Nov 112021
 
 November 11, 2021  Posted by at 9:28 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , ,


Pablo Picasso Juan-Les-Pins 1920

 

Senior NIH Doctor Pushes Back on COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates (ET)
Covid-Resistant People Point Way To Universal Coronavirus Vaccine (NS)
More on Original Antigenic Sin (eugypp)
Most Covid19-Specific Antibodies In Obese Are Autoimmune, Not Neutralizing (Nat)
Why They Didn’t Stop the Trials (Vox)
So WAS It Fraud? (Denninger)
Germany Recommends Only Biontech/Pfizer Vaccine For Under-30s (R.)
Taiwan Halts 2nd-dose BioNTech Vaccinations For Ages 12-17 (TN)
Moderna Testing Vaccine On Infants Nationwide Despite ‘Negligible’ Risk (JTN)
Navy SEALs Sue Biden Administration Over Covid Mandate (JTN)
Anti-Vaxxer Doctors Could Be Held Criminally Liable – Health Minister (RT)
10 More Upcoming Product Endorsements From Big Bird

 

 

 

 

Hecker 19x

 

 

“Memoli had told Fauci in a July 30 email that he believes “the way we are using the vaccines is wrong,” adding that mandated vaccines are “extraordinarily problematic,“

Senior NIH Doctor Pushes Back on COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates (ET)

A top infectious disease doctor has raised alarm about COVID-19 vaccine mandates despite top federal officials recommending them for businesses, schools, and other institutions. Dr. Matthew Memoli, who runs a clinical studies unit within the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci—is scheduled to argue against COVID-19 vaccine mandates during a Dec. 1 seminar hosted by the agency, according to David Wendler, a senior NIH bioethicist who is planning the seminar. “There’s a lot of debate within the NIH about whether [a vaccine mandate] is appropriate,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s an important, hot topic.”

Memoli had told Fauci in a July 30 email that he believes “the way we are using the vaccines is wrong,” adding that mandated vaccines are “extraordinarily problematic,” according to the WSJ. In comments to the paper, Memoli said that he supports COVID-19 vaccination in high-risk groups including obese people and the elderly. However, widespread vaccinations for people who have a low risk of death or severe illness from COVID-19 could hamper the U.S. population’s ability to develop more robust protection against the virus via previous infections, he said. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study released last month suggested that those who had a previous COVID-19 infection saw a five times higher chance of testing positive than those who were fully vaccinated and never had COVID-19.

Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, who previously conducted a study that suggested people with natural immunity are at low risk of reinfection, told The Epoch Times that the CDC’s research was observational and said that “randomized controlled clinical trials are the gold standard of medical evidence.” Memoli also told the paper that he has sought an exemption from the federal vaccine mandate on religious grounds, saying he is willing to risk his job and medical license for the right not to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. Regarding the discussion, Memoli said that “part of my career is to share my expert opinions, right or wrong … I mean, if they all end up saying I’m wrong, that’s fine. I want to have the discussion.”

Read more …

Or to no vaccine needed?!

Covid-Resistant People Point Way To Universal Coronavirus Vaccine (NS)

During the first half of 2020, around 700 healthcare workers in the UK were tested weekly as part of a crowdfunded study called COVIDsortium. Most of these people, who wore protective equipment, never tested positive for covid-19 in PCR tests or developed covid-19 antibodies – proteins that bind to the outside of viruses, preventing cells from being infected. However, when Leo Swadling and Mala Maini at University College London and their colleagues looked more closely, they found some of those who tested negative had a protein in their blood that is linked to covid-19 infection, as well as T cell responses to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. T cells are part of the immune system. It appears these people had what Swadling calls an “abortive infection”, where a strong, early T cell response enabled them to get rid of the virus very quickly.

Cells infected by viruses sound the alarm by displaying viral proteins on their surface, and T cells are the immune cells that learn to recognise these proteins and destroy infected cells. Crucially, while antibodies can only target proteins on the outside of a virus, T cells can learn to recognise any viral proteins. When the team looked at early blood samples from the people who had an abortive infection, they found that even before being exposed to SARS-CoV-2, they had some T cells that could recognise the proteins that this virus uses to replicate itself inside infected cells. The most likely explanation is that these people were often exposed to the existing human coronaviruses that cause around 10 per cent of colds, says Maini. “We don’t know the historic infections of these individuals, so we don’t know for sure where the T cells are coming from,” she says.

The proteins involved in viral replication are very similar in SARS-CoV-2 and other human and animal coronaviruses, meaning that if vaccines can be developed that elicit a strong T cell response against these proteins, they should protect against a very broad range of coronaviruses – a so-called universal or pan-coronavirus vaccine. One way to do this would be to add mRNAs coding for these proteins to mRNA vaccines that target the virus’s external spike protein. Adding extra components to the next generation of coronavirus vaccines might protect both against any new variants that might evolve and against animal coronaviruses that could jump into people and spark a new pandemic, says Swadling. “There is a strong rationale for adding these proteins alongside the spike protein,” he says.

Read more …

“..we are never quite immune to the flu, because its strategy is to exploit the way our immune systems learn.”

More on Original Antigenic Sin (eugypp)

To review: We have now had ten months of mass vaccination against SARS-CoV-2. Nearly 7 billion doses have been administered worldwide. This unprecedented campaign has not eradicated Corona; it has not even suppressed infections. Instead, case statistics have ballooned almost everywhere. While the vaccinated appear to enjoy some protection against severe outcomes, skyrocketing transmission means most countries have seen little benefit, on balance, from their universal vaccination campaigns. The most pressing question has become, simply: What is going on?

I’ve explored a few different possibilities. First, there seems to be a Marek Effect at work. We might imagine that all viruses have an optimal level of population-wide virulence – an advantageous degree of aggression at which they can spread effectively, while not driving their hosts underground too soon. Certain Delta sub-strains, previously punished for their excessive aggression in unvaccinated populations, have likely been favoured by the vaccines, which reduce symptoms in the vaccinated without preventing infection for more than a few months. Our vaccines reduced the average virulence of SARS-2, and the virus adapted to reattain the prior, optimal balance.

But the virus and its interactions with human hosts constitute a complex system. In such systems, it is very unlikely that any effect can be put down to a single cause. The Public Health England data provide powerful reasons to suspect that the vaccines may be compromising immunity to SARS-2 via Original Antigenic Sin. This is not a crazy internet fantasy, but a well-observed limitation of human immunity. It is the primary reason that respiratory viruses like influenza return again and again. Despite multiple reinfections across the whole population, we are never quite immune to the flu, because its strategy is to exploit the way our immune systems learn.

The mechanisms of Original Antigenic Sin are not fully understood, but we have a rough idea of what might be happening. When a virus infects your body for the first time, your naive memory B cells imprint on specific virus proteins, or antigens, presented to them. These B cells then become either memory B cells or plasma cells. Forever after, they specialise in producing antibodies against those specific antigens. When a slightly mutated form of the virus arrives, these memory B-cells begin pouring forth the antibodies they learned to produce during the first infection. These antibodies bind to multiple epitopes on the virus particles, and in the process they give the slower-moving naive B-cells little chance to learn about any new, mutant virus features.

Original Antigenic Sin was most influentially described by Thomas Francis in 1960. He noted that, regardless of whatever influenza A strains were in circulation, subjects tended to have dominant antibody responses to the strains that were current in their early childhood:

The antibody of childhood is largely a response to … the virus causing the first Type A influenza infection of the lifetime. As the group grows older and subsequent infections take place, antibodies to additional families of virus are acquired. But … the antibody which is first established continues to characterize that cohort of the population throughout its life. The antibody forming mechanisms have been highly conditioned by the first stimulus, so that later infections with strains of the same type successively enhance the original antibody to maintain it at the highest level at all times in that age group. The imprint established by the original virus infection governs the antibody response thereafter. This we have called the doctrine of original antigenic sin.

Read more …

Inflammation.

Most Covid19-Specific Antibodies In Obese Are Autoimmune, Not Neutralizing (Nat)

Thirty serum samples from individuals who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection by RT-PCR were collected from inpatient and outpatient settings. Of these, 15 were lean (BMI < 25) and 15 were obese (BMI ≥30). Control serum samples were from 30 uninfected individuals, age-, gender-, and BMI-matched, recruited before the current pandemic. Neutralizing and autoimmune antibodies were measured by ELISA. IgG autoimmune antibodies were specific for malondialdehyde (MDA), a marker of oxidative stress and lipid peroxidation, and for adipocyte-derived protein antigens (AD), markers of virus-induced cell death in the obese adipose tissue.

SARS-CoV-2 infection induces neutralizing antibodies in all lean but only in few obese COVID-19 patients. SARS-CoV-2 infection also induces anti-MDA and anti-AD autoimmune antibodies more in lean than in obese patients as compared to uninfected controls. Serum levels of these autoimmune antibodies, however, are always higher in obese versus lean COVID-19 patients. Moreover, because the autoimmune antibodies found in serum samples of COVID-19 patients have been correlated with serum levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a general marker of inflammation, we also evaluated the association of anti-MDA and anti-AD antibodies with serum CRP and found a positive association between CRP and autoimmune antibodies.

Our results highlight the importance of evaluating the quality of the antibody response in COVID-19 patients with obesity, particularly the presence of autoimmune antibodies, and identify biomarkers of self-tolerance breakdown. This is crucial to protect this vulnerable population at higher risk of responding poorly to infection with SARS-CoV-2 than lean controls.

Read more …

“The normal acceptable threshold for SAEs is 5%. Once you cross that threshold, and more than 5% of your patients are reporting SAEs, you have to stop the trial and investigate for cause.”

Why They Didn’t Stop the Trials (Vox)

Last week I caught up with a friend who worked on some of the first Moderna vaccine human trials in the US. He revealed to me that it is indeed as bad as we thought it was. He had worked at a research center 6 years testing various drugs and was in charge of describing and filing reports for serious adverse reactions (SAEs). SAE’s include anything from getting hit by a bus to having an anaphylactic reaction to the drug at the center (basically any serious health event has to be recorded and investigated for any link to the clinical trial for the duration of the trial.) For a normal week, he’d have 1 or 2 SAEs to file and report. When they started the Moderna trial, within a week he was having to come in early and stay late to get through stacks of SAEs.

The normal acceptable threshold for SAEs is 5%. Once you cross that threshold, and more than 5% of your patients are reporting SAEs, you have to stop the trial and investigate for cause. Well, they had a rate of at least 16% after a few weeks. So, confused as to why the trial had not been flagged and halted, they looked into their SAE database and found that the majority of the ones they had reported to the agency responsible (I think FDA) were missing.They called said agency and were told that there were a high volume of SAEs being reported from multiple centers, so they were going through and removing the “irrelevant ones.” They claimed that the state of the pandemic warranted an unconventional approach to research. Obviously this is insane, even to the trusting individuals my friend worked with so the head of his clinic called a conference of the other 20 or so sites in that region and they all were having the same experience. In other words, this wasn’t a fluke.

Things eventually got so bad that my friends’ boss told the company he was contracted with that he was going to discontinue the trial because people were having so many SAEs including seizures, clots, myocarditis, death, etc. The contracting company told him that he was obliged to finish the trial, from what I gather because the official number of SAEs was below the 5% threshold. Friend’s boss said “go take a hike, I quit.” Walked away from his head job at the research center where he made millions.

Read more …

Karl’s take on the Vox article above.

So WAS It Fraud? (Denninger)

In general my rule as anyone who’s followed my reporting over the last close to 15 years knows is that without sourcing I won’t run it no matter where it came from. But there are times exceptions are called for and this is one of them. Among the reasons for my decision in this instance are that at least one instance of serious fraud in the trials on teens has been documented by the victim herself attempting to take said message public — in a wheelchair — and having it spiked by the media. That standing alone might have been enough but in this case its even more-compelling because the claim can be verified as the reports are it was across multiple locations.

The claim thus must be run to the ground one way or the other: That the people conducting the original trials on the vaccines knew damn well they were dangerous and someone — likely the FDA — was intentionally deleting reports of adverse events. This is either true or it is not. If its true then every party who was involved and did nothing to blow the whistle is responsible for injecting somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 million Americans (and God knows how many worldwide) with a drug that was known to be very dangerous — and those dangers were intentionally concealed. That’s all discoverable, by the way, should someone sue. If its true then Moderna knew it too. Pfizer and J&J, from the field data I have discussed, likely knew had similar experiences and knew as well because the odds are extremely high their formulations and tests produced the same results.

May I remind you that one of the exceptions to the PREP Act’s liability shield is intentional misconduct. You can’t sue the government generally but if you can prove that the drugmakers knew of this data — and if it happened they did know because their people or their contracted labs were seeing it and reporting it — and they deliberately sat back and let anyone including the FDA delete the records and thus tamper with the trial their liability shield goes “poof” like Joe Biden’s fart in front of the Duchess.

There are a hell of a lot of dead and injured people out there, and the VAERS reports, even under-represented as they are, shows that these jabs are wildly more-dangerous than any other in United States history. The adverse event rate is high enough to have immediately terminated the trials in the fall of 2020 if it had been reported. Discovery is a bitch folks, and there’s no way around a subpoena in a situation like this. Oh, and since the government was directly involved the issuance of a “mandate” in the face of this deception, assuming it occurred and was deliberate, is quite-arguably intentional manslaughter and no, government officials are not immune from being prosecuted for that.

Read more …

CovidCrusher tweeted:

• no Moderna vaccine below the age of 30
• no Moderna vaccine for pregnant women

But I don’t see the 2nd point in the article.

Germany Recommends Only Biontech/Pfizer Vaccine For Under-30s (R.)

People aged under 30 in Germany should only receive the Biontech/Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine as it causes fewer heart inflammations in younger people than the Moderna (MRNA.O)shot, an advisory committee said on Wednesday. The committee, known as STIKO, recommended that pregnant women also be inoculated only with the Biontech/Pfizer vaccine, regardless of their age. The recommendations are based on new safety data from the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI), Germany’s authority in charge of vaccines, and new international data. Several other European Union countries have already recommended limiting use of the Moderna vaccine among younger people. The German PEI data showed a “report rate” for heart inflammations of 11.71 per 100,000 shots with the Moderna vaccine for men in the 18-29 age group, compared with 4.68 for the Biontech/Pfizer shot.


For women, the rate was 2.95 with Moderna and 0.97 with Biontech/Pfizer. In the 12-17 age group, the rate was 11.41 for males with the Moderna shot compared with 4.81 for Biontech/Pfizer. There was no data provided for females in the lower age group. France’s public health authority this week recommended that under-30s be given the Pfizer vaccine when available instead of the Moderna shot. Finland and Sweden have also limited use of the Moderna shot. read more The EU’s drug regulator said last month it concluded in its review that Moderna’s COVID-19 booster vaccine could be given to people aged 18 years and above, at least six months after the second dose. On Tuesday Moderna applied for European authorization of its COVID-19 vaccine in children aged 6-11 years, weeks after it delayed a similar filing with U.S. regulators.

Read more …

Everyone’s reinventing the wheel; unfortunately, for everyone it’s their own wheel.

Taiwan Halts 2nd-dose BioNTech Vaccinations For Ages 12-17 (TN)

Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) head Chen Shih-chung said on Wednesday (Nov. 10) that a panel of experts has decided to suspend administering second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech (BNT) COVID vaccine to children 12-17 years old amid concerns it may increase the risk of myocarditis. Cases of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the outer lining of the heart) have been reported after BNT vaccination of children between 12 and 17 years of age. According to U.S. statistics, the risk of youths experiencing myocarditis after receiving the second BNT dose is 10 times higher than after the first dose, CNA reported.


Some countries have adjusted their policies regarding administering COVID-19 vaccines to adolescents. For instance, Hong Kong has changed from two doses of BNT to only a single dose for those aged 12-17. The U.K. has done something similar, recommending only one shot for children between 12 and 18 years of age, per CNA.Chen said that the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) has decided to halt administration of second BNT doses to this age group for two weeks, during which time experts and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) physicians will look at the 16 cases of myocarditis among adolescents after BNT vaccination before making a final decision on whether to go ahead with the second shot.

Read more …

“Our very youngest children need to get the vaccine and we need to make sure they are safe..”

Talk about contradiction.

Moderna Testing Vaccine On Infants Nationwide Despite ‘Negligible’ Risk (JTN)

The Moderna COVID-19 vaccine is being tested on infants across the country, even as medical experts question the wisdom of moving so fast on novel vaccine development in a population with such low risk from COVID. Seventy-nine locations in 31 states are listed as participating in the so-called KidCOVE study, which started with children ages 6 to “less than 12,” followed by ages 2 to less than 6, and finally 6 months to less than 2 years. The infant trials have received sporadic media attention. CBS Miami and WCNC Charlotte ran features on local infant participants a month ago, followed by features last week for Colorado’s KDVR and Oklahoma’s Fox 23. New attention came Monday when the University of Wisconsin medical school announced that “dozens” of children under age 6 were participating in its trial at American Family Children’s Hospital.

The ages 5-11 trial in Madison was full just days after enrollment opened in August, the med school said. About 4 in 5 participants in its Moderna trials are from “underserved populations meaning they might face barriers based on race, ethnicity, income, geography and health outcomes.” “Our very youngest children need to get the vaccine and we need to make sure they are safe,” said Dr. Bill Hartman, co-principal investigator of its KidCOVE trial. The announcement came less than a week after the CDC approved the Pfizer vaccine for children ages 5-11, and two weeks after FDA approval. More than 13,000 children will receive “up to 3 dose levels” of the vaccine or a placebo, according to Moderna’s KidCOVE summary. Excluded from eligibility: children with a “known history” of COVID infection or “close contact” with an infected person within two weeks of the trial, as well as those who have received monoclonal antibodies in the past six months.

Asked about the ethical implications of testing a vaccine on a population at such low risk, especially relative to their risk from seasonal influenza, Hartman wrote in an email that “many kids” have developed COVID due to the Delta variant. “This kept them out of daycare, out of school, and/or they went on to infect the people around them, including immunocompromised relatives,” he said, claiming 30,000 children were hospitalized in August. He compared child COVID deaths to date — nearly 600 — with the flu season directly before COVID, which killed 188. COVID is arguably in its third season, having circulated in the U.S. as early as December 2019. “Babies under age 1 might be at higher risk of severe illness with COVID-19 than older children, likely due to their immature immune systems and smaller airways, which make them more likely to develop breathing issues with respiratory virus infections,” Hartman wrote. He didn’t respond to a subsequent query about the documented difficulty of young children transmitting COVID; why he compared multiple seasons of COVID to one flu season; or a request for the underlying health of children who died from the flu versus COVID.

Harvard Medical School epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, a pioneer in vaccine safety and vocal critic of White House COVID advisor Anthony Fauci, reviewed Hartman’s responses at the request of Just the News. It’s true that children are “about as likely to be infected as adults,” including from Delta, but there’s “more than a thousand-fold difference in mortality risk between the old and the young,” he wrote in an email. The risk is “minuscule” even for children under one. It’s wrong to blame the infection for keeping them out of school, “since most children are either asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic,” he said. “What kept them out of school were the misguided pandemic restrictions.” They are also “not major spreaders of COVID,” and vaccination is “not a burden that we should put on children” when older, high-risk people can be protected through vaccination, Kulldorff said.

Read more …

“We generally have about 2,500 Navy SEALs” [..] Hundreds are leaving because of nonsense.”

Navy SEALs Sue Biden Administration Over Covid Mandate (JTN)

A group of Navy SEALs filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration over its vaccine mandate, the latest to join the legal fight over what critics are calling unconstitutional government overreach. Dozens of SEALs, along with other Navy service members, joined in the lawsuit after the Department of Defense refused to grant them COVID-19 vaccination exemptions. With President Joe Biden’s approval, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced in August that all U.S. service members must be vaccinated. “The fact that the government has not granted a single religious exemption from the vaccine mandate shows that the Biden administration does not care about religious freedom,” said Mike Berry, general counsel for First Liberty Institute, the legal group representing the plaintiffs.

“Instead, this appears to be an attempted ideological purge. After all these elite warriors have done to defend our freedoms, the Navy is now threatening their careers, families, and finances.” “It’s appalling and it has to stop before any more harm is done to our national security,” he added. According to Liberty Counsel, the service members who requested religious exemptions to the vaccine were told they may face “court-martial or involuntary separation.” “Each of their religious exemption denials appear to be identical, suggesting the Navy is not taking their requests seriously,” the group said. “The Navy also warned some of the plaintiffs that if they sought a religious exemption, the Navy would confiscate their Special Warfare devices – such as the famous SEAL ‘Trident’ – that they proudly wear on their uniforms.

The Vaccine Mandate substantially burdens the SEALs’ free exercise of religion, and the Department of Defense has failed to prove it has a compelling government interest, or that there are no less restrictive ways to further its effort to mitigate the Covid-19 virus.” The latest lawsuit comes after a federal court temporarily halted Biden’s mandate that private sector companies with more than 99 employees ensure that their workers are vaccinated or receive weekly testing. More than 20 states have joined a series of lawsuits challenging the private sector vaccine mandate. A separate vaccination mandate for federal employees is also facing pushback.

Many SEALs have reportedly left in anticipation that they would be forced out. “We generally have about 2,500 Navy SEALs,” Robert O’Neill, a former Navy SEAL who claims to have killed Osama Bin Laden in Operation Neptune Spear, said after the mandate was announced. “It takes time to get to certain levels. Hundreds are leaving because of nonsense.”

Read more …

Russia’s health minister.

Anti-Vaxxer Doctors Could Be Held Criminally Liable – Health Minister (RT)

Doctors who oppose vaccination against Covid-19 could be found criminally liable because they pose a serious threat if they catch the virus, Russia’s health minister revealed to a parliamentary committee on Wednesday. Mikhail Murahsko’s comments came on the same day as Russia’s Covid-19 HQ revealed that 1,239 people died of the disease in the last 24 hours, a new record. “In criminal legislation, there are articles that could be applied to people who pose a threat,” Murashko explained. “You don’t have to be a prophet to see what happens when anti-vaxxer medical workers get sick.” According to the health minister, medical professionals should be “more advanced” than the average person and know better than refusing inoculation.


Murashko also suggested that the country should take a stricter stance on vaccination as a whole, citing Singapore’s decision to refuse medical care to unvaccinated citizens as a possible inspiration for policy. The health minister’s increasingly tough view on Covid-19 comes as the delta variant continues to rip through Russia, regularly breaking records for both infections and deaths. Much of the blame for the spread of the virus has been placed on the low level of vaccination, which, according to Murashko, currently sits at 53% of the adult population. On Wednesday, Russian Senator Andrey Klishas suggested that parliament could vote in favor of a vaccination mandate. On Tuesday, lawmakers in Russia’s second city, St. Petersburg, signed a decree requiring all over-60s and people with chronic conditions to receive their first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine within the next month.

Read more …

Big Bird selling vaccines to toddlers is a deep deep low.

10 More Upcoming Product Endorsements From Big Bird

The beloved Sesame Street character Big Bird is finally doing what he was born to do: sell pharmaceutical products to small children! After his resounding success in selling a Pfizer vaccine, here are 10 more exciting Big Bird product endorsements PBS is planning:

1) The brand new cereal Pfizer-O’s: Every bowl is the equivalent of one additional COVID booster. The FDA says it’s a balanced part of your complete breakfast! Cool!

2) Pfizer’s watermelon flavored puberty blocker chewables: change your gender without sacrificing taste.

3) Lead finger-paint set: This is a great way to boost your child’s immunity to lead poisoning. Made in China.

4) Communist Manifesto: Illustrated Children’s Edition: It’s never too early to introduce your kids to the greatest political ideology on earth. A great alternative to Tuttle Twins books.

5) Fisher Price’s My First Pregnancy Test: They even come in pink and blue, depending on whether your pregnant child is a man or a woman!

6) Waterboarding kit: A great way for kids to learn how we treat enemies of the state.

7) COVID Heroes Trading Cards: Fauci, Whitmer, Newsom… collect ’em all!

8) Injectable sugar: a great way to boost your energy on the go!

9) Afghanistan withdrawal Lego set: Reinact Biden’s heroic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and decide who gets left behind!

10) A government-issued satellite phone for reporting your parents to the state: Don’t let them get away with mask violations on your watch!

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

Entombed

 

 

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Home Forums Debt Rattle November 11 2021

Viewing 40 posts - 41 through 80 (of 98 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #92089
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    I may have mentioned this before. I know, on a very close basis, someone who ran Boeing’s, um, quality control for aircraft design. Part or all of it, I’m not sure. Call this person X.

    X signed off on the 737 aircraft design that crashes so spectacularly

    ***

    Meanwhile, eslewhere, my favorite horse’ss ass, Dmitry Orlov knocks it out of the park again. The man’s a genius, but in person, only my vow of non-violence unless the voices in my head tell me to fight would prevent me from knocking him out of the park. Aside from my avowed pacifism, the only thing that would save Mr. Orlov from wearing the front of his face on the backof his head would be that he can be hysterically funny, as witness here:

    The Reverse Green Energy Cargo Cult

    #92090
    Figmund Sreud
    Participant

    This doc did some testing, … and reporting results:

    Doctor’s “jaw dropped after seeing the blood test” following the 2nd vaccine

    Doctor’s “jaw dropped after seeing the blood test” following the 2nd vaccine


    F.S.

    #92091
    zerosum
    Participant

    Kamala Has An Even Lower Approval Rating than Dick Cheney…

    Its worth a pay raise ….. can’t do that ….
    therefore, an all expensive trip to France should be sufficient compensation

    #92092
    Rover
    Participant

    I’m a novice and new poster… following the scents, trying to make some sense… Let us go then, you and I..

    #92093
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    I just now thought of how cellphones replaced what was once a family or at least residence PoP (Point of Presence, an old telephony term) with a nomadic location, and how that facilitated the increasing atomization of what is left of the USA’s social fabric.

    ET phone home? No. ET phone phone.

    #92094
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “Let us go then, you and I..” um, over the river and through the woods, right? Asking for T.S. Eliot. 😉

    #92095
    Mr. House
    Participant

    “In Brazil, many who get the second dose are getting COVID,” said Bolsonaro, to which the WHO head responded by saying the vaccine doesn’t stop the spread of COVID but reduces the risk of serious illness and death.

    “In Brazil, many who got the second dose are dying,” Bolsonaro clarified, to which Adhanom responded by saying underlying diseases were to blame.

    Bolsonaro then decried his inability to stop mandatory vaccinations for children, to which Adhanom responded by saying the WHO doesn’t support giving the vaccine to children.

    https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/bolsonaro-confronts-who-chief-people-are-dying-after-second-dose

    Your 2.6 to 3 comorbidities are only killing you if you’re jabbed. Nobody argued it was those in 2020, nope it was total silence.

    #92096
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    @ Figmund Freud

    We have seen the video before and it is nice to see it in article.

    It is a reminder that the immune systems of the injected are being destroyed among other things.

    The future feels like life is going to implode on a lot of people.

    #92097
    Mister Roboto
    Participant

    It probably doesn’t help Kamala Harris’s approval rating any that every time she speaks in public, she really sounds as though she is on the verge of bursting into tears.

    #92098
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    rom the article on • Anti-Vaxxer Doctors Could Be Held Criminally Liable – Health Minister (RT):

    Meant as a showcase for Russian science that would quickly turn the page on the pandemic in the country, it has failed to win over the public, with polls showing fewer than half of people planning to get vaccinated.

    For Russians like Vyacheslav, a 52-year-old businessman, the government has given them no reason to have confidence in the vaccine.

    “The authorities lie to us on all sorts of subjects. Why should we believe them on vaccination?” he asked, his sports bag on his knees as he prepared for a swim at a Moscow pool.

    “I have no trust,” he said, declining to give his last name.

    Even some of those who have contracted COVID, like Svetlana Zhetlukhina, are still refusing to get jabbed.

    “It’s an experimental vaccine,” said the 54-year-old financial analyst, adding there is not yet enough “scientific data” on Sputnik V. “I am not a monkey.”

    Like elsewhere, Russia has its share of diehard anti-vaxxers. But beyond those who oppose all vaccines, there are “a big number of Russians who distrust the people who made this vaccine and the Russian government”, said anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova.

    “They think that we cannot expect anything good from the government… and that our laboratories are incapable of producing aspirin, let alone a good vaccine,” she said.

    Tamara Alexeyeva, an elegant 67-year-old retiree, said the Kremlin’s claims of Sputnik’s alleged superiority over Western vaccines have fed her skepticism.

    “They want us to believe that we have the best scientists in the world, like the USSR,” she said, walking briskly towards a Metro station. “But me, I will never accept this so-called vaccine.”

    Sputnik V has been administered to millions of people and both its effectiveness and safety have been confirmed by respected medical journal The Lancet.

    But it has not yet won approval from the World Health Organization or the European Medicines Agency —

      another fact that is feeding concern among Russians

    .

    It’s suspicious,” said Vyacheslav, his eyebrows furrowing.

    Emphases for pointing out irony. They mistrust their own government but trust the likes of WHO & EMA.

    #92099
    TAE Summary
    Participant

    * The new American justice: All are presumed sick until proven vaccinated; Trust authorities, not eye witnesses

    * FDA examines SAEs (Serious Adverse Events) and reclassifies many as simply TAEs (Typical Adverse Events). TAEs are dismissed as trivial and ridiculous leaving a smaller number of SAEs.

    * Much bigger chance for young males to get myocarditis from the shot than from Covid; Possibilities: 1) the young have much less chance of Covid than the vaccine getting into their blood stream and 2) the vaccine creates many more spike proteins than a case of Covid does

    * We are never quite immune to MSM propaganda, because its strategy is to exploit the way our information systems learn

    * Taiwan Halts 2nd-dose BioNTech Vaccinations For Ages 12-17 (TN)
    – Germany Recommends Only Biontech/Pfizer Vaccine For Under-30s
    – BioNTech is a German biotechnology company based in Mainz
    – Hmmm….

    * New Sesame Street Characters who support vaccination
    – The Undercount – Like the count but skips over things that don’t fit the narrative
    – Hurt and Burnie – Squabbling roommates who explain why adverse-effects don’t matter.
    — “Hey Hurt, I’m feeling some pain in my chest. Should I see a doctor?”
    —- “Burnie, I’ve told you that’s just your imagination. Go play with your hypodermic needle collection and forget about it.”
    – Drover – Chronically optimistic Muppet who rounds up healthy sheep and herds them into vaccination clinics
    – Spred, the Wonder Horse – Drover’s sidekick and mount
    – Helno – Adorable Muppet sent to respond to pesky requests for religious exemptions in a cute, high pitched voice
    – The Mookie Conster – A furry blue blogger Muppet who sucks up to authorities and writes whatever they want to convince the masses
    – Oscar the Fauch – Unpleasant Muppet who lives in a Sharps Container and continually extols the virtues of generating massive amounts of medical waste

    * Original Anti-Vaxx Sin
    To review: We have now had ten months of mass propaganda about SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. Nearly 6 billion have been propagandized worldwide. And yet this unprecedented campaign has not eliminated vaccine refusal; it has not even suppressed vaccine hesitancy. Instead, vaccine mistrust has ballooned almost everywhere. While the vaccinated appear to believe what they are told, skyrocketing adverse effects means most countries have seen little additional compliance, on balance, for their universal vaccination campaigns. The most pressing question has become, simply: What is going on? Why isn’t everyone convinced?

    #92100
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    A little something for thebotrolls and trollbots to insert into the GO hole of their GIGO systems. Think of it as an aid to informational incontinence:

    “Our latest research shows, once again, that when the totality of the evidence is examined, there is no doubt that ivermectin is highly effective as a safe prophylaxis and treatment for COVID-19,” said Paul E. Marik, M.D., FCCM, FCCP, founding member of the FLCCC and Chief, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School. “We can no longer rely on many of the larger health authorities to make an honest examination of the medical and scientific evidence. So, we are calling on regional public health authorities and medical professionals around the world to demand that ivermectin be included in their standard of care right away so we can end this pandemic once and for all.”

    Latest peer-reviewed research: Immediate global ivermectin use will end COVID-19 pandemic

    Not that I was even remotely looking for rebuttal data. I queried “global use ivermection” under “News” in google, looking for a possible back door into info on Putin’s apparently nonexistent relationship with the topic of ivermection<>covid, and this appeared at the top of the list. (Odd that the googlebots haven’t buried it 3 pages down.)

    #92101
    those darned kids
    Participant
    #92102
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “We are never quite immune to MSM propaganda, because its strategy is to exploit the way our information systems learn”

    Not aiming the following at TAE< of course, but at the Average Bloke: turning off the news is, of course, unthinkable. Not that Big Brother is watching and will punish you for inattention to the Daily Bullshit, but that we are so addicted to watching Big Brother that we feel lost if we don’t gaze fondly on Him regularly and frequently.

    This: “The new American justice: All are presumed sick until proven vaccinated; Trust authorities, not eye witnesses” is gold-standard TAE Sum.

    This: “FDA examines SAEs (Serious Adverse Events) and reclassifies many as simply TAEs (Typical Adverse Events). TAEs are dismissed as trivial and ridiculous leaving a smaller number of SAEs.” borders on acronymic blasphemy. 😉

    #92103
    Rover
    Participant

    anybody catch this yet?https://theexpose.uk/

    #92104
    Maxwell Quest
    Participant

    Anecdotal:

    My son caught Fauci’s weaponized virus a few days ago from a coworker and started the FLCCC protocol immediately upon having symptoms. A Covid home test provided by a doctor aunt confirmed his fears. A big fan of Joe Rogan, he tracked down a hospital that would give him the antibody infusion and was able to get an appt for this morning.

    I texted a while ago to see how he was doing. He said there was an older gentleman sitting next to him (late 60’s) who was very sick from Covid. The old guy was a bit pissed that he had both vaccines plus the booster and still got sick. I wrote back that appears to validate the Iceland Covid graph I has sent earlier.

    My son feels tired, knows he is sick, but is doing pretty well so far. He’s the first in our family to get it, so I’m watching carefully to see how he does.

    Iceland

    #92105
    Mister Roboto
    Participant

    The most pressing question has become, simply: What is going on? Why isn’t everyone convinced?

    Trump! It’s Trump! He’s responsible for everything bad, even though he isn’t president anymore! REEEEEEEE!

    #92106
    those darned kids
    Participant

    maxq: best of luck to your son. our experience here is that sunshine, sunshine, sunshine is a huge help.

    #92107
    chooch
    Participant

    Give us this day, our daily TAE.

    First, thanks oxy for the kind note the other day. Beautiful in the light of the dark oppression that you are confronted versus I and the potential need for violence is more of reality for you.

    I usually start the day checking out what Raul has served up. Even though things are going from bad to worse, if there is an inflection point occurring, I think I am likely to read about it here first. Though Veracious would likely say that in the event the pilot finally tried to pull back on the stick, the wings would rip off.

    Infants being jabbed. ARE YOU KIDDING ME! Please don’t post any Moloch Images bosco, they give me nightmares.

    I assign a voice and a tone to what I read. After Dr. D shared a little about himself, a bit of Chris Farley sneaks in at times.

    “but I feel something else out there.” This is more of a Fox Mulder vibe though.

    So I am at work reading the Mad Max scenario link oxymoron provided and a coworker comes over an interrupts. “Ya know, this is a spiritual battle being played out in the physical realm.” I am thinking, did God himself just tap you on the shoulder or what? Yep, evil will be taken out but I kinda want how and when but then again it is happening on a continuum and each day has enough trouble of its own but a break in the other direction would be nice for a change.

    But how does this depopulation idea play out. I am starting to think that a cold is to the sinuses as diarrhea is to the colon. It is a necessary mechanism for reset when things go out of balance. We literally swim in a sea of bacteria, molds, fungus and viruses at some point our sinus tract will get overwhelmed. A cold might just be a mechanism to restore balance. How many jabs to become a bubble boy? Right now I am of the camp that this will be more of an unintended result as opposed to an intended one. Yes, the whole idea seems a bit nutty but these are crazy times.

    Finally, I was a bit reluctant to post today. Bosco’s stream of consciousness is something to behold.

    #92108
    Figmund Sreud
    Participant

    @ Michael Reid – The future feels like life is going to implode on a lot of people.
    ________

    I’m afraid that’s what may just be happening? A very good friend: … a sailor, squash player, hiker, runner, frequent worldly traveller, with no prior health issues whatsoever – an older fellow, though – just ended up being air lifted to hospital: … ICU. Massive cardiac system failure, … un-known reasons yet of extent and what was the trigger for all of it! Mind you, few days ago when we were jogging, he indicated enthusiastically that he just booked a vaccine booster shot at the local pharmacy. For fun, as I recall, I asked him at the time, ‘So what the heck does the vaccine booster do?’. He simply blurted out, “It vaccinates, …” I just picked up the pace at that point, …

    F.S.

    #92109
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    canceled due to duplication

    #92110
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “Please don’t post any Moloch Images bosco, they give me nightmares.”

    OK. Instead, one of my very favorite media persons:

    copy

    “Bosco’s stream of consciousness is something to behold.”

    I have to do major breathing/meditation to slow down the gyroscopes of my monkey mind enough to get any peace. For decades I used various drugs to do this along with soothing the huge cognitive dissonance I’ve felt since realizing at age 16 that virtually everyone is more mediated zombie than individual person, but finally am past that, praise Allah or some invisible deity who looks just like It.

    A Thought

    But I also do like to contribute, and am grateful that at least some of it is appreciated here and there. As many of us here know, being the child who proclaimed the emperor’s nudity is a mostly thankless chore at best, and a ticket to jail and such at worst.

    Graci, chooch

    #92111
    Mr. House
    Participant
    #92112

    TDK- Yeah, my fifth grade teacher made us memorize it, and I am surprised how much of it I remember. I was watching CSPAN’s Washington Journal when I posted it- it was a day for old LIVING soldiers to recall how noble all their DEAD brothers are. As I said: and so the wars continue.

    On a different topic…

    Putin is a human-
    Just like you or I.
    He goes along to get along:
    He doesn’t want to die.

    #92113
    Mister Roboto
    Participant

    Just thought I would post a comment that I think is useful to keep in mind when the mainstream media is amping up the fear-porn:

    According to a relative who’s a retired nursing manager, “overwhelmed” hospitals, including hospitals on bypass, are not uncommon. The system operates close to capacity at all times, simply because it costs money to operate much below capacity. So any little bump in demand has potential to create “overwhelming” situations. All it takes is a semi-bad flu season sending a modestly higher number of old/sick people to hospital, or a new street drug/bad batch of street drug that increases overdoses or other reactions among users and sends more of them to the emergency rooms – and wham, hospital overwhelm.

    I’ve also seem collections of OMG-scary news headlines from all over the country (done for both US and UK) about how overwhelmed all the hospitals are by all the infected people, with alarming reports of long waits for care, patients piling up in hallways, hospitals on bypass, supply shortages, nurses being flown in from out of state, quotes from medical personal about how terrible it is, etc. And then the punchline, so to speak, is that all of those reports were lifted verbatim from pre-2020 flu seasons, not covid.

    So it is TRUE that hospitals are overwhelmed? Quite possibly. They often are.

    Is it the fault of people who don’t take experimental gene therapy?

    Draw your own conclusions…..

    I know a lot of people here have a right-libertarian bent, but I really think this showcases one of the major downsides of having a privately-owned, for-profit healthcare system.

    #92114
    those darned kids
    Participant

    medicine for profit?

    stupid humans.

    #92115
    Michael Reid
    Participant
    #92116
    Mister Roboto
    Participant

    The comment, BTW, if from JMG’s weekly Covid-post discussion.

    #92117
    DarkMatter
    Participant

    @John Day @Mister Roboto

    How did you set an icon for your account?

    #92118
    Mister Roboto
    Participant

    It was long enough ago that I don’t really remember. I would suggest just going to WordPress’s main site and poking around and seeing if you can find anything that might help you do that.

    #92119
    Dimitri
    Participant

    fwiw

    #92120
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “Putin is a human-
    Just like you or I.
    He goes along to get along:
    He doesn’t want to die.”

    Funny. Just an hour ago I was thinking that it was time for to share another sharp little rhyme.

    ***
    Boomers already had some of the issues Millennials have but in much smaller degree. Our parents had some of this too but even less so. They had radio, primitive telephony, cinema, published text, automobiles, early aviation, a massive train system, and phonographs but most of them had parents derived from rural or semi-rural backgrounds. Media was not the center of their lives but an adjunct.

    Media is now the center of EVERYthing down to the guy in the monster combine watching porn in his air-conditioned control tower while GPS tells his combine what to do after the coordinates are entered into the software.

    Millennials grew up with parents themselves divorced from primary human biophysical reality as evolved over millions of years. My Dad was great… when I could get him away from the boob-tube. Even then, I at least had old reruns, especially lots of 30s-50s B&W movies, to give me some connection to my parents’ past as well as that of their parents and grandparents both through subtext in those movies but also direct context: those old movies were often about older days and, while their content was romanticized and dramatized, still gave me some idea of what it was like to depend on animal power to do most of the heavy lifting and long distance travel. (Check out Alfalfa’s goucho pants: Live and Learn

    Cable TV ended that, replacing it with infommercials while relegating the old stuff to a ghetto called Turner Classics. Informative, Turner was, but in a self-declared tunnel-vision way… and most kids didn’t watch that old stuff anyway, and when they did, they had no context for understanding, hence the question: “Dad, why was everything B&W in the old days?”

    Now consider what the genzies and Generation Alhpa kids, raised by MIllenials and young genzies, are like. I see the kids in my Portland area apt complex: they are seriously damaged, and soon to be confronted by life without handroids and constant access to hypnotic, illusory distractions and ever more flavors of nutritionally vapid food that are more psychedelics for the tongue than what our ancestors thought of as food.

    The Industrial/Gutenberg Revolution experiment has reached its conclusions, and the verdict is plain: we belong in the woods, squatting around campfires, directly engaged with the physical reality that Fate/God/Nature has evolved over megamillennia not with the delusional utopian nosense we call Progress/Modernity/CIvilization.

    Hopefully, we can reclaim that heritage without having to nuke most of us and the planet. We shall see.

    ***

    Meanwhile, omigod: it’s Greta with a boob job. (No, I have nothing against Greta. She’s a product/victim of all this. Dissing her is like stealing candy from babies, imo.)

    boobs

    And now to finish revising a story about a blind ghost before sending it to a likely publisher. I may be good for something yet!

    #92121
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    test

    #92122
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    Shared before. Shared again. It addresses media in our times conjsummately, I feel:

    UP THE LINE

    A talk given by WIlliam Gibson at the Directors Guild of America’s Digital Day, Los Angeles, May 17, 2003

    The story of film begins around a fire, in darkness. Gathered around this fire are primates of a certain species, our ancestors, an animal distinguished by a peculiar ability to recognize patterns.

    There is movement in the fire: embers glow and crawl on charcoal. Fire looks like nothing else. It generates light in darkness. It moves. It is alive.

    The surrounding forest is dark. Is it the same forest our ancestors know by day? They can’t be sure. At night it is another place, perhaps no place at all. The abode of the dead, of gods and demons and that which walks without a face. It is the self turned inside out. Without form, it is that on which our ancestors project the patterns their interestingly mutated brains generate.

    This patterning-reading mutation is crucial to the survival of a species that must ceaselessly hunt, ceaselessly gather. One plant is good to eat; it grows in summer in these lowlands. But if you eat its seedpods, you sicken and die. The big, slow-moving river-animal can be surprised and killed, here in these shallows, but will escape in deeper water.

    This function is already so central, in our ancestors, that they discover the outlines of the water-animal in clouds. They see the faces of wolves and of their own dead in the flames. They are already capable of symbolic thought. Spoken language is long since a fact for them but written language has not yet evolved. They scribe crisscross patterns on approximately rectangular bits of ocher, currently the world’s oldest known human art.

    They crouch, watching the fire, watching its constant, unpredictable movements, and someone is telling a story. In the watching of the fire and the telling of the tale lie the beginning of what we still call film.

    Later, on some other night, uncounted generations up the timeline, their descendants squat deep in caves, places of eternal night — painting. They paint by the less restless light of reeds and tallow. They paint the wolves and the water-animal, the gods and their dead. They have found ways to take control of certain aspects of the cooking-fire universe. Darkness lives here, in the caves; you needn’t wait for dusk. The reeds and tallow throw a steadier light. Something is being turned inside out, here, for the first time: the pictures in the patterning brain are being projected, rendered. Our more recent ancestors will discover these stone screens, their images still expressing life and movement, and marvel at them, and not so long before the first moving images are projected.

    What we call “media” were originally called “mass media”. technologies allowing the replication of passive experience. As a novelist, I work in the oldest mass medium, the printed word. The book has been largely unchanged for centuries. Working in language expressed as a system of marks on a surface, I can induce extremely complex experiences, but only in an audience elaborately educated to experience this. This platform still possesses certain inherent advantages. I can, for instance, render interiority of character with an ease and specificity denied to a screenwriter. But my audience must be literate, must know what prose fiction is and understand how one accesses it. This requires a complexly cultural education, and a certain socio-economic basis. Not everyone is afforded the luxury of such an education.

    But I remember being taken to my first film, either a Disney animation or a Disney nature documentary (I can’t recall which I saw first) and being overwhelmed by the steep yet almost instantaneous learning curve: in that hour, I learned to watch film. Was taught, in effect, by the film itself. I was years away from being able to read my first novel, and would need a lot of pedagogy, to do that. But film itself taught me, in the dark, to view it. I remember it as a sort of violence done to me, as full of terror as it was of delight. But when I emerged from that theater, I knew how to watch film.

    What had happened to me was historically the result of an immensely complex technological evolution, encompassing optics, mechanics, photography, audio recording, and much else. Whatever film it was that I first watched, other people around the world were also watching, having approximately the same experience in terms of sensory input. And that film no doubt survives today, in Disney’s back-catalog, as an experience that can still be accessed.

    That survival, I think, is part of the key to understanding where the digital may be taking us. In terms of most of our life so far, as a species, it’s not a natural thing to see the dead, or hear their voices. I believe the significance of that is still far from being understood. We can actually see what life, at least in some very basic sense, was like, one hundred years ago. We can watch a silent movie, and not only see people who are long dead, but see people who were in their seventies and eighties in the 1920s, and who therefore bore the affect of their developing years — i.e., from before the Civil War, and earlier. It is as if in 1956 we had been able to watch silent film of, say, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, or the various revolutions of 1848. When the ramifications of this are really thought about, it becomes awesome in almost a religious sense.

    Our ancestors, when they found their way to that first stone screen, were commencing a project so vast that it only now begins to become apparent: the unthinking construction of a species-wide, time-defying, effectively immortal prosthetic memory. Extensions of the human brain and nervous system, capable of surviving the death of the individual — perhaps even of surviving the death of the species. The start of building what would become civilization, cities, cinema. Vast stone calendars, megalithic machines remembering the need to plant on a given day, to sacrifice on another.

    With the advent of the digital, which I would date from, approximately, World War Two, the nature of this project begins to become more apparent, more overt; the texture of these more recent technologies, the grain of them, becomes progressively finer, progressively more divorced from Newtonian mechanics. In terms of scale, they are more akin to the workings of the brain itself.

    All us, creators or audience, have participated in the change so far. It’s been something many of us haven’t yet gotten a handle on. We are too much of it to see it. It may be that we never do get a handle on it, as the general rate of technological innovation shows no indication of slowing.

    Much of history has been, often to an unrecognized degree, technologically driven. From the extinction of North America’s mega-fauna to the current geopolitical significance of the Middle East, technology has driven change. (That’s spear-hunting technology for the mega-fauna and the internal-combustion engine for the Middle East, by the way.) Very seldom do nations legislate the emergence of new technologies.

    The Internet, an unprecedented driver of change, was a complete accident, and that seems more often the way of things. The Internet is the result of the unlikely marriage of a DARPA project and the nascent industry of desktop computing. Had nations better understood the potential of the Internet, I suspect they might well have strangled it in its cradle. Emergent technology is, by its very nature, out of control, and leads to unpredictable outcomes.

    As indeed does the emergent realm of the digital. I prefer to view this not as the advent of some new and extraordinary weirdness, but as part of the ongoing manifestation of some very ancient and extraordinary weirdness: our gradual spinning of a sort of extended prosthetic mass nervous-system, out of some urge that was present around the cooking-fires of our earliest human ancestors.

    We call film “film” today in much the same way we “dial” phones, the actual dials being long gone. The fact that we do still employ actual film, in the traditional sense, seems an artifact of platform-transition and industrial economics. I tend to take arguments for the innate esthetic superiority of “film”, with the same grain of salt I reserve for arguments for the innate esthetic superiority of vinyl. Whatever the current shortcomings of the digital image, I imagine there will be digital ways around them.

    But I need to diverge here into another industry, one that’s already and even more fully feeling the historical impact of the digital: music. Prior to the technology of audio recording, there was relatively little one could do to make serious money with music. Musicians could perform for money, and the printing press had given rise to an industry in sheet music, but great fame, and wealth, tended to be a matter of patronage. The medium of the commercial audio recording changed that, and created industry predicated on an inherent technological monopoly of the means of production. Ordinary citizens could neither make nor manufacture audio recordings. That monopoly has now ended. Some futurists, looking at the individual musician’s role in the realm of the digital, have suggested that we are in fact heading for a new version of the previous situation, one in which patronage (likely corporate, and non-profit) will eventually become a musician’s only potential ticket to relative fame and wealth. The window, then, in which one could become the Beatles, occupy that sort of market position, is seen to have been technologically determined. And technologically finite. The means of production, reproduction and distribution of recorded music, are today entirely digital, and thus are in the hands of whoever might desire them. We get them for free, often without asking for them, as inbuilt peripherals. I bring music up, here, and the impact the digital is having on it, mainly as an example of the unpredictable nature of technologically driven change. It may well be that the digital will eventually negate the underlying business-model of popular musical stardom entirely. If this happens, it will be a change which absolutely no one intended, and few anticipated, and not the result of any one emergent technology, but of a complex interaction between several. You can see the difference if you compare the music industry’s initial outcry against “home taping” with the situation today.

    Whatever changes will come for film will be as unpredictable and as ongoing, but issues of intellectual property and piracy may ultimately be the least of them. The music industry’s product is, for want of a better way to put it, a relatively simple, relatively traditional product. Audio recordings just aren’t that technology-heavy. Though there’s one aspect of the digital’s impact on music that’s absolutely central to film: sampling. Sampling music is possible because the end-consumer of the product is now in possession of technologies equal or even superior to the technologies involved in producing that product. Human capital (that is, talent) aside, all the end-consumer-slash-creator lacks today, in comparison to a music-marketing conglomerate, is the funds required to promote product. The business of popular music, today, is now, in some peculiarly new way, entirely about promotion.

    Film, I imagine, is in for a different sort of ride up the timeline, primarily owing to the technology-intensive nature of today’s product. Terminator III Unplugged is a contradiction in terms. Hollywood is massively and multiply plugged, and is itself a driver of new technologies. The monopoly on the means of production (at least in terms of creation) can be preserved, in this environment, as the industry itself operates on something very near the cutting edge of emergent technology. For a while, at least.

    In terms of the future, however, the history of recorded music suggests that any film made today is being launched up the timeline toward end-user technologies ultimately more intelligent, more capable, than the technologies employed in the creation of that film.

    Which is to say that, no matter who you are, nor how pure your artistic intentions, nor what your budget was, your product, somewhere up the line, will eventually find itself at the mercy of people whose ordinary civilian computational capacity outstrips anything anyone has access to today.

    Remember the debate around the ethics of colorizing films shot in black-and-white? Colorization, up the line, is a preference setting. Probably the default setting, as shipped from the factory.

    I imagine that one of the things our great-grandchildren will find quaintest about us is how we had all these different, function-specific devices. Their fridges will remind them of appointments and the trunks of their cars will, if need be, keep the groceries from thawing. The environment itself will be smart, rather than various function-specific nodes scattered through it. Genuinely ubiquitous computing spreads like warm Vaseline. Genuinely evolved interfaces are transparent, so transparent as to be invisible.

    This spreading, melting, flowing together of what once were distinct and separate media, that’s where I imagine we’re headed. Any linear narrative film, for instance, can serve as the armature for what we would think of as a virtual reality, but which Johnny X, eight-year-old end-point consumer, up the line, thinks of as how he looks at stuff. If he discovers, say, Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, he might idly pause to allow his avatar a freestyle Hong Kong kick-fest with the German guards in the prison camp. Just because he can. Because he’s always been able to. He doesn’t think about these things. He probably doesn’t fully understand that that hasn’t always been possible. He doesn’t know that you weren’t always able to explore the sets virtually, see them from any angle, or that you couldn’t open doors and enter rooms that never actually appeared in the original film.

    Or maybe, if his attention span wavers, he’ll opt to experience the film as if shot from the POV of that baseball that McQueen keeps tossing.

    Somewhere in the countless preferences in Johnny’s system there’s one that puts high-rez, highly expressive dog-heads on all of the characters. He doesn’t know that this setting is based on a once-popular Edwardian folk-motif of poker-playing dogs, but that’s okay; he’s not a history professor, and if he needed to know, the system would tell him. You get complete breed-selection, too, with the dog-head setting, but that was all something he enjoyed more when he was still a little kid.

    But later in the afternoon he’s run across something called The Hours, and he’s not much into it at all, but then he wonders how these women would look if he put the dog-heads on them. And actually it’s pretty good, then, with the dog-heads on, so then he opts for the freestyle Hong Kong kick-fest…

    And what has happened, here, in this scenario, is that our ancient project, that began back at the fire, has come full circle. The patterns in the heads of the ancestors have come out, over many millennia, and have come to inhabit, atemporally, this nameless, single, non-physical meta-artifact we’ve been constructing. So that they form an extension of Johnny’s being, and he accesses them as such, and takes them utterly for granted, and treats them with no more respect than he would the products of his own idle surmise. But he’s still a child, Johnny, and swims unknowing in this, his culture and the culture of his species. He’ll be educated (likely via this same system he plays with now, in a more pedagogical mode — and likely, without his knowing, it’s already doing that, in background as it were). It may be that he’ll have to be taught to watch films, in the way that we watch them (or watched them, as I think DVD’s are already changing that, not to mention changing the way you approach making them). He may need something akin to the sort of education that I needed in order to read novels — to appreciate, as it were, a marginalized but still powerfully viable media-platform.

    I can only trust that Johnny’s entertainment system, and the culture that informs it, will be founded on solid curatorial principles. That there will be an ongoing archaeology of media-product in place to insure that someone or something is always there to categorically state, and if necessary to prove, that The Maltese Falcon was shot in black and white and originally starred Humphrey Bogart.

    Because I see Johnny falling asleep now in his darkened bedroom, and atop the heirloom Ikea bureau, the one that belonged to his grandmother, which his mother has recently had restored, there is a freshly-extruded resin action-figure, another instantaneous product of Johnny’s entertainment system.

    It is a woman, posed balletically, as if in flight on John Wu wires.

    It is Meryl Streep, as she appears in The Hours.

    She has the head of a chihuahua.

    #92123
    oxymoron
    Participant

    Elmo had a heart attack

    #92124
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “It is Meryl Streep, as she appears in The Hours.

    She has the head of a chihuahua.”

    I’ll bet chooch wishes I’d just posted an image of Moloch barbecuing babies for dinner. 😉

    #92125
    chooch
    Participant

    Federal contractors have been given additional breathing room to address recalcitrant covered employees who are resisting the vaccination mandate.

    Key Takeaways

    Using January 18, 2022, as the date for full vaccination, federal contractors should establish written policies, if they have not done so already, which:

    Identify the vaccination requirements

    Provide an opportunity for the submission of medical and religious exemptions
    Establish a process and timeline for reviewing the submission of such exemptions

    Provide a defined period of time for a covered employee to become vaccinated if the request for an exemption is denied

    Establish a process, which could span a period of weeks, through which an employee who refuses to become vaccinated can be counseled and then subject to disciplinary measures (but not termination) in order to induce the employee to become vaccinated

    During all periods when a covered employee remains unvaccinated, require the covered employee to adhere to the masking and social distancing requirements in the Guidance

    Note that it is entirely up to the contractor to determine how much accommodation should be given to a recalcitrant employee before the contractor elects to terminate or reassign (if possible) the employee. The new FAQ makes clear, however, that the contractor retains flexibility to use carrot and stick approaches to induce recalcitrant employees to become fully vaccinated beyond the January 18 deadline.

    Important Updates on Federal Contractor Vaccine Mandate—Deadline Extended and Flexibility Added

    #92126
    those darned kids
    Participant

    lifted from comments elsewhere:

    “This started with the government protecting people from the pandemic; now they’re protecting the pandemic from the people.”

    #92127
    chooch
    Participant

    #92128
    redshift
    Participant

    “China Gets Half A Million Barrels Of Iranian Oil Every Day, Violating US Sanctions As Biden Looks The Other Way”

    That’s how every other nation should deal with US: “shove your sanctions up your arse!”

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