America's Ruling Ideology Has Yielded A Bounty Of Poverty, Homelessness, and Crime...,

nakedcapitalism |  Ross What do you think was revealed in 2020 that we all intuitively knew but couldn’t actually see because it hadn’t crystallized?

Michael Hudson Well, it’s obvious that the economy never recovered from the Obama depression after he bailed out the banks, not the economy. So the question is, how long can the economy limp along without recovery?

Well, it’s obvious now that the debts can’t be paid, but the coronavirus only catalyzed that. It’s made it even clearer. So in a sense, the Biden administration is going to be picking up just where the Obama administration left off, namely with huge evictions. Obama evicted about 10 million families. Most of them were black and Hispanic, lower income families who were the victims of the chump mortgages. Biden’s going to start his administration by kicking out probably another five million families. Again, black and Hispanic families are going to be the big losers because they were the people who had the highest coronavirus or were the first to be laid off. So it’s going to begin with a large eviction.

This reverses the trend in homeownership going up to 2008. It’s been going down, and this is going to continue now. People somehow imagined that there was going to be a recovery, that somehow we could recover from the post 2008 breakdown. But now it’s obvious we can’t recover. You’re going to have the polarization of the economy that has been occurring for the last 12 years. It will simply accelerate.

Ross What do you think are the megatrends that we should be looking at in 2021? What do you think is the direction of travel, if you like, for so-called developed economies?

Michael Hudson Well, the big trend in any economy is the growth of debt, because the debt grows exponentially. The economy has painted itself into a debt corner. We can see that in real estate. We can see that for small business. There’s also almost no way to recover. The Federal Reserve has been printing quantitative easing to keep stock and bonds high. But for the real economy, the trend is polarization and lower employment.

The trend also is that state and local finances are broke, especially in the biggest cities, New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles. They’re not getting income tax revenue from the unemployed or closed businesses. They’re not getting the real estate tax with so many defaults and mortgage arrears. In New York City there’s talk of cutting back the subways by 70 percent. People will be afraid to take the subways when they’re overcrowded with people with the virus. So you’re having a breakdown not only in state and local finances, but of public services that are state run – public transportation services, health services, education is being downsized. Everything that is funded out of state and local budgets is going to suffer.

And living standards are going to be very sharply downward as people realize how many services they got are dependent on public infrastructure.

Ross Which, of course, opens the door for vulture funds and predatory capital, whether it be private equity, VCs or whatever else to come in and do public infrastructure deals?

Michael Hudson Well, you’ll have privatizations. The American economy will be privatized because the states can’t support their transportation system and other systems. The pressure to privatize subway and transport system, schools are going to be more privatized, as jails have been in the United States. So you’re going to have a huge privatization trend.

This Capitol Hill Police Officer Singlehandedly Set Kneegrows Back 402 Years Today....,

Cuomo Covid Camps: NY Assembly Bill A416

whitehotharlots |  The “2020 UGGGHH” discourse is insufferable. It boggles my mind that so many people think an arbitrary temporal distinction is the cause of our nation’s collapse. They believe, in all earnestness, that 2021 is going to be better simply by virtue of it being different.

There’s a very good chance–better than 50/50–that 2020 is going to be the best of our remaining years, that every year and month and day from now until the sun explodes is going to be progressively worse than the one that preceded it.  

I had a sad, drunk epiphany last night about neoliberal management strategies during our collapse. The general consensus is that people like Mitch McConnell and Larry Summers are evil and stupid. But what if they’re actually evil and competent? They know that mass displacement is coming, probably very soon, and they intentionally want to immiserate most people beforehand so that we won’t have the resources or will to mount any consequential protest as the cities start to flood and burn and trains start herding us into camps.

You might have heard of The Great Reset. Like all other reflections of our horrific future, the political media recently began referring to it as a “conspiracy theory.” Indeed, it has been badly misunderstood by paranoid right wingers. But it’s real. There was a Davos conference that was literally called “The Great Reset.” Transcripts and videos of conference proceedings can be found with a 10 second Google search. These people put their ideology out in the open for everyone to digest, and now simply re-posting the things they said on record makes you a conspiracy theorist.

These types of Rich People Gatherings–Davos, the Aspen Ideas Festival, etc–should not be regarded as a meeting of soothsayers. They’re not even really prognosticators. They are, instead, the collected mewlings of the modern clarisy. Their declarations are meant to placate the hyper elite, convince them that their destructive behaviors are moral and the current system is totally sustainable even though the ground is clearly caving in beneath their feet. 

You can think of the visions set for at these conferences as sort of what the rich think the best case scenario might be.

The Great Reset’s best case scenario is terrifying indeed: one of the very first slides announces that by 2030 upwards of a billion people will be displaced by climate change. We won’t eat meat anymore (okay, fine, whatever). Oh, also, our economy will be entirely rentier-based. You don’t have any possessions. You rent everything you use. You don’t draw a steady paycheck. Everyone is a gig worker. There is no retirement, either; you work until you can’t, and then you die. 

This is the world both of our wretched political parties want to build. To the people who control our fate, this is idealism.

The weirdest omission is that they all seem to think that the masses are just going to go along with it. India and Pakistan will not exchange nuclear weapons: each side will merely accept that their countries are no longer inhabitable and instead of fighting for water or territory they will simply sit tight and wait for immolation. Eritreans will humbly march themselves into the sea. American homeowners will simply shrug their shoulders and consent to signing all of their earthly possessions over to Citibank in exchange for a weekly allowance of 4 cans of Spam.

Is this naivety, or do they know something we don’t? Are they stupid enough to simply believe that no one will fight back, or are they planning some type of mechanisms for the supression of unrest?

Assembly Bill A416

 

Are The Boule A Case Study In How The 1% Control The 99%?

ghionjournal |  It is a sad sight to see; it’s like we are revisiting the slave trade where neighbors sell their own neighbors down the river for the sake of money.

Malcolm X identified them a long time ago, he realized the lethality of the boule society, the few who have attained success yet refuse to reach back and lift up others behind them. I was once in this cloaked society, a man of Omega Psi Phi, I too used to pretend that I cared about justice while dabbling in the very orders that impoverish the majority. It says in the bible that man cannot serve God and mammon concurrently; now I understand the wisdom of these words:

“No one can serve two masters: Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” ~  Matthew 6:24

Sure enough, I learned the hard way that one cannot be in two places at the same time—either we choose one side or the other. For far too long, I chose ego over God only to feel the fires that come with empty pride and emptier affiliations. Look I’m really not trying to be preachy over here; even though it is the day of Sabbath, my aim is not to convert you into my line of thinking. I am just telling my truth as best as I can and then letting the chips fall where they may.

The truth is this: the boule society have become a bullet upon the temples of the African-American communities. Rooted in Masonic traditions, the “Divine 9”—as they call themselves haughtily—have made it their purpose to rise above their station and dismissively thumb their noses at those with lesser opportunities. It’s like Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, where all are equal except those who walk in two Weitzman and Guccis are more equal.

There is no need to be coy here, the people I’m referring to are those in “black” Greek fraternities and sororities—AKAs, Deltas, Betas Ques, Kappas, Sigmas, Alphas, Zetas and Iotas—who wear letters and throw up demonic signs and symbols paying homages to Luciferian societies. Most of them have zero idea what they are doing; they are blinded by ideologies and bonded by ignorance to respect that which disrespects them thoroughly. The vast majority are branded either outwardly or inwardly, they bow before Satan without understanding who they are pledging their lives to.

 

No Corporate Sector Does A Better Job Masking Dysfunction And Profiteering Than Healthcare

charleshughsmith |  Unbeknownst to most Americans, many core systems are already in the first stages of collapse. No corporate sector does a better job of masking dysfunction and profiteering than healthcare, and so the collapse of healthcare systems will surprise everyone who swallowed the sector's glossy PR. 

Though 2020 is widely perceived as "the worst year ever," it was only a snack. The real banquet of consequences will be served in 2021. The reason 2020 was only a snack is that systems didn't break down in 2020. The reason 2021 is the main course is that systems will break down, and once broken, they cannot be restored.  Systems have numerous sources of potential fragility:

1. Systems can be tightly bound to other fragile systems, setting up the potential for a domino-like cascading collapse that starts with one system failure that then brings down every connected, interdependent system.

2. Systems can be hollowed out by self-interested insiders who mistakenly believe the system can survive endless looting.

3. Systems can be weakened by perverse incentives that provide strong incentives to under-invest in core functions and divert revenues to profiteering and extraction (stock buybacks, bonuses to managers, etc.)

4. Systems can appear robust to casual observers because insiders cloak the decay of function, accountability and transparency.

5. The decline of functionality / results can be hidden by bureaucratic obscurity (accounting statements in which all the important information is buried in footnotes starting on page 217, etc.) and by complexity thickets that reduce accountability to near-zero: no one is responsible for the decay of function, accountability and transparency.

6. Process replaces results as the Prime Directive of the system. Devoting resources to following processes rather than to getting results generates an illusion of functionality even as the ability to evolve and adapt is lost.

7. Buffers that enabled effective responses to crisis are stripped to the bone as redundancy and resilience are discounted as "hurting profits" or "needless expenses."

8. Insiders and the public / customers wrongly assume money can solve all of these systemic frailties. But money cannot buy trust, competence, institutional depth, productive incentives or anything else that is essential to robust, anti-fragile systems.

Americans are unprepared for the collapse of core systems. The secular faith holds that corporate ownership of core systems, centralized state control and the relentless pursuit of infinite greed will magically manifest the best of all possible worlds because self-enrichment by any means available is what perfects systems.

The New Reset Strategy Requires >90% Vaccination Compliance

off-guardian |  The World Health Organization has changed the definition of “herd immunity” on the Covid section of their website, inserting the claim that it is a “concept used in vaccination”, and requires a vaccine to be achieved.

Both of these statements are total falsehoods, which is demonstrated by the WHO’s own website back in June, and every dictionary definition of “herd immunity” you can find.

To quote the WHO’s own original definition:

Herd immunity is the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or a natural immunity developed through previous infection.

This definition was posted on the WHO’s website on June 9th of this year, and conforms with the general usage of the term for generations.

Then, on October 15th, we woke up to find the words on the side of the barn had changed. The definition has been altered to this:

‘Herd immunity’, also known as ‘population immunity’, is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.

No explanation is offered for the change, in fact note of the change is made on the website at all.

Indeed all the previous versions of the website have been totally wiped from the wayback machine. A telling thing to do, in and of itself.

What BeeDee And Arnach Need To Know About Ivermectin

Go to page 3 of this document. Eastern Virginia Medical Center Covid Critical Care Protocol 

The typical dosing for humans is 200 micrograms per kilogram of body mass- but can be safely upped to 600 micrograms per kilogram of body mass for prophylactic use against covid.

Any reservations about using veterinary ivermectin and veterinary medications in general? (true confession, I keep a large supply of veterinary antibiotics and other medications because they are easily obtained over the counter, exponentially less expensive than the same molecule packaged for humans, and are identical to those requiring a prescription for human consumption

 

Based on the type of animal, they are often in different media that may not work as well in humans. Also, the dosing may be different for a cow or horse and again, the amount of medication in the pills is formulated to dissolve in that specific animal intestine. 

Veterinary Ivermectin is not problematic, though you can run into problems with other medications. People in rural America know they can afford animal meds but not human meds and take the chance. Post reset, there will be a LOT MORE rural uhmurkans. 

Because this is a real thing in our society, I encourage you to hollar at your veterinarian connected homies. Potentially have your veterinary meds evaluated for safety. That is unfortunately the world we live in - so man-up and get used to it.

The safety issues with Ivermectin in humans seem to be concentrated on transplant drugs like tacrolimus and cyclosporin, on HIV drugs, on antifungal drugs and on some types of antibiotics.

The Eastern Virginia Medical Center Covid treatment protocol is straight fire. They have been updating this protocol since the beginning. They use evidence based medicine. They are basically the entire Department of Medicine – primary care, critical care, infectious disease. They have been way out over the curve on this epidemic from the beginning. They instantly update this protocol with new findings. In my opinion, they are doing a much better public service than any of your Great Reset sock-puppeted politicians or health aligned agencies.  

You can see where they are using Ivermectin – and it is being done more and more by smart physicians all over the world. Because of the very good safety profile, it would be great if more information was made available about this drug. It would be preferable to having folks self-medicate with literal horse pills.

 

Healthcare Worker Used Inflatable Costume To Transform Into Covid Superspreader

This is the air powered costume an employee wore in the Emergency Dept.of Kaiser Permanente San Jose Medical Center Xmas day to spread cheer. Turns out employee unknowingly had covid , now 43 employees have covid .Kaiser investigating if costume blower helped spread the virus. pic.twitter.com/DLLi8z5e2T

— Marianne Favro (@mariannefavro) January 3, 2021

LATimes |  An employee working the Christmas shift at Kaiser Permanente San Jose Medical Center has died after falling ill with COVID-19. The worker was one of at least 43 staff members who tested positive for the coronavirus in recent days, an outbreak possibly linked to a staff member who wore an inflatable holiday costume to lift spirits.

The staff member who appeared briefly in the emergency department Christmas Day wore an air-powered, holiday-themed costume, according to a hospital executive. KNTV-TV, the San Jose NBC station that first reported the outbreak, reported that the costume was an inflatable Christmas tree.

Inflatable costumes are typically battery-powered and use a fan to keep the costume puffed up. But such a fan can also cause virus particles to travel much farther in a room.

KNTV-TV reported that the person who died was a woman who worked as a registration clerk in the emergency department. 

“Our thoughts and prayers are with those affected by this terrible loss. We are providing support to our employees during this difficult time,” said a statement issued by the hospital late Sunday.

In a statement Saturday, Irene Chavez, senior vice president and area manager of Kaiser Permanente San Jose Medical Center, said officials were investigating whether the costume contributed to the outbreak.

“Any exposure, if it occurred, would have been completely innocent, and quite accidental, as the individual [wearing the costume] had no COVID symptoms and only sought to lift the spirits of those around them during what is a very stressful time,” Chavez said.

 

When Someone Shows You Who They Are Believe Them The First Time...,

 

What Is the Great Reset? Part I: Reduced Expectations and Bio-techno-feudalism  - “the Great Reset” is but a coordinated propaganda campaign shrouded under a cloak of inevitability. Rather than a mere conspiracy theory, as the New York Times has suggested,9 the Great Reset is an attempt at a conspiracy, or the “wishful thinking”10 of socioeconomic planners to have corporate “stakeholders”11 and governments adopt the desiderata of the WEF.

In order to sell this package, the WEF mobilizes the warmed-over rhetoric of “economic equality,” “fairness,” “inclusion,” and “a shared destiny,” among other euphemisms.12 Together, such phrases represent the collectivist, socialist political and ideological component of the envisioned corporate socialism13 (since economic socialism can never be enacted, it is always only political and ideological).

I’ll examine the prospects for the Great Reset in future installments. But suffice it to say for now that the WEF envisions a bio-techno-feudalist global order, with socioeconomic planners and corporate “stakeholders” at the helm and the greater part of humanity in their thrall.

 

The Great Reset, Part II: Corporate Socialism  - Nevertheless, the aims of the WEF are not to plan every aspect of production and thus to direct all individual activity. Rather, the goal is to limit the possibilities for individual activity, including the activity of consumers—by dint of squeezing out industries and producers within industries from the economy. “Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.”6

As Hayek noted, “when the medieval guild system was at its height, and when restrictions to commerce were most extensive, they were not used as a means actually to direct individual activity.”7 Likewise, the Great Reset aims not at a strictly collectivist planning of the economy so much as recommends and demands neofeudalistic restrictions that would go further than anything since the medieval period—other than under state socialism itself, that is. In 1935, Hayek noted the extent to which economic restrictions had already led to distortions of the market:

How much further, then, the Great Reset would take us toward the kinds of restrictions imposed under feudalism, including the economic stasis that feudalism entailed!

The Great Reset, Part III: Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics - The Great Reset represents the development of the Chinese system in the West, only in reverse. Whereas the Chinese political elite began with a socialist-communist political system and implemented “capitalism” later, the elite in the West began with “capitalism” and is aiming to implement a socialist-communist political system now. It’s as if the Western oligarchy looked to the “socialism” on display in China, and said, “yes, we want it.”

This explains many otherwise seeming contradictions, not the least of which is the leftist authoritarianism of Big Tech. Big Tech, and in particular Big Digital, is the ideological communications apparatus for the advancement of corporate socialism, or capitalism with Chinese characteristics.

The Chinese characteristics that the Great Reset aims to reproduce in connection with Western capitalism would resemble the totalitarianism of the CCP. It would require a great abridgement of individual rights—including property rights, free expression, freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedom of religion, and the free enterprise system as we understand it.

The Great Reset would implement the political system in much the same way as China has done—with 5G-enabled smart city surveillance, the equivalent of social credit scores, medical passports, political imprisonment, and other means of social and political repression and control.

In the end, socialism with Chinese characteristics and capitalism with Chinese characteristics would amount to the same thing.

Computational Statistical Mappings Between Function Spaces (Like "Cute" Dancing Robots)

technologyreview |  The first thing to understand here is that neural networks are fundamentally function approximators. (Say what?) When they’re training on a data set of paired inputs and outputs, they’re actually calculating the function, or series of math operations, that will transpose one into the other. Think about building a cat detector. You’re training the neural network by feeding it lots of images of cats and things that are not cats (the inputs) and labeling each group with a 1 or 0, respectively (the outputs). The neural network then looks for the best function that can convert each image of a cat into a 1 and each image of everything else into a 0. That’s how it can look at a new image and tell you whether or not it’s a cat. It’s using the function it found to calculate its answer—and if its training was good, it’ll get it right most of the time.

Conveniently, this function approximation process is what we need to solve a PDE. We’re ultimately trying to find a function that best describes, say, the motion of air particles over physical space and time.

Now here’s the crux of the paper. Neural networks are usually trained to approximate functions between inputs and outputs defined in Euclidean space, your classic graph with x, y, and z axes. But this time, the researchers decided to define the inputs and outputs in Fourier space, which is a special type of graph for plotting wave frequencies. The intuition that they drew upon from work in other fields is that something like the motion of air can actually be described as a combination of wave frequencies, says Anima Anandkumar, a Caltech professor who oversaw the research alongside her colleagues, professors Andrew Stuart and Kaushik Bhattacharya. The general direction of the wind at a macro level is like a low frequency with very long, lethargic waves, while the little eddies that form at the micro level are like high frequencies with very short and rapid ones.

Why does this matter? Because it’s far easier to approximate a Fourier function in Fourier space than to wrangle with PDEs in Euclidean space, which greatly simplifies the neural network’s job. Cue major accuracy and efficiency gains: in addition to its huge speed advantage over traditional methods, their technique achieves a 30% lower error rate when solving Navier-Stokes than previous deep-learning methods.

The whole thing is extremely clever, and also makes the method more generalizable. Previous deep-learning methods had to be trained separately for every type of fluid, whereas this one only needs to be trained once to handle all of them, as confirmed by the researchers’ experiments. Though they haven’t yet tried extending this to other examples, it should also be able to handle every earth composition when solving PDEs related to seismic activity, or every material type when solving PDEs related to thermal conductivity.

Remember Who Told You Alexandria Ocasio Cortez Was A Fraud First?!?!?

Jenny Frum Da Block Aint..., 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez And The Politics Of A $3000.00 Suit 

 

And to be 💯% honest, it was hard during this to be targeted+marred as some sellout-enemy of the people over a late tactical disagreement over 1 floor vote.

Also a bummer to see figures excuse comments like “f- her and f- anyone who protects her.” That’s not tone,that’s violence

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 2, 2021

One of the 1st votes I ever cast broke w/ my party over House rules that strangled transformative legislation for working people + climate. It was honestly terrifying.

Now, CPC has pushed these critical rule changes in House negotiations. Grateful for @RepMcGovern’s leadership🙏🏽 https://t.co/4N0NfF5Arz

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 2, 2021

Nancy Pelosi’s Home Vandalized With Graffiti, Severed Pig’s Head

cbslocal  |  The new year brought a disturbing discovery at the San Francisco home of U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, where, early Friday morning, vandals spray-painted her house and left a severed pig’s head in front of her garage.

The graffiti says “Cancel rent” and “We want everything” — possibly referencing coronavirus stimulus checks. There was also a severed pig’s head in a pool of red paint left in front of the garage door.

San Francisco police say they first got the call about the incident around 2:00 a.m. on Friday. Speaker Pelosi was not home as she is currently in Washington D.C.

Neighbors say while they understand the frustration over politics on Capitol Hill and they say this type of vandalism doesn’t help resolve anything.

“I don’t think that this is a useful way to go about it and it’s a terrible start to this new year, when we are hoping for less anger and hatred than we’ve had to deal with for the last year,” said Audrey Carlson, a neighbor of Speaker Pelosi.

KPIX reached out to Speaker Pelosi’s office for comment on the incident but has not heard back.

San Francisco police have not released any information about suspects in the case. Also, no one has come forward claiming responsibility for the vandalism. Some of the graffiti mentions UBI (universal basic income) and “cancel rent,” so it is possible the culprit is someone associated with those movements.

 

Sen. Mitch McConnell's Louisville Home Vandalized

WDRB  |  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's home in the Highlands area of Louisville was vandalized overnight.

Messages were written on the front of the home in red and white spray paint. The words "Weres my money" were spray painted on the front door in reference to McConnell blocking an effort to increase COVID-19 stimulus checks from $600 to $2,000.

Other messages were spray painted along the front porch, but the rest of McConnell's home appeared to be untouched. As of Saturday morning, Louisville Metro Police said it does not know who is responsible for the damage.

"I’ve spent my career fighting for the First Amendment and defending peaceful protest. I appreciate every Kentuckian who has engaged in the democratic process whether they agree with me or not," McConnell said in a statement responding to the vandalism. "This is different. Vandalism and the politics of fear have no place in our society. My wife and I have never been intimidated by this toxic playbook. We just hope our neighbors in Louisville aren’t too inconvenienced by this radical tantrum."

At ~43:00 Minutes In - Weinstein Explains Chanda Prescod Weinstein's Core Issue

Whither Now The Intersectional Identitarian Project?

 wsws  |  Since the late 1960s, the efforts to racialize scholarly work, against which Genovese rightly polemicized, have assumed such vast proportions that they cannot be adequately described as merely “inane.” Under the influence of postmodernism and its offspring, “critical race theory,” the doors of American universities have been flung wide open for the propagation of deeply reactionary conceptions. Racial identity has replaced social class and related economic processes as the principal and essential analytic category.

Whiteness” theory, the latest rage, is now utilized to deny historical progress, reject objective truth, and interpret all events and facets of culture through the prism of alleged racial self-interest. On this basis, the sheerest nonsense can be spouted with the guarantee that all objections grounded on facts and science will be dismissed as a manifestation of “white fragility” or some other form of hidden racism. In this degraded environment, Ibram X. Kendi can write the following absurd passage, without fear of contradiction, in his Stamped from the Beginning:

For Enlightenment intellectuals, the metaphor of light typically had a double meaning. Europeans had rediscovered learning after a thousand years in religious darkness, and their bright continental beacon of insight existed in the midst of a “dark” world not yet touched by light. Light, then, became a metaphor for Europeanness, and therefore Whiteness, a notion that Benjamin Franklin and his philosophical society eagerly embraced and imported to the colonies. … Enlightenment ideas gave legitimacy to this long-held racist “partiality,” the connection between lightness and Whiteness and reason, on the one hand, and between darkness and Blackness and ignorance, on the other. [19]

This is a ridiculous concoction that attributes to the word “Enlightenment” a racial significance that has absolutely no foundation in etymology, let alone history. The word employed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1784 to describe this period of scientific advance was Aufklärung, which may be translated from the German as “clarification” or “clearing up,” connoting an intellectual awakening. The English translation of Aufklärung as Enlightenment dates from 1865, seventy-five years after the death of Benjamin Franklin, whom Kendi references in support of his racial argument. [20]

Another term used by English speaking people to describe the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been “The Age of Reason,” which was employed by Tom Paine in his scathing assault on religion and all forms of superstition. Kendi’s attempt to root Enlightenment in a white racist impulse is based on nothing but empty juggling with words. In point of fact, modern racism is connected historically and intellectually to the Anti-Enlightenment, whose most significant nineteenth century representative, Count Gobineau, wrote The Inequality of the Human Races. But actual history plays no role in the formulation of Kendi’s pseudo-intellectual fabrications. His work is stamped with ignorance.

istory is not the only discipline assaulted by the race specialists. In an essay titled “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” Professor Philip A. Ewell of Hunter College in New York declares, “I posit that there exists a ‘white racial frame’ in music theory that is structural and institutionalized, and that only through a reframing of this white racial frame will we begin to see positive racial changes in music theory.” [21]

This degradation of music theory divests the discipline of its scientific and historically developed character. The complex principles and elements of composition, counterpoint, tonality, consonance, dissonance, timbre, rhythm, notation, etc. are derived, Ewell claims, from racial characteristics. Professor Ewell is loitering in the ideological territory of the Third Reich. There is more than a passing resemblance between his call for the liberation of music from “whiteness” and the efforts of Nazi academics in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s to liberate music from “Jewishness.” The Nazis denounced Mendelssohn as a mediocrity whose popularity was the insidious manifestation of Jewish efforts to dominate Aryan culture. In similar fashion, Ewell proclaims that Beethoven was merely “above average as a composer,” and that he “occupies the place he does because he has been propped up by whiteness and maleness for two hundred years.” [22]

Academic journals covering virtually every field of study are exploding with ignorant rubbish of this sort. Even physics has not escaped the onslaught of racial theorizing. In a recent essay, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, assistant physics professor at the University of New Hampshire, proclaims that “race and ethnicity impact epistemic outcomes in physics,” and introduces the concept of “white empiricism” (italics in the original), which “comes to dominate empirical discourse in physics because whiteness powerfully shapes the predominant arbiters of who is a valid observer of physical and social phenomena.” [23]

Prescod-Weinstein asserts that “knowledge production in physics is contingent on the ascribed identities of the physicists,” the racial and gender background of scientists affects the way scientific research is conducted, and, therefore, the observations and experiments conducted by African-American and female physicists will produce results different than those conducted by white males. Prescod-Weinstein identifies with the contingentists who “challenge any assumption that scientific decision making is purely objective.” [24]

Can A Black Woman Be A Physicist?

uchicago  |   In this article I take on the question of how the exclusion of Black American women from physics impacts physics epistemologies, and I highlight the dynamic relationship between this exclusion and the struggle for women to reconcile “Black woman” with “physicist.” I describe the phenomenon where white epistemic claims about science—which are not rooted in empirical evidence—receive more credence and attention than Black women’s epistemic claims about their own lives. To develop this idea, I apply an intersectional analysis to Joseph Martin’s concept of prestige asymmetry in physics, developing the concept of white empiricism to discuss the impact that Black women’s exclusion has had on physics epistemology. By considering the essentialization of racism and sexism alongside the social construction of ascribed identities, I assess the way Black women physicists self-construct as scientists and the subsequent impact of epistemic outcomes on the science itself.

Who is allowed to be an observer in physics, and who is fundamentally denied the possibility? In this article, I propose that race and ethnicity impact epistemic outcomes in physics, despite the universality of the laws that undergird physics, and I introduce the concept of white empiricism to provide one explanation for why. White empiricism is the phenomenon through which only white people (particularly white men) are read has having a fundamental capacity for objectivity and Black people (particularly Black women) are produced as an ontological other. This phenomenon is stabilized through the production and retention of what Joseph Martin calls prestige asymmetry, which explains how social resources in physics are distributed based on prestige. In American society, Black women are on the losing end of an ontic prestige asymmetry whereby different scientists “garner unequal public approbation” in their everyday lives due to ascribed identities such as gender and race (Martin 2017, 475). White empiricism is one of the mechanisms by which this asymmetry follows Black women physicists into their professional lives. Because white empiricism contravenes core tenets of modern physics (e.g., covariance and relativity), it negatively impacts scientific outcomes and harms the people who are othered.

White empiricism comes to dominate empirical discourse in physics because whiteness powerfully shapes the predominant arbiters of who is a valid observer of physical and social phenomena. Based primarily on their own experiences, white men, who are the dominant demographic in physics, construct the figure of the observer to exclude anyone who does not share the attending social and intellectual identities and beliefs. These beliefs can limit investigations of what constitutes a reasonable physical theory, whether the scientific method should be brought to bear on this physical theory, and the capacity to understand how incidents of racism disrupt the potential for objective discourse. Essentially, white empiricism involves a predominantly white, predominantly male professional community selectively failing to apply the scientific method to themselves while using “scientific” evaluation to strengthen the barriers to Black women’s entry into physics. White empiricism is therefore a form of antiempiricism masquerading as an empirical approach to the natural world. By denying agency to Black women in discussions of racism, white empiricism predetermines the experiences of Black women in physics.

To provide an example of the role that white empiricism plays in physics, I discuss the current debate in string theory about postempiricism, motivated in part by a question: why are string theorists calling for an end to empiricism rather than an end to racial hegemony? I believe the answer is that knowledge production in physics is contingent on the ascribed identities of the physicists. Contingentists focus on top-down social forces, or the contingency associated with laboratory instrumentation; in this way, they challenge any assumption that scientific decision making is purely objective.¹ Scientists are also typically monists—believers in the idea that there is only one science—who, rather than feeling burdened to prove there is only one science, expect contingentists to prove that there can be more than one (Soler 2015b). This monist approach to science typically forecloses a closer investigation of how identity and epistemic outcomes intermix.

 

Members Of That "Fallen Professional Class" Living VERY LARGE About Now....,

wirepoints  |  “As recently as Thursday,” according to WGN, Sarah Chambers “tweeted to rally special education teachers not to return to work Monday because it’s unsafe. Just a few hours earlier, Chambers posted a picture on Instagram that appears to show her pool side in Puerto Rico and talking about going to Old San Juan for seafood.”

According to WGN, the post also mentions she previously had COVID, got a negative test result and consulted her doctor before traveling.

Chambers, you may remember, was part of that solidarity mission last year by CTU members to communist Venezuela we wrote about.

At the time, she said on Twitter that “The USA does not want people to realize that another world is possible with justice and love.” Chambers also wrote on Twitter that the delegation hadn’t seen a single homeless person during their trip. No mention that housing might be plentiful because over three million people have fled – about 10% of the population.

In 2017, the school district fired her for, as reported by WTTW,

“leaving her own classroom to barge into classrooms of other teachers and issue her own instructions to students, interfering with statewide tests, and participating in a scheme to remove and transport students without any chaperone who had cleared criminal background checks, without alerting school officials which students would be missing from class and which students were unaccounted for….”

However, she claimed she was fired in retaliation for other matters and the CTU got her reinstated, the union says.

Props to Ben Bradley at WGN for catching this story.

 

Drug Addicts Out'Chere Dying Like Hotcakes...

gatestoneinstitute  |  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Over 81,000 drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States in the 12 months ending in May 2020, the highest number of overdose deaths ever recorded in a 12-month period..." That is equal to one-third of the total number of deaths supposedly attributed to the COVID pandemic.

Deaths equal to one-third of the pandemic? From another cause? Where is the wall-to-wall news reporting on that public health crisis? Why aren't people marching in the streets demanding action and justice for that threat to human life? Since Joe Biden was elected president, we have not heard a peep from Antifa and BLM -- maybe they can take up the drug overdose cause?

In October, federal law enforcement officials arrested Mexican General Salvador Cienfuegos as he arrived in Los Angeles for a family vacation. Cienfuegos was accused of taking bribes and protecting cartel leaders when he served as defense minister from 2012 to 2018. A month later, the U.S. dropped charges and returned Cienfuegos to Mexico. "Foreign policy considerations" was the official lie covering for the reversal of what might have been an incremental step forward towards legitimate justice in America's decades-long, losing "War on Drugs." Every thinking person who has contemplated the drug corruption crisis confronting America knows that absolutely nothing will happen to Cienfuegos now that he is back in Mexico. He gets off Scot-free, other than having to vacation in places other than the United States.

The Wall Street Journal, reporting on the Cienfuegos debacle, noted:

"Gen. Cienfuegos's return puts an uncomfortable spotlight on Mexico's judicial system. More than nine in 10 crimes are never reported or punished, according to the country's statistics agency."

Let us look more deeply at the drug crisis we face at the level of families and communities. We can get lost looking at national overdose numbers and corrupt foreign generals. Dirty cops are killing Americans, directly and indirectly. In a border community like El Paso, the Mexican cartels have an insidious, silent and powerful control that few people wish to acknowledge or accept -- that includes a largely compliant news media who usually report what happens, but rarely, if ever, ask "Why?" or "How can this go on, decade after decade, without accountability or resolution?"

More than seven years of ongoing investigation by Judicial Watch in that region has revealed law enforcement corruption that ranges on a scale from merely turning a blind eye; to marked law enforcement vehicles being used to move burlap bales of marijuana; all the way up to senior officials communicating with and tipping-off cartel members about planned operations. That is what some of the supposedly "good guys" are doing.

This is a dark, dangerous and threatening side of life in American communities across the country. The drugs do not just materialize out of thin air in Dayton, OH, or Rockville Centre, NY, or Whitefish, MT. If a population is dying from overdoses that is one-third as large as the COVID pandemic -- and we don't see, don't hear about it, and apparently don't really care about it -- what does that say about us?

Tens of thousands of law enforcement officers, billions of taxpayer dollars, nearly fifty years -- and the highest overdose rate in history? It is terribly unpopular to blame law enforcement, especially when they are being unfairly attacked by the militant fringe elements like Antifa and various lunatic municipal officials seeking to defund them -- but cleaning house within various agencies and increasing police pay would go a long way towards thwarting our greatest domestic threat.

A year ago, President Donald J. Trump declared he would name Mexican Cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. He paused his decision, and then tabled it, based on assurances from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and a reported wave of resistance from his own cabinet.

The incoming Biden administration has the cartels virtually "high-fiving" each other -- they know a Biden administration will do nothing to stop cartel dominance and control of the US-Mexico border. What law enforcement officer is going to put his life on the line for a Biden administration policy? None. Unless there is an unforeseen and dramatic positive change in law enforcement at the federal, state and municipal levels, expect more of our dirtiest little secret for years to come and a continuation of the United States' longest war.

Controlavirus Lockdowns, Broke-Assed Mules, Breaking Bad And OD Explosions...,

NYTimes  |  While traffickers have also continued to try to push drugs through ports of entry, the American authorities have detected at least one particularly dramatic shift in tactics in the profile of smugglers caught at those border crossings.

Before the pandemic, the cartels would frequently hire foreign-born smugglers who would cross the border from Mexico into the United States under the pretense of tourism or a shopping trip.

But because the pandemic-related border restrictions have blocked entry to many foreign visitors, the trafficking groups have been recruiting a greater number of American citizens and Green Card holders, who are not bound by the restrictions, to smuggle drugs into the United States, American officials said. These smugglers are most often discovered with the narcotics hidden inside their bodies, officials said.

Guadalupe Ramírez Jr., director of field operations for Customs and Border Protection in Arizona, recalled that when he was director of the ports of entry in Nogales from 2009 to 2016, “internal carriers,” as such smugglers are known by border officials, were rare.

“Now it seems like almost on a daily basis we’re getting internal carriers,” and most are American citizens or permanent residents, Mr. Ramírez said.

The challenges of getting drugs into the United States also appears to have spurred the development of clandestine laboratories in the United States for the production of synthetic drugs, said Celina Realuyo, professor at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies at the National Defense University in Washington.

And law enforcement agencies around the world have also detected an acceleration in the use of cryptocurrency and the so-called dark web for drug transactions and money laundering during the pandemic, she said.

“They’re adjusting,” Ms. Realuyo said of the drug trafficking groups. “They already had kind of a wherewithal, and what they’re doing is they’re just adapting quicker to their context.”

 

Nashville Far From Alone...,

usatoday |  The vulnerability of the telecommunications system in Nashville and beyond became clear Christmas Day when AT&T's central office in downtown became the site of a bombing.

Mayor John Cooper called the blast on Second Avenue an attack on infrastructure. The effects of that attack are sure to ripple through the region for weeks, as the telecom giant scrambles to restore services while maintaining the integrity of an active investigation site teeming with federal agents.

State and local officials and experts say the fact that a multistate region could be brought to its knees by a single bombing is a "wake-up call," exposing vulnerabilities many didn't know existed and predicting it would lead to intense conversations about the future. 

The bombing and the damage to the AT&T office was a "single-point of failure," said Douglas Schmidt, the Cornelius Vanderbilt professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University.

American Comfort Taking Hits Left And Right

NYPost  |  Thousands of residents in Aspen, Colorado were left without heat during near-zero degree weather after vandals — possibly green activists from an environmental group — attacked the city’s gas system, authorities said Monday.

The vandals apparently attacked three separate Black Hills Energy gas lines, one in Aspen and two in Pitkin County, leaving around 3,500 residents shivering in their homes Saturday night, The Aspen Times reported.

The Aspen Police Department said the words “Earth first!” were written on one pipe near Aspen. It’s unclear if the environmental group “Earth First!” was behind the vandalism.

Aspen assistant police chief Bill Linn believes the vandals would have to be familiar with the gas system to pull off the scheme.

“They tampered with flow lines,” Linn said. “They turned off gas lines.”

Police scrambled to distribute thousands of space heaters to residents while Black Hill Energy continued working Tuesday to restore the gas.

Computational Statistics (So-Called AI) Is Inherently Biased

FT |  Baysean statistical models, (so-called AI) inherently amplify bias of whatever data set they have been modeled on.  Moreover, this amplification is exponential, meaning the more you use AI, the more biased it will get via self learning. Since it is impossible to eliminate  bias completely in a training dataset, any AI system will eventually become extremely biased. Self correcting mechanisms suffer from the same problem since they too are AI based, you end up with a system that is unstable and will always eventually become extremely biased based on even minute impossible to eradicate biases in its initial data set. 

“F*** the algorithm!” became one of the catchphrases of 2020, encapsulating the fear that humanity is being subordinated to technology. Whether it was British school students complaining about their A level grades or Stanford Medical Centre staff highlighting the unfairness of vaccination priorities, people understandably rail against the idea of faceless machines stripping humans of agency. 

This is an issue that will only grow in prominence as artificial intelligence becomes ubiquitous in the computer systems that power our modern world. To some extent, these fears are based on a misconception. Humans are still the ones who exercise judgment and algorithms do exactly what they are designed to do: discriminate. Whether they do so in a positive or a negative way depends on the humans who write these algorithms and interpret and act upon their output. 

It may on occasion be convenient for a government official or an executive to blame some “rogue” algorithm for their mistakes. But we should not be fooled by this rhetoric. We should hold those who deploy AI systems legally and morally accountable for the outcomes they produce. Artificial intelligence is no more than a technological tool, like any other. It is a powerful general purpose technology, akin to electricity, that enables other technologies to work more effectively. But it is not a property in its own right and has no agency. AI would sound a lot less frightening if we were to relabel it as computational statistics. 

That said, companies, researchers and regulators should pay particular attention to the feedstock used in these AI systems: data. Researchers have shown that partial data sets used to power modern AI systems can bake in societal inequities and racial and sexual prejudices. This issue has been highlighted at Google following the departure of Timnit Gebru, an ethical researcher, who claimed she was dismissed after warning of the dangers of large-scale language generation systems that rely on historic data taken from the internet.

Hyundai Motor Company Robots Dance Better Than You Do...,

theverge |   It’s not the first time Boston Dynamics has shown off its robots’ dancing skills: the company showcased a video of its Spot robot doing the Running Man to “Uptown Funk” in 2018. but the new video takes things to another level, with the Atlas robot tearing it up on the dance floor: smoothly running, jumping, shuffling, and twirling through different moves.

Things get even more incredible as more robots file out, prancing around in the kind of coordinated dance routine that puts my own, admittedly awful human dancing to shame. Compared to the jerky movements of the 2016 iteration of Atlas, the new model almost looks like a CGI creation. 

Boston Dynamics was recently purchased by Hyundai, which bought the robotics firm from SoftBank in a $1.1 billion deal. The company was originally founded in 1992 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where it became known for its dog-like quadrupedal robots (most notably, the DARPA-funded BigDog, a precursor to the company’s first commercial robot, Spot.) It was bought by Alphabet’s X division in 2013, and then by Softbank in 2017.

While the Atlas and Handle robots featured here are still just research prototypes, Boston Dynamics has recently started selling the Spot model to any company for the considerable price of $74,500. But can you really put a price on creating your own personal legion of boogieing robot minions?

 

Are You The Voice In Your Head And Is That Voice In Your Head Just Movement?

wikipedia |  Subvocalization is commonly studied using electromyography (EMG) recordings,^[5] concurrent speaking tasks,^[6][7][8] shadowing,^[6] and other techniques.^[6][7]

EMG can be used to show the degree to which one is subvocalizing^[5] or to train subvocalization suppression.^[9] EMG is used to record the electrical activity produced by the articulatory muscles involved in subvocalization. Greater electrical activity suggests a stronger use of subvocalization.^[5][9] In the case of suppression training, the trainee is shown their own EMG recordings while attempting to decrease the movement of the articulatory muscles.^[9] The EMG recordings allows one to monitor and ideally reduce subvocalization.^[9]

In concurrent speaking tasks, participants of a study are asked to complete an activity specific to the experiment while simultaneously repeating an irrelevant word.^[6] For example, one may be asked to read a paragraph while reciting the word "cola" over and over again.^[8] Speaking the repeated irrelevant word is thought to preoccupy the articulators used in subvocalization.^[6] Subvocalization, therefore, cannot be used in the mental processing of the activity being studied. Participants who had undergone the concurrent speaking task are often compared to other participants of the study who had completed the same activity without subvocalization interference. If performance on the activity is significantly less for those in the concurrent speaking task group than for those in the non-interference group, subvocalization is believed to play a role in the mental processing of that activity.^[6][7][8][9] The participants in the non-interference comparison group usually also complete a different, yet equally distracting task that does not involve the articulator muscles ^[7][9](i.e. tapping). This ensures that the difference in performance between the two groups is in fact due to subvocalization disturbances and not due to considerations such as task difficulty or a divide in attention.^[7][9]

Shadowing is conceptually similar to concurrent speaking tasks. Instead of repeating an irrelevant word, shadowing requires participants to listen to a list of words and to repeat those words as fast as possible while completing a separate task being studied by experimenters.^[6]

Techniques for subvocalization interference may also include counting,^[7][8] chewing ^[10] or locking one's jaw while placing the tongue on the roof of one's mouth.^[10]

Subvocal recognition involves monitoring actual movements of the tongue and vocal cords that can be interpreted by electromagnetic sensors. Through the use of electrodes and nanocircuitry, synthetic telepathy could be achieved allowing people to communicate silently.^[11]

Know What You Are Doing So That You Can Do What You Want

feldenkraisresourcesformusicians |   This description is marvelous because it captures the effect of integration through listening.61 Trough listening, something happens that Ephram does not ‘know’.
He is given a taste of the pre-symbolic Real for a moment. He does not speak, but instead acknowledges this internal, placeless ‘fnding’ (between visible activity) with chirruping laughter; this giddy delight and uncertainty refect the trauma of the Real and the way in which the senses are unifed in this domain. Nancy attempts to come to grips with the way in which laughter mediates the senses.

He states that, Laughter bursts at the multiple limits of the senses and of language, uncertain of the sense to which it is ofered […] Laughter is the joy of the senses, and of sense, at their limit. In this joy, the senses touch each other and touch language, the tongue in the mouth.62

Ephram’s laughter is like a cloudburst. Feldenkrais touches something deeper than just Ephram’s sensorium through touch and listening, and Ephram responds with laughter: he touches Ephram’s uniqueness.63 Feldenkrais states: ‘You know what that laughter is worth? Tat is Eureka!’ Later, when Ephram laughs again, he observes: ‘You see that laughter is priceless; you can’t buy it for all the money that you have in the world.’ Feldenkrais tacitly acknowledges that in this release, Ephram as a listening being has also withdrawn from him.64 Nancy might say that essential to listening is a ‘withdrawal and turning inward’.65 Laughter provides evidence of an essential independence that signals and derives from integration.66

Trough Ephram’s laughter, the external listeners assembled are exposed to a moment when Ephram is on a fulcrum of listening. It is not just that in Nancy’s terms he has become present to (him)self, but that he registers the trauma of the Real; Ephram’s laughter registers the possibility of change in his self-image. In Nancy’s terms this is the ‘reference’ (renvoi) of sound, ‘from a sign to a thing’.69

But what is this ‘thing’? Te making of ‘sense’ within Ephram’s sensorium is the jouissance of precisely that which does not make sense to him, a new self-image which cannot be immediately rationalized or assimilated.70 So when Nancy states that ‘a self is nothing other than a form or function of referral, a self is made of a relationship to self, or of a presence to self’, this can be considered only part of the story.71

One of the functions of FI is to bring the subject into an encounter with what is unknown, moving from the self that is known, founded in gravity and their own body image in the world, to a new image of the self.72 Ephram’s laughter bubbles up; it escapes what is presented to the world as a disabled boy. It is the resonance of an encounter with another self. His listening is an ongoing process of (re-)formation in the irreducible, intimate and non-linear temporal paradigm of ‘making the impossible possible’, as Feldenkrais has stated,73 and it is precisely this which is inscribed in the Lacanian Real.74

His outburst of laughter creates a symbolic cut in the Real that through its diferentiation signals the Real: it is like the tip of an iceberg that appears above the water, but in doing so it also signifes that below the water (apart from the rest of the iceberg, which is already integrated with the symbolic register) is the ocean’s void.75 In Nancy’s terms, Ephram is a paradigm of a ‘subject of listening [that] is always still yet to come’.76 With regard to Feldenkrais’s ‘listening for his next breath’, Nancy’s question is germane here: ‘What does it mean for a being to be immersed entirely in listening, formed by listening or in listening, listening with all its being?’ – and one might add here: ‘listening to all his being’.77 In this spirit of enquiry we might listen with Feldenkrais and ask: ‘Is it indeed possible (or desirable) to listen to all of another person’s being?’

This is a crucial question, and one fundamental to FI, because listening for Feldenkrais is a sensing through his hands of where someone else is stuck; where, through habit or injury, for example, the mind/body entity is momentarily incapable of utilizing a deeper intelligence to improve a function or action. Helping a person to fnd this intelligence within themselves is one of the primary functions of instrumental lessons and indeed of the Feldenkrais Method. Listening, then, as is shown in  Feldenkrais’s work with Ephram, is an enactivist engagement with intelligence and awareness, not just with presence to the world or the self (pace Nancy).

Feldenkrais’s ideal of listening is intimately connected to overcoming ‘resistance’, a term borrowed from Freud. In their book The Language of Psychoanalysis, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis defne this concept: ‘In psycho-analytic treatment the name “resistance” is given to everything in the words and actions of the analysis and that obstructs his gaining access to his un-conscious.’78 

Laplanche and Pontalis point out that while Freud first discovered that resistance was ‘an obstacle to the elucidation of the symptoms and to the progress of the treatment’, he realized that ‘resistance was itself a means of reaching the repressed and unveiling the secret of neurosis’ and that ‘the interpretation of resistance, along with that of the transference, constituted the specifc characteristics of his technique’ that was part and parcel of the possibility of a cure.79 Feldenkrais extends this in profound ways elaborated through the examples given in this study. 

Resistance is understood not merely as that which obstructs the change in the self-image; Feldenkrais ‘interprets’ this resistance as an active means of gaining access to Ephram’s motor cortex, rather than the psychoanalytic ‘un-conscious’.

Do You Know How Much Damage Faulty Sleep And Movement Habits Can Cause?

princeton |  I turned to Feldenkrais because a friend I respected a lot suggested it as a solution to my hand and arm pain (RSI). I went to ATM classes and took FI lessons from a local teacher in Princeton NJ. Though these whetted my curiosity, they did not solve my RSI problems.

I found an excellent teacher, Angel DiBenedetto, during a 5-month stay in Seattle. She learned from Moshe Feldenkrais, and is herself a trainer of other Feldenkrais teachers. Eight lessons from her (over a 3-month period) completely changed my view of my body. My hand was much better but still not 100%. Also, I sensed the tremendous potential of this method and wanted to go further. So I took 8-9 Feldenkrais lessons with another amazing teacher, Anat Krivine, during a subsequent 4-month stay in Israel. Anat is also a trainer of Feldenkrais teachers. It was very useful for me to learn from multiple teachers, since  no two teachers have the same perspective. One important thing that Anat finally made me realize and give up was my tendency to ask for "the best way to do X" which I think was limiting my learning. Furthermore, unknown to me, she had a special interest in scoliosis (sideways curve of the spine) which turned out to be relevant to my problems. By the end, my hand problems were completely gone and my scoliosis (which the medical profession thinks of as a skeletal problem, with no cure) much reduced. (See the links below for an explanation of scoliosis and the Feldenkrais approach to it.)

So what can you expect when you get Feldenkrais lessons from a good teacher? The immediate sensation is one of calm that you have never known. You may realize that you have lived in a background of muscular tension that you had never noticed until it went away. (Kind of like the change in background noise level you might notice if you moved from Manhattan to Montana.) This can be a powerful, even emotional experience. It is a good idea to  savor this calm right after the lesson, and to take a nap. You may feel great, but avoid the temptation to go out and do something strenuous. (Skip your usual exercise routine for a day or two.) The calm may dissipate over the next few hours and days, but in future sessions it will last longer and longer, until it becomes part of your everyday state.

The FI's implant new ideas into your body, and over the next few days and weeks it will slowly imbibe them and change. Do not be surprised if you find yourself doing things differently.

Another thought that might occur to you is that much of what you have known about pain is wrong. You will learn that often pain is caused by faulty movement patterns, not any kind of damage to the body. Thus pain can be produced and taken away at will, using simple change in movements. This knowledge is extremely empowering for people who have suffered from chronic pain.

(Update Aug 2008): During the year since I first wrote my page, I have continued to do ATMs every week, and felt continuous and noticeable improvement. However, I also slowly became more and more aware of the asymmetries still left over from my scoliosis. These were interfering with my enjoyment of activities I had newly started (Capoeira, rollerskating, and running). In Summer 2008 I got a few lessons from another excellent teacher, Reuven (Robbie) Ofir, in Manhattan. (I heard of him from a friend.) Robbie is also a Feldenkrais trainer and a former  head of physical therapy at a leading NYC hospital.  Robbie helped me work out some deep asymmetries and tensions  in my body. Robbie also taught me do ATMs at an even slower and gentler pace that I used to, which has taken my learning to a higher level. I feel truly great now.  But Robbie has helped me appreciate that there is no end to the process of improvement with the Feldenkrais method. (Encouraged by this, I also took my aged parents to Robbie for a few lesson, which helped them a lot. They are from India and Feldenkrais is unlike anything they have experienced.)  I plan to get an occasional FI or two in future years to continue this learning. In particular I plan to explore the use of the method in voice and music.

The Opposite Of Karen: I'm A Healthy Person, I'm Not Crazy