The No Lives Matter Movement And Mask Non-Compliant Unsafe "Others"...,

off-guardian |  The mask-wearing phenomena is interesting on several counts; one is that it seems to be a completely artificial concoction. Another is the opposing idea that there is good logical argument for wearing one.

It does look as if there is a conscious manipulation of an archaic psychological complex (the innate fear of “different” deeply seated in a very old truth about neighboring tribes), i.e., “taking advantage of a psychological, although illogical, propensity” in order to push along the agenda of the manipulators — but who or what is the manipulator? I leave that question up to the reader, and other authors, to contemplate. 

We again have seen historically the manipulation of a populace to hate “other” that is fabricated by the state. The most obvious in recent years is the Nazi vilification of the Jews. Even more recently Muslim’s have been similarly targeted as “other to be feared” by the US Government. Mexicans and immigrants in general have been as well. 

Many people believe that other marginalized peoples, races, people of certain sexual orientations, other religious groups as well as women, have been purposely and maliciously marked as “other” by the state. The rationalization for this action generally comes under the insistence that it is for the “good of the people.” Therefore the groups identified as dangerous are to be avoided, chastised, abused, shamed and even violently harmed for being the “enemy.” 

This all may seem like a stretch to some people, and yes, it can be subtle—at least a conscious and nefarious intention or agenda behind it can be subtle. With regard to the mask-wearing/not wearing phenomena the process has happened so quickly it is relatively easy to follow its progress. In the beginning, mask-wearing was considered unnecessary in the effort to minimize disease transmission.

In fact, several official reports were clear that masks simply could not prevent the tiny virus particles to reach the inner sanctum of the human body where it would wreak havoc—a popular analogy was the dubious efficacy of throwing dirt at a chain-link fence in order to reach the other side. Then the tables begin to turn, as “case” numbers began to escalate during the horrid spectre of “the second wave” — mask-wearing became a new focus. 

However, an interesting thing happened with the public. They began to take it all very personally.

Seeing someone not wearing a mask did not translate to a logical response such as avoiding that mask-less person to lessen the possibility of infection, but rather the response was to mark that person as the selfish enemy who was purposefully trying to spread disease, or at least didn’t care about that possibility. Again, it didn’t seem that people even considered the person a physical threat, but more an emotional one, as someone that isn’t decent.

Vilification became the weapon to attack this marked enemy with, that and shaming, as well as denigration. “They are out to destroy us, the decent people who care about life, grandma, community and what is good in the world.” That is what marking “other” is all about—identification of the enemy, either moral enemy, or physical enemy.

The eminent Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung made popular a phrase, “participation mystique,” which had already been invented by Lévy-Brühl, a French scholar and philosopher who lived in the early part of the 20th Century.

Roughly, and simply speaking, “participation mystique” refers to a collective human compulsion to project an identity on to a group of people that is largely imaginative or symbolic. This is probably where a concept like “herd mentality” originates, or even a more common phrase we are hearing these days, “sheeple” — people who seem to follow blindly an official narrative. 

It also applies to “conspiracy theorists,” “tin foil hat wearers,” and in the context of this article, “selfish no-mask-wearers.” This projection that Jung speaks of is generally unconscious, or at least the impetus for it is. What becomes the basis for fear, hate, disgust, or whatever other derogatory term and emotion that sputters forth when confronting the object of the projection is again unconscious and archaic in origin. 

If any group of people can be identified as other, and conscious manipulative propaganda from a controlling entity has always been good at marking groups that are unsympathetic to the entity’s agenda as “other,” then it is easy to conjure up this magic of unconscious projection in a group as they move against another, identified and marked, group.

Population-Consumption-Climate-Control - The .00001%'s No Lives Matter Movement

realworldeconomicsreview |  Ten years ago, the rich and powerful Rockefeller Foundation played through and favorably described a scenario in which a pandemic would lead to autocratic forms of government with total surveillance and control of citizens. Now it has published a pandemic plan to make this scenario a reality.

According to the preamble by the President of the Foundation, it took two weeks to set up and edit this plan, implicating a large number of “experts and decision-makers from academia, business, politics and government – across industries and political ideologies” and publish it in glossy on April 21, 2020, under the title “National Covid-19 Testing Action Plan: Pragmatic steps to reopen our workplaces and our communities”.

I became aware of this plan through a German translation of an article by Dux Morales in the Italian newspaper il manifesto about it. As I read through this my breath stood still. 

Two weeks seems a very short time for such a comprehensive work with allegedly many contributors and about 25 signers. However, the Foundation had ten years to prepare for this moment. So it wasn’t a hollow phrase in the 2010 publication, which already included the “Lock-Step” pandemic response scenario, telling decision-makers in foundations: ” Scenarios are designed to stretch our thinking about both the opportunities and obstacles that the future might hold; they explore, through narrative, events and dynamics that might alter, inhibit, or enhance current trends, often in surprising ways.”.

In the current brochure, the Rockefeller Foundation proposes, along with other recommendations, to form a Pandemic Testing Board, modelled on the War Production Board, which was an agency of the US to supervise and plan war production during World War II. This new powerful technocratic council is designed to consist of nine representatives from business, government, acadimia, universities and labor, and the order seems not to be random. Microsoft and Google are probably at the top of the list of candidates for this council.

The name of one of the four authors of the proposal caught my eye immediately: E. Glen Weyl, techno-libertarian market radical, Microsoft research manager and long-time campaigner for the legalisation and reintroduction of debt bondage, precisely for migrants.

Another author is Ganesh Sitaraman, professor of law at Vanderbilt University and former researcher at the “Counterinsurgency Training Centre” in Afghanistan. The third is Julius Krein, former hedge fund manager and head of the right-wing nationalist journal American Affairs, which emerged from the Journal of American Greatness. The renowned ethics professor Danielle Allen is allowed to dilute a bit this toxic cocktail of authors.

In wartime, anything goes

As in wartime, the Pandemic Board should have the power to confiscate and order the production of whatever is needed to achieve testing capacity in a short time, a capacity to test so many people a day that the majority of Americans, and possibly the entire world population, can be tested for Covid-19 on a weekly basis. This, it is said, is necessary to get the economy back on track.

Congruously, the state should guarantee test providers a fair price, “e.g. $100” per test. Where companies invest, governments are to relieve them from any risk for their great profit prospect by a guarantee to order tests.

A pandemic corps of 300,000 testers and contact tracers will have to perform police-like tasks towards a reluctant population – even if the latter is not stated explicitly in the brochure -, because “the infection status must be known for people to participate in many societal functions “. In other words: Those who cannot prove that they are corona-free will not be allowed to go to work and even less to participate in social life.

In order to “enable more complete contact tracing”, apps and tracking software should be used as extensively as possible, recording and reporting who is close to whom.

The foundation innocently writes that laws must be passed to prevent dismissal due to infection. As if that had even the slightest chance of happening in a country where in many states you can be dismissed for any reason with two weeks’ notice, including when you are being called up for jury duty.

The global unique ID under a new name

The brochure also promotes the plan to introduce a globally unique identification number for everyone, which the Rockefeller Foundation has already been busy pushing forward with the ID2020 total surveillance project, but now under the name “unique patient identification number”. Everyone is declared a patient here.

This unique “patient” number will provide information on the viral status, antibody status and finally the vaccination status of each citizen. But not only that. The database is to be a hyper database that will be linked to pretty much any other database with personal information, from attendance lists in schools, passenger lists of any kind of transport, or ticket sales at events. Of course, privacy is to be preserved. What else?

In order to identify populations at risk and to achieve performant contact tracing and decision support, powerful analytical tools must operate across any such platform of data. Existing obstacles in accessing and collating data by such analysis instruments (i.e. artificial intelligence) need urgently be removed. Recent progress towards this goal through new regulation is praised.

The Blasted Thing's Invisible...,

charleshughsmith |  The word privilege is much bandied about now. I've been writing about privilege for many years, and ended up writing a book about the source (and thus the end) of privilege: Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege.

Privilege and inequality are two sides of the same coin. Those with privilege get more than everyone else without actually creating more value, which is the definition of inequality.

What few seem to grasp is the absolute source of inequality / privilege is our financial system, specifically the way we create and distribute money.

Few people connect the dots between a central bank (the Federal Reserve) creating money out of thin air and giving the super-wealthy first dibs on this new money, and the vast inequalities of wealth and power that are widening to the point of social disorder on a grand scale.

While the majority may not fully understand the source of inequality, they do intuit that billionaires got the mine and the rest of us got the shaft. Since humans are social apes and social apes have a sense of fairness, even within pecking orders with a few at the top, the inherent unfairness of our financial system generates resentment and indignation, while the lack of understanding generates frustration.

My colleague Mark Jeftovic penned a post explaining how those closest to the Fed's money spigot get wealthier for doing absolutely nothing but being close to the spigot. This is the most basic structure of our financial system and economy. Everything else flows from this simple mechanism. On Cantillionaires, Sycophants and Losers.

Put another way: while the rest of us earn money by creating goods and services, those close to the Fed's money spigot create absolutely nothing but they get billions of dollars at rates of interest that are essentially zero, or adjusted for inflation, less than zero.

 As a result, they can outbid the rest of us for all the assets that generate income.

The Great Reset Is "What They're Doing" - Question Is, What're You Going To Do?

bloomberg |  A major new study of the relationship between carbon dioxide and global warming lowers the odds on worst-case climate change scenarios while also ruling out the most optimistic estimates nations have been counting on as they attempt to implement the Paris Agreement.

A group of 25 leading scientists now conclude that catastrophic warming is almost inevitable if emissions continue at their current rate, even if there’s less reason to anticipate a totally uninhabitable Earth in coming centuries. The research, published Wednesday in the journal Reviews of Geophysics, narrows the answer to a question that’s as old as climate science itself: How much would the planet warm if humanity doubled the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere?

That number, known as “equilibrium climate sensitivity,” is typically expressed as a range. The scientists behind this new study have narrowed the climate-sensitivity window to between 2.6° Celsius and 3.9°C.

That’s smaller than the current range accepted by  the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has for almost a decade used a spread between 1.5°C to 4.5°C—a reading of climate sensitivity that has changed little since the first major U.S. climate science assessment in 1979. Improving these estimates is “sort of the holy grail of climate science,” says Zeke Hausfather, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute and one of the study’s authors.

Climate sensitivity is one of the most iconic numbers in climate science, but it’s not necessarily intuitive. The range isn’t a projection; it’s more like a speed limit that influences projections. “It informs all the other things—like 2100 warming projections, for example—that depend on the sensitivity of our models, and our scenarios,” Hausfather says.

What gave the authors confidence is that three independent lines of evidence—the modern temperature record, geological evidence, and the latest Earth systems models—all agreed on the same answer. Kate Marvel, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University’s applied math and physics department, also contributed to the new paper. She answered questions for Bloomberg Green about the scope and meaning of the new work.

What is “equilibrium climate sensitivity,” and why is it so important?

It's basically answering this question: How hot is it going to get? People are sometimes really surprised. They’re like, “You guys have one job like, why do you not know this?”

The number one determinant in how hot it's going to get is what people are going to do. If we gleefully burn all the fossil fuels in the ground, it's going to get very hot. If we get extremely serious about mitigating climate change—cutting our emissions, moving off fossil fuels, changing a lot about our way of life—that will have a different impact on the climate. As a physical scientist, “What are we going to do?” is totally above my pay grade.

So Much Trouble In The World...,

strategic-culture |  As the Covid-19 pandemic continues its deadly march around the world, a number of relatively dormant conflicts, as well as several well-known flash points, stand ready to place the world on the edge of a major armed conflict. History shows us that during times of stress – economic depression, religious strife, vacuums of political leadership, and public health crises like that which is now plaguing the world – the chances for war increase commensurately.

India and China, which fought a border war in 1962, are against faced off at several key border locations stretching from Ladakh in the western Himalayas to Arunachal Pradesh in the eastern sector of the mountain range. The resurgent border conflict between the world’s most populous and second-most populous nations is exacerbated by the Covid-19 virus that has taken a toll on what had been the burgeoning economies of both nuclear-armed countries. Deaths and injuries among Indian and Chinese border troops have resulted from fights, with sticks and rocks being used as weapons. A wider and deadlier conflict may result if the weapons used are India’s T-90S tanks and Apache helicopters – now engaged in exercises along the border – and armed Chinese troops that have penetrated some 8 kilometers beyond the 1962 truce line, which is officially called the Line of Actual Control (LAC), in eastern Ladakh. Meanwhile, the number of Covid cases in India has climbed about one million.

In Barbara Tuchman’s widely-acclaimed book on the factors that resulted in the First World War, “The Guns of August,” she wrote, “Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers – danger, death, and live ammunition.” All the plans of nations large and small to prevent a repeat of the so-called Spanish flu of 1918, which ravaged the battlefield trenches of France, have largely proven ineffective. The world is now being subjected to Tuchman’s danger and death – the danger of the uncontrolled pandemic and the mounting death toll arising from it. The current missing ingredient of live ammunition may, if cooler heads do not prevail, result in a modern-day “guns of August.” Continued economic dislocation and a deepening global recession is all that is needed as a catalyst for military standoffs from the Himalayas and South China Sea to the Caribbean waters off Venezuela and the 38^th parallel of Korea to turn into hot war zones purposely or by accident.

Straining SO HARD Against The Great Reset Leash - But Not Comprehending That No Lives Matter!!!

unz |  Let’s assume that the events of the last five months are neither random nor unexpected. Let’s say they’re part of an ingenious plan to transform American democracy into a lockdown police state controlled by criminal elites and their puppet governors. And let’s say the media’s role is to fan the flames of mass hysteria by sensationalizing every gory detail, every ominous prediction and every slightest uptick in the death toll in order to exert greater control over the population. And let’s say the media used their power to craft a message of terror they’d repeat over and over again until finally, there was just one frightening storyline ringing-out from every soapbox and bullhorn, one group of governors from the same political party implementing the same destructive policies, and one small group of infectious disease experts –all incestuously related– issuing edicts in the form of “professional advice.”

Could such a thing happen in America?

What’s most astonishing about the Covid-19 operation is the manner in which the elected government was circumvented by public health experts (connected to a power-mad billionaire activist.) That was a stroke of genius. Most people regard the US as a fairly stable democracy and yet, the first sign of infection triggered the rapid transfer of power from the president to unelected “professionals” whose conflicts of interest are too vast to list. Equally fascinating is the fact that the lockdowns were not the brainchild of Donald Trump but the mainly Democrat governors who shrugged-off any Constitutional limits to their power and arbitrarily ordered people to stay in their homes, wear masks and avoid close physical contact with other humans. All of this was done in the name of “science” and condoned under “emergency powers” despite the fact that mass quarantines of healthy people have no historical precedent or scientific basis. No matter, this was never about science or logic anyway, and it certainly wasn’t about saving lives. It was always about power, pure, unalloyed political power. The power to push the economy into freefall destroying millions of jobs and businesses. The power to bail out Wall Street while diverting attention to a fairly-mild infection that kills roughly 1 in every 500 people. The power to create a permanent underclass willing to work for table scraps or less. And the power to fundamentally restructure human relations so that normal intimacies like handshakes, hugs or social gatherings are entirely banned. This, of course, was the most ambitious part of the project, the basic changes to human interaction that date back thousands of years, and which are now seen as an obstacle to a new order in which the individual must be isolated, desensitized and kept in a constant state of fear to be more easily controlled and manipulated.

On top of that, all of this is taking place in plain sight where anyone with even minimal critical thinking skills should be able to see what is happening, but very few do. Why is that?

Fear. Fear has gripped the population and is preventing typically intelligent, perceptive people from seeing something that’s right beneath their noses. Check out this clip from an article titled “When Will the Madness End?”:

“What’s happening now is a spread of this serious medical condition to the whole population… The public is adopting a personality disorder … paranoid delusions, and irrational fear. … It can happen with anything but here we see a primal fear of disease turning into mass panic….

…. Once fear reaches a certain threshold, normalcy, rationality, morality, and decency fade and are replaced by shocking stupidity and cruelty.…..We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. ..…

…This is made far worse by politics, which has only fed the beast of fear. This is the most politicized disease in history, and doing so has done nothing to help manage it and much to make it all vastly worse.” (“When Will the Madness End?“, AIER)

We’re not saying that Covid doesn’t kill people, and we’re not suggesting that Covid is a bioweapon released on the public for nefarious purposes. (although that’s certainly a possibility.) What we’re saying is that scheming elites and their allies in the media and politics see every crisis as an opportunity to advance their own authoritarian agenda. In fact, the restructuring of basic democratic institutions can only take place within the confines of a major crisis. That’s why the CIA, the giant corporations, the WHO and the Gates Posse gathered for meetings that anticipated an event just like the Covid outbreak. They needed a crisis of that magnitude to achieve their ultimate objective; total control. That’s what they mean when they say there will be “no return to normal”, they mean they’re replacing representative government with a new totalitarian model in which the levers of state power will be controlled by them. So while the virus outbreak might be coincidental, the management of the crisis certainly is not.

Drug Gang Governance Livestock Management In The PanicDemic

Time |  In spring, as Colombia settled into a nationwide COVID-19 lockdown, some Colombians received troubling new guidelines—and not from the government. In remote parts of 11 of the country’s 32 states, armed groups began enforcing their own quarantine measures, according to a report published July 15 by Human Rights Watch. Through pamphlets and WhatsApp messages, the groups laid out curfews, restrictions on movement, categories of essential work, and more. These restrictions were sometimes stricter than government rules, and punishments for breaking them far more serious.

One pamphlet seen by HRW, released in early April by Marxist guerrillas the National Liberation Army (ELN) in the northern Bolívar department, warned that fighters would be “forced to kill people in order to preserve lives” because residents had not “respected the orders to prevent Covid-19.”

Latin America is the current center of the pandemic, with more than 3.5 million cases across the region and numbers in many countries still rising sharply. Analysts say COVID-19 is worsening the region’s problem with “criminal governance” – where the state loses control over a part of its territory as non-state armed groups, such as drug gangs and guerrilla forces, take over and effectively govern small areas. Groups in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and elsewhere have taken on the fight against COVID-19, allowing them to claim an interest in the public good, and strengthen their violent grip on local communities—in a way that could be permanent.

Which armed groups control territory in Latin America?

The nature of criminal governance varies hugely between regions and countries across Latin America, according to Chris Dalby, managing editor of investigative news site InSight Crime, which examines organized crime in the region. But it tends to take hold, he says, in poor or remote areas where the state presence is weak; that is, where the government has failed to provide effective law enforcement, public services, and economic opportunity.

In Colombia, armed groups are mostly a legacy of the country’s decades-long conflict with rebel groups. Though the Colombian government reached a landmark peace deal with the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2016, other guerrilla groups, including the ELN, and paramilitary forces remain powerful in some rural areas. In Brazil, drug traffickers exert more influence than the police in some of the favela neighborhoods that lie on the outskirts of large cities, with the largest gang being the First Capital Command (PCC) in São Paulo. In Mexico, drug cartels, such as the Sinaloa Cartel in the northwest of the country, have similar control over poor communities.

These distinct groups use their territories for a range of illicit businesses: drug trafficking, people trafficking, illegal mining, extortion rackets and more. But they often also provide resources and public services for communities, as a way of legitimizing their control and buying loyalty. During the pandemic, with many money-making activities harder to carry out thanks to national restrictions on movement and businesses, many groups have leaned into this role of governing, Dalby says. “They’ve taken the opportunity to reaffirm that control.”

In March, after COVID-19 started to spread through Brazil, gangs in Rio de Janeiro favelas drove through streets using a loudspeaker to tell residents they were putting a curfew in place and threatening violence if they did not comply, according to Brazilian newspaper UOL. Traffickers reportedly also handed out hand soap, and issued edicts banning tourists from entering the area in case they infect the residents. In Mexico, in April, drug cartels handed out boxes of food and other basic supplies to people struggling with the economic impact of the pandemic. Images circulated in Latin American media showed packages branded with the names of cartels.

In Colombia, some armed groups implemented stricter restrictions than the government did on people’s movement, humanitarian workers and community leaders told HRW, allowing no exceptions for accessing health services or banks during curfews, for example. People who did not comply with the rules faced brutal punishments: HRW documented at least 8 killings of civilians who apparently did not abide by COVID-19 measures imposed by armed groups between March and June.

Zheng-Li Shi..., Gurrl We Coming For Your Dome-Piece

counterpunch |  Our proposal is consistent with all the principal undisputed facts concerning SARS-CoV-2 and its origin. The MMP proposal has the additional benefit of reconciling many observations concerning SARS-CoV-2 that have proven difficult to reconcile with any natural zoonotic hypothesis.

For instance, using different approaches, numerous researchers have concluded that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein has a very high affinity for the human ACE2 receptor (Walls et al., 2020; Piplani et al., 2020; Shang and Ye et al., 2020; Wrapp et al., 2020). Such exceptional affinities, ten to twenty times as great as that of the original SARS virus, do not arise at random, making it very hard to explain in any other way than for the virus to have been strongly selected in the presence of a human ACE2 receptor (Piplani et al., 2020).

In addition to this, a recent report found that the spike of RaTG13 binds the human ACE2 receptor (Shang and Ye et al., 2020). We proposed above that the virus in the mine directly infected humans lung cells. The main determinant of cell infection and species specificity of coronaviruses is initial receptor binding (Perlman and Netland, 2009). Thus RaTG13, unlike most bat coronaviruses, probably can enter and infect human cells, providing biological plausibility to the idea that the miners became infected with a coronavirus resembling RaTG13.

Moreover, the receptor binding domain (RBD) of SARS-CoV-2, which is the region of the spike that physically contacts the human ACE2 receptor, has recently been crystallised to reveal its spatial structure (Shang and Ye et al., 2020). These authors found close structural similarities between the spikes of SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 in how they bound the human ACE2 receptor:

“Second, as with SARS-CoV-2, bat RaTG13 RBM [a region of the RBD] contains a similar four-residue motif in the ACE2 binding ridge, supporting the notion that SARS-CoV-2 may have evolved from RaTG13 or a RaTG13-related bat coronavirus (Extended Data Table 3 and Extended Data Fig. 7). Third, the L486F, Y493Q and D501N residue changes from RaTG13 to SARS CoV-2 enhance ACE2 recognition and may have facilitated the bat-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (Extended Data Table 3 and Extended Data Fig. 7). A lysine-to-asparagine mutation at the 479 position in the SARS-CoV-2 RBD (corresponding to the 493 position in the SARS-CoV-2 RBD) enabled SARS-CoV to infect humans. Fourth, Leu455 contributes favourably to ACE2 recognition, and it is conserved between RaTG13 and SARS CoV-2; its presence in the SARS CoV-2 RBM may be important for the bat-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2″ (Shang and Ye et al., 2020). (italics added)

The significance of this molecular similarity is very great. Coronaviruses have evolved a diverse set of molecular solutions to solve the problem of binding ACE2 (Perlman and Netland, 2009; Forni et al., 2017). The fact that RaTG13 and SARS CoV-2 share the same solution makes RaTG13 a highly likely direct ancestor of Sars-CoV-2.

A further widely noted feature of SARS-CoV-2 is its furin site (Coutard et al., 2020). This site is absent from RaTG13 and other closely related coronaviruses. The most closely related virus with such a site is the highly lethal MERS (which broke out in 2012). Possession of a furin site enables SARS-CoV-2 (like MERS) to infect lungs and many other body tissues (such as the gastrointestinal tract and neurons), explaining much of its lethality (Hoffman et al., 2020; Lamers et al., 2020). However, no convincing explanation for how SARS-CoV-2 acquired this site has yet been offered. Our suggestion is that it arose due to the high selection pressure which existed in the miner’s lungs and which in general worked to ensure that the virus became highly adapted to the lungs. This explanation, which encompasses how SARS-CoV-2 came to target lung tissues in general, is an important aspect of our proposal.

The implication is therefore that the furin site was not acquired by recombination with another coronavirus and simply represents convergent evolution (as suggested by Andersen et al., 2020).

An intriguing alternative possibility is that SARS-CoV-2 acquired its furin site directly from the miner’s lungs. Humans possess an epithelial sodium channel protein called ENaC-a whose furin cleavage site is identical over eight amino acids to SARS-CoV-2 (Anand et al., 2020). ENaC-a protein is present in the same airway epithelial and lung tissues infected by SARS-CoV-2. It is known from plants that positive-stranded RNA viruses recombine readily with host mRNAs (Greene and Allison, 1994; Greene and Allison, 1996; Lommel and Xiong, 1991; Borja et al., 2007). The same evidence base is not available for positive-stranded animal RNA viruses, (though see Gorbalenya, 1992) but if plant viruses are a guide then acquisition of its furin site via recombination with the mRNA which encodes ENaC-a by SARS-CoV-2 is a strong possibility.

A further feature of SARS-CoV-2 has been the very limited adaptive evolution of its genome since the pandemic began (Zhan et al., 2020; van Dorp et al., 2020; Starr et al., 2020). It is a well-established principle that viruses that jump species undergo accelerated evolutionary change in their new host (e.g. Baric et al., 1997). Thus, SARS and MERS (both coronaviruses) underwent rapid and readily detectable adaptation to their new human hosts (Forni et al., 2017; Dudas and Rambaut, 2016). Such an adaptation period has not been observed for SARS-CoV-2 even though it has now infected many more individuals than SARS or MERS did. This has even led to suggestions that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had a period of cryptic circulation in humans infections that predated the pandemic (Chaw et al., 2020). The sole mutation consistently observed to accumulate across multiple studies is a D614G substitution in the spike protein (e.g. Korber et al., 2020). The numerically largest analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes, however, found no evidence at all for adaptive evolution, even for D614G (van Dorp et al., 2020).

The general observation is therefore that Sars-CoV-2 has remained functionally unchanged or virtually so (except for inconsequential genetic changes) since the pandemic began. This is a very important observation. It implies that SARS-CoV-2 is highly adapted across its whole set of component proteins and not just at the spike (Zhan et al., 2020). That is to say, its evolutionary leap to humans was completed before the 2019 pandemic began.

It is hard to imagine an explanation for this high adaptiveness other than some kind of passaging in a human body (Zhan et al., 2020). Not even passaging in human cells could have achieved such an outcome.

Two examples illustrate this point. In a follow up to Shang and Ye et al., (2020), a similar group of Minnesota researchers identified a distinct strategy by which the spike (S) protein (which contains the receptor bind domain; RBD) of SARS-CoV-2 evades the human immune system (Shang and Wan et al., 2020). This strategy involves more effective hiding of its RBD, but it implies again that the spike and the RBD evolved in tandem and in the presence of the human immune system (i.e. in a human body and not in tissue culture).

The Andersen authors, in their critique of a possible engineered origin for SARS-CoV-2, also stress the need for passaging in whole humans:

“Finally, the generation of the predicted O-linked glycans is also unlikely to have occurred during cell-culture passage, as such features suggest the involvement of an immune system” (Andersen et al., 2020).

The final point that we would like to make is that the principal zoonotic origin thesis is the one proposed by Andersen et al. Apart from being poorly supported this thesis is very complex. It requires two species jumps, at least two recombination events between quite distantly related coronaviruses and the physical transfer of a pangolin (having a coronavirus infection) from outside China (Andersen et al., 2020). Even then it provides no logical explanation of the adaptedness of SARS-CoV-2 across its whole genome or why the virus emerged in Wuhan.

By contrast, our MMP proposal requires only the one species jump, which is documented in the Master’s thesis. Although we do not rule out a possible role for mixed infections in the lungs of the miners, nor the possibility of recombination between closely related variants in those lungs, nor the potential acquisition of the furin site from a host mRNA, only mutation was needed to derive SARS-CoV-2 from RaTG13. Hence our attention earlier to the figure from P. Zhou et al., 2020showing that RaTG13 is the most closely related virus to SARS-CoV-2 over its entire length. This extended similarity is perfectly consistent with a mutational origin of SARS-CoV-2 from RaTG13.

In short, the MMP theory is a plausible and parsimonious explanation of all the key features of the COVID-19 pandemic and its origin. It accounts for the propensity of SARS-CoV-2 infections to target the lungs; the apparent preadapted nature of the virus; and its transmission from bats in Yunnan to humans in Wuhan.

Did That Public Toilet Stink? Then Its Plume Aerosol Blew Infected Feces Right Through Your Little Mask!

Slate |  In early July, a group of scientists authored an article outlining the evidence for COVID-19 being an airborne disease. It made plenty of headlines, which was, frankly, a bit confusing. Didn’t the public already know that COVID-19 was a respiratory illness? And didn’t medical providers already know that COVID-19 could be transmitted by aerosols in some situations, not just droplets? Why was this news, exactly?

To understand the confusion, we have to go back to the definition of airborne. In medical parlance, an “airborne” disease is one that is spread primarily by the distribution of aerosols—tiny particles, less than 5 microns in size, that can linger in the air and travel long distances. They can also travel lower into your respiratory tract. Classic examples are chicken pox, measles, and tuberculosis. In contrast, a “droplet disease” is one that is primarily transmitted by much larger droplets (20 microns or larger) that don’t linger in the air and don’t travel long distances—they typically fall to the ground within about 3 feet of the source. Classic examples are influenza, mumps, and whooping cough. 

These droplets can land in your eyes, nose, or mouth, and infect you, or be transferred from fomites (surrounding objects) to hands, and thereby to the face, infecting the respiratory tract by direct contact with mucus membranes in the eyes, nose, or mouth. But that doesn’t mean you can think of a droplet disease as requiring direct contact—this kind of disease can infect you either when you inhale it or when you have direct contact with it.

Which underscores the problem. In real life, what comes out of a COVID-infected patient when they breathe, cough, or sneeze doesn’t neatly fit exactly into one category or the other—particles can exist along a size continuum. And just to make things more confusing, not everyone even uses the term airborne to mean aerosol only—sometimes it means only that the disease is spread by any size infective particle that is inhaled. On top of that, while the World Health Organization hasn’t disputed that the disease can be spread by inhaled droplets, it has focused mainly on direct contact with droplets, which is why, until recently, it’s mostly pushed hand-washing and distancing as ways to contain spread, while being slower to push masks, which are mainly protective against droplet inhalation. Sorting through these competing transmission ideologies, and trying to figure out if you are keeping yourself safe from aerosols or droplets, feels like canoeing through crabgrass.

What I have come to realize is that it really shouldn’t matter that much. Even as we’ve focused on droplets, in the clinical world, we’ve always known that a COVID-positive patient could generate aerosols and spread the disease that way. The WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention both acknowledged this, hence their recommendation that medical staff wear an N95 mask when performing a procedure considered “aerosol generating.” But we couldn’t agree on what these procedures were either, in practice. Placing a breathing tube into someone’s trachea before putting them on a ventilator is considered an aerosolizing procedure, that is certain. But scientists and physicians quibble about everything else that could be an aerosolizing procedure: nebulizer treatments for asthma, chest tubes inserted for collapsed lungs, suctioning, CPR. A patient just sitting quietly by themselves in a room might cough and generate an aerosol, as well as a spray of droplets capable of traveling up to 200 mph, a speed that could easily launch them further than 3 feet.

Next Time You Cop A Squat - Remember Why You're Allegedly Wearing These Little Buhshidt Masks....,

medicalexpress |  Scientists have known for several months the new coronavirus can become suspended in microdroplets expelled by patients when they speak and breathe, but until now there was no proof that these tiny particles are infectious. 

 A new study by scientists at the University of Nebraska that was uploaded to a medical preprint site this week has shown for the first time that SARS-CoV-2 taken from microdroplets, defined as under five microns, can replicate in lab conditions.

This boosts the hypothesis that normal speaking and breathing, not just coughing and sneezing, are responsible for spreading COVID-19—and that infectious doses of the virus can travel distances far greater than the six feet (two meters) urged by social distancing guidelines. 

The results are still considered preliminary and have not yet appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, which would lend more credibility to the methods devised by the scientists. 

The paper was posted to the medrxiv.org website, where most cutting-edge research during the pandemic has first been made public.

The same team wrote a paper in March showing that the virus remains airborne in the rooms of hospitalized COVID-19 patients, and this study will soon be published in a journal, according to the lead author.

"It is actually fairly difficult" to collect the samples, Joshua Santarpia, an associate professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center told AFP.

The team used a device the size of a cell phone for the purpose, but "the concentrations are typically very low, your chances of recovering material are small."

The scientists took air samples from five rooms of bedridden patients, at a height of about a foot (30 centimeters) over the foot of their beds. 

The patients were talking, which produces microdroplets that become suspended in the air for several hours in what is referred to as an "aerosol," and some were coughing.

The team managed to collect microdroplets as small as one micron in diameter. 

They then placed these samples into a culture to make them grow, finding that three of the 18 samples tested were able to replicate. 

For Santarpia, this represents proof that microdroplets, which also travel much greater distances than big droplets, are capable of infecting people. 

"It is replicated in cell culture and therefore infectious," he said.

It's Not Green And For Damn Sure Not Any Kind Of New Deal....,

off-guardian |  Like everyone, I would love to live in a pollution-free world. I would love to see human civilization strike a balance with nature and at the risk of sounding like a naïve idealist, I sincerely do believe that this is ultimately our destiny as a species.

My personal experience has led me to the conclusion that we have only failed to achieve this paradigm as a species due to the system (and cultural influence) of oligarchism which has managed to stubbornly sink its claws parasitically onto its host for a few too many generations- corrupting and perverting everything that it dominates.

Due to the pervasiveness of oligarchism, mass exploitation, wars and pollution have lain waste to ecosystems and countless human lives alike, and as the neo-liberal order continues to careen towards the inevitable breakdown of a 2 quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble which our un-repentant decades of decadence has caused, very serious choices will need to be made.

False Remedies to the Oncoming Meltdown

Many false solutions will be presented as society wakes up to the burning building it is trapped in, and unless our minds have become aware of those false solutions, (not to mention those arsonists managing this fire from the top), then many well-intentioned souls from all walks of life may sign onto their own death warrants and accidentally usher in a solution far worse than the disease they sought to remedy.

Before you, dear reader, accuse me of being overly dramatic in my claims, let me bring your attention to a June 3rd event sponsored by the World Economic Forum (WEF) entitled The Great Reset featuring impassioned calls by leaders of the IMF, World Bank, UK, USA, corporate and banking sector to take advantage of COVID-19 to shut down and “reset” the world economy under a new operating system entitled the Green New Deal.

WEF founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab said:

“the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions… Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”

Schwab’s message was amplified by Prince Charles who gushed over this golden opportunity to radically modify human behaviour in ways that decades of environmentalism have failed to accomplish when he said:

“We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from this [COVID-19] crisis. Its unprecedented shockwaves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change,”

While the World Economic Forum is usually known as a forum of global corporate elites, this organization branched out in recent years to become a leader in global pandemic coordination as a co-sponsor of the creepy October 2019 Event 201 and has embraced leaders of typically “anti-capitalist” resistance groups like Greenpeace who now speak regularly at their events.

Jennifer Morgan (current head of Greenpeace) stated at the event:

We set up a new world order after World War II… We’re now in a different world than we were then. We need to ask, what can we be doing differently? The World Economic Forum has a big responsibility in that as well—to be pushing the reset button and looking at how to create well-being for people and for the Earth.”

So is this definition of international wellbeing truly what it appears? Or does something more nefarious lurk under the surface? How can we know?

Manifesto For Secure Tolerance

unz |  In 2010, Harvard duo Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons published The Invisible Gorilla, which detailed their study of the human capacity to overlook even the most obvious things. In one of their experiments, Chabris and Simons created a video in which students wearing white and black t-shirts pass a basketball between themselves. Viewers were asked to count the number of times the players with the white shirts passed the ball, and many were later very satisfied to find that they were accurate in their counting. This satisfaction was tainted, however, when they were asked if they had spotted “the gorilla.” Amidst considerable confusion, the video would then be replayed for the puzzled viewers, who were stunned to see a man in a gorilla suit walk among the students and balls, take up a position in the center of the screen, and wave at the camera. They’d missed him entirely in their initial viewing. The study highlighted the capacity for humans to become fixated on set tasks, events, or other distractions, and miss even the most elaborate and remarkable of occurrences.

When it comes to Jewish activism, and especially Jewish activism in the area of censorship and mass migration, I fear that the same dynamics are at work. Panicked by this or that website or YouTube channel being defunded or banned, we miss the ‘Invisible Gorilla’ — a plan of action far more horrifying and deadly in its implications than any single act of censorship.

There are essentially two forms of censorship. The hard kind we are very familiar with. It consists in the banning or removal of websites, videos, books, podcasts, and social media accounts. It extends to defunding and deplatforming, and it reaches its apogee in the banning of activists from entering certain countries, in the arrest of activists on spurious grounds, and in the development of new laws with harsh criminal penalties for speech. These methods are dangerous and rampant, and I myself have fallen victim to several of them.

I think, however, that softer, more diffuse methods of censorship are even more insidious and perhaps even more catastrophic. We could consider, for example, the manipulation of culture so that even if certain speech is not illegal and carries no legal repercussions, it nevertheless leads to the loss of employment, the destruction of education opportunities, and the dissolving of one’s relationships. This is a form of cultural self-censorship, involving the modification of in-group standards, that has demonstrable Jewish origins. “Soft” censorship can also take the form of socio-cultural prophylaxis. Take, for example, the recent initiative of the U.S. State Department to initiate a drive to engage in the global promotion of philo-Semitic (pro-Jewish) attitudes. I really don’t believe that this will play out in the manner the State Department hopes, and I watch with interest to see precisely what the methodologies of this policy will be. I sincerely doubt its prospects for success. But what other way can this be interpreted than as a preventative measure, obstructing the growth of organic attitudes that, let’s face it, are more likely to skew to the anti-Jewish? Finally, isn’t it in the nature of contemporary culture, with its emphasis on entertainment, consumption, and sex, to be the perfect environment in which to hide many “Invisible Gorillas”? Isn’t it a whirlwind of fixations and distractions, replete with untold numbers of “woke” viewers happy to report that they’ve been enthusiastically counting passes and have the accurate number? Isn’t it rather the axiom of our time that, from the idiotic Left to the idiotic Right, Invisible Gorillas stroll freely and unhindered, laughing and waving as they go, hidden in plain sight?

The Great Reset's Multifaceted Devastation Of The U.S. Economy

jackrasmus |  Great Recessions are always associated with a financial crisis, but that crisis need not precede the deep contraction of the real, non-financial economy. The COVID-19 pandemic has played the role of a financial crash in driving the real economy into a contraction that is both quantitatively and qualitatively worse than a ‘normal’ recession. Furthermore, a subsequent banking system-financial crash is not impossible in the coming months, although not yet likely in 2020.
The preconditions for a financial crisis are in development. It won’t be precipitated by a residential mortgage crisis, as in 2007-08. But there are several potential candidates for precipitating a financial crash once again. Here are just a few:

• The commercial property sector in the US is in deep trouble. Commercial property includes malls, office buildings, hotels, resorts, factories, and multiple tenant apartment complexes. Many incurred deep debt obligations as they expanded after 2010 or just kept operating by accruing more high cost debt when they were unprofitable. Today they are unable to continue servicing (i.e. paying principal and interest) on their excessive debt load. Many have begun the process of default and chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. Banks and investors hold much of the commercial property debt that will never be repaid. Excess derivatives (credit default swaps) have been written on the debt. A debt crisis and wave of defaults and bankruptcies in 2020-21 in the commercial property sector could easily precipitate a subprime mortgage-like debt crisis as occurred in 2008-09. And derivatives obligations could transmit the crisis throughout the banking system—as it did in 2009. Regional and small community banks in the US are particularly vulnerable.

• The oil and gas fracking industry, where junk bond and leverage loan debt had already risen to unstable levels by the advent of the COVID crisis. The collapse of world oil and gas prices—which began before the COVID-19 impact and continues—will render drillers and others unable to generate the income with which to service their debt. Already more than 200 companies in this sector are in default and bankruptcy proceedings. Again, regional banks that financed much of the expansion of fracking in Texas, the Dakotas, and Pennsylvania will be impacted severely by the defaults. Their financial instability could easily spread to other sectors of banking and finance in the US.

• State and local governments, should Congress fail to appropriate sufficient bailout funding in its next round of fiscal spending in July 2020. State and local governments are capable of default and bankruptcy—unlike the Federal government, which is not. The US has a long history of state defaults associated with the onset of Great Depressions. This time around, state financial instability will quickly spill over to public pension funds, and from public to private pensions, and from there to the municipal bond markets with which state and local governments raise revenue by borrowing to fund deficits.

• Global sovereign debt markets, as previously noted. Defaults on massive debt accumulated since 2010 by many countries could result in serious contagion effects on the private banking systems of the advanced economies, including the US, Europe, and Japan. Should the IMF fail to contain a chain of sovereign debt crises that could follow in the wake of the current Great Recession, a chain reaction of defaults across emerging market economies in particular has the potential to precipitate a global financial crisis.

History shows that financial crises often originate from unsuspected corners of the economy. The above candidates are the ‘known unknowns’. There may also lurk in the bowels of the capitalist global financial system still more ‘unknown unknowns’—i.e. what are sometimes called ‘black swan’ events.

Masks Prove And Signal Your Compliance With The Great Reset

off-guardian |  Recently I had the poor judgment to turn on National Public Radio for about an hour, under the impression that I was going to learn something about the day’s news.

I could have saved myself the trouble. During the hour in question, I learned nothing at all about the presidential election campaign (now in its final months), nothing about the tens of millions of my fellow citizens whose jobs have been snatched away by government fiat, nothing about climate change, nuclear arms buildups, international refugees or growing worldwide poverty – nothing even about the intensification of air and water pollution authorized by recent federal regulation, although pollution kills an estimated 100,000 Americans every year.

No – for a solid hour, I heard the following: that COVID19 – in reality, at most, a moderately serious flu virus – is the worst medical threat the United States has ever faced; that this “deadly” virus (the word “deadly” was repeated obsessively, even though the disease is fatal in a tiny percentage of cases) has been empowered by a conspiracy of Republican politicians serving the arch-demon Donald Trump; that recent data showing the rapid decline in deaths attributable to the virus may have been faked, because the numbers aren’t what the “experts” want them to be; and that a massive increase in COVID19 tests – primarily among people between 20 and 40 years of age who are subjected to swabbing because their employers demand it, not because they’re in any danger – cannot possibly have anything to do with a rise in the number of reported infections, and that anyone who dares to suggest otherwise is “putting lives at risk.”

But the real theme of the hour was masks, masks, masks: how to make them, how to wear them, their different types, who doesn’t seem to have enough of them, and why muffling our faces (even though no such thing was ever demanded of us during dozens of past viral outbreaks) is absolutely, positively good for us all.

I waited in vain for some mention of the fact that every single order requiring the wearing of muzzles in the US is probably unconstitutional, a matter that National Public Radio – which once prided itself on its legal affairs reporting – might have been expected to care about.

Nor did anyone mention that just a few months ago, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention was explicitly advising against a general mask-wearing regime, as was Anthony Fauci, the High Priest of COVID19.

No, facts would only have complicated matters. After all, we already knew what good little boys and girls were expected to do with those muzzles. At the close of each weather forecast, just in case anyone had missed the point, the reporter said cheerily, “And when you go out – put on a mask.” “And drink milk with every meal,” I half expected him to add, but I guess self-conscious condescension would have spoiled the effect.

Put on a mask.

In well over half a century, I cannot remember a weather report that ended with a brisk piece of non-meteorological advice, let alone a patently silly one – after all, if these magical masks were to make any difference, their greatest usefulness would have been at the beginning of the outbreak, not on its heels. 

Yet throughout March, while police-state fever prompted the suspension of democracy in some 40 states and most of the US population was being hustled into virtual house arrest, the pro-incarceration crowd’s loudest voices unanimously insisted that masks were of no practical value.

Police Have Been Their Own Worst Public Relations Enemy Playing War With Protesters

propublica |  Experts said how police respond to demonstrations is, in part, dictated by the availability of nonlethal weapons and on how officers are trained to use them.

In 2016, Haar surveyed 25 years of research on crowd-control weapons used around the world, including three commonly used in the United States: projectiles such as rubber bullets or beanbag rounds; chemical irritants such as tear gas; and disorientation devices known as flashbangs. Her report found that when fired, tear gas canisters can cause vision loss or other traumatic injuries.

“These are all weapons that should be used as a last resort when open dialogue and communication fail and the violence is so out of hand that normal policing methods and arresting people have been tried and don’t work,” Haar said.

The size of protests also influences how police respond, Straub said. Small protests can likely be handled by specialized units that are regularly tasked with managing crowds. Larger protests may require many more officers, some of them drawn from parts of police departments that have less experience and training in crowd control and de-escalation, and thus may be more likely to resort to weapons.

In the Washington video, by not rushing the crowd when a protester threw a bottle, Straub said, the officers remained calm and acted with “restraint.” It would be unfair, Straub said, to require the police to analyze what protesters are throwing at them before reacting, given how quickly such an encounter could escalate. “One person throws a water bottle, five people throw water bottles, and then somebody throws a brick,” he said.

Experts said how quickly officers choose to deploy weapons in the field depends on their training, which can vary widely between departments.

No entity sets training standards for police use of force, experts said. However, departments, equipment manufacturers and state officials have mandated that officers undergo training before they are allowed to use nonlethal weapons. Depending on the training, officers may be taught how to shoot weapons so they “skip off the pavement” in order to decrease their velocity and risk of serious injury.

In firing their guns, officers are taught to aim at the person’s torso because it reduces the risk that a bystander will be struck. But with nonlethal weapons, officers are often instructed to avoid the torso, head or groin, said Thor Eells, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association, a trade group for SWAT teams that also conducts training for police departments. Precise aim in a crowd is extremely difficult, he said.

“We explain to them that in a crowd control situation, it’s a dynamic environment,” Eells said. “It’s not the same as a paper target.”

 Reaction to police escalation caught on video has been swift.

As demonstrations continued and the media drew attention to the police tactics, departments in at least 40 cities have announced changes. In Philadelphia, officials announced a moratorium on tear gas to control crowds, New York moved to make officers’ disciplinary records public, San Francisco announced plans to stop sending police officers to calls that don’t involve criminal activity and Atlanta now requires officers to intervene if they see another officer using unreasonable force.

Straub said that the scrutiny of officers’ actions in protests, and the condemnation of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, were strong signals “that that kind of behavior isn’t going to be tolerated.”

Meanwhile, academic conversations around defunding or abolishing the police have been around for decades, but now, some politicians are opening up to such notions. That’s in part, Bell said, because of the “intellectual organizing” Black Lives Matter activists did early on to help frame the injustices they were protesting.

“Now, the real question about whether this time will be ‘different’ also has to do with what’s adopted,” Bell said.