The Effects Of Platform Social Media On Politics And Identity Politics

newleftreview |   The reputation economy undergirded by platform capitalism has played an important role in the growth and mutation of the politics of recognition since the financial crisis. This is not simply to blame ‘the internet’ for identity politics, but to highlight how a new type of rationality has penetrated the social and cultural sphere, turning the distribution of esteem into a type of inter-capitalist competition. Controversies about the supposed threat to the liberal public sphere emanating from universities and the left often ignore a more structural transformation driven by Silicon Valley.

Cultural-political arguments in the Anglosphere frequently turn upon the question of free speech, and the need to rescue it from ‘identitarians’. In the uk, the Johnson government is intent on legislating to force universities to uphold ‘free-speech’ norms. While these allegations are often made in bad faith and on slim evidence—not to mention the accompanying crackdown on any free expression of Islamist views—the task should be to provide a more accurate diagnosis of the decline of liberal norms, not to deny that anything has changed. This requires paying close attention to the capitalist business model and the interfaces on which civil society and the public sphere increasingly depend. Arguments about censorship and ‘no-platforming’ of speakers are often driven by the quest for reputational advantage—on the part of institutions, individuals and social movements—and a need to avoid reputational damage. This is how the politics of recognition is now structured.

As Gramscian scholars have long argued, a capitalist business model does not only determine relations of production, but is mirrored in the mode of political and cultural activity that accompanies it—potentially providing a foothold for critique and resistance. Debates around Fordism and post-Fordism posed questions of what cultural and political analogues they facilitated, and of what new modes of organization and collectivism might emerge. For Jeremy Gilbert, similar questions need to be asked about the type of political-party mobilizations that might or might not be available through the template of the digital platform.footnote¹⁹ New technologies and economic relations also reconfigure the processes of political and cultural life, beyond their own immediate application.

This perspective tends to emphasize positive opportunities for new political strategies, but the negative outcomes also need to be identified. Platforms represent a watershed in the moral and cultural contests of modernity. They not only transform relations of production, but re-format how status and esteem are socially distributed. They are refashioning struggles for recognition no less decisively than the birth of print media did. At the same time, their logic is such that their principal effect is to generalize a feeling of misrecognition—heightening the urgency with which people seek recognition, but never satisfying this need. One effect of this process is the rise of groups who feel relatively deprived, to the point of political insurrection. In terms of Fraser’s perspectival dualism, one of the main questions raised by contemporary politics is how and why many people who are both economically privileged and culturally included can end up feeling like they are neither of those things.

Two paths of critique have opened up in this context, an internalist and an externalist one. The internalist path follows the example of pragmatist sociology in urging political movements to work with the grain of the speculative reputation economy, so as to sabotage centres of power. On a small scale, this might simply mean the mobilization of memes and trolls to build the capital value of a political insurgent or to undermine that of an incumbent power. This type of reputation warfare was notoriously used by the Trump campaign but is widely deployed on the left. Organizations like Greenpeace have worked to attack brand value through graphically disrupting the art galleries and museums that receive oil-industry sponsorship, for instance. Feher advocates a kind of ‘investee activism’, which posits the principal class conflict within neoliberal capitalism as a financial one, between investor and investee. In this perspective, resistance should take aim at the market value of company stocks and operate via debtor strikes that threaten the interests of finance capital and banks. Optimistically, Feher calls for the left to mobilize its own quasi-financial vision of a good society for investment: ‘Creditworthiness is worth vying for, lest we leave it to investors to determine who deserves to be appreciated and for what motives’.footnote²⁰ The very volatility of the moral-economic marketplace offers an opportunity to compete politically over the future.

The externalist critique focuses on the platform itself and its inherent injustices, both for its exploited workers and its users. Srnicek’s approach shows how Marxian political economy can identify the underlying structural conditions of this extractive business form and the variations that it can take. A materialist assessment and critique of the platform business model is a necessary starting point for rethinking the position of organized labour within the gig economy, in which employees are legally reconfigured as ‘contractors’. It is also the starting point for the real-utopian analysis and activism envisaged by Erik Olin Wright, which seeks to establish platform cooperatives and other forms of digital civic infrastructure.footnote²¹ Resistance to Amazon and Uber could involve inventing alternative means of mediating civic life that would not be dedicated to the extraction of rents. And yet, as Seymour’s critique of the ‘social industry’ reminds us, there are other aspects of platform technologies—their addictive, gamified qualities, which exploit and perpetuate our anxieties—whose very function is to suck the life out of social existence.

The challenge for social movements is how to update Fraser’s perspectival dualism for an age in which the platform is becoming a dominant distributor of both reward and mutated forms of recognition. Few movements can afford to abstain entirely from the reputation economy. A lesson from Black Lives Matter is that social media’s accumulation of reputational capital can be harnessed towards longer-standing goals of social and economic justice, as long as it remains a tactic or an instrument, and not a goal in its own right. Campaigns may trigger or seize reputational bubbles that spread at great speed—#MeToo is an example—and potentially burst soon after, making a political virtue of the ability to shift movements into other spaces, including the street. The quest for recognition is more exacting and slower than that for reputation, and appreciating this distinction is a first step to seeing beyond the cultural limits of the platform, towards the broader political and economic obstacles that currently stand in the way of full and equal participation.

Is Dr. Robert Malone Qualified To Speak On The Safety And Efficacy Of mRNA Therapeutics?

dailymail  |  Malone pioneered 'in-vitro RNA transfection' and also 'in-vivo RNA transfection' in 1987 and 1988 at the Salk Institute, according to his biography. He did that on frog embryos and mice.      

Conventional vaccines are produced using weakened forms of the virus, but mRNAs use only the virus’s genetic code.

An mRNA vaccine is injected into the body where it enters cells and tells them to create antigens. These antigens are recognized by the immune system and prepare it to fight coronavirus.  

No actual virus is needed to create an mRNA vaccine. 

This means the rate at which it can be produced is dramatically accelerated. As a result, mRNA vaccines have been hailed as potentially offering a rapid solution to new outbreaks of infectious diseases. 

The findings were presented in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which is the official journal of the US National Academy of Sciences and has been published since 1914.  

But Malone said the federal government is recommending COVID vaccines for everyone over 12 without the research to back that up. 

'Young adults in the prime of their lives are being forced to take the vaccine because Tony Fauci said that,' Carlson said during Wednesday night's show, adding that Malone 'has a right to speak,' given his expertise.

Malone was a guest speaker on a podcast that included Bret Weinstein, who is an evolutionary biologist, and Steve Kirsh, an American serial entrepreneur who has started seven companies.

The Panicdemic Backfired Exposing ALL Of The Ruling Classes Weaknesses

americanthinker |  What happens when a population of introverts, hypochondriacs, and obsessive-compulsives is continuously bombarded with messages to seclude and disinfect themselves, for fear that COVID-19 prickle-balls lurk everywhere, waiting to attack?

What happens is that emotionally damaged people start driving bad politics and bad policy.

"Fifteen days to flatten the curve."  That phrase is surely now banned by corporate media, for it reminds us how the supposedly acute health threat of March 2020 was repeatedly re-packaged to keep populations off-balance and out of business not for 15 days, but for 15 months. 

“Outrageous.” @BillMaher railed against Facebook and Google for banning and suppressing content about lab leak. “You were wrong, Google and Facebook....The CDC’s been wrong about a lot shit, this is outrageous that I can’t look this information up.” #RealTime pic.twitter.com/28dwaQGz9W

— Brent Baker (@BrentHBaker) June 26, 2021

Never in modern times has a health issue been so flagrantly politicized, nor wielded as a club, as the Wuhan virus has been.  Outside a few rational locales, almost every nation drank the COVID Kool-Aid, competing to see who could enforce the stupidest rules.

Naturally, academia would lead the way: 

Among Americans aged 15–24, a total of 587 died of COVID in 2020, according to the CDC, representing about 0.16%, or about 1 in 642, of COVID deaths.  If you are young, you have essentially no chance of dying of COVID.  The low youth mortality impact from COVID was known by April 2020.

Yet many universities now require these low-risk young people to inject the experimental vaccine or be banished from campus.  Did you already catch the WuFlu and have antibodies?  Too bad.  The great pulsating brains of academia cannot differentiate.

Young people who want to serve their country are also targets: the passive-aggressive command at West Point compels the unvaccinated to sacrifice a week's vacation to quarantine and then to wear masks in the most ridiculous circumstances imaginable — to harass them and make them look like fools.  Military leaders do not care whether the experimental vaccines might do more harm than good, especially on a previously COVID-exposed youth.  Take the jab and shut up, cadet; Colonel Suckup needs to PowerPoint his 100% compliance success.

From Industrialization Back To Feudalism (Neofeudalism)

medium  |  The pandemic housing bubble has multiple, complex causes among them:

• A housing shortage resulting from a decade of anemic construction following the Great Financial Crisis and a wave of homebuilder bankruptcies;
• Supply-chain shocks created by the pandemic, which was especially hard on “efficient” industries, where financialization and monopolization drained vital industries of their cash and inventory reserves and turned them over to the richest people in America;
• The trillions that the Trump stimulus pumped into the financial markets, which are now being used to buy up every single-family dwelling that hits the market, for cash-above-the-asking-price, in order to convert it to a subprime rental whose predatory rents, savage evictions and dangerous neglect are the basis for a boom in bonds that financialize the rent they generate.

Generations of Americans have dreamed of owning a home, both to insulate themselves from the whims of their landlords and to create intergenerational wealth. Home ownership was a key driver of social mobility, allowing working class people to enter the middle class. A horrible “natural experiment” shows just how important property acquisition is to economic stability: redlining and restrictive covenants froze Black people out of the home-purchasing boom of the New Deal and the GI Bill, exacerbating and accelerating the racial wealth gap.

Two factors drove the growth of the American middle-class: property ownership and unionization. Of the two, unionization was more universal — by no means free of institutional racism, but far more accessible than home ownership.

Of the two, unionization was the one that underwent sustained assault from business, finance and the state. After decades of declining union participation, amid stagnating wages and worker misclassification, the dream of social mobility through stable employment has evaporated for most workers (especially workers from the poorest households, burdened beyond belief by student debt, this debt assumed on the assurance that it would create employment-based access to a stable, middle-class existence).

But the American belief in home ownership as a path to a better future for homeowners and their descendants remains intact. And housing shortages — and the bubbles that attend them — only fuel this belief. When the house your working-class parents bought for $30,000 is appraised at $1.5 million, home ownership becomes a solution to all of life’s insecurities.

The Emergence Of Murcomycosis Represents Catastrophic Immune Failure Induced By Covid Reinfection

 

Since the first reports about murcomycosis black fungus infection started coming out of the vast south asian gain of function human petri dish, it has been conspicuously clear - to even the most casual observer - that something very strange is going on.

 

The organism causing Mucormycosis is actually everywhere. 

 

We humans are exposed to black fungus daily, the level of exposure depending on where you are in the world and your location’s climate. Normal immune hosts dispatch black fungus infection immediately upon contact.

 

The only times you clinically observe black fungus infection in humans is with catastrophically immunosuppressed individuals. Most notably AIDS and diabetics with chronic A1C levels above 12.

 

Murcomycosis black fungus infection is horrible. It cannot be remedied by antifungals, and to the extent that it can be remedied, it requires drastic exculpatory extraction. That means it has to be cut out. It has a predilection for the sinuses. That means that the patient gets half their face cut out often with eyes included. 

 

As you might imagine, when you become nutrient media for black fungus, that's that ass. You're over, done, kaput, DEAD-ASS...,

The immunsuppression required for this to get started normally requires years to develop. Even in the chemo related scenarios - months are required.

 

The humans conducting this vast in vitro gain of function experiment are still in the early stages of their experiment with the sars-cov2 bioweapon. 

 

This black fungus fork is screaming something about how sars-cov2 goes mob deep on the human immune system. It is obviously very important. 

 

What living memory history involves a retrovirus that directly attacked the immune system?  These types of observations are instrumental in understanding the motivations of those behind this very curious epidemic.

Are AR-15 LARPS Wondering About General Milley's Intentions Toward Them?

greenwald |  Within that domestic War on Terror framework, Gen. Milley, by pontificating on race, is not providing cultural commentary but military dogma. Just as it was central to the job of a top Cold War general to embrace theories depicting Communism as a grave threat, and an equally central part of the job of a top general during the first War on Terror to do the same for Muslim extremists, embracing theories of systemic racism and the perils posed to domestic order by “white rage” is absolutely necessary to justify the U.S. Government's current posture about what war it is fighting and why that war is so imperative.

None of this means that Gen. Milley's defense of critical race theory and woke ideology is purely cynical and disingenuous. The U.S. military is a racially diverse institution and — just as is true for the CIA and FBI — endorsing modern-day theories of racial and gender diversity can be important for workplace cohesion and inspiring confidence in leadership. And many people in various sectors of American life have undergone radical changes in their speech if not their belief system over the last year — that is, after all, the purpose of the sustained nationwide protest movement that erupted in the wake of the killing of George Floyd — due either to conviction, fear of loss of position, or both. One cannot reflexively discount the possibility that Gen. Milley is among those whose views have changed as the cultural climate shifted around him.

But it is preposterously naive and deceitful to divorce Gen. Milley's steadfast advocacy of racial theories from the current war strategy of the U.S. military that he leads. The Pentagon's prime targets, by their own statements, are sectors of the U.S. population that they regard as major threats to the national security of the United States. Embracing theories that depict “white rage” and white supremacy as the source of domestic instability and violence is not just consistent with but necessary for the advancement of that mission. Put another way, the doctrine of the U.S. intelligence and military community is based on race and ideology, and it should therefore be unsurprising that the worldview promoted by top generals is racialist in nature as well.

Whatever else is true, it is creepy and tyrannical to try to place military leaders and their pronouncements about war off-limits from critique, dissent and mockery. No healthy democracy allows military officials to be venerated to the point of residing above critique. That is especially true when their public decrees are central to the dangerous attempt to turn the war posture of the U.S. military inward to its own citizens.

The Irrepairably Broken Trust/Distrust Axis In Science And Medicine

taibbi  |  Telescope out a little further, however, and the ivermectin debate becomes more complicated, reaching into a series of thorny controversies, some ridiculous, some quite serious.

The ridiculous side involves the front end of Lorigo’s story, the same story detailed on this site last week: the censorship of ivermectin news that, no matter what one thinks about the evidence for or against, is clearly in the public interest.

Anyone running a basic internet search on the topic will get a jumble of confusing results. YouTube’s policies are beyond uneven. It’s been aggressive in taking down videos containing interviews with people like Kory and doling out strikes to independent media figures like Bret Weinstein, but an interview with Lorigo on TrialSite News containing basically all of the same information is still up, as are clips from a just-taped episode of the Joe Rogan Experience that feature both Weinstein and Kory. Moreover, all sorts of statements at least as provocative as Kory’s “miraculous” formulation in the Senate still litter the Internet, many in reputable research journals. Take, for instance, this passage from the March issue of the Japanese Journal of Antibiotics:

When the effectiveness of ivermectin for the COVID-19 pandemic is confirmed with the cooperation of researchers around the world and its clinical use is achieved on a global scale, it could prove to be of great benefit to humanity. It may even turn out to be comparable to the benefits achieved from the discovery of penicillin…

There clearly is not evidence that ivermectin is the next penicillin, at least as far as its effects on Covid-19. As is noted in nearly every mainstream story about the subject, the WHO has advised against its use pending further study, there have been randomized studies showing it to be ineffective in speeding recovery, and the drug’s original manufacturer, Merck, has said there’s no “meaningful evidence” of efficacy for Covid-19 patients. However, it’s also patently untrue, as is frequently asserted, that there’s no evidence that the drug might be effective.

This past week, for instance, Oxford University announced it was launching a large-scale clinical trial. The study has already recruited more than 5,000 volunteers, and its announcement says what little is known to be true: that “small pilot studies show that early administration with ivermectin can reduce viral load and the duration of symptoms in some patients with mild COVID-19,” that it’s “a well-known medicine with a good safety profile,” and “because of the early promising results in some studies, it is already being widely used to treat COVID-19 in several countries.”

The Oxford text also says “there is little evidence from large-scale randomized controlled trials to demonstrate that it can speed up recovery from the illness or reduce hospital admission.” But to a person who might have a family member suffering from the disease, just the information about “early promising results” would probably be enough to inspire demands for a prescription, which might be the problem, of course. Unless someone was looking for that information, they likely wouldn’t find it, as mainstream news even of the Oxford study has been effectively limited to a pair of Bloomberg and Forbes stories.

Ivermectin has suffered the same fate as thousands of other news topics since Donald Trump first announced his run for the presidency nearly six years ago, cleaved in two to inhabit separate factual universes for left and right audiences. Repurposed drugs generally have had a hard time being taken seriously since Trump announced he was on hydroxychloroquine last year, and ivermectin clearly also suffers from its association with Republican Senators like Ron Johnson. Still, the drug’s publicity issues go beyond the taint of “conservative” news.

The drug has become a test case for a controversy that’s long been building in health care, about how much input patients should have in their own treatment. Well before Covid-19, the medical profession was thrust into a revolution in patient information, inspired by a combination of Google and new patients’ rights laws.

Reuters Says That Pfizer Says That Its mRNA Jab Is Effective Against The Delta Variant

reuters  |   The Pfizer-BioNTech >PFE.N< vaccine is highly effective against the Delta variant of COVID-19, a Pfizer official in Israel said on Thursday.

First identified in India, Delta is becoming the globally dominant variant of the coronavirus, according to the World Health Organization.

"The data we have today, accumulating from research we are conducting at the lab and including data from those places where the Indian variant, Delta, has replaced the British variant as the common variant, point to our vaccine being very effective, around 90%, in preventing the coronavirus disease, COVID-19," Alon Rappaport, Pfizer's medical director in Israel, told local broadcaster Army Radio.

A study by researchers from the University of Texas together with Pfizer and BioNtech and published this month by Nature journal found that antibodies elicited by the vaccine were still able to neutralize all tested variants, including Delta, albeit at reduced strength.

"We continue to synthesize viruses in our labs and with collaborators as we see new variants emerge so we can conduct testing to obtain the most information we can about our vaccine’s impact on neutralisation of emerging strains," a Pfizer spokesperson said in an email to Reuters.

Other recent studies have also shown the vaccine is likely to provide high protection against the variant. read more

Israel has one of the world's most advanced vaccination campaigns largely based on the Pfizer-BioNTech shot. Sharon Alroy-Preis, head of public health at Israel's Health Ministry, said that Israel still lacks enough data to provide insight into vaccine effectiveness against the Delta variant.

"We are collecting the data now. We are only now seeing the first cases of the Delta variant in Israel - about 200 of those - so we will know more soon," she told reporters on Wednesday.

Why Do Pfizer mRNA Jabbed Israelis Have To Quarantine If Exposed To Delta Variant?

reuters  |  Israel empowered health officials on Wednesday to quarantine anyone deemed to have been exposed to an especially infectious variant of COVID-19, even if they were previously vaccinated or recovered from the disease with presumed immunity.

The decision followed a warning by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Tuesday over new outbreaks caused by the Delta variant, with daily infections rising after weeks of low plateau credited to Israel's record mass-vaccination drive.

Under the updated Health Ministry directives, vaccinated or formerly infected people can be ordered to self-isolate for up to 14 days if authorities believe they may have been in "close contact with a carrier of a dangerous virus variant".

Such proximity could include having been passengers on the same plane, the ministry said - a possible dampener on Israel's gradual opening of its borders to vaccinated summer tourists.

Addressing parliament, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said fines of "thousands of shekels" would also be levied against Israeli citizens or residents who travel to countries blacklisted as high COVID-19 risks.

On June 16, the Health Ministry listed Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, India, Mexico and Russia as off-limits to Israeli citizens or residents unless they receive special permission.

Some 55% of Israel's 9.3 million population have received both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech (PFE.N), (22UAy.DE) vaccine, and a steep drop in cases had prompted most economic restrictions to be lifted.

 

Fugg You Mean mRNA Therapeutics "Likely Safe" For Pregnant Women?!?!?!

NIH  |  A new observational study has begun to evaluate the immune responses generated by COVID-19 vaccines administered to pregnant or postpartum people. Researchers will measure the development and durability of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in people vaccinated during pregnancy or the first two postpartum months. Researchers also will assess vaccine safety and evaluate the transfer of vaccine-induced antibodies to infants across the placenta and through breast milk.

The study, called MOMI-VAX, is sponsored and funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. MOMI-VAX is conducted by the NIAID-funded Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Consortium (IDCRC). 

“Tens of thousands of pregnant and breastfeeding people in the United States have chosen to receive the COVID-19 vaccines available under emergency use authorization. However, we lack robust, prospective clinical data on vaccination in these populations,” said NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., “The results of this study will fill gaps in our knowledge and help inform policy recommendations and personal decision-making on COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy and in the postpartum period.”

Pregnant people with COVID-19 are more likely to be hospitalized, be admitted to the intensive care unit, require mechanical ventilation, and die from the illness than their non-pregnant peers. Severe COVID-19 during pregnancy also may put the infant at risk for complications such as preterm birth. Individuals who are pregnant or breastfeeding can choose to receive(link is external) authorized COVID-19 vaccines, and studies to gather safety data in these populations are ongoing. So far, COVID-19 vaccines appear to be safe in these populations. The NIAID study will build on these studies by improving the understanding of antibody responses to COVID-19 vaccines among pregnant and postpartum people and the transfer of antibodies to their infants during pregnancy or through breast milk. Experience with other diseases suggests that the transfer of vaccine-induced antibodies from mother to baby could help protect newborns and infants from COVID-19 during early life.

Investigators will enroll up to 750 pregnant individuals and 250 postpartum individuals within two months of delivery who have received or will receive any COVID-19 vaccine authorized or licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Their infants also will be enrolled in the study. Vaccines are not provided to participants as part of the study protocol. Currently, three COVID-19 vaccines are available in the United States under emergency use authorization: the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccines and the Johnson & Johnson adenoviral vector vaccine. The study is designed to assess up to five types of FDA-licensed or authorized COVID-19 vaccines, should additional options become available.

In February, Lil'Fauci Proclaimed mRNA Jabs "Safe For Pregnant Women"

cnbc |  There have been “no red flags” seen in the more than 10,000 pregnant women who have received Covid-19 vaccine shots so far, White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday.

Pregnant women and young children were excluded from the original U.S. clinical trials of the vaccines, as is typical in experimental vaccine research. That’s led to some concerns that there’s not enough data to be sure that the vaccines are safe among pregnant women, but Fauci said the Food and Drug Administration has not seen reason to worry yet.

“The FDA, as part of the typical follow up you have following the initial issuing of any [emergency use authorization] have found, thus far, and we’ve got to be careful, but thus far, no red flags about that, about pregnant women,” Fauci said Wednesday in an interview with The Journal of the American Medical Association’s Dr. Howard Bauchner.

Since the authorization of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines in December, over 10,000 pregnant women, many of whom were health-care workers, have gotten the shots, Fauci said. He noted that there is evidence that a coronavirus infection can lead to heightened risk of an adverse outcome in pregnancy, which might be why many pregnant health-care workers decided to get the vaccine.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has advised that pregnant women should consult their health-care provider on whether or not to get vaccinated against Covid-19. But the World Health Organization has struck a more cautious tone, saying last week that only pregnant women who are at high risk of being exposed to Covid-19 should get vaccinated.

As for young children, the FDA has only authorized Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine for use in people 16 and older in the U.S. Moderna’s vaccine is only authorized for use in people 18 and older in the country.

Fauci said “de-escalation studies” for younger children are underway. Such studies will look at the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines in progressively younger and younger children. Data from those studies should be available in “the next few months,” Fauci said.

Post mRNA Therapeutic Heart Issues Explained By A Physician...,

The data they went over today showed that the overwhelming majority of myocarditis cases in young males occur shortly after the second dose.

 

For example, in a group of 18-24 year olds they tracked for 7 days after dose 1 of an mRNA vaccine, they expected* to see 1-11 myocarditis cases; they observed 41 cases.

 

Tracking the same group for 7 days after the second dose of mRNA vaccine, they expected to see 1-8 cases; instead they observed 219 cases. What is that, a 27 times higher rate of myocarditis than you would expect to see?

 

See slides 26 and 28 of this presentation by Tom Shimabukuro, MD, MPH, MBA,

Vaccine Safety Team, CDC COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force for more details.

 

* Based on Gubernot et al. U.S. Population-Based background incidence rates of medical conditions for use in safety assessment of COVID-19 vaccines.

 

Myocardial cells are one of the types of cells in our bodies that are not readily reproducible. Other examples of this are brain and nerve cells. They just simply do not turn over.

There are organs that are made up of cells that are able to turn over but just do it when they absolutely need to – examples here would be the liver and all the endocrine glands.

 

Then there are parts of the body that turn over for a living daily and do so intensely – examples would be the skin and the lining of the GI system.

 

Because the myocardium does not reproduce itself, the amount of the initial damage from myocarditis is critical. FYI, the same thing happens in an acute MI – the dead part is just dead – and will forever be dead. The remaining undamaged tissue has the ability to “remodel” and take up some of the slack but the person will never have the same heart.

 

To sum it up – with these cases of myocarditis – it is unlike an MI in that the damage is not confined to one area. 

 

The damage tends to be global throughout the heart all at once. Recovery is absolutely dependent on how bad that damage is. If recognized and treated early – it is possible to mitigate the damage somewhat depending on what all is involved. Some patients recover reasonably well because the damage was just not that severe. However, many times in my life, I have seen these patients struggle with heart failure symptoms from the moment it happens. We can help this with meds to some degree – and the rhythm problems can be helped with meds and defibrillators – but the patients will never be the same.

 

I have been staggered by the reports I am reading from all over about these COVID vaccine young people – and the startling number of them that are having to be transplanted.

 

The very concerning thing – there are now hospitals all over America where there are more admissions to the hospital from this COVID vaccine related myocarditis than ever were with the whole 18 months of COVID. I am referring only to the 12-17 age group. NOT THE WHOLE POPULATION. Unfortunately, this now includes my hospital – with zero 12-17 aged COVID admissions this whole time – and we have now had our very first teen admitted critically ill with myocarditis 3 days after the 2nd shot.

 

I was on a Zoom conference yesterday about this issue – a very “elder statesman” ethics professor ended the discussion of this myocarditis issue and I almost started tearing up – our standards have fallen so far – he simply stated – the medical ethical principles of beneficience and non-harm are overwhelming in this case. If the CDC/FDA fails to act to protect these young people – let the word go forth – this profession has lost its way, it is corrupt to the core – and is now being run only in the interests of the corporations and not the patients.

 

I am not “in the know” – I do not have any access to any deliberations or information that the public itself does not know.

 

But I have to say – I could not agree with this gentleman more. We are hearing a lot today that this age group is going to be the new reservoir of the variants and unless vaccinated will be the downfall of us all – all I can say is EVIDENCE PLEASE –

 

When I read reports in the media the past few days about this issue – and on comments on social media – there is quite a bit of conflating of data. We compare the vaccine side effects in this age group vs the incidence of COVID and COVID deaths NOT JUST in that age group but the entire population. That is just one example.

 

The further confounding issue is in this age group – basically teenagers – the case numbers are likely very very high – indeed – I would not be surprised if upwards of 2/3 of them are “case numbers” and not deaths or hospitalizations – because they so vanishingly rarely ever get sick with COVID and certainly not ending up dying. But yet have been positive and therefore a case number. Making vaccination even more questionable. I would say your 141 thousand case number is too small by orders of magnitude.

 

I know this because all year – I have had family clusters and school clusters pre and post vaccine – and almost invariably the teenagers and kids were postiive and completely asymptomatic. It is very likely that the vast majority of them were positive and never came to attention. They just simply do not get sick or just minimally so.

 

With regard to the death counts. My state has less than 10 teens dying of COVID for the entire past year. When the state medical examiner actually did a deep dive on these cases – only 2 were ever determined to actually have died FROM COVID – all the others were suicides, traumas, etc that died WITH COVID. The 2 who actually did die were both kids with severe issues – across the country cystic fibrosis, sickle cell, and other immunocompetence disorders have been the mainstay of this group. In general, under age 20 just do not die or get hospitalized with this problem – it is very very very unusual – and they almost universally have some kind of severe co-morbidity.

 

The incidence of admission and morbidity with these vaccines with relation to this myocarditis is actually higher than the COVID issues. Anyone who tries to “statistics” their way out of that fact is LYING to you. The CDC readily admits that their myocarditis numbers are very likely way undercounted. And still their numbers are indicating a rise in myocarditis from baseline between 25-200 times higher in this age group. In many people with any kind of myocarditis – they may never know about it because their cardiac reserve is so excellent at their younger age. As these people age and lose that reserve, we may be looking at this problem to be with us for some time.

 

In general – the rules and tenets of medical ethics are universal and not dependent on the times. There are very specific tenets that do take into account community and population issues vs individual issues like we deal with in pandemics. I could not even begin to go into it here – but the numbers are simply not there for these kids to be taking the risk for the benefit of society – they just simply are not. The risk/benefit to them and the benefit to society just do not match up. If this was a much more deadly disease – or other issues that were different – that may change the calculus.

 

One thing that would change the calculus that is being trumpeted to the heavens today as I have pointed out – is if there was evidence that leaving them unvaccinated would cause them to be a reservoir. The fact that these vaccines appear to be NON STERILIZING ( not stopping transmission) in the real world makes that point completely mute. But it is getting real mileage out there today.

 

That is why I asked for EVIDENCE PLEASE of that assertion.

 

I hate to say this – but say it I must. I have sat and watched the Pharma industry lie, manipulate, pretty up and just make up statistical numbers for 30 years of my life. In every conceivable way. I have sat through hours of journal clubs and gatherings to discuss this with colleagues. Medical statistics and epidemiology – are very very difficult to learn and apply (lots of confounding) – but because of the presence of certain statistical methods are very easy for marketing firms to really manipulate. THEY ARE DOING THIS NOW IN SPADES. This time, it is not just for an audience of doctors – it is for the whole country. Certainly, people in the media know this – and know exactly what Pharma is doing – but the marketing and manipulation just keeps flowing out to the public.

 

I have just about given up.

The Heart Inflammation Damage Is Likely Grossly Undercounted...,

cidrap.umn  |  Today during a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a panel of expert advisors to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), discussed rare instances of heart inflammation among mRNA COVID-19 vaccine recipients. The committee agreed the vaccines are likely linked to cases of myocarditis and pericarditis but said the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks.

The first reports of myocarditis and pericarditis occurred in Israel in January, the experts said, and have followed in all countries using mRNAs. The myocarditis (inflammation of heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the tissues surrounding the heart) associated with vaccines are usually mild and respond well to a course of treatment with non-steroidal anti-inflammatories.

"Clinical presentation of myocarditis cases following vaccination has been distinct, occurring most often within 1 week after dose two, with chest pain as the most common presentation, " said Grace Lee, MD, chair of ACIP's safety subcommittee.

"mRNA vaccines may be a new trigger for myocarditis, yet it does have some different characteristics," said Matthew Oster, MD, MPH, from the CDC's COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force.

The most common symptoms reported by patients were chest pain, shortness of breath, and difficulty sleeping.

Cases mostly in males under 30

Tom Shimabukuro, MD, MPH, MBA, the deputy director of the Immunization Safety Office at the CDC, said the agency has received reports of 1,226 cases of myocarditis, with 827 (67.5%) reported after dose two of either the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine.

Of those cases identified after second doses, 563 followed the Pfizer vaccine series. In total, that's approximately 12.6 heart inflammation cases per million doses administered in the United States.

Among the 1,226 patients, 484 are younger than 29, and roughly two-thirds are men.

Dr. Robert Malone mRNA Jab Inventor Says Jab Mandates Are Deeply Unethical

foxnews  |  As colleges issue controversial mandates that students be vaccinated or not attend classes, and reports surfaced of numerous deaths potentially caused by the various coronavirus vaccines, the inventor of the mRNA technology that went into some of the vaccines told Fox News on Wednesday that Google-owned YouTube deleted a posting of a podcast during which he discussed his concerns and findings.

As "Tucker Carlson Tonight" host Tucker Carlson noted, Dr. Robert Malone is "the single most qualified" expert on mRNA vaccines, but that the Big Tech companies are asserting themselves as more informed than him on the topic.

"A Norwegian study conducted of 100 nursing home residents who died after receiving Pfizer's Corona shots. They found that at least ten of those deaths were likely caused by the vaccine. 10%," said Carlson.

Meanwhile, the New York Post reported that researchers found a link between rare cases of juvenile heart inflammation and vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, which utilize the mRNA route.

"Young adults in the prime of their lives are being forced to take the vaccine because Tony Fauci said that," Carlson said, adding that Malone "has a right to speak," given his expertise.

"[O]ne of my concerns are that the government is not being transparent with us about what those risks are. And so, I am of the opinion that people have the right to decide whether to accept vaccines or not, especially since these are experimental vaccines," Dr. Malone said, pointing to the fact the vaccines are not formally approved but instead being administered under Emergency Use Authorization.

"This is a fundamental right having to do with clinical research ethics," he said. "And so, my concern is that I know that there are risks. But we don't have access to the data and the data haven't been captured rigorously enough so that we can accurately assess those risks – And therefore … we don't really have the information that we need to make a reasonable decision."

Malone said that in the case of younger Americans, he "has a bias that the benefits probably don't outweigh the risks in that cohort."

But, he noted there is no substantive risk-benefit analysis being applied to the vaccines.

 

 

Machine Learning For New Materials Design And Performance Testing

 mit  |  Materials called perovskites are widely heralded as a likely replacement for silicon as the material of choice for solar cells, but their greatest drawback is their tendency to degrade relatively rapidly. Over recent years, the usable lifetime of perovskite-based cells has gradually improved from minutes to months, but it still lags far behind the decades expected from silicon, the material currently used for virtually all commercial solar panels.

Now, an international interdisciplinary team led by MIT has come up with a new approach to narrowing the search for the best candidates for long-lasting perovskite formulations, out of a vast number of potential combinations. Already, their system has zeroed in on one composition that in the lab has improved on existing versions more than tenfold. Even under real-world conditions at full solar cell level, beyond just a small sample in a lab, this type of perovskite has performed three times better than the state-of-the-art formulations.

The findings appear in the journal Matter, in a paper by MIT research scientist Shijing Sun, MIT professors, Moungi Bawendi,  John Fisher, and Tonio Buonassisi, who is also a principal investigator at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), and 16 others from MIT, Germany, Singapore, Colorado, and New York.

Perovskites are a broad class of materials characterized by the way atoms are arranged in their layered crystal lattice. These layers, described by convention as A, B, and X, can each consist of a variety of different atoms or compounds. So, searching through the entire universe of such combinations to find the best candidates to meet specific goals — longevity, efficiency, manufacturability, and availability of source materials — is a slow and painstaking process, and largely one without any map for guidance.

“If you consider even just three elements, the most common ones in perovskites that people sub in and out are on the A site of the perovskite crystal structure,” which can each easily be varied by 1-percent increments in their relative composition, Buonassisi says. “The number of steps becomes just preposterous. It becomes very, very large” and thus impractical to search through systematically. Each step involves the complex synthesis process of creating a new material and then testing its degradation, which even under accelerated aging conditions is a time-consuming process.

The key to the team’s success is what they describe as a data fusion approach. This iterative method uses an automated system to guide the production and testing of a variety of formulations, then uses machine learning to go through the results of those tests, combined again with first-principles physical modeling, to guide the next round of experiments. The system keeps repeating that process, refining the results each time.

Buonassisi likes to compare the vast realm of possible compositions to an ocean, and he says most researchers have stayed very close to the shores of known formulations that have achieved high efficiencies, for example, by tinkering just slightly with those atomic configurations. However, “once in a while, somebody makes a mistake or has a stroke of genius and departs from that and lands somewhere else in composition space, and hey, it works better! A happy bit of serendipity, and then everybody moves over there” in their research. “But it's not usually a structured thought process.”

This new approach, he says, provides a way to explore far offshore areas in search of better properties, in a more systematic and efficient way. In their work so far, by synthesizing and testing less than 2 percent of the possible combinations among three components, the researchers were able to zero in on what seems to be the most durable formulation of a perovskite solar cell material found to date.

Machine Learning Aids Materials Fabrication

mit  |  In recent years, research efforts such as the Materials Genome Initiative and the Materials Project have produced a wealth of computational tools for designing new materials useful for a range of applications, from energy and electronics to aeronautics and civil engineering.

But developing processes for producing those materials has continued to depend on a combination of experience, intuition, and manual literature reviews.

A team of researchers at MIT, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the University of California at Berkeley hope to close that materials-science automation gap, with a new artificial-intelligence system that would pore through research papers to deduce “recipes” for producing particular materials.

“Computational materials scientists have made a lot of progress in the ‘what’ to make — what material to design based on desired properties,” says Elsa Olivetti, the Atlantic Richfield Assistant Professor of Energy Studies in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). “But because of that success, the bottleneck has shifted to, ‘Okay, now how do I make it?’”

The researchers envision a database that contains materials recipes extracted from millions of papers. Scientists and engineers could enter the name of a target material and any other criteria — precursor materials, reaction conditions, fabrication processes — and pull up suggested recipes.

As a step toward realizing that vision, Olivetti and her colleagues have developed a machine-learning system that can analyze a research paper, deduce which of its paragraphs contain materials recipes, and classify the words in those paragraphs according to their roles within the recipes: names of target materials, numeric quantities, names of pieces of equipment, operating conditions, descriptive adjectives, and the like.

In a paper appearing in the latest issue of the journal Chemistry of Materials, they also demonstrate that a machine-learning system can analyze the extracted data to infer general characteristics of classes of materials — such as the different temperature ranges that their synthesis requires — or particular characteristics of individual materials — such as the different physical forms they will take when their fabrication conditions vary.

In 2021 - Engineering In Secret Amounts To Bone-In-The-Nose Engineering...,

ieee |  When your job involves working on sensitive information, products and projects, how do you talk about it, not just at work, but also at conferences, when mentoring or recruiting, or at dinner and social events?

“When information about what you are doing is privileged—classified—you can’t talk about it,” says Dennisa Thomas, senior surety systems engineer at Sandia National Laboratories “But you can talk about the general understanding or expertise you have gained from certain systems and materials projects, and how you can transfer that knowledge and those skills to other spaces.”

One definition of surety, according to Thomas, is “a level of confidence that a component or system will operate exactly as intended, both under expected and unexpected circumstances.” This includes not just Sandia’s mandate to keep the United States’ nuclear stockpiles safe, secure, and effective, but now also tackling complex national security problems including homeland security, transportation, energy, and cyber-, chemical and biological defense.

For example, reports Thomas—who has worked on hundreds of components and systems—“I worked with the team that put the first Sandia-designed telemetry transmitter into production. I’m currently working on qualifying two fusing/firing assemblies for production.”

Thomas got into surety “by picking opportunities,” she says. “North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NCA&T), where I got my B.S. in electrical engineering, has a large career fair twice a year.... During my first year, I was offered an internship with the NSA, where I learned about some of the communications systems and work they do for the military.

“And at another career fair, somebody from Sandia spoke with me, telling me about their Masters Fellowship Program, which gives graduating seniors a chance to attend graduate school to achieve their master’s degree in an area of focus that Sandia is interested in. I went to Florida State University for my M.S. in electrical and electronics engineering and then in 2015 came back to Sandia full time.”

Surety appealed to Thomas because “you get to see how the pieces and teams all fit together.” For those interested in the field, even outside government work, “Learn about failure analysis,” says Thomas. “For electrical engineering, math and science is a given. Having a strong foundation in circuit analysis and electronics is important. And statistics is important—if we can’t interpret the data that’s collected, it’s not as helpful.”

Eric Weinstein Asked Joe Rogan For A Favor And Joe Happily Obliged...,

NOPE!!! Contagion And Anti-Prophylactic Delusions Of "Love" Utterly Disgust Me...,

daily.jstor |  Deriving from the Greek words for “before” and “guard,” prophylaxis refers to a variety of precautionary measures designed to predict and preempt a negative outcome, primarily in a medical context. Vaccines fortify the body against certain viruses; condoms and other prophylactic barriers can prevent pregnancy and the transmission of STIs; and routine screenings like mammograms and colonoscopies are designed to detect and neutralize issues in their early stages.

However, at the time that Fitzgerald wrote the lyrics quoted above, prophylaxis was most frequently invoked as an extension of eugenic ideology and practice. Marshalling the white supremacist science of “racial hygiene,” doctors became amateur sociologists recommending “prophylactic” solutions to social problems. These solutions included both “negative eugenics”—the institutionalization and forced sterilization of prostitutes, poor women, women of color, and disabled people—as well as “positive eugenics,” which attempted to increase the birthrate among white, upper middle class, nondisabled, and neurotypical families.

Consider, for example, these remarks by Dr. R.M. Funkhouser which link the science of preventative medicine to private decisions around romantic courtship. This advice appeared in a 1913 issue of the Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association just one year before Fitzgerald wrote “Love or Eugenics”:

The quality of human beings should count and not quantity. Is it not wiser and better that prophylaxis precede than wholesale destruction follow?… The general knowledge of the laws of heredity should be more largely disseminated and marriage should primarily depend on the desire to produce ‘worthy’ offspring with the best qualities.

To be clear, when Funkhouser weighs the benefits of “prophylaxis” against a future of “destruction,” the calamity he is referring to is the imagined contamination and degradation of white bloodlines. Prescriptions like these were echoed in countless medical publications of the period and strongly influenced both public policy and popular culture. The same year, the United States Surgeon General, Rupert Blue, advocated for the use of “eugenic marriage certificates,” which would certify the mental and physical health of both partners in advance of their wedding.

By the end of the decade in which Fitzgerald was writing, state fairs across the country would begin to hold “fitter families” contests, transforming these medical recommendations into a recreational pastime. Making an anxious spectacle of the usually unmarked category of whiteness, middle class families competed for “top honors” by undergoing a series of mental and physical evaluations designed to test their eugenic fitness. Winners were announced and ribbons were awarded—though any family that scored a B+ or higher was presented with a medal bearing the inscription, “Yea, I have a goodly heritage.”

Arguably, Fitzgerald is poking fun at practices like these; his lyrics appear to satirize prophylactic marriage and invite skepticism around the wisdom of applying the “laws of heredity” to mate selection. While Dr. Funkhouser would no doubt advocate choosing a “prophylactic dame” over “kisses that set your heart aflame,” the plot arc of the musical validates the opposite outcome as the charming Celeste wins out over the eugenically “fit” Clover.

 

No Concept Of Dopamine Addiction Or Dopamine Hegemony Constitutes A Crippling Conceptual Failure

caitlinjohnstone |  Humanity is becoming more conscious.

It is. This is not a popular thing to say in the more cynical and pessimistic corners of the internet, but it’s true.

I’m not referring to anything “out there” or “spiritual” when I make this assertion. I’m talking about a mundane reality that is easily verifiable by casual observation, if you just look past all the headlines and narrative chatter to see the big picture as a whole.

Humans are becoming more and more aware of what’s going on, both in our world and in ourselves, as our ability to network and share information with each other becomes greater and greater. Because of the ubiquitousness of smartphones and social media, things like police brutality and the abuse of Palestinians are no longer regarded as mere verbal assertions made by their victims but as concrete realities which must be addressed. The most viral posts of the day on apps like Twitter, Reddit and TikTok are routinely just people making relatable observations about their feelings and psychological tendencies and what it’s like to be human.

These things matter. Seeing into each other and around our world all the time like this, in a way we never could before the internet, can’t help but change things. It’s a consistent rule throughout history that every positive change in human behavior has been preceded by an expansion of consciousness, whether it’s becoming collectively conscious of the injustices of racial discrimination or individually conscious of the motives and consequences of our self-destructive behavior. Increasing consciousness is always a movement toward health.

And a movement toward health absolutely is what’s been happening. The young today are the kindest, most sensitive and most awake generation that has ever lived, no matter what the bitter old farts say about them. My kids are having conversations with their friends that are vastly deeper and more tuned-in than I was having with my own friends at their age. The independent content that people are creating without the authorization of the cultural filters in New York and Hollywood can take your breath away every single day if you know where to look, while the movies from the eighties which once enthralled us are today virtually unwatchable because of how shallow and artless they are compared to what we’re now used to seeing.

It’s happening in a weird, sloppy, awkward way, like an infant learning to walk, but it is clearly happening. It’s happening through an internet whose origins are rooted firmly in the US war machine, it’s happening through billionaire-owned social media platforms with extensive ties to powerful governments, it’s happening through technologies that are the fruits of all the most exploitative tendencies of global capitalism, but it’s happening.

Sloppy Toppy Prof. Of Globalization Ian Goldin Self-Glazes As Embarrassingly As Karl W. Smith...,

voxeu |   Despite the tragic deaths, suffering and sadness that it has caused, the pandemic could go down in history as the event that rescued humanity. It has created a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reset our lives and societies onto a sustainable path (Schwab and Malleret 2020, Zakaria 2020). Global surveys and protests have demonstrated the appetite for fresh thinking and a desire not to return to the pre-pandemic world. 

Rescue offers no guarantee of a better life, but it does make it possible. Like refugees whose rescue from a cataclysmic fate allows them to envisage a better future, we now have the potential to create a better world. First, though, we have to traverse a no-man’s-land; we are leaving the old pre-pandemic world but have not yet entered into a new one. This will naturally create anxiety and a desire to return to familiar territory. This is the greatest danger, and recalls the words of Jay Gatsby in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!” Set in the Jazz Age of the Roaring Twenties, the depiction of the exuberance following from the devastating pandemic of 1918 and WWI could well be repeated, as the pent-up desire to socialise and spend creates a roaring 2020s. A century ago, that ended in tears, with the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and WWII.

Bouncing back is bad

In a recent book (Goldin 2021), I argue that that returning to ‘business as usual’, or ‘bouncing back’, means we would be heading in the same direction that brought us to the catastrophe we are in today. Other widely used expressions are similarly worrying. ‘Bouncing forward’ implies we are leaping ahead along the same tracks which lead over a precipice. A Great Reset, as called for by the World Economic Forum, or ‘reboot’, another popular phrase, can suggest that we should go back to what has already been programmed, when what is needed is a different operating system. ‘Building back better’ – the slogan used by the Biden–Harris presidential team – is more encouraging but still worrying; if there is one thing that Covid-19 has taught us, it is that our system is built on shaky foundations. Building back on unstable foundations guarantees future collapse. To prevent future pandemics, which could be much more deadly than Covid-19, and to stop catastrophic climate change and other crises, we need to change direction. Is this possible, and in what way?

Which Is It Klaus - Major Population Reduction Or A New Type Of Slavery?

strategic culture |  With the UN World Food Program announcing that some 270 million people worldwide now face starvation, the ongoing debate about the real aims of the technocracy is profound. The question is whether their aim tends more towards major population reduction, or more towards a new type of slavery.

It appears that philosophical and long-term practical questions remain a mystery. We will argue that evil, not simply the influence of the base upon the superstructure, is at the core of this endeavor. We have defined evil as inflicting the highest degree of pain upon the greatest number of resisting subjects. In short, we have defined evil as sadism, inflicting evil because it brings satisfaction to those inflicting it.

Because evil is fundamentally a destructive force, it cannot create anything: nothing in it is truly novel nor of use to humanity. Its pleasures are short-lived and spurious. It is unsustainable, self-defeating, ultimately leading to self-destruction.

We have adequately assessed from any number of sources that nefarious interests are behind this process, who seek to make the process also about the exercise of power, in addition to several other aims (remaining in power, exercising power in ways consistent with their occult beliefs about evil, etc.). We understand that they are ‘evil’ because they involve a type of ‘power-over’ (as opposed to power-with/consent) which derives this power from fear-mongering and terrorism upon the population. Terrorism here is defined as the operationalized use of fear, pain, and other injury towards socio-political aims.

Had their plans not been rooted in evil, they would have used soft-power tactics like manufacturing consent, to arrive at their ends.

The aim of the Great Reset is to transition the ruling plutocratic oligarchy into a technocratic one. The basis of plutocracy is finance, and the introduction of AI and automation eliminates the basis for finance as the foundation of an economy of scale. This is because automation and deflation move in tandem, making new technologies net losers. Therefore a new paradigm accounting for this post-financial ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, must be introduced.

These Are About To Be Some Exceptionally Interesting Times...,

theeconomiccollapseblog |  Over the past couple of years we have become accustomed to expecting the unexpected, but soon we many have to start anticipating the unthinkable.  In this article, I am going to be discussing a couple of potential scenarios that would have been unimaginable to the vast majority of Americans just a few short years ago.  Unfortunately, our world is now changing at a pace that is absolutely breathtaking, and many things that were once “unimaginable” could soon become reality.

Let’s start by talking about the record-setting heat wave which is making the epic megadrought in the western half of the country even worse.  Many western farmers planted crops this year hoping that weather conditions would eventually turn in their favor, but that has definitely not happened.  In fact, at this point 88 percent of the West is experiencing at least some level of drought.

2021 has been the worst year of this multi-year megadrought so far, and last week was the worst week for this drought up to this point in 2021.  Old temperature records were shattered all over the West, and some areas were already seeing triple digits by 8 o’clock in the morning…

The West is in the midst of a record-breaking heat wave this week, as all-time records were shattered and daily records broken in over a dozen states.

Even by desert standards, the heat wave in the Southwest is atypical. On Thursday, the National Weather Service in Tucson tweeted that the city recorded a temperature of 100 degrees at 8:14 a.m., the second earliest time in the day recorded since 1948.

That is crazy.

Can you imagine hitting triple digits before you have even finished your morning coffee?

Summer had not even officially begun yet last week, and yet new all-time record highs were being established all over the place…

Record-breaking temperatures spread from California to Montana this week. On thursday, the all-time high temperature was tied in Palm Springs, California at 123 degrees, breaking the previous June record of 122 degrees.

Salt Lake City tied its all-time record high of 107 degrees. The old record was notably set in July — when temperatures are usually at their highest for the year in that region. This comes after daily record highs were broken Sunday, Monday and Tuesday in Salt Lake, each with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.

We have never seen anything quite like this in the state of Utah.

More than half of the state is in the highest level of drought, and thanks to dramatic water restrictions farmers are being forced to choose which of their crops will die…

With drastic limits placed on what little water he has, Tom Favero said he and many farmers along this west side of Weber County were forced to watch some crops die. “We’ve all made serious choices of what fields we can water and what we can’t,” Favero said.

Another Utah farmer that lost a lot of corn and an entire field of barley said that it really “hurts” to see his hard work go to waste…

Farmer Dean Martini pointed at one of his fields. “That corn there, where I can’t water, I don’t have the water. It makes me sick to see it go to heck like that.”

With limits on amount and time, he said there wasn’t enough water flowing to make it across his fields. While some of the corn dried up, he had to let a whole field of barley go too. “It hurts buddy. That hurts,” Martini said.

Of course this is just the beginning.

If this summer is as hot and as dry as they are projecting, we could see catastrophic crop failures all across the West.

And that is really bad news, because the state of California alone produces more than a third of our vegetables and about two-thirds of our fruits and nuts.

A few years ago, hardly anyone would have imagined that we would be facing a crisis of this magnitude in 2021, but here we are.  Paleoclimatologist Kathleen Johnson is quite “worried” about what will happen this summer, and she is warning that this drought is shaping up to be the worst the region has experienced “in at least 1,200 years”…

I’m worried about this summer – this doesn’t bode well, in terms of what we can expect with wildfire and the worsening drought. This current drought is potentially on track to become the worst that we’ve seen in at least 1,200 years.

Now I would like to shift gears.

It Makes Me Ashamed And Sad That A Kneegrow Wrote This Isht...,

bloomberg  |  Rising real-estate prices are stoking fears that homeownership, long considered a core component of the American dream, is slipping out of reach for low- and moderate-income Americans. That may be so — but a nation of renters is not something to fear. In fact, it’s the opposite.

The numbers paint a stark picture. After peaking at 69% in 2004, the homeownership rate fell every year until 2016, when it was 64.3% — its lowest level since the Census Bureau started keeping track in 1984. The rate rebounded in Donald Trump’s presidency, hitting 66% in 2020, but that trend is likely to be arrested by a housing market that is desperately short on supply and seeing month-over-month price increases greater than they were in the frenzied market of 2006.

This process is painful, but it’s not all bad. Slowly but surely, most Americans’ single biggest asset — their home — is becoming more liquid. Call it the liquefaction of the U.S. housing market.

Even in the best markets, single-family homes have historically been an extremely illiquid asset. Appraisals have to be made on an individual basis, and mispriced homes can sit on the market for months waiting for a potential buyer — only for that buyer’s financing to fall through.

 

Liquid assets, like publicly traded stocks and corporate bonds, earn what’s known as a liquidity premium: Their market price is many times the dividend or coupon that investors get from holding them. The more liquid an asset, the higher that premium goes. On the flip side, those same high-flying stocks and bonds can see their prices collapse when investors get spooked and withdraw their cash from the market.

Houses have typically traded with very little liquidity premium. That meant a relatively low purchase price compared to what it would cost to rent — the equivalent of the dividend from housing investment — and stable prices over time.

These two factors made houses a good investment for moderate-income families who often lacked the cash and the risk tolerance for market investments. As investments went, single-family homes were cheap and slowly grew in value in both good times and bad.

In the early 21st century, automated appraisals and mortgage underwriting began to change that. Combined with the repackaging of subprime loans into presumably safer CDOs, they created a far more liquid market for housing. In response, housing prices soared — and became more sensitive to the vagaries of the markets. When investors pulled out of CDOs, buyer financing dried up and the whole housing market crashed.

It may have seemed at the time like a failed experiment. But financialization had changed the housing market forever. Houses are now more prone to be priced high relative to rents, and to see their prices fluctuate with the market. The very features that made home buying an affordable and stable investment are coming to an end.