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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wholesale Discrediting Of The American Medical Industrial Complex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet the lying continues. 

Worse than that, the dying continues. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Solution

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

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

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

 

The Results

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Vaccine Is An Excuse To Get You To Agree To Surrender All Your Rights

 twitter |  This is the absolute end of the line for human liberty in the West and if you don’t understand why, ask a techie. Once you agree to this platform any functionality can be loaded into it turning off and on access to society, goods, information, movement, based on your behavior.

2/ Wake up world, for love of God. As I’ve been screaming for a year, it’s not about virus, or even vaccine; it’s the data. The vaccine is an excuse, a Trojan Horse, to get you to agree to a platform that is ALREADY 360 degree surveillance, geolocation, turns society off and on.

3/Once this platform is ‘mandated’ you can no longer opt in or out of out as you do when you sign ‘I agree’ to terms and conditions on a website. You’ll be FORCED to ‘agree’ in order to work, socialize, travel. Then any functionality - social credit system that turns PayPal off..

4/ and on based on your social media behavior, or restricts you to your home based on whether you saw ‘dissidents’, which it will know, or a forbidden play the night before, can be loaded onto it with NO PROBLEM, w/o any additional consent from you which you can’t revoke anyway.

5/ Lastly and as the granddaughter of a woman who lost brothers and sisters to the Holocaust, I don’t say this lightly: IBM is producing the NYS version. IBM’s German subsidiary in Nazi Germany built the forerunner of a digitized system like this, using punch cards, that ...

6/ first did exactly what ‘Vaccine Passport’ proposes - it separated Nazi Germany into a two tier society, Jew and Aryan, using the technology of the day. Then IBM created the mechanized lists that allowed Jews to be rounded up swiftly, efficiently. Exactly same system, updated.

8/ But before that, Nazis created exactly what ‘Vaccine Passports’ explicitly promise: separation of society into two tiers: the ‘clean’ (privileged, with access) and ‘unclean (restricted, stigmatized, marginalized). There is no going back once this platform unrolls; no escape.

First, Allow Americans To Prove Vaccination Is Bizarre Language At Best

WaPo’s phrasing is insidious:“vaccine passports – that would allow Americans to prove that they have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to reopen." First, “allow Americans to prove” is bizarre language. I can try to prove anything. I do not need the federal government’s help to prove anything, necessarily. And to what extent does a government app prove anything? Are fake ID’s held by teenagers not a thing? Second, “as businesses try to reopen.” Try? Business closures were by government edict. 

WaPo |  The Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a standard way of handling credentials — often referred to as “vaccine passports” — that would allow Americans to prove they have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to reopen.

The effort has gained momentum amid President Biden’s pledge that the nation will start to regain normalcy this summer and with a growing number of companies — from cruise lines to sports teams — saying they will require proof of vaccination before opening their doors again.

The administration’s initiative has been driven largely by arms of the Department of Health and Human Services, including an office devoted to health information technology, said five officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the effort. The White House this month took on a bigger role coordinating government agencies involved in the work, led by coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients, with a goal of announcing updates in coming days, said one official.

The White House declined to answer questions about the passport initiative, instead pointing to public statements that Zients and other officials made this month.

“Our role is to help ensure that any solutions in this area should be simple, free, open source, accessible to people both digitally and on paper, and designed from the start to protect people’s privacy,” Zients said at a March 12 briefing.

The initiative has emerged as an early test of the Biden administration, with officials working to coordinate across dozens of agencies and a variety of experts, including military officials helping administer vaccines and health officials engaging in international vaccine efforts.

The passports are expected to be free and available through applications for smartphones, which could display a scannable code similar to an airline boarding pass. Americans without smartphone access should be able to print out the passports, developers have said.

Other countries are racing ahead with their own passport plans, with the European Union pledging to release digital certificates that would allow for summer travel.

U.S. officials say they are grappling with an array of challenges, including data privacy and health-care equity. They want to make sure all Americans will be able to get credentials that prove they have been vaccinated, but also want to set up systems that are not easily hacked or passports that cannot be counterfeited, given that forgeries are already starting to appear.

 

God Help Us If You Succumb To A Publicly Issued And Privately Enforced National Vaccination ID

Guardian |  God, I miss the pub. I miss pushing through the door and diving into a pool of sound, all chatter and laughter and sport on the telly. I miss the sight of people’s faces, friendly and relaxed and a bit flushed. I miss finding friends gathered around a table, bantering and gossiping, pausing only to place their order when I ask if anyone needs a drink. I miss weaving through the crowd, taking care not to spill pints or drop crisp packets, catching a flirty glance from a stranger out of the corner of my eye.

What I would give to go to the pub this evening and talk with my friends about everything and nothing. Since many of us work in technology, at some point the government’s “vaccine passports for the pub” plan would come up.

I’d say it is dumb. They would tell me that, no, I am the one who is dumb. We’d hash it out, order another round and set the world to rights. Sadly, it’s a conversation we won’t be having. We’re in lockdown. None of us has tasted a proper pint in months. We’ve had to debate what the prime minister, Boris Johnson, has called “papers for pints” over WhatsApp and FaceTime while sitting at home and walking in the park.

The good news is that pubs open for outdoor service from 12 April and for indoor service from 17 May. The bad news is that Johnson’s “papers for pints” plan is essentially a national ID card by stealth, one that would link our identity to our Covid status – whether we’ve been vaccinated, had a recent negative test or have antibodies.

The UK has already toyed with national ID cards. It rejected them in 2010. As Theresa May, then home secretary, explained in 2010: “This isn’t just about cost savings, it’s actually about the principle, it’s about getting the balance right between national security and civil liberties, and that’s what the new coalition government is doing.”

That was before coronavirus, of course, but just because we’re in a pandemic doesn’t mean that we stop caring about that balance.

Already, the Conservatives have announced plans to introduce a bill to make photo ID mandatory from 2023 for all UK-wide and English elections. There’s no obvious need for it: there was only one conviction for “personation” fraud in the UK in 2019.

Piss-ant, Contemplate Your "Rights" On The Tree Of Woe....,

Ten days ago, I vigorously and explicitly waived in this direction - The Unrivaled Power of Google's Coalition of the Connected - I'm going to try again today. Once you accept that corporations are people under law, and that they wield exponentially greater power and thus rights under law - the nature of our current predicament becomes very straightfoward, simple, and plain.

crushlimbraw |  The government has outsourced tyranny. Let’s see how this black magic is performed.

Expression of Viewpoints is Guaranteed to be Free from Government Abridgement, Even if the Viewpoints are Hateful…

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is a remarkable provision that has, for centuries, protected Americans from the abridgment of their freedom of speech by their government. Even so-called “hate speech” is protected.

The relevant provision states that “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.” As written, the guarantee of free speech originally applied only to the federal government. However, the Supreme Court ruled in Gitlow v. New York that the guarantee had been “incorporated” in the Fourteenth Amendment and the guarantee is now applied to all state and local governments as well.

Now, in practice, there are laws regulating speech (you cannot shout “fire” in a crowded theater, and so on), but such regulations are generally “time, place, and manner” restrictions. Our Courts have universally frowned on what is called viewpoint discrimination:

Viewpoint discrimination is a form of content discrimination particularly disfavored by the courts. When the government engages in content discrimination, it is restricting speech on a given subject matter. When it engages in viewpoint discrimination, it is singling out a particular opinion or perspective on that subject matter for treatment unlike that given to other viewpoints.

And, yes, viewpoint discrimination explicitly includes hateful, hostile, and offensive viewpoints. This position was unanimously upheld by the United States Supreme Court in Matal vs. Tam. Justice Samuel Alito wrote:

Speech may not be banned on the ground that it expresses ideas that offend.

The disparagement clause denies registration to any mark that is offensive to a substantial percentage of the members of any group… That is viewpoint discrimination in the sense relevant here: Giving offense is a viewpoint.

Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful, but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’

A more explicit statement could not be made. Speech may not be banned for being offensive or hateful. Giving offense is a viewpoint. There is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment.

But Expression of Viewpoints is Not Guaranteed Against Private Abridgement

Government cannot regulate your expression of your viewpoint - but corporations can.

Most people understand that the First Amendment does not apply to private actors on their private property. A person or corporation can choose to allow free speech in their home or business, or can choose to regulate free speech, even viewpoints, as they deem. This “exception” to the First Amendment has been the case since the foundation of Anglo-American law, and it is absolutely necessary to protect the rights of property owners.

For instance, if I am running a bicycle shop, I am absolutely permitted to prevent my employees from putting up posters that say “bicycles suck” or telling my customers to “buy a scooter.” Likewise, if I am running a video game news site, I am absolutely permitted to tell my journalists not to write about the beauties of Sistine Chapel instead. And if I invite you to my home to binge-watch Babylon 5, and you express the offensive viewpoint that Star Trek is better, I am altogether within my rights to make you leave.

Admittedly, there have been occasional exceptions to this rule under the so-called state actor doctrine. Most notably, the US Supreme Court ruled in Marsh v Alabama (1946) that the First Amendment fully applied to expressive activities on the company-owned sidewalks and streets of a company-owned town. The precedent of Marsh v Alabama was expanded in Amalgamated Food Employees Union v Logan Valley Plaza (1968) then overturned in Hudgens v NLRB (1976). Since Hudgens, the state actor doctrine has waned in importance, despite numerous conservative efforts to sue online platforms.

We will put aside the so-far toothless Section 230 for a discussion another day. In general, private corporations can regulate the expression of viewpoints, even though government cannot, and that’s the law.

America's Great Moral, Aesthetic, And Operational Delusion

There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today.”  Arthur Jensen

nautil |  The hero of Atlas Shrugged is John Galt, a supremely self-confident inventor. He has figured out a way to turn static electricity into an inexhaustible source of clean energy. But Galt and his kind are living in an America veering toward the kind of ham-fisted socialism that Rand escaped when she immigrated from the Soviet Union in 1926. Galt brings about a rebellion of the “producers” of the world, like the mythical Atlas shrugging the earth from his shoulders, so that the “looters” and “moochers” can be brought to their senses. The centerpiece of the novel is a speech that Galt delivers to the world by taking over the airwaves with his technical prowess.

Whether conveyed through philosophy or fiction, Rand’s worldview couldn’t function as a moral system if the pursuit of self-interest didn’t end up benefiting the common good. That’s where the invisible hand of the market comes in, a metaphor that was used only three times by Adam Smith in his voluminous writing, but was elevated to the status of a fundamental theorem by economists such as Milton Friedman and put into practice by Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan, who served as Chair of the United States Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: Everything of value can be represented as a dollar value and therefore can be compared to anything else of value by their relative prices. Making money is the surest way to provide value to people because the best way to make money is to provide what people are most willing to pay for. The system works so well that no other form of care toward others is required. No empathy. No loyalty. No forgiveness. Thanks to the market, the old-fashioned virtues have been rendered obsolete. That’s why Milton Friedman could make his famous claim in 1970 that the only social responsibility of a business is to maximize profits for its shareholders. In Ayn Rand’s fictional rendering, the word “give” is banned from the vocabulary of the Utopian community founded by John Galt, whose members must recite the oath: “I swear by my life and love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine.”

My sequel to Atlas Shrugged is titled Atlas Hugged and its protagonist is John Galt’s grandson. Ayn Rand was not a character in her novel, but since anything goes in fiction, I could transport her into mine as Ayn Rant, John I’s lover and John III’s grandmother. Rant’s son, John II, parlays her Objectivist philosophy into a world-destroying libertarian media empire. John III rebels against the evil empire by challenging his father to a duel of speeches. In the process, he brings about a worldwide transformation based on giving. Atlas Hugged is so anti-Rand that it isn’t even being sold. Instead, it is gifted for whatever the reader wishes to give in return. Eat your heart out, Amazon!

Indefinite Causality

wired |  Over the last five years, a growing community of quantum physicists has been implementing the quantum switch in tabletop experiments and exploring the advantages that indefinite causal order offers for quantum computing and communication. It’s “really something that could be useful in everyday life,” said Giulia Rubino, a researcher at the University of Bristol who led the first experimental demonstration of the quantum switch in 2017.

But the practical uses of the phenomenon only make the deep implications more acute.

Physicists have long sensed that the usual picture of events unfolding as a sequence of causes and effects doesn’t capture the fundamental nature of things. They say this causal perspective probably has to go if we’re ever to figure out the quantum origin of gravity, space and time. But until recently, there weren’t many ideas about how post-causal physics might work. “Many people think that causality is so basic in our understanding of the world that if we weaken this notion we would not be able to make coherent, meaningful theories,” said Brukner, who is one of the leaders in the study of indefinite causality.

That’s changing as physicists contemplate the new quantum switch experiments, as well as related thought experiments in which Alice and Bob face causal indefiniteness created by the quantum nature of gravity. Accounting for these scenarios has forced researchers to develop new mathematical formalisms and ways of thinking. With the emerging frameworks, “we can make predictions without having well-defined causality,” Brukner said.

Progress has grown swifter recently, but many practitioners trace the origin of this line of attack on the quantum gravity problem to work 16 years ago by Lucien Hardy, a British-Canadian theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. “In my case,” said Brukner, “everything started with Lucien Hardy’s paper.”

Hardy was best known at the time for taking a conceptual approach made famous by Albert Einstein and applying it to quantum mechanics.

Einstein revolutionized physics not by thinking about what exists in the world, but by considering what individuals can possibly measure. In particular, he imagined people on moving trains making measurements with rulers and clocks. By using this “operational” approach, he was able to conclude that space and time must be relative.

In 2001, Hardy applied this same approach to quantum mechanics. He reconstructed all of quantum theory starting from five operational axioms.

He then set out to apply it to an even bigger problem: the 80-year-old problem of how to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity, Einstein’s epic theory of gravity. “I’m driven by this idea that perhaps the operational way of thinking about quantum theory may be applied to quantum gravity,” Hardy told me over Zoom this winter.

Valodya Tells The U.S. Establishment "I Am Not Your Negroe"

theconversation |  The tense test of strength began when Biden was asked about Putin in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos and agreed he was “a killer” and didn’t have a soul. He also said Putin will “pay a price” for his actions.

Putin then took the unusual step of going on the state broadcaster VGTRK with a prepared five-minute statement in response to Biden. 

In an unusually pointed manner, Putin recalled the US history of genocide of its Indigenous people, the cruel experience of slavery, the continuing repression of Black Americans today and the unprovoked US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the second world war.

He suggested states should not judge others by their own standards:

Whatever you say about others is what you are yourself.

Some American journalists and observers have reacted to this as “trolling”. It was not. 

It was the preamble to Putin’s most important message in years to what he called the American “establishment, the ruling class”. He said the US leadership is determined to have relations with Russia, but only “on its own terms”.

Although they think that we are the same as they are, we are different people. We have a different genetic, cultural and moral code. But we know how to defend our own interests.

And we will work with them, but in those areas in which we ourselves are interested, and on those conditions that we consider beneficial for ourselves. And they will have to reckon with it. They will have to reckon with this, despite all attempts to stop our development. Despite the sanctions, insults, they will have to reckon with this.

This is new for Putin. He has for years made the point, always politely, that Western powers need to deal with Russia on a basis of correct diplomatic protocols and mutual respect for national sovereignty, if they want to ease tensions.

But never before has he been as blunt as this, saying in effect: do not dare try to judge us or punish us for not meeting what you say are universal standards, because we are different from you. Those days are now over.

 

 

A Nation Of Sheep Ruled By Wolves Owned By Pigs..,

theburningplatform |  What appears to be happening is the last dying gasps of an empire of debt as it thrashes about using un-Constitutional means to control its subjects, while injecting trillions of fiat dollars as an adrenaline treatment for a terminal cancer diagnosis. As a last resort, initiating a global war with Russia and China would certainly distract the masses and keep them from realizing the true enemy within. Turning Washington DC into an armed encampment is not to protect the government from white supremacists. It is to protect the traitorous creatures in Congress and the White House from the citizens when this diabolical plan blows up in our faces.

Inflation is already raging, but the government and Fed tell you it is 1.5%. There are 261 million working age Americans and only 127 million are employed full-time, but the government tells you the unemployment rate is 6.2%, when more than 50% of those capable of working are not. The government will tell you GDP soared in the first quarter at 6%, when we are in the midst of a government created Depression, and the GDP calculation is nothing more than the government borrowing trillions from future generations and giving a minuscule portion to current generations, with the vast majority going into the pockets of billionaire oligarchs, Wall Street, and mega-corporations. The “economic recovery” narrative is entirely false, but the jar shakers know the plebs do not understand math.

The plumbing of our astonishingly crooked financial system began to fail in September 2019, with overnight Repo rates soaring to 10%. The Fed immediately leapt into action by restarting QE (aka No Banker Left Behind) to keep the depth of our debt predicament hidden from the public. A flu released from a Chinese bio-lab, which is highly non-lethal to anyone under 80 years old, has been utilized by the jar shakers to unleash a tsunami of digital fiat (aka debt) to prop up a system being smothered by too much debt.

Since March of 2020, our beloved legislators have added $4.5 trillion to the national debt, a 20% increase in one year. The Fed has done their part by jolting their balance sheet up by $3.5 trillion, an 85% increase in one year. The current administration is saying hold my beer, as they are busy adding another $4 trillion in the next year and the Fed will add another $2 trillion or so to their balance sheet. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of small businesses have been permanently destroyed, while Bezos and the rest of his billionaire buddies have increased their net worth by tens of billions. At least your grandma is earning .015% in her savings account, while her living expenses rise by 10%. Do you get it yet?