Seriously - Am I The Only Cat Fixated On This LOW HANGING SARS-CoV2 FRUIT?!?!?!
thescientist |Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease
researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week
(November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a
virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in
horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of one that causes human-like
severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could
infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the
team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine.
The
results demonstrate the ability of the SHC014 surface protein to bind
and infect human cells, validating concerns that this virus—or other
coronaviruses found in bat species—may be capable of making the leap to
people without first evolving in an intermediate host, Nature reported. They also reignite a debate about whether that information justifies the risk of such work,
known as gain-of-function research. “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody
could predict the trajectory,” Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the
Pasteur Institute in Paris, told Nature.
In October 2013, the US government put a stop to
all federal funding for gain-of-function studies, with particular
concern rising about influenza, SARS, and Middle East respiratory
syndrome (MERS). “NIH [National Institutes of Health] has funded such
studies because they help define the fundamental nature of
human-pathogen interactions, enable the assessment of the pandemic
potential of emerging infectious agents, and inform public health and
preparedness efforts,” NIH Director Francis Collins said in a statement at the time. “These studies, however, also entail biosafety and biosecurity risks, which need to be understood better.”
Baric’s
study on the SHC014-chimeric coronavirus began before the moratorium
was announced, and the NIH allowed it to proceed during a review
process, which eventually led to the conclusion that the work did not
fall under the new restrictions, Baric told Nature. But some researchers, like Wain-Hobson, disagree with that decision.
The
debate comes down to how informative the results are. “The only impact
of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,”
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers
University, told Nature.
But Baric and others argued the
study’s importance. “[The results] move this virus from a candidate
emerging pathogen to a clear and present danger,” Peter Daszak,
president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which samples viruses from animals
and people in emerging-diseases hotspots across the globe, told Nature.
nakedcapitalism | The important characteristic (of Russia and China) is that banking and finance are public
functions.
In modern (Anglo-Judeo-American) geopolitics, “democratic” means financialized. It
is still, as Aristotle described, pre-oligarchic. But this dynamic is
creditor-driven. And creditors not only control the supply of money and
credit, but also the legal system governing creditor privileges
(“rights”) to appropriate the assets and income of their debtors.
This financial dimension is the main characteristic neglected by modern
political theory and popular language. It is important to stress that
the antonym of “democracy” is not well described by pejorative words
such as “autocracy” or other journalistic terms.
There is no single term
for a socialist state in which banking and debt laws are public
utilities. But some term needs to be proposed – and “enlightened
despotism” or “philosopher-king” state sound anachronistic. Or perhaps
de-financialized state, social-credit state (problems with the SocCred
movement), or social-creditor state.
off-guardian | Environmentalist Vandana Shiva has described on numerous occasions
how the Gates Foundation through its ‘Ag One’ initiative is pushing for
one type of agriculture for the whole world. A top-down approach
regardless of what farmers or the public need or want. The strategy
includes digital farming, in which farmers are monitored and mined for
their agricultural data, which is then repackaged and sold back to them.
Along with Bill Gates, this is very much the agrifood model that
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva and
Cargill have in mind. The tech giants recent entry into the sector will
increasingly lead to a mutually beneficial integration between the
companies that supply products to farmers (pesticides, seeds,
fertilisers, tractors, drones, etc) and those that control the flow of
data (on soil, weather, pests, weeds, land use, consumer preferences,
etc) and have access to digital (cloud) infrastructure. A system based
on corporate concentration and centralisation.
Those farmers who remain in the system will become passive recipients
of corporate directives and products on farms owned by the Gates
Foundation (now one of the largest owners of farmland in the US),
agribusiness and financial institutions/speculators.
The three pieces of farm legislation in India (passed by parliament
but on hold) are essential for laying the foundation for this model of
agriculture. The legislation is The Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce
(Promotion and Facilitation) Act, The Farmers (Empowerment and
Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act and The
Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act.
The foreign and home-grown (Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani)
billionaires who have pushed for these laws require a system of contract
farming dominated by their big tech, big agribusiness and big retail
interests. Smallholder peasant agriculture is regarded as an impediment
to what they require: industrial-scale farms where driverless tractors,
drones and genetically engineered seeds are the norm and all data
pertaining to land, water, weather, seeds and soils is controlled by
them.
It is unfortunate that prominent journalists and media outlets in
India are celebrating the legislation and have attempted to
unjustifiably discredit farmers who are protesting. It is also worrying
that key figures like Dr Ramesh Chand, a member of NITI (National
Institute for Transforming India) Ayog, recently stated that the
legislation is necessary.
When these figures attack farmers or promote the farm acts, what they
are really doing is cheerleading for the destruction of local markets
and independent small-scale enterprises, whether farmers, hawkers, food
processers or mom and pop corner stores. And by implication, they are
helping to ensure that India is surrendering control over its food.
They are doing the bidding of the Gates Foundation and the global
agrifood corporations which also want India to eradicate its buffer food
stocks. Some of the very corporations which will then control stocks
that India would purchase with foreign exchange holdings. At that stage,
any notion of sovereign statehood would be bankrupt as India’s food
needs would be dependent on attracting foreign exchange reserves via
foreign direct investment or borrowing.
This would represent the ultimate betrayal of India’s farmers and
democracy as well as the final surrender of food security and food
sovereignty to unaccountable global traders and corporations.
The farm legislation is regressive and will eventually lead to the
country relying on outside forces to feed its population. This, in an
increasingly volatile world prone to conflict, public health scares,
unregulated land and commodity speculation and price shocks.
cam.ac.uk | We have to cut our greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050: that’s what climate scientists tell us, it’s what social protesters are asking for and it’s now the law in the UK. But we aren’t on track. For twenty years we’ve been trying to solve the problem with new or breakthrough technologies that supply energy and allow industry to keep growing, so we don’t have to change our lifestyles. But although some exciting new technology options are being developed, it will take a long time to deploy them, and they won’t be operating at scale within thirty years.
Meanwhile, our cars are getting heavier, we’re flying more each year and we heat our homes to higher temperatures. We all know that this makes no sense, but it’s difficult to start discussing how we really want to address climate change while we keep hoping that new technologies will take the problem away.
In response, this report starts from today’s technologies: if we really want to reach zero emissions in thirty years time, what does that involve? Most of what we most enjoy - spending time together as families or communities, leisure, sport, creativity - can continue and grow unhindered. We need to switch to using electricity as our only form of energy and if we continue today’s impressive rates of growth in non-emitting generation, we’ll only have to cut our use of energy to 60% of today’s levels. We can achieve this with incremental changes to the way we use energy: we can drive smaller cars and take the train when possible, use efficient electric heat-pumps to keep warm and buy buildings, vehicles and equipment that are better designed and last much longer.
The two big challenges we face with an all electric future are flying and shipping. Although there are lots of new ideas about electric planes, they won’t be operating at commercial scales within 30 years, so zero emissions means that for some period, we’ll all stop using aeroplanes. Shipping is more challenging: although there are a few military ships run by nuclear reactors, we currently don’t have any large electric merchant ships, but we depend strongly on shipping for imported food and goods.
In addition, obeying the law of our Climate Change Act requires that we stop doing anything that causes emissions regardless of its energy source. This requires that we stop eating beef and lamb - ruminants who release methane as they digest grass - and already many people have started to switch to more vegetarian diets. However the most difficult problem is cement: making cement releases emissions regardless of how it’s powered, there are currently no alternative options available at scale, and we don’t know how to install new renewables or make new energy efficient buildings without it.
We need to discuss these challenges as a society. Making progress on climate change requires that the three key groups of players - government, businesses and individuals - work together, rather than waiting for the other two to act first. But until we face up to the fact that breakthrough technologies won’t arrive fast enough, we can’t even begin having the right discussion.
Committing to zero emissions creates tremendous opportunities: there will be huge growth in the use and conversion of electricity for travel, warmth and in industry; growth in new zero emissions diets; growth in materials production, manufacturing and construction compatible with zero emissions; growth in leisure and domestic travel; growth in businesses that help us to use energy efficiently and to conserve the value in materials.
Bringing about this change, and exploring the opportunities it creates requires three things to happen together: as individuals we need to be part of the process, exploring the changes in lifestyle we prefer in order to make zero emission a reality. Protest is no longer enough - we must together discuss the way we want the solution to develop; the government needs to treat this as a delivery challenge - just like we did with the London Olympics, on-time and on-budget; the emitting businesses that must close cannot be allowed to delay action, but meanwhile the authors of this report are funded by the government to work across industry to support the transition to growth compatible with zero emissions.
Breakthrough technologies will be important in the future but we cannot depend on them to reach our zero emissions target in 2050. Instead this report sets an agenda for a long-overdue public conversation across the whole of UK society about how we really want to achieve Absolute Zero within thirty years
newsweek | The Spanish firm Grifols helped set off a kerfuffle last year when
it, along with other firms, offered nearly double the going price for
blood donations for a COVID-19 treatment trial. Brigham Young University
in Idaho had to threaten some enterprising students with suspension to
keep them from intentionally trying to contract COVID-19. The trial
failed, however, and now the Barcelona-based firm is hoping to extract
something far more valuable from the plasma of young volunteers: a set
of microscopic molecules that could reverse the process of aging itself.
Earlier this year, Grifols closed on a $146 million-deal to buy Alkahest, a company founded by Stanford University
neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray, who, along with Saul Villeda, revealed
in scientific papers published in 2011 and 2014 that the blood from
young mice had seemingly miraculous restorative effects on the brains of
elderly mice. The discovery adds to a hot area of inquiry called
geroscience that "seeks to understand molecular and cellular mechanisms
that make aging a major risk factor and driver of common chronic
conditions and diseases of older adulthood," according to the National
Institutes of Health. In the last six years, Alkahest has identified
more than 8,000 proteins in the blood that show potential promise as
therapies. Its efforts and those of Grifols have resulted in at least
six phase 2 trials completed or underway to treat a wide range of
age-related diseases, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Alkahest
and a growing number of other geroscience health startups signal a
change in thinking about some of the most intractable diseases facing
humankind. Rather than focusing solely on the etiology of individual
diseases like heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's and arthritis—or, for
that matter, COVID-19—geroscientists are trying to understand how these
diseases relate to the single largest risk factor of all: human aging.
Their goal is to hack the process of aging itself and, in the process,
delay or stave off the onset of many of the diseases most associated
with growing old.
The idea that aging and illness go hand and hand is, of course,
nothing new. What's new is the newfound confidence of scientists that
"aging" can be measured, reverse-engineered and controlled.
Until
recently, "people working on diseases did not think that aging was
modifiable," says Felipe Sierra, who recently retired as director of the
Division of Aging Biology at the National Institute on Aging, a part of
the NIH. "That is actually what many medical books say: The main risk
factor for cardiovascular disease is aging, but we cannot change aging
so let's talk about cholesterol and obesity. For Alzheimer's, aging is
the main risk factor—but let's talk about the buildup in the brain of
beta-amyloid proteins. Now that is beginning to change."
medicalbag | Some say that CountessElizabeth Báthory, considered by many to be the world’s worst female serial killer, was the true inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
After all, legend has it that she bathed in the blood of at least 650
servant girls she had tortured and killed. She was said to be so evil
that villagers kept their daughters in hiding for fear that Elizabeth
would take them. Her gruesome activities even earned her such names as
“the Infamous Lady” and “the Blood Countess.” This is her story.
Erzsébet Báthory, more commonly known in the Western world as
Elizabeth, was born in 1560 to one of the most powerful Protestant
families in Hungary at the time. She was the daughter of Baron George
Báthory and Baroness Anna Báthory, who were both Báthorys by birth.
Possibly stemming from inbreeding within her family, it is said that
from an early age Elizabeth suffered from seizures, loss of control,
and fits of rage. As a child, she witnessed the brutal punishments
handed out by her family’s officers on their estates; one anecdote
describes a gypsy accused of theft who was sewn up in the belly of a
dying horse and left to die. Her family tree certainly included some
disturbed kin as well. One of her uncles taught her Satanism, and she
learned about sadomasochism from her aunt.
Elizabeth was married by the time she was 15 years old to Count
Ferenc Nádasdy, a soldier who would go on to lead the armies of Hungary
against Ottoman forces threatening Central Europe. After her marriage,
the countess became the mistress of the Nádasdy estate, where the
couple earned a reputation as harsh masters. Building upon her own
cruelty, it is believed that Ferenc showed her some of his own ways of
punishing his servants. After 10 years, Elizabeth gave birth to 3
daughters and a son.
Although the count participated in his wife’s torture activities, it
wasn’t until the death of her husband in the early 1600s that
Elizabeth’s true evil came to fruition. She eventually moved to one of
her castles at Čachtice in northwest Hungary (now Slovakia) and began
surrounding herself with a cohort of servants to help her with her
torture practices. Legend has it that one day an attendant girl was
brushing Elizabeth’s hair when she accidentally pulled too hard and it
tugged on a snag in her hair. The countess erupted in anger, jumping up
and striking the girl with the back of her hand. The strike was so
hard that it made the girl bleed and some of that blood was left on
Elizabeth’s hand. Later that night, Elizabeth noticed that the skin on
her hand where the blood had been looked more youthful than she had
seen it in many years. This gave her the idea that if such a small
amount of blood could make her hand look so young, then more could
restore youthfulness to her whole body. It’s said that this is when the
madness began and Elizabeth started to bathe in the blood of virgin
girls.
Young women began to disappear from villages near and far, as well as
children. Unhappy girls were lured to the castle with the prospect that
they would find work there but were never seen again. When they
arrived, they were locked up in a cellar as they awaited torture.
Elizabeth carried out much of the torture herself, often beating the
girls to death. Sometimes she would sew a girl’s mouth shut, force her
to eat her own flesh, or burn her genitals. When she was too sick to
get out of bed to beat them, Elizabeth would order her servants to
bring up a girl to her quarters where she would bite their faces and
shoulders. In other instances, she would stick needles underneath the
girl’s fingertips before cutting off the fingers of those who tried to
take them out. Soon Elizabeth began to run out of young women, because
she had either already taken them, or the villagers had started to hide
their daughters out of fear that she would take them. This is when the
countess began to resort to noble girls, a decision that would
ultimately lead to her demise.
lifespan | Back in 2005, Drs. Irina and Michael
Conboy showed that joining the circulatory systems of young and old mice
together in a procedure called parabiosis could rejuvenate aged tissues
and reverse some aspects of aging in old mice.
Following this discovery, many
researchers concluded that there must be something special in young
blood that was able to spur rejuvenation in aged animals, and various
companies have been trying to find out what. Indeed, we recently
reported that researchers were apparently successful in halving the epigenetic age of old rats by treating them with Elixir, a proprietary mix of pro-youthful factors normally found in young blood.
However, a question still remains: was
the rejuvenation the result of there being something beneficial in the
young blood, or is it more a case of dilution of the harmful factors
present in old blood?
Today, we want to spotlight a new study
by Drs. Irina and Michael Conboy, which again lends more weight to the
idea that the rejuvenation is most likely due to a dilution of pro-aging
factors in old blood rather than there being any special sauce in young
blood [1].
During the study, the research team
discovered that by replacing half of the blood plasma in old mice with a
saline and albumin mixture, the albumin replacing the lost protein that
was removed when the original old blood plasma was taken, they could
achieve a similar or even greater rejuvenation effect in brain, liver,
and muscle tissues as joining two mice together through parabiosis or
giving old mice young blood.
We had the opportunity to interview Drs.
Irina and Michael Conboy about this new discovery and to see if we
could get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding aged blood
rejuvenation.
Steve: This recent paper builds on the
2015 paper of TGF beta, but it goes even further back to the days when
you guys had a lab next door to Amy Wagers and Tony Wyss-Coray and you
all shared the techniques, including the parabiosis technique.
Irina: Yes. Actually, I would like also
to thank you, Elena, and the whole organization for highlighting our
work and giving us an opportunity to speak in interviews.
Steve: You are very welcome. So, is this
dilution? Is it what you put in that’s more important, is it what you
take out, or is it both? I personally think that the evidence strongly
suggests that it’s more what you take out, but that doesn’t necessarily
mean that there isn’t good stuff in young blood.
Irina: Since our 2005 heterochronic
parabiosis paper, many people jumped into this boat of young blood,
thinking that the reason for rejuvenation is that there are less young
factors in an old animal and we provided them. Meanwhile, all our work
even leading to that paper suggested the opposite outcome: that there
are excessive factors in old blood that are actually good proteins; for
example, TGF beta. You cannot live without TGF beta. But, when people
age, the levels of this protein become elevated, and they start doing
counterproductive things for tissue repair, induce inflammation,
increase fibrosis, and prevent proliferation of tissue stem cells. That
was our point of view for the past 15 years, and every single paper that
we published since was putting forward the general idea that it is not
the young blood, it is the old blood that needs thought and attention.
michaelochurch | In a society like ours, the upper and
lower classes have more in common with each other than either has with
the middle class. The upper and lower classes “live like animals”, but
for very different reasons. The upper classes are empowered to engage
their primal, base urges; the lower classes are pummeled with fear on a
daily basis and regress to animalism not out of moral paucity but in
order to survive. People in the lower class live lives that are consumed
entirely by money, because they lack the means of a dignified life.
Those in the upper class, likewise, experience a life dominated by
money, because maintaining injustices favorable to oneself is hard work.
So, even though the motivations are different (fear at the bottom,
greed at the top) the lower and upper classes are united in what the
middle class perceives as “crass materialism” and, therefore, have
strikingly similar cultures. Their lives are run by that thing called
“money” toward which the middle classes pretend– and it is very much
pretend– to be ambivalent about. The middle classes are sheltered, until
the cultural protection, on which their semi-privileged status depends,
runs out.
The
“middle-est” of the middle class is the Gentry. Here we’re talking
about people who dislike pawnbrokers and stock traders alike, who appear
to lead a society from the front while its real owners lead it from the
shadows. This said, I have my doubts on the matter of there being one,
singular Gentry. I would argue that corporate middle management, the
clergy, the political establishments of both major U.S. political
parties, TED-talk onanist “thought leaders” and media personalities, and
even Instagram “influencers” could all be called Gentries; in no
obvious or formal way do these groups have much to do with one another.
Only in one thing are they united: by the middle 2010s it became clear
that both the Elite (bourgeoisie) and Labor (self-aaware proletariat)
were fed up with all these Gentries. Starting around 2013, an
anti-Gentry hategasm consumed the United States, and as a member of said
(former) Gentry I can’t say we didn’t deserve it.
Technology, I believe, is a major cause of
this. Silicon Valley began as a 1970s Gentry paradise; by 2010, it had
become a monument to Elite excess, arrogance, and malefaction. Modern
technology has given today’s employers an oppressive power the Stasi and
KGB only dreamt of. The American Gentry was a PR wing for capitalism
when it needed to win hearts and minds; but with today’s technological
weaponry, the rich no longer see a need to be well-liked by those they
rule.
For a concrete example, compare the “old
style” bureaucratic, paperwork corporation of the midcentury and the
“new style” technological one, in which workers are tracked, often
unawares, down to minutes. The old-style companies were hierarchical and
feudalistic but, by giving middle managers the ability to protect their
underlings, ran on a certain sense of reciprocated loyalty– a social
contract, if you will– that no longer exists. The worker agreed not to
undermine, humiliate, or sabotage his manager; the manager, in turn,
agreed to represent the worker as an asset to the company even when said
worker had a below-average year. All you had to do in the old-style
company was be liked (or, at least, not be despised) by your boss. If
your boss liked you, you got promoted. If your boss hated you, you got
fired. If you were anywhere from about 3.00 to 6.99 on his emotional
spectrum, you moved diagonally or laterally, your boss repping you as a
6.75/10 “in search of a better fit” so you moved along quickly and
peaceably. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it worked better than what
came afterward.
I’ve worked in the software industry long
enough to know that software engineers are the most socially clueless
people on earth. I’ve often heard them debate “the right” metrics to use
to track software productivity. My advice to them is: Always fight
metrics. Sabotage the readings, or blackmail a higher-up by catfishing
as a 15-year-old girl, or call in a union that’ll drop a pipe on that
shit. Always, always, always fight a metric that management wishes to
impose on you, because while a metric can hurt you (by flagging you as a
low performer) it will never help you. In the old-style
company, automated surveillance was impossible and performance was
largely inscrutable and only loyalty mattered– your career was based on
your boss’s opinion of you. It only took one thing to get a promotion:
be liked by your boss. In the new-style company, devised by management
consultants and software peddlers with evil intentions, getting a
promotion requires you to pass the metrics and be liked by your
boss. In the old-style company, you could get fired if your boss
really, really hated you. (As I said, if he merely disliked you, he’d
rep you as a solid performer “in search of a better fit” so you could
transfer peacefully, and you’d get to try again with a new boss.) In the
new-style company, you can get fired because your boss hates you or because
you fail the metrics. The “user story points” that product managers
insist are not an individual performance measure (and absolutely are, by
the way) are evidence that only the prosecution may use. This is
terrible for workers. There are new ways to fail and get fired; the
route to success is constricted by an increase in the number of targets
that must be hit. The old-style hierarchical company, at least, had
simple rules: be loyal to your boss. Having been a middle manager, I can
also say that the new-style company is humiliating for us– we can’t
protect our reports. You have to “demand accountability from” people,
but you can’t really do anything to help them.
This,
I think, gives us a metaphor for the American Gentry’s failure. Middle
managers who cannot protect their subordinates from the company’s more
evil instincts (such as the instinct to fire everyone and hire
replacements 5 percent cheaper) have no reason to expect true loyalty.
They become superfluous performance cops and taskmasters, and even if
they are personally liked, their roles are justifiably hated (including
by those who have to perform them.)
indiepf | What I’ve called the Labor, Gentry, and Elite “ladders” can more
easily be described as “infrastructures”. For Labor, this infrastructure
is largely physical and the relevant connection is knowing how to use
that physical device or space, and getting people to trust a person to
competently use (without owning, because that’s out of the question for
most) these resources. For the Gentry, it’s an “invisible graph” of
knowledge and education and “interestingness”, comprised largely of
ideas. For the Elite, it’s a tight, exclusive network centered on social
connections, power, and dominance. People can be connected to more than
one of these infrastructures, but people usually bind more tightly to
the one of higher status, except when at the transitional ranks (G4 and
E4) which tend to punt people who don’t ascend after some time. The
overwhelmingly high likelihood is that a person is aligned most strongly
to one and only one of these structures. The values are too conflicting
for a person not to pick one horse or the other.
I’ve argued that the ladders connect at a two-rung difference, with
L2 ~ G4, L1 ~ G3, G2 ~ E4, and G1 ~ E3. These are “social equivalencies”
that don’t involve a change in social status, so they’re the easiest to
transitions to make (in both directions). They represent a transfer
from one form of capital to another. A skilled laborer (L2) who begins
taking night courses (G4) is using time to get an education rather than
more money. Likewise, one who moves from the high gentry (G2) to a
90-hour-per-week job in private wealth management (E4) is applying her
refined intellectual skills and knowledge to serving the rich, in the
hope of making the connections to become one of them.
That said, these ladders often come into conflict. The most relevant
one to most of my readers will be the conflict between the Gentry and
the Elite. The Gentry tends to be left-libertarian and values
creativity, individual autonomy, and free expression. The Elite tends
toward center-right authoritarianism and corporate conformity, and it
views creativity as dangerous (except when applied to hiding financial
risks or justifying illegal wars). The Gentry believes that it is the deserving elite and the face of the future, and that it can use culture to engineer a future in which its values are
elite; while the upper tier of the Elite finds the Gentry pretentious,
repugnant, self-indulgent, and subversive. The relationship between the
Gentry and Elite is incredibly contentious. It’s a cosmic, ubiquitous
war between the past and the future.
Between the Gentry and Labor, there is an attitude of distrust. The
Elite has been running a divide-and-conquer strategy between these two
categories for decades. This works because the Elite understands (and
can ape) the culture of the Gentry, but has something in common with
Labor that sets the categories apart from the Gentry: a conception of workas a theater for masculine dominance.
This is something that the Elite and Labor both believe in– the
visceral strength and importance of the alpha-male in high-stakes
gambling settings such as most modern work– but that the Gentry would
rather deny. Gender is a major part of the Elite’s strategy in turning
Labor against the Gentry: make the Gentry look effeminate.
That’s why “feminist” is practically a racial slur, despite the world
desperately needing attention to women’s political equality, health and
well-being (that is, feminism).
The Elite also uses the Underclass in a different process: the Elite
wants Labor think the Gentry intends to conspire with the Underclass to
dismantle Labor values and elevate these “obviously undeserving” people
to, at least, the status of Labor if not promoted above them. They
exploit fear in Labor. One might invoke racism and the “Southern
strategy” in politics as an example of this, but the racial part is
incidental. The Elite don’t care whether it’s blacks or Latinos or
“illigals” or red-haired people or homosexuals (most of whom are not
part of the Underclass) that are being used to frighten Labor into
opposing and disliking the Gentry; they just know that the device works
and that it has pretty much always worked.
The relationship between the Gentry and Elite is one of open rivalry,
and that between the Gentry and Labor is one of distrust. What about
Labor and the Elite? That one is not symmetric. The Elite exploit and
despise Labor as a class comprised mostly of “useful idiots”. How does
Labor see the Elite? They don’t. The Elite has managed to convince Labor
that the Gentry (who are open about their cultural elitism, while the
Elite hides its social and economic elitism) is the actual “liberal
elite” responsible for Labor’s misery over the past 30 years. In effect,
the Elite has constructed an “infinity pool” where the Elite appears to
be a hyper-successful extension of Labor, lumping these two disparate
ladders into an “us” and placing the Gentry and Underclass into “them”.
thehill |Morgan Freeman says if you trust him, you'll take his advice and get vaccinated against COVID-19.
"I'm
not a doctor, but I trust science. And I’m told that, for some reason,
people trust me," the "Vanquish" star says in a public service
announcement released Monday by the arts advocacy group The Creative
Coalition.
Freeman, 83, has played God in multiple films and is a popular choice for narrating documentaries and science specials.
“So here I am to say I trust science and I got the vaccine," he tells viewers in the PSA.
"If you trust me, you’ll get the vaccine," Freeman adds.
Morgan, I don't trust you as far as I could spit on you. First, there's your recent Russiagate foolishness and phukkery:
And then, there's that deeply disturbing personal failing from several years ago when your nasty old ass was simultaneously on those blue pills and your own step grand daughter!!! Now, low-information, short-memory, IQ-75 may have forgotten what you were up to, but these liminal views of consensus reality CANNOT UNSEE what they have seen:
WaPo | I
think it’s time for us to extend the newfound normalcy from social
settings to business operations. While the CDC guidance currently
discourages vaccinated people from gathering in public places, this
should be overridden if businesses can verify vaccination status.
Imagine that you own a gym that used to have high-intensity exercise
classes but had to stop because it’s high risk to have lots of people
breathing heavily in crowded indoor spaces. You could reopen these
classes if everyone attending is guaranteed to be vaccinated. Or imagine
that you run a restaurant that has had to operate at 30 percent
capacity to keep distancing between tables. You could establish certain nights where you serve at 100 percent capacity, if all patrons and servers are reliably known to be vaccinated.
Some entities are already exploring such possibilities, including cruise operators and a handful of colleges.
By requiring proof of vaccination, they will aim for herd immunity on
their ships and campuses. Not only could they return to full operation,
but also they could probably give their customers and students something
close to the pre-pandemic experience, with full interaction and
possibly without the need for masks.
In
these examples, vaccination isn’t a government-imposed requirement but a
voluntary action facilitated by the private sector. Any outcry over
government overreach shouldn’t focus on proof of vaccination, but rather
on attempts to ban businesses from asking for it. It’s the height of
hypocrisy for politicians who normally tout their support for free
markets to now bar the private sector from covid-safety innovations. Why
can’t businesses offer customers the peace of mind that comes with
much-reduced risk from a potentially deadly disease?
Some
have made the equity argument: How could vaccination policies be fair
as long as some aren’t able to get shots? I am the mother of two young
children, and I know they probably won’t be eligible until 2022; until
then, I am happy for others to have privileges that my family can’t.
This isn’t so different from, say, adults-only resorts: Just because
some people can’t enjoy them doesn’t mean that no one should. In fact,
the more incentives the better, because the more people vaccinated, the
better we all are protected.
Throughout the pandemic, there have been polarizing terms that trigger fierce opposition. Just as we should never have invoked “lockdowns,” we need to stop debating “vaccine passports.” Instead, we should define what it is that we need to move toward normalcy:
a covid-19 health screen that enables people to associate with one
another free from pandemic restrictions. That’s a concept I hope most
Americans can get behind.
thescientist | Despite being treated with drugs designed to target this gene, the
patients were not getting better, and when we interrogated the genomes
of their cancers after the tumors were surgically removed following
treatment, we saw that they had changed. The tumors had dramatically
reduced the number of copies of the targeted epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)
gene, presumably giving them an advantage to escape the drugs, and they
had evolved these genetic differences at a rate that seemed to make no
sense—within just one to two weeks.
Normally, we think of cancers evolving over many cell divisions, as
the cells carrying genetic changes that provide a fitness advantage—such
as an ability to resist a particular treatment—will be more likely to
survive and divide. Here, we were noticing a change in the copy number
of the gene within just a few generations. There was no way that we
could explain how the tumors were altering their DNA so quickly.
Even
stranger, we could take any cell from the tumor, and whether it had
high or undetectable protein levels of EGFR, it would give rise to a new
tumor when cultured in the lab or implanted into a mouse. Each of these
new tumors would then display the full spectrum of cells found in the
original tumor, varied in their EGFR copy number. This makes no
sense according to what we know about classical genetics. We would have
expected that tumors arising from a cell with low levels of EGFR would
give rise to a tumor with low EGFR levels, whereas a tumor arising from a
cell with high levels of EGFR would give rise to a tumor with high EGFR
levels.
When we removed the treatment with the EGFR inhibitor from
cultured tumor cells, EGFR copy number quickly rebounded, but again, not
on chromosomes. When we saw this, we realized that ecDNA might explain
why some cancers can become resistant to treatment so quickly, allowing
tumors to evolve at a rate that far exceeds anything that could be
accounted for by classical genetics. We published our results in Sciencein
2014, but they were not immediately accepted by the community. Although
we had only studied one tumor type, glioblastoma, we began to wonder
whether this might be the tip of the iceberg.
Without realizing
it, this study led us, and now others, to a series of discoveries that
have changed the way that researchers view cancer in general, revealing
frightening ways that tumors can evolve. We have learned that ecDNA is
central to the behavior of some of the most aggressive forms of cancer,
enabling remarkably elevated levels of oncogene transcription, creating
new gene regulatory interactions, and providing a powerful mechanism for
rapid change that can drive very high oncogene copy numbers or allow
cancer cells to resist treatment. Fist tap Woodensplinter
francesoir |In a letter dated March 21, 2021 published on the Nakim.org website, Professor Montagnier, Nobel Prize winner in medicine, supports the request of Dr Seligmann and engineer Haim Yativfor the suspension of vaccination against Covid-19judges of the Supreme Court of the State of Israel.
This letter is in support of the petition for the suspension of vaccination against covid-19 which was presented to you by MM.Yativ and Seligmann.
I am Luc Montagnier, doctor of medicine, professor emeritus at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, director of research emeritus at CNRS, Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the discovery of the AIDS virus.
I am an expert in virology, having devoted a large part of my research to RNA viruses, in particular mouse encephalomyocarditis, Rous sarcoma virus, HIV 1 and HIV 2 virus.
Considerable effort has been devoted to vaccination against the coronavirus covid-19 responsible for a global pandemic.In particular the State of Israel has organized a mass vaccination of its population so far, 49% of its total population has received two doses of Pfizer vaccine.
First of all, I would like to stress the novelty of this type of vaccine.
In conventional vaccines, the genetic information carried by viral DNA or RNA is inactivated and virus proteins are used to induce vaccine antibodies.In some cases, the virus remains alive, but is attenuated by successive passages in vitro.
In the case of so-called RNA messenger vaccines, these vaccines are made from an active fraction of the virus's RNA which will be injected into the vaccinated person.It therefore penetrates the cells of the latter which will manufacture the vaccine proteins from the code of the injected RNA. We immediately see that this last step depends a lot on its success on the physiological state of the recipient.
I would like to summarize the potential dangers of these vaccines in a mass vaccination policy.
1.Short-term side effects : these are not the normal local reactions found with any vaccination, but serious reactions are life threatening to the recipient such as anaphylactic shock linked to a component of the vaccine mixture. , or severe allergies or an autoimmune reaction up to cell aplasia.
2.Lack of vaccine protection :
2.1 induction of facilitating antibodies - the induced antibodies do not neutralize a viral infection, but on the contrary facilitate it depending on the recipient.The latter may have already been exposed to the virus asymptomatically.A low level of naturally induced antibodies may compete with the antibodies induced by the vaccine.
2.2 The production of antibodies induced by vaccination in a population highly exposed to the virus will lead to the selection of variants resistant to these antibodies.These variants can be more virulent or more transmissible.This is what we are seeing now.An endless virus-vaccine race that will always turn to the advantage for the virus.
3.Long-term effects : Contrary to the claims of the manufacturers of messenger RNA vaccines, there is a risk of integration of viral RNA into the human genome.Indeed, each of our cells has endogenous retroviruses with the ability to reverse transcriptase RNA into DNA.Although this is a rare event, its passage through the DNA of germ cells and its transmission to future generations cannot be excluded.
“Faced with an unpredictable future, it is better to abstain."
theintercept |Pfizer, Moderna, and other coronavirus vaccine makers have said repeatedly that they intend to hike prices on vaccines as early as this year, as the potential need for additional booster shots and future demand could lead to an unprecedented financial windfall. One estimate projects that if Pfizer raised the price of its coronavirus vaccine from $19.50 to $175 per dose, as one Pfizer executive recently suggested, and if every adult American were to take it, the cost would be $44.7 billion — nearly 10 percent of all U.S. drug spending.
But the federal government, which
funded crucial biomedical research to develop the patented messenger RNA
technology behind the leading Covid-19 vaccines, is on the verge of
eliminating a legal mechanism to control the prices of key medical
products, including vaccines.
Next week, the National Institute of
Standards and Technology, or NIST, will wrap up a comment period to
modify the rules governing the Bayh-Dole Act, a law that regulates the
transfer of federally funded inventions into commercial property. Under
the current interpretation of the law, the government may “march in” and
suspend the use of patents developed via government-funded inventions
if it determines that the products are excessively priced.
The rulemaking is the latest flashpoint
in a decades long battle to control drug prices. The drug industry has
fought successfully to prevent “march-in” rights in the past; the
government has never managed to exercise them. But over the last year, a
growing number of Republicans and Democrats, including newly appointed
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Beccera, have called for the
use of march-in rights to rein in drug prices.
This supposed leverage to control
prices — on coronavirus medications and dozens of other drugs whose
development relied heavily on government-backed research — would be gone
if the rule-change proceeds.
theconversation | At the end of 2020, there was a strong hope that high levels of
vaccination would see humanity finally gain the upper hand over
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. In an ideal scenario, the
virus would then be contained at very low levels without further
societal disruption or significant numbers of deaths.
But since then, new “variants of concern”
have emerged and spread worldwide, putting current pandemic control
efforts, including vaccination, at risk of being derailed.
Put simply, the game has changed, and a successful global rollout of
current vaccines by itself is no longer a guarantee of victory.
No one is truly safe from COVID-19 until everyone is safe. We are in a
race against time to get global transmission rates low enough to
prevent the emergence and spread of new variants. The danger is that
variants will arise that can overcome the immunity conferred by
vaccinations or prior infection.
What’s more, many countries lack the capacity to track emerging
variants via genomic surveillance. This means the situation may be even
more serious than it appears.
As members of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission Taskforce on Public Health, we call
for urgent action in response to the new variants. These new variants
mean we cannot rely on the vaccines alone to provide protection but must
maintain strong public health measures to reduce the risk from these
variants. At the same time, we need to accelerate the vaccine program in
all countries in an equitable way.
Together, these strategies will deliver “maximum suppression” of the virus.
What are ‘variants of concern’?
Genetic mutations of viruses like SARS-CoV-2 emerge frequently, but some variants are labelled “variants of concern”, because they can reinfect people who have had a previous infection or vaccination, or are more transmissible or can lead to more severe disease.
There are currently at least three documented SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern:
B.1.351, first reported in South Africa in December 2020
B.1.1.7, first reported in the United Kingdom in December 2020
P.1, first identified in Japan among travellers from Brazil in January 2021.
Similar mutations are arising in different countries simultaneously,
meaning not even border controls and high vaccination rates can
necessarily protect countries from home-grown variants, including
variants of concern, where there is substantial community transmission.
If there are high transmission levels, and hence extensive
replication of SARS-CoV-2, anywhere in the world, more variants of
concern will inevitably arise and the more infectious variants will
dominate. With international mobility, these variants will spread.
FT | The tax fight is a preamble for an upcoming mayoral election that all sides view as one of the most consequential in New York’s history. The Democratic primary, which is expected to crown the eventual winner in a city where seven out of every eight voters are Democrats, is in June.
Business leaders and the wealthy have been nursing existential dread at the possibility of what one prominent property developer calls another “ideological” mayor. That is, someone in the mould of the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, who is limited to serving two terms.
Two days after winning the 2013 Democratic primary, De Blasio attended a private lunch with the city’s business leaders and promptly alienated many of them. They expected he would solicit their advice and extend a hand. Instead, the mayor reprised his “tale of two cities” campaign rhetoric, and declared that he cared about the other side. “Faces dropped,” one attendee recalls.
That divide has only deepened in the ensuing years. De Blasio’s legion of executive class critics deride him as a lazy manager who deploys politicised rhetoric to cover for his own incompetence. While the budget has increased by 35 per cent during his tenure, problems like homelessness and public housing have worsened — even before the pandemic.
“The city is at a crossroads. This is truly the most important election of our lifetime and in NYC’s history,” Stephen Ross, chair of The Related Companies, and de facto king of the city’s developers, wrote to fellow business leaders last month as he urged them to join his effort to elect a business-friendly mayor. The race’s outcome, Ross wrote, will determine whether “NYC will rebound or languish”.
Looming large for executives like Ross is the grim memory of the 1970s, when a fraying city ended up losing half its Fortune 500 companies — many fleeing to surrounding suburbs — and shedding more than 1m inhabitants. That era also birthed a civic movement.
It was christened at a breakfast meeting at the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue in 1971 when the developer Lew Rudin and hotelier Robert Tisch hatched what would become the Association for a Better New York, a group of business leaders who aimed to step in where city government was failing. ABNY’s moguls lobbied the federal government on the city’s behalf. They also brought labour leaders into their tent.
pluralistic | The zombie economy shambles on. Obama's loan-shark bailout and the
eviction crisis let the architects of subprime buy up whole towns' worth
of homes and turn them into hugely profitable slums: high-rent,
low-quality deathtraps.
Wall St landlords package rents from subprime rentals into bonds,
backed by the loan-shark's guarantee: arm-breakers will evict the shit
out of anyone who stops paying.
America-a land where eviction was once a rarity-now faces an eviction epidemic.
The foreclosure crisis was only possible because Wall St and the
courts collaborated to streamline the historically complicated and
time-consuming process of taking away someone's home. Same goes for the
eviction epidemic.
It's a simple equation: the more loan-sharks spend on arm-breakers, the lower the expected profits.
Improvements to arm-breaking processes – cost-savings on traditional
coercion or innovative new forms of terror – are powerful engines for
unlocking new debt markets.
When innovation calls, tech answers. Our devices are increasingly
"smart," and inside every smart device is a potential arm-breaker.
Digital arm-breakers have been around since the first DRM systems, but
they really took off in 2008.
That's when subprime car loans boomed. People who lost everything in
the GFC still needed to get to work, and thanks to chronic US
underinvestment in transit, that means owning a car. So loan-sharks and
tech teamed up to deliver a new lost-cost, high-efficiency arm-breaker.
They leveraged the nation's mature wireless network to install
cellular killswitches in cars. You could extend an unrepayable loan to a
desperate person, and use an unmutable second stereo system to bombard
them with earsplitting overdue notices.
Within a decade, the bond-market for payments from subprime car
drivers was edging up on $1T; not because borrowers didn't default, but
because they defaulted later, and the car could be easily re-leased to
another desperate person.
The zombie economy shambled on. Tech built undeletable, always-on
kill-switches, lo-jacks, and spyware into an ever-expanding
constellation of devices, like laptops.
Rent-to-own subprime laptops were the epicenter of innovation in
digital arm-breaking. Laptops shipped with spyware for covert operation
of cameras and mic and access ot files.
That went beyond repoing a laptop! Lenders could make and share covert sex-tapes of their customers!
They spied on children, plundered MP3 collections, stole passwords,
read email. It was beyond the wildest dreams of analog loan-sharks.
NYTimes | America’s most powerful people have a problem. They can’t admit that they’re powerful.
Take
Andrew Cuomo. On a recent call with reporters, the embattled Mr. Cuomo
insisted that he was “not part of the political club.” The assertion was
confounding because Mr. Cuomo is in his third term as governor of New
York — a position his father also held for three terms. Mr. Cuomo has
also served as state attorney general and as secretary of the Department
of Housing and Urban Development.
Or
think of Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence. After her
appointment was announced, Ms. Haines declared, “I have never shied away
from speaking truth to power.” That is a curious way of describing a
meteoric career that includes stints at exclusive universities, a
prestigious judicial clerkship and important jobs in foreign policy and
intelligence before her appointment to a cabinet-level office overseeing
a budget of more than $60 billion.
This
sort of false advertising isn’t limited to Democrats. Senator Josh
Hawley of Missouri, for instance, has embraced an image as a populist
crusader against a distant “political class.” He does not emphasize his
father’s career as a banker, his studies at Stanford and Yale Law
School, or his work as clerk to prominent judges, including Chief
Justice John Roberts. The merits of Mr. Hawley’s positions are open to
debate. But his membership in the same elite that he rails against is
not.
And it’s not only politicians.
Business figures love to present themselves as “disrupters” of stagnant
industries. But the origins of the idea are anything but rebellious.
Popularized by a Harvard
professor and promoted by a veritable industry of consultants, it has
been embraced by some of the richest and most highly credentialed people
in the world.
Examples could be multiplied, but these cases are enough to show that
the problem of insiders pretending to be outsiders cuts across party,
gender and field. The question is why.
Part of the explanation is strategic. An outsider pose is appealing
because it allows powerful people to distance themselves from the
consequences of their decisions. When things go well, they are happy to
take credit. When they go badly, it’s useful to blame an incompetent,
hostile establishment for thwarting their good intentions or visionary
plans.
FREEP | State health officials say 246 fully vaccinated Michiganders contracted coronavirus from January to March, and three have died.
"These
are individuals who have had a positive test 14 or more days after the
last dose in the vaccine series," said Lynn Sutfin, a spokesperson for
the state health department.
Some of the 246
people may ultimately be excluded from the state's tally of vaccine
breakthrough cases because they may have had earlier coronavirus
infections and still tested positive two weeks post immunization.
"These
cases are undergoing further review to determine if they meet other
(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) criteria for determination
of potential breakthrough, including the absence of a positive antigen
or PCR test less than 45 days prior to the post-vaccination positive
test," Sutfin said.
Although so-called vaccine
breakthrough cases are rare, and all three COVID-19 vaccines on the
market are considered highly effective with efficacy rates ranging from
72% for Johnson & Johnson's vaccine to 94% and 95% for Moderna's and
Pfizer's, respectively, it can happen.
"While it is significantly less likely, it is still possible to contract
the virus after being vaccinated," Sutfin said. "Studies indicate that
even if vaccinated people do become ill, they are far less likely to
experience severe illness requiring hospitalization or resulting in
death.
"But the possibility of infection and further
transmission is why we continue to encourage Michiganders to take
precautions while out in public, including wearing masks, washing hands
and social distancing, even after receiving the vaccine until more
Michiganders have been able to be vaccinated."
Hospitalization
data for 129 of the fully vaccinated cases is incomplete, Sutfin said.
But for the 117 people for whom hospitalization records are known, 11
were hospitalized.
"A number of these are new cases that have been
reported ... as a result of a positive test, but local health
departments are either early in their investigation or have yet to begin
their case investigation," Sutfin said.
The
three fully vaccinated people who died, Sutfin said, were all ages 65
and older. Two of them were within three weeks of full vaccination.
nakedcapitalism | My worst nightmare concerns are starting to come true and the media
will not be able to hide this for much longer. Today, I am not concerned
about the SCIENCE of medicine – I am concerned about the ART of
medicine.
The ART can best be summarized as encouraging patients to do the
right thing for THEM. With regard to COVID 19, that would be to meet the
patient at whatever level they are and find ways to encourage social
distancing rules, masking and to correctly guide them on vaccine choice.
It would also include encouraging them to be engaged in the healthiest
behaviors possible during this time of crisis. Eat well, exercise, sleep
and de-stress.
The ART is often much more important to a physician’s medical
outcomes than the SCIENCE – something our society and our medical
establishment has long ago forgotten. ART requires as a foundation
explicit trust and honesty between a patient and the physician. There is
no other way.
Yves, I appreciated your post the other day on the Christian
Nationalism aspect of COVID 19. I made a comment on the post about this
not just being an Evangelical problem. I even suggested in the comment
that there could be issues brewing among Roman Catholics, based on what I
had been hearing as a physician.
As of Easter Sunday, there are now multiple videos being widely
circulated and they all speak to the issue better than I could ever type
out in a comment. I have been seeing this problem slowly brewing for
weeks and it has largely been completely ignored by our mainstream
media.
I will state for the record officially today – the public health
authorities have lost the narrative. They apparently have also lost
their minds. If they think this type of behavior on the most Holy Days
of the Church is not going to go unnoticed – they have rocks for brains.
This kind of thuggishness is not going to help their cause in any way;
rather, it will make these people dig in more. And trust me – as of this
Easter Sunday AM – they are digging in. Bunker-style. A clarion call
has gone out and it could not be more clear. And I am talking about
Roman Catholics – not my Evangelical family – they went off the
reservation long ago. Now even my Orthodox friends have taken notice.
As I have been stating over the past few days – the authorities have
repeatedly allowed discredited, hypocritical and lying Hoohahs to be
their voice in the national media. Outside of our big blue cities and
states – NO ONE AMONG MY PATIENTS COULD GIVE A RAT’S ASS WHAT THESE
PEOPLE HAVE TO SAY ANYMORE ABOUT THIS PANDEMIC. I hear this refrain
constantly every day. The lying, dissembling, crying, misstatements,
backtracking and hypocrisy have taken their final toll. If they are not
careful, they will soon be public enemy #1.
We have made many errors as a society in the past 12 months, but
probably the most important mistake is hardly ever mentioned. One which
our forbears in public health, like my father, worked to eradicate for
decades. It is very simple – national “one-size-fits-all” narratives and
plans in public health do not now nor have they ever worked. Never
have. Never will.
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Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
