Harvard Epidemiologist Dr. Martin Kulldorff Censored By Twitter

lockdownskeptics |  Now that we are allowed to meet up in groups of six outside their homes, Matt Hancock is warning us not to do anything foolish, like hug one another or breach the two metre rule. “Do it safely,” he tweeted. “Don’t blow it now”.

But in fact, the people who shouldn’t “blow it” are Boris Johnson, Sir Patrick Vallance, Chris Whitty and, yes, Matt Hancock. That is the view of Martin Kulldorff, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, biostatistician and epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts, and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration.

Professor Kulldorff has told the UK Government and its scientific advisors exactly who they should be listening to and why if they want to save lives – and it doesn’t include vaccinating the entire population, including children. He said this on Twitter on March 15th – “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. Covid vaccines are important for older high-risk people and their care-takes. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children.” – and Twitter attached a health warning to his Tweet: “This tweet is misleading. Learn why health officials recommend a vaccine for most people.” Because, of course, a 22 year-old graduate in Whiteness Studies sitting in Twitter’s HQ in Silicon Valley knows much more about infectious diseases than a Harvard professor of medicine.

Speaking to me in an exclusive interview for Lockdown Sceptics, Kulldorff said:

That warning was rather silly. When making unscientific claims, media often refer to ‘health officials’ or ‘health experts’ without naming those experts. I challenge Twitter to name vaccine epidemiologists who think that everyone must get the Covid vaccine, including children and those with immunity from prior infection.

Equally strange, they even concur with my tweet when they say “most people” rather than “all people”. Right now, children are clearly not part of “most people”, since a Covid vaccine has not yet been approved for them and we know nothing about efficacy or potential adverse reaction in children. Since most children are asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic, it will be hard to show that the vaccine can reduce symptoms, hospitalisations or mortality in children, requiring a large sample size in countries that still has considerable disease spread.

I have worked with vaccines for a couple of decades, but Twitter clearly thinks that scientific discussions about these things are dangerous. Maybe social media is dangerous to those in power. I do hope that social media is dangerous to the lockdowns that have done so much damage to public health during this past year. The enormous collateral public health damage, which is being documented by Collateral Global, is something that we will continue to to live with, and die with, for many years to come. It truly is a public health tragedy of epic proportions.

The catastrophic impact of the lockdowns on public health has been exacerbated by headlines and adverts striking the fear of god into millions, making them less likely to seek medical help for non-Covid diseases.

 

You Can Travel With AIDS, Hepatitis, And Tuberculosis - But Not Without An mRNA Jab!!!

thehill |   Republicans are seizing on the intensifying debate over coronavirus vaccination passports as part of their strategy for recapturing control of Congress in 2022.

In interviews and conversations with The Hill, GOP strategists and operatives acknowledged the growing eagerness among Americans to be vaccinated against COVID-19. But many are also betting that emerging debates about so-called vaccine passports will help them play on voters’ fears of government overreach and privacy violations.

The idea of vaccine passports has gained increasing attention in recent weeks as eligibility for COVID-19 vaccinations has rapidly expanded and Americans begin to see glints of a post-pandemic normal on the horizon. The White House has indicated that it will issue basic guidelines for such programs, though it has also said that it has no plans to create a centralized, federal requirement.

Still, some of the country’s most prominent conservatives have begun to latch on to the emerging possibility of vaccine passports or certificates, seeing such proposals as an extension of their campaign to rally the GOP base in opposition to coronavirus-related restrictions like lockdown orders and mask mandates.

“It’s a political winner,” Ford O’Connell, a Florida-based Republican strategist, said. “They look at it as an all-out assault on personal freedoms and the Constitution, but also, it’s about protecting the average, ordinary Floridian who wants to live their regular day-to-day lives.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is among the Republicans who have come out early against the proposals. He criticized the idea of vaccine passports at a press conference Monday, calling it “unacceptable” for local governments or businesses to require proof of vaccination for people to “participate in normal society.”

On Friday, he signed an executive order banning any future vaccine certificate requirements in Florida, and called on the GOP-controlled state legislature to draft a bill to enshrine such a policy into law.

Republicans are hoping that their early efforts to define vaccine passports as a symbol of government overreach will help counter what Democrats see as their most powerful political weapon in the 2022 midterms: their efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic crisis.

Democrats are hoping that a massive $1.9 trillion stimulus package signed into law last month, along with a sweeping proposal to overhaul the nation’s infrastructure, will help them stave off the typical electoral shellacking that a new president’s party typically sees in the first midterms following his inauguration.

 

Vaccine Passports: Where Biosecurity State Aims - Shed - Pandemic Mitigation Pretensions...,

BMJ  |  The critical issue is not the effect that vaccine passports might have on people in general. If one wants to increase take-up, it is the effect on those individuals and communities who harbour doubts about vaccination which matters. 

Based on hard experience, such communities (ethnic minorities in particular) have reason to question whether medical and governmental authorities treat their needs as a priority and this historical distrust provides a framework for interpreting contemporary pandemic policies. [18] Members of these communities are more attuned to the possibility that such policies (including vaccination) are something done to them rather than done for them by authorities who are not of them but against them. Moreover, there are plenty of anti-vaxxers aiming to promote this view by arguing that covid measures are not a matter of public health, but of social control by a hostile elite. [19] The reality, and even the rumour, of vaccine passports for core activities serves to give substance to these fears and to give traction to the anti-vaxxers. Passports can be seen as confirming the perception that vaccination is a measure of compulsion imposed upon the community. And once people begin to regard vaccines as compulsory then the evidence suggests that this produces anger and reduces willingness to get vaccinated. [20]

All in all, there are reasons to conclude that vaccine passports for basic activities may actually undermine vaccine rollout by disincentivising the very populations who most need incentivising. Closer inspection of the Israeli “green pass” scheme serves to reinforce this message. The evidence for passes increasing vaccination uptake is weak, while suspicions of compulsion and reports of people barred from workplaces for not being vaccinated have “resulted in antagonism and increased distrust among individuals who were already concerned about infringement on citizens’ rights”. [21] By contrast, what has proved successful in Israel are basic measures of community engagement: involving trusted community leaders, taking mobile vaccination units into communities, bringing along medical experts who can answer any questions, and providing food and drink to those who attend, has proved successful in Israel. [22]

To conclude: there are many good reasons to reject any passport scheme which makes everyday social participation dependent on vaccination. There are arguments on the grounds of liberties, of equalities, and of practicalities. However, even some of the grounds used to support them (i.e. vaccine take-up) may be another reason to oppose them. At a point in the pandemic where increased engagement is critical, both in order to overcome doubts about vaccination, and to enhance the pandemic response more generally, the mere possibility of vaccine passports threatens to alienate marginalised communities still further. [23,24]

So, let’s stop discussing the use of vaccine passports as a criterion for basic social and economic participation. This is an idea with few redeeming features and even talking about introducing them may be enough to do damage.

Covid19 And The Multinational Biosecurity State

architectsforsocialhousing |  I want to start our awakening from the sleep of reason by looking at the social practices of the coronavirus crisis [to] correct the conspiracy theory of an elite with their hands … on the gears of history. Let’s [instead] look at the machine of history. We all know its name, and despite all the renewed predictions of its death it hasn’t gone away. On the contrary, it’s just going through a revolution … but its name is still the same. Capitalism.

Marx was right. When the material productive forces of society come into conflict with existing relations of production — its property relations — a period of social revolution begins. ‘With the change of the economic foundations’, he wrote, ‘the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.’ The expansion into new markets of the neoliberal capitalism that has dominated Western democracies for 40 years no longer has to accommodate liberal democracy. What we are undergoing — what we are colluding in producing — are the new political, legal and social forms for a multinational biosecurity state. And no elite, no matter how powerful, is in control of it for the simple reason that, despite immensely powerful international organisations increasingly divorced from and opposed to democratic process, capitalism is a dynamic process that develops by conflict and contradiction.

Capitalism has a grip on the world the like of which it has never had before, and as it faces the long-heralded limits to [its] expansion it is developing new forms and powers to extend that grip further over the world’s diminishing resources. But there is no single government or corporation ruling the globe, no secret society whose members sit on every cabinet and board.

The US Government is the greatest military power the world has ever seen, and the United Nations has long been superseded by far more unaccountable coalitions of state and corporate powers whose activities are largely secret and getting more so. And the power of technology to monitor and control the world’s populations is expanding at an exponential rate in both breadth and depth. But the world is not a single, supra-political block.

There is no invisible hand of the market-god ruling over us, for good or for evil; there are only devils competing for his crown. The world undergoing this revolution in capitalism remains a conflict whose battleground, now and for the immediate future, is the coronavirus crisis. What makes that conflict new for Western democracies is that the war being waged is a civil one, of governments against their own people, rather than against other countries.

By looking at how this civil war is being waged, therefore, we can begin to understand to what ends it is being fought.

Resistance To The Multinational Biosecurity State Is Musical Chairs On The Deck Of The Titanic

CTH  |   Consider if you will, the backdrop of current U.S. politics; the influence of Wall Street and the multinationals who align with globalism; the reality of K-Street lobbyists writing the physical legislation that politicians sell to Americans; and then overlay what you are witnessing as those same multinationals now attack the foundation of our constitutional republic.  All of this is CORPORATISM, a continuum that people were ignoring for decades… Now, thankfully, there is a new awakening.

In these economic endeavors President Trump was disrupting decades of financial schemes established to use the U.S. as a host for their endeavors. President Trump was confronting multinational corporations and the global constructs of economic systems that were put in place to the detriment of the host (USA) ie YOU. There are trillions at stake; it is all about the economics; everything else is chaff and countermeasures.

The road to a “service-driven economy” is paved with a great disparity between financial classes. The wealth gap is directly related to the inability of the middle-class to thrive.

Elite financial interests, including those within Washington DC, gain wealth and power, the U.S. workforce is reduced to servitude, “service”, of their affluent needs.

The destruction of the U.S. industrial and manufacturing base is EXACTLY WHY the middle class has struggled, and exactly why the wealth gap exploded in the past 30 years.

Behind this dynamic we find the international corporate and financial interests who are inherently at risk from President Trump’s “America-First” economic and trade platform. Believe it or not, President Trump is up against an entire world economic establishment.

When we understand how trade works in the modern era we understand why the agents within the system are so adamantly opposed to U.S. President Trump.

♦The biggest lie in modern economics, willingly spread and maintained by corporate media, is that a system of global markets still exists.

It doesn’t.

Every element of global economic trade is controlled and exploited by massive institutions, multinational banks and multinational corporations. Institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Bank control trillions of dollars in economic activity.

Underneath that economic activity there are people who hold the reigns of power over the outcomes. These individuals and groups are the stakeholders in direct opposition to principles of America-First national economics. Collectively known as “The Big Club”.

The modern financial constructs of these entities have been established over the course of the past three decades. When you understand how they manipulate the economic system of individual nations you begin to understand why they are so fundamentally opposed to President Trump.

In the Western World, separate from communist control perspectives (ie. China), “Global markets” are a modern myth; nothing more than a talking point meant to keep people satiated with sound bites they might find familiar. Global markets have been destroyed over the past three decades by multinational corporations who control the products formerly contained within global markets.

The same is true for “Commodities Markets”. The multinational trade and economic system, run by corporations and multinational banks, now controls the product outputs of independent nations. The free market economic system has been usurped by entities who create what is best described as ‘controlled markets’.

U.S. President Trump understood what had taken place. He used economic leverage as part of a broader national security policy; and to understand who opposes President Trump specifically because of the economic leverage he creates, it becomes important to understand the objectives of the global and financial elite who run and operate the institutions. The Big Club.

Understanding how trillions of trade dollars influence geopolitical policy we begin to understand the three-decade global financial construct they seek to retain and protect.

That is, global financial exploitation of national markets.

 

The Uniparty Is Really Struggling To Distract Its Respective Piss-Ants Constituencies...,

nbcnews  |  Republicans and corporate America are on the outs.

In the past week alone, American Airlines and computer company Dell came out strongly against GOP-led bills that place restrictions on voting in their home base of Texas. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a rising star in Republican Party, continued to take heat for nixing a bill that would have imposed a ban on transgender athletes in sports, citing the potential impact on her state's bottom line. And conservatives spent days bashing "vaccine passports" some businesses think are needed to return to normal.

And then there was Georgia, where the Republican-controlled state House narrowly voted to end a tax break worth millions that Delta enjoys on jet fuel after the airline's CEO — along with the CEO of Coca-Cola, another major Atlanta-based business — condemned new voting restrictions in the state. (The GOP-led state Senate did not take up the measure.) On Friday, Major League Baseball pulled this year's All-Star Game out of Atlanta in protest of that same law.

Republicans were outraged.

"Boycott baseball and all of the woke companies that are interfering with Free and Fair Elections," former President Donald Trump said in a statement. "Are you listening Coke, Delta, and all!"

"Why are we still listening to these woke corporate hypocrites on taxes, regulations & anti-trust?" Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., tweeted.

Such public dust-ups between businesses and members of the GOP are becoming more frequent, though the divide — possibly one of the most consequential in U.S. politics and society — is years in the making. The shift is the product of a Republican Party increasingly driven by "culture war" issues that animate a base invigorated by Trump and corporate powerhouses that are under more pressure than ever to align themselves with the left on voting rights, LGBTQ rights and anti-racist efforts.

The result is a fraying in relations between a GOP that has for years advocated for the kinds of libertarian economic policies that have widely benefited these businesses and companies that are using their might to help advance racial and social justice causes.

"We have long thought and still think of the big institutional drivers of this culture war as more in academia, the arts, the media, and corporate America has mostly sat it out until recently," retiring Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., told NBC News in an interview. He added that while he does not think of corporate America "as the biggest player yet," companies coming off the sidelines "can change the dynamic."

Coronavirus Criminalization

off-guardian  |  Asymptomatic false-positive diagnosis is unforgivable, but one without testing for other common causes is even worse. Misdiagnosing what would have been death from old age or some other usual event with an asymptomatic false-positive Covid test is falsifying the cause of death and is literally criminal. Natural deaths seem no longer a thing. Bad science, shoddy medicine, central directives to certify COVID-19 where there is any doubt, and poor data gathering mean the crime is perfect.

The WHO cooks definitions of Pandemic, Adverse Events Following Immunisation (AEFIs), PCR tests and herd immunity like a criminal cartel.

Tossing a coin is far more diagnostically accurate than community Covid PCR testing on well persons. Ideally, there should have been a parallel influenza test for each Covid test. My experience of patients’ hospital discharge letters reveals not one influenza test result was recorded.

Our police, who under their own oath should police the criminal common law with our consent are now acting like the vigilantes of commerce. They enforce unnatural statutory law, regulations and guidelines. Where does that leave non-commercial, natural human interests? They tackle unmasked, healthy people as if they were undetonated bombs.

Since when did the spread of a cold or flulike illness become a crime? Since when did a well person become a potential suspect? The police never used to become involved in the politesse of a cough, fever or cold.

In 2019 it used to be a badge of honour to keep coming, sniffling into the office. Now it seems a crime against humanity. I am waiting for the first bona fide coryzal assault case, where the brain-washed magistrate will accept that the victim reasonably apprehended a harm from a defendant’s sniffle.

What material difference is there between terrorists and the actions of the WHO, Gates and our government?

Well, those three seem like mere terrorists, but not also another’s freedom fighter. Our government preach of how ‘hateful extremists exploit the pandemic,’ but there is no mention of themselves. Moreover, it is the questioning norm which is smeared as terrorists. What if the vaccines are killing more than Covid. Do we convict Drs. Whitty and Fauci for crimes against humanity?

In stark contrast to my first patient, I speak with my last patient, she is socioeconomically vulnerable.

In March 2020 she complained of a lump in her throat. Her urgent scan was cancelled due to ‘Covid measures’. In February 2021 she complained of multiple lumps in her throat and difficulty swallowing.

This is the mountain of disease concealed under the magic carpet of Covid. Coronavirus Regulations-sponsored NHS medical negligence is often grossly negligent, bordering on criminal.

The game is to keep the patient away and out of your zone of accountability. Like hands-free patient ping-pong.

One might conclude life on earth is impossible without Big Pharma. It has moulded the world in its own vision. The vaccine passport is likewise an inappropriate response. Particularly when viewed through the lens of another continuously, unpredictably mutating, elderly-targeting respiratory virus. Would anyone else find the prospect of a flu vaccine passport troubling?

It is not coincidence that Monsanto GMOs abduct the food chain, Farmer Gates pushes a Pharma lifestyle, and gene modification is both’s central pièce de résistance.

When Gates becomes America’s biggest owner of farmland one has confirmatory triangulation that Mother Nature is no longer boss. Most of us only need basic sanitation, an active life, family love and a natural diet to remain well.

The Biosecurity Karenwaffen Will Not Be Satisfied With Merely Shaming Or Punishing You...,

slate |   The second reason shame has been criticized is that many have conflated shame’s worth as a tool with the norms some use shame to try to uphold. The shame that accompanies sexually transmitted infections, for example, has more to do with the problematic norms around sex that remain in our society then shame itself. The shame that accompanies illness more broadly has to do with the problematic norm that assumes, falsely, that we will all remain able-bodied and healthy and that if we do not, it is linked to some form of moral or behavioral failing. In both cases, the shame isn’t the  problem—the norms are. Instead of throwing out shame, we should be more conscious of how we use it.

In spite of the current uproar against it, Americans do routinely use shame as a tool, quietly and comfortably. “We shame poor people all of the time,” said Phuong Luong, a certified financial planner and educator at Just Wealth (and also a friend). In her role as a financial planner, Luong, has helped low-income people access public services. “If you’ve ever gone into an office to apply for public benefits like welfare or food stamps, it can be a really demeaning and stressful experience,” she said. “The quality, tone, and respect in customer service between a private service and a public service is so different. And I think we make poor people jump through so many hoops to show effort and to show motivation, to get what they need.” It’s as if the process was designed to evoke shame.

But shame can work positively as a tool with people or institutions when the thing happening is in fact worth punishing, and other forms of punishment are out of reach. “In a system where formal punishment is missing, that’s when the informal mechanisms step in,” said Jacquet. You can, for example, incarcerate an individual but, “it’s much more difficult, almost impossible to take away the liberty of an entire group like Exxon Mobil,” she explained. You can, however, shame them as climate activists do when they troll oil companies on Twitter. It’s about depriving these companies of their social license and reputation, which, in many cases, they worked very hard to create.

On the individual level, Jacquet points to the policies that some states have publishing the names of residents who owe a significant sum in taxes—in California, it’s more than $100,000; in Wisconsin, it’s $5,000, but those on the top 100 list all currently owe more than $400,000—as another example of effective shaming. The late taxpayers are given letters in advance of the list’s publication, with the expectation that the threat of exposure will get them to pony up (or at least enter into a repayment plan)—and it often does. When the state of Wisconsin launched its tax-shaming program in 2006, it thought it would recoup $1.5 million in its first year of operation; the state ultimately collected 15 times that in that year.

 

John Ioannides Takes A Hit For Questioning The Panicdemic Consensus

sciencebasedmedicine  |  As much as I used to admire him, since the pandemic hit John Ioannidis has consistently disappointed me to an extreme degree. In the last year, my disappointment with Prof. Ioannidis has gotten to the point where it’s hard for me to avoid lumping him with the COVID-19 minimizers/deniers like those who published and continue to promote the Great Barrington Declaration, one of whom was his co-author on his infamous Santa Clara seroprevalence study. The Great Barrington Declaration, boiled down to its essence, asserted that COVID-19 is not dangerous to the vast majority of the population, leading to its writers and signatories to conclude that governments should, in essence, let SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease, run rampant through the population in order to achieve “natural herd immunity”, while putting in place measures designed to protect only those viewed as “at risk”, such as the elderly and those with significant co-morbidities. (Note that, at the time the Declaration was published, there was as yet no safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19, while now there are at least four.) Of course, as many noted, it is not possible to protect the vulnerable if COVID-19 is rampaging unchecked throughout the rest of the population. Also, as I noted when I wrote about it, the Great Barrington Declaration was the product of the American Institute for Economic Research, a right-wing, climate science-denying think tank, which recruited three ideologically—shall we say?—amenable scientists to sign on as authors of the declaration, which was basically, as I put it, “eugenics-adjacent” and full of misinformation and half-truths.

Moreover, I’m not the only one who’s now soured on Prof. Ioannidis. For example, Scientific American columnist John Horgan, someone with whom both Steve Novella and I have had disagreements based on his downplaying of skepticism in medicine with respect to homeopathy:

Optimism has also distorted my view of the coronavirus. Last March, I took heart from warnings by Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis that we might be overestimating the deadliness of the virus and hence overreacting to it. He predicted that the U.S. death toll might reach only 10,000 people, lower than the average annual toll of seasonal flu. I wanted Ioannidis to be right, and his analysis seemed plausible to me, but his prediction turned out to be wrong by more than an order of magnitude.

Horgan didn’t go quite far enough in his criticisms for my taste, but such is life.

Then there’s Alex Rubinstein:

“What a weird turn to see John Ioannidis pushing one of sloppiest studies in the deluge of Covid-19 papers,” Alex Rubinsteyn, an assistant professor of computational medicine and genetics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, wrote on Twitter. “If he weren’t an author I would expect [the study] to show up in one of his talks as a particularly potent cocktail of bad research practices.”

Then, of course, there are all the scientists on Twitter criticizing Prof. Ioannidis. In fairness, one has to acknowledge that there are things Prof. Ioannidis has argued that have some merit. His estimates of IFR were closer to the mark than some of the very high estimates early in the pandemic, but they were still off considerably in the other direction. He was not wrong about the poor quality of so much of the data and research on COVID-19; it’s just, in an amazing feat of lacking self-awareness, he himself contributed to it as well.

This brings me back to that discussion of Ioannidis’ paper claiming that the NIH is too conservative and that only conservative, “safe” science is funded. It was more than that, though. He claimed that the scientists on NIH study sections were no better than scientists not on NIH study sections. Before I get to that, though, I note that Ioannidis’ cardinal sin since the pandemic started is not to have been wrong, even repeatedly so. It’s been his extreme arrogance:

Instead, Ioannidis sounded sure of himself. He was right; the others had it wrong. He called out other research teams by name—Johns Hopkins, Imperial College London—to berate their findings as “astronomically wrong,” and “constantly dialed back to match reality.” Here he was, about to come out with an exciting and important finding—if he were right, it could change almost everything about how we deal with this virus—and he seemed unworried by the possibility that something might be amiss with the project.

If anyone should understand how the pressure to contribute to the science of the crisis might lead to flawed work and exaggerated claims, it ought to be Ioannidis, arguably the world’s most famous epidemiologist. Who knows? Perhaps like so many of us, he’s just stressed out by the whole damned thing. Maybe he’s just off his game.

The article from which this quote came dates back to May 2020. Now, eleven months later with the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think you can say that Ioannidis was “off his game”. With his attack on a graduate student, he’s continued to double down and, in fact, has even gone further than Freedman had previously described. That is what brings me back to my previous discussion of his article about those “safe” scientists at the NIH, with a funding process that he’d characterized as “conformity” and “mediocrity”. I wrote this over eight years ago:

In the end, as much as I admire Ioannidis, I think he’s off-base here. It’s not that I don’t agree that the NIH should try to find ways to fund more innovative research. However, Ioannidis’ approach to quantifying the problem seems to suffer from flaws in its very conception. In light of that, I can’t resist revisiting the discussion in my last post on the question of riskiness versus safety in research, and that’s a simple question: What’s the evidence that funding more risky research will result in better research and more treatments? We have lots of anecdotes of scientists whose ideas were later found to be validated and potentially game-changing who couldn’t get NIH funding, but how often does this really happen? As I’ve pointed out before, the vast majority of “wild” ideas are considered “wild” precisely because they are new and there is little good support for them. Once evidence accumulates to support them, they are no longer considered quite so “wild.” We know today that the scientists whose anecdotes of woe describing the depredations of the NIH were indeed onto something. How many more proposed ideas that seemed innovative at the time but ultimately went nowhere?

And my conclusion:

However, the assumption underlying Ioannidis’s analysis seems to be that there must be “bolts out of the blue” discovered by brilliant brave maverick scientists. It’s all very Randian at its heart. However, science is a collaborative enterprise, in which each scientist builds incrementally on the work of his or her predecessors. Bolts out of the blue are a good thing, but we can’t count on them, nor has anyone demonstrated that they are more likely to occur if the NIH funds “riskier research.” It’s equally likely that the end result would be a lot more dud research.

Maybe the problem with Prof. Ioannidis was there all along, and I just didn’t see it until the pandemic amplified it for all to see. He seems, dating back at least to 2012, have had the belief that conventional science is too “safe” and “conformist,” perhaps with a bit of a self-image of himself as being the “brave maverick doctor” or iconoclast. Maybe that’s why, during the pandemic, he was so easily drawn to being a “rebel” or a “contrarian,” whose findings bucked the existing consensus, and maybe that’s why he can’t give that up. After all, it’s happened to greater scientists than he. Moreover, Prof. Ioannidis seems to be an excellent cautionary tale at how being a critic doesn’t necessarily mean that you can do what’s being criticized that well. He’s very good at finding the flaws in studies, but his studies during the pandemic demonstrate that, when designing studies of his own, he’s prone to every bias and flaw that he criticizes in others.

In any event, I should go back and read some of Prof. Ioannidis’ old work in light of what I know about him now, with the realization that the pandemic has done me a favor. I wonder what I might find.

Christian Nationalism Doesn't Account For Black, Latino, Or Medical Vaccine Hesitancy

nakedcapitalism |  Yves here. I’m running this post with its original headline, although the article doesn’t make terribly clear what “Christian nationalism” is. The author defines is at extreme evangelism but I’m at a loss to understand what makes that “nationalism”. The reason I am running this article is that it discusses an specific issue that IM Doc mentioned back in early February.

And even though we are discussing different subcultures in America, we might as well be talking about different countries. One of the lessons I learned by virtue of deciding to see the world on the McKinsey plan, was that virtually without exception, US companies entering a foreign market would royally screw things up. Even if they’d managed to hire good managers from the new market, the top brass would reject recommended changes to the product or branding to cater to local tastes: “They can’t possibly want that! Of course they’ll prefer our superior dog food!” They almost always had to fail before they’d listen to how the locals thought about things and understand why they wanted what they wanted.

I had sent a link from the Ghion Journal, which was and is pretty up in arms about the Covid vaccines, as an example of vaccine alarmism in the black community. IM Doc said then that he was hearing a lot of reports from doctors in his network in big cities of vaccine hesitancy among blacks and if anything more so among Latinos at that point. But he was the first to alert me to opposition among conservative Christians, beyond those based on the mistaken belief that fetal cells had somehow been used in vaccine development (true in a very strained sense with the J&J vaccine). From his e-mail:

We are seeing all this rage and rush to get vaccinated right now. It is easy to assume there is widespread demand. That is not true…. And then the fun will begin. If you think the anti-mask, anti-lockdown people have been ridiculed and shamed – you have not seen anything yet. I know my Big Pharma and it is obvious they have a stranglehold on our agencies and politicians. They have gotten so used to complete acquiescence that they are becoming supremely over-confident. Trust me, if they think they will get away with forced vaccination of kids for school, they have no idea what they are stepping in. Also, I can think of no quicker way to bankruptcy for airlines and cruise companies then to demand a vaccine passport. They will instantly cut their customer base by 30-40%.

It is not just blacks and Latinos. Our medical and public health elites have their head so far up their ass that they are missing critical cultural and religious issues going on all over this country with regard to the vaccine. For example, my oh so Protestant family members and all their friends back home have zero intention of taking this vaccine. All the talk of vaccine passports and vaccine cards to get in and out of stores and restaurants and events have convinced them that this is the first manifestation of the long anticipated Mark of the Beast. To take the Mark of the Beast is a certain trip to Hell for Eternity….And because of our elites’ complete bungling insensitivity, they have already completely and permanently alienated these people. Again, this is being preached from their pulpits, and no amount of coercion or threats is going to work. I grew up in that environment. I know what I am talking about. They will starve to death before they take The Mark of the Beast.

I have no idea how large this population is. IM Doc gave an estimate for rural America and the South that struck me as high, having lived in the rural upper Midwest, Oregon, and spent a lot of time in Maine. But the point is this is a cohort that is not trivial in size, and its existence has finally gotten the attention of some in the officialdom, too late in the game for them to change course. You’ll see the out-of-touch recommendation in the piece:

…faith leaders can guide their followers and use their pulpits to encourage parishioners that the vaccine is safe and in line with religious doctrines.

That could work with concerns that are based on misinformation, but not ones based on views that see social control/surveillance as evil. There’s no way of prettying up the more heavy-handed schemes to get citizens to take the shot.

And IM Doc, then as now, argued that the bureaucrats have done a terrible job with general practitioners by failing to give the information needed to give honest answers and “best available data” assessments of outcomes and risks:

And again, I will remind you – as a primary care physician I have been tasked with educating patients about these vaccines. I have little if any information about safety. I have zero information on how these vaccines will help death or hospitalizations. I have zero information on how long the immunity will last. I have zero credible and often wildly disparate information about whether it will work on these variants, which are now this month’s panic porn topic on the news. I have very educated patients who come to ask questions all day every day. I will not lie to them, nor will I smile and pass out happy horse shit like so many of my colleagues seem to be doing. The medical elites have put the normal PCPs of this country in a very difficult if not impossible situation.

I hope and pray that all goes well. I, like everyone else, want this to be over. However, if something goes majorly wrong with this gamble, God help us.

Worse Than Walensky: Dr. Leana Wen Claims "Very Narrow Window To Tie ReOpening Policy To Vaccination Status"

CTH |  There is so much in this soundbite from Dr Leana Wen (Public Health Policy, George Washington University) it is difficult to encapsulate.

When they show you who they are, believe them.  In this soundbite Dr. Wen is apoplectic that people might realize there is no need for a vaccination because everything is open and there is no crisis.   She frets that American people will enjoy their freedoms without vaccination.  Just watch and listen to the priority in her soundbite.

The blind-spot exposure of their ideology is a weakness of the totalitarian mind.  They spend so much time in an echo-chamber they cannot fathom the insanity of what they are espousing.  To them it just seems like the typical conversation they have all the time, because they never face anyone challenging them.

“We have a very narrow window to tie reopening policy to vaccination status because if everything is reopened, then what’s the carrot going to be… How are we going to incentivize people to actually get the vaccine… So that’s why I think the CDC & the Biden  admin need to come out a lot bolder & say “if you’re vaccinated, you can do all these things…here are all the freedoms that you have, because otherwise people are going to go out and enjoy these freedoms ANYWAY.”

Dr. Walensky Single-Handedly Setting The Administration's Propaganda Program Back 400 Years....,

nymag |  Though the study is an impressive piece of evidence of the effectiveness of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, some public-health experts pushed back on Walensky’s pandemic-changing takeaway. “There cannot be any daylight between what the research shows — really impressive but incomplete protection — and how it is described,” Dr. Peter Bach, director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, told the New York Times on Thursday. “This opens the door to the skeptics who think the government is sugarcoating the science,” Bach added, “and completely undermines any remaining argument why people should keep wearing masks after being vaccinated.”

Even the Centers for Disease Control hedged on Walensky’s claims. “Dr. Walensky spoke broadly during this interview,” a CDC spokesperson told the Times. “It’s possible that some people who are fully vaccinated could get Covid-19. The evidence isn’t clear whether they can spread the virus to others. We are continuing to evaluate the evidence.”

More than 142 million doses of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been administered in the U.S. as of March 30, according to the CDC. The third vaccine currently on the American market is a single-dose shot made by Johnson & Johnson, which was shown to be 66 percent effective in thwarting moderate to severe COVID-19-related illness.

Compliant Obedient Piss-Ants Hate You Hesitant Piss-Ants Most Of All...,

WaPo  |  Across the Charles River in Boston, where the smallpox outbreak had begun, the board of health chairman wasn’t so mild. Samuel Durgin had offered free vaccinations to hundreds of thousands of residents, but when that failed to stem the tide of infected patients, he enlisted “virus squads” — gangs of policemen and medical officials who held down and forced people, often homeless men, to be vaccinated, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. One man was beaten so badly by police that after he was vaccinated he had to get stitches for a wound to his head.

Durgin had also publicly challenged any anti-vaccine individuals to come with him to the island where sick patients were isolated and treated. One, Immanuel Pfeiffer, accepted. He nearly died of smallpox. Many were angered that Durgin let Pfeiffer back into the community before he fell ill, where he could have ignited another outbreak, but Durgin thought the headlines — “Anti-vaccinationist May Not Live,” “Chairman Durgin Comes Up Smiling” — were worth the risk, according to the New England journal.

Still, the outbreak continued to spread, and not just to Cambridge but also to within two blocks of Jacobson’s home. So when Spencer returned and the pastor still refused, he did what the law allowed him to do: He fined Jacobson $5 (about $153 today).

Instead of paying the fine, Jacobson and a handful of other vaccine refusers appealed to a higher court, where they caught the attention and support of anti-vaccination societies. Those societies provided Jacobson with powerful attorneys, who argued the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

There had been a number of decisions in other state courts on compulsory vaccination laws, and they were all over the map. Some upheld the laws, some struck them down or placed limitations. Clearly, a national policy was needed.

The Supreme Court handed down its decision in February 1905; in a 7-2 opinion, Justice John Marshall Harlan — a former Kentucky enslaver who fought for the Union in the Civil War and wrote a blistering dissent against Plessy v. Ferguson — said public health could supersede individual rights:

“[T]he liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly free from restraint. There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good.”

While the high court in Massachusetts had ruled in favor of the board of health, it also made clear that “it is not in their power to vaccinate [Jacobson] by force.” The Supreme Court didn’t contradict this, and in fact, placed more safeguards, saying “common good” laws had to be reasonable. That’s important, because “virus squads” weren’t limited to Boston; immigrants in tenements were also forcibly vaccinated in New York City, as were Black Americans in Kentucky.

By the time of the Supreme Court’s decision, nearly three years after Jacobson had first refused to be vaccinated, the smallpox outbreak in Cambridge had died down and would never return. (Smallpox was declared eradicated from the planet in 1979.)

The government began regulating the quality of vaccines, and in 1922, another Supreme Court case, Zucht v. King, specifically affirmed proof of vaccination laws for public schoolchildren.

Jacobson paid his fine and went back to his mild-mannered life of preaching to his flock. The anti-vaccine movement had only just begun.

Corporations That Will Enforce Your "Immunity Privileges" Clearly Hate You Piss-Ants...,

theatlantic  |  Amazon’s straight-up aggression broke so much from these two common patterns that one Amazon engineer even submitted a support ticket, concerned that the Amazon News Twitter account had been hacked. It’s shocking to see a company act like an online troll instead.

It shouldn’t be. In fact, it’s long past time that citizens stop construing online brands, and the companies their messages represent, as clever human interlocutors, be they catty or chatty. Which brings me back to my theory: In a backwards way, and certainly unintentionally, Amazon’s weird behavior is liberating us from the affliction of building affable relationships with corporations. It’s a reminder that although companies have basically become people in our lives, those people might very well be assholes.

The law has preserved their right to be so for some time. Over the past century, companies have been transformed into private individuals, deserving protection from the state. The Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission allowed corporations to spend unlimited funds on elections. The Court’s opinion justified the decision on the grounds that limiting political spending violates the First Amendment right to free speech. Citizens United is the most recent victory for corporate personhood in the United States, but that history goes back much further. In particular, the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed all citizens equal protection under the law, became a mechanism for corporations to argue for their rights as individuals. (Corporations had previously been treated as institutions chartered by a state for the public good.)

It’s a convenient accident that the Citizens United decision corresponded with the arrival of the consumer internet. By 2010, everyone was online, and in public too, on social-media services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Previously, companies could speak only through formal messages on billboards; by mail, radio, or television; or via media coverage of their actions. The web had shifted that control a bit, but websites were still mostly marketing and service portals. Social media and smartphones changed everything. They made corporate speech functionally identical to human speech. Case law might have given companies legal personhood, but the internet made corporations feel like people.

It also allowed companies to behave like people. As their social-media posts were woven into people’s feeds between actual humans’ jokes, gripes, and celebrations, brands started talking with customers directly. They offered support right inside people’s favorite apps. They did favors, issued giveaways, and even raised money for the downtrodden. Brands became #brands.

In 2018, I wrote about my personal experiences with this new kind of brand behavior for The Atlantic, when Comcast sent me 10 pizzas after I dared them to on Twitter. By then, brands had developed distinctive, humanlike personalities online: Wendy’s cattiness countered Arby’s dorkiness, for example. Steak-umm had become a kind of social-media hero, using the persona of a Rust Belt underdog to opine on social and political topics of all stripes.

Back then, I warned against growing too comfortable with these newly seductive corporate relationships. The brands were not real human friends, but neither were they faceless corporations anymore. That ennui has deepened, and “Ugh, #brands” has become a more common sentiment among people who might previously have found them charming. Now Amazon’s social-media mutiny expresses the same disgust, but in a despicable corporate voice.

 

Vaccine Passports: Corporate Fascists Plotting War On Individual Freedom And Lying About It Again

WaPo  |  These non-passport passports won’t emerge as a mandate from the Oval Office or Congress, and the biggest of Big Government won’t be tracking our individual vaccination status, what we’ve done with our newfound immunity or where we’ve done it. Mostly, private companies will want to know whether we’re jabbed so that they can finally make as much money as they used to with as little hazard as that used to involve.

But public health guidelines permitting large indoor gatherings only among the inoculated will inform some of those private companies’ decisions, and creating scannable codes such as those New York just started piloting will require some verification against state records. (The concerns about equity, too, are real, as long as disenfranchised people get fewer shots and own fewer smartphones.)

Similarly, signing up will be a choice — but when everything fun in the world is conditioned on that sign-up, the concept of choice turns fuzzy. This is coercion. Yet coercion may be exactly what the doctor ordered for those hesitant to face the needle but desperate to dance at a wedding.

None of us know yet where, when and to whom we might be required to present this handy-dandy credential, so people instead invent the scenarios that either most enrage or most soothe them. Maybe we’re barred from anywhere and everywhere, unable even to step into the grocery store for tomorrow’s breakfast. Or maybe we’re only turned back from the punk show where we had hoped to throw ourselves against thousands of strangers.

Vaccine passports are the new masks. Depending on where you are, what you read and how you vote, they are either the badge of the oppressor or the brand borne by the righteous. They will either solve everything or nothing. They are the new lockdown and the new quarantine: both terms we continue to use for our current condition even though most of us are only semi-isolated and fully free to romp where we please. No one cares about the in-between. We want extremes, and where there aren’t any we create them.

Vaccine passports don’t even exist yet, but that won’t stop our riven country from turning them into exactly what we’re always looking for: a reason to get mad at the other guy.

mRNA Therapeutics Don't Confer Immunity - So - How Do These Lying Liars Say "Immunity Privileges"

NEJM  |  The public appears to be deeply divided on the appropriateness of immunity privileges. Last summer, we elicited views from a nationally representative panel.² Support for certification programs based on positive tests for antibodies to Covid-19 was almost evenly split (see graph). Moreover, in contrast with views on many other pandemic-control policies, the division of opinion on immunity passports cut across ideological, racial, and socioeconomic lines. The survey was conducted during an earlier phase of the pandemic and did not address vaccination-acquired immunity explicitly, although more recent surveys that have done so have also revealed deeply divided views.³

The mixed views and range of competing arguments suggest that it would be precipitous — and extremely unlikely in the United States — to adopt an official government policy requiring widespread use of vaccine passports. On the other hand, we believe the objections raised fall short of justifying a ban on any and all uses of vaccine certification (which some commentators have proposed). Access to vaccines is increasing rapidly, with special efforts being made to reach disadvantaged groups. Although better understanding is needed of the nature and degree of immunity that vaccination confers, it seems clear enough that risk — especially for severe disease — is dramatically reduced. Mechanisms for reliable and accurate certification are important. But development of such mechanisms is largely a technical issue — one that some leading technology companies are addressing — and it should not completely block an otherwise sensible policy. Finally, requiring people who decline vaccination to bear some consequence for their refusal seems only fair, especially if, collectively, such hesitancy puts herd immunity out of reach.

Thus, rejecting policy extremes — a broad mandatory public scheme or a prohibition on all private uses of certification — is a relatively easy call. But how should policymakers navigate the large and complex space in between? What is either acceptable or optimal can vary substantially by context. Two features of this landscape are particularly important for evaluating the appropriateness of policy moves: the nature of privileged activities and the identity of the regulator.

An important starting point is distinguishing passports from mandates. When government conditions participation in essential activities such as work or education, certification essentially functions as a mandatory vaccination program. The legal and ethical perils of a government mandate for SARS-CoV-2 vaccines at this time have been well reviewed elsewhere.⁴ Therefore, we focus here on policy uses of vaccine certification other than having the government itself restrict physical access to essential settings such as workplaces, schools, and health care institutions.

The “passport” concept applies most obviously to travel. Federal and state authorities currently impose quarantine requirements on people who cross state or international borders. Most such policies do not make exceptions for vaccinated travelers. However, some states are considering doing so. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recognizes vaccination as grounds for lifting quarantine for people exposed to Covid-19 infection; and for travel from most countries, the agency has recommended lifting restrictions on entrants who have recovered from Covid-19.⁵ It seems only a matter of time before the same policies would apply to travelers who can show proof of completed vaccination.

In taking the lead on vaccination-related travel policy, government can start by establishing standards for reliable documentation of vaccination. Such standards are likely to emerge relatively soon from public–private partnerships in the travel sector, and then spread to other settings.

Those other settings include social and recreational gatherings. Here, the case for government control is weaker, because frontline policy setting and implementation more naturally fall to private actors. Allowing sports leagues, concert and sporting venues, clubs, restaurants, and bars some latitude to set rules that determine access on the basis of customers’ vaccination status would be reasonable; doing so may also serve wider efforts to encourage vaccine uptake. Although not in the driver’s seat, government will have to help steer. Private actors need standards and bounds, including clear directives barring uses of vaccine certification that constitute unlawful discrimination. More generally, government can help to mitigate inequities arising from private certification by boosting the supply and distribution of vaccines and redoubling efforts to reach underserved populations.

Neither Liberalism Or Egalitarianism Can Survive What Is Around That Signpost Up Ahead

interfluidity |  I think it makes perfect sense that liberalism has become a kind of upper-class creed. So long as it is, liberalism is in peril, and should be. There are illiberal currents on both the left and right that would exploit popular dissatisfaction to remake society in ways that I would very much dislike, whether by restoring a “traditional” hierarchy of implicit caste, or by granting diverse professionals even more prescriptive authority than they already have at the expense of liberty for the less enlightened. 

My strong preference is that we do neither of these things, and instead restore the broad appeal of liberalism by “leveling up”. We should ensure that everyone has the means to rely upon some mix of the market and the state to see to their material welfare, reducing the economic role of networks of personal reciprocity and history. This would render the good parts of liberalism more broadly and ethically accessible. 

Reducing economic stratification makes liberal proceduralism more credible pretty automatically. When economic and institutional power are dispersed and broadly shared, no one has a built-in edge, and aspirations of neutrality and fairness become plausible. Once we view society less through a lens of domination and oppression — because in a more materially equal society that will be a less credible lens — it will become possible to agree on a common, stable set of commercial and professional mores rather than extend deference to myriad communities’ evolving sensibilities. It will be practical for the broad public to learn and understand those common mores, and so not be excluded or set apart from professional communities by what come to seem like inscrutable courtly conventions.

There are undoubtedly tensions between liberalism and egalitarianism. But they are yin to one another’s yang. Opposites in a sense, they must be reconciled if either is to survive.

The Wholesale Discrediting Of The American Medical Industrial Complex

nakedcapitalism |  Of so many tragedies to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the saddest to me – and probably the one with the longest-reverberating consequences – has been its wholesale discrediting of our health science institutions.

Here we are, over a year into this pandemic, and we cannot get a straight answer on whether or not this relatively cheap and safe drug (ivermectin) saves human lives from COVID-19 or not. Worse, we can’t even seem to properly investigate it. All questions bring hysterics, or hardly-believable obfuscation, or (informed?) outrage, no matter what authority we turn to. The fallout in my own life from watching all this unfold has been… dramatic.

I don’t trust what the CDC says. I don’t trust what the WHO says. I don’t trust what the FDA says. I don’t trust Pfizer and the rest of the pharmaceutical companies any farther than I can throw them. I look with suspicion on my own scientist acquaintances, wondering if they are really following the data, or if they are clinging to a chosen worldview that science in America still works, oh god it still works, oh god it hasn’t been completely discredited, no it cannot be, my life work must have meant something, it must still work, it must still work….??

None of this means that ivermectin works–or for that matter, that it doesn’t work. It means that I have realized, slowly and then all-of-a-sudden, that I cannot know. Nor can any other layperson. We are alone, our economy is collapsing in slow-motion, and our lives are at stake. Or so we think! If we doubt so much, how much more should we really be doubting? I believe, for what it’s worth, that COVID-19 is real and that these experimental vaccines probably won’t kill us. At least… not that many of us.

But I wonder now, in my darker moments, whether the claim of those who don’t believe such things that refusing the vaccination is a “Darwin’s test – pass it and survive” have grokked something that was beyond me, in my previous worldview. How could it have come to this…? And if I am feeling like this, how must people with less scientific background (I attended a science magnet school) be feeling about it all??

Will my children be safe from measles, etc in the years to come? I have vaccinated them with the whole slate, and feel fine about that choice, but will the fallout from this debacle mean the end of herd immunity in America, as trust in the ‘health experts’ collapses into dust? How can we get it back, then – at gunpoint? With all that would imply… is it even worth such a high price…?

"The Time To Reason With "These People" Has Long Passed...,"

consentfactory |  There is no place for us in New Normal society. The New Normals know this and so do we. To them, we are a suspicious, alien tribe of people. We do not share their ideological beliefs. We do not perform their loyalty rituals, or we do so only grudgingly, because they force us to do so. We traffic in arcane “conspiracy theories,” like “pre-March-2020 science,” “natural herd immunity,” “population-adjusted death rates,” “Sweden,” “Florida,” and other heresies.

They do not trust us. We are strangers among them. They suspect we feel superior to them. They believe we are conspiring against them, that we want to deceive them, confuse them, cheat them, pervert their culture, abuse their children, contaminate their precious bodily fluids, and perpetrate God knows what other horrors.

So they are discussing the need to segregate us, how to segregate us, when to segregate us, in order to protect society from us. In their eyes, we are no more than criminals, or, worse, a plague, an infestation. In the words of someone (I can’t quite recall who), “getting rid of the Unvaccinated is not a question of ideology. It is a question of cleanliness,” or something like that. (I’ll have to hunt down and fact-check that quote. I might have taken it out of context.)

In Israel, Estonia, Denmark, Germany, the USA, and other New Normal countries, they have already begun the segregation process. In the UK, it’s just a matter of time. The WEF, WHO, EU, and other transnational entities are helping to streamline the new segregation system, which, according to the WEF, “will need to be harmonized by a normative body, such as the WHO, to ensure that is ethical.”

Here in Germany, the government is considering banning us from working outside our homes. We are already banned from flying on commercial airlines. (We can still use the trains, if we dress up like New Normals.) In the village of Potsdam, just down the road from Wannsee (which name you might recall from your 20th-Century history lessons), we are banned from entering shops and restaurants. (I’m not sure whether we can still use the sidewalks, or whether we have to walk in the gutters.) In Saxony, we are forbidden from attending schools. At the Berliner Ensemble (the theater founded by Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, lifelong opponents of totalitarianism and fascism), we are banned from attending New Normal performances.

We All Know They're Lying - They Know We Know They're Lying - Yet The Lying Continues...,

tomluongo |   It doesn’t matter what issue we’re discussing: masks, vaccines, election fraud, racism, Joe Biden’s health, climate change, the sovereign bond markets, lockdowns.

No matter the issue or the question Biden’s Press Secretary, the uniquely incompetent Jenn Psaki, will be happy to ‘circle back to that later’ but never doing so hoping to just get through the next news cycle without a revolt.

Everyone’s doing the ‘believe me’ look that body language experts talk about all the time.  It’s all so tiresome and exhausting.  And you can feel the level of frustration building like John Cleese’s anger in the sketch.

It even looks to me like the people in the media are getting fed up with having to disseminate the lies.  But, since their access to power and livelihoods depend on playing along with the charade even the best ones act out on the stage prepared for them.

We all know they are lying.  They know we know they are lying.  We know they know that we know they are lying.

And yet the lying continues. 

Worse than that, the dying continues. 

Because that is the net outcome of all this lying, the wasted time and energy billions of people who eventually are asked to fight wars on behalf of these venal liars desperate to retain power and privilege.

The endless lying comes from the need to sell us on a future we don’t want for a price we can’t afford to pay.  That the pols in D.C. think they can bribe us with a couple thousand bucks of stimmy money after they’ve destroyed our quality of life is the clearest sign ever that they are completely out of touch.

But what is clear as well is that they do not care.  They don’t have to care because our government has openly morphed into the phone company from the old Lily Tomlin sketch of a few years after the Pythons’ heyday.

This absurd level of lying betrays the elites’ utter contempt for us.  They’re obsessed with squashing all traces of the only truly four-letter word in Brussels and D.C. “populism.’

Populism is the bane of tyrants and comedy like the Dead Parrot sketch can no longer be tolerated in the coming brave new world where you’ll own nothing and like it… or else.

I can’t stress enough that this obsession with narrative control is equal parts terrifying and hilarious at the same time.

Terrifying because the real world consequences are destroyed businesses, suicidal children, bombed cities, starved local populations, sanctions, threats, embargoes and migrations.

Hilarious because these people are patently absurd.  And we all know that comedy is, unfortunately, tragedy plus time. 

Because if we don’t laugh at this just a little bit the only recourse is insanity and violence.

Meet Spot, Pick, And Stretch - Amazon's New Tireless And Uncomplaining Warehouse Workers

and these workers don't have to stop and pee in a bottle....,

bostondynamics |  Robotic navigation of complex subterranean settings is important for a wide variety of applications ranging from mining and planetary cave exploration to search and rescue and first response. In many cases, these domains are too high-risk for personnel to enter, but they introduce a lot of challenges and hazards for robotic systems, testing the limits of their mobility, autonomy, perception, and communications.

The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge seeks novel approaches to rapidly map, navigate, and search fully unknown underground environments during time-constrained operations and/or disaster response scenarios. In the most recent competition, called the Urban Circuit, teams raced against one another in an unfinished power plant in Elma, Washington. Each team's robots searched for a set of spatially-distributed objects, earning a point for finding and precisely localizing each object.

Whether robots are exploring caves on other planets or disaster areas here on Earth, autonomy enables them to navigate extreme environments without human guidance or access to GPS.

 

The Solution

TEAM CoSTAR, which stands for Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Robots, relies on a team of heterogeneous autonomous robots that can roll, walk or fly, depending on what they encounter. Robots autonomously explore and create a 3D map of the subsurface environment. CoSTAR is a collaboration between NASA’s JPL, MIT, Caltech, KAIST, LTU, and industry partners.

“CoSTAR develops a holistic autonomy, perception, and communication framework called NeBula (Networked Belief-aware Perceptual Autonomy), enabling various rolling and flying robots to autonomously explore unknown environments. In the second year of the project, we aimed at extending our autonomy framework to explore underground structures including multiple levels and mobility stressing-features. We were looking into expanding the locomotion capabilities of our robotic team to support this level of autonomy. Spot was the perfect choice for us due to its size, agility, and capabilities.

We got the Spot robot only about 2 months before the competition. Thanks to the modularity of the NeBula and great support from Boston Dynamics, the team was able to integrate our autonomy framework NeBula on Spot in several weeks. It was a risky and aggressive change in our plans very close to the competition, but it paid off and the integrated NeBula-on-Spot framework demonstrated an amazing performance in the competition.” said CoSTAR's team lead Ali Agha of JPL. "The NeBula-powered Spots were able to explore 100s of meters autonomously in less than 60 minutes, negotiate mobility-stressing terrains and obstacles, and go up and down stairs, exploring multiple levels."

 

The Results

Performance of the NeBula-enabled Spots alongside CoSTARs roving and flying robots led to the first place in the urban round of competition for team CoSTAR. For more information about Team CoSTAR's win, see:

• Robots Autonomously Navigate Underground in DARPA Challenge
• Teams CoSTAR and BARCS Take Top Spots in DARPA Subterranean Challenge Urban Circuit
• SubT Challenge Urban Circuit Overview

Vic Used To "Wear The Blue Vest" But Now He's Just Big Mad And Utterly Helpless...,

trust |  I drove for Amazon from December 2019 until March of 2021, and I want to shed light on the work environment and the way the world's largest online retailer treats its employees. I want to show support for all the people I worked with and drove with, and with those who wear the blue vest across the nation. I support the driver walk-out on Easter Sunday. It's time to show Amazon that drivers are people who deserve better, and not machines who don't need a bathroom break!

When Vic started delivering packages for Amazon in 2019, he enjoyed it - the work was physical, he liked the autonomy, and it let him explore new neighborhoods in Denver, Colorado.

But Vic, who asked to be referred to by his first name for fear of retaliation, did not like the sensation that he was constantly under surveillance. 

At first, it was Amazon’s “Mentor” app that constantly monitored his driving, phone use and location, generating a score for bosses to evaluate his performance on the road.

“If we went over a bump, the phone would rattle, the Mentor app would log that I used the phone while driving, and boom, I’d get docked,” he said.

Then, Amazon started asking him to post “selfies” before each shift on Amazon Flex, another app he had to install. 

“I had already logged in with my keycard at the beginning of the shift, and now they want a photo? It was too much," he said.

The final indignity, he said, was Amazon's decision to install a four-lens, AI-powered camera in delivery vehicles that would record and analyse his face and body the entire shift. 

This month, Vic put in his two-week notice and quit, ahead of a March 23 deadline for all workers at his Denver dispatch location to sign release forms authorising Amazon to film them and collect and store their biometric information.

“It was both a privacy violation, and a breach of trust,” he said. “And I was not going to stand for it.”

The camera systems, made by U.S.-based firm Netradyne, are part of a nationwide effort by Amazon to address concerns over accidents involving its increasingly ubiquitous delivery vans.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment, but has previously told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that access to the footage was limited, and video would only be uploaded after an unsafe driving incident was detected.

Albert Fox Cahn, who runs the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project - a privacy organisation - said the Amazon cameras were part of a worrying, new trend.

"As cameras get cheaper and artificial intelligence becomes more powerful, these invasive tracking systems are increasingly the norm," he said.