The United States is no less vulnerable than Britain and France to threats to security and air safety. The United States Air Force or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration should reopen investigations of U.F.O. phenomena. It would not imply that the country has suddenly started believing in little green men. It would simply recognize the possibility that radar alone cannot always tell us what’s out there.
A healthy skepticism about extraterrestrial space travelers leads people to disregard U.F.O. sightings without a moment’s thought. But in the United States, this translates into overdependence on radar data and indifference to all kinds of unidentified aircraft — a weakness that could be exploited by terrorists or anyone seeking to engage in espionage against the United States.
The American government has not investigated U.F.O. sightings since 1969, when the Air Force ended Project Blue Book, an effort to scientifically analyze all sightings to see if any posed a threat to national security. Britain and France, in contrast, continue to investigate U.F.O. sightings, because of concerns that some sightings might be attributable to foreign military aircraft breaching their airspace, or to foreign space-based systems of interest to the intelligence community.
I love these articles. To me, they're like tchotchkys of the collective unconscious. I expect we'll be seeing lots more such bon mots in the weeks and months to come as the perfect storm afflicting the economy and the American body politic gathers strength. The American political theater will prove jarringly impotent in dealing with the encompassing reality corrections - so it's time once again to inject a little mystery and awe into the otherwise steady diet of bread and circuses...., Originally posted August 2, 2008.
Though UFO abductions do appear to be an international phenomenon, the lion's share of cases seem to come from Anglo-Saxon-rooted countries like the United States, England, South Africa, and Australia. Interestingly, all of these countries face race problems - whether it be with Aborigines, African-Americans, Zulu and Xhosa, or Caribbean blacks from the commonwealth. In the Third World, many people from these First World countries commonly encounter "organ removal" panics. Rumors have spread like wildfire that Americans in Guatemala are kidnapping small children and "harvesting" their organs for transplants. The similarity between these panics and UFO abductions should also be fairly obvious....
The connection between the UFO phenomenon itself (long before the current wave of abductions) and race is curious and bizarre. Many of the first group of UFO "contactees" - who went aboard the flying saucers willingly, to make love to gorgeous Venusians (but never producing offspring) - were loosely affiliated with the "Silver Shirt" movement of the 30s and 40s, a sort of homegrown American fascism which, among other things, opposed Roosevelt and WW II. The 50s contactees seemed to report that the majority of the saucer pilots were "Aryans" - long-haired, blonde, tall beings from Venus or other planets in the solar system. The "Aryans," when not warning humanity about atomic war, often gave messages promoting race harmony, but softly warning against racial intermixture and the "population explosion" of the Third World masses...
What ever became of the New World Order eruptions of the early 90's? Do you remember the vast conspiracy imaginings associated with pre-Katrina FEMA? Oklahoma City, Waco, Black Helicopters, etc.., etc.., etc..? Whatever became of all those folks now that they've had eight years of rule by the other side of the governance duopoly? Originally posted March 29, 2008.
hopenothate | The Order of Nine Angles is a Nazi-Satanist “group” (or Nazi Occult
as they prefer to describe themselves) that promotes a supernatural,
hateful system of thought which condemns liberal, Judeo-Christian
society and longs for a new imperial age created by a ludicrous
sub-Nietzschean superman figure called ‘Vindex.’ Ultimately, the O9A
elite aspires to colonise the solar system.
The racist order deifies Hitler and the Third Reich, which are
regarded as having attempted to create a “Satanic empire” in order to
achieve the destiny of the western world.
Much of the O9A writings and activities appear on the surface quite comical. The chanting, the dressing up, the rituals.
The Mass of Heresy, contained within the ONA’s Black Book of Satan,
is performed before an altar adorned with a swastika banner, a framed
photograph of Hitler and a copy of Mein Kampf. With black candles and
incense of Mars burning, the congregation, dressed in black robes,
chant:
We believe Adolf Hitler was sent by our gods To guide us to greatness. We believe in the inequality of the races
And in the right of the Aryans to live According to the laws of the folk.
In The Ceremony of Recalling, the Preistess blindfolds the Priest and
takes him to each member of the congregation who kiss him. After being
lifted on an alter containing “red candles and quartz tetrahedron”, the
Priest has his robe removed by the Priestess as the others walk around
him. After performing a sexual act on the Priest, the Priestess removes
the robes of the congregation. Meanwhile, the Mistress, dressed in a
white robe, “takes the person she has chosen and indulges herself
according to her desire. The congregation consume the consecrated cakes
[made from wheat, water, egg, honey, animal fat and marijuana] and wine
and take their own pleasures according to their desires.” The ceremony
ends with the killing of a chosen one; in a symbolic sacrifice, an
animal replaces a person. On the next new moon, the congregation consume
cakes containing the sacrificial victim’s blood.
But
behind the fantasy and roleplay lies a very sinister organisation which
has the potential to inspire their followers to commit extreme acts of
violence.
The O9A believes civilisation must be undermined and destroyed from
within, so adherents are encouraged to be as grubby and horrible as they
like – committing crimes, random acts of violence, sexual assaults, and
even the “culling” of human victims.
The three volumes of The Black Book of Satan are considered so
extreme that they are kept is a special section of the British Library
and not available to the general public. There is repeated talk of
“culling”, committing acts of violence and destabilisation and even
terrorism. In the The Dreccian Way, an O9A training manual written by
leader Richard Moult, followers are encouraged not just to commit crime,
but to “spread it, encourage it, incite it, support it”.
O9A
literature regularly advocates ritualised rape, random attacks on
innocent victims and “human culling”. The Black Book of Satan volume 3
describes how the Spring Equinox should be celebrated by a human
sacrifice of somebody who volunteers for the role by their bad deeds,
which, it suggests, could be “a Nazarene, such as an interfering
investigative journalist.”
“Culling is natural and necessary,” wrote Moult in The Dreccian Way.
“To cull humans is to be the ONA. To cull – according to our guildlines
and tests – is what makes us ONA.”
al-jazeera | “If I don’t steal your home, someone else will steal it,” was the
answer given by an Israeli settler to Mona al-Kurd, a young Palestinian
woman who accused him of stealing her home in the Sheikh Jarrah
neighbourhood in the occupied East Jerusalem.
The dialogue, captured on video by Palestinian activist Tamer Maqalda
on Saturday, shows 22-year-old al-Kurd confronting the settler in the
garden of her family home.
In the video, al-Kurd is heard telling the settler in English: “Jacob, you know that this is not your home.”
The settler replies in a thick US accent: “Yes, but if I go, you
don’t go back, so what’s the problem? Why are you yelling at me?”
The response provoked al-Kurd, who told him “You are stealing my house!”
“If I don’t steal it, someone else will steal it,” Jacob answers. “So why are you yelling at me?”
“No one is allowed to steal my home!” al-Kurd shouts.
Jacob then says in Hebrew: “This is not mine in order to return it.”
In recent months, the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood saw a series of
sit-ins by Palestinians to protest against Israeli orders for them to
vacate their homes, which they have described as a continuation of the
ethnic cleansing that began with the Nakba in 1948.
On Monday night, dozens of Israeli forces stormed the neighbourhood
and assaulted Palestinian families by beating and shooting tear gas and
sound bombs at them. According to local Palestinian media, 20 people
were injured, and at least four Palestinian men and one girl were
arrested, with two being released on Tuesday.
Half of the al-Kurd family home was taken over by Israeli settlers in 2009. Al-Kurd’s twin brother Mohammed previously told Al Jazeera that sharing their home with “squatters with Brooklyn accents” was “insufferable, intolerable [and] terrible”.
“They are just sitting in our home, tormenting us, harassing us,
doing everything they can to not only force us to leave the second half
of our home but also harassing our neighbours into leaving their homes
as part of an effort to completely annihilate the presence of
Palestinians from Jerusalem,” Mohammed said, who was 11 years old when
the settlers forced their way in.
Last March, the Israeli district court in occupied East Jerusalem
ratified orders for six Palestinian families – the al-Kurds included –
in Sheikh Jarrah to vacate their homes in order to make way for the
settlers. The same court also ruled that another seven families should
leave their homes by August 1.
technologyreview | In 2050,
2.5 billion more people will live in cities than do today. As the world
grows more urbanized, many cities are becoming more populous while also
trying to reduce carbon emissions and blunt the impacts of climate
change.
In the coming decades, cities will be engines of
economic growth. But they must also play a key role in confronting
climate change; the world’s 100 most populous cities are responsible for
roughly one-fifth of global carbon emissions.
Some
of the world’s biggest cities—called megacities—are rising to this
challenge. However, these urban areas vary greatly in how efficient they
are and how much they will grow. Seeing how they stack up can help us
identify where our greatest opportunities are to reduce emissions.
technologyreview | Fourteen-year-old
Neha Dashrath was ecstatic when the pizza arrived. It was the first
time she’d ever ordered from a food delivery app. “I always felt shy
when my friends talked about ordering food from apps,” she says. “Now I,
too, can show off.”
Dashrath lives in Laxmi Nagar, a slum in
Pune, Maharashtra, alongside some 5,400 other Indians. Cramped brick and
tin structures line crooked lanes wide enough for just one person.
According
to the 2011 census, India has 108,000 slums that are home to 65 million
residents. It will add more urban residents by 2050 than any other
country, according to a 2014 UN estimate, and its slums are growing faster than its cities.
Until
recently, Dashrath shared a common address with everyone around
her—that of the slum itself. A large banyan tree served as a collection
center for mail and other deliveries. With no addresses of their own,
residents had a hard time opening bank and postal accounts or accessing
electric and water bills. During the pandemic, medical teams struggled
to track down infected residents.
Last September, a nonprofit organization called Shelter Associates
began a pilot project with Google and UNICEF to provide unique digital
addresses to houses in Laxmi Nagar. Now, Dashrath has a special code she
can type into delivery apps and share with friends to direct them to
her front door.
“It was the pandemic that really spurred the initiative,” says Pratima Joshi, an architect who cofounded the nonprofit and has worked closely with slums in the cities of Kolhapur and Thane since 1993.
The
digital addresses residents received were “plus codes,” a free feature
developed by Google and built with open-source software. A plus code
is a simple alphanumeric combination derived from latitudes and
longitudes. Each code consists of four characters followed by a plus
sign and two to four more characters. The characters after the plus sign
define the size of the area.
For example, GRQH+H4 points to a popular temple in Pune, and FRV5+2W56
is the code of a community toilet in Laxmi Nagar. These codes are
available on Google Maps and can be used anywhere in the world with an
internet connection.
Despite the services that become available to those with a physical
address, it took time to convince residents to sign up. Many had never
heard of Google Maps and were suspicious of Joshi’s staff, mistaking
them for officials from India’s Slum Rehabilitation Authority. So the nonprofit enlisted local students to go door to door and tell people about the program.
technologyreview | Finding
your way through Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro is not easy. The buildings
are densely and turbulently arranged in a manner that defies traditional
identification systems like street names and numbers. Rocinha is a favela,
one of the largest among hundreds of unplanned settlements that have
sprung up on the outskirts of Brazilian cities since the 19th century.
More than 5% of the country’s population now lives in communities like
these, with 100,000 people in Rocinha alone.
The challenge of navigating Rocinha has birthed creative solutions, such as the “friendly mailman”
program: companies deliver parcels to a central drop-off point, and a
team of Rocinha residents—the only couriers familiar enough with the
area to navigate its maze-like streets—take them the rest of the way.
With
little formal aid or administration and scant economic opportunities,
favela residents have struggled to contend with unhealthy living
conditions and frequent violence. A thick wall of social segregation
means that resources from the city—including electricity and clean
water—must take twisting, uncertain paths to make it inside. Life
expectancy in favelas is just 48, which is 20 years below the national average.
Much
has been made of the dizzying growth of the world’s cities, but few
people are aware of what most urban growth actually looks like. Births
and migrations are concentrated in the developing world, and with the
exception of China, most new urban fabric is informal—more shantytowns
than skyscrapers. For all our futuristic reveries, the city of tomorrow
probably will not look much different from Rocinha.
In the 20th century, the Brazilian government attempted to eradicate favelas
and replace them with more formal public housing, but the bulldozers
could not keep up with the massive urban migration that made these
settlements swell.
Other governments and urban planners have also tried to prevent such
settlements from forming or to dismantle them when they do, but that’s
proved a losing strategy. More than 2 billion people worldwide are now estimated to live in them.
Telegraph | When listing his regrets about the pandemic, Boris Johnson has
started to tell friends that he was let down by his own liberal
instincts. That he hoped for too long that Britain could, like Sweden,
fight the virus through consent rather than diktat – getting through
this without abolishing basic freedoms. His fear at the time was
irreversibility. If sacred principles were jettisoned in an emergency,
would they ever be restored? Might he end up unleashing something he’d
struggle to control?
It was a good question. Covid levels are now so low in Britain that
the Prime Minister could have proclaimed the second wave over yesterday.
Instead, he asked for his Government’s emergency powers to be extended
for another six months. Why, if there is no longer an emergency? Sir
Keir Starmer didn’t ask. Instead, he voted with the Tories. Even Labour,
it seems, has grown used to a life without much in the way of debate,
scrutiny, opposition or explanation.
Big
announcements continue to come via people like Prof Neil Ferguson, who
still seems to have a Rasputin-like hold over the Government. Earlier
this week, he said he thought it may be unwise to book any foreign
holidays this summer. This is big news, because what he thinks today
tends to become Matt Hancock’s policy tomorrow. “We’re run by scientist
groupthink,” says one minister. “But that won’t change until the polls
change.”
Lockdown remains very popular, to the Prime Minister’s initial
amazement. But he talks now as if he has been given a new mandate from
the electorate. “My impression is that there is a huge wisdom in the
public’s feeling about this,” he told MPs this week. “Human beings
instinctively recognise when something is dangerous and nasty to them.
They can see, collectively, that Covid is a threat. They want us, as
their Government – and me as the Prime Minister – to take all the
actions I can to protect them.”
The creation of a “Health Security Agency” was announced this week.
An unusual name: British “security” services have not, so far, tended to
involve public health officials. But perhaps the language is simply
catching up with reality: that the fundamentals of a biosecurity state
are now under construction. This is what ministers think the public now
want: a big shift in the dial away from liberty so the state can better
provide security. It’s happening incrementally, with no real debate.
Until recently, no government would have thought it was expected to
control a virus. The wildest of the pandemic plans did not involve
lockdown. But Wuhan showed what public health figures could “get away
with” as Prof Ferguson put it – which changed everything. The definition
of what government can “get away with” is being expanded week after
week.
Controlling the circulation of viruses can, logically, be done by
controlling what people do. So the old inalienable rights – freedom of
assembly, of protest, of school education, to leave the country – become
privileges to be removed or restored as ministers see fit. This might
be the remit of the Health Security Agency. In Whitehall, people are
thinking the unthinkable: one idea is citizens sending their temperature
in every day using the NHS app.
Take digital identity cards. They’re common in China, where citizens
are given a colour code taking in health status which decides how freely
they can move. Might ministers get away with vaccine identity cards
here? “We are not a papers-carrying country,” Hancock said in January.
Now, Michael Gove is busy working on vaccine passports, which the Prime
Minister says we may need to go to the pub. Or, in some cases, get a
job.
Hancock was right, though: at the heart of this is a question of what
kind of country we are – and whether liberal Britain became a casualty
of the pandemic. Opinion polls show support for vaccine identity cards,
curfews, border closures, the works. When Tony Blair proposed identity
cards in 2004, Johnson said he’d eat his in front of anyone who asked
him to produce it. “Extremism in the defence of liberty,” he
wrote, “is no vice.” Blair now is back as the public face of vaccine
identity cards, as if he wants to hammer home that, in the end, he won.
scientificamerican | We are likely to think of fungi, if we think of them at all, as minor
nuisances: mold on cheese, mildew on shoes shoved to the back of the
closet, mushrooms springing up in the garden after hard rains. We notice
them, and then we scrape them off or dust them away, never perceiving
that we are engaging with the fragile fringes of a web that knits the
planet together. Fungi constitute their own biological kingdom of about
six million diverse species, ranging from common companions such as
baking yeast to wild exotics. They differ from the other kingdoms in
complex ways. Unlike animals, they have cell walls, not membranes;
unlike plants, they cannot make their own food; unlike bacteria, they
hold their DNA within a nucleus and pack cells with organelles—features
that make them, at the cellular level, weirdly similar to us. Fungi
break rocks, nourish plants, seed clouds, cloak our skin and pack our
guts, a mostly hidden and unrecorded world living alongside us and
within us.
That mutual coexistence is now tipping out of balance. Fungi are
surging beyond the climate zones they long lived in, adapting to
environments that would once have been inimical, learning new behaviors
that let them leap between species in novel ways. While executing those
maneuvers, they are becoming more successful pathogens, threatening
human health in ways—and numbers—they could not achieve before.
Surveillance that identifies serious fungal infections is patchy, and
so any number is probably an undercount. But one widely shared estimate
proposes that there are possibly 300 million people infected with
fungal diseases worldwide and 1.6 million deaths every year—more than
malaria, as many as tuberculosis. Just in the U.S., the CDC estimates
that more than 75,000 people are hospitalized annually for a fungal
infection, and another 8.9 million people seek an outpatient visit,
costing about $7.2 billion a year.
For physicians and epidemiologists, this is surprising and unnerving.
Long-standing medical doctrine holds that we are protected from fungi
not just by layered immune defenses but because we are mammals, with
core temperatures higher than fungi prefer. The cooler outer surfaces of
our bodies are at risk of minor assaults—think of athlete's foot, yeast
infections, ringworm—but in people with healthy immune systems,
invasive infections have been rare.
That may have left us overconfident. “We have an enormous blind
spot,” says Arturo Casadevall, a physician and molecular microbiologist
at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Walk into the
street and ask people what are they afraid of, and they'll tell you
they're afraid of bacteria, they're afraid of viruses, but they don't
fear dying of fungi.”
Ironically, it is our successes that made us vulnerable. Fungi
exploit damaged immune systems, but before the mid-20th century people
with impaired immunity didn't live very long. Since then, medicine has
gotten very good at keeping such people alive, even though their immune
systems are compromised by illness or cancer treatment or age. It has
also developed an array of therapies that deliberately suppress
immunity, to keep transplant recipients healthy and treat autoimmune
disorders such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. So vast numbers of
people are living now who are especially vulnerable to fungi. (It was a
fungal infection, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, that alerted doctors to the first known cases of HIV 40 years ago this June.)
Not all of our vulnerability is the fault of medicine preserving life
so successfully. Other human actions have opened more doors between the
fungal world and our own. We clear land for crops and settlement and
perturb what were stable balances between fungi and their hosts. We
carry goods and animals across the world, and fungi hitchhike on them.
We drench crops in fungicides and enhance the resistance of organisms
residing nearby. We take actions that warm the climate, and fungi adapt,
narrowing the gap between their preferred temperature and ours that
protected us for so long.
But fungi did not rampage onto our turf from some foreign place. They
were always with us, woven through our lives and our environments and
even our bodies: every day, every person on the planet inhales at least
1,000 fungal spores. It is not possible to close ourselves off from the
fungal kingdom. But scientists are urgently trying to understand the
myriad ways in which we dismantled our defenses against the microbes, to
figure out better approaches to rebuild them.
theatlantic | Deep in the forests of Germany, nestled neatly into the hollowed-out
shells of acorns, live a smattering of ants who have stumbled upon a
fountain of youth. They are born workers, but do not do much work. Their
days are spent lollygagging about the nest, where their siblings shower
them with gifts of food. They seem to elude the ravages of old age,
retaining a durably adolescent physique, their outer shells soft and
their hue distinctively tawny. Their scent, too, seems to shift, wafting
out an alluring perfume that endears them to others. While their
sisters, who have nearly identical genomes, perish within months of
being born, these death-defying insects live on for years and years and
years.
They are Temnothorax ants, and their elixirs of life are the
tapeworms that teem within their bellies—parasites that paradoxically
prolong the life of their host at a strange and terrible cost.
A few such life-lengthening partnerships have been documented between microbes and insects such as wasps, beetles, and mosquitoes.
But what these ants experience is more extreme than anything that’s
come before, says Susanne Foitzik, an entomologist at Johannes Gutenberg
University Mainz, in Germany, who studies the ants and their tapeworms.
Infected Temnothorax ants live at least three times longer than their
siblings, and perhaps much more, she and her colleagues report in a study published today in Royal Society Open Science.
No one is yet sure when the insects’ longevity tops out, but the answer
is probably in excess of a decade, approaching or even matching that of
ant queens, who can survive up to 20 years.
“Some other parasites do extend life spans,” Shelley Adamo, a
parasite expert at Dalhousie University, in Nova Scotia, who was not
involved in the study, told me. “But not like this.”
Under
typical circumstances, Temnothorax ants live as most other ants do.
They reside in communities ruled by a single fertile queen attended by a
legion of workers whose professional lives take a predictable
trajectory. They first tend the queen’s eggs as nurses, then graduate
into foraging roles that take them outside the nest. Apart from the
whole freaky parasite thing, “they are pretty boring,” Foitzik told me.
Normalcy
goes out the door, however, when Temnothorax larvae ingest
tapeworm-egg-infested bird feces trucked in by foragers. The parasites
hatch and set up permanent residence in the young ants’ abdomens, where
they can access a steady stream of nutrients. In return, they offer
their host an unconventional renter’s fee: an extra-long life span that
Foitzik and her colleagues managed to record in real time.
discovermagazine |If you’re hiking in the wilderness,
stay away from warm, stagnant bodies of fresh water, no matter how
thirsty you are. These inviting little ponds often play host to Naegleria fowleri, an amoeba species with a taste for human brain tissue.
N. fowleri can
spend long spans of time just hanging around as a cyst, a little
armored ball that can survive cold, heat, and dry conditions. When a
cyst comes into contact with an inviting host, it sprouts tentacle-like
pseudopods and turns into a form known as a trophozoite. Once it’s
transformed, the trophozoite heads straight for the host’s central
nervous system, following nerve fibers inward in search of the brain.
Once it’s burrowed into its host’s brain tissue — usually the olfactory bulbs — N. fowleri sprouts a “sucking apparatus” called an amoebostome and
starts chowing down on juicy brain matter. As the amoeba divides,
multiplies and moves inward, devouring brain cells as it goes, its hosts
can go from uncomfortable to incoherent to unconscious in a matter of
hours.
The symptoms start subtly, with
alterations in tastes and smells, and maybe some fever and stiffness.
But over the next few days, as N. fowleri burrows
deeper into the brain’s cognitive structures, victims start feeling
confused, have trouble paying attention, and begin to hallucinate. Next
come seizures and unconsciousness, as the brain loses all control. Two
weeks later, the victim’s most likely perishes — although one man in Taiwan managed to stick it out for a grueling 25 days before his nervous system finally gave out.
Although N. fowleri infections
are rare in the extreme — worldwide historical totals number only in
the hundreds — they’re almost always fatal, and tricky to catch and
treat before they spiral out of control. Even so, you’d be wise to avoid
warm pools of still water, lest you end up with an uninvited guest on
the brain.
theatlantic | To find the world’s most sinister examples of mind control, don’t look
to science fiction. Instead, go to a tropical country like Brazil, and
venture deep into the jungle. Find a leaf that’s hanging almost exactly
25 centimeters above the forest floor, no more and no less. Now look
underneath it. If you’re in luck, you might find an ant clinging to the
leaf’s central vein, jaws clamped tight for dear life. But this ant’s
life is already over. And its body belongs to Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the zombie-ant fungus.
When the fungus infects a carpenter ant, it grows through the insect’s
body, draining it of nutrients and hijacking its mind. Over the course
of a week, it compels the ant to leave the safety of its nest and ascend
a nearby plant stem. It stops the ant at a height of 25 centimeters—a
zone with precisely the right temperature and humidity for the fungus to
grow. It forces the ant to permanently lock its mandibles around a
leaf. Eventually, it sends a long stalk through the ant’s head, growing
into a bulbous capsule full of spores. And because the ant typically
climbs a leaf that overhangs its colony’s foraging trails, the fungal
spores rain down onto its sisters below, zombifying them in turn.
The fungus’s skill at colonizing ants is surpassed only by its skill at
colonizing popular culture. It’s the organism behind the monsters of the
video game “The Last of Us” and the zombies of the book The Girl With All the Gifts. It’s also an obsession of one David Hughes,
an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University, who has been studying
it for years. He wants to know exactly how this puppet master controls
its puppets—and his latest experiments suggest that it’s even more ghoulish than it first appears.
The sudden opening of Gates’ closet and the rate at which skeletons are tumbling out is very, very suspicious. There is a flurry of unmistakably coordinated articles and posts. His past common-knowledge peccadilloes are being reported breathlessly as if it is the Scoop of the Century. This is fallout of internecine warfare among the powers that be.
Who is so powerful that even Bill Gates cannot escape their wrath?
How did Bill Gates manage to piss them off?
From a PR perspective, Bill had outlived his usefulness as a public face for the Great Reset.
It’s not like he’ll lose money beyond the half he has to hand over to Melinda French - but he definitely won't ever get that coveted Nobel prize or be carted out on TV as the public face of the Great Reset anymore.
NYMag | On Sunday night, another volley of reporting on Gates’s alleged behavior
was published, including several details on the Microsoft co-founder’s
improprieties at work. According to the Wall Street Journal,
Microsoft board members ultimately decided that he must step down from
the board in the midst of a company investigation into a romantic
relationship with a subordinate in 2000. While Gates and Microsoft
admitted to the relationship — which a spokeswoman for the
philanthropist called “an affair almost 20 years ago which ended
amicably” — his team denied that the “decision to transition off the
board” was related to the investigation.
Pursuing
sexual relationships at a powerful institution he co-founded was not
just limited to Microsoft, or the affair in 2000. According to the New York Times,
Gates tried to date women working for him at Microsoft and the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation, asking people out by email — “If this makes
you uncomfortable, pretend it never happened,” he wrote in 2006 — and in
person. Witnesses also claim that he was dismissive of his wife in
meetings at their shared group, and that Gates did not respond to her
request for an outside party to investigate a sexual-harassment claim
against their money manager, who is still on the job.
More
information on the Epstein connection also came to light on Sunday
evening. While it’s already understood that Melinda Gates was not
thrilled by her husband spending time with the alleged sex trafficker,
the Times notes that Gates ignored her advice on the subject
and continued meeting with him. Epstein provided some advice of his own,
according to the Daily Beast,
which reported that the predator met with Gates dozens of times between
2011 and 2014 and told him how to end his “toxic” marriage to Melinda.
Apparently going to Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion to get the advice
was more impactful than the advice itself.
nakedcapitalism | The question that I have no answer to is when exactly was
it decided to not contain it. If you remember, some information came
out about early and mid-February 2020 closed Senate meetings, after
which senators were selling their shares in hotels and airlines, i.e.
what was going to happen in late March was known at that time. But it
was not in fact too late to contain it in early February, it could have
been done with test-trace-isolate. So maybe it was perceived at the time
that it could not be, assuming the decision was made as late as
possible within that timeline. But the earlier that decision happened,
the more nefarious motivations one would have to suspect were involved,
because why would you not at least try to contain it when it was
eminently doable? After all SARS-1 was contained even though it reached
hundreds of cases in Canada and the US. And then what followed was the
outright sabotage of testing and detection by the CDC,1 the
CDC allowing strongly suspected to be infected people to just get off
their flight and walk right back into the community, and a rather long
list of other such absurd actions. Maybe one day internal information
will leak and we will learn the truth, who knows…
Also, this all becomes even more gruesome when one realizes that the
decision of the US to allow it to become endemic meant the same decision
was imposed on most of the rest of the world, as the US controls it. As
I said above, Eastern Europe (except for Belarus and Russia) took it
very seriously early on and locked down before it had gotten out of
hand, and was in fact very close to elimination. Montenegro, which
eventually ended up being one of the worst affected countries, actually
did eliminate it in May 2020.
But once it became clear the US will not eliminate and the EU will
not eliminate, those countries had no choice, although they could have
at least held out for vaccines instead of letting it rip. There was
never going to be a world in which the EU and Latin America have
indefinitely banned travel out of the US, not with US military bases
stationed all over Europe. And there was never going to be a world in
which Bulgaria and Romania ban travel from Germany.
The really sad part is that a country like Russia supposedly does
have that independence, and could have gone for elimination and closed
borders and a bubble with China. But modern Russia is not the USSR, it’s
just as, if not more neoliberal than the US, so they let it rip too,
for the same reasons as in the US…
And now some the countries that did the right thing — Taiwan,
Vietnam, and Laos — are encircled and battling their worst outbreaks
since the start, which is heartbreaking to watch.
The combination of infection level and vaccine effectiveness lead toward viral evolutionary selection:
Unfortunately, with many respected scientists jumping on
board of the optimism hype train (it was quite noticeable how the mood
shifted on purely scientific matters that had absolutely nothing to do
with politics a few months ago), the wrong message has already been once
again sent to the public, and we can expect disaster in the future.
Non-sterilizing vaccines mean the virus will not only get the chance
to evolve complete escape but will be channeled in that direction. But
it also may be channeled in the direction of being much more virulent as
a side effect of its fight with the vaccines (this can get quite
detailed on a molecular level so I will not go into it right now).
The math does not look good — the unmitigated-spread R_0 in February
2020 was much closer to 6.0 than to the usually cited 2.0. But the
current variants have undergone adaptation and are much more contagious.
Let’s say we have R_0 = 6. And let’s say we reach 70% vaccination (it’s
hard to see how we will get higher), and that transmission is cut by
80% (this, however, is simplistic — it is quite likely that transmission
is cut by 80% in the first couple months after vaccination, but then
the first thing that will wear off is protection from infection, with
protection from severe disease going away last). That’s 56% effective
vaccination. But the herd immunity threshold for R_0=6 is 85%, a lot
higher, i.e. it will continue to spread. It might in fact continue to
spread even with 100% vaccination with a full return to 2019 in terms of
lack of social distancing.
So we should absolutely never have gone down the path of “solving”
this crisis with vaccines and not doing anything to stop transmission.
The vaccines should have been used as one of the tools to eliminate the
virus, but in combination with NPIs.
If evolution featured in the thinking of our overlords, they would
not have settled on this as the “solution” to the problem. But either it
does not, or they just don’t care.
P.S. Some more sobering simple math. Let’s say the vaccine is 90%
protective against severe disease over a period of two years. Then one
can expect to have on average three serious COVID episodes by the time
he is 60 even if he is always up-to-date with his biannual vaccinations
(and there is no knowing how much more virulent to young people it will
have become in the future with all the serial passaging). We now see
what round #1 of mass reinfections looks like in India. So that is the
“solution” being offered right now. However, it will probably not happen
as one giant apocalyptic wave so it can be pushed to the background as a
non-problem.
thedrive | We may not know the identities of all the mysterious craft that
American military personnel and others have been seeing in the skies as
of late, but I have seen more than enough to tell you that it is clear
that a very terrestrial adversary is toying with us in our own backyard
using relatively simple technologies—drones and balloons—and making off
with what could be the biggest intelligence haul of a generation. While
that may disappoint some who hope the origins of all these events are
far more exotic in nature, the strategic implications of these bold
operations, which have been happening for years, undeterred, are
absolutely massive.
Our team here at The War Zone has
spent the last two years indirectly laying out a case for the hypothesis
that many of the events involving supposed UFOs, or unidentified aerial
phenomena (UAP), as they are now often called, over the last decade are
actually the manifestation of foreign adversaries harnessing advances
in lower-end unmanned aerial vehicle technology, and even simpler
platforms, to gather intelligence of extreme fidelity on some of
America's most sensitive warfighting capabilities. Now, considering all the news on this topic in recent weeks, including our own major story
on a series of bizarre incidents involving U.S. Navy destroyers and
'UAP' off the Southern California coast in 2019, it's time to not only
sum up our case, but to discuss the broader implications of these
revelations, what needs to be done about them, and the Pentagon's
fledgling 'UAP Task Force' as a whole.
Yes, I realize that the idea that an adversary is penetrating U.S.
military training areas unmolested, and has been for years, using lowly
drone technology and balloons, is a big pill to swallow, but as one of
the people who have repeatedly warned about the threat posed by lower-end drones
for a decade—warnings that largely were dismissed by the Pentagon until
drones made or altered in ramshackle ISIS workshops in a war zone were literally raining down bomblets on U.S. and allied forces in Iraq—it isn't really surprising at all. Nor is the fact that the Defense Department is still playing catch-up when it comes to the realities surrounding the drone threat, and not just to its forces abroad,
but also to the homeland overall. The utter lack of vision and early
robust interest in regards to this emerging threat will go down as one
of the Pentagon's biggest strategic missteps of our time.
The gross inaction and the stigma surrounding unexplained aerial
phenomena as a whole has led to what appears to be the paralyzation of
the systems designed to protect us and our most critical military
technologies, pointing to a massive failure in U.S. military
intelligence. This is a blind spot we ourselves literally created out of
cultural taboos and a military-industrial complex that is ill-suited to
foresee and counter a lower-end threat that is very hard to defend
against.
newsweek | The largest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon
over the past decade. Some 60,000 people now belong to this secret
army, many working under masked identities and in low profile, all part
of a broad program called "signature reduction." The force, more than
ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA,
carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniforms
and under civilian cover, in real life and online, sometimes hiding in
private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name
companies.
The unprecedented shift has placed an ever greater
number of soldiers, civilians, and contractors working under false
identities, partly as a natural result in the growth of secret special
forces but also as an intentional response to the challenges of
traveling and operating in an increasingly transparent world. The
explosion of Pentagon cyber warfare, moreover, has led to thousands of
spies who carry out their day-to-day work in various made-up personas,
the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when
Russian and Chinese spies do the same.
Newsweek's exclusive report on this secret world is the result
of a two-year investigation involving the examination of over 600
resumes and 1,000 job postings, dozens of Freedom of Information Act
requests, and scores of interviews with participants and defense
decision-makers. What emerges is a window into not just a little-known
sector of the American military, but also a completely unregulated
practice. No one knows the program's total size, and the explosion of
signature reduction has never been examined for its impact on military
policies and culture. Congress
has never held a hearing on the subject. And yet the military
developing this gigantic clandestine force challenges U.S. laws, the
Geneva Conventions, the code of military conduct and basic
accountability.
The signature reduction effort engages some 130 private companies to
administer the new clandestine world. Dozens of little known and secret
government organizations support the program, doling out classified
contracts and overseeing publicly unacknowledged operations. Altogether
the companies pull in over $900 million annually to service the
clandestine force—doing everything from creating false documentation and
paying the bills (and taxes) of individuals operating under assumed
names, to manufacturing disguises and other devices to thwart detection
and identification, to building invisible devices to photograph and
listen in on activity in the most remote corners of the Middle East and
Africa.
vice | The
Pentagon is carrying out warrantless surveillance of Americans,
according to a new letter written by Senator Ron Wyden and obtained by
Motherboard.
Senator
Wyden's office asked the Department of Defense (DoD), which includes
various military and intelligence agencies such as the National Security
Agency (NSA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), for detailed
information about its data purchasing practices after Motherboard
revealed special forces were buying location data. The responses also
touched on military or intelligence use of internet browsing and other
types of data, and prompted Wyden to demand more answers specifically
about warrantless spying on American citizens.
Some
of the answers the DoD provided were given in a form that means Wyden's
office cannot legally publish specifics on the surveillance; one answer
in particular was classified. In the letter Wyden is pushing the DoD to
release the information to the public. A Wyden aide told Motherboard
that the Senator is unable to make the information public at this time,
but believes it would meaningfully inform the debate around how the DoD
is interpreting the law and its purchases of data.
"I
write to urge you to release to the public information about the
Department of Defense's (DoD) warrantless surveillance of Americans," the letter, addressed to Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, reads.
Wyden
and his staff with appropriate security clearances are able to review
classified responses, a Wyden aide told Motherboard. Wyden's office
declined to provide Motherboard with specifics about the classified
answer. But a Wyden aide said that the question related to the DoD
buying internet metadata.
"Are
any DoD components buying and using without a court order internet
metadata, including 'netflow' and Domain Name System (DNS) records," the
question read, and asked whether those records were about "domestic
internet communications (where the sender and recipient are both U.S. IP
addresses)" and "internet communications where one side of the
communication is a U.S. IP address and the other side is located
abroad."
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The folks must be growing increasingly restive about the Obama candidacy. The NYTimes had this crunchy little morsel in this past week's op-eds. 
