Policymaking Is A Contact Sport Involving Competing Narratives, Institutions, and Interests...,

authorea |  This paper offers a critique of UK government policy based on mode of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (which in turn followed misleading advice from the World Health Organisation) through the lens of policymaking as narrative. Two flawed narratives—“Covid is droplet- not airborne-spread” and “Covid is situationally airborne” (that is, airborne transmission is unusual but may occur during aerosol-generating medical procedures and severe indoor crowding)—quickly became dominant despite no evidence to support them. Two important counter-narratives—“Covid is unequivocally airborne” and “Everyone generates aerosols; everyone is vulnerable”— were sidelined despite strong evidence to support them. Tragic consequences of the flawed policy narrative unfolded as social dramas. For example, droplet precautions became ritualised; care home residents died in their thousands; public masking became a libertarian lightning rod; and healthcare settings became occupational health battlegrounds. In a discussion, we call for bold action to ensure that the science of SARS-CoV-2 transmission is freed from the shackles of historical errors, scientific vested interests, ideological manipulation and policy satisficing.

Policymaking is a contact sport involving competing narratives (about problems, how they arose, and how they will be resolved), institutions (especially government and its bureaucratic machinery) and interests (financial, political, ideological).^{1 2} Policy may—ideally—“follow science” but a key question is whosescience and why? Science shapes policy narratives via an “inside track” (e.g. official advisory committees) and to a lesser extent by an “outside track” (e.g. less mainstream scientists, citizen movements).³

 

Pandemic policymaking has been characterised not by clearly-identified knowledge gaps which science obligingly fills but by toxic clashes between competing scientific and moral narratives. Policymakers have risked losing control of the “dramaturgy of political communication” (page 78⁴).

Getting the mode of transmission for a contagious disease right matters, because preventive strategies follow (Table 1).⁵ Being honest about scientific uncertainty also matters, because—among other reasons—it is hard to back-track after declaring a policy “evidence-based”.

 

Table 1: Droplet versus airborne transmission: implications for public health and healthcare worker protection

 

Parasitic Agents Of Invincibility And Status And An Insidious Social Sickness...,

theatlantic  |  Deep in the forests of Germany, nestled neatly into the hollowed-out shells of acorns, live a smattering of ants who have stumbled upon a fountain of youth. They are born workers, but do not do much work. Their days are spent lollygagging about the nest, where their siblings shower them with gifts of food. They seem to elude the ravages of old age, retaining a durably adolescent physique, their outer shells soft and their hue distinctively tawny. Their scent, too, seems to shift, wafting out an alluring perfume that endears them to others. While their sisters, who have nearly identical genomes, perish within months of being born, these death-defying insects live on for years and years and years.

They are Temnothorax ants, and their elixirs of life are the tapeworms that teem within their bellies—parasites that paradoxically prolong the life of their host at a strange and terrible cost.

A few such life-lengthening partnerships have been documented between microbes and insects such as wasps, beetles, and mosquitoes. But what these ants experience is more extreme than anything that’s come before, says Susanne Foitzik, an entomologist at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, in Germany, who studies the ants and their tapeworms. Infected Temnothorax ants live at least three times longer than their siblings, and perhaps much more, she and her colleagues report in a study published today in Royal Society Open Science. No one is yet sure when the insects’ longevity tops out, but the answer is probably in excess of a decade, approaching or even matching that of ant queens, who can survive up to 20 years.

“Some other parasites do extend life spans,” Shelley Adamo, a parasite expert at Dalhousie University, in Nova Scotia, who was not involved in the study, told me. “But not like this.”

Under typical circumstances, Temnothorax ants live as most other ants do. They reside in communities ruled by a single fertile queen attended by a legion of workers whose professional lives take a predictable trajectory. They first tend the queen’s eggs as nurses, then graduate into foraging roles that take them outside the nest. Apart from the whole freaky parasite thing, “they are pretty boring,” Foitzik told me.

Normalcy goes out the door, however, when Temnothorax larvae ingest tapeworm-egg-infested bird feces trucked in by foragers. The parasites hatch and set up permanent residence in the young ants’ abdomens, where they can access a steady stream of nutrients. In return, they offer their host an unconventional renter’s fee: an extra-long life span that Foitzik and her colleagues managed to record in real time.

This Isn't An Accident, It Is Desired By Global Capital And Will NOT Go Away

consortiumnews |  A few days after the Nov. 2 election, The New York Times published a vehement editorial calling for the Democratic Party to adopt “moderate” positions and avoid seeking “progressive policies at the expense of bipartisan ideas.” It was a statement by the Times editorial board, which the newspaper describes as “a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values.”

The editorial certainly reflected “longstanding values” — since the Times has recycled them for decades in its relentless attacks on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

The Times editorial board began its polemic by calling for the party to “return” to “moderate policies.”

Translation: Stick to corporate-friendly policies of the sort that we applauded during 16 years of the Clinton and Obama presidencies.

The board also said the election results:

“are a sign that significant parts of the electorate are feeling leery of a sharp leftward push in the party, including on priorities like Build Back Better, which have some strong provisions and some discretionary ones driving up the price tag.”

Translation: Although poll after poll shows that the Build Back Better agenda is popular with the broad public, especially increased taxation on wealthy and corporate elites to pay for it, we need to characterize the plan as part of “a sharp leftward push.”

And the board noted:

“the concerns of more centrist Americans about a rush to spend taxpayer money, a rush to grow the government, should not be dismissed.”

Translation: While we don’t object to the ongoing “rush to spend taxpayer money” on the military, and we did not editorialize against the bloated Pentagon budget, we oppose efforts to “grow the government” too much for such purposes as healthcare, childcare, education, housing and mitigating the climate crisis.

“Mr. Biden did not win the Democratic primary because he promised a progressive revolution. There were plenty of other candidates doing that. He captured the nomination—and the presidency—because he promised an exhausted nation a return to sanity, decency and competence.”

Translation: No need to fret about the anti-democratic power of great wealth and corporate monopolies. We liked the status quo before the Trump presidency, and that’s more or less what we want now.

“‘Nobody elected him to be F.D.R.,’ Representative Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat from Virginia, told the Times after Tuesday’s drubbing.”

Translation: Spanberger, a former CIA case officer and current member of the corporate Blue Dog Coalition in Congress, is our kind of Democrat.

“Democrats should work to implement policies to help the American people.”

Translation: Democrats should work to implement policies to help the American people but not go overboard by helping them too much. We sometimes write editorials bemoaning the vast income inequality in this country, but we don’t want the government to do much to reduce it.

“Congress should focus on what is possible, not what would be possible if Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and — frankly — a host of lesser-known Democratic moderates who haven’t had to vote on policies they might oppose were not in office.”

Translation: We editorialize about social justice, but we don’t want structural changes and substantial new government policies that could bring it much closer. We editorialize about the climate crisis, but not in favor of government actions anywhere near commensurate with the crisis.

Getting To Net-Zero Means Getting Rid Of You No Longer Necessary Middle-Class Eaters...,

epochtimes  |  It is too often overlooked in all the discussions about the “transition” to a net-zero emissions economy that the most consequential transition is that from democratic capitalism to feudal serfdom.

This is the conclusion of American demographer and “blue-collar Democrat” Joel Kotkin, who has highlighted that the supposedly well-intentioned green policies being adopted across the West come at enormous expense to the working- and middle-classes.

As Kotkin wrote in ‘Spiked’ earlier this year, “extreme climate measures have driven the loss of traditional blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, construction and energy, while other environmental regulations have boosted housing prices.”

Kotkin’s thesis is that the West is on the road to serfdom. Rather than maintaining our capitalist societies where a large, asset-owning middle-class underpin a stable democratic system, we are becoming stratified feudal societies.

Home and small business ownership are declining, especially among the young and the less well-off, a group of technocratic elites are establishing themselves as permanent rulers in the apparatus of the administrative state, and corporate oligarchs are coming to dominate both the economy and broader society.

his transition has been occurring for some time, but it has been accelerated by the COVID-19-inspired lockdowns and the zeal with which Western governments have thoughtlessly adopted net-zero emissions targets.

Both play out as an aggressive form of reverse Robin Hood asset stripping, taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

Australia is now officially committed to a net-zero emissions by 2050 target.

But beyond the slogan “technology not taxes,” the Australian people do not know how the government plans on achieving its newfound ambition.

The UK Treasury, by contrast, recently released a Net-zero Review report (pdf) which provides some detail of how the UK government expects to reach net-zero.

The report includes a surprisingly honest admission from the bureaucracy: “The costs and benefits of the transition to a net-zero economy will ultimately pass through to households through a range of different channels.”

It includes a helpful chart that shows that, regardless of the specific policy or mechanism, the costs of net-zero will always fall on households, that is, everyday mums, dads, and workers.

This insight is evident to many but is too often obfuscated.

Bill Nelson - Going Where No Previous NASA Administrator Has Gone Before

medium |  “I’ve seen the classified report,” Nelson told CNN’s Pamela Brown in an interview shortly before the June 25th “Preliminary Report on UAP” came out. “It says basically what we thought. We don’t know the answer to what those Navy pilots saw.”

“Now, they know that they saw something. They tracked it. They locked their radar onto it. They followed it. It would suddenly move quickly from one location to another. And what the report does tell us that is public is that there have been over 140 of these sightings, So, naturally, what I ask our scientists to do is to see if there’s any kind of explanation from a scientific point of view and I’m awaiting their report.”

This summer NASA press secretary Jackie McGuinness confirmed her new boss Nelson had directed researchers to move forward with exploring any lines of questioning around the topic as they see fit.

“There’s not really a lot of data and scientists should be free to follow these leads, and it shouldn’t be stigmatized,” McGuinness said, acknowledging that UFO research can be negatively associated with unfounded conspiracy theories. “This is a really interesting phenomenon and Americans are clearly interested in it so if the scientists want to investigate, they should.”

This is great news for large numbers of scientists who have been frustrated about attempts to get research started because of the stigma the topic generates. The idea that NASA itself is willing to authorize, support and coordinate such work is revolutionary.

What Questions Did He Ask Again?

Now you read it in the earlier breakout quote in this article, but in one of his responses Nelson asked a series of questions. Let’s give them a little more breathing space as we wrap up here:

• What, who is out there?
• Who are we?
• How did we get here?
• How did we become as we are?
• How did we develop?
• How did we civilize?

It’s worth considering that these are not the first things a public official is likely to say when questioned about the June 25 Preliminary Assessement: Undentified Aerial Phenomena, is it? On the other hand, we know he has had the Full Monty of the classified briefing, and probably others. We also know that if Joe Biden wants to know what the hell is going on, he’s apt to call up Bill Nelson.

Still, it sure sounds like Nelson seems to be saying something with a little more complexity than the version of human development we get taught in high school and college. He’s asking questions that make it seem like we had help.

Why Is He Talking Like This?

It seems the main reason is that he believes it. That, of course, would be refreshing and illuminating and, from what I’ve read, seen and heard, it appears to be the truth.

But it may also be that his age has something to do with it. Nelson turned 79 this year. He was born in World War II, fought in Vietnam, had a lifetime of experiences that many of us will never have. He knows in his heart that something strange is going on now, and has been for the entire time he’s been on this Earth.

He seems ready to play his part now by saying the quiet part out loud.

Keep it coming, Bill. Turn your teams loose on this. Tell them they can speak truth to power. Find out some answers. Confirm what you can and offer the best theories and interpretations that can be made about the explanations. We’ve all been waiting a long time, too.

Is The Pentagon Withholding Full-Spectrum UAP Data?

medium |  After Congress was briefed on the classified portion of the Pentagon’s UAP report in June, D.C. power player and scientist Robert McGwier participated in a panel discussion on the Canadian UFO and paranormal radio program Spaced Out Radio and said he’d heard from an acquaintance in the closed-door session.

The briefing, he said, included the National Security Council and members of Congress — just how many of the latter, it wasn’t clear from McGwier’s off-air remarks during one of the show’s breaks, which are live-streamed on YouTube while radio listeners hear commercials. This elite audience of Washington power brokers was privy to information that has not been publicly released.

“Seventy pages and 14 videos,” he said. “They got to see the good stuff.” Later in the program, he added a caveat: “I want to make very, very clear: I heard no classified information whatsoever.”

McGwier, affectionately known as “Bob the Science Guy,” is an academic and active member of the ufology community.

An expert in radio technology with a Ph.D in applied mathematics from Brown University, he joined the Institute for Defense Analyses Center for Communications Research, a non-profit think tank in Princeton, N.J. in 1986. When he was hired in 2011 to head a research center at Virginia Tech, the school noted that McGwier’s work with the U.S. government had earned him the intelligence community’s “highest honor” in 2002. His job at Virginia Tech, according to the school, was to “develop strategic research relationships within the industry and government working in the national security sector.”

Put another way, he has connections in Washington D.C. McGwier continued:

“I know several people who were in the National Security Council meeting,” he said. “The best comment I heard was, ‘What we had was 40 minutes of science fiction movies. We were all gobsmacked.’

Which is to say, 40 minutes of video of UAPs doing their thing out over the ocean, running circles around U.S. Navy aircraft carriers and fighter pilots, whatever it is they do out there. Not fiction, but actual reality.

Imagine video, then, that gives you the palpable feeling of shit getting unnervingly real, of the world shifting beneath your feet. It’s what the American philosopher and physicist Thomas Kuhn called in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions a “paradigm shift,” or what philosophy and religious studies professor Jeffrey Kripal calls “the flip.” Out with the old, in with the new — and the woo.

Make no mistake: The videos we’ve already seen, acquired and published by the New York Times (and those reportedly leaked and subsequently dribbled out by ufologist and filmmaker Jeremy Corbell) are extraordinary, game-changing documents. They are, at this point, probably the most famous “authentic” UFO videos ever seen by the public. Future books on the topic will probably feature images from these videos the way UFO books published during the 1970s and ’80s included the famous Trent photos from McMinnville.

Thing is though, they’re not enough.

 

Why Is The CDC's Drug Overdose Data So Much Better Than Its Covid Mortality Data?

CDC  |  This data visualization presents provisional counts for drug overdose deaths based on a current flow of mortality data in the National Vital Statistics System. Counts for the most recent final annual data are provided for comparison. National provisional counts include deaths occurring within the 50 states and the District of Columbia as of the date specified and may not include all deaths that occurred during a given time period. Provisional counts are often incomplete and causes of death may be pending investigation (see Technical notes) resulting in an underestimate relative to final counts. To address this, methods were developed to adjust provisional counts for reporting delays by generating a set of predicted provisional counts (see Technical notes).

The provisional data presented in this visualization include: (a) the reported and predicted provisional counts of deaths due to drug overdose occurring nationally and in each jurisdiction; (b) a U.S. map of the percentage changes in provisional drug overdose deaths for the current 12 month-ending period compared with the 12-month period ending in the same month of the previous year, by jurisdiction; and (c) the reported and predicted provisional counts of drug overdose deaths involving specific drugs or drug classes occurring nationally and in selected jurisdictions. The reported and predicted provisional counts represent the numbers of deaths due to drug overdose occurring in the 12-month periods ending in the month indicated. These counts include all seasons of the year and are insensitive to variations by seasonality. Deaths are reported by the jurisdiction in which the death occurred.

Several data quality metrics, including the percent completeness in overall death reporting, percentage of deaths with cause of death pending further investigation, and the percentage of drug overdose deaths with specific drugs or drug classes reported are included to aid in interpretation of provisional data as these measures are related to the accuracy of provisional counts (see Technical notes). Reporting of the specific drugs and drug classes involved in drug overdose deaths varies by jurisdiction, and comparisons of death rates involving specific drugs across selected jurisdictions should not be made (see Technical notes). Provisional data presented in this visualization will be updated on a monthly basis as additional records are received.

The U.S. Govt Has Seized Enough Fentanyl This Year To Give Every American A Lethal Dose

CNN  |  America's drug epidemic is the deadliest it has ever been, new federal data suggests.

More than 100,000 people died of drug overdoses in the United States during the 12-month period ending April 2021, according to provisional data published Wednesday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 

That's a new record high, with overdose deaths jumping 28.5% from the same period a year earlier and nearly doubling over the past five years.

 

Opioids continue to be the driving cause of drug overdose deaths. Synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl, caused nearly two-thirds (64%) of all drug overdose deaths in the 12-month period ending April 2021, up 49% from the year before, the CDC's 's National Center for Health Statistics found.

 

Drug overdose deaths rose nearly 30% in the past year, according to provisional data released by the National Center for Health Statistics. More than 100,000 people died from a drug overdose between April 2020 and April 2021, up from 78,000 the year before and nearly double the deaths five years ago.

 

The Covid-19 pandemic and the rise in use of fentanyl have both been key contributors to the rising overdose death toll, experts say.

 

The latest provisional data on drug overdose deaths captures those occurring in May 2020 through April 2021. Covid-19 killed about 509,000 people in that same timeframe, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

 

"What we're seeing are the effects of these patterns of crisis and the appearance of more dangerous drugs at much lower prices," Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told CNN. "In a crisis of this magnitude, those already taking drugs may take higher amounts and those in recovery may relapse. It's a phenomenon we've seen and perhaps could have predicted."

But the rise of fentanyl, a stronger and faster-acting drug than natural opiates, has made those effects even more deadly, she said.

 

Increasing use of the synthetic drug caught the attention of experts before Covid-19 hit, but the pandemic may have exacerbated the problem. 

 

With international travel limited, synthetics that are easier to manufacture and more concentrated were likely more efficient to smuggle across borders, Volkow said.

 

Fentanyl Is The Grim Reaper's Constant Background Hum In Nashville

nashvillescene |  On April 7, Tyler Smith graduated from a 10-week addiction treatment program in Athens, Tenn. His family traveled from Knoxville for the occasion and felt optimistic that, this time, his recovery might last. At 31 years old, he told his mother Danita McCartney that he was ready to be done with the cycle that had shaped his life for more than a decade.

Like many teens, Tyler partied in high school, drinking beer and smoking weed on occasion. But the beast got its claws in him toward the end of his senior year, when a co-worker at a restaurant — a work environment where drugs are often found about as easily as any other ingredient — showed him how to crush an OxyContin and snort it. He spent the next 12 years in and out of the clutches of addiction. Danita would cling to hope where she could find it. As a young boy, Tyler had always been deathly afraid of needles — perhaps that would at least keep him from shooting up. It didn’t.    

But Danita says there were wonderful seasons of sobriety. Tyler loved the Grateful Dead and the mountains. Despite it being where he was introduced to hard drugs, the restaurant industry had made him into an excellent cook, and he delighted in taking over the kitchen at holidays to make a meal for the whole family. 

In between those seasons, Tyler wandered, living for short stints in various places around the country. When he struggled, he had the support of his family, and his mother says he found great treatment through urban rescue missions similar to the one where she works in Knoxville. He spent time in recovery programs in Alabama, Indiana and Florida before moving to Nashville, where he rekindled a relationship with a young woman he’d known in high school. He found a job at a downtown restaurant — there, again, he found drugs. In January of this year, he survived an overdose after his girlfriend was able to revive him. That prompted his family to send him to the program in Athens, where he stayed for more than two months. 

After he graduated from the program, Tyler returned to Nashville and got a job at an irrigation company, deciding to stay away from the kitchens where he’d been unable to resist substances. He talked on the phone with his mother frequently, never failing to end a conversation by telling her he loved her. But on the morning of Tuesday, April 14, Danita received the phone call she’d been expecting for years but could never prepare for. Tyler’s girlfriend had found him dead in the living room. A toxicology report later revealed what was in his system: meth and fentanyl, the latter a synthetic opioid that can be 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine and lethal in doses as small as 2 milligrams.

Tyler’s death inducted his family into a growing, grieving community — those who have lost loved ones to a raging epidemic of drug deaths, the majority of which have been caused by fentanyl. It’s the other epidemic, one that has been largely overshadowed by the global COVID-19 pandemic. But in Nashville, it’s claimed almost as many lives. From March 20, 2020 — the day of the first confirmed COVID-19 death in Nashville — to Oct. 16, 2021, the city reported 1,113 deaths from the virus. In that same time period, 1,070 suspected drug deaths have occurred in Nashville. That figure includes residents, non-residents and people whose status is unknown. According to the Metro Public Health Department, residents have accounted for around 70 percent of all drug deaths in Davidson County this year. 

The coronavirus pandemic has made us all terribly familiar with the notion of the so-called curve. Fentanyl deaths are still rising, and this curve is showing no signs of flattening.

Brain Computer Interfaces Are Still A Loooong Ways Away...,

technologyreview |  In a 12-by-20-foot room at a skilled-nursing facility in Menlo Park, California, researchers are testing the next evolution of the computer interface inside the soft matter of Dennis DeGray’s motor cortex. DeGray is paralyzed from the neck down. He was hurt in a freak fall in his yard while taking out the trash and is, he says, “as laid up as a person can be.” He steers his wheelchair by puffing into a tube. 

But DeGray is a virtuoso at using his brain to control a computer mouse. For the last five years, he has been a participant in BrainGate, a series of clinical trials in which surgeons have inserted silicon probes the size of a baby aspirin into the brains of more than 20 paralyzed people. Using these brain-computer interfaces, researchers can measure the firing of dozens of neurons as people think of moving their arms and hands. And by sending these signals to a computer, the scientists have enabled those with the implants to grasp objects with robot arms and steer planes around in flight simulators. 

This story was part of our November 2021 issue

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DeGray is the world’s fastest brain typist. He first established the mark four years ago, using his brain signals to roam over a virtual keyboard with a point-and-click cursor. Selecting letters on a screen, he reached a rate of eight correct words in a minute. Then, right before the covid-19 pandemic began, he demolished his own record, using a new technique where he imagined he was hand-­writing letters on lined paper. With that approach, he managed 18 words per minute.

One of the people responsible for the studies with DeGray is Krishna Shenoy, a Stanford University neuroscientist and electrical engineer who is among the leaders of the BrainGate project. While other brain-interface researchers grabbed the limelight with more spectacular demonstrations, Shenoy’s group has stayed focused on creating a practical interface that paralyzed patients can use for everyday computer interactions. “We had to persevere in the early days, when people said Ah, it’s cooler to do a robotic arm—it makes a better movie,” says Shenoy. But “if you can click, then you can use Gmail, surf the Web, and play music.” 

Shenoy says he is developing the technology for people with “the worst afflictions and the most need.” Those include patients who are utterly locked in and unable to speak, like those in the end stage of ALS. 

But if the technology allows people like DeGray to link their brain directly to a computer, why not extend it to others? In 2016, Elon Musk started a company called Neuralink that began developing a neural “sewing machine” to implant a new type of threaded electrode. Musk said his goal was to establish a high-throughput connection to human brains so that society could keep pace with artificial intelligence. 

The Energing Rennaissance In Neuromancy

nature |  A human brain slice is placed in a microscope to visualize nerve fibres. Credit: Mareen Fischinger

Imagine looking at Earth from space and being able to listen in on what individuals are saying to each other. That’s about how challenging it is to understand how the brain works.

From the organ’s wrinkled surface, zoom in a million-fold and you’ll see a kaleidoscope of cells of different shapes and sizes, which branch off and reach out to each other. Zoom in a further 100,000 times and you’ll see the cells’ inner workings — the tiny structures in each one, the points of contact between them and the long-distance connections between brain areas.

Scientists have made maps such as these for the worm¹ and fly² brains, and for tiny parts of the mouse³ and human⁴ brains. But those charts are just the start. To truly understand how the brain works, neuroscientists also need to know how each of the roughly 1,000 types of cell thought to exist in the brain speak to each other in their different electrical dialects. With that kind of complete, finely contoured map, they could really begin to explain the networks that drive how we think and behave.

Such maps are emerging, including in a series of papers published this week that catalogue the cell types in the brain. Results are streaming in from government efforts to understand and stem the increasing burden of brain disorders in their ageing populations. These projects, launched over the past decade, aim to systematically chart the brain’s connections and catalogue its cell types and their physiological properties.

It’s an onerous undertaking. “But knowing all the brain cell types, how they connect with each other and how they interact, will open up an entirely new set of therapies that we can’t even imagine today,” says Josh Gordon, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland.

The largest projects started in 2013, when the US government and the European Commission launched ‘moonshot’ efforts to provide services to researchers that will help to crack the mammalian brain’s code. They each poured vast resources into large-scale systematic programmes with different goals. The US effort — which is estimated to cost US$6.6 billion up until 2027 — has focused on developing and applying new mapping technologies in its BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative (see ‘Big brain budgets’). The European Commission and its partner organizations have spent €607 million ($703 million) on the Human Brain Project (HBP), which is aimed mainly at creating simulations of the brain’s circuitry and using those models as a platform for experiments.

 

Is An Ancient Virus The Physical Substrate For Memory Formation?

royalsocietyofbiology |  Understanding how memories are formed and stored is one of the great enigmas in neuroscience. After more than a century of research, detailed knowledge of the mechanisms of memory formation remain elusive.

In the past decade, memory research has been advanced by the study of neuronal engrams, or networks of neurons that are incorporated into a memory. In particular brain regions associated with memory, a neuronal engram is theorised to consist of a subset of neurons within that brain region that is uniquely activated by a behaviour that leads to memory formation.

For example, when mice are trained on a simple, initial behavioural task, a certain subset of neurons within a specific brain region will become activated. Genetic techniques can be used to ‘tag’ this network of neurons.

If the mouse is then placed in a different behavioural or environmental context, and the network of neurons from the initial behavioural task is artificially activated, the mouse will display behaviour that it learned in the initial task[1]. The initial behavioural task triggered the incorporation of a subset of neurons into an engram, which encoded the memory for that task.

Given the vast number of neurons in the brain, the potential combination of neurons that could make up separate memory engrams is virtually limitless. So the question that is key to our understanding of the mechanisms of memory formation is: what causes the incorporation of one neuron, but not another, into memory engrams?

Research has demonstrated that certain proteins can ‘prime’ neurons for incorporation into an engram[2]. Neurons that naturally express more of these proteins are frequently found in memory engrams for a behaviour. Artificially inducing more of these substances to be expressed can encourage neurons to become part of an engram.

One substance in particular that was found to be important for priming neurons for engram incorporation is known as Arc[3]. This protein is induced rapidly by neuronal activity and regulates levels of receptors at synapses that are critical for synaptic function and neuronal communication.

Mice that genetically lack Arc protein are unable to form memories that last longer than the course of a behavioural training session (known as long-term memories), although they can learn normally at short-term time scales. Although these experimental findings suggest that Arc is an important piece of the memory puzzle, the mechanisms that regulate Arc at the cellular and molecular level remain unclear.

Recently, research I conducted in the laboratory of Dr Jason Shepherd at the University of Utah[4] revealed something very surprising: Arc structurally and functionally resembles a retrovirus such as HIV. This is the first time a neuronal protein, much less one underlying a process as crucial as memory formation, has been shown to have a viral structure. Evolutionary analysis from our laboratory showed that Arc protein is distantly related to a class of retrotransposons that also gave rise to retroviruses such as HIV.

Why Do These Mengeles Want Children To Suffer From mRNA Long Vaccinoid?

What are Fauci and the pedophobe pediatrician smoking? That pediatrician MUST NOT HAVE kids of his own.  The neo-vaccinoids were tested on only 2,268 youngsters aged 5 to 12:

The pediatrician: “Given how infectious Delta is and other variants, everyone’s eventually going to get vaccinated or COVID.”

NO. Since the neo-vaccinoids are not sterilizing, everyone is going to get COVID, neo-vaccinoided or not.  

So Stop Lying...,

Children face much less risk from the virus and face much higher risk from the neo-vaccinoids. 

Fortunately many pediatricians understand this and are not pushing neo-vaccinoids, which begs the question, why is the Slate framing the decision to do so in such a net positive when the science is far from certain?

How many parents trusted the doctors who said, with authority, that pain is the sixth vital sign, filled the miracle opioid Rx they were given, and had their kids turn into opioid addicts?

 

 

Neo-vaccinoid Neurotic Pediatrician Wants Mandate For Children

slate |  Why do you think there’s this disconnect that might exist between what a vaccinated parent is willing to do for themselves and what they might be willing to do for their kid?

One is that you feel a sense of responsibility to your children that sometimes feels harder than to yourself, because you’ve been taking risks with yourself your whole life. You’ve probably made some reasonably risky decisions in your 20s, both with respect to sexual activity and perhaps with substances—you’re used to understanding tradeoffs. With kids however, we’re much more restrictive. And we feel that we could be blamed. The dangers seem much bigger and the benefits sometimes pale in comparison.

Of course, weighing benefits and risks of vaccines is nothing new. That’s why families turn to their pediatricians for advice. For years, doctors have tried to increase vaccination rates and fight hesitancy. Did this same struggle occur with earlier vaccines?

When the varicella vaccine got approved in the ’90s, lots of parents were like, “Why should I vaccinate my kid against chicken pox? It’s a nothing big, minor illness. Everybody gets it.” And for a lot of people, that’s true. But when adults get chicken pox, it’s massively bad. Plus, some number of babies died every year of varicella infection. It wasn’t huge numbers, but they were real numbers.

And just a couple of years after we really started vaccinating kids, in the early 2000s, zero babies died of chicken pox. That’s a huge win, given that zero babies are immunized against chicken pox. You can’t get it until you’re 1 year of age. But by vaccinating children, we’ve protected everyone. And now today we have like 86 percent of eligible children vaccinated, and chicken pox has largely gone away.

You wrote about your experience as a young pediatrician, vaccinating kids with the varicella vaccine against chicken pox. How did you break through to skeptical parents?

I think it’s time and effort and it’s building up trust. I would talk about risk and benefits. In fact, this is part of what we do with everything. When parents are like, “I want an antibiotic for my kid’s ear infection,” I talk about these are the benefits of it and these are the risks.
It’s negotiation. It’s making sure people feel heard, making sure that you understand what they’re going through, that it’s not unreasonable and trying to find a solution that works.

In your writing about varicella, I noticed that you said in 2008, only about 34 percent of eligible adolescents were fully immunized. And by 2018, about 90 percent of kids have been vaccinated. That seems both great, and made me think: Are we talking about immunizing kids against COVID on a decade long timeframe? Is it going to take us 10 years?

Unless we have mandates, yeah, I think it is because, and, to be honest with you, we won’t get all the way there without mandates. Let’s be clear too. I can’t win 90 percent as a pediatrician. I just own that. It’s not going to happen. You need these to become so expected that the school system’s requiring it. The default has to be “vaccinated,” so that most people will do it.

 

Lil'Fauci Gone Lil'Fauci - Advocating Neo-Vaccinoidation For Children

self |  Following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s official recommendation of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for children ages 5 to 11 last week, NPR host Mary Louise Kelly asked Dr. Fauci for his take on how parents who are still weighing the risks and benefits of vaccination for their newly eligible kids should think the decision through. “Well, first of all, we have to always respect when parents have questions, reasonable questions about this,” Dr. Fauci said. “And what you do is you take them to the data.”

Dr. Fauci cited evidence from the clinical trial studying the first COVID-19 vaccine for kids, which the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration used in their decision-making about the first pediatric COVID-19 vaccine. “This is a study that very clearly showed a high degree of efficacy,” Dr. Fauci said. In the trial, which included about 3,100 children who received the vaccine and about 1,500 who received a placebo, vaccination was found to be nearly 91% effective at preventing symptomatic cases of COVID-19. “That is really very good for a vaccine,” Dr. Fauci said. He noted that the study found the pediatric COVID-19 vaccine also has a very good safety profile. 

Another key data point Dr. Fauci believes parents should consider is the prevalence of COVID-19 infections among children—and the real risks of serious illness, long-term effects, or death. “I would tell the parents [that] although it is less likely for a child to get a serious result from infection than an adult, particularly an elderly adult, it is not something that’s trivial with children,” Dr. Fauci said.

There have been about 1.9 million reported cases of COVID-19 in children ages 5 to 11 in the U.S., including approximately 8,300 hospitalizations and 100 deaths, according to Dr. Fauci. There have also been over 2,000 cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in U.S. children, “which can really be quite severe,” Dr. Fauci said. The rare but serious (and still poorly understood) syndrome can cause inflammation in a variety of body organs and systems, including the lungs, heart, kidneys, brain, digestive system, skin, and eyes, according to the CDC. 

During the interview, Dr. Fauci also addressed another key question parents may have: whether children who have already had COVID-19 still ought to be vaccinated. The added protective benefit of COVID-19 vaccination in kids who have already been infected can’t be demonstrated yet, since the FDA just authorized the two-dose mRNA vaccine. But based on mounting data on vaccinated adults, the answer is yes, as SELF has reported.

What End-Stage Civil War Gaslighting Looks Like...,

Minorities, working class females, refugees, indentured 1099 gig-serfs - none of these people are in any kind of position to “tear each other’s faces off” in American Civil War 2.0.

The working class is the most integrated sector of America. Most of the black folk I know don’t have much interest in BLM. Most are likely to ask “What do you have to say about the violence in the hood?” None of the black folk I know have any interest in the race baiters at CNN. MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, NPR, those jokers are for idiotic comfortable white folks, the pretty people.

Most of the white working class folk I know aren’t interested in any of that gas either. They're too busy trying to get by, take care of family etc. Now find a politician that doesn’t have a platinum tongue, who walks the talk about forcing industry to come back to America, and who threatens the rich with high wages for those folk or watch your holdings get repurposed. See what happens then. Watch as the pretty people show their true colors as the real race baiters.

We’ve got a family friend who is a shift manager at a local Starbucks. The chain closed 8,000 stores in 2018 for a day of racial sensitivity training. The sensitivity trainer surveyed the group of workers at our friend’s location. They stared back at him. After a moment, everyone broke out laughing. There was nary a marginalized minority who was not represented among them.

1% Media/Social Network Activists and White kids’ co-opting movements or appropriating and spinning the utter HORROR of being poor and Black in America has precious little to do with Black Lives Matter.  Conflating this with Comcast-ATT-Fox-Disney-Viacom - again monetizing poor worker deaths by cop, OR, prodding the working poor into hellish gig-serfdom, to intentionally infect vulnerable loved-ones, flip their apartments; then further break them down into homelessness - IS what Taibbi, Greenwald… basically all your HEROS studiously ignore. 

Think Of The Jackpot As Eugenics Writ Large...,

“The Jackpot” is a reference to William Gibson’s The Peripheral.

Here’s the quote; I think it’s self-explanatory.

[The Jackpot] was androgenic, he said, and she knew from Ciencia Loca and National Geographic that meant because of people. Not that they’d known what they were doing, had meant to make problems, but they’d caused it anyway. And in fact the actual climate, the weather, caused by there being too much carbon, had been the driver for a lot of other things. How that got worse and never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in the past, clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all up, then not been able to get it together to do anything about it, even after they knew, and now it was too late.

So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn’t happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming anyway. She’d looked across the silver lawn, that Leon had cut with the push-mower whose cast-iron frame was held together with actual baling wire, to where moon shadows lay, past stunted boxwoods and the stump of a concrete birdbath they’d pretened was a dragon’s castle, while Wilf told her it killed 80 percent of every last person alive, over about forty years. …

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there. …

But science, he said, had been the wild card, the twist. With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before…. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable. …

None of that, he said, had necessarily been as bad for very rich people. The richest had gotten richer, there being fewer to own whatever there was. Constant crisis bad provided constant opportunity. That was where his world had come from, he said. At the deepest point of everything going to shit, population radically reduced, the survivors saw less carbon being dumped into the system, with what was still being produced being eaten by those towers they’d built… And seeing that, for them, the survivors, was like seeing the bullet dodged.

“The bullet was the eighty percent, who died?”

 

If The Jabs Are Safe And Effective - Why Are Their Manufacturers Shielded By Liability Waivers?

CTH  |  Many people have asked: how is the best way to stop the insanity behind the incessant vaccine narrative?  The likely best approach is to start demanding the pharmaceutical companies have their liability waivers removed.

If the vaccine is safe and effective, why would the U.S. government still need to provide liability waivers from adverse vaccine outcomes?

Start pressuring legislators and elected officials to force the elimination of the waivers.  Alinsky them… Make them live up to their own narrative; their own words, their own rules.  If the vaccines are safe/effective, why do we need the waivers?    If you want to get more people vaccinated, drop the waiver moving forward.

Eliminate those liability waivers and watch how fast every vaccine mandate is dropped, while every voice demanding vaccination goes quiet.

A Pandemic Of The Feebleminded

spiegel |  Meanwhile, a large population of the feebleminded have continued to ignore the dangers presented by the virus and refuse to be vaccinated. Indeed, the untenable situation in Germany’s intensive care units is primarily due to this group. In its most recent weekly report, the RKI notes that 87 percent of adults under 60 receiving intensive care due to COVID-19 have not been vaccinated.

"The winter will be a societal and medical challenge for Germany, resulting from a lack of preparation, clear rules and rigor," said Gerald Haug, president of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. The unusually stern tone of his message is justified. Almost no preventative measures were taken, the rules now in place aren’t particularly rigorous, and they are hardly enforced.

The fact that Germany is stumbling into the fall virtually unprepared is one problem. The fact that the country has essentially been without leadership since the September general election is another. The leadership shown – or better, not shown – by the country’s political representatives in recent months borders on malpractice. Hardly anyone is doing what they should be doing in the face of a crisis like this. Angela Merkel is no longer offering guidance. Her likely successor, Olaf Scholz, isn’t yet in office. And even worse, the next coalition will in all likelihood include the Free Democrats (FDP), a party which, when it comes to measures to control the coronavirus, is far more focused on what they don’t want than on what is necessary.

The result is that Germany’s federal politicians are pushing off responsibility onto the states. And they are again doing what they always do: Each state comes up with its own strategy. No coordination. Collective negligence.

The consequences are serious. Whereas more than half the population of Israel has received a third dose of vaccine, the rate in Germany is just 4 percent. Despite the fact that it has been known for some time that protection from the initial doses begins to wane after a few months.

Back in summer, immunologists and virologists made it clear to the German government that all elderly people in the country and those with compromised immune systems needed to receive a booster, which can increase protection from the virus by up to 20 times. The Health Ministry, under the leadership of Jens Spahn, calculated that up to 11 million people could be reached by the end of October. It is now November, and just over 3 million have received their booster shots. Just how outgoing Chancellery Chief of Staff Helge Braun intends to achieve his self-proclaimed target of 20 million boosters by the end of the year remains his secret. Preparations for the campaign have suffered for weeks from chaotic agreements and contradictory statements.

And it was Health Minister Spahn himself who was the source of much of the confusion. After he – in concert with the RKI – initially recommended booster shots after six months for the elderly, those with weak immune systems and health-care personnel, he suddenly shifted his approach two weeks ago. He did so in response to a discussion with his Israeli counterpart, who has been preaching booster shots for some time. There are now indications that boosters don’t just help at-risk patients, but can also result in a lower virus transmission rate, thus breaking new chains of infection.

So, Spahn also suddenly recommended that everyone get their booster shot.

The consequence has been massive confusion in medical practices across the country. Primary care physicians say their phone lines were suddenly jammed and people mobbed their offices – right at the beginning of the cold and flu season. Last Tuesday, the outraged doctors took an unusual step. In comments to journalists in Berlin, Andreas Gassen, head of the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians, said that comments from political leaders introduced "chaos" into German medical practices. It was clear that he was talking about Spahn.

 

 

Only A Softhead Could Pretend Jacobson Vs Massachusetts Made The Mandate Constitutional

 

Twitter is designed in a way to mislead and distort objective reality.

This headline based on one Bloomberg opinion piece was trending on Twitter for literally *weeks*, leading many people to believe that the vaccine mandates were perfectly constitutional.

Wrong. https://t.co/xLNJ3BssWE pic.twitter.com/sAejFzgAjz

— Rav Arora (@Ravarora1) November 13, 2021