What Would An Exploding Heads Day Be Without A Heaping Helping Of Weinstein?

dr.brian.keating |  In part one of our extensive conversation, we cover his Geometric Unity theory and the value of scientific theories in general.

As a mathematician and an economist, Eric is uniquely suited to understanding how ideas have contributed to human civilization — and what we’re losing out on when academia throttles them. His perspective that, “[Professors] need the freedom of a billionaire without the wealth of one,” is a spin on something Ralph Gomory, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, told him:

“The bargain was always that you weren’t going to get super rich as a professor, but you would have the freedom that came from your job. And that’s how we got great people. When we lost freedom, we stopped being able to compete effectively for the top people.”

Having Eric on the show challenged me to consider my approach to the interview. Though an expert in experimental physics, it is beneficial to be reminded about the contributions of theoretical study. His allegory that the tailor who sews on the last button of a coat shouldn’t get all the credit is powerful. Think of the creative spark, the person who sketches, then finds practical materials, the engineers who bring instruments into the equation, and all the other pieces of the puzzle.

In this interview, Eric says, “The scientific method is actually the radio edit of great science” and that is really striking. It is important to remember that the unedited version exists, even if it doesn’t make it through all the noise very often.

Different Than Penrose and Weinstein: Wolfram REALLY Mesmerized By Rule 30

dr.brian.keating |  On the philosophical front, we compared Godel to Popper and discussed computational irreducibly which arose from Stephen’s interest in Godel and Alan Turing’s work.

“Actually, there’s even more than that. If the microscopic updatings of the underlying network end up being random enough, then it turns out that if the network succeeds in corresponding in the limit to a finite dimensional space, then this space must satisfy Einstein’s Equations of General Relativity. It’s again a little like what happens with fluids. If the microscopic interactions between molecules are random enough, but satisfy number and momentum conservation, then it follows that the overall continuum fluid must satisfy the standard Navier–Stokes equations. But now we’re deriving something like that for the universe: we’re saying that these networks with almost nothing “built in” somehow generate behavior that corresponds to gravitation in physics. This is all spelled out in the NEW KIND OF SCIENCE book. And many physicists have certainly read that part of the book. But somehow every time I actually describe this (as I did a few days ago), there’s a certain amazement. Special and General Relativity are things that physicists normally assume are built into theories right from the beginning, almost as axioms (or at least, in the case of string theory, as consistency conditions). The idea that they could emerge from something more fundamental is pretty alien. The alien feeling doesn’t stop there. Another thing that seems alien is the idea that our whole universe and its complete history could be generated just by starting with some particular small network, then applying definite rules. For the past 75+ years, quantum mechanics has been the pride of physics, and it seems to suggest that this kind of deterministic thinking just can’t be correct. It’s a slightly long story (often still misunderstood by physicists), but between the arbitrariness of updating orders that produce a given causal network, and the fact that in a network one doesn’t just have something like local 3D space, it looks as if one automatically starts to get a lot of the core phenomena of quantum mechanics — even from what’s in effect a deterministic underlying model. OK, but what is the rule for our universe? I don’t know yet. Searching for it isn’t easy. One tries a sequence of different possibilities. Then one runs each one. Then the question is: has one found our universe?”

My question: that was then, what do you think now?

On the implications of finding a simple rule that matches existing laws of physics:

“I certainly think it’ll be an interesting — almost metaphysical — moment if we finally have a simple rule which we can tell is our universe. And we’ll be able to know that our particular universe is number such-and-such in the enumeration of all possible universes. It’s a sort of Copernican moment: we’ll get to know just how special or not our universe is. Something I wonder is just how to think about whatever the answer turns out to be. It somehow reminds me of situations from earlier in the history of science. Newton figured out about motion of the planets, but couldn’t imagine anything but a supernatural being first setting them in motion. Darwin figured out about biological evolution, but couldn’t imagine how the first living cell came to be. We may have the rule for the universe, but it’s something quite different to understand why it’s that rule and not another. Universe hunting is a very technology-intensive business. Over the years, I’ve gradually been building up the technology I think is needed — and quite a bit of it is showing up in strange corners of Mathematica. But I think it’s going to be a while longer before there are more results. And before we can put “Our Universe” as a Demonstration in the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. And before we can take our new ParticleData computable data collection and derive every number in it. But universe hunting is a good hobby.”

It’s awfully easy to fall into implicitly assuming a lot of human context. Pioneer 10 — the human artifact that’s gone further into interstellar space than any other (currently about 11 billion miles, which is about 0.05% of the distance to α Centauri) — provides one of my favorite examples. There’s a plaque on that spacecraft that includes a representation of the wavelength of the 21-centimeter spectral line of hydrogen. Now the most obvious way to represent that would probably just be a line 21 cm long. But back in 1972 Carl Sagan and others decided to do something “more scientific”, and instead made a schematic diagram of the quantum mechanical process leading to the spectral line. The problem is that this diagram relies on conventions from human textbooks — like using arrows to represent quantum spins — that really have nothing to do with the underlying concepts and are incredibly specific to the details of how science happened to develop for us humans.”

From the audience he responded to some questions including “what does he believe a scientific theory should be?” and “Does mathematical beauty matter at all, or is it just falsifiability?”

The Story of Rule 30

How can something that simple produce something that complex? It’s been nearly 40 years since I first saw rule 30 — but it still amazes me. Long ago it became my personal all-time favorite science discovery, and over the years it’s changed my whole worldview and led me to all sorts of science, technology, philosophy and more.

A Class of Models with the Potential to Represent Fundamental Physics

arvix |  Stephen Wolfram A class of models intended to be as minimal and structureless as possible is introduced. Even in cases with simple rules, rich and complex behavior is found to emerge, and striking correspondences to some important core known features of fundamental physics are seen, suggesting the possibility that the models may provide a new approach to finding a fundamental theory of physics.

Subjects:	Discrete Mathematics (cs.DM); General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc); High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th); Mathematical Physics (math-ph)
Cite as:	arXiv:2004.08210 [cs.DM]
	(or arXiv:2004.08210v1 [cs.DM] for this version)

Bibliographic data

[Enable Bibex (What is Bibex?)]

Submission history

From: Stephen Wolfram [view email]

[v1] Wed, 15 Apr 2020 16:23:43 UTC (108,032 KB)

Leadership By Governor Buckwheat "Do As I Say Do" Northam

politico |  Tension that began with governors versus the federal government has now trickled down, pitting officials within their own states against each other in ways that have direct implications for the fight against the virus and have already landed in the courts. Future disputes could complicate plans to respond to a resurgence, tie up urgent policy issues in legal wrangling and even risk lives. 

With cases increasing in some places and falling in others — and with a second wave predicted in the fall — the new pandemic battlegrounds will be increasingly localized. 

“Cities can't wait for the federal and state government for guidance,” said Charleston Mayor Amy Shuler Goodwin, who has continued to clash with West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, including last week over his decision to add tanning beds to the list of essential businesses. “There is not one single mayor that doesn't want all the lights back on and all the doors back open, but we need to be really careful about doing that.”

Experts say a one-size-fits-all approach for reopening is not an option — not when the number of new daily cases is changing at vastly different rates from city to city and state to state. Across many states that have started to reopen, governors have indeed prescribed economic restart plans based on regional metrics, not statewide figures. As that continues — and if the virus resurges — there could be even more openings for such disagreements. 

“We have to be making decisions that are hyper local. This is not one big epidemic, it’s multiple, small epidemics,“ said Caroline Buckee, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, during a Brookings Institution discussion on reopening plans. “And the decisions we make have to reflect the inequalities in the location in question and how reopening is going to impact the relationships between different neighborhoods.”

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has faced backlash from coastal mayors over cracking down on beach use, and the Democratic governor has allowed more than 20 of the state's 58 counties to move faster than his original plan in the face of increasing pressure — and lawsuits — from those anxious to reopen.

Things escalated in Texas last week after Attorney General Ken Paxton sent letters to counties that include metropolitan hubs Dallas, Austin and San Antonio, chastising them for stricter local requirements on masks and mass gatherings that conflict with state efforts to loosen restrictions.

“Insofar as your order conflicts with the governor’s order, it is unenforceable,”

Karenism Isn't Communism But It Sucks Just The Same....,

detroitnews |  “It’s just heartbreaking,” said Maehr, executive director of the Greater Chicago Food Depository. “They’re finding themselves in a set of circumstances where they have no income and they also have no food, and it happened in an instant.”

The number of people seeking help from her organization and affiliated food pantries has surged 60% since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which has shut down the nation’s economy and thrown tens of millions of people out of work. Across the country, worries about having enough to eat are adding to the anxiety of millions of people, according to a survey that found 37% of unemployed Americans ran out of food in the past month and 46% said they worried about running out.

Even those who are working often struggle. Two in 10 working adults said that in the past 30 days, they ran out of food before they could earn enough money to buy more. One-quarter worried that would happen.

Those results come from the second wave of the COVID Impact Survey, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for the Data Foundation. The survey aims to provide an ongoing assessment of the nation’s mental, physical and financial health during the pandemic.

There is no parallel in U.S. history for the suddenness or severity of the economic collapse, which has cost more than 36 million jobs since the virus struck. The nationwide unemployment rate was 14.7% in April, the highest since the Great Depression. While many Americans believe they will be working in the coming months, unemployed Americans – those most likely to report running out of food – aren’t as optimistic.

Overall, those who are still working are highly confident they will have a job in one month and in three months, with more than 8 in 10 saying it’s very likely. But among those who aren’t working because they are temporarily laid off, providing care during the pandemic or looking for work, just 28% say it is highly likely that they will be employed in 30 days and 46% say it’s highly likely they’ll be working in three months. Roughly another quarter say it’s somewhat likely in 30 days and 90 days.

The likelihood of unemployed people returning to work depends heavily on whether states can restart their economies without creating new surges in COVID-19 infections, said Gabriel Ehrlich, an economic forecaster at the University of Michigan. He said most layoffs are expected to be temporary. But he worries that many small businesses will fail while fewer new ones take their place, and that state and local governments won’t get federal help to avoid furloughs.

Phugg Karen, Corona, Social Distancing, An All-A-Dat Buhshidt....,

Keep Your Stinking Experts, Their Strategies, And Your Vaccines....,

HBR |  For those who believe that a vaccine for Covid-19 will end or largely contain this pandemic or who hope that new drugs will be discovered to combat its effects, there is plenty cause for concern. Instead of working together to craft and implement a global strategy, a growing number of countries are taking a “my nation first” approach to developing and distributing potential vaccines or other pharmaceutical treatments.

This “vaccine nationalism” is not only morally reprehensible, it is the wrong way to reduce transmission globally. And global transmission matters: If countries with a large number of cases lag in obtaining the vaccine and other medicines, the disease will continue to disrupt global supply chains and, as a result, economies around the world.

In the midst of this global pandemic, we must leverage our global governance bodies to allocate, distribute, and verify the delivery of the Covid 19 vaccine. We need the science — not politics — to inform the global strategy.

 Experts in epidemiology, virology, and the social sciences — not politicians — should take the lead in devising and implementing science-based strategies to reduce the risks that Covid-19 poses to the most vulnerable across the globe and to reduce transmission of this novel virus for all of us. To avoid ineffective nationalistic responses, we need a centralized, trusted governance system to ensure the appropriate flow of capital, information, and supplies.

Comments Stay Free Off-Guardian Discusses EU Vaccination Passports

off-guardian |  A  report published by the European Commission in late 2019 reveals that the EU has been looking to increase the scope and power of vaccination programmes since well before the current “pandemic”.

The endpoint of the Roadmap is, among many other things, to introduce a “common vaccination card/passport” for all EU citizens. 

This proposal will be appearing before the commission in 2022, with a “feasibility study” set to run from 2019 through 2021 (meaning, as of now, it’s about halfway through).

To underline the point: The “vaccination roadmap” is not an improvised response to the Covid19 pandemic, but rather an ongoing plan with roots going back to 2018, when the EU released a survey of the public’s attitude toward vaccines titled “2018 State of Vaccine Confidence”

 

On the back of this research, the EU then commissioned a technical report titled “Designing and implementing an immunisation information system”, on – among other things – the plausibility of an EU-wide vaccination monitoring system.

In the 3rd quarter of 2019 these reports were all combined into the latest version of the the “Vaccination Roadmap”, a long-term policy plan to spread vaccine “awareness and understanding” whilst counteracting “vaccine myths” and combatting “vaccine hesitancy”.

You can read the entire report here, but below are some of the more concerning highlights [emphasis throughout is ours]:

Comments Not Free Guardian Frets Over EU Anti-Vaxxer Coalitions

Guardian |  In front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate a politically incongruous crowd of protesters gathered on Saturday. They wore flowers in their hair, hazmat suits emblazoned with the letter Q, badges displaying the old German imperial flag or T-shirts reading “Gates, My Ass” – a reference to the US software billionaire Bill Gates.

Around the globe, millions are counting the days until a Covid-19 vaccine is discovered. These people, however, were protesting for the right not to be inoculated – and they weren’t the only ones.

For the ninth week running, thousands gathered in European cities to vent their anger at social distancing restrictions they believe to be a draconian ploy to suspend basic civil rights and pave the way for “enforced vaccinations” that will do more harm than the Covid-19 virus itself.

Walking towards the focal point of the protests down the Straße des 17. Juni boulevard, one woman said she believed the Covid-19 pandemic to be a hoax thought up by the pharmaceutical industry.

“I’d never let myself be vaccinated,” said the woman, who would give her name only as Riot Granny. “I didn’t get a jab for the flu either, and I am still alive.”

The alliance of anti-vaxxers, neo-Nazi rabble-rousers and esoteric hippies, which has in recent weeks been filling town squares in cities such as Berlin, Vienna and Zurich is starting to trouble governments as they map out scenarios for re-booting their economies and tackling the coronavirus long term.

Even before an effective vaccine against Covid-19 has been developed, national leaders face a dilemma: should they aim to immunise as large a part of the population as possible as quickly as possible, or does compulsory vaccination risk boosting a street movement already prone to conspiracy theories about “big pharma” and its government’s authoritarian tendencies?

This Phase Of The Plan Failed Because Not All Palestinians Will Cooperate

benjaminstudebaker |  All around us, the quarantine is beginning to die. In the United States, the Southern states are slowly abandoning it and many Midwestern states are planning to follow. But it’s not just Republicans. The European states are bailing too. If you ask Democrats why states are beginning to defect, they will tell you it comes down to greed and stupidity. They’ll tell you the rich Republicans are greedy and the poor Republicans are stupid. But this policy was never a good fit for either the American or European political systems. To work, it needed a lot of economic support from regional authorities, and it never got that support.

For most of the last century, the social pact in America has been pretty simple. If you’re willing to work, you get healthcare and housing. If you’re not willing to work, you lose both. If there are no jobs available, the government promises to create them, and to take care of your healthcare and housing in the interim. Full employment protects against precarity. The quarantine violates this pact by deliberately annihilating millions of jobs. It intentionally sets about destroying full employment.

If we’re to end full employment, there needs to be an alternative way to provide healthcare and housing. These things will have to be guaranteed to us regardless of employment status. That’s really expensive. Individual US states don’t have the tax revenue to pay for that. The European Union’s fiscal rules would ordinarily prohibit that kind of spending. To get it, we’d need action from the federal government and from the EU.

But nobody consulted political economists. Public health officials conceived of the quarantine policy in a deeply naive way. For them, the only goal was to save lives. They pursued that goal at the expense of the social pact, with no plan to replace it. For weeks, they dismissed any discussion of the economy as indicative of greed or stupidity, ignoring the immense cost of their policy and the political consequences of the cost. Any attempt to introduce complexity into the public discussion was equated with denying the threat of the virus. Because of this, the quarantine is going to end, and when it ends the virus will take off again. Through their absolutism, the advocates of the quarantine have guaranteed the very result they sought to avoid.

You Are ALL Palestinians Now...,

gilad.online |  One may wonder what drives this new alliance that divides nearly every Western society? The left’s betrayal is hardly a surprise, yet, the crucial question is  why, and out of the blue, did those who had been so successful in locating their filthy hands in our pockets go along with  the current destruction of the economy? Surely, suicidal they aren’t.

It occurs to me that what we may be seeing is a controlled demolition all over again. This time it isn’t a building in NYC. It isn’t the destruction of a single industry or even a single class as we have seen before. This time,  our understanding of Being as a productive and meaningful adventure is embattled. As things stand, our entire sense of livelihood  is at risk.

It doesn’t take a financial expert to realise that in the last few years the world economy in general and western economies in particular have become a fat bubble ready to burst. When economic bubbles burst the outcome is unexpected even though often the culprit or  trigger for the crash can be identified. What is unique in the current controlled demolition is the willingness  of our compromised political class, the media and in particular  Left/Progressive networks to participate in the destruction.

The alliance is wide and inclusive. The WHO, greatly funded by Bill Gates, sets the measures by which we are locked down, the Left and the Progressives fuel the apocalyptic phantasies to keep us  hiding in our global attics, Dershowitz tries to rewrite the constitution , big Pharma’s agenda shapes our future and we also hear that Moderna and its leading Israeli doctor  is ready to “fix” our genes.  Meanwhile we  learn that  our governments are gearing up to stick a needle in our arms. Throughout this time, the Dow Jones has continued to rise. Maybe in this final stage of capitalism, we the people aren’t needed even as consumers. We can be left to rot at home, our governments seemingly willing to fund this new form of detention. 

No Country For Old Palestinians

unz |  The previous shift of such magnitude occurred in late 18^th century; it is called the Industrial Revolution. Then the factory owners had begun to replace their skilled labour with inexpensive machines, and the workers were losing their jobs, livelihoods and self-esteem. In 1811, the workers formed the Luddite movement. The Luddites would break into factories and smash textile machines. It lasted until 1816, when the movement ran out of steam. The workers were defeated, (a lot of them escaped to America), and the British bourgeoisie prospered. It took many years until the workers regained some of their previous positions in society, mainly due to the threat of Communist revolution.

Now we are coming to the new Digital Revolution, with workers being replaced by smart computers and an AI future. Millions of office workers already function as a human interface to the computer. You may have noticed this as you talk with them: they are trained to avoid making decisions; they say sentences that were scripted for them, and the decisions are made by the computer that was programmed to do their master’s will. As lockdown had forced millions to communicate with computers directly, a lot of workers became superfluous.

The process of shedding millions of workers in the existing economic system is likely to be painful for the unemployed. The virus-blamed lockdown and digital control allows the owners of the digital companies to carry out the revolution with minimal risks for them. What would need an army and police involvement against riotous unemployed workers, can be achieved with greater ease under threat of the pandemic. The economy will be modernized and made more efficient. Alas, for us this script presages the fate of highly qualified weavers in 18^th century England, even if we shall avoid the total AI takeover Terminator-style.

Probably the scariest piece of news is not about the numbers of “infected”. It is a meaningless word, for there are persistent carriers who do not succumb to disease; the vast majority of the “infected” are asymptomatic, meaning they aren’t sick and aren’t infectious; the number of “infected” is in direct proportion to the number of tests; the tests are dubious at best, and none is verified by the methods accepted in pre-corona medicine, while the methodology approved and enforced by the WHO can’t be described as scientific. It is not about deaths, for we do not experience more deaths than in 2018. Moreover, in many countries, notably in France and in Norway there are 30% fewer deaths in certain weeks of April and May in this year than in the last year.

The scariest piece of news is that Zoom is worth more than the seven biggest airlines. These airlines with their accumulated labour (millions of working hours, hundreds of thousands of employees, highly trained pilots, masses of sophisticated equipment) just can’t be worth as much as a job done in a month by a few programmers and which can be done anew in a month. Money and stock market prices are useful tools if they measure human efforts; they do not that anymore. What began with bankers earning more money in a day than a hundred qualified workers and engineers in their lifetime, ended with the hi-tech lords earning more than a million workers in their lifetime. It means that Money had banked on the Digital Economy, a Union made in Hell, while the real economy came up for grabs. Money decided that we won’t fly anymore. They, the new masters, will fly in their private jets; the era of mass access is over. You will get satisfied with Zoom and PornHub, instead of the real thing.

Added to this the negative oil future price and the emission centres issuing more and more money, trying to smother the fire with gasoline, and you will get a picture of the coming world. There is probably no place for you and me in this world.

the people know what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard...,

economicprism |  Again, this is a nasty virus.  We don’t discount how contagious it is…or its potential to cause death to the elderly and those with preexisting health conditions.  But, by all honest accounts, the apocalyptic prophecies have not come true.

The point is the fear of the plague is proving to be much more destructive than the actual plague.  There are the immediate economic ramifications of the lockdown orders.  There are also the psychological impacts from the loss of basic rights, freedoms, and liberty.

The American psyche, like the American economy, will not quickly recover as lockdown orders are lifted.  Something sinister has happened.  Though it has happened before.

Van Bryan, writing at Classical Wisdom, recently brought the following shrewd insight of Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, to our attention.  From book IX of his Meditations…

“An infected mind is a far more dangerous pestilence than any plague.  One only threatens your life.  The other destroys your character.”

There’s mounting evidence the American character is being destroyed by an infected mind.  While some Americans have been rightly irate by the government’s lockdown orders, there are others that love it.  They love forced hunkering.  Moreover, they love the prospect of free money.

Rule Of Law: Obama Landgrab In Chicago

chicagotribune |  “Throughout this entire process, the city’s primary, indeed sole, loyalty was to the former president personally and his foundation,” lawyers for Protect Our Parks wrote in its appellate brief, which noted that one of the center’s top cheerleaders, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, had served as Obama’s White House chief of staff.

During his 20-minute argument before the 7th Circuit, Richard Epstein, the lead attorney for Protect Our Parks, balked at the city’s insistence that only a small percentage of the roughly 500-acre park would be affected by the project.

Almost half of the park already is a lagoon or marshland, Epstein said. Factor in the destruction of trees and ripping up of roads that would come with the center’s construction, “and you’re essentially taking away 80 to 90%” of the park’s usable territory, Epstein said.

“What we have is land worth $200 million ... given away for $10,” Epstein said, citing the amount listed on the 99-year land-use deal inked by the City Council. “This is a massive transfer.”

The attorney representing the city, Benna Ruth Solomon, argued that the state legislature specifically addressed any legal concerns when it updated the Museum Act in 2016 to include presidential centers in the list of entities that could be built on park land.

Solomon also said the district court was correct in ruling that the deal entered into by the city with the Obama Foundation was not a lease, as characterized by the plaintiffs, but a “use agreement” that has a “very, very public purpose.”

“We’re not taking parkland and giving it a nonpark use,” Solomon said. “We’re taking parkland that used to be used simply as a park with grass and trees … and we will now have a park with other park purposes,” including the cultural benefits of a museum, she said.

Among the questions posed by the three-judge panel, made up of Judge Amy Barrett, Judge Daniel Manion and Judge Michael Brennan, was whether the litigation even belonged in federal court.

At one point, Barrett interrupted Epstein’s argument and asked him to address why the lawsuit wasn’t brought in state court, where land-use disputes typically are settled.

“It seems like we’re sitting as a zoning board,” Barrett said.

A written ruling will come at a later date.

Herb Caplan, president and co-founder of Protect Our Parks, told the Chicago Tribune in an interview this week that he’s optimistic about their chances on appeal.

“We’re obviously being outspent and outpowered by both the city of Chicago and the University of Chicago and the Obama Foundation,” Caplan said. “But we believe in the rule of law. … I’m confident that the court will do the right thing."

NO FEDERAL BAILOUT FOR PRITZKERVILLINOIS!!!

thecentersquare |  Pension contributions amount to nearly one-fourth of the state’s annual budget and it’s still not at the level actuaries estimate would bring down the level of unfunded liabilities. This is because the “Edgar Ramp,” enacted in 1995, that set contributions to track with the statute, rather than actuarial suggestions. 

Gov. J.B. Pritzker has said the state’s budget would have been balanced had it not been for the pandemic-related revenue shortfalls, something that’s been disputed. 

In Chicago, city officials revealed to Aldermen this week that the COVID-19 crisis has cut into their revenues by an estimated $500 million. 

Chief Financial Officer Jennie Bennett told aldermen on Monday, according to WTTW, that the city could see a $2 billion deficit in the fall should the economy slide into a recession. 

Like Illinois, Chicago has seen its unfunded liabilities increase over the years as well. 

The city’s pension debt has grown by $7 billion since 2015, according to a Chicago Tribune analysis in late 2019 and is scheduled to cost more than $1 billion annually in the coming years.

“The latest point that we have is the product of years of effectively not balancing a budget,” Truth in Accounting Research Director Bill Bergman said. 

Its annual City Combined Taxpayer Burden report released in April showed Chicago taxpayers shoulder $122,100 in deferred costs from the multiple units of government they reside in. 

Pritzkers Are Slobbish Degenerate Dumbasses Violating The Rules For Rulers

Breitbart |  The deep blue state of Illinois is beginning to revolt against the nation’s strictest coronavirus lockdowns even as those in charge seek to strengthen their power.

Some of the more outrageous examples of overreach are seen in the City of Chicago, where Mayor Lori Lightfoot has fenced in the city’s extensive lakeshore areas and even created newly designated no parking zones around churches to prevent worshipers from attending services.

Last Sunday, the city’s first gay mayor sent the Chicago Police Department (CPD) out to erect new signs around the neighborhood of Philadelphia Romanian Church to suddenly create long stretches of new “No parking/tow warning” zones around the building.

Lightfoot also sent the CPD to prowl around outside several of the city’s churches to hand out parking violations, Chicago’s CBS affiliate reported.

The mayor’s campaign against churches comes on the heels of statements by several church officials across the city saying they had no intention of submitting to the mayor’s orders to shut down their houses of worship.

The Windy City is not the only Illinois jurisdiction instituting the draconian lockdowns that are riling citizens. The state’s novice Governor, J.B. Pritzker, has also dabbled in harsh lockdowns that have stifled the state.

Indeed, a recent review of lockdown policies by the personal finance site WalletHub found Illinois has the harshest lockdown policies in the country.

As a result, the Windy City citizens are not the only Illinoisans who have revolted against the Democrat-enforced lockdowns.

A growing number of county and municipal officials are coming out in opposition to Gov. Pritzker’s seemingly arbitrary orders. Pritzker ruled businesses that violated his orders could be handed a prison sentence of up to a year for refusing to obey him. But many balked at the order.

Sheriff James Mendrick of DuPage County, Illinois, for instance, told his constituents he had no intention of enforcing Pritzker’s order to fine and arrest violators of the gov’s lockdown orders.

“I just can’t do this anymore. I stand with our citizens and businesses of DuPage County who have offered no trouble or no resistance to any rule we put upon them, no matter how strange.,” Sheriff Mendrick wrote in a Facebook post.

At Least 20% Of Illinois Restaurants Have Succumbed To The Controlavirus

cbslocal |  “The restaurant industry, we’ve kind of alway been up against it anyways,” said Joe Frillman, owner of Daisies Restaurant. “The statistics are never in our favor to begin with.”

Once known for its dine in homemade pastas, the kitchen at Daisies in Logan Square has pivoted to pay the bills.

“It’s all to go now, so the whole business model has changed,” said Frillman.

He debuted a new concept last weekend. In the age of COVID-19, his dining space became a farmer’s market with fresh produce, meal kits and specialty products.

“We had over 150 people come out to support us,” he said. “I was kind of blown away. We didn’t really know what to expect.”

But for every hopeful moment like these, there are thousands of others from restaurants on the brink of closing.

Jeanne Roeser, in business since 1996, was forced to close her two popular brunch destinations, Toast. Each sat only a handful of diners, and an eventual scaled back reopening didn’t add up.

“It felt like a death,” said Roeser, owner of Toast Restaurant. “It felt like going through the grieving process, which I still am. Any time I thought about it, and I looked at the prospects, it just, in my gut, didn’t feel like it was something that would be workable”

According to the Illinois Restaurant Association, in March there were 25,851 restaurants operating in the state. It estimates 20% — nearly 5,200 restaurants — will go out of business in the coming months because of COVID-19.

 

“I think it’s an undercount,” said Roeser.

“I think that’s generous,” said Frillman. “I think would be a best case scenario.”  “Independent restaurants bring wealth to the city, culturally, economically,” said Roeser.

The Negative Consequences Of Large-Scale Quarantine Are Insufferable

AIER |  For two to three months, Americans have suffered the loss of liberty, security, and prosperity in the name of virus control. The psychological impact has been beyond description. We thought we could count on basic rights and freedoms. Then over a few days in March, it all ended in ways hardly anyone could believe possible. 

The manner in which governments dealt with foundational principles of modernity has been shocking. They put half the country under house arrest and managed every movement in disregard for the Bill of Rights and all legal precedent, to say nothing of the Constitution. It felt like a coercive unraveling of civilization itself. It’s like we are all waking up from a bad dream only to look around and see the wreckage that proves it was all real.

So how can we deal with this terror that befell us? One way is to figure out some aspect in which our sacrifice has been worth it, maybe not on net given the consequences, but surely some good has come out of this. If my email and feeds are correct, this is how many people have been justifying this. The psychology here is rooted in the sunk-cost fallacy: when you commit resources to something, even when it is a proven error, you tend to find justifications by doubling down rather than just admitting the mistake. 

Thus have many people written me to say that whether you agree or disagree with the lockdown, we have to admit that it has saved millions of lives. I always write back and ask how they know that. They send me a link to a projection – those very projections that presume all kinds of things about cause and effect that we cannot know and which have proven wrong time and again throughout this crisis. 

So let’s just grant that it is possible that lockdowns can be credited with slowing the spread of the virus, and perhaps preserving hospital capacity (which turned out to be unnecessary). Still, the virus doesn’t then get bored and move by to Wuhan or to another planet. It still sticks around, so at best, these measures only “prolong the pain,” in the words of Knut Wittkowski. 

So even if lockdowns slow the spread in the short run, it’s not clear that they have saved lives from the coronavirus, even if it results in more death overall from deferred surgeries and diagnostics, suicides, drug overdoses, and depression. 

The trouble here is that certain features of this experience stand out to contradict the idea that lockdowns are saving lives over the longer term. In New York, two thirds of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 were in fact sheltering in place during the lockdown, essentially living in forced isolation. The lockdown didn’t help them; it might have contributed to making matters worse.

Catch Corona - And - Catch A Case?!?!

apnews |  More than 11 million people have been tested in the U.S. for COVID-19, all with the assurance that their private medical information would remain protected and undisclosed.

Yet, public officials in at least two-thirds of states are sharing the addresses of people who tested positive with first responders — from police officers to firefighters to EMTs. An Associated Press review found that at least 10 of those states also share the patients’ names. 

First responders argue the information is vital to helping them take extra precautions to avoid contracting and spreading the coronavirus. 

But civil liberty and community activists have expressed concerns of potential profiling in African-American and Hispanic communities that already have an uneasy relationship with law enforcement. Some envision the data being forwarded to immigration officials.

“The information could actually have a chilling effect that keeps those already distrustful of the government from taking the COVID-19 test and possibly accelerate the spread of the disease,” the Tennessee Black Caucus said in a statement. 

Sharing the information does not violate medical privacy laws, according to guidance issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But many members of minority communities are employed in industries that require them to show up to work every day, making them more susceptible to the virus — and most in need of the test. 

In Tennessee, the issue has sparked criticism from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, who only became aware of the data sharing earlier this month.

The process is simple: State and local health departments keep track of who has received a test in their region and then provide the information to dispatch centers. The AP review shows that happens in at least 35 states that share the addresses of those who tested positive. 

At least 10 states go further and also share the names: Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Tennessee. Wisconsin did so briefly but stopped earlier this month. There have been 287,481 positive cases in those states, mostly in New Jersey. 

“We should question why the information needs to be provided to law enforcement, whether there is that danger of misuse,” said Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

DAYYUM!!! Just Can't Catch A Break

Guardian |  The racial wound at the center of the coronavirus pandemic in the US continues to fester, with latest data showing that African Americans have died from the disease at almost three times the rate of white people.

New figures compiled by the non-partisan APM Research Lab and released on Wednesday under the title Color of Coronavirus provide further evidence of the staggering divide in the Covid-19 death rate between black Americans and the rest of the nation.

Across the country, African Americans have died at a rate of 50.3 per 100,000 people, compared with 20.7 for whites, 22.9 for Latinos and 22.7 for Asian Americans.

More than 20,000 African Americans – about one in 2,000 of the entire black population in the US – have died from the disease.

At the level of individual states, the statistics are all the more shocking. Bottom of the league table in terms of racial disparities is Kansas, where black residents are dying at seven times the rate of whites.

“This is a call to action for our county commissioners, our state and our city officials,” the Kansas state representative Gail Finney told local TV channel KWCH12 recently.

In other states, the gulf is almost as extreme. In the nation’s capital, Washington, the disparity in death rate between blacks and whites is six times, in Michigan and Missouri five, and in major hotspots of the disease – New York, Illinois and Louisiana – three.

Bring It! Elites Are Ready For You...,

medium |  The American government and the elites who they work for are playing with fire, so no wonder they’ve begun to prepare for the uprising that’s coming.

Lee Fang at The Intercept writes:

“The Federal government has ramped up security and police-related spending in response to the coronavirus pandemic, including issuing contracts for riot gear, disclosures show.

The purchase orders include requests for disposable cuffs, gas masks, ballistic helmets, and riot gloves, along with law enforcement protective equipment for federal police assigned to protect Veterans Affairs facilities. The orders were expedited under a special authorization “in response to Covid-19 outbreak.”

The Veterans Affairs department, which manages nearly 1,500 health care care facilities around the country, has also extended special contracts for coronavirus-related security services.While the pandemic has coincided with a historic drop in violent crime across the country, analysts have expressed concern that the rapid spread of the virus will fuel confrontations.

There have been multiple inmate riots in response to Covid-19 outbreaks in prisons and jails, which have become dangerous hotspots for the disease. The economic upheaval and disagreements over coronavirus-related policy have also fueled demonstrations across the country.

…The federal funding requests contrast sharply with the rosy rhetoric from President Donald Trump, who has lavished himself with praise for his response to the crisis and issued optimistic predictions that recovery is around the corner. Last month, the federal government secured a contract to purchase 100,000 body bags to dispose of deaths related to the Covid-19 outbreak.”

If the elites are beginning to prepare for what they clearly know is coming in response to how this crisis has been handled, then perhaps it’s time for us to get ready as well.

They BEEN Laying Up For You

lewrockwell |  The newest term being targeted toward the masses is the coming of the “Dark Winter,” which is nothing more than propaganda based lies meant to prepare the sheep for a planned continuation and escalation of this fake pandemic in order to bring about world domination.

Operation Dark Winter was the code name for a senior-level bio-terrorist attack simulation conducted from June 22–23, 2001, which was designed to carry out a mock version of a covert bio-weapon’s attack on the United States. The players involved in this were the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (CCBS) and Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and the project designers were Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of Analytic Services. It is very interesting that the same Johns Hopkins along with the evil Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation conducted Event 201, a coronavirus “simulation” just this past October, on the verge of this so-called pandemic. The same players, same objectives, but now it is real.

Rick Bright, the former director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, and claimed whistleblower, has been all over the mainstream news as of late projecting the “darkest winter in modern history.” Using this term was no accident, and in fact was meant as propaganda to frighten and alarm the already cowardly and pathetic public. It was also meant to instill a mindset of a killing plague soon to come. This was completely staged in my opinion, but it will nonetheless be accepted by a society steeped in fear due to this “crisis.”

I would expect the term “dark winter” to become a new buzzword, as this new term the second time around, is strictly tied to the original scenario, but applied to today’s panic. None of this is coincidence, none of it is accidental, but it is sinister. If things continue as they have been, and this lockdown remains in place, whether fully or partially, the anticipation of this “dark winter” will be on the minds of most all American sheep, especially if it is continually used as the threat of things to come.

With that in the minds of the people, they will be expecting the worst, and will probably get exactly what they expect; another planned pandemic. 

 

The current government plan, regardless of what is partially opened this summer, is to continue to mandate social distancing and masks as some sort of faux protection against this non-existent threat, to continue to shame those dissenters that refuse to comply with government orders, and to use more force to stop any dissent.

How Many Of Y'all Die Each Day?

visualcapitalist |  As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, the media continues to rattle off statistics at full force.

However, without a frame of reference, numbers such as the death toll can be difficult to interpret. Mortalities attributed to the virus, for example, are often measured in the thousands of people per day globally—but is this number a little or a lot, relative to typical causes of death?

Today’s graphic uses data from Our World in Data to provide context with the total number of worldwide daily deaths. It also outlines how many people who die each day from specific causes.

Worldwide Deaths by Cause

Nearly 150,000 people die per day worldwide, based on the latest comprehensive research published in 2017. Which diseases are the most deadly, and how many lives do they take per day?

Here’s how many people die each day on average, sorted by cause:

Rank	Cause	Daily Deaths
#1	Cardiovascular diseases	48,742
#2	Cancers	26,181
#3	Respiratory diseases	10,724
#4	Lower respiratory infections	7,010
#5	Dementia	6,889
#6	Digestive diseases	6,514
#7	Neonatal disorders	4,887
#8	Diarrheal diseases	4,300
#9	Diabetes	3,753
#10	Liver diseases	3,624
	Total Daily Deaths	147,118

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Cardiovascular diseases, or diseases of the heart and blood vessels, are the leading cause of death. However, their prominence is not reflected in our perceptions of death nor in the media.

While the death toll for HIV/AIDS peaked in 2004, it still affects many people today. The disease causes over 2,600 daily deaths on average.

Interestingly, terrorism and natural disasters cause very few deaths in relation to other causes. That said, these numbers can vary from day to day—and year to year—depending on the severity of each individual instance.

The Unspoken Goal Has Always Been Herd Immunity

project-syndicate |  Science cannot determine what the correct COVID-19 response should have been for each country. A model may be considered validated if its predictions correspond to outcomes in real life. But in epidemiology, we can have confidence that this will happen only if a virus with known properties is allowed to run its natural course in a given population, or if there is a single intervention like a vaccine, the results of which can be accurately predicted.

Too many variables – including, say, medical capacity or cultural characteristics – scrambles the model, and it starts spewing out scenarios and predictions like a demented robot. Today, epidemiologists cannot tell us what the effects of the current COVID-19 policy mix will be. “We will know only in a year or so,” they say.

The outcome will therefore depend on politics. And the politics of COVID-19 are clear enough: governments could not risk the natural spread of infection, and thought it too complicated or politically fraught to try to isolate only those most at risk of severe illness or death, namely the 15-20% of the population aged over 65.

The default policy response has been to slow the spread of natural immunity until a vaccine can be developed. What “flattening the curve” really means is spacing out the number of expected deaths over a period long enough for medical facilities to cope and a vaccine to kick in.

But this strategy has a terrible weakness: governments cannot keep their populations locked down until a vaccine arrives. Apart from anything else, the economic cost would be unthinkable. So, they have to ease the lockdown gradually.

Doing this, however, lifts the cap on non-exposure gained from the lockdown. That is why no government has an explicit exit strategy: what political leaders call the “controlled easing” of lockdowns actually means controlled progress toward herd immunity.

Governments cannot openly avow this, because that would amount to admitting that herd immunity is the objective. And it is not yet even known whether and for how long infection confers immunity. Much better, then, to pursue this goal silently, under a cloud of obfuscation, and hope that a vaccine arrives before most of the population is infected.

Aerosol Filtration Efficiency

ACSNano |  The emergence of a pandemic affecting the respiratory system can result in a significant demand for face masks. This includes the use of cloth masks by large sections of the public, as can be seen during the current global spread of COVID-19. However, there is limited knowledge available on the performance of various commonly available fabrics used in cloth masks. Importantly, there is a need to evaluate filtration efficiencies as a function of aerosol particulate sizes in the 10 nm to 10 μm range, which is particularly relevant for respiratory virus transmission. We have carried out these studies for several common fabrics including cotton, silk, chiffon, flannel, various synthetics, and their combinations. Although the filtration efficiencies for various fabrics when a single layer was used ranged from 5 to 80% and 5 to 95% for particle sizes of <300 and="" nm="">300 nm, respectively, the efficiencies improved when multiple layers were used and when using a specific combination of different fabrics. Filtration efficiencies of the hybrids (such as cotton–silk, cotton–chiffon, cotton–flannel) was >80% (for particles <300 and="" nm="">90% (for particles >300 nm). We speculate that the enhanced performance of the hybrids is likely due to the combined effect of mechanical and electrostatic-based filtration. Cotton, the most widely used material for cloth masks performs better at higher weave densities (i.e., thread count) and can make a significant difference in filtration efficiencies. Our studies also imply that gaps (as caused by an improper fit of the mask) can result in over a 60% decrease in the filtration efficiency, implying the need for future cloth mask design studies to take into account issues of “fit” and leakage, while allowing the exhaled air to vent efficiently. Overall, we find that combinations of various commonly available fabrics used in cloth masks can potentially provide significant protection against the transmission of aerosol particles.

Toilet Aerosols A Primary Coronavirus Contagion Vector

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the COVID-19 virus spreads from person-to-person among close contacts and occurs mainly via respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes. These droplets can land in the mouths or noses of nearby people or possibly be inhaled directly into the lungs. It might be possible for a person to get the virus by touching a contaminated surface or object and then touching their own mouth, nose, or eyes.

 

How can the coronavirus spread through bathroom pipes? Experts are investigating in Hong Kong” A https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/12/asia/hong-kong-coronavirus-pipes-intl-hnk/index.html

waterandhealth |  According to the article,² two residents living on different floors of a high-rise apartment tower called Hong Mei House had been infected with coronavirus according to Hong Kong health officials. The first to be infected was a 75-year-old man. About 10 days later, a 62-year-old woman in the same building became infected. That woman’s son and daughter-in-law who share the apartment were later diagnosed with COVID-19.  

In the tower, the first two persons with coronavirus lived 10 floors apart, but were located in the same vertical block of apartments. For this reason, health authorities conducted an initial investigation and evacuated all residents living directly above and below each other in block seven across all 30 floors because their toilet and vent pipes were all connected (see figure).

Scary Reminder of the 2003 SARS Outbreak

The possibility of the coronavirus being transmitted through building sewage pipes immediately drew comparisons to the 2003 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) coronavirus outbreak, where this was discovered to be a major source of transmission. At the Amoy Gardens housing estate, also in Hong Kong, more than 300 infections and 42 deaths occurred after poorly-designed plumbing allowed the SARS virus to spread throughout the building complex. As a result, following a 24-hour medical lock-down, the residents were moved to confinement camps for 10 days as doctors, clinicians, sewage experts and engineers investigated.  

How Could Bathroom Sewage Pipes Spread Coronavirus?

The COVID-19 virus could have spread through the Hong Mei House through close human contact or the shared use of elevator buttons. But because the two first patients lived above and below one another in the tower, and because an initial inspection found that a vent pipe had been disconnected from the bathroom’s waste (soil) pipe, the building was partially evacuated. Although a full investigation is ongoing, based on the initial investigation, health officials declared the Hong Mei House’s sewage pipe system to be safe. 

Preliminary studies of the COVID-19 virus have suggested it is present in fecal matter, though it is still unclear whether the coronavirus could be transmitted and infect others by some type of fecal-oral route (via exposure from hands to nasal passages and eyes not through ingestion). As can be seen in the figure, toilets (as well as sinks and floor drains) have a “U-“ or “P-shaped” pipe that prevents sewer gases from entering the home and that allows wastewater and odors to escape. To work properly, the sharply curved pipe, also known as a “trap,” needs to hold water in its bend. These connect to a soil pipe, which washes the waste down and away from the toilet, sink, or drain. The soil pipe also needs to be connected to a vent pipe to remove sewer gases and odors—usually through roof vents. The vent pipe also ensures that wastewater keeps flowing freely. One local microbiologist suggested at a press conference that the improperly sealed vent pipe “could have resulted in a virus transmission, by carrying infected feces into the building’s ventilation system and blowing it into people’s bathrooms”.