Debt Rattle November 11 2021
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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
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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:
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.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 compensationI’m a novice and new poster… following the scents, trying to make some sense… Let us go then, you and I..
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.
“Let us go then, you and I..” um, over the river and through the woods, right? Asking for T.S. Eliot. 😉
“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.
@ 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.
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.
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 —
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another fact that is feeding concern among Russians
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“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.
* 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?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.)
phoenix: it’s everywhere: https://news.google.com/search?q=staffing%20shortage%20school&hl=en-CA&gl=CA&ceid=CA%3Aen
“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. 😉
anybody catch this yet?https://theexpose.uk/
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.
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!
maxq: best of luck to your son. our experience here is that sunshine, sunshine, sunshine is a huge help.
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.
@ 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.
“Please don’t post any Moloch Images bosco, they give me nightmares.”
OK. Instead, one of my very favorite media persons:
“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.
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
talking bout my generation
https://moneycircus.substack.com/p/join-millennials-in-fighting-the
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.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.
@John Day @Mister Roboto
How did you set an icon for your account?
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.
fwiw
Thread re: retraction of the FLCCC paper from the Journal of Intensive Care Medicine
It is unfortunate that JICM retracted an entire paper based on their refusal to accept an update to 1 section of data that had little relevance to the focus or conclusions of the paper (1/8)— Pierre Kory, MD MPA (@PierreKory) November 11, 2021
“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.)
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!
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.
“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. 😉
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 exemptionsProvide 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
lifted from comments elsewhere:
“This started with the government protecting people from the pandemic; now they’re protecting the pandemic from the people.”
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