japantoday | Japanese supercomputer simulations showed that wearing two masks gave
limited benefit in blocking viral spread compared with one properly
fitted mask.
The findings in part contradict recent recommendations from the U.S.
Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that two masks were
better than one at reducing a person's exposure to the coronavirus.
Researchers used the Fugaku supercomputer to model the flow of virus
particles from people wearing different types and combinations of masks,
according to a study released on Thursday by research giant Riken and
Kobe University.
Using a single surgical-type mask, made of non-woven material, had
85% effectiveness in blocking particles when worn tightly around the
nose and face. Adding a polyurethane mask on top boosted the
effectiveness to just 89%.
Wearing two non-woven masks isn't useful because air resistance builds up and causes leakage around the edges.
"The performance of double masking simply does not add up," wrote the researchers, led by Makoto Tsubokura.
bloomberg | If messenger-RNA vaccines are the breakout medicine of the pandemic,
then the tiny lipid spheres that bring them into people’s cells are the
unsung heroes.
Lipids catapulted toward the top of the world’s health-care priority list because the potent vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Inc., as well as others still being developed by CureVac NV and Sanofi,
can’t do their job without them. Messenger RNA, the genetic material at
the heart of these vaccines, needs a protective shell composed of four
different types of the fatty material -- collectively called a lipid
nanoparticle -- so that it can successfully journey from factory to a
person’s arm, and then get inside of human cells.
“This is an incredibly complex process,” said President Joe Biden,
touring a Michigan factory last month alongside Pfizer Chief Executive
Officer Albert Bourla, who vowed to produce more lipids -- along with mRNA -- at the facility as part of a push to double vaccine supplies. Biden marveled
at the close collaboration between machine technicians, chemists and
biologists who were “pioneering technologies that less than a year ago
were little more than theories and aspirations.”
For Bob Langer, those aspirations stretch back a lot
longer. As early as the 1970s, he was trying to prove you can capture
and transport big, complex molecules like DNA and RNA inside tiny
particles without destroying them.
“Everybody told me it was
impossible,” he recalled during a phone interview. “I got my first nine
grants rejected. Couldn’t get a faculty job.”
Turns out it was possible, and Langer wasn’t out of a job for long. Today, the professor has a chemical engineering lab
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology bearing his name, focused on
the intersection of biotechnology and materials science. Following
decades of development, Langer in 2010 co-founded Moderna, where he’s
still on the board. That company -- like BioNTech and CureVac -- is
developing mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases beyond just Covid,
along with therapies for cancer and rare illnesses.
“I don’t think
people realized just how important the delivery systems are to all
kinds of medicines,” Langer said. “If you get more and more complex
medicines, like RNA and DNA and things like that, you’ll see more and
more work on delivery systems and more and more problems will be solved.
Lipid nanoparticles are going to be a big piece of the arsenal.”
khn | There’s a reason soldiers go through basic training before heading
into combat: Without careful instruction, green recruits armed with
powerful weapons could be as dangerous to one another as to the enemy.
The immune system works much the same way. Immune cells, which
protect the body from infections, need to be “educated” to recognize bad
guys — and to hold their fire around civilians.
In some covid patients, this education may be cut short. Scientists
say unprepared immune cells appear to be responding to the coronavirus
with a devastating release of chemicals, inflicting damage that may
endure long after the threat has been eliminated.
“If you have a brand-new virus and the virus is winning, the immune
system may go into an ‘all hands on deck’ response,” said Dr. Nina
Luning Prak, co-author of a January study
on covid and the immune system. “Things that are normally kept in close
check are relaxed. The body may say, ‘Who cares? Give me all you’ve
got.’”
While all viruses find ways to evade the body’s defenses, a growing field of research suggests that the coronavirus unhinges the immune system more profoundly than previously realized.
All these conditions can be triggered by “autoantibodies” — rogue antibodies that target the patient’s own proteins and cells.
In a report published in October, researchers even labeled the coronavirus “the autoimmune virus.”
“Covid is deranging the immune system,” said John Wherry, director of
the Penn Medicine Immune Health Institute and another co-author of the
January study. “Some patients, from their very first visit, seem to have
an immune system in hyperdrive.”
summit.news | The London Telegraph reports
that a study of 100 countries by the World Obesity Federation found
that 2.2 million of 2.5 million deaths occurred in countries with high
levels of obesity.
The study noted that death rates were discovered to be 10 times higher in nations where more than 50% the population was overweight.
According to the study, in countries without obesity problems, the
death rate from the virus was no higher than 10 per 100,000 population.
“We now know that an overweight population is the next pandemic
waiting to happen,” noted Dr Tim Lobstein, the author of the report,
senior policy adviser to the World Obesity Federation and visiting
professor at the University of Sydney.
Britain, which has the third highest COVID death rate in the world,
also has fourth highest obesity rate. On the flip side, Vietnam has one
of the lowest levels of obesity in the world, and also has the lowest
COVID death rate.
The findings have prompted stark warnings from the World Health
Organisation, with Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general
noting “This report must act as a wake-up call to governments globally.
The correlation between obesity and mortality rates from Covid-19 is
clear and compelling.”
The CDC has also warned that obesity is a clear factor in coronavirus death rates.
bloomberg | More than a year after Covid-19 touched off the worst pandemic in more than a century, scientists have yet to determine its origins.
The closest related viruses to SARS-CoV-2 were found in bats more than
1,000 miles from the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where the disease
erupted in late 2019. Initially, cases were tied to a fresh food market
and possibly the wildlife sold there. Other theories allege the virus accidentally escaped
from a nearby research laboratory, or entered China via imported frozen
food. Amid all the posturing and finger-pointing, governments and
scientists agree that deciphering the creation story is key to reducing
the risk of future pandemics.
1. Why don’t we know where it came from?
Where,
when and how a pathogen crosses the species barrier and begins
spreading in humans can be difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint.
Although SARS-CoV-2 is genetically similar to coronaviruses collected
from a type of bat, it may have followed a long and convoluted path to
Wuhan, a city of 11 million people. Scientists are tracing the earliest
known cases to try to establish how they were infected, but the trail
backward largely goes cold in early December 2019. Where a new disease
starts spreading isn’t necessarily where it spilled over from the animal kingdom to infect the first human. HIV, for instance, is thought to have originated in chimpanzees in southeastern Cameroon, but didn’t begin spreading readily in people until the 1920s, when it reached the city of Kinshasa, hundreds of miles away. Scientists reported that finding in 2014, some three decades after the AIDS pandemic was recognized.
2. Who’s looking?
The World Health Organization was asked in May to help with the research, and a team of 17 international scientists, including one based in the U.S., concluded a four-week joint mission
with 17 researchers from China in early February. Their findings are
slated to be released in March. Other groups, including an expert panel convened by the medical journal The Lancet called the Covid-19 Commission, are also
3. What do we know so far?
Not much. Bats are the source of two coronaviruses that
caused lethal outbreaks in people during the past two decades -- severe
acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle Eastern respiratory
syndrome (MERS) -- and the flying mammals are considered the reservoir
host for SARS-CoV-2 as well as a plethora of other viruses. (A reservoir host is an animal that harbors a pathogen but isn’t sickened by it.) After SARS-CoV-2 emerged, Shi Zhengli, a virologist who heads a group that studies bat-borne coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, identified three closely related viruses collected during the previous 15 years. The closest, which is about 96% identical to SARS-CoV-2, was isolated from swabs and fecal material from Rhinolophus affinis, a species of horseshoe bat, in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan in 2013. Some researchers have linked that particular virus to a mineshaft in Mojiang county in Yunnan, where six men contracted a pneumonia-like disease
in 2012 that killed three of them. Although SARS-CoV-2 and the virus
from Yunnan may share a common ancestor, they’re not sufficiently similar
to indicate SARS-CoV-2 was derived from the Yunnan virus. Sampling of
bats in Hubei, the province of which Wuhan is the capital, haven’t found
any positive for the pandemic strain. Coronaviruses sharing certain
genetic features with SARS-CoV-2 have been found in other Rhinolophus
bat species and pangolins, a scaly, ant-eating mammal, elsewhere in Asia, highlighting the broad distribution
of related coronaviruses that may have contributed to SARS-CoV-2’s
evolution. That’s led to multiple hypotheses for how and where it
emerged.
wikipedia | The Grimms believed that the most natural and pure forms of culture were linguistic and based in history.[2]
The work of the Brothers Grimm influenced other collectors, both
inspiring them to collect tales and leading them to similarly believe,
in a spirit of romantic nationalism, that the fairy tales of a country were particularly representative of it, to the neglect of cross-cultural influence.[7] Among those influenced were the Russian Alexander Afanasyev, the Norwegians Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, the English Joseph Jacobs, and Jeremiah Curtin, an American who collected Irish tales.[8]
There was not always a pleased reaction to their collection. Joseph
Jacobs was in part inspired by his complaint that English children did
not read English fairy tales;[9] in his own words, "What Perrault began, the Grimms completed".
W. H. Auden praised the collection during World War II as one of the founding works of Western culture.[10] The tales themselves have been put to many uses. Adolf Hitler
praised them as folkish tales showing children with sound racial
instincts seeking racially pure marriage partners, and so strongly that
the Allies of World War II warned against them;[11] for instance, Cinderella
with the heroine as racially pure, the stepmother as an alien, and the
prince with an unspoiled instinct being able to distinguish.[12] Writers who have written about the Holocaust have combined the tales with their memoirs, as Jane Yolen in her Briar Rose.[13]
Three individual works of Wilhelm Grimm include Altdänische Heldenlieder, Balladen und Märchen ('Old Danish Heroic Songs, Ballads, and Folktales') in 1811, Über deutsche Runen ('On German Runes') in 1821, and Die deutsche Heldensage ('The German Heroic Saga') in 1829.
The Grimm anthology has been a source of inspiration for artists and composers. Arthur Rackham, Walter Crane and Rie Cramer are among the artists who have created illustrations based on the stories.
History | During the Third Reich, the Nazis adopted the Grimms’ tales for
propaganda purposes. They claimed, for instance, that Little Red Riding
Hood symbolized the German people suffering at the hands of the Jewish
wolf, and that Cinderella’s Aryan purity distinguished her from her
mongrel stepsisters.
Although the brothers Grimm toned down the sex in later editions of
their work, they actually ramped up the violence. A particularly
horrific incident occurs in “The Robber Bridegroom,” when some bandits
drag a maiden into their underground hideout, force her to drink wine
until her heart bursts, rip off her clothes and then hack her body into
pieces. Other tales have similarly gory episodes. In “Cinderella” the
evil stepsisters cut off their toes and heels trying to make the slipper
fit and later have their eyes pecked out by doves; in “The Six Swans”
an evil mother-in-law is burned at the stake; in “The Goose Maid” a
false bride is stripped naked, thrown into a barrel filled with nails
and dragged through the streets; and in “Snow White” the wicked queen
dies after being forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes. Even the love
stories contain violence. The princess in “The Frog King” turns her
amphibian companion into a human not by kissing it, but instead by
hurling it against a wall in frustration.
caitlinjohnstone | I
write about humanity’s problems as a species in all sorts of ways in
this space, but really if you want to get straightforward about things
all we’re ever actually talking about here is a lack of awareness of
what’s true and the need to eliminate that lack.
A
lack of awareness is the source of all our major problems, whether
we’re talking about war, poverty, ecocide, corruption, exploitation,
authoritarianism, prejudice, or even much smaller-scale problems like
abusive family dynamics or the psychological suffering of the
individual.
If there weresufficiently
widespread and penetrating awareness of the contributing factors in any
of these problems, these problems would cease to exist. All you’d have
left would be the odd natural disaster and the inevitability of sickness
and death, which would also become far less problematic with the
introduction of more awareness.
Yes,
from a certain point of view it is true and accurate to say that many
of our large-scale problems are due to the fact that humans whose brains
lack functioning empathy centers are most well-equipped to manipulate
their way into positions of power and influence, and that the amoral
nature of capitalism ensures that it will be dominated by those willing
to do whatever it takes to climb to the top. From a certain point of
view it is true and accurate to say that our problems are caused by the
fact that things like war, oppression, ecocide and exploitation will
necessarily continue as long as our world is dominated by a system where
those things are profitable and human behavior is driven by profit.
But it is also true that underlying every single part of the dynamics I just listed is a fundamental lack of human awareness.
CJR |You recently tweeted, “Stockton is the miner’s canary for the impact of disinformation,” describing the 209 Times
as “an example of racism and disinfo that is able to thrive in news
deserts.” So I’d like to open the floor for you to talk about news media
coverage in Stockton, how it has changed over the years, and how this
media landscape has allowed for disinformation to not only spread, but
really thrive in your hometown.
So Stockton, California, is what’s called a news desert. Even before the layoffs and the cuts, we had one newspaper: the Stockton Record.
In addition to that, despite being the twelfth-largest city in the
state, sixty-second largest in the country, we weren’t our own media
market. So all of our digital, broadcast media was homed in Sacramento,
so they’d have to drive an hour to Stockton to shoot things.
During my years as mayor, the Record had to lay off employees and stopped running as many articles. When the Record didn’t
have as much staff to cover things, and subscriptions declined, at the
same time, this fake-news site went up. Even when I was on city council,
that was the play, just attacking the Record’s credibility all the time. “The Record’s corrupt,” “The Record’s elite,” “No one reads the Record”—and using elected officials to do that and to just question the legitimacy of an imperfect but also the only
local press that we had in the city. Then when I became mayor, and
after the success of former president Trump’s 2016 campaign utilizing
social media and algorithms and weaponized information, these same folks
got together and, in my first month as mayor, created what’s now known
as the 209 Times.
People saw 209 Times and thought, Well, it’s a news site. Why would anyone purposely and deliberately go out and deceive people? So a lot of people took it at face value, like this is just an alternative news site because the Record doesn’t run as much, the Record’s
not as quick, etc. And what we saw was that they started with just
blatantly false articles, like articles that were literally lies and
disinformation. It was really about weaponizing information and playing
on people’s biases and racism.
The stories would all follow a
similar thread. Either (a) Michael Tubbs was stealing money from the
city, because Black people are criminals—and I think for a lot of people
it played on their bias and orientation towards, Who are Black people really?
And (b) the second one was, Michael Tubbs doesn’t work, or Michael
Tubbs is lazy, which is another racist trope—that Black people,
particularly Black men, loiter, that they’re criminals, that they don’t
work, that they’re lazy. And (c) the third was, again, Michael Tubbs is
just corrupt. It’s just a corrupt administration. There’s no way he
could win legitimately. He doesn’t live in the city. It’s corrupt, it’s
corrupt; he’s under investigation; he’s corrupt. And for four years,
leveraging social media and leveraging algorithms, they fed that
poison.
And in the course of that, they just
created a different reality. I left office with a
thirteen-million-dollar surplus. We were named as the fourth most
fiscally healthy city in this country. But for a lot of folks, it was, No, he’s stealing money.
It’s just a different reality. And that’s what I recognized, that no,
this disinformation wasn’t just about an election campaign, but indeed,
it was a four-year campaign that only works in a news desert. It only
works when the algorithm rewards racism and bigotry and bias. It only
works when there’s no check, there’s no certification. We know that
brain research tells us that we look for news that confirms our bias; we
look for facts that confirm our bias. And that, if I’m biased to be
racist, or if I’m biased to think that the government is corrupt, I’ll
find something, whether it’s the Epoch Times or the 209 Times or OAN or Fox News, that’s going to create the reality.
nakedcapitalism | From France to Australia to the US state of Maryland, the free press
is waging a battle for survival against Facebook and Google. Besides
being gushing firehoses of COVID and election disinformation and QAnon
conspiracies, another of Google and Facebook’s dangerous impacts is
undermining the financial stability of media outlets all over the world.
Where is the Biden administration and European Commission in this
fight? A lot is at stake, yet so far they have been quiet as church
mice.
How do Google and Facebook threaten the Free Press? These two companies alone suck up an astounding 60% of all online advertising in the world (outside China). With Amazon taking another 9 percent,
that leaves a mere 30% of global digital ad revenue to be split among
thousands of media outlets, many of them local publications. With
digital online advertising now comprising over half of all ad spendng (and projected to grow further),
that has greatly contributed to underfunded and failing news industries
in country after country, including in Europe and the US.
Australia’s situation is typical. Its competition commission found
that, for every $100 spent by online advertisers in Australia, $47 goes
to Google and $24 to Facebook (71%), even as traditional advertising has
declined. Various studies have found that the majority of people who
access their news online don’t go to the original news source,
instead they access it via Facebook’s and Google’s platforms which are
cleverly designed to hold users’ attention. Many users rarely click
through the links, instead they absorb the gist of the news from the
platforms’ headlines and preview blurbs.
Consequently, Facebook and Google receive the lion’s share of revenue
from digital ads, rather than the original news sources receiving it.
Note that Facebook and Google could tweak their design and algorithms to
purposefully drive users to the original news sources’ websites. But
they don’t.
So Australia decided to fight this duopoly with some rules-setting of
its own. A new law will require large digital media companies to
compensate Australian media companies fairly for re-packaging and
monetizing their proprietary news content. Media outlets around the
world are watching to see how this plays out.
Google initially fought the proposal, but finally negotiated deals
with Australian news publishers to pay them some compensation. But
Facebook flexed its digital muscles by cutting off Australia entirely from
its platform for several days, preventing Aussie news publishers as
well as everyday users, including important government agencies like
health, fire and crisis services, from posting, viewing or sharing news content.
The result was jarring, the proverbial “shot heard ‘round the world.”
Facebook censored Australian users more effectively than the Chinese
communist government ever could, prompting charges of “big tech authoritarianism.” Facebook finally relented to Australia’s requirement, in return for some vague and uncertain concessions. But the message of raw, naked platform power was unmistakably clear.
Now a similar battle is playing out in the US state of Maryland. Over the last 10 years, US newspapers’ advertising revenue has declined by 62%, and without that funding newsroom employment dropped by nearly half.
Squeezed by these economics, Maryland approved the US’s first tax on
digital ad revenue (earned inside its state borders), targeting
companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. The measure is projected to
generate as much as $250 million in its first year, dedicated to schools.
CTH | Let us first be clear… CTH is not suddenly naive enough to believe
that Google is now positioning out of some great sense of altruism,
magnanimity or business stewardship. That thought is laughable in the
extreme. No, what is really going on here is that the Eye of Sauron has
noticed how the Rebel Alliance, within which CTH is a leading
insurgency voice, has found ways to tunnel under the technology
landscape.
Additionally, both domestic and international patriots are putting
laws, rules and regulations into place that are directly adverse to the
current business model that Google has been dependent upon for their Ad
Revenue services. There are people working in the background to create
regulations on top of the tech industry that are founded on privacy
concerns.
In the U.S. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida legislature
are one group who are heeding the assistance from tech insiders,
members of the insurgency, well versed in the roadmap of Google. There
are plans in the works that will cut the tentacles of the Tech
overlords. Google is now being manipulatively proactive in their
self-defense.
Outside the U.S. the advancements of privacy regulations are being
spear-headed by Australia, Poland, Hungary and subsidiary Rebel Alliance
members who are also benefiting from the insider information provided.
The alliance membership grows daily.
Cont…
[…] Google plans to stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing
across multiple websites, a change that could hasten upheaval in the
digital advertising industry.
The Alphabet Inc. GOOG -2.57% company said Wednesday that it plans
next year to stop using or investing in tracking technologies that
uniquely identify web users as they move from site to site across the
internet.
The decision, coming from the world’s biggest digital-advertising
company, could help push the industry away from the use of such
individualized tracking, which has come under increasing criticism from
privacy advocates and faces scrutiny from regulators.
How do we know the Rebel Alliance is making a difference?
Specifically, how do we know efforts of CTH are bearing fruit in our
tech push-back…. Because “sandboxing” was a CTH developmental tool,
being field tested with tech partners since 2017.
[…] Google says its ad-buying tools will use new
technologies it has been developing with others in what it calls a
“privacy sandbox” to target ads without collecting information about
individuals from multiple websites. One such technology analyzes users’
browsing habits on their own devices, and allows advertisers to target
aggregated groups of users with similar interests, or “cohorts,” rather
than individual users. Google said in January that it plans to begin open testing of buying using that technology in the second quarter. (read more)
Ironically, and not coincidentally, it appears Google now wants to
own the tunneling technology that was created specifically to work
around the influence of Google.
guardian | Carbon dioxide emissions must fall by the
equivalent of a global lockdown roughly every two years for the next
decade for the world to keep within safe limits of global heating, research has shown.
Lockdowns around the world led to an unprecedented fall in emissions of about 7% in 2020, or about 2.6bn tonnes of CO2,
but reductions of between 1bn and 2bn tonnes are needed every year of
the next decade to have a good chance of holding temperature rises to
within 1.5C or 2C of pre-industrial levels, as required by the Paris
agreement.
Research
published on Wednesday shows that countries were beginning to slow their
rates of greenhouse gas emissions before the Covid-19 pandemic struck,
but not to the levels needed to avert climate breakdown. Since lockdowns
were eased in many countries last year, there have been strong signs that emissions will rise again to above 2019 levels, severely damaging the prospects of fulfilling the Paris goals.
Corinne Le Quéré, lead author of the study, said
the world stood at a crucial point as governments poured money into the
global economy to cope with the impacts of the pandemic. “We need a cut
in emissions of about the size of the fall [from the lockdowns] every
two years, but by completely different methods,” she said.
Governments
must prioritise climate action in their efforts to recover from the
pandemic, she said. “We have failed to understand in the past that we
can’t have tackling climate change as a side issue. It can’t be about
one law or policy, it has to be put at the heart of all policy,” she
said. “Every strategy and every plan from every government must be
consistent with tackling climate change.”
“There is a real contradiction between what governments are saying they are doing to do [to generate a green recovery], and what they are doing,” said Le Quéré. “That is very worrisome.”
scheerpost | What is taking place is not neglect. It is not
ineptitude. It is not policyfailure. It is murder. It is murder because
it is premeditated. It is murder because a conscious choice was made by
the global ruling classes to extinguish life rather than protect it. It
is murder because profit, despite the hard statistics, the growing
climate disruptions and the scientific modeling, is deemed more
important than human life and human survival.
The elites thrive in this system, as long as they serve the dictates
of what Lewis Mumford called the “megamachine,” the convergence of
science, economy, technics and political power unified into an
integrated, bureaucratic structure whose sole goal is to perpetuate
itself. This structure, Mumford noted, is antithetical to
“life-enhancing values.” But to challenge the megamachine, to name and
condemn its death wish, is to be expelled from its inner sanctum. There
are, no doubt, some within the megamachine who fear the future, who are
perhaps even appalled by the social murder, but they do not want to lose
their jobs and their social status to become pariahs.
The massive resources allocated to the military, which when the costs
of the Veterans Administration are added to the Department of Defense
budget come to $826 billion a year, are the most glaring example of our
suicidal folly, symptomatic of all decaying civilizations that squander
diminishing resources in institutions and projects that accelerate their
decline.
The American military — which accounts for 38 percent of military
spending worldwide — is incapable of combating the real existential
crisis. The fighter jets, satellites, aircraft carriers, fleets of
warships, nuclear submarines, missiles, tanks and vast arsenals of
weaponry are useless against pandemics and the climate crisis. The war
machine does nothing to mitigate the human suffering caused by degraded
environments that sicken and poison populations or make life
unsustainable. Air pollution already kills an estimated 200,000
Americans a year while children in decayed cities such as Flint,
Michigan are damaged for life with lead contamination from drinking
water.
The prosecution of endless and futile wars, costing anywhere from $5
to $7 trillion, the maintenance of some 800 military bases in over 70
countries, along with the endemic fraud, waste and mismanagement by the
Pentagon at a time when the survival of the species is at stake is
self-destructive. The Pentagon has spent more than $67 billion alone on
a ballistic missile defense system that few believe will actually work
and billions more on a series of dud weapons systems, including the $22
billion Zumwalt destroyer. And, on top of all this, the U.S. military
emitted 1.2 billion metric tons of carbon emissions between 2001 and
2017, twice the annual output of the nation’s passenger vehicles.
A decade from now we will look back at the current global ruling
class as the most criminal in human history, willfully dooming millions
upon millions of people to die, including those from this pandemic,
which dwarf the murderous excesses of the killers of the past including
the Europeans that carried out the genocide of the indigenous peoples in
the Americas, the Nazis that exterminated some 12 million people, the
Stalinists or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. This is the largest crime
against humanity ever committed. It is being committed in front of us.
And, with few exceptions, we are willfully being herded like sheep to
the slaughter.
It is not that most people have faith in the ruling elites. They know
they are being betrayed. They feel vulnerable and afraid. They
understand that their misery is unacknowledged and unimportant to the
global elites, who have concentrated staggering amounts of wealth and
power into the hands of a tiny cabal of rapacious oligarchs.
charleshughsmith | Even as the chirpy happy-talk of a return to normal floods the airwaves, what nobody dares
acknowledge is that "normal" for a rising number of Americans is the social depression
of downward mobility and social defeat.
Downward mobility is not a new trend--it's simply accelerating.
As this RAND Corporation report documents,
(
Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018)
$50 trillion in earnings has been transferred to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of
American households over the past 45 years.
"The $50 trillion
transfer of wealth the RAND report documents has occurred entirely within the American economy,
not between it and its trading partners. No, this upward redistribution of income, wealth, and
power wasn't inevitable; it was a choice--a direct result of the trickle-down policies we chose
to implement since 1975.
We chose to cut taxes on billionaires and to deregulate the financial industry. We chose to allow
CEOs to manipulate share prices through stock buybacks, and to lavishly reward themselves with
the proceeds. We chose to permit giant corporations, through mergers and acquisitions, to
accumulate the vast monopoly power necessary to dictate both prices charged and wages paid.
We chose to erode the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and the bargaining power of labor.
For four decades, we chose to elect political leaders who put the material interests of the
rich and powerful above those of the American people."
I've been digging into downward mobility and social depression for years:
Are You Really Middle Class?
The reality is that the middle class has been reduced to the sliver just below the
top 5%--if we use the standards of the prosperous 1960s as a baseline.
Downward mobility excels in creating and distributing what I term social defeat:
In my lexicon, social defeat is the spectrum of anxiety, insecurity, chronic stress, fear and
powerlessness that accompanies declining financial security and social status.
newsweek | Cancel culture activists have come for Dr. Seuss, who they deem a
racist despite the fact that his books were undoubtedly woke for their
time. It shouldn't be dismissed as yet another silly instance of fringe
activists overreacting. It's part of a coordinated campaign to
indoctrinate children to take on progressive causes.
After complaints from teachers and academics, Dr. Seuss Enterprises decided to cease publishing six books, including And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and Scrambled Eggs Super!, accused of having racist and insensitive imagery.
The move was supposedly long in the works, but it comes
as Virginia's Loudoun County Public Schools issued guidance to promote
"inclusive and diverse" books rather than to "simply celebrate Dr.
Seuss." Read Across America Day coincides with Dr. Seuss' birthday.
"Research in recent years has revealed strong racial undertones in many
books written/illustrated by Dr. Seuss," the school district said in a
statement.
One piece of that "research" comes from Katie Ishizuka and Ramón
Stephens, two social justice activists behind the Conscious Kid, an
organization "dedicated to equity and promoting healthy racial identity
development in youth."
Both
authors use critical race theory to condemn Dr. Seuss. They compared
the number of white characters with the number of those representing
minority communities, and judged the "dominance" and "master narrative"
exhibited by white characters. They looked for stereotypes and
characters who were dehumanized or exoticized.
"The
Cat's physical appearance, including the Cat's oversized top hat,
floppy bow tie, white gloves, and frequently open mouth, mirrors actual
blackface performers; as does the role he plays as 'entertainer' to the
white family—in whose house he doesn't belong," Ishizuka said of Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat.
rosemaryfrei | There are at least three clues to why there is dramatic under-reporting of serious illness and death from the vaccine.
One clue
is that for years now politicians and public-health bureaucrats have
been saturating the airwaves, academe and health-care institutions with
the messaging that vaccines are safe and effective. They tell us
ceaselessly that serious adverse events are one in a million.
The same goes for the Covid vaccines. We’re told the Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech and other shots were thoroughly tested in “large clinical trials”
before being used in the populace at large. And that they had to be
rushed into use because they’re critical for saving lives in the midst
of the worldwide Covid emergency.
The second clue
for here in Ontario is that the same person who’s in charge of the
rushing of vaccines into millions of people’s arms also heads the office
that leads death investigations, including deaths of people who died
from Covid or who passed away shortly after receiving a Covid vaccine.
That person is Dirk Huyer.
I’ve written previously about his prominence in pushing the official
Covid narrative and rushing Covid vaccines into millions of Ontarians’
arms. (On May 11 and May 26,
2020, I documented his role in drastically changing the way deaths are
handled in Ontario, making it far harder to determine whether a death
attributed to Covid was instead caused by something else; and on October 20, 2020, I wrote about how Huyer has climbed the bureaucratic ladder by serving the powerful rather than the populace).
Others
have also written about how the Office of the Chief Coroner for Ontario
has performed shockingly poorly under his watch. For example,
investigative journalists at the National Post, Toronto Star and Hamilton Spectator
showed that Huyer and a colleague likely shut down a busy
forensic-pathology unit in southwestern Ontario as revenge for the
unit’s staff lodging official complaints about the pair’s bullying
behaviour including interference in evidence-based decision-making.
And Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk’s 2019 annual report devotes a chapter
to the Office of the Chief Coroner and the Ontario Forensic Pathology
Service. Among the serious deficits she documented were that, “The
Office misses the opportunity to make more effective use of its death
investigation data to identify actions to improve public safety and
reduce preventable deaths.”
Officially, Dirk Huyer doesn’t have a
direct role in investigations of deaths related to Covid. Stephanie Rea,
a spokesperson for Huyer and his office, responded to a question from
me about this; she indicated that Huyer stepped back from such
investigations last August.
“The Chief Coroner for Ontario has
recused himself from any work the Office of the Chief Coroner is doing
in regard to COVID-19 to maintain the impartiality of the death
investigation system. COVID-19 related work with the Office of the Chief
Coroner is overseen by two Deputy Chief Coroners,” Rea wrote in an
email to me.
However, Dr. Huyer doesn’t say he’s recused himself.
And he seemed to indicate in a press conference that he was involved in
the investigation of a person who died after getting one of the Covid
vaccines.
The third clue is that doctors seldom
report adverse events. When people get really sick or die after getting a
vaccination the docs attribute that to anything but the vaccines. It’s
been that way for years. Anyone who wonders aloud whether the Covid
vaccines or other shots cause harm is immediately branded as “anti-vax”
and “anti-science.” That’s a career-threatening consequence for health
professionals.
And of course on top of that there’s huge pressure
to go along with the push to vaccinate billions of people in as short a
time as possible.
verywellhealth | “Adipose fat is considered like an endocrine organ now, and the immune
response in central obesity is that the fat that sits around the organ
and abdomen has a much higher prevalence of low immunity in fighting
infection and generating antibodies to vaccines,” Desai says.
A 2012 review in the Proceedings Of The Nutrition Society reported
that a potential mechanism could be that excess fat hinders access to
the nutrients that immune cells need to carry out their daily
activities.6
Research has shown that obesity’s role in an impaired immune system
often shows itself as lowered vaccine effectiveness. A 2017 study in the
journal Annals of the American Thoracic Society found that adults with obesity who were vaccinated with the flu shot
were two times more likely to get sick than vaccinated adults who were
not obese—despite having the same level of vaccine-induced antibodies.7 The researchers theorized that the effect might be related to impaired T cell function.8
“The data we have so far is from influenza, hepatitis B, and tetanus
that shows people who are obese have a decreased immune response to
those vaccines,” Desai says.
In terms of the new COVID-19 vaccines, Glatt says that there’s no evidence that the mRNA vaccines
produced by Moderna and Pfizer would not work in a person who is obese.
Rather, Glatt thinks that there are not enough studies to show how well
the vaccine works in people who are overweight or obese.
The data that has been released by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) and Pfizer show that the clinical trial was representative of
people at different body weights—34.8% of vaccinated participants and
35.3% of participants in the placebo group were obese.9
“I think the evidence strongly supports that it is effective in obese patients, but I can’t guarantee that it’s as effective until we get a lot more data,” Glatt says.
Unlike the annual flu shot that uses a weakened or inactive version of
the influenza virus, Pfizer and Moderna's COVID-19 vaccines use mRNA
technology. Desai says that this changes how the immune response is
generated.
However, Desai personally thinks that people who are obese will still
respond poorly to the COVID-19 virus because of the body’s inability to
handle the infection.
“It’s not how the immune challenge is administered whether through a
vaccine or natural disease. The body’s response is weak irrespective of
how the challenge is dealt,” Desai says. “People with obesity are most
likely going to respond poorly whether it’s the vaccine or the virus.
The coronavirus has already proven that it’s not good for obese
individuals. In my opinion, no scientific evidence on this yet, [but]
the vaccine will work more poorly in obese individuals.”
By that logic, boosting your chances for vaccine effectiveness means
controlling for obesity—but Glatt admits that's easier said than done.
“It’s a hard thing to accomplish, but it’s an important thing to
accomplish.”
nakedcapitalism | My most frequent Google use case is searching for posts I know I have
written so I can link to them, since searching for them on WordPress
causes timeouts, because our database has issues.
Imagine my surprise, then, when yesterday (Sunday, February 28), I searched for the following post from February 18, “CDC School Reopening Guidance Suppresses Aerosols Based on Thin Evidence and Driven by Budgetary Concerns,” (Reopening Guidance)
and nothing came up. I then performed a number of other searches for
likely keywords, like “aerosol.” Again, no joy. I mentioned this to
Yves, who also got no hits, and she said I should check with others,
since Google will optimize searches for the individual. I verified that
“CDC School Reopening Guidance Suppresses Aerosols” at NC was the first
hit on both Bing and DuckDuckGo, sent out my want list for searches to
two geographically distributed friends, and sat back to await results in
the form of screen shots. I present the results here in tabular form,
because a post full of screenshots would not be readable:
Table 1: Google Searches for Reopening Guidance February 28 (Three Users)
Label
Search
Hits for Post
#1
“CDC School Reopening Guidance Suppresses Aerosols” site:www.nakedcapitalism.com
0
#2
CDC schools site:www.nakedcapitalism.com
0
#3
CDC guidance site:www.nakedcapitalism.com
0
#4
walensky site:www.nakedcapitalism.com
0
#5
cdc school re-opening site:www.nakedcapitalism.com Sidebar
0
#6
aerosols site:www.nakedcapitalism.com
0
So, nobody got results for Reopening Guidance, including search #1, on a big chunk of the post title plus the URL for the site.
Now, in the headline I said that Google “suppressed” Reopening Guidance.
(I don’t say “censor,” because in my view censorship is properly
considered a function of the State, a task of officialdom, and Google is
not a State actor, at least not yet.) There are three reasons (besides past behavior) to think that Google did this. When I searched on “CDC School Reopening Guidance Suppresses Aerosols” (search #1, Table 1):
(1) Reopening Guidance was the very first hit in Bing and
DuckDuckGo (each of which run search engines independent of Google).
That would imply that Google, and only Google, has some secret sauce
that causes my post not to appear.
(2) Reopening Guidance appears in “Recent Items” hits (and one internal cross-reference) but there are no hits for the post itself.
yahoo | As the United States adds another COVID-19 vaccine to its arsenal and ramps up its distribution drive, potentially pushing
the country closer toward herd immunity, concerns about vaccine
hesitancy among the population remain. But overall, it seems, people are
growing increasingly comfortable with getting a shot. Data from the KFF
Vaccine Monitor shows 55 percent of Americans have either already
received a vaccine dose or plan on getting one as soon as possible, Axios reports. For context, back in December only 34 percent of people said they were prepared for inoculation without hesitation.
The share of Americans who say they won’t get vaccinated is now small enough that the U.S. should be able to reach herd immunity even if the most reluctant people don’t change their minds, according to polling. https://t.co/xJ3UNVDFYf
The
increase there appears to correlate with a decline in the number of
people who are in the "wait and see" camp, especially because the number
of surefire holdouts has remained steady. And even if folks in the
latter group don't ever change their minds, Axios notes, herd immunity is feasible.
Additionally, while much has been made about hesitancy, driven by
historical distrust in the U.S. health care system, among communities of
color, Black and Latino Americans have rapidly and consistently joined
the ranks of people who want a shot, polling conducted by Civiqs between November and February shows, per Axios. Overall, white Americans are now less likely to get vaccinated, and the stance is largely split along party lines.
NYTimes | Anna Ruch had
never met Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo before encountering him at a crowded New
York City wedding reception in September 2019. Her first impression was
positive enough.
The governor was
working the room after toasting the newlyweds, and when he came upon Ms.
Ruch, now 33, she thanked him for his kind words about her friends. But
what happened next instantly unsettled her: Mr. Cuomo put his hand on
Ms. Ruch’s bare lower back, she said in an interview on Monday.
When
she removed his hand with her own, Ms. Ruch recalled, the governor
remarked that she seemed “aggressive” and placed his hands on her
cheeks. He asked if he could kiss her, loudly enough for a friend
standing nearby to hear. Ms. Ruch was bewildered by the entreaty, she
said, and pulled away as the governor drew closer.
“I
was so confused and shocked and embarrassed,” said Ms. Ruch, whose
recollection was corroborated by the friend, contemporaneous text
messages and photographs from the event. “I turned my head away and
didn’t have words in that moment.”
Ms. Ruch’s account comes after two former aides accused Mr. Cuomo of sexual harassment in the workplace, plunging his third term into turmoil as the governor’s defenders and Mr. Cuomo himself strain to explain his behavior.
A spokesman for the governor did not directly address Ms. Ruch’s account, referring to a general statement that Mr. Cuomo released on Sunday night in which he acknowledged that some things he had said “have been misinterpreted as an unwanted flirtation.”
“To the extent anyone felt that way, I am truly sorry about that,” the statement said.
Ms. Ruch’s example is distinct from those of the former aides: A former member of the Obama administration and the 2020 Biden campaign, Ms. Ruch has never been employed by the governor or the state. But her experience reinforces the escalating concerns and accusations about Mr. Cuomo’s personal conduct — a pattern of words and actions that have, at minimum, made three women who are decades his junior feel deeply uncomfortable, in their collective telling.
washingtonexaminer | Former CIA Director John Brennan said he is "increasingly embarrassed to be a white male" while discussing supporters of former President Donald Trump.
He made the comment during an MSNBC panel on Monday that set its focus on whether Republicans are lying
about the circumstances surrounding the U.S. Capitol siege, when
rioters disrupted lawmakers certifying President Biden's 2020 electoral
victory.
Former Sen. Claire McCaskill,
a Democrat from Missouri, remarked how she saw "whiny white men calling
themselves victims ... over the weekend at CPAC," which she attributed
to how they believe they have "a huge grievance from a position of
significant privilege," before asserting that the Republican Party has
embraced lies about who the rioters were and in claiming House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi denied a request for National Guard support.
Host Nicolle Wallace,
who was a White House communications director under President George W.
Bush, then teed up Brennan by casting doubt on the "notion" that
Republicans care about the lives and safety of law enforcement.
"Well, I must say, to Claire's point, I’m increasingly embarrassed to
be a white male these days," Brennan began, prompting a laugh from
Wallace, who was visible on the split screen, "with what I see other
white males saying."
Noting "very few exceptions" in the GOP, naming Sen. Mitt Romney and Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, Brennan said that "there are so few Republicans in Congress who value truth, honesty, and integrity."
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4/3
43
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