure to name - to those with high-level security clearances  -an American citizen whose name appears in intelligence gathering such as eavesdropping or wiretaps that are initially aimed at suspected foreign agents.

U.S. citizens' names are obscured in such intelligence gathering, unless there is specific permission from the FISA court to eavesdrop on them over concerns they are working for or influenced by foreign intelligence agencies.

Supporters of Trump allege that members of the Obama administration improperly sought to investigate Flynn over contacts he had with the ambassador to Russia, Sergei Kislyak, during the transition to the Trump administration.

The FBI and then the Mueller probe focused on Flynn telling Kislyak that sanctions put in place on Russia at the end of December 2016 by Obama would be reviewed - which he then denied telling Kislyak to both Mike Pence and then the FBI. 

It is alleged that Flynn's identity was unmasked during the course of the federal investigation into contacts held between Russian figures and the Trump presidential campaign.

Flynn's calls with Kislyak were routinely intercepted because all the diplomat's communications were the subject of eavesdropping.

Flynn's name would have been redacted in intelligence reports but some top officials were then able to ask for the name to be 'unmasked.'

The heads of all intelligence agencies and members of the national security council have such power - as does the president.

Under the Obama administration, membership of the national security council included Joe Biden, as vice president, Susan Rice, the national security adviser, Ash Carter, the defense secretary, Ernest Moniz, the energy secretary, Jacob Lew, the Treasury secretary, and Samantha Power, the ambassador to the United Nations.

All were legally empowered to ask for unmasking but leaking an unmasked identity would be a felony.

Human Behaviour Or Pressurized Flush Toilets And Closed Loop Air Conditioning?

nature |  Human behaviour is central to transmission of SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and changing behaviour is crucial to preventing transmission in the absence of pharmaceutical interventions. Isolation and social distancing measures, including edicts to stay at home, have been brought into place across the globe to reduce transmission of the virus, but at a huge cost to individuals and society. In addition to these measures, we urgently need effective interventions to increase adherence to behaviours that individuals in communities can enact to protect themselves and others: use of tissues to catch expelled droplets from coughs or sneezes, use of face masks as appropriate, hand-washing on all occasions when required, disinfecting objects and surfaces, physical distancing, and not touching one’s eyes, nose or mouth. There is an urgent need for direct evidence to inform development of such interventions, but it is possible to make a start by applying behavioural science methods and models.

In addition to industrial aerosolizing flush toilets https://waterandhealth.org/disinfect/preventing-infection/can-coronavirus-spread-through-defective-bathroom-sewage-pipes/ do you know whether your office building or apartment complex has electrostatic filters and outside fresh air exchangers?

Here is a study on an early transmission site in China, where incidents of infection seem to correlate to ventilated air flow in a restaurant: COVID-19 Outbreak Associated with Air Conditioning in Restaurant, Guangzhou, China, 2020 https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article

This illustration helps to visualize this: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764-f1  Here is a not-yet-reviewed preprint of a study of two buses transporting attendees to and from an event in China. One bus (#2) had a suspected “index patient” (IP), the other didn’t.  https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1255579524047220741

From the article: “In both buses and conference rooms, central air-conditioners were in indoor re-circulation mode.”   Untreated recirculated air bearing virus-laden droplets may lead to repeated exposure and increase concentration of virions in individuals.

66% of hospitalized New Yorkers had no travel or contact with external 3^rd parties, i.e., they were self-quarantined. What they had in common was that they were apartment dwellers living in comparatively high density with shared spaces and a shared plumbing system. 

Their behavior was of no consequence WHATSOEVER when it came to mitigating or limiting their exposure to the SARS-Cov2 pathogen, aerosolized via plumbing and concentrated and recirculated via air conditioning.

What Did Obama Know And When Did He Know It?

Foxnews |  Former National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn's lead attorney accused top officials of orchestrating a plot to frame her client, insisting that former President Barack Obama himself was in on it.

Flynn had initially pleaded guilty to providing a false statement to the FBI regarding his contact with a Russian ambassador, but later changed his story and pushed back by questioning the FBI's tactics.

OBAMA KNEW DETAILS OF WIRETAPPED FLYNN PHONE CALLS, SURPRISING TOP DOJ OFFICIAL IN MEETING WITH BIDEN, DECLASSIFIED DOCS SHOW

"These agents specifically schemed and planned with each other how to not tip him off, that he was even the person being investigated," Powell told Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures," pointing to evidence that FBI agents took a casual approach with Flynn, not telling him they were investigating him and not warning him that it would be a federal crime to lie during their conversation.

"So they kept him relaxed and unguarded deliberately as part of their effort to set him up and frame him," Powell said.

According to recently released testimony, President Obama revealed during an Oval Office meeting weeks before the interview that he knew about Flynn's phone call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, apparently surprising then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.

After the meeting, Obama asked Yates and then-FBI Director James Comey to "stay behind." Obama "specified that he did not want any additional information on the matter, but was seeking information on whether the White House should be treating Flynn any differently, given the information."

Wayminnit..., This Seems Like A Particularly Uncharacteristic Obama Moment

washingtonexaminer |  Obama “started by saying that he had ‘learned of the information about Flynn’ and his conversation with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak," Yates said, according to the notes. “Obama specified he did not want any additional information on the matter but was seeking information on whether the White House should be treating Flynn any differently.” 

Yates told investigators that “at that point,” she “had no idea what the President was talking about.” She “recalled Comey mentioning the Logan Act” but could not remember if Comey specifically said there was an “investigation.” 

"It was not clear ... where the President first received the information," Yates said, adding that she “did not recall Comey’s response to the President’s question about how to treat Flynn.” Yates told Mueller's team, “She was so surprised by the information she was hearing that she was having a hard time processing it and listening to the conversation at the same time," the notes said. 

The Justice Department’s Thursday court filing described the ensuing clash between Comey and Yates on the question of whether to tell the incoming Trump administration that the recording of Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador did not entirely square up with what Flynn had apparently told incoming Vice President Mike Pence. Comey “took the position that the FBI would not notify the incoming Trump administration of the Flynn-Kislyak communications." Yates and other senior DOJ officials “took the contrary view and believed that the incoming administration should be notified.” 

Yates told Mueller’s team about a pre-inauguration conversation about notifying the Trump team either with Comey or now-fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and “recalled that the FBI was resistant to the idea.” She also “recalled Comey’s view was that no one really knew if the Vice President was aware of the calls,” but “the DOJ response was that they shouldn’t assume the Vice President was aware and had knowingly lied.” The FBI notes state that “in the days immediately leading up to inauguration, Yates was really pushing to notify, while Comey was still very resistant.”

Yates, who noted it was "not always clear what the FBI was doing to investigate Flynn" and whose team noted the case appeared to vacillate between being a counterintelligence investigation and a criminal investigation, told investigators she decided “enough was enough” and would tell the White House a few days after President Trump’s inauguration. On Jan. 24, 2017, Yates and her team agreed that she would inform the Trump White House about the Flynn recordings, and Yates called Comey to let him know. But when Yates spoke with Comey later that day, he “informed her that two agents were on their way to interview Mike Flynn at the White House.”

Andrew Cuomo - Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste

theintercept |  For a few fleeting moments during New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday, the somber grimace that has filled our screens for weeks was briefly replaced by something resembling a smile.

“We are ready, we’re all-in,” the governor gushed. “We are New Yorkers, so we’re aggressive about it, we’re ambitious about it. … We realize that change is not only imminent, but it can actually be a friend if done the right way.”

The inspiration for these uncharacteristically good vibes was a video visit from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who joined the governor’s briefing to announce that he will be heading up a blue-ribbon commission to reimagine New York state’s post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life.

“The first priorities of what we’re trying to do,” Schmidt said, “are focused on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband. … We need to look for solutions that can be presented now, and accelerated, and use technology to make things better.” Lest there be any doubt that the former Google chair’s goals were purely benevolent, his video background featured a framed pair of golden angel wings.

Just one day earlier, Cuomo had announced a similar partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop “a smarter education system.” Calling Gates a “visionary,” Cuomo said the pandemic has created “a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’s] ideas … all these buildings, all these physical classrooms — why with all the technology you have?” he asked, apparently rhetorically.

It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent Pandemic Shock Doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the “Screen New Deal.” Far more high-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.