Government Punishment Of Disinformation Is Fundamentally Antithetical To Democracy

tabletmag  |  The unavoidable problems with censoring disinformation have predictably plagued recent laws, including those touted as restricting pandemic-related disinformation in order to protect public health. As the Economist reported in February 2021, “Censorious governments are abusing ‘fake news’ laws,” invoking the pandemic as “an excuse to gag reporters” and to silence critics of pandemic-era policies. In February 2020, Amnesty International noted that Singapore’s 2019 law against “online falsehoods and manipulation” was “repeatedly used to target critics and political opponents.” The Singaporean government could not deny this, but instead claimed that the law’s consistent enforcement against opposition party members was a “coincidence.” To the contrary, these patterns necessarily result from restrictions on such a vague, broad category of speech, even in democratic regimes.

That is why the American Civil Liberties Union brought a 2020 lawsuit challenging disinformation laws that the government of Puerto Rico had recently passed for the asserted purpose of protecting public health and safety. One such law makes it a crime to share “false information” about the government’s post-pandemic emergency and curfew orders with the intent to cause “confusion, panic, or public hysteria.” Shortly after the law went into effect, the Puerto Rican government charged a prominent clergyman with allegedly disseminating false information on WhatsApp about a rumored executive order to close all businesses. In fact, only a short time later, the governor did issue such an order.

Even beyond the speech that disinformation laws directly stifle, these laws also suppress incalculable amounts of important expression, including information about the pandemic that could literally be a matter of life or death. That’s because the laws deter scientists and other experts from providing information to journalists, and journalists are in turn deterred from conveying information to the public, for fear of transgressing—or being charged with transgressing—the laws’ blurry boundaries. The ACLU’s complaint in the Puerto Rico case was filed on behalf of two prominent investigative journalists, who explained that “developing stories on matters of immense public concern are often complex, contentious, and murky,” and thus “inadvertent inaccuracies are inevitable even in the most thoroughly vetted reporting.”

Throughout the pandemic, we have witnessed constantly evolving and shifting views among expert individuals and agencies, as they steadily gather and analyze additional data. Yesterday’s life-endangering “disinformation” can and has become today’s life-protecting gospel. Recall, to cite only the most obvious example, the CDC’s changing edicts about mask-wearing.

Inherently subjective disinformation restrictions can easily be wielded for ulterior purposes, including to promote partisan interests. Consider, for instance, recent evidence that the Biden administration has been pressuring social media companies to restrict content that purportedly purveys disinformation about COVID, in light of allegations that the actual concerns may well involve politics at least as much as public health. Republican members of Congress have claimed that platforms have restricted “conservative” posts on issues related to the pandemic in response to pressure from administration officials, even though the posts contained no factual misrepresentations and simply conveyed perspectives with which the administration disagreed. Whether or not these claims are factually correct, it is true that the concept of disinformation is so open-ended that it could be deployed against particular communications for partisan reasons.

The inevitable manipulability of restrictions on disinformation is well illustrated by YouTube’s recent removal of a video for violating its “medical misinformation policy.” The video, which had been posted by New York Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, was of an August 2021 news conference in which she announced a lawsuit challenging New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s “vaccine passport” as an invasion of privacy and an unreasonable mandate on small businesses. Although Malliotakis supports vaccination, she believes that the mandate constitutes government overreach—a position that the Supreme Court might well end up sharing. After Malliotakis appealed YouTube’s removal, the company said that it was “taking another look” and ultimately reinstated the video, thus underscoring the inherent elasticity of the misinformation concept. Whether or not YouTube actually had a good-faith health reason for its initial removal of the video, the fact remains that the vague policy can easily be invoked as a pretext, masking other motives.

All the more reason, then, to be suspicious of even sincere attempts by public and private authorities to prevent the harm that disinformation can cause. Recall that Southern officials based their libel lawsuits against activists and journalists during the civil rights movement on the dissemination of inaccurate information. What we learned in that era is that disinformation is unavoidable in any vigorous discussion of fast-breaking public issues, and that making it punishable by law can only inhibit democratic debate. It’s time we relearn that lesson.

Let My Brothers And Sisters Work

ladailypost |  WWII was the most devastating and destructive wars of all time. It began when Adolph Hitler took power at a time when Germany was economically and politically unstable. He invaded Poland, and made treaties with Italy and Japan to enhance his ability to dominate the entire world and proceeded to murder 6 million Jews in what he called the “final solution”.

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) was established when the world’s leading scientists wanted to create a weapon that would put an end to Hitler’s plan and the unspeakable devastation of the war.

By bringing together scientists who could put their unique and different minds together in a rigorous way to think and debate and create, LANL was able to win WWII and the cold war afterwards.

Decades later, LANL seems to have lost sight of the value of intellectual freedom and dissent. The latest example is that LANL has asked it’s employees who choose not to take vaccines due to their faith to either quit their job or take leave without pay on Oct. 15.

First of all, this measure seems medically unnecessary, since the vaccination rate at LANL is over 90 percent, which is well above the minimum rate to stop  runaway circulation of COVID-19 at the lab. On top of that, I’m amazed that in a society of free will, more than 90 percent of people would ever choose to do the exact same thing no matter what it is. But what’s mind boggling is that the lab is demanding 100 percent alignment  or you’re fired!

This kind of extreme and unbending policy is not unfamiliar to me. Growing up in a communist country, I witnessed and experienced long brain-washing and knew people were getting their heads cut off when 100 percent consensus wasn’t achieved.

While an individual’s utopian wishful thinking of saving every life may make him a hero some of the time, it’s dangerous when an organization has an utopian policy of saving every life because the results come at the cost of other people’s lives. In this case, life of  hundreds families will put upside down in such a short time.

Personally, I am not even anti-vaccine; I am fully vaccinated.

As a biologist and a Christian, I understand why people choose not to vaccinate for medical or religious reasons. Their choice came with some risks, mostly (>99%) to themselves. Taking a risky path is usually a rare behavior in any group and can lead to valuable contributions to society.

As an organization based on science, LANL should take the lead to protect religious freedom

Why?

Because religion, specifically Christianity, is the father of modern science. Modern science could not exist if there was no Christianity.

Let me explain. I was an atheist before I became a Christian. I experienced two stages of conversion, first emotional conversion and then rational conversion. The rational conversion happened when I  studied the history of modern science, Christianity, and other religions. My conclusion from that study is that modern science could only occur in a society that practices faith. In this short writing, I will tell you briefly about my main reasonings.

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty Puts Everything On The Line In Defense Of Truth And Principles

aaronkheriaty  |  Here is the latest move by the University of California in response to my lawsuit in Federal court challenging their vaccine mandate on behalf of Covid-recovered individuals with natural immunity. Last Thursday Sept 30th at 5:03 PM I received this letter from the University informing me that, as of the following morning, I was being placed on “Investigatory Leave” for my failure to comply with the vaccine mandate. I was given no opportunity to contact my patients, students, residents, or colleagues and let them know I would disappear for a month. Rather than waiting for the court to make a ruling on my case, the University has taken preemptive action:

You might be thinking, a month of paid leave doesn’t sound so bad. But the language is misleading here, since half of my income from the University comes from clinical revenues generated from seeing my patients, supervising resident clinics, and engaging in weekend and holiday on-call duties. So while on leave my salary is significantly cut. Furthermore, my contract stipulates that I am not able to conduct any patient care outside the University: to see my current patients, or to recoup my losses by moonlighting as a physician elsewhere, would violate the terms of my contract.

It came as no surprise that, since my request for a preliminary injunction was not granted by the court, the University would immediately begin procedures to dismiss me. However, in the complicated legal game of three-dimensional chess I did not anticipate this particular development: the current administrative designation, where I am neither able to work at the University nor permitted to pursue work elsewhere, was not a development I had anticipated. The University may be hoping this pressure will lead me to resign “voluntarily,” which would remove grounds for my lawsuit: if I resign prior to being terminated by the University, I have no legal claim of harm.

I have no intention at this time of resigning, withdrawing my lawsuit, or having an unnecessary medical intervention forced on me, in spite of these challenging circumstances. You may be wondering about the CA Department of Public Health vaccine mandate mentioned in the University’s letter above: yes, I am subject to two mandates, the UC mandate as a faculty member and the CA State mandate as a healthcare provider. Regarding the latter mandate, I filed a similar lawsuit in Federal court last Friday against the State Public Health Department. I will post more later on that case as it develops.

Although this is a challenging time for me and my family, at this time I remain convinced that this course of action is worthwhile. I am grateful for your ongoing encouragement, prayers, and support. I want my readers to know that am taking legal action not primarily for myself, but for all those who have no voice and whose Constitutional rights are being steamrolled by these mandates. As I wrote in my first post:

Is Joe Biden Winning The Culture War Over The Mark Of The Beast mRNA NeoVaccinoids?

slate |  On Thursday, President Joe Biden went to Chicago to make his case for COVID-19 vaccination mandates. He warned that unvaccinated Americans were “overrunning” hospitals—thereby crowding out patients who needed care for heart attacks or cancer—and he accused them of jeopardizing the economy by scaring people away from shops and restaurants. Getting vaccinated, said the president, was a simple matter of “being patriotic, doing the right thing.”

Biden has been using this kind of language—moralizing the COVID debate and vilifying noncompliant Americans—for the past month. It’s a formula that Republicans have often exploited in other contexts. Here’s how it works: First, you identify a politically vulnerable minority. Then you accuse that minority of deviant behavior. You depict these people as a threat to everyone else, and you blame them for the country’s troubles. Over the years, conservatives have cynically applied this algorithm to many topics, such as homosexuality, welfare, immigration, Islam, and kneeling for the national anthem. But now it’s being turned against Republicans, because they’ve chained their party to a genuinely deviant minority: vaccine refusers.

Unlike Muslims or gay people, vaccine refusers really do pose an inherent threat to others. Yet Republican politicians proudly embrace them. In Congress, state legislatures, and the courts, conservative governors and lawmakers are fighting to block vaccine requirements—even requirements imposed by private employers—as the virus kills thousands of Americans each week. These politicians accuse progressives of “shaming” vaccine refusers and treating them like “second-class pariahs.” Often, they borrow language from the abortion rights movement, framing vaccination as a matter of “personal choice.” Last week, Sen. Ted Cruz defended NBA players who have declined COVID shots, tweeting “#yourbodyyourchoice.” On Tuesday, another abortion opponent, Sen. Mike Lee, pleaded that unvaccinated Americans “just want to make their own medical decisions.” His fellow pro-lifer, Sen. Ron Johnson, told vaccine proponents to butt out because “it’s not your body.”

For months, Biden was patient with people who resisted vaccination. He offered them retail discounts and paid time off from work to get a shot. He appealed to their altruism, arguing that most would “be convinced by the fact that their failure to get the vaccine may cause other people to get sick and maybe die.” After four years of Donald Trump’s divisiveness, Biden wanted unity. “We’ve had too much conflict, too much bitterness, too much anger, too much polarization,” he lamented in May, referring to the debate over masks. “Let’s remember that we are all in this together.”

 

 

Cornpop Doesn't Know That The mRNA Therapeutics Don't Prevent Covid Infection Or Transmission...,

 

Vaccination requirements work. They drive up vaccination rates, which makes our communities and schools safer, along with strengthening our economic recovery. Vaccine requirements are widely supported, proven successful, and quickly becoming the standard across the country. pic.twitter.com/qo1swxjbYg

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) October 7, 2021

Uh..., About That $700.00/Dose Merck Anti-Covid Pill Though....,

Barrons |  Merck ‘s announcement that its antiviral molnupiravir had halved hospitalizations in a trial of high-risk Covid-19 patients was met with enthusiasm on Friday, inspiring a vision of a world in which treating a Covid-19 infection could be as trivial as swallowing a few pills.

Some scientists who have studied the drug warn, however, that the method it uses to kill the virus that causes Covid-19 carries potential dangers that could limit the drug’s usefulness.

Molnupiravir works by incorporating itself into the genetic material of the virus, and then causing a huge number of mutations as the virus replicates, effectively killing it. In some lab tests, the drug has also shown the ability to integrate into the genetic material of mammalian cells, causing mutations as those cells replicate.

If that were to happen in the cells of a patient being treated with molnupiravir, it could theoretically lead to cancer or birth defects.

Merck (ticker: MRK) says it has run extensive tests in animals that show that this isn’t an issue. “The totality of the data from these studies indicates that molnupiravir is not mutagenic or genotoxic in in-vivo mammalian systems,” a Merck spokesperson said.

Scientists who have studied NHC, the compound that molnupiravir creates in the body after it is ingested, however, say that Merck needs to be careful.

“Proceed with caution and at your own peril,” wrote Raymond Schinazi, a professor of pediatrics and the director of the division of biochemical pharmacology at the Emory University School of Medicine, who has studied NHC for decades, in an email to Barron’s.

Scientists are split on how serious a risk this is, and in the absence of detailed data on Merck’s animal tests, and long-term human safety data, it’s difficult to know for sure.

The safety concerns suggest that the stock market’s reaction to the positive molnupiravir data on Friday might have been overblown. Shares of Merck jumped 8.4% Friday, while shares of Covid-19 vaccine maker Moderna (MNRA) fell 11.4%, and shares of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals (REGN), which developed one of the leading monoclonal antibodies for Covid-19, fell 5.7%. Vir Biotechnology (VIR), which developed another of the monoclonal antibodies in partnership with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), was down 21.1%.

“It was sort of, in effect, wishful thinking,” says SVB Leerink analyst Dr. Geoffrey Porges of investors’ reactions on Friday.

 

Is There A Tipping-Point Where The Wrong Little Person Get's Crushed By The NeoVaccinoid Mandate?

CBS-4  |  A Colorado woman with stage 5 renal failure was months away from getting a new kidney. Now, she and her donor are looking for another hospital after learning UCHealth’s new policy.

According to UCHealth, the majority of transplant recipients and living donors are now required to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Neither woman has received their shots.

Leilani Lutali met her donor, Jaimee Fougner, in Bible study just 10 months ago.

“It’s your choice on what treatment you have. In Leilani’s case, the choice has been taken from her. Her life has now been held hostage because of this mandate,” said Fougner.

Fougner says she hasn’t received the vaccine for religious reasons. Lutali hasn’t gotten the shot because she says there are too many unknowns. Until last week, neither woman thought they needed to be vaccinated for the transplant.

“At the end of August, they confirmed that there was no COVID shot needed at that time,” said Lutali. “Fast forward to Sept. 28. That’s when I found out. Jamie learned they have this policy around the COVID shot for both for the donor and the recipient.”

The women received this letter from UCHealth:

Getting Out Of The "Tried And True Egg-Growing Of Vaccines" By Hijacking Your RNA!

 

Scandinavia Cancels mRNA NeoVaccinoids For Those Under 30 - Pentagon Threatening Dishonorable Discharges

apnews  |  Scandinavian authorities on Wednesday suspended or discouraged the use of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine in young people because of an increased risk of heart inflammation, a very rare side effect associated with the shot.

Sweden suspended the use of Moderna for those recipients under 30, Denmark said those under 18 won’t be offered the Swiss-made vaccine, and Norway urged those under 30 to get the Pfizer vaccine instead.

The countries have adequate supplies of both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and will be able to continue their vaccination campaigns.

In neighboring Finland, authorities are expected to announce their decision Thursday, according to Dr. Hanna Nohynek, chief physician at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, told local broadcaster YLE.

reuters |   Finland on Thursday paused the use of Moderna's (MRNA.O) COVID-19 vaccine for younger males due to reports of a rare cardiovascular side effect, joining Sweden and Denmark in limiting its use.

Mika Salminen, director of the Finnish health institute, said Finland would instead give Pfizer's vaccine to men born in 1991 and later. Finland offers shots to people aged 12 and over.

"A Nordic study involving Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark found that men under the age of 30 who received Moderna Spikevax had a slightly higher risk than others of developing myocarditis," he said.

Swedish and Danish health officials had announced on Wednesday they would pause the use of the Moderna vaccine for all young adults and children, citing the same unpublished study.

Norwegian health officials reiterated on Wednesday that they recommended men under the age of 30 opt for Pfizer's vaccine.

The Finnish institute said the Nordic study would be published within a couple of weeks and preliminary data had been sent to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for further assessment.

Coercion Works!

npr |  In the quest to get more Americans vaccinated, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: Vaccine mandates work.

Nowhere is that more apparent than at United Airlines. On Aug. 6, United became the first U.S. airline to tell its workers to get vaccinated against COVID-19 if they wanted to keep their jobs.

The company says 99.5% of United employees have been vaccinated, not counting the roughly 2,000 who have applied for religious or medical exemptions. Elsewhere, other employers also report success with mandates. Tyson Foods, New York City schools, major hospital systems in Maine and the NBA are among those with vaccination rates topping 90%.

Taking the shot isn't an easy decision for many people. One of them was Margaret Applegate, a San Francisco-based customer service agent with United for 29 years. She was proud of how United had handled the pandemic up until then — the lengths the airline had gone to for keeping workers and customers safe, even partnering with Clorox on cleaning and disinfecting.

Now she no longer felt so proud.

Applegate, who is 57, had not gotten vaccinated. Like many people, she was scared. She'd heard from friends in the U.S. and abroad about bad reactions to the shots, and she worried that the vaccine could exacerbate her heart condition.

She was also uneasy about how quickly the COVID-19 vaccines had been developed and authorized for use.

"I thought that was a little bit too rushed. It just felt too rushed," she says.

Still, she wrestled with what to do. She was troubled by the death of a co-worker from COVID-19 and the diminished health of another co-worker who had been hospitalized with the virus and survived. She recognized the vaccine mandate as her company's final push to keep employees safe.

 

The Vaccine Mandate Has Taught Elites "In The Future Go Straight To Coercion!"

FT |  Vaccine mandates are not incurring a vicious public backlash, at least not yet. Almost a month has passed since President Joe Biden announced that most US workers would have to be vaccinated or frequently tested. Street protests are real but containable. Resignations from work are at modest levels. The governor of California even feels emboldened to require vaccines for school children….

If it holds, the public’s grudging tolerance of mandates will have eye-opening lessons. For one, people are hopeless predictors of their own future behaviour. Surveys had suggested a rash of job-quitting in the event of employer mandates (just as they had implied that France, whose vaccination rate is pulling ahead of Britain’s, would be a laggard). Public opinion data does not just inform the election predictions of speculative columnists. It is also an important basis of government policy. If the science has a systemic blind spot for the future, for what people think they would do in hypothetical scenarios, it has distorted governance.

Another conclusion is that partisanship has its uses… It is a sign of the most dire civic rot that people base even their approach to personal health on their tribal fealties. But it also means that Biden’s mandate is mostly alienating those who were never going to vote for him anyway. The very bifurcation of America can empower as well as curb a leader.

Of all the inferences to be drawn from the elusive backlash, the last is the most far-reaching. In fact, after five years of anti-elite politics, from Brazil to the Philippines, it feels transgressive to express this thought: in the end, people want to be led.

A truism, possibly? Or something more unpleasant? More:

The public has already supplied an example of what we might call enlightened docility. Imagine being told in 2016 that, in four years, there would be vast support for a lockdown with no peacetime precedent, prescribed by an invisible expert class. Next to coercion of that scale and nature, the mandates are laissez-faire. I say all this with the jitters of a man carrying a vase in a greased hand across a stone floor.

No, not concerning at all! In a way, the whole process resembles the neoliberal playbook: (1) Degrade public health by underfunding and corruption, (2) watch it fail in a very public test, and (3) replace it with coercion. Best of all, in future you can go directly to coercion!

OSHA - Any Adverse Reaction To An Employer Mandated Covid Jab Is Work-Related

ENR  |  New guidance from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration is causing contractors to change their COVID-19 vaccine requirements, and many of them criticize the guidance as diametrically opposed to the Biden administration's stated desire to increase vaccinations.

Update: EEOC Says It Will Create Specialized Return-to-Work Guidelines

On April 20, OSHA released the new guidance in the frequently asked questions section of its website for COVID-19 safety compliance.  

The question asks whether an employer should record adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccination if the employer requires the vaccine. OSHA states that if a vaccine is required, then any adverse reaction is considered work-related and therefore it must be recorded. Under OSHA rules, most employers with more than 10 employees are required to keep a record of serious work-related injuries and illnesses. Recorded injuries and illnesses become part of a contractors safety record.

TAKE OUR POLL: Do you agree with OSHA's guidance on employers requiring vaccines?

This is the actual text of the new question and answer on the OSHA website:

"If I require my employees to take the COVID-19 vaccine as a condition of their employment, are adverse reactions to the vaccine recordable?

"If you require your employees to be vaccinated as a condition of employment (i.e., for work-related reasons), then any adverse reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine is work-related. The adverse reaction is recordable if it is a new case under 29 CFR 1904.6 and meets one or more of the general recording criteria in 29 CFR 1904.7."

In response, several large contractors said they have changed or will change their vaccination policy to only recommend—not require—a vaccine.

"We, sadly, had to back off our (employee vaccination) mandate because OSHA did something I don't understand at all," said Bob Clark, founder and executive chairman of Clayco in a recent ENR Critical Path podcast. "I side with OSHA frequently, we're in its VIP program, but on this they're just wrong. It's a terrible decision they've made and I think it'll be overturned."

Clark said Clayco, which participated in crafting the initial Centers for Disease Control guidance on construction site safety during the pandemic, would be communicating with OSHA through members of congress to seek changes to the guidance. A spokeswoman for OSHA did not immediately return messages asking for clarification of the new guidance. Construction industry groups universally panned the guidance and said it would hurt their efforts to encourage employees to get vaccinated.

"What they put forward could potentially discourage employers from supporting their workers getting the vaccine," said Kevin Cannon, senior director of safety and health services at the Associated General Contractors of America. "AGC is not in support of any mandate, however we participated, April 19th through 23rd, in vaccine awareness week. We had a lot of members who were in chapters that supported the event. We even had some who hosted vaccine clinics on an active job site or in their offices."

Cannon said some member contractors may have changed their approach to those events had they known, at the time, they could potentially "be on the hook for recording these potential adverse reactions."

Retail And Pharmaceutical Distribution Of Psychedelics Will Destroy Millions More Minds And Lives

caitlinjohnstone |   “Money has begun flowing into companies intending to monetize psychedelic therapy as new research has increasingly shown that blowing one’s mind can alter it for the better,” reads a new article for the Los Angeles Times titled “Money is pouring into psychedelics. Meet the mystical hedge fund investor bankrolling the boom.”

“This scientific and commercial excitement rests on research showing that psychedelics can supercharge mental health treatment for PTSD, depression, anxiety, addiction, and other chronic ailments of the mind, enabling patients to dive deep, confront their traumas and — a rarity for mental illnesses — return healed,” the article reads. “That goes for synthetic chemicals such as MDMA and ketamine as well as plant-derived drugs such as psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), the South American plant brew ayahuasca, and the West African root-derived substance iboga.”

LA Times’ Sam Dean shares the personal journey of hedge fund investor Sa’ad Shah and his involvement in what has become a multibillion-dollar psychedelics industry long before even the legal infrastructure necessary for such companies to turn a profit is in place. We learn of Shah’s experience with ayahuasca, his interest in mystical traditions and personal growth, and his conviction in the shift that has for the last few years been known as the psychedelic renaissance.

And then, about halfway down the article, we get to the actual meat of the matter:

“Shah welcomes big pharma and big institutions to enter the fray in the interest of spreading the chemical gospel far and wide. He sees the financial and therapeutic potential for psychedelics not in the cannabis model, which would make psychedelics broadly available for retail purchase, but in the pharmaceutical mode — psychedelics as prescribed drugs, with patent rights, administered in medical settings.”

That “with patent rights” bit right there is behind the so-called psychedelic renaissance we’ve been hearing so much about: “favoring the FDA regulatory route over the Oregon route,” as a psychiatrist cited in the article put it. It’s being driven not by the need to free human consciousness from the prohibition-induced coma it’s been under since the sixties so that we can collectively navigate through the many existential hurdles our species is fast approaching with wisdom and insight, but by the agenda to make rich people even richer by forcefully controlling psychedelic substances via the pharmaceutical industry.

How To Solve The Crime Problem In A Big City

1. End Drug Prohibition

2. Treat Drug Addiction As Mental Illness

3. Restore Residential Mental Health Treatment Facilities

quora |  I thought I was a man of the world when I joined the police. I was 31, served ten years in the army, a couple of years on the news desks and a few more in drama production all over the world. A few weeks into my first beat I realised most of my assumptions of police work were Hollywood. I had a better idea of the ground situation in the Balkans than I did my own city.

This was my first beat in 2002. To the south were celeb and banker heavy clubs, bohemians and bright young things flaunting their success in the drinking squares. The remnants of the Curtain Theatre where Shakespeare learnt his trade sits squarely in the middle. It was a veneer factory when I attended it after a burglary and got to stand on the last 3ft of original stage.

When I first walked it the Prime Minister’s home address was just off the top left corner of this map in Islington. The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony video was still popular and was filmed on Hoxton Street along the eastern boundary.

The Provost estate sits in the top right corner of the beat. I entered my first crack den there: Two toms (prostitutes), a street artist (beggar) and a small business owner (distribution of car tyres) all cooking up while a half mummified dog was still chained to the radiator in the back room. The floor had been used as a toilet and newspaper put down to cover the mess, a four inch duvet of human waste.

You could see the back yard of the Police Station from the window.

At the end of my first year I had to turn in a file on my beat - an intelligence and ground picture of: prom nom sightings (prominent nominals - the bigger players in crime); PYOs (persistent young offenders - much the same but under 18); gang nominals; street dealers; drug prices; robbery hotspots; burglary trends; vehicle crime methods; drug dens and stairwells. The names of homeless and street drinkers; bouncers; shop keepers; prostitutes the lot.

It was a record of what you had been up to and what you’d taken notice of.

One important aspect was to build a map of your ground: active crack houses / drug dens were a big part of this picture, my bosses loved closing them down and getting pictures in the papers. Wherever they sprung up anti-social behaviour, criminal damage, robbery, theft from vehicles, snatches and begging would spread out like ink blots on a map.

So drugs are bad - whole estates reduced to stinking derelicts as the locust-zombies meander your patch devouring goodwill and community relations. So we closed them down on a regular basis. We’d push them onto the next beat and three months later they got pushed back to us and you started collecting the evidence again.

The most common venues for drugs dens were the homes of vulnerable adults. Long ago it was decided that people with severe learning disabilities or chronic mental health issues would get more from life if they got their care in the community. The officials running this policy swiftly became inundated and the locusts descended in lieu.

Nice little cash cows are folk on disability benefit. You can trash their house and the council will get them a new one. You can get a free car lease and insurance thru motability finance if you just claim to be the carer of the vulnerable disabled person you’re using as a cash cow and shell company for the low-level fraud you fund your habit with.

In my annual report I had found evidence of maybe thirty drug addled locusts in four squats. I may have missed some but they are not covert. Let’s say those addicts are using twice a day (the upper scale of use) thats 30 x £40 a day = £1,200 a day - £438,000 a year to be made supplying crack and heroin to the locusts in this small square of London.

 

Civil War IS Coming - Embrace The Suck And Move On...,

alt-market |  There are a lot of assumptions and misconceptions when it comes to the notion of a second civil war within the US. What I see most often is the argument that the political left has “already won” the war without firing a shot and that a rebellion would be crushed under the heel of a newly a-wokened military industrial complex and a leftist controlled federal government. The problem is, this argument is extremely naive and ignores the bigger picture.

I think there are a couple of reasons why certain people press the leftist supremacy theory: First, they greatly fear the idea of a kinetic war breaking out and find the idea of combat repellent. So, they act as if a shooting war cannot ever be won. They hide their fear behind a veil of “rationalism” and thin hopes of a completely passive resistance. They figure that if they can’t fight and win, then no one else can fight and win.

Second, the motives of some of these people are more nefarious than fearful. One of the primary functions of 4^th Generation (psychological) warfare is to convince a target population that “resistance is futile.” If you can make them believe that winning is impossible then they may not fight at all, and thus the prophecy is self fulfilling.

Luckily this method of propaganda does not seem to be working on a large number of Americans. That said, there are many layers to the scenario of civil war. While the extreme cultism of leftists is relegated to a small percentage of the population, they are supported by almost every major institution in our nation. The federal government supports and protects them. Some state and local governments support and protect them. The mainstream media avidly sings their praises. Most corporations and Big Tech platforms support them and spread social justice doctrine along with them. And, all globalist foundations support, organize and even fund them.

All the people that the political left used to consider evil are now on their side. This gives their small cult unprecedented social power and a number of political weapons to use when they desire to threaten or harm people who disagree with them. For now, most of this power is actually used to terrify other people on the left.

There are many moderate democrats that have a distaste for the lunacy of social justice warriors, but they are so afraid of being labeled heretics, racists, fascists, etc. that they keep their mouths shut or support draconian policies because they think they have to in order to defend their political team. Limp-wristed moderates and old school democrats that go along to get along are almost as big a problem as hardcore leftists because they don’t have the guts to stand up to the bullies in their own political circles.

This is how we end up with around half the country in support of vaccine passport mandates, a totalitarian agenda which would give government complete control over the health decisions of individual Americans, complete control over how businesses operate and who they are allowed to hire, not to mention complete control over the economic participation of the average citizen. Vaccine passports are the ULTIMATE POWER in the hands of government to decide the life and death of individuals and their families. And, not surprisingly, the political left and democrats are by far the biggest group backing the government and the globalists on this agenda.

This places our nation in a difficult position; the political left desperately wants to control the lives of others while conservatives and some moderates just want to be left alone. We are at an impasse. We cannot share the same spaces, we cannot share the same government and we may not even be able to share the same land mass.

Our ideals are mutually exclusive. We believe in freedom and individual responsibility and they simply do not.

Make no mistake, an outright conflict is coming in the US and the people in alternative media circles that fear it need to come to terms with that fear and accept the inevitability of war. The sooner they do this the sooner they can take action to mitigate the damage to their families and communities. There will come a day very soon when you will have to defend your freedoms and the freedoms of future generations with your life. Embrace the suck and move on.

The Atlantic Asks "Are White People Getting Ready For Civil War?"

theatlantic |   “Let me start big. The mission of the Claremont Institute is to save Western civilization,” says Ryan Williams, the organization’s president, looking at the camera, in a crisp navy suit. “We’ve always aimed high.” A trumpet blares. America’s founding documents flash across the screen. Welcome to the intellectual home of America’s Trumpist right.

As Donald Trump rose to power, the Claremont universe—which sponsors fellowships and publications, including the Claremont Review of Books and The American Mind—rose with him, publishing essays that seemed to capture why the president appealed to so many Americans and attempting to map a political philosophy onto his presidency. Williams and his cohort are on a mission to tear down and remake the right; they believe that America has been riven into two fundamentally different countries, not least because of the rise of secularism. “The Founders were pretty unanimous, with Washington leading the way, that the Constitution is really only fit for a Christian people,” Williams told me. It’s possible that violence lies ahead. “I worry about such a conflict,” Williams told me. “The Civil War was terrible. It should be the thing we try to avoid almost at all costs.”

That almost is worth noticing. “The ideal endgame would be to effect a realignment of our politics and take control of all three branches of government for a generation or two,” Williams said. Trump has left office, at least for now, but those he inspired are determined to recapture power in American politics. My conversation with Williams has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

---

Emma Green: What do you see as the threats to Western civilization?

Ryan Williams: The one we have focused on at the Claremont Institute is the progressive movement. [Progressives think that] limited government, in the Founders’ sense—checks and balances, robust federalism, a fairly fixed view of human nature and the rights attendant to it—all has to give way to a notion that rights evolve with the times.

The biggest institutional part of [the progressive movement] is this large bureaucracy or administrative state, which is insulated from control by the executive or even, increasingly, by Congress.

I would say the leading edge of progressivism now is this kind of woke, social-justice anti-racism. It’s a threat to limited government because it seems to take its lead from scholars like Ibram Kendi, who has proposed a Department of Anti-racism that would basically have carte blanche control over local and state governments. His definition of racism is any policy that results in disparate outcomes for different groups. And we take issue with that. You always have different outcomes between different groups. Human nature is varied. We all have different talents. The pursuit of equal results is only going to be successful in a new woke totalitarianism. I realize that sounds a little hyperbolic, but that seems to be the road we’re on.

Green: We’re going to unpack “woke totalitarianism” in a second, but I want to make sure I’m understanding your starting point correctly. When you say Western civilization, it sounds like you’re not necessarily describing people situated in geography or time but rather a set of ideas that you believe are falling out of fashion or are being actively destroyed by various forces in society. Am I getting you right?

Williams: You can never really divorce a set of ideas and principles from the people in which it grew up. America is an idea, but it’s not just that. It’s the people who settled it, founded it, and made it flourish.

Green: Just to ask the question directly, do you mean white people?

Williams: No, not necessarily. I mean, Western civilization happens to be where a lot of white people are, historically, but I don’t think there’s any necessary connection between the two. The ability to believe in natural rights and a regime of limited government the way the Founders did is not reserved only to white people.

How Can Cornpop Unite America When He Can Barely Unite Words Into Coherent Sentences?

centerforpolitics  | To achieve understanding that can empower effective compromise, deeper insights into the political and social-psychological motivations that animate each side of the political spectrum are needed. Toward those ends, this Center for Politics/Project Home Fire study aims to:

— Provide a deeper understanding of the dangerous divide that threatens America’s pursuit of universally representative democracy.

— Uncover the politically and psychologically motivated “compromise receptive” subgroups that exist among Biden and Trump voters.

— Identify compromise corridors (the policy and issue areas both Biden and Trump voters care about) and compromise clusters (those groups of compromise receptive Biden and Trump voters who both care about a particular policy or issue area and express less dissimilar opinions).

— Reveal the specific pathways to persuade Americans on both sides of the divide to open their minds to mutually beneficial compromise that accrues to the bigger goal of preserving, protecting, and expanding America’s universally representative democracy.

“Our hope is that, by employing the tools of modern behavioral science, Project Home Fire can develop a deep, data-driven understanding of the fears and concerns animating the increasingly dangerous political and cultural divide in America. The first step toward effectively solving a problem is to accurately understand its causes and we believe Project Home Fire can provide such understanding,” said Robert “Mick” McWilliams of Project Home Fire.

“The logical conclusion then, is that it is in the long-term interest of the country to pursue a series of strategies and tactics that encourage bridge-building and constructive dialogue and re-affirm America’s reputation as the world’s leading representative democracy. Simply put — we need a real plan to heal our fractured democracy. In our research, we have uncovered some pathways to help do that,” said Project Home Fire’s Larry Schack.

Western Media Blackout Of The Most Successful Pandemic Control In The World Using Ivermectin

Last week I used Dr. John Campbell's great video about Ivermectin in the context of an explanation for why U.S. physicians have been hamstrung in prescribing Ivermectin for Covid treatment and prophylaxis.  I also questioned the generalized western media blackout on the amazing pandemic control results realized in India while having mRNA neovaccinoid proliferation only in the single digits, but widespread Ivermectin prophylaxis and treatment.

desertreview  |  Now is the right moment to notice the onslaught of United States poison control articles attempting to smear Ivermectin, a drug proven safe and effective in the Uttar Pradesh test-and-treat program administered under the auspices of both the WHO and CDC.

It is appropriate to remind the reader that the WHO and CDC possess direct and recent knowledge of Ivermectin use for COVID-19 in India. Moreover, they know better than anyone the colossal effectiveness and overwhelming safety of Ivermectin used in those millions of Uttar Pradesh test and treat kits.

Perhaps it is also time to ask why exactly Dr. Tess Lawrie’s peer-reviewed meta-analysis was given an Altimetric score of 26,697, making it number eight out of some 18 million publications. 

https://hopepressworks.org/f/ivermectin-meta-analysis-by-dr-tess-lawrie-nears-most-cited-ever

This rank is far better than the top 1%, which would only need a ranking of 180,000 for it to rank in the top 1%. It would only need 18,000 for it to rank in the top .1%. Ranking in the top .001% would mean #180. Therefore, at number eight, it is 8/180 of the top .001% or roughly the top 4.4% of the top .001%. This article ranks in the top 5% of the top .001%!

In other words, only seven articles in the world out of those 18 million are ranked higher.

This peer-reviewed paper is one of the most cited of medical references of all time – period. That should alert any reader – immediately - to its historical significance. Dr. Tess Lawrie is a 30-year veteran WHO evidence synthesis expert. Her conclusion is every bit as meaningful as the article's rank. Here are those words,

“Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using Ivermectin. Using Ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that Ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.”

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34145166/

Maybe it is time to ask why Dr. Pierre Kory’s peer-reviewed narrative review of Ivermectin ranks #38 out of the same 18 million publications. 

He concludes, “Finally, the many examples of Ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality reduction indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8088823/

If Dr. Lawrie’s paper is ranked in the top 5% of the top .001% of all such published medical articles of all time, then Dr. Kory’s is not far behind.  His is 38/180 of the top .001% or the top 21% of the top .001% 

Thus, both articles would rank in the rarified atmosphere of nearly one in a million.

Therefore, the reader must now ask why two magnificent independent reviews from two different continents, coming to the same conclusion, are both ignored by our world’s medical leaders?

Uttar Pradesh is one such population that experienced a considerable drop in COVID-19 morbidity and mortality months AFTER Dr. Kory’s article was published on April 22, 2021. Therefore, one must ask that if Ivermectin so predictably and safely eradicates COVID-19, then why is it not being systematically deployed over all the world, as Dr. Kory and Dr. Lawrie suggest?

Perhaps every reader needs to ask themselves this question - Why is it that BOTH Dr. Lawrie’s and Dr. Kory’s supremely-rated expert review articles, published in the medical literature on PubMed, the National Library of Medicine, are BANNED from Wikipedia?

https://www.thedesertreview.com/opinion/columnists/wikipedia-and-a-pint-of-gin/article_22ffa0d8-dde9-11eb-be75-d7b0b1f2ff67.html

Although India’s Ivermectin victory over COVID  may have been lost on bent-on-vaccinating-everyone Big Pharma and Big Regulators, the message seems to have gotten through to the man on the street. If Google Trends is any indicator, interest in Ivermectin is exploding, and for good reason. We are all being systematically deceived by influential organizations in the name of profits.

https://www.thedesertreview.com/opinion/columnists/gaslighting-ivermectin-vaccines-and-the-pandemic-for-profit/article_19f42a96-05c5-11ec-8172-d776656bad51.html

https://trialsitenews.com/is-the-ivermectin-situation-rigged-in-favor-of-industry-is-the-big-tobacco-analogy-appropriate/

A daily onslaught of media propaganda bombards us with messages attempting to steer us away from the safest and most effective treatments.

https://www.thedesertreview.com/opinion/columnists/the-ivermectin-deworming-hoax---part-ii-eric-clapton-s-human-rights-warning/article_284902bc-14be-11ec-8d43-43e98275cff8.html

Interest in Ivermectin and India is only increasing and has now reached an all-time high. India’s conquest of COVID-19 is concealed no longer. The secret is out. And perhaps, at long last, that much-anticipated WHO Final Report detailing the most successful Pandemic campaign of any place on earth will be published.

NIH/NIAID Blatantly Lying - Pretending It Just Now Figured Out Aerosol Transmission

NYTimes | Newer variants of the coronavirus like Alpha and Delta are highly contagious, infecting far more people than the original virus. Two new studies offer a possible explanation: The virus is evolving to spread more efficiently through air.

The realization that the coronavirus is airborne indoors transformed efforts to contain the pandemic last year, igniting fiery debates about masks, social distancing and ventilation in public spaces.

Most researchers now agree that the coronavirus is mostly transmitted through large droplets that quickly sink to the floor and through much smaller ones, called aerosols, that can float over longer distances indoors and settle directly into the lungs, where the virus is most harmful.

The new studies don’t fundamentally change that view. But the findings signal the need for better masks in some situations, and indicate that the virus is changing in ways that make it more formidable.

“This is not an Armageddon scenario,” said Vincent Munster, a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who led one of the new studies. “It is like a modification of the virus to more efficient transmission, which is something I think we all kind of expected, and we now see it happening in real time.”

Dr. Munster’s team showed that small aerosols traveled much longer distances than larger droplets and the Alpha variant was much more likely to cause new infections via aerosol transmission. The second study found that people infected with Alpha exhaled about 43 times more virus into tiny aerosols than those infected with older variants.

The studies compared the Alpha variant with the original virus or other older variants. But the results may also explain why the Delta variant is so contagious — and why it displaced all other versions of the virus.

“It really indicates that the virus is evolving to become more efficient at transmitting through the air,” said Linsey Marr, an expert in airborne viruses at Virginia Tech who was not involved in either study. “I wouldn’t be surprised if, with Delta, that factor were even higher.”

Thicker Than Cold Peanut Butter And Hotter Than A $2.00 Pistol - Everything Else Is Conversation...,

nytimes |   Just like the original Sphinx, the Phoenix Sphinx is blocking the way until those who would move ahead solve her riddle:

What does Kyrsten Sinema want? And why doesn’t she stick around to explain it?

The 1973 Film Soylent Green Was Set In The Year 2022 - YOU Are The Soylent Green...,

rutherford  |  It’s no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.

This is what we know: the government has the means, the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons, detention centers, and FEMA concentration camps paid for with taxpayer dollars.

It’s just a matter of time.

It no longer matters what the hot-button issue might be (vaccine mandates, immigration, gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage, healthcare, criticizing the government, protesting election results, etc.) or which party is wielding its power like a hammer.

The groundwork has already been laid.

Under the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military can detain and imprison American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a terrorist.

So it should come as no surprise that merely criticizing the government or objecting to a COVID-19 vaccine could get you labeled as a terrorist.

After all, it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore, especially given that the government likes to use the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

For instance, the Department of Homeland Security broadly defines extremists as individuals, military veterans and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”

Military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan may also be characterized as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats by the government because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”

Indeed, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

According to the FBI, you might also be classified as a domestic terrorism threat if you espouse conspiracy theories or dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s.

The government also has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

This is what happens when you not only put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police but also give those agencies liberal authority to lock individuals up for perceived wrongs.

It’s a system just begging to be abused by power-hungry bureaucrats desperate to retain their power at all costs.

Human Sacrifice Is Back With A Vengeance - Just Not The Archaic Pagan Variety

Human sacrifice is back with a vengeance, and this time we’re not throwing virgins into a volcano to stop an eruption or cutting the hearts out of prisoners-of-war to feed the gods and maintain cosmic balance. Instead, we’re calculating how many humans, along with other living creatures, must be sacrificed to keep economic growth going.

From the systemic degradation of the public health system link:

Somewhere in the last year public health lost its soul. The goal of fostering individual and collective health and well-being became secondary to disputable economic growth indicators and radical utilitarianism regarding the value of human lives. The focus on equity that was central in all public health discourses fell as one of the first victims of the discipline turn toward political symbiosis and realpolitik. The ambition to be a science-driven evidence-based practice continues to be daily trampled in evidence-free statements (Daflos, 2021; Goldman, 2020).

The neoliberal nations of the world are as much in thrall to religion as medieval Europe, but YHWH and the rest of the Trinity have been replaced by the Invisible Hand and monotheistic theology by the myths of growth and money. Where human sacrifice was practiced on victims numbered in the dozens or less in times past, now millions, and before long perhaps billions, will be sacrificed - justified by ungrounded speculation and willful blindness to alternatives.

slatestarcodex |   4. The Malthusian trap, at least at its extremely pure theoretical limits. Suppose you are one of the first rats introduced onto a pristine island. It is full of yummy plants and you live an idyllic life lounging about, eating, and composing great works of art (you’re one of those rats from The Rats of NIMH

You live a long life, mate, and have a dozen children. All of them have a dozen children, and so on. In a couple generations, the island has ten thousand rats and has reached its carrying capacity. Now there’s not enough food and space to go around, and a certain percent of each new generation dies in order to keep the population steady at ten thousand.

A certain sect of rats abandons art in order to devote more of their time to scrounging for survival. Each generation, a bit less of this sect dies than members of the mainstream, until after a while, no rat composes any art at all, and any sect of rats who try to bring it back will go extinct within a few generations.

In fact, it’s not just art. Any sect at all that is leaner, meaner, and more survivalist than the mainstream will eventually take over. If one sect of rats altruistically decides to limit its offspring to two per couple in order to decrease overpopulation, that sect will die out, swarmed out of existence by its more numerous enemies. If one sect of rats starts practicing cannibalism, and finds it gives them an advantage over their fellows, it will eventually take over and reach fixation.

If some rat scientists predict that depletion of the island’s nut stores is accelerating at a dangerous rate and they will soon be exhausted completely, a few sects of rats might try to limit their nut consumption to a sustainable level. Those rats will be outcompeted by their more selfish cousins. Eventually the nuts will be exhausted, most of the rats will die off, and the cycle will begin again. Any sect of rats advocating some action to stop the cycle will be outcompeted by their cousins for whom advocating anything is a waste of time that could be used to compete and consume.

For a bunch of reasons evolution is not quite as Malthusian as the ideal case, but it provides the prototype example we can apply to other things to see the underlying mechanism. From a god’s-eye-view, it’s easy to say the rats should maintain a comfortably low population. From within the system, each individual rat will follow its genetic imperative and the island will end up in an endless boom-bust cycle.

5. Capitalism. Imagine a capitalist in a cutthroat industry. He employs workers in a sweatshop to sew garments, which he sells at minimal profit. Maybe he would like to pay his workers more, or give them nicer working conditions. But he can’t, because that would raise the price of his products and he would be outcompeted by his cheaper rivals and go bankrupt. Maybe many of his rivals are nice people who would like to pay their workers more, but unless they have some kind of ironclad guarantee that none of them are going to defect by undercutting their prices they can’t do it.

Like the rats, who gradually lose all values except sheer competition, so companies in an economic environment of sufficiently intense competition are forced to abandon all values except optimizing-for-profit or else be outcompeted by companies that optimized for profit better and so can sell the same service at a lower price.

(I’m not really sure how widely people appreciate the value of analogizing capitalism to evolution. Fit companies – defined as those that make the customer want to buy from them – survive, expand, and inspire future efforts, and unfit companies – defined as those no one wants to buy from – go bankrupt and die out along with their company DNA. The reasons Nature is red and tooth and claw are the same reasons the market is ruthless and exploitative)

From a god’s-eye-view, we can contrive a friendly industry where every company pays its workers a living wage. From within the system, there’s no way to enact it.

(Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose blood is running money!)

 

Degradation Of The Public Health System Wasn't Caused By The Evil Ineptitude Of Fauci And Walensky

authorea |  In most Western countries, and in the majority of Canadian provinces, the COVID response symbiotically produced by political actors and public health institutions caused multiple disconnects: between the scientific evidence on COVID transmission and the public health sanctioned advice; between public health and governmental discourses prioritizing the wellbeing of the population and containment strategies focused mostly on economic indicators; and between inclusive discourses putting forward collective sacrifices for a common good and deeply inequitable interventions. 

At the time of writing this commentary, those disconnects have grown too deep to be hidden. More efforts seem to go in controlling the political spin and rationing the information made available than in trying to correct documented deficiencies (Daflos, 2021; Thomas & Gervais, 2021). This is not to say that there is no push back by some public health officials and it could be that fierce debates are taking place behind closed doors. But, in most jurisdictions there have been little to no place for open dissension (Deep Singh, 2021).

 

Somewhere in the last year public health lost its soul. The goal of fostering individual and collective health and well-being became secondary to disputable economic growth indicators and radical utilitarianism regarding the value of human lives. The focus on equity that was central in all public health discourses fell as one of the first victims of the discipline turn toward political symbiosis and realpolitik. The ambition to be a science-driven evidence-based practice continues to be daily trampled in evidence-free statements (Daflos, 2021; Goldman, 2020).

 

In the following months and years, we should expect the COVID pandemic to be used to support calls for increased budgets by public health state bureaucracies. And many valid arguments can be made in support of stronger public health. However, it would be a huge mistake to ignore what the discipline lost in the pandemic, and the causes explaining the disconnects discussed here. The pandemic caused public health to turn back to its medical roots instead of leveraging the interdisciplinarity it long preached (Greenhalgh et al., 2021). It pushed many public health state bureaucracies to become tools for governments instead of being carriers for evidence-based information. And more generally it caused the discipline to renege most of its principles.

RNA Is The Embodied Information That Sets Causal Boundary Conditions

axial  |  Schrödinger won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 and was exiled from his native home Austria after the nation was annexed by Nazi Germany. He moved to Ireland after he was invited to set up the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. This follows the past history of Ireland acting as a storehouse of knowledge during the Dark Ages. After decades of work, biology was becoming more formalized around the 1940s. Better tools were emerging to perturb various organisms and samples and the increasing number of discoveries was building out the framework of life. With the rediscovery of Mendel’s work on genetics, scientists probably most importantly Thomas Hunt Morgan and his work on fruit flies (Drosophila) set up the rules of heredity - genes located on chromosomes with each cell containing a set of chromosomes. In 1927, a seminal discovery was made that irradiation by X-rays of fruits flies can induce mutations. Just the medium was not known where Schrödinger was thinking through his ideas on biology. At the same type, organic chemistry was improving and various macromolecules in the cell such as enzymes were being identified along with the various types of bonds made. For Schrödinger, there were no tools to characterized these macromolecules (i.e. proteins, nucleic acids) such as X-ray crystallography. Really the only tool useful at the time was centrifugation. At the time, many people expected proteins to be the store and transmitter of genetic information. Luckily, Oswald Avery published an incredible paper in 1944 that found DNA as probably the store instead of proteins.

With this knowledge base Schrödinger took a beginner’s mind to biology. In some ways his naivety was incredibly useful. Instead of being anchored to some widely-accepted premise that proteins transmitted genetic information (although he had a hunch some protein was responsible), the book thought from first principles and identified a few key concepts in biology that were not appreciated but became very important. Thankfully Schrödinger was curious - he enjoyed writing poetry and reading philosophy so jumped into biology somewhat fearlessly. At the beginning of the book, he sets the main question as:

“How can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?”

Information

In the first chapter, Schrödinger argues that because organisms have orderly behavior they must follow the laws of physics. Because physics relies on statistics, life was follow the same rules. He then argues that because biological properties have some level of permanence the material that stores this information then must be stable. This material must have the ability to change from one stable state to another (i.e. mutations). Classical physics is not very useful here, but for Schrödinger his expertise in quantum mechanics helped determine that these stable states must be held together through covalent bonds (a quantum phenomena) within a macromolecule. In the early chapters, the book argues that the gene must be a stable macromolecule.

Through discussion around the stability of the gene, the book makes its most important breakthrough - an analogy between a gene and an aperiodic crystal (DNA is aperiodic but Schrödinger amazingly didn’t know that at the time): “the germ of a solid.” Simply, a periodic crystal can store a small amount of information with an infinite number of atoms and an aperiodic crystal has the ability to store a near infinite amount of information in a small number of atoms. The latter was more in line with what the current data suggested what a gene was. Max Delbrück had similar ideas along with J.B.S. Haldane, but the book was the first to connect this idea to heredity. But readers at the time and maybe even still overextended this framework to believe that genetic code contains all of the information to build an organism. This isn’t true, development requires an environment with some level of randomness.