cbslocal | “The restaurant industry, we’ve kind of alway been up
against it anyways,” said Joe Frillman, owner of Daisies Restaurant.
“The statistics are never in our favor to begin with.”
Once known for its dine in homemade pastas, the kitchen at Daisies in Logan Square has pivoted to pay the bills.
“It’s all to go now, so the whole business model has changed,” said Frillman.
He debuted a new concept last weekend. In the age of
COVID-19, his dining space became a farmer’s market with fresh produce,
meal kits and specialty products.
“We had over 150 people come out to support us,” he said. “I was kind of blown away. We didn’t really know what to expect.”
But for every hopeful moment like these, there are thousands of others from restaurants on the brink of closing.
Jeanne Roeser, in business since 1996, was forced to close her two popular brunch destinations, Toast. Each sat only a handful of diners, and an eventual scaled back reopening didn’t add up.
“It felt like a death,” said Roeser, owner of Toast
Restaurant. “It felt like going through the grieving process, which I
still am. Any time I thought about it, and I looked at the prospects, it
just, in my gut, didn’t feel like it was something that would be
workable”
According to the Illinois Restaurant Association, in March
there were 25,851 restaurants operating in the state. It estimates 20% —
nearly 5,200 restaurants — will go out of business in the coming months
because of COVID-19.
“I think it’s an undercount,” said Roeser.
“I think that’s generous,” said Frillman. “I think would be a best case scenario.” “Independent restaurants bring wealth to the city, culturally, economically,” said Roeser.
AIER | For two to three months, Americans have suffered the loss of liberty,
security, and prosperity in the name of virus control. The
psychological impact has been beyond description. We thought we could
count on basic rights and freedoms. Then over a few days in March, it
all ended in ways hardly anyone could believe possible.
The manner in which governments dealt with foundational principles of
modernity has been shocking. They put half the country under house
arrest and managed every movement in disregard for the Bill of Rights
and all legal precedent, to say nothing of the Constitution. It felt
like a coercive unraveling of civilization itself. It’s like we are all
waking up from a bad dream only to look around and see the wreckage that
proves it was all real.
So how can we deal with this terror that befell us? One way is to
figure out some aspect in which our sacrifice has been worth it, maybe
not on net given the consequences, but surely some good has come out of
this. If my email and feeds are correct, this is how many people have
been justifying this. The psychology here is rooted in the sunk-cost fallacy:
when you commit resources to something, even when it is a proven error,
you tend to find justifications by doubling down rather than just
admitting the mistake.
Thus have many people written me to say that whether you agree or
disagree with the lockdown, we have to admit that it has saved millions
of lives. I always write back and ask how they know that. They send me a
link to a projection – those very projections that presume all kinds of
things about cause and effect that we cannot know and which have proven
wrong time and again throughout this crisis.
So let’s just grant that it is possible that lockdowns can be
credited with slowing the spread of the virus, and perhaps preserving
hospital capacity (which turned out to be unnecessary). Still, the virus
doesn’t then get bored and move by to Wuhan or to another planet. It
still sticks around, so at best, these measures only “prolong the pain,”
in the words of Knut Wittkowski.
So even if lockdowns slow the spread in the short run, it’s not clear
that they have saved lives from the coronavirus, even if it results in more death overall from deferred surgeries and diagnostics, suicides, drug overdoses, and depression.
The trouble here is that certain features of this experience stand
out to contradict the idea that lockdowns are saving lives over the
longer term. In New York, two thirds of hospitalized patients
with COVID-19 were in fact sheltering in place during the lockdown,
essentially living in forced isolation. The lockdown didn’t help them;
it might have contributed to making matters worse.
apnews | More than 11 million
people have been tested in the U.S. for COVID-19, all with the
assurance that their private medical information would remain protected
and undisclosed.
Yet,
public officials in at least two-thirds of states are sharing the
addresses of people who tested positive with first responders — from
police officers to firefighters to EMTs. An Associated Press review
found that at least 10 of those states also share the patients’ names.
First
responders argue the information is vital to helping them take extra
precautions to avoid contracting and spreading the coronavirus.
But civil liberty and community activists have expressed concerns of
potential profiling in African-American and Hispanic communities that
already have an uneasy relationship with law enforcement. Some envision
the data being forwarded to immigration officials.
“The information
could actually have a chilling effect that keeps those already
distrustful of the government from taking the COVID-19 test and possibly
accelerate the spread of the disease,” the Tennessee Black Caucus said
in a statement.
Sharing
the information does not violate medical privacy laws, according to
guidance issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But
many members of minority communities are employed in industries that
require them to show up to work every day, making them more susceptible
to the virus — and most in need of the test.
In Tennessee, the issue has sparked criticism from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, who only became aware of the data sharing earlier this month.
The
process is simple: State and local health departments keep track of who
has received a test in their region and then provide the information to
dispatch centers. The AP review shows that happens in at least 35
states that share the addresses of those who tested positive.
At
least 10 states go further and also share the names: Colorado, Iowa,
Louisiana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, South
Dakota and Tennessee. Wisconsin did so briefly but stopped earlier this
month. There have been 287,481 positive cases in those states, mostly in
New Jersey.
“We
should question why the information needs to be provided to law
enforcement, whether there is that danger of misuse,” said Thomas Saenz,
president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Guardian | The racial wound at the center of the coronavirus pandemic
in the US continues to fester, with latest data showing that African
Americans have died from the disease at almost three times the rate of
white people.
New figures compiled by the non-partisan APM Research Lab and released on Wednesday under the title Color of Coronavirus provide further evidence of the staggering divide in the Covid-19 death rate between black Americans and the rest of the nation.
Across the country, African Americans have died at a rate of 50.3 per
100,000 people, compared with 20.7 for whites, 22.9 for Latinos and
22.7 for Asian Americans.
More than 20,000 African Americans – about one in 2,000 of the entire black population in the US – have died from the disease.
At the level of individual states, the statistics are all the more
shocking. Bottom of the league table in terms of racial disparities is
Kansas, where black residents are dying at seven times the rate of
whites.
“This is a call to action for our county commissioners, our state and
our city officials,” the Kansas state representative Gail Finney told
local TV channel KWCH12 recently.
In other states, the gulf is almost as extreme. In the nation’s
capital, Washington, the disparity in death rate between blacks and
whites is six times, in Michigan and Missouri five, and in major
hotspots of the disease – New York, Illinois and Louisiana – three.
medium | The
American government and the elites who they work for are playing with
fire, so no wonder they’ve begun to prepare for the uprising that’s
coming.
“The
Federal government has ramped up security and police-related spending
in response to the coronavirus pandemic, including issuing contracts for
riot gear, disclosures show.
The purchase orders include requests for disposable cuffs, gas masks, ballistic helmets, and riot gloves, along with law enforcement protective equipment
for federal police assigned to protect Veterans Affairs facilities. The
orders were expedited under a special authorization “in response to
Covid-19 outbreak.”
The Veterans Affairs department, which manages nearly 1,500 health care care facilities around the country, has also extended special contracts for coronavirus-related security services.While
the pandemic has coincided with a historic drop in violent crime across
the country, analysts have expressed concern that the rapid spread of
the virus will fuel confrontations.
There have been multiple inmate riots
in response to Covid-19 outbreaks in prisons and jails, which have
become dangerous hotspots for the disease. The economic upheaval and
disagreements over coronavirus-related policy have also fueled
demonstrations across the country.
…The federal funding requests contrast sharply with the rosy rhetoric from President Donald Trump, who has lavished himself
with praise for his response to the crisis and issued optimistic
predictions that recovery is around the corner. Last month, the federal
government secured a contract to purchase 100,000 body bags to dispose of deaths related to the Covid-19 outbreak.”
If
the elites are beginning to prepare for what they clearly know is
coming in response to how this crisis has been handled, then perhaps
it’s time for us to get ready as well.
lewrockwell | The newest term being targeted toward the masses is the coming of the
“Dark Winter,” which is nothing more than propaganda based lies meant to
prepare the sheep for a planned continuation and escalation of this
fake pandemic in order to bring about world domination.
Operation Dark Winter
was the code name for a senior-level bio-terrorist attack simulation
conducted from June 22–23, 2001, which was designed to carry out a mock
version of a covert bio-weapon’s attack on the United States. The
players involved in this were the Johns HopkinsCenter for Civilian Biodefense Strategies(CCBS) and Center for Strategic and International Studies(CSIS),
and the project designers were Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of Analytic
Services. It is very interesting that the same Johns Hopkins along with
the evil Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation conducted Event 201,
a coronavirus “simulation” just this past October, on the verge of this
so-called pandemic. The same players, same objectives, but now it is
real.
Rick Bright, the former director of the Department of Health and
Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority,
and claimed whistleblower, has been all over the mainstream news as of
late projecting the “darkest winter in modern history.” Using this term
was no accident, and in fact was meant as propaganda to frighten and
alarm the already cowardly and pathetic public. It was also meant to
instill a mindset of a killing plague soon to come. This was completely
staged in my opinion, but it will nonetheless be accepted by a society
steeped in fear due to this “crisis.”
I would expect the term “dark winter” to become a new buzzword, as
this new term the second time around, is strictly tied to the original
scenario, but applied to today’s panic. None of this is coincidence,
none of it is accidental, but it is sinister. If things continue as they
have been, and this lockdown remains in place, whether fully or
partially, the anticipation of this “dark winter” will be on the minds
of most all American sheep, especially if it is continually used as the
threat of things to come.
With that in the minds of the people, they will be expecting the
worst, and will probably get exactly what they expect; another planned
pandemic.
The current government plan, regardless of what is partially opened
this summer, is to continue to mandate social distancing and masks as
some sort of faux protection against this non-existent threat, to
continue to shame those dissenters that refuse to comply with government
orders, and to use more force to stop any dissent.
visualcapitalist | As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, the media continues to rattle off statistics at full force.
However, without a frame of reference, numbers such as the death toll
can be difficult to interpret. Mortalities attributed to the virus, for
example, are often measured in the thousands of people per day
globally—but is this number a little or a lot, relative to typical
causes of death?
Today’s graphic uses data from Our World in Data
to provide context with the total number of worldwide daily deaths. It
also outlines how many people who die each day from specific causes.
Worldwide Deaths by Cause
Nearly 150,000 people die per day worldwide, based
on the latest comprehensive research published in 2017. Which diseases
are the most deadly, and how many lives do they take per day?
Here’s how many people die each day on average, sorted by cause:
Cardiovascular diseases, or diseases of the heart and blood vessels,
are the leading cause of death. However, their prominence is not
reflected in our perceptions of death nor in the media.
While the death toll for HIV/AIDS peaked in 2004, it still affects
many people today. The disease causes over 2,600 daily deaths on
average.
Interestingly, terrorism and natural disasters cause very few deaths
in relation to other causes. That said, these numbers can vary from day
to day—and year to year—depending on the severity of each individual
instance.
project-syndicate | Science cannot determine what the correct COVID-19 response should have
been for each country. A model may be considered validated if its
predictions correspond to outcomes in real life. But in epidemiology, we
can have confidence that this will happen only if a virus with known
properties is allowed to run its natural course in a given population,
or if there is a single intervention like a vaccine, the results of
which can be accurately predicted.
Too many variables – including, say,
medical capacity or cultural characteristics – scrambles the model, and
it starts spewing out scenarios and predictions like a demented robot.
Today, epidemiologists cannot tell us what the effects of the current
COVID-19 policy mix will be. “We will know only in a year or so,” they
say.
The outcome will therefore depend on politics. And the politics of
COVID-19 are clear enough: governments could not risk the natural spread
of infection, and thought it too complicated or politically fraught to
try to isolate only those most at risk of severe illness or death,
namely the 15-20% of the population aged over 65.
The default policy response has been to slow the spread of natural
immunity until a vaccine can be developed. What “flattening the curve”
really means is spacing out the number of expected deaths over a period
long enough for medical facilities to cope and a vaccine to kick in.
But this strategy has a terrible weakness: governments cannot keep their
populations locked down until a vaccine arrives. Apart from anything
else, the economic cost would be unthinkable. So, they have to ease the
lockdown gradually.
Doing this, however, lifts the cap on non-exposure
gained from the lockdown. That is why no government has an explicit exit
strategy: what political leaders call the “controlled easing” of
lockdowns actually means controlled progress toward herd immunity.
Governments cannot openly avow this, because that would amount to
admitting that herd immunity is the objective. And it is not yet even
known whether and for how long infection confers immunity.
Much better, then, to pursue this goal silently, under a cloud of
obfuscation, and hope that a vaccine arrives before most of the
population is infected.
ACSNano | The emergence of a pandemic affecting the respiratory system can result
in a significant demand for face masks. This includes the use of cloth
masks by large sections of the public, as can be seen during the current
global spread of COVID-19. However, there is limited knowledge
available on the performance of various commonly available fabrics used
in cloth masks. Importantly, there is a need to evaluate filtration
efficiencies as a function of aerosol particulate sizes in the 10 nm to
10 μm range, which is particularly relevant for respiratory virus
transmission. We have carried out these studies for several common
fabrics including cotton, silk, chiffon, flannel, various synthetics,
and their combinations. Although the filtration efficiencies for various
fabrics when a single layer was used ranged from 5 to 80% and 5 to 95%
for particle sizes of <300 and="" nm="">300 nm, respectively, the
efficiencies improved when multiple layers were used and when using a
specific combination of different fabrics. Filtration efficiencies of
the hybrids (such as cotton–silk, cotton–chiffon, cotton–flannel) was
>80% (for particles <300 and="" nm="">90% (for particles >300
nm). We speculate that the enhanced performance of the hybrids is likely
due to the combined effect of mechanical and electrostatic-based
filtration. Cotton, the most widely used material for cloth masks
performs better at higher weave densities (i.e., thread count)
and can make a significant difference in filtration efficiencies. Our
studies also imply that gaps (as caused by an improper fit of the mask)
can result in over a 60% decrease in the filtration efficiency, implying
the need for future cloth mask design studies to take into account
issues of “fit” and leakage, while allowing the exhaled air to vent
efficiently. Overall, we find that combinations of various commonly
available fabrics used in cloth masks can potentially provide
significant protection against the transmission of aerosol particles.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),
the COVID-19 virus spreads from person-to-person among close contacts
and occurs mainly via respiratory droplets produced when an infected
person coughs or sneezes. These droplets can land in the mouths or noses
of nearby people or possibly be inhaled directly into the lungs. It
might be possible for a person to get the virus by touching a
contaminated surface or object and then touching their own mouth, nose,
or eyes.
waterandhealth | According to the article,2
two residents living on different floors of a high-rise apartment tower
called Hong Mei House had been infected with coronavirus according to
Hong Kong health officials. The first to be infected was a 75-year-old
man. About 10 days later, a 62-year-old woman in the same building
became infected. That woman’s son and daughter-in-law who share the
apartment were later diagnosed with COVID-19.
In the tower, the first two persons
with coronavirus lived 10 floors apart, but were located in the same
vertical block of apartments. For this reason, health authorities
conducted an initial investigation and evacuated all residents living
directly above and below each other in block seven across all 30 floors
because their toilet and vent pipes were all connected (see figure).
Scary Reminder of the 2003 SARS Outbreak
The possibility of the coronavirus
being transmitted through building sewage pipes immediately drew
comparisons to the 2003 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome)
coronavirus outbreak, where this was discovered to be a major source of
transmission. At the Amoy Gardens housing estate,
also in Hong Kong, more than 300 infections and 42 deaths occurred
after poorly-designed plumbing allowed the SARS virus to spread
throughout the building complex. As a result, following a 24-hour
medical lock-down, the residents were moved to confinement camps for 10
days as doctors, clinicians, sewage experts and engineers
investigated.
How Could Bathroom Sewage Pipes Spread Coronavirus?
The COVID-19 virus could have spread
through the Hong Mei House through close human contact or the shared use
of elevator buttons. But because the two first patients lived above and
below one another in the tower, and because an initial inspection found
that a vent pipe had been disconnected from the bathroom’s waste (soil)
pipe, the building was partially evacuated. Although a full
investigation is ongoing, based on the initial investigation, health
officials declared the Hong Mei House’s sewage pipe system to be safe.
Preliminary studies of the COVID-19 virus have suggested it is present in fecal matter,
though it is still unclear whether the coronavirus could be transmitted
and infect others by some type of fecal-oral route (via exposure from
hands to nasal passages and eyes not through ingestion). As can be seen
in the figure, toilets (as well as sinks and floor drains) have a “U-“
or “P-shaped” pipe that prevents sewer gases from entering the home and
that allows wastewater and odors to escape. To work properly, the
sharply curved pipe, also known as a “trap,” needs to hold water in its
bend. These connect to a soil pipe, which washes the waste down and away
from the toilet, sink, or drain. The soil pipe also needs to be
connected to a vent pipe to remove sewer gases and odors—usually through
roof vents. The vent pipe also ensures that wastewater keeps flowing
freely. One local microbiologist suggested at a press conference that
the improperly sealed vent pipe “could have resulted in a virus
transmission, by carrying infected feces into the building’s ventilation
system and blowing it into people’s bathrooms”.
aier | Now begins the grand effort, on display in thousands of articles and
news broadcasts daily, somehow to normalize the lockdown and all its
destruction of the last two months. We didn’t lock down almost the
entire country in 1968/69,1957, or 1949-1952, or even during 1918.
But in a terrifying few days in March 2020, it happened to all of us,
causing an avalanche of social, cultural, and economic destruction that
will ring through the ages.
There was nothing normal about it all. We’ll be trying to figure out what happened to us for decades hence.
How did a temporary plan to preserve hospital capacity turn into
two-to-three months of near-universal house arrest that ended up causing
worker furloughs at 256 hospitals,
a stoppage of international travel, a 40% job loss among people earning
less than $40K per year, devastation of every economic sector, mass
confusion and demoralization,
a complete ignoring of all fundamental rights and liberties, not to
mention the mass confiscation of private property with forced closures
of millions of businesses?
Whatever the answer, it’s got to be a bizarre tale. What’s truly
surprising is just how recent the theory behind lockdown and forced
distancing actually is. So far as anyone can tell, the intellectual
machinery that made this mess was invented 14 years ago, and not by
epidemiologists but by computer-simulation modelers. It was adopted not
by experienced doctors – they warned ferociously against it – but by
politicians.
Let’s start with the phrase social distancing, which has mutated into
forced human separation. The first I had heard it was in the 2011 movie
Contagion. The first time it appeared in the New York Times was February 12, 2006:
If the avian flu goes pandemic
while Tamiflu and vaccines are still in short supply, experts say, the
only protection most Americans will have is “social distancing,” which
is the new politically correct way of saying “quarantine.”
But distancing also encompasses
less drastic measures, like wearing face masks, staying out of elevators
— and the [elbow] bump. Such stratagems, those experts say, will
rewrite the ways we interact, at least during the weeks when the waves
of influenza are washing over us.
strategic-culture | In Tempetes Microbiennes,
Patrick Zylberman, a professor of History of Health in Paris, detailed
the complex process through which health security, so far at the margins
of political strategies, was sneaking into center stage in the early
2000s. The WHO had already set the precedent in 2005, warning about “50
million deaths” around the world caused by the incoming swine flu. In
the worst-case scenario projected for a pandemic, Zylberman predicted
that “sanitary terror” would be used as an instrument of governance.
That worst-case scenario has been revamped
as we speak. The notion of a generalized obligatory confinement is not
warranted by any medical justification, or leading epidemiological
research, when it comes to fighting a pandemic. Still, that was
enshrined as the hegemonic policy – with the inevitable corollary of
countless masses plunged into unemployment. All that based on failed,
delirious mathematical models of the Imperial College kind, imposed by
powerful pressure groups ranging from the World Economic Forum (WEF) to
the Munich Security Conference.
Enter Dr. Richard Hatchett, a former member of the National Security
Council during the first Bush Jr. administration, who was already
recommending obligatory confinement of the whole population way back in
2001. Hatchett now directs the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness
Innovations (CEPI), a very powerful entity coordinating global vaccine
investment, and very cozy with Big Pharma. CEPI happens to be a
brainchild of the WEF in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation.
Crucially, Hatchett regards the fight against Covid-19 as a “war”.
The terminology – adopted by everyone from President Trump to President
Macron – gives away the game. It harks back to – what else – the global
war on terror (GWOT), as solemnly announced in September 2001 by Donald “Known Unknowns” Rumsfeld himself.
Rumsfeld, crucially, had been the chairman of
biotech giant Gilead. After 9/11, at the Pentagon, he got busy aiming
to blur the distinction between civilians and the military when it came
to GWOT. That’s when “generalized obligatory confinement” was
conceptualized, with Hatchett among the key players.
As much as this was a militarized Big Pharma spin-off concept, it had
nothing to do with public health. What mattered was the militarization
of American society to be adopted in response to bioterror – at the time
automatically attributed to a squalid, tech-deprived al-Qaeda.
The current version of this project – we are at “war” and every
civilian must stay at home – takes the form of what Alexander Dugin has
defined as a medical-military dictatorship.
Hatchett is very much part of the group, alongside ubiquitous Anthony
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases (NIAID), very close to WHO, WEF and the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, and Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. chapter of the
Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Further applications inbuilt in the project will include all-around
digital surveillance, sold as health monitoring. Already implemented in
the current narrative is the non-stop demonization of China, “guilty” of
all things Covid-19-related. That is inherited from another tried and
tested war game – the Red Dawn scheme.
strategic-culture | Amidst the storm of controversy raised by the lab-origin theory of
COVID-19 extolled by such figures as Nobel prize winning virologist Luc
Montagnier, bioweapons expert Francis Boyle, Sri Lankan Cardinal Malcolm
Ranjith and the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, an elaborate
project was undertaken under the nominal helm of NATURE Magazine in
order to refute the claim once and for all under the report ‘The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2’.
This project was led by a team of evolutionary virologists using a
line of reasoning that “random mutation can account for anything” and
was parroted loudly and repeatedly by Fauci, WHO officials and Bill
Gates in order to shut down all uncomfortable discussion of the possible
laboratory origins of COVID-19 while also pushing for a global vaccine
campaign. On April 18, Dr. Fauci (whose close ties with Bill Gates, and
Big Pharma have much to do with his control of hundreds of billions of
dollars of research money), stated:
“There was a study recently that we can
make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary
virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as
they evolve. And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it
is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to
a human.”
I think at this moment, rife as it is with speculative arguments,
confusion and under-defined data, it is useful to remove oneself from
the present and look for higher reference points from which we can
re-evaluate events now unfolding on the world stage.
In order to do this, let us begin by asking a new series of questions:
What is Nature Magazine exactly? Is it truly an “objective” platform
for pure scientific research untainted by the filth of political
agendas? Is this standard-bearer of “proper method”, which can make or
break the career of any scientist, truly the scientific journal it
claims to be or is there something darker to be discovered?
As I presented a part of this story in my previous installment in this series The Rise of Optical Biophysics and Clash of the Two Sciences, a very old battle has been waged around political systems but also what sort of scientific paradigms will shape our future.
themarshallproject | Since March, The Marshall Project has been tracking
how many people are being sickened and killed by COVID-19 in prisons
and how widely it has spread across the country and within each state.
Here, we will regularly update these figures counting the number of
people infected and killed nationwide and in each prison system until
the crisis abates.
By May 13, at least 25,239 people in prison had tested positive for the illness, a 25 percent increase from the week before.
Much of the remarkable recent growth in coronavirus cases has been
due to a handful of states—Ohio, Tennessee, Arkansas, Michigan, North
Carolina among them—that began aggressively testing nearly everyone at prisons where people had become sick.
This spate of testing would suggest that coronavirus had been
circulating in prisons in much greater numbers than known, and that in
the many states where tests have not been prevalent, far more people may
have been carrying it than were initially reported.
The first known COVID-19 death of a prisoner was in Georgia when Anthony
Cheek died on March 26. Cheek, who was 49 years old, had been held in
Lee State Prison near Albany, a hotspot for the disease. Since then, at
least 372 other prisoners have died of coronavirus-related causes. By
May 13, the total number of deaths had risen by 23 percent in a week.
Given the huge differences in how many people are being tested in
prisons for the virus, the effects of the pandemic have varied widely
between different state prison systems. The first reported cases began
popping up in Massachusetts and Georgia on March 20. By the end of
April, some states like Nebraska, Idaho and Maine still had not
identified any confirmed cases of sick prisoners. Here, you can choose
to view the data for any state prison system and see how the numbers
compare. For a summary of the number of cases in facilities run by the
federal Bureau of Prisons, choose the “Federal” option.
opendemocracy | It is difficult to say if it was our friends that miscalculated the
scope of the censorship, or if it was the Chinese government that
miscalculated the scope of the new epidemic. For the reality quickly got
lost, perhaps to everyone, under close surveillance of domestic
reporting of the virus. After returning to the UK in January, a large
part of my daily routine has been saving Chinese news reports and key
commentaries on the virus through clusters of screenshots rather than
simply saving the links. This was because ‘disharmonious’ web content
would be soon deleted without a trace and during January articles
related to the epidemic were censorship targets. In fact, due to the 8
hour time difference between China and the UK, it was not uncommon for
me to wake up in the morning, only to find that half of the articles
passed on by friends had already been removed or their access denied. To
be sure, some of the censored content may have been fake news, but it
was also evident that what remained in circulation adhered to the
party-line.
More importantly, COVID-19 exposed an often-ignored
character of how censorship works when it is effectively
‘constitutionalised' in the political system. Its ubiquity in governing
rationales means that censorship is not necessarily centrally
coordinated but is a layered practice. That is, censorship becomes a
tool wielded at the discretion of multiple authorities and can be
discriminately applied in accordance to local needs. For example,
compared to many other less affected cities, in the early phase, Wuhan’s
local media was subject to stringent censorship. According to a corpus
study of Chinese official newspapers carried out by a media studies’
scholar at Hong Kong University, between 1 January and 20 January 2020,
coronavirus was only reported four times by Wuhan local newspaper Chutian Dushi Bao, of which two were rebuking ‘rumours’ and two were news releases by the local health bureau.
On 20 January, the day before President Xi Jinping publicly
acknowledged the seriousness of the outbreak and 3 days before the Wuhan
lockdown, local news was still celebrating that 20,000 free tickets to
key tourist sites been handed out to the public with the expectation of a
tourist surge during the Spring Festival holiday.
A key difference between democratic and non-democratic states in the
response to COVID-19 does not hinge on lockdowns, but on what has been
discussed and done to mitigate the various knock-on effects of
lockdowns. For example, in the days following the UK’s lockdown in late
March, discussion, and sometimes protests, on the welfare of different
social groups filled mainstream news outlets: the impact of children
with special needs, individuals in care homes, domestic violence, mental
health and concerns for safety-nets for the self-employed. Of course
many of these issues remain unresolved or only partially resolved, but
this ‘explosion’ of public expression of concerns made many underlying
social issues visible from the start.
In contrast, few such
(pre-emptive) discussions on the social consequences of lockdown could
be found in Chinese media. If one types in ‘domestic violence’ (家庭暴力)
and ‘coronavirus pneumonia’ (新冠肺炎, the common way for Chinese media to
refer to the COVID-19 pandemic) onto China’s search engine Baidu, the
results are predominately news reports on the increase of domestic
violence in the UK, US, Japan and other countries. Reports on domestic
violence in China in the context of the pandemic were scarce. Of course,
Baidu as the main Chinese search engine has long been criticised for
manipulating research results, bowing to political and commercial
pressure. Thus this might not be a fair representation of what has been
discussed or done about domestic violence in China during the lockdown.
But this perhaps further underlines my point. That is, social
controversies within China are censored out of public sight, and thus
out of public mind.
The true danger of political censorship,
however, lies not simply in the absence of certain discussions, but in
the nurturing of social acquiescence to this silence. For example,
similar to other countries, medical staff were soon heralded as the
contemporary ‘heroes’ in China. Images of the medical profession on
posters paying tribute to them were predominantly male, yet published
lists of medical staff volunteering to join the front line were largely
female. I wrote a post on Chinese social media questioning this aspect
of gender inequality. The response was mixed. While some commented that
this was an ‘interesting point’, others disapproved of my ‘making a
fuss’. One such criticism came from my own cousin, who, along with his
wife, were front-line doctors. He believed that everyone was or should
be preoccupied with fighting the disease. So why should I ‘distract’
this concentration with ‘the trivial matter of gender equality’? My
cousin’s rationale echoes China’s development strategy over the last 40
years. That is, China has been exceptionally good at identifying one
goal (e.g. fighting coronavirus) and concentrating the whole nation’s
resources into achieving that goal (e.g. speedy reallocation of
financial and human resources into the health system). Wider social
discussions are considered as but a distraction. In fact, there is
almost a ‘pragmatic’ argument for no discussion: even if issues were
raised, given limited government resource and under-developed societal
services, there is no capacity to address these problems anyway. So
what’s the point of discussion?
ianwelsh | A sea change happened in the 60s and 70s: one where the legitimacy of
violence was rejected by the left, and violence was gifted to the
right. The end of the draft and the left wing hatred of all violence
meant that the left gave the military to the right wing. Cops have
always been right wing, of course, but the draft had meant that the rank
and file military included many left wingers. It also meant that people
on the left had violent skills, taught courtesy of the military.
That ended. Meanwhile the right, including the most far right,
encouraged their people to join the military and the policy, to learn
the skills and to make sure those institutions were run by right wingers
from top to bottom.
So there are two likely reasons the Michigan legislature gave into
violence. One: they think that right wing violence is legitimate. Two,
they don’t trust the police or national guard to stop right wingers they
sympathize with and support.
Meanwhile only two parts of the left believe they have a right to be
violent: Antifa, and the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers have taken
to armed escort of legislators they support.
Those who disarm; those who believe fanatically in non-violence,
always exist at the whim of those who believe in violence and are good
at it.
This is the position the left has put itself in in America and many
other countries: disarmed, bad at violence, with no influence over the
violent organs of the state and almost no tradition or skill in violence
in the few organs it still has influence over (like some unions.)
Some of this weakness was caused by the right: as with their gutting
of unions in the 80s. But much of it is because the left both believes
that violence is always wrong and that it is ineffective.
Michigan is the fruit of those beliefs.
And, children, history is a record of violence often working.
Sometimes non-violence works, yes, sometimes it even works very well.
But effective violence, especially if it is perceived as legitimate, is
also a winning strategy.
PCOTG | The other day, at a meeting here, the following lines were read: "Let us take the Sermon on the Mount and try to understand what it means. As was said before, in the last talk, "religion"—as it is called—that is, as the psychological ideas taught by Christ about the individual evolution of man and his transformation into a new man are usually called—is concerned with the development of essence after personality has been formed. A man in whom a rich personality has been formed by experience, education and interests, is a "rich man" in personality. But essence remains poor. For it to develop, personality must become passive." This was not understood, but it is very important that everyone in the work should understand what this paragraph means. It means that religion in the real sense—and we only know Christianity ourselves—refers to the third stage of a man, the making of personality passive so that essence can grow. I must repeat again that the inner meaning of the Gospels has nothing to do with life. Their teaching starts at the point where personality has been formed already in a man and refers to this third stage of possible development. A man must first of all become developed as regards personality by the action of life.
This work is sometimes called a second education. It is for those who are looking for a second education. The first education is an education that life gives us; and this is absolutely necessary. The better a person is educated by means of life, the more he learns, the more intelligent he is, the more experienced he is, the more he knows about people, and about affairs, the more he knows about manners, the better he can express himself, the more he is able to use the different sides of life, the better for him. This is the first education. This forms personality. We have said before that man consists of different centres and each of these has different parts; these centres and parts should be well furnished and the better furnished they are with inscriptions on rolls, the better forhim.
But a point comes in a man's development where, as was said before, he feels empty, and it is at this stage that the teaching of the Gospels and all this work comes in. I do not know whether any of you have ever thought about this very deeply. But it is quite possible that some of you who have done your duty in life often wonder what it is exactly you are doing, what the meaning of it all is. Speaking in this personal way for a moment I would like to ask you this question: Do you think that life and the meanings that it affords us are enough and have you felt that in some way life does not quite give you what you expected?
I am not saying that life is meaningless; it has obviously many meanings. But have any of you come to the point of feeling a certain meaninglessness even in those interests that you follow and try to hold on to? Why I am saying this is because if life afforded us our full meaning then there would be no point, in fact, no meaning, either in what the Gospels talk about or in what this system talks about. If you are quite content with the meanings that life affords, quite selfsatisfied, then there is no point in trying to understand what this system teaches, and, let me add, there is no point in your trying to understand what Christ's teaching really means. Now, if man were nothing but a well-formed personality and this were his end, then we might very well believe in all those doctrines of humanitarianism and other scientific ideas that say that man is nothing but a creature turned towards external life and having to adapt himself as intelligently as possible towards it. But if you have followed what has been said in this letter about the idea of man in this system you will see that the development of personality is merely a stage, and an absolutely necessary stage, towards a further stage.
It is directly comparable with the formation of a mass of food round a seed, as in the case of a nut. The nut has an essential part in it—namely, the seed itself that can grow—but it cannot grow until it is surrounded by a mass of nourishing material, just as an egg has a seed in it surrounded by a mass of yolk, and so on. Take the latter example: how can a chicken grow unless it has all the substances surrounding it for it to feed on? And remember that it grows inside the egg-shell and finally emerges a complete chicken and this complete chicken has been made out of the substances that the living germ has attacked and eaten. Now the fate of acorns is one thing, but the fate of oak-trees is a different thing, and, as was said, man surrounded by personality resembles an acorn and suffers, as it were, the same fate as the acorn, unless he begins to grow, and growth in a man corresponds to what we are calling the third stage in a man after personality has been formed round essence. If we take man at this second stage where essence is surrounded by personality he is just like an acorn, maybe a larger or a smaller acorn, but nothing but an acorn. He is perhaps very important; he has learnt many things; he feels he knows; he is, in short, full of personality, and that is his level, and at that level he suffers, not really a proper human fate, but the fate of an undeveloped organism, the fate of a person who is not yet fully-grown, just as an acorn is not a fully-grown tree. And unless we understand very clearly about this third stage—namely, the development of an acorn into a tree by its living essence or seed feeding on the substances formed round it—we shall never understand, as I said before, what this work is about, nor shall we understand what the Gospels are about.
Erotic Christianity | Tantra is generally understood less in terms of ‘sex’ than in terms of power or energy. That is, it is a series of teachings and techniques aimed at awakening, harnessing, and utilizing the spiritual power believed to flow through the entire cosmos and the human body.”10
We cannot, however, avoid noticing that the embrace of the lawless power is very much in tune with the Gnostic attack on the god of the law who binds his dupes to the Earth, preventing consumption of the fruit, and who works through the lowest level of created existence, manifest in the unredeemed genitals that under normal circumstances, waste seed or push it into unhappy reproductions of unredeemed souls. It is also important to recognize then that in Tantra’s consciousness of kundalini (the serpent), we may see the Gnostic itinerary placed firmly within the human body, as it may be supposed members of Gnostic groups did as well, judging by what we have seen. Much of what the heresiologists took to be crazy physics, cod theology, perverted scripture, and barmy creation structures were almost certainly taken by the cognoscenti of the movement as codes and metaphors for physical practices coupled to a nascent psychology—as Carl Jung recognized and strongly believed.
The whole drama of the Gnostic creation and redemption myths can be seen as taking place not in the objective, arguably illusory, universe, or even beyond it in spatial terms, but chiefly within the awakened being of the Gnostic, wherein paradise is in the genitals, the unknown Father is accessed through the crown of the head, and the serpent-Sophia redeems the seed that comes from on high and brings it back up the spinal column (tree) through the aeons, corresponding to the “cakkras” (chakras) to its source, from which the precious pearl of creation has dripped to the lower regions, governed by a dark ignorance, enslaved to the cycle of birth and death. The way to eternal life is up, and it takes a lot of courage to make the journey; the world doesn’t want you to do it. The world wants you to do as you’re told. The world wants you scared, for your “own good” (an offer we are not meant to refuse). Hence the Tantrik master is a hero and his mistress a heroine, for she in-personates Shakti, as he in-personates for her Shiva, whose symbol is the erect shiva lingam. Now perhaps we can see what the worship of Simon and Helen was all about, once we remove the skin of eighteen hundred years of orthodox smothering.
Gordan Djurdjevic has written most effectively concerning the Tantric use of decadence as a spiritual technique for ascending from the lowest cakkra (chakra) (“wheel” or “flower”), the mūlādhāra, at the genitals, to the highest cakkra where supreme joy awaits the successful practitioner: “According to Tantric theory, the semen, which in its original state [and situated at the top of the head], has ambrosial properties, turns into poison when it reaches the lower parts of the body [cf. the Demiurge and the unredeemed seed] specifically the genitals. For this situation to be remedied, the semen needs to be brought back to the top of the head.”11
Practices for achieving this have involved the voluntary retention of semen and imaginary rechanneling of its essence up the spine, and even sucking back the combined fluids from the vagina after quite extraordinary yogic training. These practices are generally regarded as later developments of Tantric practice. The Kaula method is thought to be the most ancient. Oral consumption of semen (bindu), menstrual blood (rajas), and vaginal sexual fluids (yonitattva) conferred divine status on participants. Such may account for the claims of Simonians that their followers possessed eternal life. Walter O. Kaelber’s account of Vedic asceticism in ancient India informs us how “Male seed is also capable of generating spiritual rebirth and immortality.”12 Understood from this perspective, Ireneaeus’s and Epiphanius’s taunts fired at Gnostics’ belief in their eternal life register as the carping of ignoramuses. It is an ancient belief of the Indian subcontinent that loss of semen contributes to disease, aging, and premature death, for semen is life and the promise of fertility.
The North Indian Tantric tradition of the Nāth Siddhas, credited with developing hatha yoga, considered that while bindu carried immortality, its perpetual dripping from the crown depletes energy by its being consumed in the stomach’s digestive fire or through ejaculation, which, to be at its holiest, must rather be fertile of the spinal lotuses opening them up to induce spiritual awakening as the spirit rises home. Analogies (at least) with Gnostic claims for “realized resurrection in the body” can hardly go unnoticed. Tantriks hold that oral consumption offers rejuvenation as well as enlightenment, for the nectar of the gods is also the elixir of immortality, amrita, or the divine liquor soma, giving the drinker “eternal life in heaven on earth.”13
We may also wonder about the tendency in Gnostic thought to emphasize Jesus’s other body, which watches the crucifixion at a distance in the Nag Hammadi Apocalypse of Peter and in The Second Treatise of the Great Seth.14 Normally attributed to the heresy of Docetism (Jesus only appears as human), the emphasis on Jesus’s being outside of his body may also be attributed to a common store of ideas implicit in Tantra, wherein the gross body conceals a subtle body, and a goal of alchemy is to refine the subtle from the gross. Thus, the subtle body extends invisibly from the genitals via the spine to the crown of the head. When we consider the spine in terms of the Barbelite tree, we may be able to make fresh sense of the following utterance of Jesus in the Apocalypse of Peter, which might as well have been called the awakening of Peter:
He whom you saw on the tree, glad and laughing, this is the living Jesus. But this one into whose hands and feet they drive the nails is his fleshly part, which is the substitute being put to shame, the one who came into being in his likeness. But look at him and me. But I, when I [Peter] had looked, said, “Lord no one is looking at you. Let us flee this place.”
No one is looking at the spiritual body. That was the Gnostics’ complaint, so preoccupied with flesh were the fleshly materialists that they failed, from the Gnostic point of view, to see what was really happening: the spiritual glory of the living Jesus, not the death of the fleshly tunic. In worshipping the man, they blinded themselves to themselves. The last words of the Apocalypse are: “When he [Jesus] had said these things, he [Peter] came to himself.” That is the point. He came to himself. John 3:14 seemed to Gnostics to give the game away: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness: even so must the Son of man be lifted up.” For Tantriks, of course, the primal spiritual energy is the snake coiled at the base of the spine. Was Tertullian, I wonder, cognizant of this idea when, in Adversus Valentinianos (II.76), he mercilessly parodied the supposed esoteric “wisdom” of the Valentinians’ serpent: To sum up, the dove used to reveal Christ; the serpent used to tempt him. The former from the first was the herald of divine love; the latter from the first was the thief of God’s image. Therefore, innocence by itself can easily both recognize and exhibit God. Wisdom by itself can rather attack and betray him.
Now, let the serpent hide himself as much as he can; let him twist his entire wisdom into the windings of his lairs. Let him live deep in the ground, push into dark holes, unroll his length coil by coil; let him slither out—but not all of him at once, the light-hating beast. Our dove, however, has a simple home, always in high and open places toward the light since this symbol of the Holy Spirit loves the sunrise, the symbol of Christ. Just so, truth blushes at nothing except being hidden away, because no one is ashamed to listen to her, to learn to recognize as God the one whom nature has already pointed out to him as God, the one whom he sees daily in all his works.
For Tantriks, who would easily qualify for Tertullian’s lesson, kundalinī śakti is the microcosmic correspondent of the Great Goddess, whose divine partner Shiva has his esoteric home on the top of the human head. One can hear Tertullian’s reaction to this: “Microcosmic correspondent! Microcomic, more like!” Heresy, remember, began in Eden, so the Carthaginian lawyer would have no truck with the idea that when Shiva and Shakti appear separate, the world appears illusory, pain-ridden: the world of ordinary people whom, Tertullian asserts, Christ came to save, not with esoteric subtleties (“for the serpent was more subtle than any beast in the field”), but with the truth delivered plainly. But the Gnostic might reply to the Tertullian tirade: “Did not the dove whom you say is the Holy Spirit alight upon the top of Jesus’s head at the baptism, when Jesus emerged from the waters below, and was not the voice heard: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”?
In his book Kālī’s Child, Jeffrey J. Kripal urges us not to see Tantra as a philosophical, text-based school, but as a “dirty path” to ontological truths that are as terrifying as they are profound.”15 Djurdjevic quotes Alexis Sanderson on the benefits of decadent rejection of rules of purity: “The conscientiousness essential to the preservation of purity and social system was to be expelled from his identity by the Tantric Brahman as impurity itself, the only impurity he was to recognize, a state of ignorant self-bondage through the illusion that purity and impurity, prohibitedness and enjoinedness were objective qualities residing in things, persons and actions.”16
Tantra is quintessentially about a kind of marriage, and the sādhāna (sexual rite) is often today performed within otherwise conventional marriages. As we shall see when we investigate Valentinian practices, a kindred setting was enjoyed among Valentinians enjoined to celebrate a kind of mystical marriage involving something like an alchemy of the bodies of the married couple that thoroughly internalized the idea of marriage while transforming it into its spiritual essence. In Tantra, it is the human body that is the setting and the means of achieving gnosis. And when we speak of alchemy, we shall be on the right lines to consider what is intended by a base metal that can be transformed into gold, for as the alchemists have never ceased repeating, the first matter of the Great Work is something universally diffused, but universally unvalued. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, but the world knew him not.
popularmechanics | Is NASA really working on . . . a warp drive? An internal feasibility report
suggests the agency might be, or at least that the idea of traveling
through folded space is part of the NASA interstellar spaceflight menu.
The Alcubierre drive works like a physics version
of a classic party trick. The spaceship sits in spacetime while science
pulls the fabric from in front of it to behind it, like a tablecloth
pulled out from under a full spread of dishes. White explains:
“The
concept of operations as described by Alcubierre is that the spacecraft
would depart the point of origin (e.g. earth) using some conventional
propulsion system and travel a distance d, then bring the craft
to a stop relative to the departure point. The field would be turned on
and the craft would zip off to its stellar destination, never locally
breaking the speed of light, but covering the distance in an arbitrarily
short period of time just the same.”
Alcubierre’s
theory dates to 1994, and physicists have used it as a jumping-off
point for further discussion ever since. By creating a kind of pocket
world where a spaceship can operate seemingly outside of physics, the laws of physics can be sidestepped—or so the theory goes.
What’s
the paradox? White describes it this way: “When the energy density is
initiated, the choice in direction of the +x-axis is mathematically
arbitrary, so how does the spacecraft ‘know’ which direction to go?”
Sci-fi has solved this paradox by inventing a “stable wormhole,” but
White can’t fly a deus ex machina to Alpha Centauri.
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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