Inwardly Wokeness Is A Weapon, Outwardly Wokeness Is A Disguise

greenwald  |  The British spy agency GCHQ is so aggressive, extreme and unconstrained by law or ethics that the NSA — not exactly world renowned for its restraint — often farms out spying activities too scandalous or illegal for the NSA to their eager British counterparts. There is, as the Snowden reporting demonstrated, virtually nothing too deceitful or invasive for the GCHQ. They spy on entire populations, deliberately disseminate fake news, exploit psychological research to control behavior and manipulate public perception, and destroy the reputations, including through the use of sex traps, of anyone deemed adversarial to the British government.

But they want you to know that they absolutely adore gay people. In fact, they love the cause of LGBT equality so very much that, beginning on May 17, 2015 — International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia — they started draping their creepy, UFO-style headquarters in the colors of the rainbow flag. The prior year, in 2014, they had merely raised the rainbow flag in front of their headquarters, but in 2015, they announced, “we wanted to make a bold statement to show the nation we serve how strongly we believe in this.”

Who could possibly be opposed to an institution that offers such noble gestures and works behind such a pretty facade? How bad could the GCHQ really be if they are so deeply committed to the rights of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people? Sure, maybe they go a little overboard with the spying sometimes, and maybe some of their surveillance and disinformation programs are a bit questionable, and they do not necessarily have the highest regard for law, privacy and truth. But we know that, deep down, these are fundamentally good people working within a fundamentally benign institution. Just look at their flamboyant support for this virtuous cause of social justice.

Large corporations have obviously witnessed the success of this tactic — to prettify the face of militarism and imperialism with the costumes of social justice — and are now weaponizing it for themselves. As a result, they are becoming increasingly aggressive in their involvement in partisan and highly politicized debates, always on the side of the same causes of social justice which entities of imperialism and militarism have so effectively co-opted.

Corporations have always sought to control the legislative process and executive branch, usually with much success. They purchase politicians and their power aides by hiring them as lobbyists and consultants when they leave government, and those bought-and-paid-for influence-peddlers then proceed to exploit their connections in Washington or state capitals to ensure that laws are written and regulations enforced (or not enforced) to benefit the corporations’ profit interests. These large corporations achieve the same goal by filling the campaign coffers of politicians from both parties. This is standard, age-old K Street sleaze that allows large corporations to control American democracy at the expense of those who cannot afford to buy this influence.

But they are now going far beyond clandestine corporatist control of the government for their own interests. They are now becoming increasingly powerful participants in highly polarizing and democratic debates. In the wake of the George Floyd killing last summer, it became virtually obligatory for every large corporation to proclaim support for the #BlackLivesMatter agenda even though many, if not most, had never previously evinced the slightest interest in questions of racial justice or policing.

 

There Is Nothing Like Spending A Ton On Wunderwaffen

The Research and Technology Protection Program wants everyone to know that aliens ARE real. The UFO’s on FLIR are totally NOT a subsurface maritime-launched UAV. The US DOESN'T have those, but if they did, the Navy might want to introduce them without breaking the law on special access programs. Hypothetically, such limited hangouts could force adversaries to re-think their combat doctrine, potentially delaying future offensives in the South China Sea.  There is nothing like spending a ton on wunderwaffen to plant a kernel of doubt in your adversaries, and convince yourself that conflict is anything but a crapshoot.

It's Not Supposed To Be Possible For RNA To Modify DNA

The central dogma of molecular biology is “DNA makes RNA makes proteins" but a quick read of this paper says different, and, the data are probably good. Moreover, Richard Young and Rudolf Jaenisch have been pioneers in the later phase of modern molecular biology. Bottomline, you'd have to be a total fooking fool to get injected with any of that mRNA therapeutic goop. Strongly recommend downloading the pdf as the technical Karenwaffen is shitting its anti-vax implication panties about now and agitating for censorship of the paper.

biorxiv  |  Prolonged SARS-CoV-2 RNA shedding and recurrence of PCR-positive tests have been widely reported in patients after recovery, yet these patients most commonly are non-infectious^1–14. Here we investigated the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 RNAs can be reverse-transcribed and integrated into the human genome and that transcription of the integrated sequences might account for PCR-positive tests. In support of this hypothesis, we found chimeric transcripts consisting of viral fused to cellular sequences in published data sets of SARS-CoV-2 infected cultured cells and primary cells of patients, consistent with the transcription of viral sequences integrated into the genome. To experimentally corroborate the possibility of viral retro-integration, we describe evidence that SARS-CoV-2 RNAs can be reverse transcribed in human cells by reverse transcriptase (RT) from LINE-1 elements or by HIV-1 RT, and that these DNA sequences can be integrated into the cell genome and subsequently be transcribed. Human endogenous LINE-1 expression was induced upon SARS-CoV-2 infection or by cytokine exposure in cultured cells, suggesting a molecular mechanism for SARS-CoV-2 retro-integration in patients. This novel feature of SARS-CoV-2 infection may explain why patients can continue to produce viral RNA after recovery and suggests a new aspect of RNA virus replication.

Introduction

Continuous or recurrent positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR tests have been reported in patients weeks or months after recovery from an initial infection^1–14. Although bona fide re-infection of SARS-CoV-2 after recovery has been reported lately¹⁵, cohort-based studies with strict quarantine on subjects recovered from COVID-19 suggested “re-positive” cases were not caused by re-infection^16,17. Furthermore, no replication-competent virus was isolated or spread from these PCR-positive patients^1–3,5,6,12. The cause for such prolonged and recurrent viral RNA production is unknown. As positive-stranded RNA viruses, SARS-CoV-2 and other beta-coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV-1 and MERS employ an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase to replicate their genomic RNA and transcribe their sub-genomic RNAs^18–20. One possibility is that SARS-CoV-2 RNAs could be reverse-transcribed and integrated into the human genome, and transcription of the integrated DNA copies could be responsible for positive PCR tests.

Endogenous reverse transcriptase (RT) activity has been observed in human cells, and the products of reverse transcription have been shown to become integrated into the genome^21,22. For example, APP transcripts have been shown to be reverse-transcribed by endogenous RT, with resultant APP fragments integrated into the genome of neurons and transcribed²². Human LINE-1 elements (~17% of the human genome), a type of autonomous retrotransposons, are a potential source of endogenous RT, able to retro-transpose themselves and other non-autonomous elements such as Alu^21,23.

Results

Expression of viral-cellular chimeric transcripts in infected cultured and in patient-derived cells is consistent with genomic integration of viral sequences

To investigate the possibility of viral integration into virus infected cells we analyzed published RNA-Seq data from SARS-CoV-2-infected cells for evidence of chimeric transcripts, which would be indicative of viral integration into the genome and expression. Examination of these data sets ^24–30 (Fig. S1a-b) revealed a substantial number of host-viral chimeric reads (Fig. 1a-c, S1c). These occurred in multiple sample types, including cells and organoids from lung/heart/brain/stomach tissues, as well as BALF cells directly isolated from COVID-19 patients (Fig. 1c). Chimeric read abundance was positively correlated with viral RNA level across the sample types (Fig. 1c). Chimeric reads generally accounted for 0.004% - 0.14% of total SARS-CoV-2 reads across the samples, with a 69.24% maximal number of reads in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid cells derived from severe COVID19 patients and near no chimeric reads from patient blood buffy coat cells (corresponding to almost no total SARS-CoV-2 reads). A majority of chimeric junctions mapped to SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid (N) sequence (Fig. 1d-e). This is consistent with the finding that nucleocapsid (N) RNA is the most abundant SARS-CoV-2 sub-genomic RNA³¹, and thus is most likely to be a target for reverse transcription and integration. These analyses support the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 RNA may retro-integrate into the genome of infected cells resulting in the production of chimeric viral-cellular transcripts.

 

St. Vincent Evacuation A Vaccine Passport Mic Drop

nakedcapitalism |  As the use of vaccine passports snowballs around the world, concerns about their potential reach and implications are growing.

Vaccine passports (or passes or certificates) are being rushed through around the world, including in places where most people have not even been able to get a vaccine yet. They are being touted as a way of jump-starting the global economy by providing a means for people to prove their vaccinated status, allowing them to travel, shop, go to the gym, attend sporting and cultural events and conduct other indoor activities. Countries like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore have already introduced vaccine passports in the last couple of months.

Of course, the use of the word “passport” is deceptive. “Passport” implies a document endorsed by a state that establishes citizenship and guarantees diplomatic protection. A traditional passport does not require the bearer to participate in a vaccine program, although immunity certificates have existed for diseases such as Yellow Fever. Another difference is that a vaccine passport is likely to come in the form of a digital document. The potential scope of its application is also far broader than that of a normal passport. It could be required not only to establish identity and vaccine status at national borders but also to travel, access public buildings and basic services within one’s own country of residence.

In countries that already have an established national health service, such as the UK and Israel, the vaccine passport has been mandated at state level. In the US tech and health-care companies are firmly in the driving seat. At least 17 alternative programs are currently under development. As for the EU, it has proposed issuing “digital green certificates” that would allow EU residents to travel freely across the 27-nation bloc by the summer as long as they have been vaccinated, tested negative for COVID-19 or recovered from the disease. It’s worth noting that the EU has been studying the feasibility of creating a common EU vaccination card since early 2019.

International Initiatives

There are also initiatives taking place internationally such as the Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group, whose partners include WHO, UNICEF, ITU and the European Commission. The group “is focused on establishing key specifications, standards and a trust framework for a digital vaccination certificate to facilitate implementation of effective and interoperable digital solutions that support COVID-19 vaccine delivery and monitoring, with intended applicability to other vaccines.”

Another initiative is the CommonPass digital health app being developed by the Commons Project Foundation (CPJ), which was founded by the Rockefeller Foundation and is supported by the World Economic Forum. The CommonPass is both a framework and an app that “will allow individuals to access their lab results and vaccination records, and consent to have that information used to validate their COVID status without revealing any other underlying personal health information.”

Then there’s ID2020, a nongovernmental organization that advocates for digital IDs for the billion undocumented people worldwide and under-served groups like refugees. In 2019, ID2020 launched a new digital identity program in collaboration with the government of Bangladesh and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). It is now involved in the Good Health Pass Collaborative, “an open, inclusive, cross-sector initiative, bringing together leading companies and organizations from the technology, health, and travel sectors”.

Pause for Thought

Some of these initiatives are already being piloted by companies, including airlines, and local or regional authorities. All Nippons Airways has started a test of the CommonPass on its flights from Tokyo Haneda to New York. Last week New York unveiled its Excelsior pass, which is based on technology from IBM. Other states are likely to follow suit. France has also just completed a month-long trial of a health passport app for Air France passengers travelling to Martninique and Guadeloupe.

The speed at which these initiatives are being rushed out should give pause for thought. Just as with contact tracing apps, the rollout is haphazard and rife with conflicts of interest. The technology is unproven and the privacy issues are glaring. Below are seven reasons why I believe vaccine passports should worry us. Perhaps you can think of more.

Speaking Of Fools' Errands And Taking Membership Fees From Pissants....,

dailymail  |  Black reporter LOCKED OUT of Twitter for criticizing BLM founder's $1.4 million home purchase blasts big tech for making movement a 'sacred cow despite its financial grift'

• Patrisse Cullors, 37, has bought an expansive property in Topanga Canyon
• The district in which the BLM founder will now live is 88% white and 1.8% black
• Critics accused her of abandoning her social justice and activist roots
• Sports journalist Jason Whitlock was among those remarking on her purchase
• Twitter on Friday locked him out of his account in response to his tweet
• Whitlock told DailyMail.com he remains blocked by the social media network
• Twitter is demanding he delete his tweet linking to a celebrity real estate blog
• Whitlock says he remains 'in Twitter jail, because I won't post bail' 
• The action is the latest draconian step in censorship by the Silicon Valley firm

Have You Discovered The Beginning That Now You Seek The End?

 vanityfair  |  No wonder we’ve entered a new era in Silicon Valley, with the tech elite having their own period of sex, drugs, and rock and roll—often without the rock, the roll, or even the sex. Last year, a number of rich founders began experimenting with microdosing drugs to make it through the day, as two people with knowledge of these habits have told me, by taking tiny amounts of MDMA and LSD, and a long list of psilocybin mushrooms to help take the edge off, but not so much that you’re seeing tie-dyed dolphins or 3D cartoon characters chasing you down Market Street. For Musk, the pressures of being at the top led the board of Tesla to worry about the founder’s use of Ambien to get to sleep each night after the “excruciating” toll running Tesla had taken on him.

Some have even begun building their own microdosing labs, hiring chemists and pharmaceutical scientists to make bespoke batches of hallucinogens to pop like Skittles when reality gets a little too real. During the pandemic, I’ve heard of founders going to far-off places to experiment with ayahuasca, peyote, and the new drug of choice, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a synthetic drug that one person told me was “like doing 10 years of psychotherapy in five minutes.”

Then there’s the body hacking, which first made its way into the mainstream in 1984 by way of the sci-fi subculture novel Neuromancer but has since leapt off the page and into Palo Alto, where everyone seems to want to outdo their cohorts by pushing their bodies to extremes. You’ve got the Dorseys of the world bragging about how little they eat each day, the Zuckerbergs boasting of killing their own food, and an army of nerds now wearing every tracking device imaginable—from rings that follow your sleep to real-time sugar monitoring devices you inject into your arm—and then experimenting with all forms of starvation and sleep habits to show how in control they are of their bodies. There’s intermittent fasting, working under infrared heat lamps, calculating ketones, and working with “DIY surgeons” to implant magnets and microchips.

“I think this is all a result of a complete detachment from authenticity by these tech founders. They present a version of themselves that isn’t real, and then, when they look in the mirror, they see how inauthentic they really are, and the only way they can handle the illusion they’ve created is through drugs,” said one Silicon Valley insider who often spends time with the biohacking-obsessed ultrarich. “It’s all synthetic and it’s all an illusion.” The pandemic only heightened this, with people slipping into more extreme activities in their quest for control.

One Silicon Valley founder who sold his company to Google years ago told me that the year that followed the sale—when he had gone from an average American worrying about paying rent each month to seeing seven zeros at the end of his bank account—was one of the most miserable times of his life. “You think it’s going to solve all these problems,” the founder told me, “but it just creates so many more issues, both psychologically and existentially. You don’t know what to do with yourself anymore.” For Hsieh, the only thing he could do was run away from his demons and the reality in which he found himself imprisoned.

 

Has It Dawned On You Yet Why Google And Microsoft Have Indian CEO's?

buzzfeed  |  For more than a year, India’s government first cut off and then throttled internet access to Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir after unilaterally withdrawing the disputed region’s autonomy. Facebook executives reportedly shielded members of India’s ruling party from the platform’s hate speech rules to protect the company’s business interests. Right-wing trolls have used social media platforms to harass women who they say offended their religious sensibility. Hindu nationalists have repeatedly taken offense to original shows that Netflix and Amazon have produced, claiming that the platforms were offending Hindu gods and promoting “love jihad,” a conspiracy theory that accuses Muslim men of converting Hindu women. In 2020, rioters used Facebook Live to incite violence in Delhi. Last month, India’s government threatened to jail Twitter executives for not complying with an order to block hundreds of accounts, many of which were critical of the government, and Delhi police briefly threw a young climate activist in jail after charging her with sedition for editing a Google Doc.

I love tech. But watching it intersect with a Hindu nationalist government trying to crush dissent, choke a free press, and destroy a nation’s secular ethos doesn’t feel like something I bought a ticket to. Writing about technology from India now feels like having a front-row seat to the country’s rapid slide into authoritarianism. “It’s like watching a train wreck while you’re inside the train,” I Slacked my boss in November.

---

In the physical world, it seemed like things were spiraling out of control. At the end of 2019, protests about the controversial new citizenship law roiled the nation. In January 2020, masked goons unleashed violence at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, whose students and staff are frequently branded by the ruling party as “anti-national.” Soon after, communal riots rocked New Delhi, the city I live in. More than 50 people died. But still, millions of Indians could freely voice their opinions online, at least when the government didn’t shut down their internet.

This February, it felt like the walls finally closed in. In the final week of that month, India’s government imposed draconian rules that gave it the last word over what social media platforms will leave up, what streaming services will show, and what news websites will publish. It might also require messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal to break their encryption so that it can track who texted whom.

Social media companies are now required to take down anything the government deems problematic within three days, and anything that law enforcement is unhappy with within 36 hours. Platforms must also hand over people’s information to law enforcement agencies if they ask for it. If the platforms fail to comply, their local staff can be prosecuted, and companies could lose their protection from being held liable for content that people post.

If anyone in India takes offense to any scene in any show or any movie on any streaming service, they can file a complaint. If a service doesn’t respond or give a satisfactory explanation, the person who complained can appeal to the federal government, which can then compel services to censor, edit, or take down the content.

This Is A Fool's Errand - But That's Not Going To Stop Them From Trying

robbreport |  It might be an exaggeration to say BioViva CEO Liz Parrish believes death is optional, but for her, Asprey’s goal of living to 180 shows a distinct lack of ambition. “If you can reach homeostasis in the body,” Parrish says, “where it’s regenerating itself just a little bit faster than it’s degrading, then what do you die of? An accident or natural disaster, probably. There’s no expiration date at 90 or 100 years old.”

Tall, blond and fit, Parrish cuts a strikingly youthful figure at 49—one that might convince you to order whatever she’s having. But, like Asprey, she has received criticism from the longevity research community for becoming “patient zero” in her own experimental drug trial, aimed at halting aging at the cellular level. In 2015, Parrish underwent telomerase and follistatin gene therapies in Bogotá, Colombia. The procedures involved receiving around a hundred injections of a cocktail of genes and a virus modified to deliver those new genes into her body’s cells. The objective was to prevent age-related muscle loss and lengthen her telomeres: the “caps” at the end of our chromosomes. Scientists have identified their unraveling as not only a marker of aging but also a potential cause of age-related decline.

Parrish told the media about her clandestine experiment and has published periodic updates on her condition in the five years since, and she reports that she has indeed increased her muscle mass and lengthened her telomeres. Parrish’s punk-rock approach stems from her conviction that the medical-research community—both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and researchers who aren’t business-minded—is moving too slowly, with too much red tape, when it comes to advancing aging therapeutics. But gene therapy is a relatively new area of medicine that brings with it a host of new risks, including cancer, severe immune reactions and infections caused by the viral vector used to deliver the drug.

Parrish downplays such worries. “There may be risks,” she tells Robb Report. “But the known risk is that you’re 100 percent likely to die. So you have to decide for yourself if the potential benefit outweighs that.”

Humans have always aspired to find the fountain of youth, so people might be skeptical about the fact that anti-aging technologies are working now,” says British investor and businessman Jim Mellon. “But the fact is that this is finally happening, and we need to seize the moment.” Mellon cofounded Juvenescence, a three-year-old pharmaceutical company that’s investing in multiple technologies simultaneously to increase the odds of bringing winning products to market.

Mellon, 63, has made his fortune betting on well-timed investment opportunities, and he predicts that a new “stock-market mania” for life extension is just around the corner. “This is like the internet dial-up phase of longevity biotech,” he enthuses. “If you’d invested in the internet in the very early days, you’d be one of the richest people on the planet. We’re at that stage now, so the opportunity for investors is huge.” According to a report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, he’s not wrong: The market for technologies to increase human life span is projected to grow sixfold to $610 billion in just the next five years.

 

Culture WAR! What Is The Gentrified Karenwaffen Good For? Absolutely Nothing....,

oftwominds  |  Those who lived through The Cultural Revolution are reticent about revealing their experiences. Even in the privacy of their homes in the U.S., their voices become hushed and their reluctance to give voice to their experiences is evident.

The unifying thread in my view is the accused belonged to some "counter-revolutionary" elite --or they were living vestiges of a pre-revolutionary elite (children of the landlord class, professors, etc.)--and it was now open season on all elites, presumed or real.

What generates such spontaneous, self-organizing violence on a national scale? My conclusion is that cultural revolutions result from the suppression of legitimate political expression and the failure of the regime to meet its lofty idealistic goals.

Cultural revolutions are an expression of disappointment and frustration with corruption and the lack of progress in improving everyday life, frustrations that have no outlet in a regime of self-serving elites who view dissent as treason and/or blasphemy.

By 1966, China's progress since 1949 had been at best uneven, and at worst catastrophic: the Great Leap Forward caused the deaths of millions due to malnutrition and starvation, and other centrally planned programs were equally disastrous for the masses.

Given the quick demise of the Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom movement of open expression, young people realized there was no avenue for dissent within the Party, and no way to express their frustration with the Party's failure to fulfil its idealistic goals and promises.

When there is no relief valve in the pressure cooker, it's eventually released in a Cultural Revolution that unleashes all the bottled-up frustrations on elites which are deemed politically vulnerable. These frustrations have no outlet politically because they're threatening to the status quo.

All these repressed emotions will find some release and expression, and whatever avenues are blocked by authorities will channel the frustrations into whatever is still open.

A Cultural Revolution takes the diversity of individuals and identities and reduces them into an abstraction which gives the masses permission to criticize the abstract class that "deserves" whatever rough justice is being delivered by the Cultural Revolution.

As the book review excerpt noted, the definition of who deserves long overdue justice shifts with the emergent winds, and so those at the head of the Revolution might find themselves identified as an illegitimate elite that must be unseated.

I submit that these conditions exist in the U.S.: the systemic failure of the status quo to deliver on idealized promises and the repression of dissent outside "approved" (i.e. unthreatening to the status quo) boundaries.

What elite can be criticized without drawing the full repressive powers of the central state? What elite will it be politically acceptable to criticize? I submit that "the wealthy" are just such an abstract elite.

To protect itself, a repressive status quo implicitly signals that the masses can release their ire on an abstract elite with indistinct boundaries--a process that will divert the public anger, leaving the Powers That Be still in charge.

But just as in China's Cultural Revolution, central authorities will quickly lose control of conditions on the ground. They will maintain the illusion of control even as events spiral ever farther from their control. The falcon will no longer hear the falconer.

Corporate Enforcement Of Federal Censorship Imperatives

CTH |  The Big Tech ministry of COVID compliance has again removed scientific discussion that runs counter to the approved narrative presented by the ideological community.  In this article we explain why….

…”COVID Compliance is Infrastructure“

Governor Ron DeSantis held a roundtable discussion with panel experts from world-renowned doctors and epidemiologists from Oxford, Stanford and Harvard.  However, the panel debated the efficacy of masks on children and that apparently was considered too contrarian for the Big Tech control agents.

(Via NBC) – […] The video of DeSantis’ roundtable discussion last month at the state Capitol in Tallahassee was removed on Wednesday because it violated the social media platform’s standards, YouTube spokesperson Elena Hernandez said.

[…] “YouTube has clear policies around Covid-19 medical misinformation to support the health and safety of our users,” Hernandez said in a statement. “We removed AIER’s video because it included content that contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of Covid-19.”

[…]  DeSantis’s press secretary Cody McCloud called YouTube’s move “another blatant example of Big Tech attempting to silence those who disagree with their woke corporate agenda.”

“YouTube claimed they removed the video because ‘it contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities,’ yet this roundtable was led by world-renowned doctors and epidemiologists from Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard, all of whom are eminently qualified to speak on the global health crisis,” McCloud said. “Good public health policy should include a variety of scientific and technical expertise, and YouTube’s decision to remove this video suppresses productive dialogue of these complex issues.”

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, one of the scientists on the panel, said this “was a policy forum, in which it is appropriate to consider both the benefits and costs of a policy (child masking) when making judgments and recommendations.” (read more)

CTH warned since last summer of the ramifications if a leftist group used COVID-19 to expand federal power over peoples lives and livelihoods.  In January JoeBama’s team unleashed a series of TEN EXECUTIVE ORDERS fully weaponizing the opportunity.  Their need to control the public behavior requires them to control public information.

(1) Executive order on COVID worker Safety, weaponized Dept of Labor, OSHA.  Literally word-for-word what CTH predicted.   [Predictions HERE and HERE]

(2) Executive order on COVID school safety, weaponized the Dept of Education. Leverages federal funds, grants.  Supports the education labor union effort. Exactly as expected.

(3) Executive order creating COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force.  Weaponizing the HHS takeover; the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Labor, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Secretary of Education, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.  Again, exactly as predicted.

(4) Executive order using National Health Crisis as a security threat.  Weaponizing the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Secretary of Homeland Security.

(5) Executive order taking over National Guard.  The domestic terrorists need a category within the health emergency.  The isolation and detainment camps need security. “Support of Operations or Missions to Prevent and Respond to the Spread of COVID-19. (a) The Secretary of Defense shall, to the maximum extent feasible and consistent with mission requirements (including geographic proximity), request pursuant to 32 U.S.C. 502(f) that all State and territorial governors order National Guard forces to perform duty to fulfill mission assignments.”

(6) Executive order taking control of travel.  “The Secretary of Labor, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Secretary of Transportation (including through the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)), the Secretary of Homeland Security (including through the Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Commandant of the United States Coast Guard).

You can read the rest HERE.

Social changes under the guise of COVID-19 mitigation, are the entry point for the goals and aspirations of the political left on a national and global scale. COVID-19 is a virus, but also a very important political weapon, and we are about to discover exactly what the purpose of the hype is all about. What follows will help understand; and when you encounter the fear it will help to reconcile what people cannot figure out.

Elite Discussion Of Vaccine Passport Challlenges By Those Who Would Mandate Them

Harvard |  As COVID-19 vaccines become more widespread, passports that certify immunization status may facilitate a return to normalcy, write Lawrence O. Gostin, I. Glenn Cohen, and Jana Shaw in a viewpoint published today in JAMA.

But these vaccine passports, or digital health passes, are not without scientific, legal, and ethical challenges.

I asked Gostin, Faculty Director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University Law Center, Cohen, Faculty Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, and Shaw, a professor of pediatrics at Upstate Medical University, about the key areas of concern and promise for vaccine passports. Our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, follows.

Chloe Reichel: What is a digital health pass?

I. Glenn Cohen: A digital health pass, sometimes referred to as a vaccine passport, is essentially a way of digitally recording that someone has had a vaccination, and then details about the date of vaccination, and potentially the kind of vaccine they were given, to the extent relevant. It might be something created by a governmental authority, or might be something created in the private sector.

CR: How can these digital health passes help us get to a new normal?

Jana Shaw: Vaccine passports, or digital health passes, let others know that you are safe and that you are keeping others safe by getting vaccinated. Places that require digital health passes are making sure everyone there is safe.

Lawrence O. Gostin: Essentially, the goal is to try to return to as normal as possible, as safely as we can, and as soon as we can.

And so the idea of a digital health pass is to make sure that everyone in a given space is protected, and also has a diminished potential for spreading the infection to others.

CR: Can you describe some of the scientific challenges associated with implementing digital health passes?

JS: There are numerous challenges to creating digital health passes.

Length of protection is one of them. However, that can be easily addressed by including the date of vaccination. As we get more information on length of protection from vaccination, vaccine passports can be then used accordingly.

Another limitation is that the efficacy of various COVID-19 vaccines differs. However, we recognize that the efficacy differs against developing symptomatic disease, and all authorized vaccines are very effective against serious illness.

In addition, as we monitor the emergence of variants of concern, there have been reports of decreased vaccine efficacy among certain vaccines. However, that currently is being addressed by vaccine manufacturers. They are developing vaccines that target the emergent variants to ensure that their vaccines will continue to be effective as variants evade vaccine-induced immunity.

We could not really talk about challenges and not talk about access to vaccination. Universal access to vaccines has to be ensured before digital health passes are rolled out, to mitigate the risk of transmission and the risk of creating an equity divide for those who are not vaccinated.

Remember Where You Heard It First (Last March-April)

 

Seriously - Am I The Only Cat Fixated On This LOW HANGING SARS-CoV2 FRUIT?!?!?!

thescientist |  Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week (November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine.

The results demonstrate the ability of the SHC014 surface protein to bind and infect human cells, validating concerns that this virus—or other coronaviruses found in bat species—may be capable of making the leap to people without first evolving in an intermediate host, Nature reported. They also reignite a debate about whether that information justifies the risk of such work, known as gain-of-function research. “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, told Nature.

In October 2013, the US government put a stop to all federal funding for gain-of-function studies, with particular concern rising about influenza, SARS, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). “NIH [National Institutes of Health] has funded such studies because they help define the fundamental nature of human-pathogen interactions, enable the assessment of the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents, and inform public health and preparedness efforts,” NIH Director Francis Collins said in a statement at the time. “These studies, however, also entail biosafety and biosecurity risks, which need to be understood better.”

Baric’s study on the SHC014-chimeric coronavirus began before the moratorium was announced, and the NIH allowed it to proceed during a review process, which eventually led to the conclusion that the work did not fall under the new restrictions, Baric told Nature. But some researchers, like Wain-Hobson, disagree with that decision.

The debate comes down to how informative the results are. “The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers University, told Nature.

But Baric and others argued the study’s importance. “[The results] move this virus from a candidate emerging pathogen to a clear and present danger,” Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which samples viruses from animals and people in emerging-diseases hotspots across the globe, told Nature.

Multipolarity: Money And Debt As Public Utility Vs. The Vampire Squid

nakedcapitalism |  The important characteristic (of Russia and China) is that banking and finance are public functions. 

In modern (Anglo-Judeo-American) geopolitics, “democratic” means financialized. It is still, as Aristotle described, pre-oligarchic. But this dynamic is creditor-driven. And creditors not only control the supply of money and credit, but also the legal system governing creditor privileges (“rights”) to appropriate the assets and income of their debtors.

This financial dimension is the main characteristic neglected by modern political theory and popular language. It is important to stress that the antonym of “democracy” is not well described by pejorative words such as “autocracy” or other journalistic terms. 

There is no single term for a socialist state in which banking and debt laws are public utilities. But some term needs to be proposed – and “enlightened despotism” or “philosopher-king” state sound anachronistic. Or perhaps de-financialized state, social-credit state (problems with the SocCred movement), or social-creditor state.

India Is The Petri Dish For Rapidly Prototyping Great Resets On Unarmed Pissants

off-guardian |  Environmentalist Vandana Shiva has described on numerous occasions how the Gates Foundation through its ‘Ag One’ initiative is pushing for one type of agriculture for the whole world. A top-down approach regardless of what farmers or the public need or want. The strategy includes digital farming, in which farmers are monitored and mined for their agricultural data, which is then repackaged and sold back to them.

Along with Bill Gates, this is very much the agrifood model that Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva and Cargill have in mind. The tech giants recent entry into the sector will increasingly lead to a mutually beneficial integration between the companies that supply products to farmers (pesticides, seeds, fertilisers, tractors, drones, etc) and those that control the flow of data (on soil, weather, pests, weeds, land use, consumer preferences, etc) and have access to digital (cloud) infrastructure. A system based on corporate concentration and centralisation.

Those farmers who remain in the system will become passive recipients of corporate directives and products on farms owned by the Gates Foundation (now one of the largest owners of farmland in the US), agribusiness and financial institutions/speculators.

The three pieces of farm legislation in India (passed by parliament but on hold) are essential for laying the foundation for this model of agriculture. The legislation is The Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act and The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act.

The foreign and home-grown (Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani) billionaires who have pushed for these laws require a system of contract farming dominated by their big tech, big agribusiness and big retail interests. Smallholder peasant agriculture is regarded as an impediment to what they require: industrial-scale farms where driverless tractors, drones and genetically engineered seeds are the norm and all data pertaining to land, water, weather, seeds and soils is controlled by them.

It is unfortunate that prominent journalists and media outlets in India are celebrating the legislation and have attempted to unjustifiably discredit farmers who are protesting. It is also worrying that key figures like Dr Ramesh Chand, a member of NITI (National Institute for Transforming India) Ayog, recently stated that the legislation is necessary.

When these figures attack farmers or promote the farm acts, what they are really doing is cheerleading for the destruction of local markets and independent small-scale enterprises, whether farmers, hawkers, food processers or mom and pop corner stores. And by implication, they are helping to ensure that India is surrendering control over its food.

They are doing the bidding of the Gates Foundation and the global agrifood corporations which also want India to eradicate its buffer food stocks. Some of the very corporations which will then control stocks that India would purchase with foreign exchange holdings. At that stage, any notion of sovereign statehood would be bankrupt as India’s food needs would be dependent on attracting foreign exchange reserves via foreign direct investment or borrowing.

This would represent the ultimate betrayal of India’s farmers and democracy as well as the final surrender of food security and food sovereignty to unaccountable global traders and corporations.

The farm legislation is regressive and will eventually lead to the country relying on outside forces to feed its population. This, in an increasingly volatile world prone to conflict, public health scares, unregulated land and commodity speculation and price shocks.

Carbon Zero Pissants Eat Bugs And Own Nothing

cam.ac.uk |  We  have  to  cut  our  greenhouse  gas  emissions  to  zero  by  2050:  that’s  what  climate  scientists  tell  us,  it’s  what  social  protesters are asking for and it’s now the law in the UK. But we  aren’t  on  track.  For  twenty  years  we’ve  been  trying  to  solve the problem with new or breakthrough technologies that supply energy and allow industry to keep growing, so we don’t have to change our lifestyles. But although some exciting  new  technology  options  are  being  developed,  it  will  take  a  long  time  to  deploy  them,  and  they  won’t  be  operating at scale within thirty years.

Meanwhile, our cars are getting heavier, we’re flying more each year and we heat our homes to higher temperatures. We  all  know  that  this  makes  no  sense,  but  it’s  difficult  to  start  discussing  how  we  really  want  to  address  climate  change while we keep hoping that new technologies will take the problem away.

In response, this report starts from today’s technologies: if we really want to reach zero emissions in thirty years time, what  does  that  involve?  Most  of  what  we  most  enjoy  -  spending time together as families or communities, leisure, sport,  creativity  -  can  continue  and  grow  unhindered.  We  need  to  switch  to  using  electricity  as  our  only  form  of  energy  and  if  we  continue  today’s  impressive  rates  of  growth  in  non-emitting  generation,  we’ll  only  have  to  cut  our  use  of  energy  to  60%  of  today’s  levels.  We  can  achieve  this  with  incremental  changes  to  the  way  we  use  energy: we can drive smaller cars and take the train when possible,  use  efficient  electric  heat-pumps  to  keep  warm  and buy buildings, vehicles and equipment that are better designed and last much longer.

The two big challenges we face with an all electric future are flying  and  shipping.  Although  there  are  lots  of  new  ideas  about  electric  planes,  they  won’t  be  operating  at  commercial   scales   within   30   years,   so   zero   emissions   means that for some period, we’ll all stop using aeroplanes. Shipping  is  more  challenging:  although  there  are  a  few  military  ships  run  by  nuclear  reactors,  we  currently  don’t  have  any  large  electric  merchant  ships,  but  we  depend  strongly on shipping for imported food and goods.

In  addition,  obeying  the  law  of  our  Climate  Change  Act  requires that we stop doing anything that causes emissions regardless of its energy source. This requires that we stop eating beef  and  lamb  -  ruminants  who  release  methane  as  they  digest  grass  -  and  already  many  people  have  started  to  switch  to  more  vegetarian  diets.    However  the  most difficult problem is cement:  making cement releases emissions   regardless   of   how   it’s   powered,   there   are   currently no alternative options available at scale, and we don’t  know  how  to  install  new  renewables  or    make  new  energy efficient buildings without it.

We need to discuss these challenges as a society. Making progress  on  climate  change  requires  that  the  three  key  groups of players - government, businesses and individuals -  work  together,  rather  than  waiting  for  the  other  two  to  act first. But until we face up to the fact that breakthrough technologies won’t arrive fast enough, we can’t even begin having the right discussion.

Committing    to    zero    emissions    creates    tremendous    opportunities:  there  will  be  huge  growth  in  the  use  and  conversion of electricity for travel, warmth and in industry; growth  in  new  zero  emissions  diets;  growth  in  materials  production,  manufacturing  and  construction  compatible  with zero emissions; growth in leisure and domestic travel; growth in businesses that help us to use energy efficiently and to conserve the value in materials.

Bringing     about     this     change,     and     exploring     the     opportunities  it  creates  requires  three  things  to  happen  together: as individuals we need to be part of the process, exploring  the  changes  in  lifestyle  we  prefer  in  order  to  make zero emission a reality. Protest is no longer enough  -  we must together discuss the way we want the solution to develop; the government needs to treat this as a delivery challenge - just like we did with the London Olympics, on-time  and  on-budget;  the  emitting  businesses  that  must  close  cannot  be  allowed  to  delay  action,  but  meanwhile  the authors of this report are funded by the government to work    across  industry  to  support  the  transition  to  growth  compatible with zero emissions.

Breakthrough technologies will be important in the future but we cannot depend on them to reach our zero emissions target  in  2050.  Instead  this  report  sets  an  agenda  for  a  long-overdue public conversation across the whole of UK society about how we really want to achieve Absolute Zero within thirty years

If Livestock Had ANY IDEA What's In Store For Them....,

newsweek  |  The Spanish firm Grifols helped set off a kerfuffle last year when it, along with other firms, offered nearly double the going price for blood donations for a COVID-19 treatment trial. Brigham Young University in Idaho had to threaten some enterprising students with suspension to keep them from intentionally trying to contract COVID-19. The trial failed, however, and now the Barcelona-based firm is hoping to extract something far more valuable from the plasma of young volunteers: a set of microscopic molecules that could reverse the process of aging itself.

Earlier this year, Grifols closed on a $146 million-deal to buy Alkahest, a company founded by Stanford University neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray, who, along with Saul Villeda, revealed in scientific papers published in 2011 and 2014 that the blood from young mice had seemingly miraculous restorative effects on the brains of elderly mice. The discovery adds to a hot area of inquiry called geroscience that "seeks to understand molecular and cellular mechanisms that make aging a major risk factor and driver of common chronic conditions and diseases of older adulthood," according to the National Institutes of Health. In the last six years, Alkahest has identified more than 8,000 proteins in the blood that show potential promise as therapies. Its efforts and those of Grifols have resulted in at least six phase 2 trials completed or underway to treat a wide range of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Alkahest and a growing number of other geroscience health startups signal a change in thinking about some of the most intractable diseases facing humankind. Rather than focusing solely on the etiology of individual diseases like heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's and arthritis—or, for that matter, COVID-19—geroscientists are trying to understand how these diseases relate to the single largest risk factor of all: human aging. Their goal is to hack the process of aging itself and, in the process, delay or stave off the onset of many of the diseases most associated with growing old.

The idea that aging and illness go hand and hand is, of course, nothing new. What's new is the newfound confidence of scientists that "aging" can be measured, reverse-engineered and controlled.

Until recently, "people working on diseases did not think that aging was modifiable," says Felipe Sierra, who recently retired as director of the Division of Aging Biology at the National Institute on Aging, a part of the NIH. "That is actually what many medical books say: The main risk factor for cardiovascular disease is aging, but we cannot change aging so let's talk about cholesterol and obesity. For Alzheimer's, aging is the main risk factor—but let's talk about the buildup in the brain of beta-amyloid proteins. Now that is beginning to change."

 

Pissants Must Eat Bugs: But For Us - The Blood Is The Life

medicalbag  |  Some say that Countess Elizabeth Báthory, considered by many to be the world’s worst female serial killer, was the true inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. After all, legend has it that she bathed in the blood of at least 650 servant girls she had tortured and killed. She was said to be so evil that villagers kept their daughters in hiding for fear that Elizabeth would take them. Her gruesome activities even earned her such names as “the Infamous Lady” and “the Blood Countess.” This is her story.

Erzsébet Báthory, more commonly known in the Western world as Elizabeth, was born in 1560 to one of the most powerful Protestant families in Hungary at the time. She was the daughter of Baron George Báthory and Baroness Anna Báthory, who were both Báthorys by birth. Possibly stemming from inbreeding within her family, it is said that from an early age Elizabeth suffered from seizures, loss of control, and fits of rage. As a child, she witnessed the brutal punishments handed out by her family’s officers on their estates; one anecdote describes a gypsy accused of theft who was sewn up in the belly of a dying horse and left to die. Her family tree certainly included some disturbed kin as well. One of her uncles taught her Satanism, and she learned about sadomasochism from her aunt.

Elizabeth was married by the time she was 15 years old to Count Ferenc Nádasdy, a soldier who would go on to lead the armies of Hungary against Ottoman forces threatening Central Europe. After her marriage, the countess became the mistress of the Nádasdy estate, where the couple earned a reputation as harsh masters. Building upon her own cruelty, it is believed that Ferenc showed her some of his own ways of punishing his servants. After 10 years, Elizabeth gave birth to 3 daughters and a son. 

Although the count participated in his wife’s torture activities, it wasn’t until the death of her husband in the early 1600s that Elizabeth’s true evil came to fruition. She eventually moved to one of her castles at Čachtice in northwest Hungary (now Slovakia) and began surrounding herself with a cohort of servants to help her with her torture practices. Legend has it that one day an attendant girl was brushing Elizabeth’s hair when she accidentally pulled too hard and it tugged on a snag in her hair. The countess erupted in anger, jumping up and striking the girl with the back of her hand. The strike was so hard that it made the girl bleed and some of that blood was left on Elizabeth’s hand. Later that night, Elizabeth noticed that the skin on her hand where the blood had been looked more youthful than she had seen it in many years. This gave her the idea that if such a small amount of blood could make her hand look so young, then more could restore youthfulness to her whole body. It’s said that this is when the madness began and Elizabeth started to bathe in the blood of virgin girls.  

Young women began to disappear from villages near and far, as well as children. Unhappy girls were lured to the castle with the prospect that they would find work there but were never seen again. When they arrived, they were locked up in a cellar as they awaited torture. Elizabeth carried out much of the torture herself, often beating the girls to death. Sometimes she would sew a girl’s mouth shut, force her to eat her own flesh, or burn her genitals. When she was too sick to get out of bed to beat them, Elizabeth would order her servants to bring up a girl to her quarters where she would bite their faces and shoulders. In other instances, she would stick needles underneath the girl’s fingertips before cutting off the fingers of those who tried to take them out. Soon Elizabeth began to run out of young women, because she had either already taken them, or the villagers had started to hide their daughters out of fear that she would take them. This is when the countess began to resort to noble girls, a decision that would ultimately lead to her demise.

Tissue Rejuvenation Via Plasma Dilution

lifespan  |  Back in 2005, Drs. Irina and Michael Conboy showed that joining the circulatory systems of young and old mice together in a procedure called parabiosis could rejuvenate aged tissues and reverse some aspects of aging in old mice.

Following this discovery, many researchers concluded that there must be something special in young blood that was able to spur rejuvenation in aged animals, and various companies have been trying to find out what. Indeed, we recently reported that researchers were apparently successful in halving the epigenetic age of old rats by treating them with Elixir, a proprietary mix of pro-youthful factors normally found in young blood.

However, a question still remains: was the rejuvenation the result of there being something beneficial in the young blood, or is it more a case of dilution of the harmful factors present in old blood?

Today, we want to spotlight a new study by Drs. Irina and Michael Conboy, which again lends more weight to the idea that the rejuvenation is most likely due to a dilution of pro-aging factors in old blood rather than there being any special sauce in young blood [1].

During the study, the research team discovered that by replacing half of the blood plasma in old mice with a saline and albumin mixture, the albumin replacing the lost protein that was removed when the original old blood plasma was taken, they could achieve a similar or even greater rejuvenation effect in brain, liver, and muscle tissues as joining two mice together through parabiosis or giving old mice young blood.

We had the opportunity to interview Drs. Irina and Michael Conboy about this new discovery and to see if we could get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding aged blood rejuvenation.

Steve: This recent paper builds on the 2015 paper of TGF beta, but it goes even further back to the days when you guys had a lab next door to Amy Wagers and Tony Wyss-Coray and you all shared the techniques, including the parabiosis technique.

Irina: Yes. Actually, I would like also to thank you, Elena, and the whole organization for highlighting our work and giving us an opportunity to speak in interviews.

Steve: You are very welcome. So, is this dilution? Is it what you put in that’s more important, is it what you take out, or is it both? I personally think that the evidence strongly suggests that it’s more what you take out, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t good stuff in young blood.

Irina: Since our 2005 heterochronic parabiosis paper, many people jumped into this boat of young blood, thinking that the reason for rejuvenation is that there are less young factors in an old animal and we provided them. Meanwhile, all our work even leading to that paper suggested the opposite outcome: that there are excessive factors in old blood that are actually good proteins; for example, TGF beta. You cannot live without TGF beta. But, when people age, the levels of this protein become elevated, and they start doing counterproductive things for tissue repair, induce inflammation, increase fibrosis, and prevent proliferation of tissue stem cells. That was our point of view for the past 15 years, and every single paper that we published since was putting forward the general idea that it is not the young blood, it is the old blood that needs thought and attention.

Have Elites Acquired The Technology To Rule Without The Gentry?

michaelochurch  |   In a society like ours, the upper and lower classes have more in common with each other than either has with the middle class. The upper and lower classes “live like animals”, but for very different reasons. The upper classes are empowered to engage their primal, base urges; the lower classes are pummeled with fear on a daily basis and regress to animalism not out of moral paucity but in order to survive. People in the lower class live lives that are consumed entirely by money, because they lack the means of a dignified life. Those in the upper class, likewise, experience a life dominated by money, because maintaining injustices favorable to oneself is hard work. So, even though the motivations are different (fear at the bottom, greed at the top) the lower and upper classes are united in what the middle class perceives as “crass materialism” and, therefore, have strikingly similar cultures. Their lives are run by that thing called “money” toward which the middle classes pretend– and it is very much pretend– to be ambivalent about. The middle classes are sheltered, until the cultural protection, on which their semi-privileged status depends, runs out.

The “middle-est” of the middle class is the Gentry. Here we’re talking about people who dislike pawnbrokers and stock traders alike, who appear to lead a society from the front while its real owners lead it from the shadows. This said, I have my doubts on the matter of there being one, singular Gentry. I would argue that corporate middle management, the clergy, the political establishments of both major U.S. political parties, TED-talk onanist “thought leaders” and media personalities, and even Instagram “influencers” could all be called Gentries; in no obvious or formal way do these groups have much to do with one another. Only in one thing are they united: by the middle 2010s it became clear that both the Elite (bourgeoisie) and Labor (self-aaware proletariat) were fed up with all these Gentries. Starting around 2013, an anti-Gentry hategasm consumed the United States, and as a member of said (former) Gentry I can’t say we didn’t deserve it.

Technology, I believe, is a major cause of this. Silicon Valley began as a 1970s Gentry paradise; by 2010, it had become a monument to Elite excess, arrogance, and malefaction. Modern technology has given today’s employers an oppressive power the Stasi and KGB only dreamt of. The American Gentry was a PR wing for capitalism when it needed to win hearts and minds; but with today’s technological weaponry, the rich no longer see a need to be well-liked by those they rule.

For a concrete example, compare the “old style” bureaucratic, paperwork corporation of the midcentury and the “new style” technological one, in which workers are tracked, often unawares, down to minutes. The old-style companies were hierarchical and feudalistic but, by giving middle managers the ability to protect their underlings, ran on a certain sense of reciprocated loyalty– a social contract, if you will– that no longer exists. The worker agreed not to undermine, humiliate, or sabotage his manager; the manager, in turn, agreed to represent the worker as an asset to the company even when said worker had a below-average year. All you had to do in the old-style company was be liked (or, at least, not be despised) by your boss. If your boss liked you, you got promoted. If your boss hated you, you got fired. If you were anywhere from about 3.00 to 6.99 on his emotional spectrum, you moved diagonally or laterally, your boss repping you as a 6.75/10 “in search of a better fit” so you moved along quickly and peaceably. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it worked better than what came afterward.

I’ve worked in the software industry long enough to know that software engineers are the most socially clueless people on earth. I’ve often heard them debate “the right” metrics to use to track software productivity. My advice to them is: Always fight metrics. Sabotage the readings, or blackmail a higher-up by catfishing as a 15-year-old girl, or call in a union that’ll drop a pipe on that shit. Always, always, always fight a metric that management wishes to impose on you, because while a metric can hurt you (by flagging you as a low performer) it will never help you. In the old-style company, automated surveillance was impossible and performance was largely inscrutable and only loyalty mattered– your career was based on your boss’s opinion of you. It only took one thing to get a promotion: be liked by your boss. In the new-style company, devised by management consultants and software peddlers with evil intentions, getting a promotion requires you to pass the metrics and be liked by your boss. In the old-style company, you could get fired if your boss really, really hated you. (As I said, if he merely disliked you, he’d rep you as a solid performer “in search of a better fit” so you could transfer peacefully, and you’d get to try again with a new boss.) In the new-style company, you can get fired because your boss hates you or because you fail the metrics. The “user story points” that product managers insist are not an individual performance measure (and absolutely are, by the way) are evidence that only the prosecution may use. This is terrible for workers. There are new ways to fail and get fired; the route to success is constricted by an increase in the number of targets that must be hit. The old-style hierarchical company, at least, had simple rules: be loyal to your boss. Having been a middle manager, I can also say that the new-style company is humiliating for us– we can’t protect our reports. You have to “demand accountability from” people, but you can’t really do anything to help them.

This, I think, gives us a metaphor for the American Gentry’s failure. Middle managers who cannot protect their subordinates from the company’s more evil instincts (such as the instinct to fire everyone and hire replacements 5 percent cheaper) have no reason to expect true loyalty. They become superfluous performance cops and taskmasters, and even if they are personally liked, their roles are justifiably hated (including by those who have to perform them.)

More On The Ruling Elite And Their Narrative,Technology, And Governance Endgame(s)

indiepf |  What I’ve called the Labor, Gentry, and Elite “ladders” can more easily be described as “infrastructures”. For Labor, this infrastructure is largely physical and the relevant connection is knowing how to use that physical device or space, and getting people to trust a person to competently use (without owning, because that’s out of the question for most) these resources. For the Gentry, it’s an “invisible graph” of knowledge and education and “interestingness”, comprised largely of ideas. For the Elite, it’s a tight, exclusive network centered on social connections, power, and dominance. People can be connected to more than one of these infrastructures, but people usually bind more tightly to the one of higher status, except when at the transitional ranks (G4 and E4) which tend to punt people who don’t ascend after some time. The overwhelmingly high likelihood is that a person is aligned most strongly to one and only one of these structures. The values are too conflicting for a person not to pick one horse or the other.

I’ve argued that the ladders connect at a two-rung difference, with L2 ~ G4, L1 ~ G3, G2 ~ E4, and G1 ~ E3. These are “social equivalencies” that don’t involve a change in social status, so they’re the easiest to transitions to make (in both directions). They represent a transfer from one form of capital to another. A skilled laborer (L2) who begins taking night courses (G4) is using time to get an education rather than more money. Likewise, one who moves from the high gentry (G2) to a 90-hour-per-week job in private wealth management (E4) is applying her refined intellectual skills and knowledge to serving the rich, in the hope of making the connections to become one of them.

That said, these ladders often come into conflict. The most relevant one to most of my readers will be the conflict between the Gentry and the Elite. The Gentry tends to be left-libertarian and values creativity, individual autonomy, and free expression. The Elite tends toward center-right authoritarianism and corporate conformity, and it views creativity as dangerous (except when applied to hiding financial risks or justifying illegal wars). The Gentry believes that it is the deserving elite and the face of the future, and that it can use culture to engineer a future in which its values are elite; while the upper tier of the Elite finds the Gentry pretentious, repugnant, self-indulgent, and subversive. The relationship between the Gentry and Elite is incredibly contentious. It’s a cosmic, ubiquitous war between the past and the future.

Between the Gentry and Labor, there is an attitude of distrust. The Elite has been running a divide-and-conquer strategy between these two categories for decades. This works because the Elite understands (and can ape) the culture of the Gentry, but has something in common with Labor that sets the categories apart from the Gentry: a conception of work as a theater for masculine dominance. This is something that the Elite and Labor both believe in– the visceral strength and importance of the alpha-male in high-stakes gambling settings such as most modern work– but that the Gentry would rather deny. Gender is a major part of the Elite’s strategy in turning Labor against the Gentry: make the Gentry look effeminate. That’s why “feminist” is practically a racial slur, despite the world desperately needing attention to women’s political equality, health and well-being (that is, feminism).

The Elite also uses the Underclass in a different process: the Elite wants Labor think the Gentry intends to conspire with the Underclass to dismantle Labor values and elevate these “obviously undeserving” people to, at least, the status of Labor if not promoted above them. They exploit fear in Labor. One might invoke racism and the “Southern strategy” in politics as an example of this, but the racial part is incidental. The Elite don’t care whether it’s blacks or Latinos or “illigals” or red-haired people or homosexuals (most of whom are not part of the Underclass) that are being used to frighten Labor into opposing and disliking the Gentry; they just know that the device works and that it has pretty much always worked.

The relationship between the Gentry and Elite is one of open rivalry, and that between the Gentry and Labor is one of distrust. What about Labor and the Elite? That one is not symmetric. The Elite exploit and despise Labor as a class comprised mostly of “useful idiots”. How does Labor see the Elite? They don’t. The Elite has managed to convince Labor that the Gentry (who are open about their cultural elitism, while the Elite hides its social and economic elitism) is the actual “liberal elite” responsible for Labor’s misery over the past 30 years. In effect, the Elite has constructed an “infinity pool” where the Elite appears to be a hyper-successful extension of Labor, lumping these two disparate ladders into an “us” and placing the Gentry and Underclass into “them”.