"It's not a vaccine anyway?" She is admitting having conscious awareness, she never informed him before he took his sample away for analysis ... Is that the first to cry ... "I was just doing my job"
Luke 1-5 Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. 2 For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. 3 Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops. 4 And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. 5 But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him. Fist tap Dale.
jonathanturley | Under a free speech approach, cakeshop owners have a right to refuse
to prepare cakes that offend their deep-felt values, including
religious, political or social values. Thus, a Jewish cakeshop owner
should be able to decline to make a “Mein Kampf” cake for a local
skinhead group, a Black owner to decline to make a white
supremacist-themed cake, or a gay baker to decline to make a cake with
anti-LGBT slogans. While these bakers cannot discriminate in selling
prepared cakes, the act of decorating a cake is a form of expression,
and requiring such preparation is a form of compelled speech.
In the same way, NFL teams have a free speech right to prevent
kneeling or other political or social demonstrations by players during
games, Citizen’s United has a right to support political causes — and,
yes, Facebook has a right to censor speech on its platform.
Free speech also allows the rest of us to oppose these businesses
over their policies. We have a right to refuse to subsidize or support
companies that engage in racial or content discrimination. Thus, with
social media companies, Congress should not afford these companies legal
immunity or other protections when they engage in censorship.
These companies once were viewed as neutral platforms for people to
exchange views — people who affirmatively “friend” or invite the views
of others. If Big Tech wants to be treated like a telephone company, it
must act like a telephone company. We wouldn’t tolerate AT&T
interrupting calls to object to some misleading conversation, or cutting
the line for those who misinform others.
As a neutral platform for communications, telephone companies receive
special legal and economic status under our laws. Yet, it sometimes
seems Facebook wants to be treated like AT&T but act like the DNC.
In defending Big Tech’s right to censor people, University of
California at Irvine law professor Richard Hasen declared that “Twitter
is a private company, and it is entitled to include or exclude people as
it sees fit.” That is clearly true under the First Amendment. It also
should be true of others who seek to speak (or not speak) as
corporations, from bakeries to sports teams.
Yet, when the Supreme Court sent back the Masterpiece Cakeshop case in 2018 for further proceedings, an irate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)
declared: “Masterpiece Cakeshop is a commercial bakery open to the
public, and such services clearly must be made available to the public
on equal terms … No business or organization open to the public should
hide their discriminatory practices behind the guise of religious
liberty.” But Pelosi applauded when social media companies barred some
members of the public based on viewpoint discrimination on subjects
ranging from climate change to vaccines to elections.
The difference, of course, is that Masterpiece Cakeshop was willing
to sell cakes to anyone but refused to express viewpoints that conflict
with the owners’ religious beliefs. Conversely, social media companies
like Twitter and Facebook are barring individuals, including a world
leader like Trump, entirely from their “shop.” And, taking it one step
further, Facebook has declared it will even ban the “voice of Donald Trump.”
Big Tech is allowed to be arbitrary and capricious in corporate
censorship. However, our leaders should follow a principled approach to
corporate speech that does not depend on what views are being silenced.
Because Elizabeth Warren was right. This “never was about a cake” or a
tweet or “likes” for that matter. It was always about free speech.
nationalreview | The association of danger with permissiveness has warped the “expert
class” that is supposed to inform the public. Throughout the pandemic,
public-health officials have betrayed their view that they do not trust
the public with good news; they seem to fear that an inch given will be a
mile taken. And so, even during one of the most successful vaccine
rollouts in the world, CDC director Rochelle Walensky warned of “impending doom” just a month ago. But no doom was in the offing.
And the expert class has also corrupted itself. The short circuit of
the pandemic has led to a dramatic tightening of groupthink among
public-health pundits. One would normally expect that a variety of
experts would come up with a variety of recommendations, precisely
because, like everyone else, they value the risks differently. But
instead, public-health pontificators have tried to guard their authority
with an ersatz sheen of unanimity.
When Dr. Martin Kulldorff expressed his view that the pause of
Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine would do more harm than good, the CDC
threw him off its vaccine-safety advisory committee. Four days later,
Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was made available again, but the
visible dissent was too much to abide. Kulldorff had pioneered
many of the processes by which the CDC detects the safety of vaccines.
But he had expressed his view that the urge to vaccinate everyone was as superstitious
as being anti-vaccine. Twitter, preposterously, put a misinformation
tag on this tweet, based on the superstition that there is only one
valid “expert” answer — and no valid debates among experts. Kulldorff’s
worst crime, apparently, was expressing his views in person in the
presence of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.
I used to think that the COVID era would snap to a close once
vaccines removed the danger from the most vulnerable — and that the
human urge to connect would assert itself dramatically in a new roaring
’20s. Now I’m not so sure. A significant portion of the public and some
of our leading institutions have internalized entirely new habits of
thought and life. The circuit between truth, science, fear, and caution
and virtue needs to be unwired — and reprogrammed.
caitlinjohnstone | It sure is interesting how stuff keeps happening that makes free
speech on the internet something dangerous which must be curtailed.
Covid, the Capitol riot, Russian propaganda, all of which just happen to
require tightening restrictions on our single best tool against the
powerful.
Had online platforms not agreed to curtail speech in
alignment with the US empire, they would with 100 percent certainty have
been broken up by antitrust cases and been replaced by other
monopolistic companies that would censor in alignment with imperial
interests.
You’re not permitted to ascend to power within the
system unless you cooperate with existing power structures. If you
don’t, you’ll be stopped in your tracks and replaced with someone who
will.
A rookie journalist who doesn’t advance narratives favorable
to US imperialism will keep getting called to the editor’s desk until
they get the message. When rookie social media sites first showed up it
was the same thing, except instead of the editor’s desk, it was US
congressional hearings.
NYMag | Take, for instance, this paper
from 1995: “High Recombination and Mutation Rates in Mouse Hepatitis
Viruses Suggest That Coronaviruses May Be Potentially Important Emerging
Viruses.” It was written by Dr. Ralph Baric and his bench scientist,
Boyd Yount, at the University of North Carolina. Baric, a gravelly
voiced former swim champion, described in this early paper how his lab
was able to train a coronavirus, MHV, which causes hepatitis in mice, to
jump species, so that it could reliably infect BHK (baby-hamster
kidney) cell cultures. They did it using serial passaging: repeatedly
dosing a mixed solution of mouse cells and hamster cells with
mouse-hepatitis virus, while each time decreasing the number of mouse
cells and upping the concentration of hamster cells. At first,
predictably, the mouse-hepatitis virus couldn’t do much with the hamster
cells, which were left almost free of infection, floating in their
world of fetal-calf serum. But by the end of the experiment, after
dozens of passages through cell cultures, the virus had mutated: It had
mastered the trick of parasitizing an unfamiliar rodent. A scourge of
mice was transformed into a scourge of hamsters. And there was more: “It
is clear that MHV can rapidly alter its species specificity and infect
rats and primates,” Baric said. “The resulting virus variants are
associated with demyelinating diseases in these alternative species.” (A
demyelinating disease is a disease that damages nerve sheaths.) With
steady prodding from laboratory science, along with some rhetorical
exaggeration, a lowly mouse ailment was morphed into an emergent threat
that might potentially cause nerve damage in primates. That is, nerve
damage in us.
"And we need to stop hunting for new exotic diseases in the wild, shipping them back to laboratories, and hot-wiring their genomes to prove how dangerous to human life they might become." https://t.co/N2Cnhk5Xde
A
few years later, in a further round of “interspecies transfer”
experimentation, Baric’s scientists introduced their mouse coronavirus
into flasks that held a suspension of African-green-monkey cells, human
cells, and pig-testicle cells. Then, in 2002, they announced something
even more impressive: They’d found a way to create a full-length
infectious clone of the entire mouse-hepatitis genome. Their “infectious
construct” replicated itself just like the real thing, they wrote.
Not
only that, but they’d figured out how to perform their assembly
seamlessly, without any signs of human handiwork. Nobody would know if
the virus had been fabricated in a laboratory or grown in nature. Baric
called this the “no-see’m method,” and he asserted that it had “broad
and largely unappreciated molecular biology applications.” The method
was named, he wrote, after a “very small biting insect that is
occasionally found on North Carolina beaches.”
In
2006, Baric, Yount, and two other scientists were granted a patent for
their invisible method of fabricating a full-length infectious clone
using the seamless, no-see’m method. But this time, it wasn’t a clone of
the mouse-hepatitis virus — it was a clone of the entire deadly human
SARS virus, the one that had emerged from Chinese bats, via civets, in
2002. The Baric Lab came to be known by some scientists as “the Wild
Wild West.” In 2007, Baric said that we had entered “the golden age of
coronavirus genetics.”
“I would be afraid to look in their freezers,” one virologist told me.
Baric
and Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the two top experts
on the genetic interplay between bat and human coronaviruses, began
collaborating in 2015.
Over the weekend I watched a very interesting discussion between Dutch virologist, Geest Vanden Bossche and Bret Weinstein. Vanden Bossche made exactly this point about using vaccinations in the middle of an epidemic – he points out that - this is the first time a major vaccination program has taken place while a pandemic is at its peak.
He particularly emphasized that ‘two shot’ vaccinations have a longer immunological ramp up time, giving the virus more time to evolve. The mRNA therapeutic program is nothing other than an active gain of function experiment on the virus at a global scale.
The real worries here are the following:
First, the breakthrough (mRNA therapeutic breach) cases are asymptomatic/mild now, but they will not be mild later in the year, as antibodies for the synthetic spike protein decline in those who received these shots.
Second, and most important, from the evolutionary perspective of the virus, its evolutionary “goal” is not just to survive, but to make as many copies of itself as possible. Milder cases tend to have less of the virus (yes, there are completely asymptomatic superspreaders that generate a huge amount of virus in their upper respiratory tracts, but in general, if Covid-21 can get past the upper respiratory tract and cause real damage, that means a lot more copies of the virus.) Clearly the evolutionary pressure is there for Covid-21 to evolve in that direction.
Whatever can escape the antibodies generated by the mRNA synthetic spike protein and lead to more replication will be selected for. That will mean a much more contagious and virulent virus (Covid-21_ just from that.) So far, immune escape has evolved hand in hand with stronger affinity for the ACE2 receptor, which directly translates into higher contagiousness and also elevated virulence as well. The likely mutations to come next have been identified in vitro (to be noted, in vitro evolution had already correctly identified the ones that characterize the current variants, so it has a good track record so far).
In vitro has also identified ways for it to get deadlier through a different mechanism – that is - shutting down innate immunity by inhibiting the interferon response. This second mutation is a key strategy that these viruses have evolved in their battle with bats’ immune systems. There is some evidence that Covid-19 is actually not all that good at this compared to, for example, the first SARS virus from 2003. I suspect that this was a major reason why SARS-1 was much more lethal.
Can the mRNA therapeutic regimen select for a reversion back to that state, i.e. it goes in the direction of countering the immune system as a whole by becoming better at overcoming the innate arm of the immune system. When the adaptive arm of Covid-19 has been strengthened by mRNA therapeutics, the evolutionary potential for a much more contagious and lethal Covid-21 may become evident?
I don’t have an answer, but I sure hope that it does not.
The mRNA therapeutic approach runs the risk of breeding something much more contagious and deadly Covid-21. And because it may well happen in stages, there is also the risk of it becoming gradually normalized, just as the current level of death has become normalized. I remember learning about gain of function research reading Annie Jacobson's Operation Paperclip. So it's not as if potential outcomes aren't well understood.
So not only do we have lying officials that did everything possible to help the spread of an aerosol pathogen, now those same officials are running a playbook for creating more virulent strains taking us from Covid-19 to Covid-21. Meanwhile, we're drowned in and overwhelmed by dueling narratives Outside of what you read here, there's scant information to be gotten about gain of function mutations and the rate of infection of those whose mRNA therapeutic injections have been breached.
"Trust the science" pretenders like the frightening Dr. Kavita (force the injections) Patel are pretending that shots will get the virus under control - and they won’t. mRNA therapeutic jabs won't even get degenerating public health care systems under control. So, not only does this grand Covid-21 gain of function experiment have the potential to be even more deadly, nary any of the deep seated issues with any of the impacted health care systems have been fixed.
thehill | In the current phase of this ever-changing pandemic, we are
witnessing the emergence of two Americas. One where fully-vaccinated
Americans often remain highly reluctant to remove masks with examples of
“mask shaming.”
At the opposite pole, another country where large unmasked crowds
gather in public, such as at sports events, unclear of who has or has
not been vaccinated. What links both of these Americas? Neither one is
following the CDC’s updated COVID-19 recommendations.
Recommendations
are often complex and confusing. Trust in science and the CDC, damaged
by politicization, has deteriorated. As an example of how acute these
challenges are — four out of every 10 health care workers remain
unvaccinated. Recommendations alone are not enough. New requirements for
vaccinations and reporting are required to move the country forward
that will “open” the country back up in ways that are practical and safe
at the same time.
The country needs to implement vaccine
requirements, especially in high-priority settings including hospitals,
nursing homes and schools. Without vaccine requirements the country will
face significant difficulties and delays in safely opening back up. In
turn, public health will be compromised, and the economy will face
avoidable burdens. These types of vaccination requirements aren’t new
and are done routinely in hospitals and schools. There are several
reasons why these measures are needed.
First and most important is the direct health consequences of
unvaccinated individuals in critical settings. The lack of a vaccine
requirement in health care settings has resulted in superspreader events
and preventable deaths posing a health risk to patients. It is
reasonable for many patients to assume that health care workers are all
immunized. Additional critical settings where requirements should be
considered are institutions of education or childcare, transportation,
law enforcement and hospitality industries -all places where close
contact indoors can pose risks, particularly to infants and children for
whom there is currently no available Covid-19 vaccine. While some
universities are moving ahead with mandates, a disturbing trend
has erupted: Public colleges in red states are less likely to have a
vaccine requirement compared to private universities in blue states. Law
enforcement, including police officers were some of the earliest
eligible essential works for vaccines, but in same large urban areas
such as Columbus, Ohio only 28 percent of the employed police officer have received a vaccine to date.
Vaccination
requirements will need to be augmented through mechanisms to
demonstrate proof of vaccination and reporting requirements. Without
this type of transparency, rebuilding the social trust needed to return
to normalcy will continue to lag. We are in a transitional period where
the number of immunized Americans is increasing but we are not yet at a
level where mitigation measures can easily be lifted, if at all. Federal
officials should work with state and local authorities to consider how
best to establish fair and accurate reporting mechanisms — without
overburdening already stressed businesses — to reflect actual levels of
immunization. Employers, especially large ones, are already embracing
vaccine requirements partly because they know that customers might
choose to seek services elsewhere, which could have significant
financial impact.
level |Like
so many online communities, the Black Manosphere is rife with internal
divisions and disputes, each more ridiculous than the last; what unites
it is its founding principles of anti-feminism. Most of these are
cribbed from the larger “manosphere,” an umbrella term for a collection of subreddits and “men’s rights” forums
claiming that women and a feminist-leaning society have robbed men of
their power, and then tailored to Black women specifically. Black women
lack femininity, says Black Manosphere dogma; they refuse to be
submissive; they are the ones responsible for Black family dysfunction.
As with the manosphere at large, the Black Manosphere traffics in jargon that makes them sound like Matrix superfans whose experience with actual women doesn’t extend beyond fantasy. “Red pill”
ideology casts followers as visionaries who dare to see through the
illusion; they divide other men into “alpha” and “beta” categories to
denote their power and status (“betabux,” for example, is a term used
for weak men whose only value to women is as sugar daddies). Sexually
empowered women are denigrated as riding the “cock carousel” until they
hit “the wall” in their mid-twenties and their “sexual market value”
drops; the 80/20 rule
dictates that women find only one out of every five men attractive
enough to have sex without added incentives like money (at which their
“hypergamy,” or drive to marry up a class, kicks in).
As with the manosphere at large, the Black Manosphere traffics in jargon that makes them sound like “Matrix” superfans whose experience with actual women doesn’t extend beyond fantasy.
Unlike
the larger, ostensibly White manosphere, the Black Manosphere isn’t a
pathway into the alt-right. It reserves its ire solely for its own
community: Black women and men who violate its expectations. Black women in particular are its targets, with men referring to them as “scraggle daggles,” “demons,” and “the most filthy and disease-ridden women on the planet.” It’s a codified system of misogynoir — misogyny toward Black women in particular — that gives stark form to an attitude Black women have been noticing and discussing for well over a decade.
Before the Black Manosphere, there was the men’s rights movement, and lo, it was bad. It was also predominantly White, or at least non-Black. A Philadelphia-based man who calls himself Mumia Obsidian Ali sought
to change that. After coming across men’s rights activists online in
the mid-2010s, he began to contribute pieces to blogs like A Voice for Men and Return of Kings, and eventually launched a radio show
where he holds forth on his favorite topic: Black women. (The seeds of
his own anti-feminism were sown in childhood, he suggested in one article,
when he saw his grandmother and mother being verbally abusive toward
his grandfather and father, respectively.) “Black women [in America], as
a group, suck,” he tells me in an email exchange.
As
the Black Manosphere proliferated, so did a deluge of content. Men —
mostly from North America and Western Europe — write ceaseless articles
referencing other articles, and upload videos as long as 12 hours
blaming Black women for every societal ill plaguing Black communities in
Western societies. Literally, every one: crime rates, single motherhood, STD rates, killing sprees, lagging school performance, out-of-wedlock births; abortions,
incarceration rates. To bypass YouTube’s content moderation policies,
some make their videos age-restricted. Others post their content on BitChute or Free Speech Avenger, both of which can feature profane or even pornographic content, as well as their own websites, blogs, podcasts, private Facebook pages, and Telegram chat groups. Some self-publish books. Revenue builds through donations during livestreams, one-on-one consultation fees, book sales, merchandise, and Patreon subscriptions. A nearly two-hour video can generate more than $200 in donations.
theatlantic | For both yes-vaxxers like me and the no-vaxxers I spoke with,
feelings about the vaccine are intertwined with feelings about the
pandemic.
Although I think I’m right about the vaccines, the truth
is that my thinking on this issue is motivated. I canceled vacations,
canceled my wedding, avoided indoor dining, and mostly stayed home for
15 months. All that sucked. I am rooting for the vaccines to work.
But
the no-vaxxers I spoke with just don’t care. They’ve traveled, eaten in
restaurants, gathered with friends inside, gotten COVID-19 or not
gotten COVID-19, survived, and decided it was no big deal. What’s more,
they’ve survived while flouting the advice of the CDC, the WHO, Anthony
Fauci, Democratic lawmakers, and liberals, whom they don’t trust to give
them straight answers on anything virus-related.
The
no-vaxxers’ reasoning is motivated too. Specifically, they’re motivated
to distrust public-health authorities who they’ve decided are a bunch
of phony neurotics, and they’re motivated to see the vaccines as a risky
pharmaceutical experiment, rather than as a clear breakthrough that
might restore normal life (which, again, they barely stopped living).
This is the no-vaxxer deep story in a nutshell: I trust my own cells more than I trust pharmaceutical goop; I trust my own mind more than I trust liberal elites.
So what will change their minds?
I
cannot imagine that any amount of hectoring or shaming, or
proclamations from the public-health or Democratic communities, will
make much of a difference for this group. “I’ve lost all faith in the
media and public-health officials,”said Myles Pindus, a 24-year-old in
Brooklyn, who told me he is skeptical of the mRNA vaccines and is
interested in the Johnson & Johnson shot. “It might sound crazy, but
I’d rather go to Twitter and check out a few people I trust than take
guidance from the CDC, or WHO, or Fauci,” Baca, the Colorado truck
driver, told me. Other no-vaxxers offered similar appraisals of various
Democrats and liberals, but they were typically less printable.
From
my conversations, I see three ways to persuade no-vaxxers: make it more
convenient to get a shot; make it less convenient to not get a shot; or
encourage them to think more socially.
theatlantic | Nonprofit organizations that provide these training
sessions argued that the order violated their free-speech rights and
hampered their ability to conduct their business. In December, a federal
judge agreed; President Joe Biden rescinded the order the day he took
office. But by then, critical race theory was already a part of the
conservative lexicon. Since Trump’s executive order, Rufo told me, he
has provided his analysis “to a half-dozen state legislatures, the
United States House of Representatives, and the United States Senate.”
One such state legislature was New Hampshire’s; on February 18, the
lower chamber held a hearing to discuss Keith Ammon’s bill. Rufo was
among those who testified in support of it.
Concerned that the
measure might fail on its own, Republicans have now included its
language in a must-pass budget bill. In March, Republican Governor Chris
Sununu signaled that he would object to “divisive concepts” legislation
because he believes it is unconstitutional, but he has since tempered
his stand. “The ideas of critical race theory and all of this stuff—I
personally don’t think there’s any place for that in schools,” he said
in early April. But, he added, “when you start turning down the path of
the government banning things, I think that’s a very slippery slope.”
Almost everyone I spoke with for this article assumed that Sununu would
sign the budget bill, and that the divisive-concepts ban would become
law.
Although free-speech advocates are confident that bills like Ammon’s
will not survive challenges in court, they believe the real point is to
scare off companies, schools, and government agencies from discussing
systemic racism. “What these bills are designed to do is prevent
conversations about how racism exists at a systemic level in that we all
have implicit biases that lead to decisions that, accumulated, lead to
significant racial disparities,” Gilles Bissonnette, the legal director
of the ACLU of New Hampshire, told me. “The proponents of this bill want
none of those discussions to happen. They want to suppress that type of
speech.”
Conservatives are not the only critics of diversity
training. For years, some progressives, including critical race
theorists, have questioned its value: Is it performative? Is it the
most effective way to move toward equity or is it simply an effective
way of restating the obvious and stalling meaningful action? But
that is not the fight that has materialized over the past nine months.
Instead, it is a confrontation with a cartoonish version of critical
race theory.
For
Republicans, the end goal of all these bills is clear: initiating
another battle in the culture wars and holding on to some threadbare
mythology of the nation that has been challenged in recent years. What’s
less clear is whether average voters care much about the debate. In a
recent Atlantic/Leger poll, 52 percent of respondents who
identified as Republicans said that states should pass laws banning
schools from teaching critical race theory, but just 30 percent of
self-identified independents were willing to say the same. Meanwhile, a
strong majority of Americans, 78 percent, either had not heard of
critical race theory or were unsure whether they had.
Last week,
after President Biden’s first joint address to Congress—and as Idaho was
preparing to pass its bill—Senator Tim Scott stood in front of United
States and South Carolina flags to deliver the Republican response.
“From colleges to corporations to our culture, people are making money
and gaining power by pretending we haven’t made any progress,” Scott
said. “You know this stuff is wrong. Hear me clearly: America is not a
racist country.” Rufo immediately knew what he meant. “Senator Tim Scott
denounces critical race theory in his response to Biden’s speech
tonight,” he tweeted. “We have turned critical race theory into a
national issue and conservative political leaders are starting to
fight.”
newyorker | The invention of the sensitivity-training group is often traced to a
specific evening: Lewin was running a workshop for teachers and social
workers in Connecticut, where he had been hired by the state to help
address racial and religious prejudice. After the participants had left,
a few stragglers returned and asked to be permitted to sit in on the
debriefings, and Lewin agreed. Though it was initially awkward to have
the participants present, Lewin realized that the setup led to frank and
open conversations. He saw the transformative possibilities of
uninhibited feedback in the real time of the group session, and
established the idea of the corporate T-group—shorthand for sensitivity
“training group”—at the National Training Laboratory, in Bethel, Maine.
His inroads into social engineering could also be put to less
conciliatory purposes; Lewin was a consultant for the Office of
Strategic Services and developed programs to help recruit potential
spies.
The T-group, which was sometimes called “therapy for
normals”—rather insensitively by today’s standards but with the intent
of destigmatizing the practice—was a therapeutic workshop for strangers
which would take place in a neutral locale and promote candid emotional
exchange. A typical T-group session would begin with the facilitator
declining to assume any active leadership over the session, a move that
would surprise and disconcert the participants, who would collectively
have to work out the problem of how to deal with a lack of hierarchy or
directives.
It sounds simple enough, but the experience could be
deeply unsettling, even life-changing, for some. As one contemporary
witness of the Bethel N.T.L. workshops remarked, “I had never observed
such a buildup of emotional tension in such a short time. I feared it
was more than some leaders and members could bear.” The T-group promised
an antidote to the oppressions of Dale Carnegie-style insincerity that
dominated the business world, and, crucially, the sessions seemed to
provide a glimpse of a reality in which it was finally possible to know
how one was really perceived.
the prize for the “toughest encounter seminar that had been ever
convened at Esalen” went to one run collaboratively by George Leonard
and Price Cobbs. Leonard was a white psychologist from the South, whose
youthful encounter with the terrified eyes of a Black prisoner
surrounded by a white mob instilled in him a lifelong commitment to
fighting racism. He implored Cobbs, an African-American psychiatrist who
was co-authoring the book “Black Rage,”
to come to Esalen to collaborate. They organized a storied,
twenty-four-hour-marathon racial-sensitivity workshop between Black and
white participants that became rancorous: “the anger rolled on and on
without end” and “interracial friendships crumbled on the spot.”
Finally, Anderson relates how, as the sun was beginning to rise, an
African-American woman was moved to spontaneously comfort a crying white
woman, and this shifted the tenor of the entire session. Though the
episode could easily be read less sunnily, as another troubling instance
of the oppressor requiring comfort from the oppressed, the facilitators
purportedly deemed it a success. Cobbs spoke to Leonard and declared,
“George, we’ve got to take this to the world.”
Cobbs’s
career encapsulates the shift of sensitivity training from its literary
roots to corporate argot. He was sparked by early epiphanies about
Black anger and injustice, inspired by reading Richard Wright, James
Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. He admired the plot of “Invisible Man,”
for instance, because “the unnamed main character’s sense of his own
invisibility fans his ultimate rage into flames of
self-expression. . . .” Cobbs credited Lewin’s research as a key
precedent when he went on to found Pacific Management Systems, a
training center for T-group leaders, and he played a role in the spinoff
of diversity training from sensitivity training. His years of advising
African-American businesspeople formed the basis of his guide, from
2000, “Cracking the Corporate Code: The Revealing Success Stories of 32 African-American Executives.”
In her provocative history “Race Experts,”
from 2002, the scholar Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn examines Cobbs’s career as
part of the larger story of how “racial etiquette” and sensitivity
training “hijacked” and banalized civil-rights discourse. Quinn
persuasively maintains that “sensitivity itself is an inadequate and
cynical substitution for civility and democracy—both of which presuppose
some form of equal treatment and universal standard of conduct,” and
neither of which, of course, the U.S. has ever achieved.
archive |Abstract: COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers have been
exempted from legal liability for vaccine-induced harm. It is therefore
in the interests of all those authorising, enforcing and administering
COVID-19 vaccinations to understand the evidence regarding the risks and
benefits of these vaccines, since liability for harm will fall on them.
In short, the available evidence and science indicate that COVID-19 vaccines are unnecessary, ineffective and unsafe.
Necessity: Immunocompetent individuals are
protected against SARS-CoV-2 by cellular immunity. Vaccinating low-risk
groups is therefore unnecessary. For immunocompromised individuals who
do fall ill with COVID-19 there is a range of medical treatments that
have been proven safe and effective. Vaccinating the vulnerable is
therefore equally unnecessary. Both immunocompetent and vulnerable
groups are better protected against variants of SARS-CoV-2 by naturally
acquired immunity and by medication than by vaccination.
Efficacy: Covid-19 vaccines lack a viable mechanism
of action against SARS-CoV-2 infection of the airways. Induction of
antibodies cannot prevent infection by an agent such as SARS-CoV-2 that
invades through the respiratory tract. Moreover, none of the vaccine
trials have provided any evidence that vaccination prevents transmission
of the infection by vaccinated individuals; urging vaccination to
“protect others” therefore has no basis in fact.
Safety: The vaccines are dangerous to both healthy
individuals and those with pre-existing chronic disease, for reasons
such as the following: risk of lethal and non-lethal disruptions of
blood clotting including bleeding disorders, thrombosis in the brain,
stroke and heart attack; autoimmune and allergic reactions;
antibody-dependent enhancement of disease; and vaccine impurities due to
rushed manufacturing and unregulated production standards.
The risk-benefit calculus is therefore clear: the experimental
vaccines are needless, ineffective and dangerous. Actors authorising,
coercing or administering experimental COVID-19 vaccination are exposing
populations and patients to serious, unnecessary, and unjustified
medical risks.
currentaffairs | Bill Gates has long been one of the most powerful people in the
world. For many years, he was the world’s richest man, though he has
lately rotated in the slot with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Since retiring from his position as Microsoft’s CEO in 2000, Gates has
become a celebrated figure in world philanthropy, with the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) spending astronomical sums on health and
education initiatives. The BMGF is the largest private charitable
foundation in the world, and spends more
on global health each year than the World Health Organization (WHO) and
many whole countries. (The BMGF is run jointly by the Gateses, though
the effects of the couple’s recently-announced divorce are unclear.)
Gates’ new book on climate change has brought him applause from the mainstream press (Fortune even
let him take over as editor for a day, the first time it has ever
extended that privilege), although Gates himself has one of the biggest
carbon footprints of any human being in the world. He lives in a 66,000
square foot mansion with 24 bathrooms that is worth $145 million, which
he calls (seriously) “Xanadu 2.0.” It was built using half a million
wood logs from 500-year-old trees. According to an academic study, just his prolific private jet time emitted 1,629 tons of carbon dioxide in 2017 alone.
This is why it is worth examining Gates’ career and philanthropic
work closely. His career shows the way ruthlessness and the pursuit of
self-interest are far more important than “innovation” in making a
person rich, but it also shows the problems of relying on Good Billionaires to address serious social problems. Since the time of steel baron Andrew Carnegie,
tycoons have had a philosophy: you can make your money as ruthlessly as
possible, as long as you do Philanthropy afterward. Gates is a
latter-day Carnegie. He is one of the most “benevolent” among the
uber-rich, having pledged to give most of his fortune away
(nevertheless, it continues to grow)
and devoting himself to health and climate change. And yet even he, the
best of the bunch, embodies the fundamentally dysfunctional nature of
wealth accumulation and philanthropy. The outsized influence of Gates on
education policy has shown the problems that come with allowing
billionaires to meddle in the democratic process. Gates’ fortune came at
the expense of the rest of us, and while his philanthropy has many
positive effects, it ultimately reflects an undemocratic and
unaccountable way of delivering benefits, and Gates himself can only be
in the position he’s in because we live in a deeply unjust world.
thebulletin | Why would anyone want to create a novel virus capable of causing a
pandemic? Ever since virologists gained the tools for manipulating a
virus’s genes, they have argued they could get ahead of a potential
pandemic by exploring how close a given animal virus might be to making
the jump to humans. And that justified lab experiments in enhancing the
ability of dangerous animal viruses to infect people, virologists
asserted.
With this rationale, they have recreated the 1918 flu virus, shown
how the almost extinct polio virus can be synthesized from its published
DNA sequence, and introduced a smallpox gene into a related virus.
These enhancements of viral capabilities are known blandly as
gain-of-function experiments. With coronaviruses, there was particular
interest in the spike proteins, which jut out all around the spherical
surface of the virus and pretty much determine which species of animal
it will target. In 2000 Dutch researchers, for instance, earned the
gratitude of rodents everywhere by genetically engineering the spike protein of a mouse coronavirus so that it would attack only cats.
Virologists started studying bat coronaviruses in earnest after these
turned out to be the source of both the SARS1 and MERS epidemics. In
particular, researchers wanted to understand what changes needed to
occur in a bat virus’s spike proteins before it could infect people.
Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, led by China’s
leading expert on bat viruses, Shi Zheng-li or “Bat Lady,” mounted
frequent expeditions to the bat-infested caves of Yunnan in southern
China and collected around a hundred different bat coronaviruses.
Shi then teamed up with Ralph S. Baric, an eminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina. Their work
focused on enhancing the ability of bat viruses to attack humans so as
to “examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect
humans) of circulating bat CoVs [coronaviruses].” In pursuit of this
aim, in November 2015 they created a novel virus by taking the backbone
of the SARS1 virus and replacing its spike protein with one from a bat
virus (known as SHC014-CoV). This manufactured virus was able to infect
the cells of the human airway, at least when tested against a lab
culture of such cells.
The SHC014-CoV/SARS1 virus is known as a chimera because its genome
contains genetic material from two strains of virus. If the SARS2 virus
were to have been cooked up in Shi’s lab, then its direct prototype
would have been the SHC014-CoV/SARS1 chimera, the potential danger of
which concerned many observers and prompted intense discussion.
“If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” said Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
Baric and Shi referred to the obvious risks in their paper but argued
they should be weighed against the benefit of foreshadowing future
spillovers. Scientific review panels, they wrote, “may deem similar
studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky
to pursue.” Given various restrictions being placed on gain-of function
(GOF) research, matters had arrived in their view at “a crossroads of
GOF research concerns; the potential to prepare for and mitigate future
outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous
pathogens. In developing policies moving forward, it is important to
consider the value of the data generated by these studies and whether
these types of chimeric virus studies warrant further investigation
versus the inherent risks involved.”
That statement was made in 2015. From the hindsight of 2021, one can
say that the value of gain-of-function studies in preventing the SARS2
epidemic was zero. The risk was catastrophic, if indeed the SARS2 virus
was generated in a gain-of-function experiment.
americanthinker |In 1949, sometime after the publication of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World (1931),
who was then living in California, wrote to Orwell. Huxley had briefly
taught French to Orwell as a student in high school at Eton.
Huxley
generally praises Orwell's novel, which to many seemed very similar to
Brave New World in its dystopian view of a possible future. Huxley
politely voices his opinion that his own version of what might come to
pass would be truer than Orwell's. Huxley observed that the philosophy
of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is sadism,
whereas his own version is more likely, that controlling an ignorant and
unsuspecting public would be less arduous, less wasteful by other
means. Huxley's masses are seduced by a mind-numbing drug, Orwell's
with sadism and fear.
The most powerful quote In Huxley's letter to Orwell is this:
Within
the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover
that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as
instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for
power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into
loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.
Could
Huxley have more prescient? What do we see around us? Masses of
people dependent upon drugs, legal and illegal. The majority of
advertisements that air on television seem to be for prescription drugs,
some of them miraculous but most of them unnecessary. Then comes
COVID, a quite possibly weaponized virus from the
Fauci-funded-with-taxpayer-dollars lab in Wuhan, China. The powers that
be tragically deferred to the malevolent Fauci who had long been hoping
for just such an opportunity. Suddenly, there was an opportunity to
test the mRNA vaccines that had been in the works for nearly twenty
years. They could be authorized as an emergency measure but were still
highly experimental. These jabs are not really vaccines at all, but a
form of gene therapy. There are potential disastrous consequences down the road. Government experiments on the public are nothing new.
LewRockwell | History teaches us that humanity evolves significantly only when it is really afraid: it then first sets up defense mechanisms; sometimes intolerable (scapegoats and totalitarianisms); sometimes futile (distraction); sometimes effective (therapeutics, setting aside if necessary all the previous moral principles). Then, once the crisis is over, it transforms these mechanisms to make them compatible with individual freedom, and to include them in a democratic health policy.
The beginning of the pandemic could trigger one of these structuring fears.
If it is not more serious than the two previous fears linked to a risk of pandemic (the mad cow crisis of 2001 in Great Britain and that of avian flu of 2003 in China), it will first have consequences. significant economic (fall in air transport , fall in tourism and the price of oil ); it will cost about $ 2 million per infected person and will lower the stock markets by about 15%; its impact will be very brief ( China's growth rate only declined during the second quarter of 2003, to explode higher in the third); it will also have consequences in terms of organization (In 2003, very rigorous police measures were taken throughout Asia; the World Health Organization has set up global alert procedures; and certain countries, in particular France and Japan, have built up considerable reserves of drugs and masks).
If it is a little more serious, which is possible, since it is transmissible by humans, it will have truly global consequences: economic (the models suggest to think that this could lead to a loss of 3 trillion dollars, a 5% drop in global GDP) and political ( because of the risk of contagion, the countries of the North will have an interest in ensuring that those in the South are not sick and they will have to ensure that the poorest have access to medicines today 'hui stored for only the richest); a major pandemic will then arise, better than any humanitarian or ecological discourse, the awareness of the need for altruism, at least self-interested.
And, even if, as we can obviously hope, this crisis is not very serious, we must not forget, as with the economic crisis, to learn the lessons, so that before the next inevitable one, we must not forget. set up prevention and control mechanisms and logistical processes for the equitable distribution of drugs and vaccines. For that, we will have to set up a global police force, a global storage and therefore a global tax system. We will then come, much faster than the sole economic reason would have allowed , to set up the bases of a real world government. It is also by the hospital that began in France in the 17th century the establishment of a real state.
In the meantime, we could at least hope for the implementation of a real European policy on the subject. But here again, as on so many other subjects, Brussels is silent. Fist tap BeeDee
unherd |The extraordinary spread in recent
months of what has become known, in the writer Wesley Yang’s phrase, as
“the successor ideology” has encouraged all manner of analysis
attempting to delineate its essential features. Is it a religion, with
its own litany of sin and redemption, its own repertoire of fervent
rituals and iconography? Is this Marxism, ask American conservatives,
still fighting yesterday’s ideological war?
What does this all do to speed along
policing reform, ask bewildered African-Americans, as they observe
global corporations and white celebrities compete to beat their chests
in ever-more elaborate and meaningless gestures of atonement? What kind
of meaningful anti-systemic revolution can provoke such immediate and
fulsome support from the Hollywood entertainment complex, from the
richest oligarchs and plutocrats on earth, and from the media organs of
the liberal state?
Composed with a feverish,
hallucinatory clarity, Althusser’s essay aimed to elucidate the manner
in which ideology functions as a means to prop up the political order,
observing that “no class can hold state power over a long period without
at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the Ideological
State Apparatuses”.
What are these ISAs? Contrasted with
the Repressive State Apparatuses — the police, the army, and so on — the
ISAs are the means by which the system reproduces itself through
ideology: Althusser lists the church, the media and the education system
along with the family, and the legal and political system and the
culture industry as the means through which the ideology of the
governing system is enforced. Althusser here develops Gramsci’s thesis
that the cultural sphere is the most productive arena of political
struggle, and inverts it: instead of being the site of revolutionary
victory, it is where the system reasserts itself, neutering the
possibility of political change through its wielding of the most
powerful weapon, ideology.
It is through ideology, Althusser
asserts, that the ruling system maintains itself in power: “the ideology
of the ruling class does not become the ruling ideology by the grace of
God, nor even by virtue of the seizure of state power alone,” he
states, “it is by the installation of the ISAs in which this ideology is
realised and realises itself that it becomes the ruling ideology.”
In virology, gain-of-function research is employed to better understand current and future pandemics.[1]
In vaccine development, gain-of-function research is conducted to gain a
head start on a virus and to develop a vaccine or therapeutic before it
emerges.[1]
In February 2000, a group at the Utrecht University led by Peter Rottier published a paper on their gain-of-function studies titled "Retargeting of Coronavirus
by Substitution of the Spike Glycoprotein Ectodomain: Crossing the Host
Cell Species Barrier" detailing how they constructed a mutant of the
coronavirus mouse hepatitis virus, replacing the ectodomain of the spike glycoprotein (S) with the highly divergent ectodomain of the S protein of feline infectious peritonitis virus. According to the paper, "the resulting chimeric virus, designated fMHV, acquired the ability to infect feline cells and simultaneously lost the ability to infect murine cells in tissue culture".[2]
The World Health Organization in 2010 developed a "guidance document" for Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC) in the life sciences because "research that is intended [to] benefit, but which might easily be misapplied to do harm".[3]
In May 2013, Hualan Chen, who was then director of the China's National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory, and colleagues successfully created a new strain of influenza virus through a gain-of-function experiment at the BSL3 approvedHarbin Veterinary Research Institute.[6] The Chinese scientists "deliberately mixed the H5N1 bird-flu virus, which is highly lethal [to birds] but not easily transmitted between [humans], with a 2009 strain of H1N1 flu virus, which is very infectious to humans."[7] This event caused consternation in European biotech circles, as Professor Simon Wain-Hobson of the Pasteur Institute
the Chinese scientists "haven’t been thinking clearly about what they
are doing. It’s very worrying... The virological basis of this work is
not strong. It is of no use for vaccine development and the benefit in
terms of surveillance for new flu viruses is oversold," while Lord May of Oxford
said: "The record of containment in labs like this is not reassuring.
They are taking it upon themselves to create human-to-human transmission
of very dangerous viruses. It’s appallingly irresponsible."[7]
In May 2014, the Bundestag was presented a report written by the National Ethics Council on proposed guidance for governance of GoFR.[8] At the time, some in Germany were concerned over "GoFR pathogenic pandemic microbes raging out of control".[8] Epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch
used "data of past biosafety breaches to calculate that" they occur
with a probability "of 0.01 to 0.1 percent per lab per year."[8]
In December 2014, Veronique Kiermer (at the time on the editorial board of Nature)
discussed the considerations at her place of employment, that go into
the publication of DURC. She came to the conclusion that "the journal's
editorial and review boards should not (and could not) be the only
gatekeepers who decide which research results should be published,
either fully or redacted, 'because it is way too late in the process of
GoFR.'"[8]
By March 2016 the second symposium launched by the Obama
administration reported that funding for gain-of-function research was
provided by government agencies, pharmaceutical research companies,
venture capital funds, colleges and universities, non-profit research
institutions, foundations, and charities.[15]
In May 2016,[16] the NSABB published "Recommendations for the Evaluation and Oversight of Proposed Gain-of-Function Research".[17]
On 9 January 2017, the HHS published the "Recommended Policy
Guidance for Departmental Development of Review Mechanisms for Potential
Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight" (P3CO).[16]
On 19 December 2017 under the Trump administration, the NIH
lifted the Obama moratorium into GoFR because it was deemed to be
"important in helping us identify, understand, and develop strategies
and effective countermeasures against rapidly evolving pathogens that
pose a threat to public health,"[18] because on the same day the HHS P3CO Framework restored it.[19][18]
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
