Trickle-Up Fundraising And Social Media Savvy Enabled Obama's Takeover Of The Democrat Party

theintercept  |  It didn’t have to be this way. Obama’s campaign operation, Obama for America, took small-dollar giving to never-before-seen heights and opened up the possibility of a transformation of politics. But he quickly decided to marginalize his group after the 2008 election. He renamed it Organizing for America, but ordered it to do very little organizing, worried that if grassroots activists attacked Blue Dog Democrats, they would bolt from the president and lose in 2010. Then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously told activists such a strategy was “fucking retarded.” (Most lost anyway in 2010, as the tea party wave swept them out.)

OFA became Obama’s primary campaign apparatus, supplanting the DNC, which became an afterthought handed to Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who later became Clinton’s running mate. After the 2010 wave, Obama put Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz on top of the moribund institution, a clear signal that he was uninterested in it as a central component of the party. Obama’s poor relationship with Wasserman Schultz was widely known and written about, but he left her in the job for six years regardless.

Raising money for a bland outfit like the DNC isn’t easy in the best of times, but with Obama offering little to no help, and clinging to his invaluable email list, Wasserman Schultz was set up to fail, even if she would have done so on her own.

Obama instead reasoned that he could become the party, his dynamic and charismatic personality carrying it at the national level.

Obama was re-elected, but the party itself went on a historic losing spree, ultimately shedding nearly 1,000 seats across the country. Even after Democrats lost the Senate in 2014, and the DNC continued spending money on consultants at an eye-popping rate, Obama decided not to make a leadership change. Instead, he left it saddled with debt — debt the Clinton campaign would later agree to pay off in exchange for control.

Obama finally became interested in the party after the 2016 loss. His final gift to the party apparatus was Tom Perez, his labor secretary, who he recruited to stop Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., from winning the race for DNC chair. Obama and Perez won. DNC funding has been anemic, and it recently had to add to its roughly $3 million in debt.

Unruly Peasant How Dare You Kwestin My Blue Bailouts?!?!?!

speaker.gov  |  Washington, D.C. – Speaker Nancy Pelosi joined Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s The Situation Room to discuss the resumption of COVID relief talks after the President’s decision to walk away and other news of the day.  Below are the Speaker’s remarks: 

Wolf Blitzer.  Madam Speaker, thank you so much for joining us, and as you know, there are Americans who are being evicted from their homes.  They can't pay their rent.  Many Americans are waiting in food lines for the first time in their lives.  Can you look them in the eye, Madam Speaker, and explain why you don't want to accept the President's latest stimulus offer? 

Speaker Pelosi.  Well, because – thank you very much, Wolf.  I hope you'll ask the same question of the Republicans about why they don't really want to meet the needs of the American people.  Let me say to those people, because all of my colleagues, we represent these people.  I have for over 30 years represented my constituents.  I know what their needs are.  I listen to them.  And their needs are not addressed in the President's proposal. 

So, when you say to me, ‘Why don't you accept theirs?’  Why don't they accept ours?  Our legislation is there to do three things primarily: to honor our workers, honor our heroes, our health care workers, our police and fire, our first responders, our teachers, our transportation, sanitation, food workers the people who make our lives work.  We couldn't be doing what we are doing without them.  Many of them have risked their lives so that they – to save lives and now will lose their job because Mitch McConnell says, ‘Let the states go bankrupt.’  ‘Let the states go bankrupt.’

[Crosstalk]

Wolf Blitzer.  Excuse me for interrupting, Madam Speaker, but they need the money right now.  And even members of your own –

Speaker Pelosi.  I understand that.  You asked me a question. 

Wolf Blitzer.  Members of your own Caucus, Madam Speaker, want to accept this deal, $1.8 trillion.  Congressman Ro Khanna –

[Crosstalk]

Speaker Pelosi.  Wait a minute.  Wait a second.

Wolf Blitzer.  Let me just quote Ro Khanna, a man you know well.  I assume you admire him.  He’s a Democrat.  He just said this, he said, ‘People in need can't wait until February.  1.8 trillion is significant and more than twice Obama stimulus.’  ‘Make a deal, and put the ball in McConnell court.’  So what do you say to Ro Khanna? 

Speaker Pelosi.  What I say to you is, I don't know if you're always an apologists, and many of your colleagues apologists, for the Republican position.  Ro Khanna, that’s nice.  That isn’t what we’re going to do, and nobody is waiting until February.  I want this very much now, because people need help now. 

But it's no use giving them a false thing just because the President wants to put a check with his name on it in the mail that we should not be doing all we can to help people pay the rent, put food on the table, to enhance benefits, that they don't lose their jobs if they’re state and local, that they – this – we are talking about the consequences of a pandemic, symptoms of a problem that the President refuses to address and that is the coronavirus.  That is the coronavirus.

[Crosstalk]

Wolf Blitzer.  But we know, Madam Speaker, we know about the problem out there, but here are millions of Americans who have lost their jobs.  They can't pay their rent.  Their kids need the food. 

Speaker Pelosi.  That’s right, and that’s what we’re trying to get done. 

Wolf Blitzer.  $1.8 trillion and the President just tweeted, ‘Stimulus go big or go home.’ 

Speaker Pelosi.  Right.

Wolf Blitzer.  He wants more right now

Speaker Pelosi.  That’s right.

Wolf Blitzer.  So, why not work out a deal with him and don't let the perfect, as they say here in Washington, be the enemy of the good?

Speaker Pelosi.  Well, I will not let the wrong be the enemy of the right. 

Wolf Blitzer.  What is wrong with $1.8 trillion?

Speaker Pelosi.  You know what?  Do you have any idea what the difference is between the spending they have in their bill and that we have in our bill?  Do you realize that they have come back and said all of these things for Child Tax Credits and Earned Income Tax Credits or helping people who lost their jobs are eliminated in their bill?  Do you realize they pay no respect to the fact that child care is very important for people whose children cannot go to school because they are doing remote learning and, yet, they minimize the need for child care, which is the threshold with which people, mothers and fathers, can go to work if they have that?  Do you have any idea at how woefully short their concern, their concern –

[Crosstalk]

Wolf Blitzer.  That is precisely why, Madam Speaker, it's important right now.  Yesterday, I spoke yesterday to Andrew Yang who said the same thing.  It's not everything you want, but a lot there.

[Crosstalk]

Speaker Pelosi.  Okay you know what?  Honest to God.  You really – I can't get over it because Andrew Yang, he’s lovely.  Ro Khanna, he’s lovely.  But they are not negotiating this situation.  They have no idea of the particulars.  They have no idea of what the language is here.  I didn't come over here to have you – so you're the apologist for the Obama – excuse me.  God forbid.  Thank God for Barack Obama  

Wolf Blitzer.  Madam Speaker, I’m not an apologist.  I'm asking you serious questions because people are in desperate need right now. 

The Sociology Of Race And Racism In The Digital Society

sagepub  |  An early reader of this article posed a provocative question: is there anything analytically distinct about the Internet? My answer revealed my priors. “Of course the Internet is distinct,” I wanted to say. But that is arguing from an embarrassingly basic logical fallacy. The question of what the Internet does analytically that, say, “capital” or “economy” or “culture” or “organizations” does not already do is important. My answer is debatable, but the debate is worthwhile. I do not know if the Internet adds something analytically distinct to our social inquiries, but it adds something analytical precision. Other constructs capture important dimensions of social life in a digital society. For instance, one can argue that Silicon Valley is a racial project (Noble and Roberts 2019; Watters 2015) or a sociohistorical construction of racial meanings, logics, and institutions (Omi and Winant 2014). White racial frames (Feagin 2020) or color-blind racism (Bonilla-Silva 2006) can elucidate how ironic humor about Black people, Muslims, and immigrants in online gaming platforms reproduces “offline” racism (Fairchild 2020; Gray 2012). These are just two examples of noteworthy approaches taken to studying Internet technologies and “mainstream” sociological interests (i.e., economic cultures and discourses, respectively). Still, sociological practice does not systematically engage with the social relations of Internet technologies as analytical equals to the object of study. If there is anything particular about Internet technologies for sociological inquiry, we should make it explicit. And once explicit, we should give it the same theoretical care as states, capital, and power. Daniels (2013) points us in the right direction when she argued that

the reality is that in the networked society . . . racism is now global . . ., as those with regressive political agendas rooted in white power connect across national boundaries via the Internet, a phenomenon that runs directly counter to Omi and Winant’s conceptualization of the State as a primary structural agent in racial formation.

Daniels named to the global nature of both racism and the networks of capital we gesture to when we say Internet or digital. It is an argument for bringing back the political economy of race and racism. Internet technologies are specific in how they have facilitated, legitimized, and transformed states and capital within a global racial hierarchy. An app with which underemployed skilled labor sells services to customers (e.g., TaskRabbit) might be a U.S. racial project. But the capital that finances the app is embedded in transnational capital flows. Global patterns of racialized labor that determine what is “skill” and what is “labor” mediate the value of labor and the rents the platform can extract for mediating the laborer-customer relationship. Even the way we move money on these platforms—“Cash App me!”—is networked to supranational firms such as PayPal and Alibaba (Swartz 2020). Internet technologies have atomized the political economy of globalization with all the ideas about race, capital, racism, and ethnicity embedded within. An understanding of the political economy of Internet technologies adds a precise formulation of how this transformation operates in everyday social worlds: privatization through opacity and exclusion via inclusion. Both characteristics are distinctly about the power of Internet technologies. And each characteristic is important for the study of race and racism. Understanding platform capitalism helps us understand how these two characteristics are important.

Internet technologies have networked forms of capital (Srnicek and De Sutter 2017; Zhang 2020), consolidated capital’s coercive power (Azar, Marinescu, and Steinbaum forthcoming; Dube et al. 2020), flattened hierarchical organizations (Treem and Leonardi 2013; Turco 2016), and produced new containers for culture (Brock 2020; Noble 2018; Patton et al. 2017; Ray et al. 2017). By that definition, the Internet has amplified and reworked existing social relations. Platform capitalism moves us toward the analytical importance of Internet technologies as sociopolitical regimes. Platforms produce new forms of currency (i.e., data) and new forms of exchange (e.g., cryptocurrencies), and they structure new organizational arrangements among owners, workers, and consumers (see “prosumers”). Even more important for the study of race and racism, platforms introduce new layers of opacity into every facet of social life.

In Crisis Opportunity: IMF Pandemic Loans Begin Privatization Of The Developing World

mintpressnews  |  The enormous economic dislocation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique opportunity to fundamentally alter the structure of society, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) if using the crisis to implement near-permanent austerity measures across the world.

76 of the 91 loans it has negotiated with 81 nations since the beginning of the worldwide pandemic in March have come attached with demands that countries adopt measures such as deep cuts to public services and pensions — measures that will undoubtedly entail privatization, wage freezes or cuts, or the firing of public sector workers like doctors, nurses, teachers and firefighters.

The principal cheerleader for neoliberal austerity measures across the globe for decades, the IMF has recently (quietly) begun admitting that these policies have not worked and generally make problems like poverty, uneven development, and inequality even worse. Furthermore, they have also failed even to bring the promised economic growth that was meant to counteract these negative effects. In 2016, it described its own policies as “oversold” and earlier summed up its experiments in Latin America as “all pain, no gain.” Thus, its own reports explicitly state its policies do not work.

“The IMF has sounded the alarm about a massive spike in inequality in the wake of the pandemic. Yet it is steering countries to pay for pandemic spending by making austerity cuts that will fuel poverty and inequality,” Chema Vera, Interim Executive Director of Oxfam International, said today.

These measures could leave millions of people without access to healthcare or income support while they search for work, and could thwart any hope of sustainable recovery. In taking this approach, the IMF is doing an injustice to its own research. Its head needs to start speaking to its hands.”

Oxfam has identified at least 14 countries that it expects will imminently freeze or cut public sector wages and jobs. Tunisia, for example, has only 13 doctors per 10,000 people. Any cuts to its already scant healthcare system would cripple it in its fight against the coronavirus. “If people can’t afford testing and care for COVID-19 and other health needs, the virus will continue to spread unchecked and more people will die. Out-of-pocket healthcare expenses were a tragedy before the pandemic, and now they are a death sentence,” Vera added.

Obama's The Poster Child And His Cousin Warren Buffet's The Money Behind Black Lives Matter

tabletmag  |  Tides was founded in 1976 by Drummond Pike, a California real estate investor who named the entity after a Bay Area bookstore popular among left-leaning activists. From the beginning, according to their own documents, Tides was designed unlike most other nonprofit institutions. Rather than building up or spending down an endowment, it sought to become more like a sophisticated piece of software—a financial instrument that would allow wealthy individuals and donors to contribute to the causes of their choosing with more anonymity than is generally allowed by the laws governing ordinary nonprofits.

Recently, after Pike stepped away, the Tides network has taken on a distinctly political role, whose guiding star appears to be Barack Obama. The secretary of the Tides board is Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of PEN America and a former deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations in the Obama administration; board member Cheryl Alston was appointed by Obama to the advisory committee of the federal pension program. Peter Buttenwieser, the heir to the Lehman Brothers fortune who passed away in 2018, financed a fund in his own name which is administered and distributed entirely by the Tides Foundation. A “major behind-the-scenes supporter of Democratic candidates,” Buttenwieser was one of President Obama’s earliest high profile backers, helping the then-senator organize his bid for the White House.

Moreover, Atlantic Philanthropies, a nonprofit created by billionaire retailer Chuck Feeney in the 1980s, has directed more than $42 million in grants through the Tides network since 2000. Based in Bermuda, Atlantic Philanthropies was able to participate in political lobbying efforts in ways that continental United States nonprofits cannot. Atlantic became increasingly aggressive under the Obama administration. As Gara LaMarche, Atlantic’s president, said in one think tank address, when Obama was elected “we saw opportunities to assist our grantees in moving forward more rapidly and broadly in a number of areas central to our mission.” In return, Atlantic dispensed $27 million to help push Obamacare through Congress. At the ceremony to sign Obamacare into law, LaMarche stood beside President Obama in the East Room of the White House.

In any case, what’s clear is that there is now a sophisticated and complex structure underneath what many assume to be an organic and spontaneous social movement, one with deep pockets and ambitious goals. “After over fourteen years of learning and over 700 million dollars invested ... the collapse we have been expecting is surely underway,” reads the NoVo Foundation’s website. Right now there’s only this one statement on the site, which is under construction as noted: “Working on solutions now so old patterns of power can’t, once again, re-form to rebuild and continue to repress.”

Why Am I Unsurprised To Find Peter Thiel In The Middle Of These Silicon Valley IdPol Squabbles?

WaPo  |  The day after President Trump told the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of inciting violence, to “stand back and stand by,” during the first presidential debate last week, tech investor Cyan Banister tweeted that the group was misunderstood and had “a few bad apples.”

The open defense of an organization that has been deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center is one extreme example of an increasingly public reactionary streak in Silicon Valley that diverges from the tech industry’s image as a bastion of liberalism. Some libertarian, centrist and right-leaning Silicon Valley investors and executives, who wield outsize influence, power and access to capital, describe tech culture as under siege by activist employees pushing a social justice agenda.

Curtis Yarvin, dubbed a “favorite philosopher of the alt-right” by the Verge, has become a familiar face on the invite-only audio social network Clubhouse, in rooms with investors such as Facebook board member Marc Andreessen, the founder of Andreessen Horowitz, which invested in the app.

Cryptocurrency start-up Coinbase recently sought to restrict political speech by employees, a move many interpreted as a shift to the right because it came in reaction to internal discussions of Black Lives Matter.

Move deliberately, fix things: How Coinbase is building a cryptocurrency empire

Tensions are running high even at some of the biggest tech companies. The crackdown on employee speech in response to social activism over the past year has spread to Facebook, Google and Pinterest, among others.

In September, Facebook restricted spaces for political discussions after employees protested the company’s moderation policies against hate speech affecting Black users. Pinterest shut down a Slack channel used to submit questions for company meetings and turned another Slack channel read-only, opting to use a different tool for up-voting. Employees, who had used both channels to question leadership about race and gender bias and pay equity in recent months, were upset, according to records viewed by The Washington Post.

Banister, a former partner at Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm and an early investor in Uber and SpaceX, said she applauded Coinbase’s decision. “Enough is enough. The pendulum swings and it swings back,” she told The Post. “Sometimes people just want to have a safe place to go where they don’t have to think about this stuff anymore because it’s literally everywhere. ”

Banister told The Post she became interested in the Proud Boys after Trump mentioned them during the debate. She said she does not condone white supremacy and it should have been “dead easy” for the president to say the same.

“Questioning something does not mean condoning or agreeing,” she said.

Often, the trigger for this public pushback has been social pressure around racial equity, according to diversity consultants.

The tech industry went through similar reactionary spasms around the last presidential election, revealing a different strain of libertarianism from the counterculture and cyberculture geeks coding away in their garages. At the time, the underlying tension was also around equity and injustice. But the battle was about disavowing Thiel, a Trump donor and adviser, rather than expressing support for Black Lives Matter.

Was Trump Collateral Roadkill In A Trilateral Battle For Control Of The DNC?

tomluongo  |  Back during the early days of the Democratic primaries I told you that the real story behind the scenes was a three-sided civil war for control of the DNC.

Not quite an equilateral triangle, the two major factions were the Clintons and the Obamas with the Soros-backed squad pushing them both farther and farther left, through the fake Progressivism of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

And with the ascension of Joe Biden as the candidate, triumphing over the inept Hillary-backed challenge from Mini Mike Bloomberg, it was clear that the Obamas won the internal battle.

Hillary eventually bent the knee and endorsed Biden along with everyone else.

After her failure to beat Trump in 2016 it became clear that Obama was the choice by The Davos Crowd to deliver the U.S. into their hands weak, divided, literally on fire and close to irretrievably insane.

In the words of Bush the Lesser, “Mission Accomplished.”

But what’s been sticking in the back of my mind for months was Trump’s tweet from May: 

OBAMAGATE! pic.twitter.com/pFbb6hgDhF

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2020

That was the rallying cry from him to repurpose his base’s energy towards the real villain in the RussiaGate story, Obama.

And what’s really clear now with the latest set of releases — specifically Former CIA Director John Brennan’s handwritten notes on a CIA memo — that Obama directed his people to point all the fingers at Hillary for RussiaGate’s worst abuses while keeping Obama neatly above it all.

 

74% Of Coronavirus Infectees ALWAYS Wore Masks...,

sandrarose  |   The latest statistics confirm what U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said about face masks in February.

Dr. Adams previously said the public should not wear masks to protect against the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus disease because masks offered little protection against a virus.

"Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS!" Adams tweeted on Feb. 29.

The WHO, the CDC and NIH's Dr. Anthony Fauci also strongly discouraged wearing masks as not useful for the public.

Dr. Adams changed his tune months later. He encouraged Americans to wear a mask to stop the spread of the coronavirus — insisting the face coverings don't infringe on Americans' "freedom".

Adams was not wearing a mask in August when he and another man were cited for trespassing in a park in Hawaii that was closed.

Adams, 46, was with his personal assistant, Dennis Anderson-Villaluz, a 37-year-old dietician with the U.S. Health Dept. The two men were "taking pictures" inside the rural park.

People who are most at risk for contracting Covid-19 include those with preexisting conditions such as cardiac problems, hypertension, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), immunodeficiency (HIV), psychiatric condition, diabetes, or obesity.

WHO And Former FDA Director Gottlieb Say No More Lockdowns!!!

"The idea that we're going to do a national, stay-at-home order ... it's just not going to happen," says @ScottGottliebMD. "When history looks back on us, the critical failing is going to be the fact that we were so blind to the spread back in April and May." pic.twitter.com/x7xJP1OvcX

— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) October 12, 2020

NYPost  |  The World Health Organization has warned leaders against relying on COVID-19 lockdowns to tackle outbreaks — after previously saying countries should be careful how quickly they reopen.

WHO envoy Dr. David Nabarro said such restrictive measures should only be treated as a last resort, the British magazine the Spectator reported in a video interview.

“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Nabarro said.

“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”

Nabarro said tight restrictions cause significant harm, particularly on the global economy.

“Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never, ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer,” he said.

He added that lockdowns have severely impacted countries that rely on tourism.

“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry in the Caribbean, for example, or in the Pacific because people aren’t taking their holidays,” Nabarro told the outlet.

“Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world. Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.”

Though The Facts Are Now In - Your Masters Will Continue To Pretend

off-guardian  |  The World Health Organization has finally confirmed what we (and many experts and studies) have been saying for months – the coronavirus is no more deadly or dangerous than seasonal flu.

The WHO’s top brass made this announcement during a special session of the WHO’s 34-member executive board on Monday October 5th, it’s just nobody seemed to really understand it.

In fact, they didn’t seem to completely understand it themselves.

At the session, Dr Michael Ryan, the WHO’s Head of Emergencies revealed that they believe roughly 10% of the world has been infected with Sars-Cov-2. This is their “best estimate”, and a huge increase over the number of officially recognised cases (around 35 million).

Dr. Margaret Harris, a WHO spokeswoman, later confirmed the figure, stating it was based on the average results of all the broad seroprevalence studies done around the world.

As much as the WHO were attempting to spin this as a bad thing – Dr Ryan even said it means “the vast majority of the world remains at risk.” – it’s actually good news. And confirms, once more, that the virus is nothing like as deadly as everyone predicted.

The global population is roughly 7.8 billion people, if 10% have been infected that is 780 million cases. The global death toll currently attributed to Sars-Cov-2 infections is 1,061,539.

That’s an infection fatality rate of roughly or 0.14%. Right in line with seasonal flu and the predictions of many experts from all around the world.

0.14% is over 24 times LOWER than the WHO’s “provisional figure” of 3.4% back in March. This figure was used in the models which were used to justify lockdowns and other draconian policies.

In fact, given the over-reporting of alleged Covid deaths, the IFR is likely even lower than 0.14%, and could show Covid to be much less dangerous than flu.

None of the mainstream press picked up on this. Though many outlets reported Dr Ryan’s words, they all attempted to make it a scary headline and spread more panic.

What Do You Bet The Davos Dumbasses Will Try And Put All Your Data On A Blockchain?

 WEForum |  The challenge: As countries around the world work to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic and restart their economies and tourism, they all face the challenge of how to reopen their borders and allow international travel to resume while protecting their populations’ health. The current patchwork of policies and ever-changing border entry and health screening requirements has made international travel incredibly complex, leaving airlines and border agencies uncertain about the validity of test results and passengers unsure of what is being asked of them.

The solution: CommonPass aims to develop and launch a standard global model to enable people to securely document and present their COVID-19 status (either as test results or an eventual vaccination status) to facilitate international travel and border crossing while keeping their health information private. Recognizing that countries will make sovereign decisions on border entry and health screening requirements, including whether or not to require tests or what type of test to require, CommonPass serves as a neutral platform which creates the interoperability needed for the various 'travel bubbles' to connect and for countries to trust one another's data by leveraging global standards.

For governments, airlines, airports, and other key stakeholders throughout the end-to-end travel journey, CommonPass aims to address these key questions:

• How can a lab result or vaccination record from another country be trusted?


• Is the lab or vaccination facility accredited/certified?


• How do we confirm that the person who took the test is indeed the person who is travelling?


• Does the traveler meet border entry requirements?

How it works: In line with protocols and guidelines from international organizations and standards bodies in the aviation and health sectors, CommonPass allows individuals to securely document their COVID-19 status electronically and present it when they board a plane or cross a border.

The framework will:

• Allow individuals to collect and store their health information securely and present their health status in conjunction with border crossing and travel requirements.


• Support a range of health data inputs, including PCR test results and vaccination records.


• Support a range of health screening entry requirements that vary from country to country and will evolve through the course of the pandemic and beyond.


• Protect the privacy of individual health data.


• Be interoperable across countries and regions.


• Be based on proven, international standards and open technologies.


• Be operated on an open, independent, sustainable, not-for-profit basis.

The Blockchain Has Only Ever Been A Pimper's Paradise...,

thecorrespondent  |  It seems that blockchain sounds best in a PowerPoint slide. Most blockchain projects don’t make it past a press release, an inventory by Bloomberg showed. The Honduran land registry was going to use blockchain. That plan has been shelved. The Nasdaq was also going to do something with blockchain. Not happening. The Dutch Central Bank then? Nope. Out of over 86,000 blockchain projects that had been launched, 92% had been abandoned by the end of 2017, according to consultancy firm Deloitte.  

Why are they deciding to stop? Enlightened – and thus former – blockchain developer Mark van Cuijk explained: “You could also use a forklift to put a six-pack of beer on your kitchen counter. But it’s just not very efficient.”

I’ll list a few of the problems. Firstly: the technology is at loggerheads with European privacy legislation, specifically the right to be forgotten. Once something is in the blockchain, it cannot be removed. For instance, hundreds of links to child abuse material and revenge porn were placed in the bitcoin blockchain by malicious users.

It’s impossible to remove those.

Also, in a blockchain you aren’t anonymous, but “pseudonymous”: your identity is linked to a number, and if someone can link your name to that number, you’re screwed. Everything you got up to on that blockchain is visible to everyone.

The presumed hackers of Hillary Clinton’s email were caught, for instance, because their identity could be linked to bitcoin transactions. A number of researchers from Qatar University were able to ascertain the identities of tens of thousands of bitcoin users fairly easily through social networking sites.
Other researchers showed how you can de-anonymise many more people through trackers on shopping websites.

The fact that no one is in charge and nothing can be modified also means that mistakes cannot be corrected. A bank can reverse a payment request. This is impossible for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. So anything that has been stolen will stay stolen. There is a continuous stream of hackers targeting bitcoin exchanges and users, and fraudsters launching investment vehicles that are in fact pyramid schemes. According to estimates, nearly 15% of all bitcoin has been stolen at some point.
And it isn’t even 10 years old yet.

Kampf der Nibelungen: Combat Sports Undermine The State's Monopoly On Violence?!?!

al-jazeera  |  “Kampf der Nibelungen” or “Battle of the Nibelungs,” a reference to old Germanic and Norse legends, is beloved by white supremacists from across Europe and beyond – they are both fans and fighters.

With German authorities keeping a close eye on them after banning their previous event in 2019, organisers are planning to stream their far-right fight-night of boxing, kickboxing and mixed martial arts (MMA) online this Saturday.

Observers warn Al Jazeera that Europe’s far-right groups are using combat sports to recruit young men and train them for literal battle in the streets.

“They are violent neo-Nazis training for physical violence,” said Robert Claus, a German journalist and author of a new book on combat sports and the European far right.

The individuals behind Kampf der Nibelungen are violent and “dangerous”, he added.

There is “a very long list of racist attacks which comes out of the network of Kampf der Nibelungen”.

Moreover, Claus is concerned about the longer-term consequences if Kampf der Nibelungen goes ahead as planned.

“They’re showing a middle finger to German authorities,” he said. “If they manage to go ahead and broadcast this event in defiance of German authorities, it undermines the state’s monopoly on violence and the authority of the state.”

 

Light Em'Up!!! Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes...,

reuters  |  The primary “terrorist threat” facing the United States, according to an Oct. 6 Department of Homeland Security report, are lone offenders and small domestic extremist cells who may act out grievances.

An October poll by political scientists including Lee Drutman of the New America think tank published in Politico found around a third of Americans justified violence to advance political goals, double the number in December 2019.

“The most likely outcome is the election happens, there’s no major violence, but the risk of serious or even low-level violence is probably higher than it’s been in a very long time,” said Drutman.

“That’s what is galvanizing and driving militia groups and other armed individuals to think that they have a role to play in this moment of sweeping social change,” said Joan Donovan, a misinformation expert at Harvard.

Penrose Iconoclasm: The General Idea Is In The Geometrical Pictures

YOU - don't have to follow the detailed equations and everything. The celestial sphere is a Riemann sphere and the collection of light rays/points/events comprise a lorentz group in minkowski space. 

Points on the Riemann sphere are conformal comprising a circle on the sphere. A Riemann sphere is a complex curve or manifold, twistor space is therefore a complex space.

Quantum mechanics is based on complex numbers and amplitudes and thus we need a complex and non-local space-time manifold.

An entire light ray is a point, a simultaneous entity. A photon doesn't experience "time" and thus its mechanics are and can be non-local.

9:45 Stereographic projection on a Riemann spere with discussion of particle spin.

At 11:40 he shows the spinor calculus and breaks down the components of the spinor. Showing the light cone as a spinor in Riemann space, making things real and plain.

 At 12:40 he explains the twistor and its associated algebra.

At 40:00 he explains cohomology utilizing an impossible triangular solid - can the geometric structure be realized in 3-space

weylmann |  The notion of electron spin was first surmised in 1922 when the German physicists Otto Stern and WaltherGerlach noticed that a stream of silver atoms (each having a single electron in the outer 5s orbital) could be separated by a non-uniform magnetic field into two streams, ‘‘up’’ and ‘‘down.’’ At the time, no one knew what to make of this odd behavior, but three years later George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit proposed that electrons could exist in two spin states,±1/2, each with the units of angular momentumħh=h/2π. 

Still, the concept of electron spin varied between a simplistic physical ‘‘spinning’’ of the electron about some axis (like a child’s top) and a kind of internal angular momentum. 

Today we look upon electrons and other spin-1/2 particles as havingan intrinsic angular momentum with no classical counterpart. This gave rise to the notion of such particles living in ‘‘spin space,’’ an abstract two-dimensional internal space that requires a description beyond that of scalars,vectors and tensors. Cartan’s spinor formalism was found to be appropriate for this description. 

Many attempts have been made over the years to explain spinors at an intuitive, elementary level, but the simplest approach remains an appeal to basic Lorentz group theory. This is rather a pity, because undergraduate students often express an aversion to group theory because of its mathematical nature. But the theory of Lorentz rotations and boosts is relatively simple, and it has the nice property of being relativistic from the start. 

In addition, it neatly admits a formalism that underlies that of the 4-vectors it ordinarily applies to, which is where spinors come in.

 Even better, Lorentz theory confirms the intuitive notion that if a spinor represents half of a 4-vector (rather than the square root), then there should be two kinds of spinor: one comprising the upper half and another representing the lower half. This observation is critical, since a single two-component spinor can be shown to violate odd-even parity in quantum physics, and it takes two spinors acting together to preserve it. Thus, the Dirac bispinor—a four-component object consisting of two stacked spinors—fully preserves parity. 

Our approach will therefore be based on the Lorentz transformations of rotations and boosts. There are, however,a few subtleties that other, more advanced treatments either gloss over or assert by inference, and I will try toexplain these in a more straightforward and understandable manner as we go along. 

The Dirac Equation 

When it was discovered that electrons can exist in both+12and12spin states, the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli suggested in 1927 that the scalar wave functionΨin Schrödinger’s equation be replaced by a two-component spinor, each component representing one of the electron’s allowed spin states. 

But while Pauli’s approach worked,it presented a problem having to do withparity; that is, the sign reversal operationΨ(x,t)→Ψ(−x,t)gaveinconsistent results in Pauli’s approach, violating the notion that Nature should be mirror-image invariant. 

However, in 1928, at the age of just 25, the great British mathematical physicist Paul Adrienne Maurice Diracmade a monumental discovery, perhaps the greatest discovery in all of modern physics. The student can look upthe details, but what Dirac did was essentially take the square root of the relativistic energy-mass equation

 E2=m2c4+c2p

He ended up with the set of four partial differential equations in (1) involving four4×4 matricesγμ(now calledthe Dirac gamma matrices), along with a new four-component wave functionΨa(x,t), where 

a=0,1,2,3. 

It was soon realized that Dirac’sΨwas abispinor, a four-component mathematical object consisting of theφRandφLWeyl spinors we identified earlier: 

Ψ=Ψ0Ψ1Ψ2Ψ3=ïφRφLò 

Dirac’s bispinor was found to preserve parity under the sign reversal operation 

Ψ(x,t)→Ψ(−x,t). 

Far more importantly, the spinorφReffectively represents the spin-up and spin-down components of an ordinary electron,while φL represents the spin-up and spin-down components of an anti-electron (known as a positron)—Dirac’swork thus predicted the existence of antimatter (the positron was subsequently discovered in 1932, for which the Caltech experimental physicist Carl Anderson won the Nobel Prize). 

Dirac’s relativistic electron equation alsoexplained electron spin as a form of intrinsic angular momentum called S. Thus, the angular momentum L of an electron alone is not conserved—instead, it is L+S that is conserved.Dirac’s equation and its underlying mathematics today represent the foundation of much of modern quantum field theory.

If Penrose Talm'bout Gravitational Waves, Then Get Your Surfboard Ready!!!

space  |  Penrose admits it's a wild suggestion, but believes that like all good scientific theories, it might be tested through experiment and observation. These tests stem from the idea that our aeon and the one preceding it were not completely isolated from one another. "Information does get through," he said. "It gets through in the form of a shock wave in our universe's initial dark matter." 

Dark matter, like dark energy, is a shadowy substance, this time needed to account for the way structures such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies formed in the early universe. According to Penrose's calculations, that shock wave would have had an effect on the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is the leftover radiation from the Big Bang, released when the universe was under 400,000 years old. "You'd see rings in the CMB that are slightly warmer or cooler than the average temperature," he said.

The equations of CCC predict that a shock wave arriving from a previous aeon would have dragged matter into our universe. If that caused material to head toward us, we would see light from that region shunted to shorter wavelengths — an effect astronomers call blueshift. Equally, a region carried away from us by a CCC shock wave would be redshifted, meaning its wavelength would be stretched out. 

Blueshifted regions would appear hotter and redshifted areas cooler. It's these changes Penrose believes we'd see as rings in the cosmic microwave background. Multiple shockwaves might even have produced a series of concentric rings. "I asked whether anyone had looked for these rings in the sky," Penrose said.

Several years ago, it did seem as if those rings had been found, a veritable smoking gun for CCC. "Except nobody believed us. They said it must have been a fluke or something," Penrose said. 

"But those signatures have been confirmed by alternative groups," said Vahe Gurzadyan a physicist at the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia and Penrose's long time collaborator on CCC.

The scientists point to the fact that a team of Polish and Canadian researchers confirmed the presence of the rings to a confidence level of 99.7%. However, there are still many doubters. Gurzadyan remains steadfast. "These structures are real – there is no doubt that our calculations are reliable and correct," he said. Still, Penrose has been exploring other approaches that might further support the pair's claims about CCC and a time before the Big Bang.

The transition between aeons would do something more fundamental that just create a shock wave in our dark matter and rings in the cosmic microwave background. "A new material, the dominant material in the universe, is created at the crossover," Penrose said. He regards that new material as the initial form of dark matter itself. 

"But in order that it doesn't build up from aeon to aeon, it has to decay," he said. He calls these initial dark matter particles erebons after Erebos, the Greek god of darkness.

On average it would take 100 billion years for an erebon to decay, but there are some that will have decayed in the 14-billion-year history of our universe. Crucially, as they decay, Penrose says erebons dump all their energy into gravitational waves.

A Loudly Yapping Nullity Ad Hominems Penrose For Originality And Iconoclasm

Forbes  |  Ultimately, science moved on while the contrarians became more and more irrelevant, with their trivially incorrect work fading into obscurity and their research programme eventually ceasing upon their deaths.

In the meantime, from the 1960s up through the 2000s, the sciences of astronomy and astrophysics — and particularly the sub-field of cosmology, which focuses on the history, growth, evolution, and fate of the Universe — grew spectacularly.

• We mapped out the large-scale structure of the Universe, discovering a great cosmic web.
• We discovered how galaxies grew and evolved, and how their stellar populations inside changed with time.
• We learned that all the known forms of matter and energy in the Universe were insufficient to explain everything we observe: some form of dark matter and some form of dark energy are required.

And we were able to further verify additional predictions of the Big Bang, such as the predicted abundances of the light elements, the presence of a population of primordial neutrinos, and the discovery of density imperfections of exactly the necessary type to grow into the large-scale structure of the Universe we observe today.

At the same time, there were observations that were no doubt true, but that the Big Bang had no predictive power to explain. The Universe allegedly reached these arbitrarily high temperatures and high energies at the earliest times, and yet there are no exotic leftover relics that we can see today: no magnetic monopoles, no particles from grand unification, no topological defects, etc. Theoretically, something else beyond what is known must be out there to explain the Universe we see, but if they ever existed, they’ve been hidden from us.

The Universe, in order to exist with the properties we see, must have been born with a very specific expansion rate: one that balanced the total energy density exactly, to more than 50 significant digits. The Big Bang has no explanation for why this should be the case.

And the only way different regions of space would have the same exact temperature is if they’re in thermal equilibrium: if they have time to interact and exchange energy. Yet the Universe is too big and has expanded in such a way that we have many causally disconnected regions. Even at the speed of light, those interactions couldn’t have taken place.

Unfortunately, Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose, although his work on General Relativity, black holes, and singularities in the 1960s and 1970s was absolutely Nobel-worthy, has spent a large amount of his efforts in recent years on a crusade to overthrow inflation: by promoting a vastly scientifically inferior alternative, his pet idea of a Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, or CCC.

The biggest predictive difference is that the CCC pretty much requires that an imprint of “the Universe before the Big Bang” show itself in both the Universe’s large-scale structure and in the cosmic microwave background: the Big Bang’s leftover glow. Contrariwise, inflation demands that anywhere where inflation ends and a hot Big Bang arises must be causally disconnected from, and cannot interact with, any prior, current, or future such region. Our Universe exists with properties that are independent of any other.

The observations — first from COBE and WMAP, and more recently, from Planck — definitively place enormously tight constraints (to the limits of the data that exists) on any such structures. There are no bruises on our Universe; no repeating patterns; no concentric circles of irregular fluctuations; no Hawking points. When one analyzes the data properly, it is overwhelmingly clear that inflation is consistent with the data, and the CCC is quite clearly not.