An Intricate Rube Goldberg Chain Reaction Machine That Feeds Squirrels and Other Small Backyard Critters Laughing Squid
Huge new dinosaur ‘the size of two double decker buses’ discovered in Australia The Telegraph
G-7 Stock Markets Imply Catastrophic Global Warming of 3°C Bloomberg
CEOs and investors push world leaders for stronger climate action Reuters
Military Operations Will be Strained by Climate Change Scientific American
Ifyoucantbeatemjoinemitis Chris Jones, IIHR Research Engineer. Very interesting on EOF (Edge of Field) practice to capture nitrates:
The Ag advocacy organizations form a wagon circle around the idea that the industry needs a license to pollute. There are so many of these groups that they form coalitions of groups just to keep it all straight. It’s not all one big happy Family (I capitalize family here intentionally because they call themselves The Family) but they are laser-focused on keeping Iowa farming unregulated. It’s the sine qua non of Iowa ag and politics. Take your eye off that ball and you’ll get beaned by the big right-hander. Making the public think the industry is dedicated to an Iowa with clean water is integral to maintaining an unregulated countryside.
#COVID19
Identifying and Tracking SARS-CoV-2 Variants — A Challenge and an Opportunity NEJM
Vaccinated Consumers Are Now About as Likely as the Unvaccinated to Express Comfort With a Return to Normal Morning Consult
Many More Americans Would Be Vaccinated if Our Health Care System Wasn’t So Terrifying The New Republic
Johns Hopkins announces COVID-19 vaccine mandate for faculty, staff Johns Hopkins University/
Plexiglass Is Everywhere, With No Proof It Keeps Covid at Bay Bloomberg
Observational Study on 255 Mechanically Ventilated Covid Patients at the Beginning of the USA Pandemic (preprint) (PDF) medRxiv. From the Results: ” By discharge or Day 90, 78.2% of the cohort expired. The most common pre-existing conditions were hypertension, (63.5%), diabetes (59.2%) and obesity (50.4%). Age correlated with death. Comorbidities and clinical status on presentation were not predictive of outcome. Admission markers of inflammation were universally elevated (>96%). The cohort’s weight range was nearly 7-fold. Causal modeling establishes that weight-adjusted HCQ and AZM therapy improves survival by over 100%.” From the Discussion: “The weight ranges of Covid patient cohorts are substantially greater than those of most antibiotic RCTs. Future clinical trials need to consider the weight variance of hospitalized Covid patients and need to study therapeutics more thoughtfully.”
Heartache, compounded High Country News
China?
Huarong/Great Wall: Chinese debt manager, heal thyself FT
China is vaccinating a staggering 20 million people a day Nature
China will have destroyed proof of Wuhan coronavirus leak, says former MI6 chief The Telegraph. Commentary:
The most advantageous thing about Lab Leak Theory — from Langley/neocons' pov— is that it's almost impossible to *disprove*—and lack of proof will be flipped around as further proof.
All you need to do is keep doubt alive.https://t.co/SDgbhfJwXU— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) June 3, 2021
Myanmar
Factories Shuttered in Myanmar’s First Special Economic Zone Amid Post-Coup Turmoil The Irrawaddy. 30 of 122.
Myanmar military plane carrying monks crashes, casualties feared Channel News Asia. Not a good look.
Myanmar pushes ASEAN to the brink Lowy Institute
India
India Marks Record Daily Covid Deaths After State Adjusts Data Bloomberg
Nurses in Indian villages struggle to cope with pandemic-related pressures Deutsche Welle
Syraqistan
Jewish Democratic lawmakers may condemn Ilhan Omar for likening Hamas to Israel and US Jerusalem Post
Basking in the Spotlight on Israel, GOP Hopefuls Storm the Holy Land Haaretz
Above them, war ravaged their city. But below ground, a group of unlikely librarians found hope ABC Australia
As rich nations race ahead, Africa barely makes a dent with COVID vaccinations LA Times
UK/EU
Biden lands in UK with message for Johnson: Defuse post-Brexit tensions over N. Ireland France24
Political Pressure ‘Watered Down’ Public Health England Care Home Guidance Over COVID Testing Byline Times
Rural Teacher Pedro Castillo Poised to Write a New Chapter in Peru’s History Mint Press but Castillo holds razor-thin lead in Peru vote as Fujimori alleges fraud Agence France Presse
Biden Administration
U.S. to donate 500 million Pfizer vaccine doses to the world -sources Reuters. Good!
Democrats blast Biden climate adviser over infrastructure remarks The Hill
Pentagon announces new classified programs to counter China The Hill (Re Silc).
How A New Team Of Feds Hacked The Hackers And Got Colonial Pipeline’s Ransom Back NPR
Big Pharma May Finally Lose This One Daily Poster
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
FBI wants to keep fortune in cash, gold, jewels from Beverly Hills raid. Is it abuse of power? LA Times
The Red Scare: How Joseph McCarthy’s Anti-Communist Hysteria Left a Mark on the U.S. Teen Vogue
Our Famously Free Press
Yet Another Media Tale — Trump Tear-Gassed Protesters For a Church Photo Op — Collapses Glenn Greenwald
Sports Desk
Bo Schembechler’s son says he was among hundreds abused by University of Michigan doctor NBC
Black Injustice Tipping Point
On Having Whiteness Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association (DS). Peer reviewed. “Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites-to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation.” The author is a college administrator.
How ‘Creative destruction’ drives innovation and prosperity FT
Class Warfare
Low-wage earners could not afford to comply with stay-at-home orders during lockdown News-Medical.Net
Desperate Employer Offers Basic Dignity To Incentivize New Hires The Onion
A history of FLICC: the 5 techniques of science denial Cranky Uncle. FLICC: Fake experts, Logical fallacies, Impossible expectations, Cherry picking, and Conspiracy theories. With handy diagrams.
Neuroscientists Have Discovered a Phenomenon That They Can’t Explain The Atlantic. No, not consciousness. “Representational drift.”
Fermi’s Other Paradox Caitlin Johnstone
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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Glen Greenwald doesn’t seem to ask the question: “How is Trump getting across the plaza without pushing the protestors out?”
My take would be that it shows Trump being opportunistic to take advantage of a previously planned event to stage a dubious photo opportunity. Better planning than I thought his posse was capable of, but still some pretty bizarre optics and not very well thought out.
At the time, one of the big things was whether tear gas was used.
Oh, come on Glen. Classic Cohn/Trump head fake and you fell for it. Blame the other guy.
And not great planning. An after-the-fact concocted story. Only a few people needed to be in on it. When was the last time the folks on the ground were told the reason for what they were doing – just clear the square.
A conclusion was “the evidence we reviewed showed that the USPP cleared the park to allow a contractor to safely install anti-scale fencing in response to destruction of Federal property and injury to officers that occurred on May 30 and May 31.”
From what I saw, the USPP wanted vengeance and used excessive violence to clear that street and did not care who they were clubbing with their truncheons. Certainly wasn’t a good look to beat the crap out of a foreign news crew live on international TV. So here is the unasked question. Why did they not install that anti-scale fencing at, say, 2 o’clock in the morning when there would be hardly anybody on that street? Worried about overtime payments? No. The USPP wanted to make a point and to let everybody in the country see them at work. It was a message to protestors.
It didn’t even need to be 2 in the morning. There was a DC curfew of 6 PM. They started pepper spraying and shooting people with rubber bullets at around 5:30.
And while this may have been planned already – the timing seems extremely suspect. Trump made his walk within 5 minutes of them clearing the area. And there’s no way Trump would have been able to make that walk had it not been cleared.
There’s no way Trump just happened to see the area cleared, dress in his suit and tie, find a bible, and scamper across the grounds within minutes. At the very least this was coordinated with the trump administration even if he didn’t explicitly order the area cleared
I think that you might be right. Probably some staffer pointed out to Trump what was going to happen that day and that person, or another, suggested the idea of a photo op. The fact that Trump and the rest of them went out as a mob suggests that it was done on an ad hoc basis. The Secret Service was probably having fits at the time.
Oh brother. Just give it up. You were scammed. Don’t make it worse by pretending there’s some good “explanation.”
The tear gas “controversy” is being dealt with right now, in a COURTROOM, although you’d never know it since the same media that furiously peddled the lie about Trump isn’t telling. It was DC mayor muriel bowser’s MPD that used tear gas and, instead of admitting it, she hid behind the fake Trump story and painted “black lives matter” on a street instead. BLM is suing her for it right now, fer chrissakes.
And people were actually injured, unlike in the Sicknick fable. Per a Jonathan Turley article on this IG report:
Bowser is asking that the lawsuit be dismissed, “arguing that the use of tear gas was entirely appropriate and that the clearing of the area was reasonable,” and the biden regime is “joining the effort”:
https://jonathanturley.org/2021/06/09/debunking-the-photo-op-myth-inspector-general-investigation-refutes-media-account-on-the-clearing-of-lafayette-park/
Instead of excusing these “noble lies” because they dirtied Trump, you’d probably be doing yourself a favor by taking a hard look at what these same “noble liars” are telling you NOW, and considering what the walk-back will look like a year or two down the road. If you’re even allowed to hear about it.
Thank you. I wasn’t aware the BLM was suing at all.
There is a concerted effort to de-legitimize Greenwald, one of the few people who holds a consistent position on what is right no matter who is in office. It’s scary to see it happen, and I even start to doubt myself when I see so many others turn on the man. Thank you again for posting this, and nobody should be fooled by all the charlatans trying to silence Greenwald. He may have a grating personality for some, but he is right and consistent in his critiques.
I think too much is being made specifically about tear gas. The crux of the story: It was a lawful peaceful protest that was broken up before DC’s imposed curfew at 6pm. The exact physical actions attributable to specific police departments doesn’t change the basics.
Numerous neighboring police departments were called in under the guises of maintaining peace and order on federal park land. There was absolutely zero disorder or unpeacfullness until the police started inflicting it. Arlington county ordered its police department to immediatrely leave when it became clear what was going on. https://www.arlnow.com/2020/06/01/breaking-arlington-officers-ordered-to-immediately-leave-d-c/
It appears DC police were either too big and bureacratic and/or poorly trained to make a similiar desicion. But this doesnt change the underlying dynamics. When you call out the dogs, you should expect them to attack. DC police are trained to use tear gas. Of course they used it when put in this situation.
But they never should have been in the situation. The self described reason for clearing the area – to put up a fence – does not rise to the level of calling in neighboring cities and couties to maintain peace and order. Maybe Trump didn’t directly order it, but he clearly knew about it, was okay with it, and took advantage of it for a photo op which is a really bad look
I think too much is being made specifically about tear gas.
Well, it was ALL about the tear gas at the time, in furtherance of the narrative of a lying Trump/Barr.
And as for the “lawful, peaceful protest,” here’s Turley again:
Too many cops at one “peaceful protest,” not enough at the next “deadly insurrection.” It’s like a new Downing Street Memo every damn day.
That is an absurd justification that an authoritative government like China would use. What do you think is a reasonable lapse of time to occur before we can conclude an area is once again peaceful. 1 day? 1 week? 1 month? Should we just always have militia refusing to let people gather because there’s been violence before when that occured? Who gets to decide what a reasonable time is? Everyone was being peaceful when the police turned things violence — full stop.
If its concluded that fencing is required thats fine. But there’s no requirement to put it up in the middle of a peaceful demonstration with no heads up or fair warning. At the very least they could have gotten on a bull horn and explained what was going on. Not just start firing into the crowd who had no idea why they were being fired upon. (And again, even though MPD may have been the one actually shooting rubber bullets, it doesnt change anything as the the reason MPD was there doing that was because they were duped into thinking there was actually some threat)
I like GG but I can’t quite reach the conclusion that this was the media scam he is making it out to be. I recall last summer “watching” events unfold via Twitter that even then, it was known that the initial targets were the protesters that had burned a statue in the park and it was presented in the moment as Trump was marching out of the WH to the church to make his appearance in response to the destruction in the park. The tear gas at the time seemed half retaliation and half crowd dispersal.
Terrible optics in hindsight, but I do feel that individual perspectives on whether it was an outright and uncalled for assault on peaceful protesters or a punitive crowd clearing tactic depended on which media stream you were watching as it unfolded.
Likewise, depending on how your Trump biases slant, optically, it was either a moment of a symbolic parental/paternal unit who had had enough with youthful shenanigans, or it was a hypocritical and symbolic blend of authoritarianism with overt religious overtones.
But the tear gas was very real and Trump (expertly or a fumbling stroke of good fortune) used the moment to clear his path for a photo op that none of us are going to forget.
When GG goes off on one of these rants, it tends to damage his credibility with me because they come off severely partisan. The media has a lot to answer for, but I don’t think this is the scandal Mr. Greenwald is making it out to be.
This reminds me of defenders of the FBI/ATF in the aftermath of the Branch Davidian raid or the bombing of the MOVE house.
With the BD, we all watched a home burn to the ground and the ATF raise their flag upon a pole above the still burning wreckage like conquerors. All because of an arrest warrant for one man. With MOVE we saw them drop a bomb on a home and let the whole neighborhood burn to the ground.
Debating the minutia of who called for the tanks, who approved the tear gas, and what the strategy was behind it clouded over the very real and awful event we all watched unfold before us: a government enacting a vendetta on its own citizenry.
Watching them clear the streets using violence and gas (whatever kind it was) and the president March through to stand before a church with a Bible raised in his hand is an optic which speaks louder than these trifling tidbits of specifics.
Is there reason to believe the actions of the protestors (or BD and MOVE) merited some pushback? Depending on your perspective, sure. Is original sin worth the burning down of Eden? To an angry and vengeful god it is. To a rational mind seeking harmony it is an act of authoritarian barbarity.
It’s all a little convenient – it *only* took a year+ for a Trump appointee to get his version of things out, and it’s not like this is a completely clean version of events. From ABC’s coverage (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/police-clear-lafayette-park-area-trump-hold-bible/story?id=78171712)
One Park Police commander told the inspector general’s office they were caught off guard about Trump’s plans during a conversation with Attorney General Bill Barr, who asked, “Are these people still going to be here when POTUS [President of the United States] comes out?” according to the report. “The USPP operations commander told us he had not known until then that the President would be coming out of the White House and into Lafayette Park. He said he replied to the Attorney General, ‘Are you freaking kidding me?‘” the report reads.” But it does not explore why so many officers used as much force as they did against peaceful protesters in the area that day — or dig deeper into the actions of the Secret Service and other federal entities on the ground.
I have no trouble believing that various agencies on the ground weren’t aware of what the others were up to, SNAFU predates any of the characters involved.
So, I think we haven’t heard the last word yet on this event. FWIW, I like and respect GG’s reporting. And to be very clear – I’m making no conclusions until all of the dust clears. Will today’s version hold? Invest at your peril…
Again and again, I’m reminded of Sam the Sham’s song, “Oh That’s Good! No, That’s Bad.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzgllwBnVZU
Best…H
What Greenwood misses, that he would not miss in a different context, is that an inspector general’s report rarely overturns an official “good of the service” sort of explanation of events after the participants have had the leisure to agree a story and get on the same sheet of music regarding the particulars.
Only if somebody was dumb enough to create a documentation trail or thought that saying “it was me” would be a good career move would such an investigation demonstrate much of anything.
I’m a little surprised at this thread of comments. From the general treatment of him by the commentariat on this blog I’d thought GG was unassailable. I for one have had many times a sense that his reporting is being molded to push an agenda. He’s skilled so it would take much more verbiage to disentangle. I would enjoy seeing one of those color-coded deconstructions Lambert has skillfully applied to, for example, Obama, done one some of his (GG’s) reporting.
He’s also skated on the still outstanding question about Snowden’s docs.
There may be an effort to de-legitimize him by the establishment, but at least for me, Greenwald’s been de-legitimizing himself just fine without any help. I see someone with a personal vendetta against an establishment that he feels has wronged him, and they have. I have no doubt he has been wronged, but his need to be right and be vindicated seems to be driving him towards becoming the very definition of useful idiot for the right. I understand going on Fox. I don’t have a problem with that really, but going on Tucker? Pandering to him? Calling him a “true Socialist”? Dude, that is not the audience you want to reach. Red-brown alliances haven’t worked out too well for the leftists in the past, by the way.
Anyhow, he claims several times that the police started clearing before Trump made any decision to go out there, but who really knows when that decision was made? There are no facts about that presented by Greenwald and yet he keeps saying it. I don’t think Trump would have gone out there with the protesters regardless, so it’s reasonable to think there might be some connection between the USPP’s actions and Trump’s, whether or not the USPP was aware of it. Holding up this story up above his head and taking a big victory lap is a little sad to see. It’s certainly no revelation to me or anyone else here I’m sure that the media painted Trump in a negative light at every turn, but I mean… get over it, sir. Don’t waste your journalistic talents on defending Donald Trump’s integrity or whatever.
Please explain how going on Fox News de-legitimizes Greenwald when he tells the truth when he’s there. You say he makes claims with no evidence however in the article he makes it quite clear that he is going from the report of the Inspector General of the Interior Department who is a long term government employee and a former Obama appointee to various positions and not a recent appointed Trump partisan. You ask “who really knows?”. Well, the Inspector General interviewed dozens of people who confirmed the time table according to his report.
If you think he is defending Trump’s integrity you are not getting his point as I see it at least. I don’t think he’s defending Trump or the behavior of any of the government agencies involved. He is pointing out that the corporate media was quick to blame Trump without any evidence, something they have done repeatedly in the last four years, and therefore they are unreliable and not to be trusted.
You tell me what non-partisan corporate media news program he should be on? That’s right, there isn’t one and he’s been blackballed from MSDNC who used to love him when he told the truth about the Bush administration. The closest thing to an even handed major news program I’m aware of is Kyrstal and Saager’s show, and Greenwald was the first guest on their new program.
Really tired of people who refuse to do the knee jerk demonization of Trump at the expense of the truth being labeled Trump defenders or supporters. How is that any different that “you’re either with us or with the terrorists”? Or is that sentiment OK now that the Democrat party has become such good friends with the war criminals from the Bush administration?
Thank you. Better said than I could have.
I said that I didn’t really have a problem with him going on Fox, and that I was more put off by him going on Tucker specifically and pandering to him and his audience. However I would also counter that as someone else has pointed out today, Fox news is not at all about telling the truth, and any truth or partial truth that Greenwald is telling on there is doomed to be twisted into untruthful ends.
I specifically mentioned a particular claim that Greenwald did not present evidence of but repeated twice: That the President decided to go out to the church after the protesters were already being cleared for other reasons. The report says nothing in fact about the when the decision was made for Trump to go out, so once again I say who really knows? The report actually only clears the USPP of wrongdoing, not necessarily the Trump administration.
Maybe none. Maybe he can publish independently like he is doing, and just deal with having a smaller audience than he was used to having with The Intercept. In the interest of having integrity, maybe he can resist the urge to pander to the hard right to have access to their audience. I mean I’ll still read him, even though I am a little more skeptical than I used to be, because he does tell the truth about a lot of things. But if he continues to consort with fascists then I got better people to read.
Carlson is far and away the least bad of major Fox commentators.
Haha well maybe I’m giving Fox too much benefit of the doubt then.
Irrespective of Glenn’s motivations, your statement above: “…he claims several times that the police started clearing before Trump made any decision to go out there, but who really knows when that decision was made? There are no facts about that presented by Greenwald and yet he keeps saying it.” is true, and it is precisely this journalistic crime that Greenwald so strongly deplores in others. He made his reputation on demolishing this kind of fact-deficient propaganda.
More critically, the Greenblatt report he cited made only a very narrow conclusion, one that does not support Glenn’s contention that, “…the media narrative was false from start to finish.” In actuality, the Greenblatt letter only stated that, “….the evidence did not support a finding that the [U.S. Park Police] cleared the park on June 1, 2020, so that then President Trump could enter the park.” (Greenblatt, as quoted by Greenwald)
This modest statement in no way excludes the likelihood that the Trump administration made shrewd and highly political use of the clearance process. In fact, further on in the letter Greenblatt mentions that, “….We also found weaknesses with the operation to clear the park, including the U.S. Secret Service’s deployment before the USPP had begun its dispersal warnings….”. The Secret Service was deployed in Lafayette Park prior to the dispersal effort. This fact strongly supports the MSM narrative that Trump was aware of the clearance sweep. They do not deploy at random protests, not even in D.C.
I’ve been reading Glenn since mid 2006, when he wrote at Unclaimed Territory. This is the weakest argument construction I’ve ever seen from him irrespective of topic. I’m afraid he has “….been de-legitimizing himself just fine without any help.” and not because he graces Carlson with his company. But, because he is now indulging in the kind of sloppy meme-crafting he once demolished other ‘authorities’ for engaging in. All one needs to do to refute his assertions is to read his own embedded links; they do not support his spin.
“This modest statement in no way excludes the likelihood that the Trump administration made shrewd and highly political use of the clearance process.”
But this was not the media claim. The weakness in Greenwald’s piece is not this, but that he takes an IG summary of what they were able to determine as dispositive of the actual facts. Which he would not do if the report were a whitewashing of something he’d been investigating. In that case he would be (correctly) pointing out the limitations of what an IG investigation could do in meaningfully investigating a process that was conducted largely orally, and by people who had had plenty of time to settle on a narrative.
You are right, the key issue is in Greenwald’s choice and treatment of an original source and it’s inherent flaws. However, our rightwing media is currently engaged in a winner’s strut over the fact that the MSM spun the event in a clumsy, simplistic way. Their triumphal recasting neatly eradicates the likely malice and connivance that underpinned the Trump administration’s conduct at the park at that time.
Oh, but, but, the MSM was biased and sensationalistic in the particulars! They didn’t report on every detail of who knew what when and who acted how! They must be completely disregarded!
This is a pretty standard trope in a standard right wing media passion play. Does our traditional mainstream media deserves it, yes. Do we deserve this artfully manufactured reinvention of the facts….. no.
When Greenwald stops being a non-person in #McResistance/Blue Anon media, then people can perhaps complain about his appearing on Carlson’s show. Most of the characters complaining about him in the media aren’t worthy of carrying his laptop.
Wonder why the Bureau of Prisons had its troops there. Hardly necessary to move a fence.
I remember reading or hearing somewhere/ somewhen that when Bureau of Prisons people appear even if in uniform outside of a prison, that there is some kind of exquisite little shyster-wrinkle in the shyster-law which makes it exquisitely shyster-legal for B of P officers to not wear I D when serving off of prison property.
That would make it hard for the targets of special abuse to identify the perpetrators of special abuse if those special abusers had an exquisitely shyster-legal exemption from wearing I D.
A new wrinkle in the vaccine debate:
https://news.yahoo.com/doctor-falsely-tells-ohio-lawmakers-164342873.html
Does this woman treat patients?!
The first thing I noticed about that article when I read it yesterday was the obligatory (last paragraph) “the Russians did it”. Every article I have read on the potential problems with 5G was printed on respected US sites, not Russian twitter bots.
https://fox8.com/news/coronavirus/cleveland-doctor-tells-ohio-lawmakers-covid-19-vaccine-can-leave-people-magnetized-interfaced-with-5g-towers/
Half of the pandemic unemployment funds may have been stolen:
https://news.yahoo.com/half-pandemics-unemployment-money-may-091059086.html
Only half? How much of the bailout funds in 2008 and 2021 were stolen? How much of the Pentagram’s so ironically named “budget” was stolen? Of course it kind of turns on what one’s definition of “stolen” is. There’s still a bit of fat on the carcass of the USian empire, and the dogs and maggots are all about slurping it up.
We are bled and shucked by people who just know in their hearts that the 3 degree Celsius shoe is unlikely to drop on them if they are just agile and smart enough, and die before it hits, it’s just gonna squash the weak and sessile…
From the article:
“Blake Hall, CEO of ID.me, a service that tries to prevent this kind of fraud, tells Axios that America has lost more than $400 billion to fraudulent claims. As much as 50% of all unemployment monies might have been stolen, he says…
Haywood Talcove, the CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions, estimates that at least 70% of the money stolen by impostors ultimately left the country, much of it ending up in the hands of criminal syndicates in China, Nigeria, Russia….
….Unemployment fraud is now offered on the dark web on a software-as-a-service basis, much like ransomware. States without fraud-detection services are naturally targeted the most.“
Both Blake and Hayward make their living selling “fraud-detection services”. This is an advertorial masquerading as straight news.
Right, and my state has been using their ID.me service, and requiring all recipients to go to their website and submit to their verification process.
I should have referred to them as Hall and Talcove. (Note to self: stop posting comments from iPad).
Thank you, Lambert, for sharing the link to “On Having Whiteness” from the Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association. Apparently the wokest of the academic and bureaucratic wokesters have moved even beyond Kendi and DeAngelo and are now selling “Whiteness” as a praeternaturally powerful scary monster that grows in and then erupts from the bowels of the infected, sort of like in the movie Alien: “Parasitic Whiteness,” we read, “renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples.” Wowsers. And this is, as the saying goes, not The Onion.
At this point, I really do see the spread of Critical Race and Gender Theory all across America as fundamentally anti-civilizational in its intent and effects. I have friends on both the Right and the Left who agree with me, but it seems to be very traditional conservative church-going Christians who are most alarmed. On the other hand, I have encouraged my friend James Howard Kunstler, a liberal New York Jewish atheist, to use the word “Satanic” in his biweekly blog to descibe the course of Wokeism.
So how does this play out now??
“Satanic” might be a stretch but it’s pretty pervasive that’s for sure.
We have a newly minted city councilor who doesn’t know a damn thing about government, but she sees racism hiding under every rock and she is going to bring it to the light of day and defeat it! At a recent meeting she voiced a knee jerk objection to the town approving a fundraising triathlon called “Tri Like a Savage” on the grounds that the word “savage” was racist. She was rather embarrassed when the rest of the council informed her that “Savage” in this case was the last name of a prominent local resident who had passed away of cancer a few years ago and the event was started by his family and named in his honor, something she would have known had she actually lived in this town for more than a few months before running for office to rid the world of racism, or if she had actually bothered to read any of the preparatory materials handed out to council members prior to the meeting.
At this point, hopefully laughing people like this out of town will do the trick.
Straight up similarities to the people that used to wear a sandwich board in public places shouting about redemption through Jesus and eternal hellfire.
Some of these dumb wokels will be standing around the bus depot thirty years from now holding up yellowing pulp copies of The Anti-Racist Watchtower as they clatter their dentures.
“I’m a fool for Jesus. Whose fool are you?”
My undocumented source says this was a San Francisco sandwich board c. 1956 but I don’t know.
Laughing “people like this” out of town no longer meets the criteria for ‘success.’
Like any cult down through the ages, “Wokeness” defies logic and reason. “Woke” people have no shame because, as commented to above, the ‘struggle’ takes on the mantle of a religious crusade.
Someone above mentioned the “Red Scare” of the McCarthy Era. Today we have the “White Scare.”
Thus, “Satanic” is an appropriate counter meme. The ‘struggle’ has descended to the cthonic level.
Monsters from the Id: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2BYyeS-fIU
We are still just naked apes.
Maybe they can modify those old Armed Forces movies so that “woke” people can identify those who are not “woke”-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNvPd-Zhs98 (3:18 mins)
Meanwhile, the billionaire class laugh their collective a**** off.
Ah, but they are mostly WHITE a$$es, except for the Asiax and Latinx and Africax ones… So we mopes can spew our ineffectual nugatory high dudgeon at them
classracists..Several weeks ago I was listening to CBC radio (which has become so “woke” I spend half my time turning it off).
A woman author being interviewed did a CBC no-no. In a moment of enthusiasm, she blurted out, “I love Shakespeare.” Quickly, she realized her error and corrected herself: “Well, I guess I shouldn’t say that, dead white male and all that.”
Imagine! Apologizing for loving Shakespeare! The muzzling power of “wokeness” extends even to a writer read and enjoyed by billions over the centuries.
My family and I just moved to Kansas from a rural town in upstate New York. Both here and there it appears at least superficially (rainbow flags, BLM signs) that wokeness is beginning to get a toehold in rural America — I think perhaps as a way of catching up with the fashion rather than the substance. It’s chilling.
But these are just two tiny anecdotes. I’ll be traveling more across Kansas in coming weeks and seeking more evidence. I wish I had time to stop and talk to people.
If wokeness and the substance underneath miraculously penetrates conservative middle america to the accomplishment of fair and equal treatment of black, brown and lgbtq people, that’s a good thing.
It’s hard for me to see distinction from pre-WW II papers on the toxicity of particular races portrayed as inherent diseases of race. These are the kinds of papers used as preambles and justifications for the most horrific of solutions under the rationale of “terrible, but (scientifically) necessary”. How did we drift so far from “I have a dream” and “never again”?
Well said!
Then it was scapegoating minorities, now it’s scapegoating armed (however incompetent) majorities.
We’re in for an interesting ride. Best case is the end of corporate media without which this kind of ideology could never spread.
I guess Twit and FB and Insta and podcasts and subscription blogs and the rest are now “corporate media” too? Where a lot of this resides.
“Oh, look at me! I am a member of a suspect category, and entitled to privilege and reparations! And it looks like a few of you are too! Let’s form up and press for moral advantage over those other rotten people!”
I think reader supported media, like this blog or Substack, provides the opportunity for critical thinking that advertising funded media such as Faceborg and Twitmonster deliberately subvert: they make money by doing so.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
– Volaire
And here is a broad generalization about ‘scientific necessity’ from a recent essay:
It is always dangerous to entrust to doctors and scientists decisions that are ultimately ethical and political. You see, scientists, rightly or wrongly, pursue their reason in good faith, which identifies them with the interests of science, and in whose name — history demonstrates this amply — they are willing to sacrifice any qualm of a moral kind.
– Giorgio Agamben
https://d-dean.medium.com/new-reflections-giorgio-agamben-c5534e192a5e
Thank you for the excellent Giorgio Agamben link!
The abstract ends:
“Permanent Cure,” eh?
I can’t think of a measured response. It speaks for itself.
At least he didn’t say “final solution.”
How does this play out? This, along with ‘good thinking liberal’s ‘ encouraging speech suppression, is driving me out of the Dem party. /meh. Of course, electing Joe meant nothing changes. /double meh.
adding:
“Parasitic Whiteness,” we read, “renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse.
I thought it was Parasitic Oligarch-ness that did that.
Durring the Slackalypse at our office last spring, I tried substituting “Capitalism” for “White Supremecy Culture” whereever I found the latter term.
It made coherent statements out of giberish wherever I tried it.
Wokeness is a highly tuned meme to convert critiques of capitalism into divisive identity politics misdirection as best as I can tell, but it’s now running wild in the hive mind and sowing antagonism everywhere.
I wish I understood “woke.” Is there a concise, agreed on, definition somewhere, with a link?
It is an obligatory, performative attention to a particularly structured (Critical Race Theory) set of injustices.
At least as I use it.
It’s performative aspect is a shibboleth for access to the sanctum of the “enlightened” (mostly Ivy League undergraduates and their cultural mielue) surplus elites.
No it’s just another epithet to hurl at people you don’t understand and don’t want to try to.
I am the first to say that, arguably just due to practicality, that class e.g. Bernie Sanders approach is the best tool to had.
But to pretend that minorities and women aren’t and haven’t been screwed for a long time and do have a right to complaint about it, is a bit much.
Perhaps the worst way women have been trampled on has to do with the fact that men’s wages have been forced down as liberated women entered the workforce in larger numbers. Many women found fulfilling careers, but many more were reluctantly forced out of the home and away from their children to take up demeaning, dead-end, slave-wage, service-industry jobs they never wanted.
Having spent years engaging in civil and gender rights protests and advocacy while studying the history of both patriarchy and capitalism and how both rely on divide and conquer while watching the divisive bipartisan back sliding on all these issues for the last 40 years in anger, I discovered I was a White Supremacist last spring.
That I felt universal health care, extended unemployment insurance and higher minimum wage was more important than what pronoun I used when I spoke with “them” (that is a singular usage for an Ivy League educated individual who requires to be addressed that way, rather than the inappropriate him or her) made me the problem.
The person who pointed this out to me considered themself “woke”.
So, language has historical power issues embedded in it. I can learn to use “they” to address this person. To set up and operate the institutions to impose this linguistic change on the population at large would, in my opinion, be as large a misallocation of resources as is the current stock market but this was their priority.
It is a way of changing the institutional into the presonal that has the effect of preventing positive change while looking “progressive.”
That particular article, or at least its abstract, is laughable. But as a concept “whiteness” has been around for decades in psychoanalytic journals. At the risk of appearing indifferent to the tremendous social significance of racism, in a clinical setting “whiteness,” to boil it down, often works to promote projection of impulses onto people of color.
For example, a white patient talks with mounting anger about his father’s lack of attention, and then suddenly finds himself thinking about looting by blacks during the BLM riots of last year. His outrage with his father has hit a threshold and he’s suddenly shifted to condemning blacks for their aggressive demands. In therapy this can be interpreted as a defensive shift and the focus returns to his father. In everyday life you can see how this dynamic could gel into a misalliance with other whites, aka his father, against demanding blacks.
The JAPA article cited here wants to argue that something like that misalliance is pervasive and, beyond that, the narcissistic oomph that comes with denigrating people of color is a kind of mainstay of a putative White Psyche. In my view this falls into the same kind of error that mid-20th c. psychoanalytic studies of fascism committed. Again boiling it down, those studies — here I have in mind “The Authoritarian Personality” — looked for a broad, characterological explanation of the “fit” between personality and fascism. While at the extreme that might be so, for most people accommodation to fascism was more limited personality-wise. The patient mentioned above hardly gloried in supposed racial superiority, but in the grip of his projective effort he could load on “destructive demandingness” as a problem and accept state repression against militantly expressed reasonable black demands, instead of bothering to investigate what black grievances were about. In a narrowly psychological sense, whiteness/blackness first serves to control “surplus” impulses, the narcissistic payoff is secondary and not nearly as crucial.
(The characterological whiteness error complements other instances of theoretical overreach we’ve seen recently, e.g. the 1619 Project’s claim that maintaining a slavery regime has been the primary determinant of US social development.)
It’s worth noting that one of the first uses of whiteness in a racial sense in the psychoanalytic literature is a 1938 article considering racism’s contribution to the suicide rate among blacks. A 1943 article, “Psychological Considerations of Color Conflicts Among Negroes,” looked at the preoccupation some blacks had the darkness of their skin. “The internal color conflicts of the Negroes mark their continuous struggle for adaptation in a white environment. White color-prejudice, by idealizing whiteness and caricaturing the dark complexion has become the direct exciting agent of a morbid color consciousness among them.” (Frantz Fanon was all over this.) It is really only in the 1990s that writers begin to focus on whiteness in the terms the cited article takes up in such a hyperventilating way.
Thanks for your comments. As you imply, it is important to note that the concept of “whiteness,” and (I would argue) critical race theory in general, did not originate and was not originally applied in the ridiculously farcical manner represented in this abstract. You mention Fanon. Beyond psychoanalysis, there are countless legitimate studies of race as a socio-cultural construct and an aspect of identity serving as a powerful ideological mechanism legitimating domination, exploitation, extermination, divide-and-rule, etc. Most of the early studies of “whiteness” as a social construct were part of this tradition. For me, one of the most insidious effects of the Robin DeAngelos of the liberal world is to undermine a whole history of very important work.
When I read the abstract to this article, I actually could not believe it was real. It had to be The Onion. Or perhaps Alan Sokal is having a bit of fun again! If you *wanted* to de-legitimize ‘race’ or ‘whiteness’ as analytic categories, depict such academics as worthless idiots, and alienate the majority of lay-persons, you could not do it more effectively than this. I’d suspect deliberate sabotage by academic agent provocateurs, but from my own experience I know such obliviousness actually exists.
I know I’m not supposed to do this but
+++
I couldn’t agree more. See my comment below I guess for additional thoughts.
Thanks for bringing up Sokal! I couldn’t quite recall his name but the similarity is definitely there.
Thanks for this informed comment. As a psychotherapist, I regret this article’s crude rendering of a far more nuanced psychological reality because it gives the profession a bad name. A past President of the APA no less! Actually, come to think of it, that makes perfect sense.
Glad to see mention of The Authoritarian Personality. Hesitant to summarize a book that ranges as broadly as that one does, but by my reading the core problem there would not be the thing that triggered the defocusing, (be it whiteness, dislike of deplorables, antiCatholicism, anti-Semitism,etc) but with the personality that has no appetite for confrontation with actual authority and power and thus deflects onto scapegoats who lack those things.
One thing I remember in passing was that they mentioned how subjects whose politics were clearly anti New Deal, antiRoosevelt nonetheless almost uniformly affected to to greatly admire Roosevelt, because he had won all of his key battles and handed his opponents their hats every time.
Can I get a quick definition of “critical race and gender theory,” because while I hear the term used a lot, I still don’t know what specifically is being referred to…and quite frankly I get the impression that a lot of people referring to it don’t know either. It seems to have become short-hand for anything race or gender related that annoys the commenter…but maybe I’m being ungenerous.
I did start reading a Critical Race Theory primer, and I have to say it seems pretty abstruse and academic, growing out of Critical Legal Theory, apparently…and it seems to bear little to no resemblance to the type of thing that gets labeled CRT these days. And while I fully comprehend the disdain that many have for the kind of writing/thought process on display in the link, it also seems like CRT has become like “commie” or “fascist” – a derogatory phrase to throw at whatever we don’t like, without providing any real information about the thing in question.
Wikipedia is a good start.
Doesn’t, in m opinion, focus enough on the debt to French Post Structuralism in that it’s precepts require that reality be entirely internally constructed.
While I agree we only have access to reality through the mediation of our senses and thought, none the less I still believe “reality is that which remains even if you no longer believe in it.”
My understanding: Critical race theory is an academic framework centered on the idea that racism is systemic, and not just demonstrated by individual people with prejudices. The theory holds that racial inequality is woven into legal systems and negatively affects people of color in their schools, doctors’ offices, the criminal justice system and countless other parts of life.
This is also one of its limitations. Pretty much any form of inequality is woven into the political, legal, and economic structures of the society it exists in. And because it tends to see the existence of any given racial disparity as ipso facto racist, it has difficulty doing causation beyond the assumptions embedded in it at the start. Eg, as long as blacks are disproportionately poor anything that disadvantages the poor will disproportionately disadvantage blacks. Though this aspect of the problem would clearly go away if there were no longer any poor. Which is no less achievable than a redistribution of poverty, though considerably more destabilizing to the system.
I did not see your comment when I submitted mine above, but I think you are correct. And that is a real problem. On the one hand, I think that such academics as the one cited in this Abstract absolutely deserve our scorn. But these people have appropriated the language of and in many cases usurped much more legitimate areas of social theory and historical inquiry. So on the other hand, when we ridicule them we may also legitimate the right-wing attacks on legitimate history as “critical race theory,” “cultural Marxism,” etc. As I say, insidious – thanks Robin.
You are right that actual ‘critical race theory’ began as a movement in critical legal studies. I was using the term more broadly above to refer to a tradition of critical studies of race in history and social science. Right-wing critics pretty much use the term to refer to anything they don’t like. As you point out, we need to avoid doing the same thing.
I’m not qualified to discuss the academic theory as such, but as an element in the culture wars, it’s being used on the right as a catch-phrase to refer to anything about race they don’t agree with or want to hear about.
The GOP’s ‘Critical Race Theory’ Obsession
How conservative politicians and pundits became fixated on an academic approach
1836 Project promoting ‘patriotic education’ in Texas heightens concerns about whitewashing history
“The Texas Constitution, adopted in 1836, included multiple provisions to preserve slavery, oppose emancipation and deny permanent residency to any “free person of African descent, either in whole or in part.”
In 1861, Texas seceded from the union with the stated intent of “holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery — the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits — a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.”
[HB 3979] instructs teachers to only describe slavery and racism as “deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States.””
I remember a time when CRT meant Cathode Ray Tube.
Simple: by demoralizing society and removing it’s desire to reproduce, the old liberal society can be freely discarded and reshaped into something usable to higher powers. It diverts criticism of the system into a safe avenue where it cannot effect anything.
But over the long term, it’s intellectual rot that delegitimizes the whole system. The more academia and paid psych medicine (it is peer reviewed, after all) is associated with wokeism the less customers they’re going to have. People with mental trouble created by the contradictions of capitalist society won’t buy into help that just demonizes them and makes their individual the problem. They’ll look elsewhere into workers’ collectives, clubs and political parties, just as they did in the 1920s. The final result is either socialism or fascism.
It eats it’s own tail. Such wokeism only works on believers and people who have some sense of shame or dignity. Fundamentally, wokeism cannot appeal or convert a determined fascist or a determined racist in the way socialism can.
It’s difficult to have any discussion about this topic for several reasons. First of all the discussion space is dominated by hard right narratives. These stories don’t just pop up out of nowhere. They are usually generated by and circulated around the right wing media prior to landing here. They are often cherry picked for extreme language, and out of context soundbites are chosen from them to generate maximum outrage and to bring in more of a following, especially among young people. It’s all part of the process of “red-pilling”. Another reason that understanding is hard to come by is that many white people are a bit sensitive about this topic, and it’s no wonder why. They feel that they are being attacked personally, and that someone is trying to impose shame and guilt on them. So there’s a very reactionary response from the ego. I know because I am a white guy and I experience this directly myself.
But I am also a thoughtful person who is willing to sit through some perhaps uncomfortable feelings to understand the truth. I know that I have been conditioned by society and my upbringing in it to conform to certain roles and ways of thinking, feeling and behaving. The foundation of these United States is absolutely brutal colonization: displacement and exploitation of other people and cultures, and that fact permeates our society even today. It hasn’t really been all that long, just a few hundred years, and we haven’t really come to terms with it yet as a nation. So this conditioning that I’m talking about harms all of us, those who more benefit from it and those who are more oppressed by it. It f*cks with all of our heads, and I’ve found that when I start to recognize and confront this Capitalist, patriarchal white supremacist conditioning in myself firstly, and then in the world around me is it like waking up, from a trance or a dream.
Great comment. I wish I could explain myself that well.
I actually finally accepted that I am a racist – which unexpectedly but in hindsight quite understandably was the best counter to it ever.
To wit: It’s not unnatural to be a bit offish with strangers, it’s actually a really natural self-preservation mechanism. Now I grew up in a lily-white surburban-to-cow-school-engineering-program surrounding. My best friend at college was black, literally the only one in my engineering courses, and one of only a handful that weren’t sequestered in the athletics dorm, so I thought “hey I’m not like that”.
But strangers that looked quite a bit different than the people I was used to of course turned the knob on this 150000 year old monkeysphere conditioning “up to 11”. Denying that it existed meant not dealing with it.
After a new attitude of accepting it and then stomping on it every time the situation arose, man suddenly I was master of it. Now it just slinks in the corner, cowering.
I don’t want to degenerate racism by comparing it with smoking, but it does have a parallel – I’ve never met anybody (I never smoked) who smoked who said “I can’t stand the thought of a cigarette”. Just the opposite.
But they don’t smoke anymore. And I don’t “racist” anymore. Feels pretty good.
This is why we see this as religion.
I’m Canadian. I grew up with minimal contact with American culture, or indeed with pop culture at all for the first decade. White supremacy conditioning? Give me a break. My world was divided between French and English, not white and black. In later years I saw that on American TV – but that was America: macho, conformist, sanctimonious, overwrought.
I have had that experience of waking up – from neoliberalism. It proceeded through slow observations of conformity and consensus. There are no better warnings of delusion. People are too diverse to agree that much without succumbing either to fantasy or coercion.
The woke have been deluded. Suddenly they repudiate the illusion. They think that everyone else should share the enlightenment. Never mind that some of us never shared their particular delusions; never mind that some of us experience skepticism and doubt, not revelation. They insist we acknowledge the Good News and join the faith.
They have only cast off one illusion for another. Truth is never to be found: only to be sought. To be awake is not to see the truth, but to understand that you never really can – and that the the belief that you have found truth is the biggest barrier to seeking it.
Some people might be projecting that attitude lately, but I’m not doing that. I am simply describing my experience and point of view. If you have a problem with that then well it’s your problem, not mine.
Ok then this is just the particular reality tunnel, or assemblage point that I’m choosing to acknowledge, express and experience for now. Who said anything about absolute truth?
How does it play out? The summary of ends with this line:
“There is not yet a permanent cure.”
Perhaps one day a final solution will be sorted out. Until then, we will have to suffer with our chronic whiteness.
What was that book, “We’ve had a hundred years of psychoanalysis and the world gets worse and worse”? Or something like that. Just think of all the former “disorders” from the DSM: Homosexuality, Dysaesthesia Aethiopica- primarily effecting “the negroes”, ‘independent’ women had The Vapors, even Gender Identity Disorder (recently removed from the DSM in 2012), etc etc. Will we see ‘Whiteness’ added soon?
> Many More Americans Would Be Vaccinated if Our Health Care System Wasn’t So Terrifying
The headline is a little different from the article. More technical than I expected. But it definitely gets at a primary cause.
I was listening to a local hip hop station a few months back, around the time Obama announced that he would get his vaccine. It’s a station that has a lot of positive messages about supporting black businesses. One of the hosts, when asked if he would get the vaccine, nailed the essence of this article:
“I don’t think so. I don’t have Obama money if something goes wrong.”
This. It’s precisely the reason why I am passing on The Vaccine.
Was speaking with a couple of neighbors yesterday evening. They’ve decided to pass for the same reason.
One of the two told me about a brother who got the shots and was sickened for three weeks. I keep hearing stories like this one, and let’s just say that they don’t make me more willing to roll up my sleeve.
Yep and to an extent, there’s a Covid standard of care now that has resulted in much, much fewer covid deaths and much less suffering. And because nobody wants to admit that there are any problems with vaccination, there’s not a lot of material yet on adverse mRNA events or how to treat them.
What an idiotic state of affairs.
The two 65+ members of this household will be abstaining as well. I have an admittedly inordinate fear of getting some sort of exotic, incurable autoimmune disease in the future, that can only be “managed” with an expensive, experimental drug that Medicare refuses to negotiate the price on, and has a list of side effects a mile long. I’m perfectly healthy right now.
Pressure to conform, however, is sometimes intense. Here’s something that has recently come up that some may find interesting.
Last year, our 50th high school class reunion was scheduled for September in a SE Chicago suburb. It was cancelled due to covid, and rescheduled for this Sept. Our class has remained pretty close for those 50 years and neither my husband, who was also in that class, nor I have missed regularly held get togethers over that time.
A few days ago, a facebook post appeared on the reunion page from a former classmate. He wanted everyone to know that he had received a liver transplant in 2017, and would be taking immunosuppressants for the rest of his life. (Rumor has it that he destroyed his own liver with drinking and drugs.)
He asked that anyone planning to attend the reunion weekend unvaccinated, notify him of their plans, anonymously “if necessary.” He said he had recently attended a Northwestern “webinar,” presumably for patients in his position, and felt he needed to both inform the class of his situation and ask for the information.
I’ve since spoken to one of my best friends–then and now–and we can’t figure out what we’re expected to do with this information. Since Trump’s election, the people in this class have become surprisingly vocal and political, sorting themselves out pretty virulently along the same Trump / anti-Trump, vax / no-vax lines as the rest of the country. Some very long-standing friendships have been destroyed.
Living in Florida, I guess I didn’t expect this to become such an issue, but it apparently has. Our choice is clear–we won’t be going. But I do wonder how permanent and damaging this schism–locally as well as nationally–has the potential to become.
>Pressure to conform, however, is sometimes intense.
Well the flip side is that
a) Covid doesn’t bother everybody, some of them don’t even know they had it
b) The vaccine seems about 94% effective.
So what if you are the type “a” above and you cross paths with the type “b”. You could literally kill some poor sucker who was unlucky enough to have to serve you brunch.
You say “conform”, I say “participate”.
Sure looks like that is part of the game plan
Went to the Blooberg article about deaths in India, but it was the article after it from a few days ago that caught my eye.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-07/gangrene-hearing-loss-point-to-delta-variant-being-more-severe
The last 3 paragraphs are story all of their own:
German politician and scientist Karl Lauterbach said Tuesday the variant will probably become more prevalent in Germany too in the coming months. “To avoid it completely seems unrealistic to me,” he said on Twitter in German. “The decisive factor is a very high vaccination rate, which reduces mortality.”
But with emerging evidence delta and at least one other variant may be adept at evading vaccine-induced antibodies, pharmaceutical companies are under pressure to tweak existing shots or develop new ones.
“New vaccines have to prepared with new variants in mind,” said Ghafur. “We can’t get ahead of the virus, but at least we can least keep up with it.”
re the Indian variant (Delta!) – the evidence emerging from the UK suggests a loss of efficacy for people who have only received their first shot (antibodies not yet high enough to neutralise the new variant as well as for variant alpha). After 2 shots the efficacy holds in the sense that is important i.e. protection against really severe illness and death.
It`s looking as if cellular immunity is good against all variants so far and is beginning to look as if it might be durable like it was for Sars 1 (cellular immunity still present 17 years after infection) – sorry no links but all this is info easy to find.
Christian Drosten in his podcast this week pointed out that variant delta appears to have a selective advantage in partially immune populations and therefore gradually overtakes the currently indigenous variant. He says that such immune escape usually comes at a price (in fitness) for the virus and so it would not normally come to dominate in naive populations.
Tim Spector this week however, on new evidence believes it is truly more infectious and pointed out that data from the Covid Symptom Study App shows the virus phenotype is changing – they are seeing runny noses and sneezing, sore throats, not much coughing, no more anosmia. This alone means more transmission as the youngsters are getting mild disease and sneezing etc are not likely to suspect Covid and to go about gaily spreading the virus just as the UK is opening up.
All that said, we still need to roll out Ivermectin globally – the evidence that it works (for prevention and treatment in early, viral phase and even quite well if that window is missed) is now OVERWHELMING and people are still sickening and dying unnecessarily as they have for months
I’d say that in general it seems to be working so far, and that it seems to be relatively safe. I took the J&J a month ago and have had very little reaction. A recent antibody test shows that I do have antibodies now, where I didn’t before. One shot and done. You can easily search which places have which vaccines. I got mine at Fry’s pharmacy. That said I get the reluctance, too.
IIRC Obama gets free fully paid, no deductible, no co-pay health care as a ex President. NOT Obamacare.
Of course, unlike most currently unemployed people, Obama’s rich enough to buy 75% taxpayer subsidized insurance on the ACA exchange for federal employees or the Federal Employees Health Benefits program*, buy insurance on his own, or pay for his own medical care, but I don’t think ex-presidents get fully subsidized coverage.
* The first 2 links reference the latter, but the third references the former.
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34631.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Former_Presidents_Act#Medical_insurance
https://www.businessinsider.com/financial-perks-president-of-the-united-states-2018-7#presidents-get-access-to-premier-health-insurance-16
“If a president serves five or more years of federal service, they receive priority health benefits and use of veterans hospitals. If eligible and interested in partaking, 75% of presidential health care is covered by taxpayers and purchased through the Washington, DC, Obamacare exchange, according to the LA Times.”
…and if Obama has paid federal tax on his private lifetime income, he like many Americans will be eligible to enroll in Medicare at age 65. Medicare for All would eliminate ObamaCare entirely.
Yet they presumably think they have Obama money in the far more likely event they wind up in the hospital due to Covid. People are funny. I get that people worry about missing a day or two of work due to a reaction to being vaccinated and that shouldn’t be a choice anyone should have to worry about, but hospitals were never going to be and never were put under stress from treating people who had a reaction to being vaccinated. The serious risks of non-vaccination are exponentially greater.
So he does have the money he will need if he gets Covid…
I am aware extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but – given the frequent nature of lab leaks over my 51 years on this planet – perhaps the evidentiary standard regarding a claim that is embarrassing (to a nation-state curiously deemed above reproach by the ostensible Left) is something significantly less certain than what is usually associated with “extraordinary.”
the fact is that it was almost as much an american lab as a chinese one, given that much of the funding and many of the scientists working on bat coronaviruses there were american, including Peter Dashak, the main guy debunking the lab leaks theory
And the lab was built with the help of the French gov’t and with money from Sanofi, the largest vaccine maker in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology
Sanofi wont have a vaccine for it ready until the end of the year, at the earliest
That’s what I don’t get about this latest twist to the narrative – the authorities are pushing the lab leak theory with the implication that it would somehow then be China’s fault, however it’s been well known that the US at least partially funded the research going on there. Here’s an article for April 2020 discussing the lab leak theory and US funding – https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-experiments-that-may-have-started-coronavirus-pandemic-1500503
Since this is widely known already, the US authorities flogging this narrative now means there won’ t be any legitimate investigation since that would point to US involvement with any potential lab leak. Instead this is likely just an effort to give China a black eye on the world stage as the US “pivots to Asia”.
It appears the strategy is to yell “China, China, China” for the foreseeable future much as “Russia, Russia, Russia” was used for the last half decade.
Once priors are adequatly reinforced, any such questions as those you raise can simply be dismissed as CT or your function as a foreign agent.
As is common, the Bard has the (almost) last word:
Methinks they doth protest too much!
Yep, lyman alpha blob. Sure is.
Meanwhile the benevolent US government, through its President, has promised to donate 500 million doses of vaccine, Pfizer I think, to “poorer countries”. It did not include a timeline of when the freeze-over would occur. On the other hand, that black-eyed China Ba$tard has already sent out 350 million donated vaccine to 75 countries, and they are vaccinating their own population at the rate of 20 million a day.
There was a documented case of Covid in Italy in Nov. 2019. Published in a peer-reviewed journal.
This alone disproves that Covid started with the live market cluster.
Barcelona also reported finding Covid in wastewater in spring 2019. Not sure if that was confirmed.
Is Glenn Greenwald the New Master of Right Wing Media?
https://www.thedailybeast.com/is-glenn-greenwald-the-new-master-of-right-wing-media?via=twitter_page
and What Happened to Glenn Greenwald
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/30/what-happened-to-glenn-greenwald/
I’ve followed GG since Unclaimed Territory and long been an admirer. I can appreciate his criticisms of the left (or pseudo-left) but they seem to be the primary target of his ire that seems to ignores the right. I’m suspecting his personality is primarily that of being a know it all scold. Given his trajectory it’s not hard to imagine him securing a spot on Fox News, where he is a frequent commentator. God knows they never lie or twist the truth.
Nothing happened to Greenwald. The ostensibly left media had no problem with him when he was tearing apart the Bush crowd and their blatant mendacity and warmongering. When he levels those same criticisms at the “liberals” as they cozy up the the Bush crowd and engage in the same mendacity and warmongering, suddenly they can’t take it.
People accuse Greenwald of refusing to criticize Republicans or the right – I would argue that the vast majority of the Democrat party are right-leaning Republicans these days. How many times did Obama invoke his pal Ronny Reagan in a positive light? How many lollipops has Michelle Obama given her new besty George W? How many times will we hear Biden tell us he doesn’t want to do anything unless his Republican chums are on board? And Biden gladly gave the eulogy at Strom Thurmond’s funeral, but he’s not a racist Republican but a kindly old uncle who really has all of our best interests at heart? Come on, man!
It isn’t Greenwald that has changed – it just the political class being brazen hypocrites as usual.
Exactly.
“Kill the messenger” is an old-as-the-hills-and-twice-as-dusty tactic to discredit a message that is too true be refuted any other way. As if we’re all too stupid to see it.
Great comment!
… or maybe he considers the do-nothing faux-left (read: hypocritical, prevaricating, mainstream center-right Democrats, controlling the party… and now the Congress… again) is a bigger problem than the ridiculous MAGA right who’ve been cutting the fool since forever and surprising no-one with an agenda that so many vichy-dems have been happy to be a part of since the turn to neo-liberalism under JImmy Carter.
maybe…
“Given his trajectory it’s not hard to imagine him securing a spot on Fox News, where he is a frequent commentator. God knows they never lie or twist the truth.”
As a fierce debater, why wouldn’t GG want to reach Fox’s ginormous audience?
I somehow doubt he’s turning down invites from MSNBC, CNN, etc…
co-signing comment above by Lyman Alpha Bob
Actually that is quite correct that. Fox news will have on people like Jimmy Dore and other societal critics who MSNBC and CNN will never, ever have on. They even had on Bernie Sanders who the Fox audience actually liked. If I found out that Tucker Carlson had on Susan Sarandon once, I would not be surprised. ;)
It’s sad that Fox News is the only MsM that will bring on these people but it’s also clear they are doing so for the same reason MSNBC and CNN are littered with anti-Trump republicans.
The people I know who religiously watch Fox News aren’t hearing them and thinking, “I agree with the left” they’re just having their already walled off distain for Dems confirmed.
That Sanders townhall was a surprising event in how he was able to get through and win over many in the audience. But, Sanders is a unique voice (not adversarial, much to the condemnation of many on the left who wanted him to be more adversarial) and the format was one of talking to real people (similar to his talk at Liberty U) and not paid shills like Tucker.
More town halls with lefties would be great but going on Tucker to discuss the evils of Dems is only feeding the partisan machine. I’ve tried watching some Greenwald and others on Tucker and it’s far from productive. His agenda is more than clear and it’s not about seeking the truth in any way/shape/form.
I really wish there was some form of mainstream news that didn’t focus on dividing but the dollars are in sowing fear and hate so that’s what they do. Having Greenwald and other on Fox is better than nothing (maybe it enlightens a few people at least) but it’s hardly anything to feel good about.
Side note: how anyone can listen to most “news” anymore baffles me. Way back when I first heard Limbaugh at a friend’s house I was put off by how angry he was all the time. Now, that’s all news talk shows. Just some blowhards yelling piously for an hour about how bad the others are. From Fox to TYT to Dore to MSNBC… Rising was a rare break from that and hoping their new show continues with rational discussions by rational minds. But, obviously I’m in the minority. The ranters get the highest ratings. Americans love their nightly loudmouth anger fests. Says a lot about why we are where we are as a society.
Geo; the few times I’ve watched sports talk on US television, my wife has asked me, “Do they know how to do anything but shout each other down?” She’s right. Even the sports talk shows. The two or three involved will often make basically the same points by shouting they’re smarter or more knowledgeable than the others. They’re so frequently saying exactly the same thing.
I go with sports radio, lots of comraderie, no politics
AM 710 since you’re west coast but baseball season now so,
well actually there’s lots to talk about…
Perhaps they ignore the right because it is the left (or faux left) at the moment that is beating the drum for censorship and the supposed danger of Constitutional speech protections. Which is to say that liberals who embrace this new McCarthyism are the right. Somebody just switched the labels on the product.
I will agree that some of Greenwald’s recent columns that seem out to settle scores are not his best. Taibbi is better at this.
As for Counterpunch, St Clair defends his Greenwald phobia on the basis that Greenwald supported the Iraq invasion. Which if true is fair criticism but not central to Greenwald’s civil liberties beat.
Greenwald is quite open about his initial support for the Iraq invasion — and about how he came to change his mind. I appreciate this clue as to why St. Clair is so contemptuous of Greenwald; I had been puzzled by that. In other respects, he (St. Clair) can be a very effective writer and observer.
This is liberal troll territory. Greenwald has chosen to focus on the hypocrisy of liberals, a topic that presents a cornucopia of material. Liberal failure and stooginess, by the Biden administration, also just plays right into the right’s hands. Republican monstrosity is a much-visited topic. The corporate media won’t cover liberal hypocrisy. Liberals are having kittens over Greenwald because they can’t stand the spotlight on their hypocritical posing.
@CJ
June 10, 2021 at 8:14 am
——-
“I’m suspecting his personality is primarily that of being a know it all scold.”
That is perhaps the best characterization of Greenwald I have seen. He’s written some great stuff, but there’s also a lot that really falls short, including his latest essay on the Lafayette Park report.
It appears that he has taken the report at face value without digging into who wrote it and what their agenda might have been. Apparently, it was a Trump appointee. Not to cast aspersions without evidence, but that would certainly be worth looking into.
I think he’s a know-it-all scold with a savior complex.
But then I look at the use he’s put that to, taking on Bush, Obama and Bolsonaro.
He’s occasionally sloppy and wrong, but he’s determined and fearless in attacking the powerful.
I don’t have to like him to trust his work.
Agreed with this and your comment up thread!
He talks about the background of the IG in his piece. He also remarks that none of the people interviewed (over 20) mentioned anything about an order to clear the square. Nobody mentioned it at all.
Not to “cast aspersions without evidence,” of course, but if you’d read the article you’d know that in it, Greenwald tells you who wrote the report: Mark Lee Greenblatt.
According to the obscure, little known website called Wikipedia, Greenblatt was first employed by the feds in an investigative capacity in 2003, and has worked his way up the ladder through all administrations since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Greenblatt
Just curious if you’d care to explain exactly how you feel Greenwald’s essay “falls short.” Or how Greenblatt is deserving of suspicion for that matter.
Well, from my experience in government, to last as long as Greenblatt in a subordinate position, you must have a supreme ability to “read the room”. Like Bill Barr making something appear to be “exoneration”, Mr. Greenblatt knows how to report his evidence.
The optics of Lafayette Square were clear.
And now we know that there are more people than just Trump to blame for those optics. This is what may people including myself have been yelling about for years now – our government is extremely corrupt, they’ll beat you down with few qualms for having a problem with that, and there is plenty of blame to go around. The bad stuff didn’t start with Trump and it won’t end with his presidency, despite the beliefs of the ‘back to brunch’ crowd.
Funny though how Obama never got blamed by the mighty corporate Wurlitzer when the cops were clubbing people to bust up OWS, and having coordinated federal agencies to work with local law enforcement to do so, you’d think he’d bear some responsibility for that.
But most people are so happy to see the back of Trump that they don’t even notice when their beloved Democrat party reboots McCarthyism, cozies up to Bushes and Cheneys, advocates for censorship and added surveillance, thinks lying spooks from the CIA are national heroes, abjectly refuses to even discuss national healthcare during supposedly the worst pandemic evah, etc, etc ,etc.
It’s all just one big Republican party now.
If your view the Republicans as the Id of the Oligarchy, and the Democrats as it’s Ego, you can understand why one might reach out towards the Id to try to bring it into awareness of the Ego.
Until the Ego admits it is the complete and utter tool of the Id it will just continue to rationalize (contain, distract, misdirect) all external attacks on the Id as attacks on itself.
Viewed this way, Democratic party priorities and effectiveness can be clearly seen. As Lambert likes to point out, keeping Medicare for All off the table through a murderous pandemic is a significant achievement which the Republicans could never have hoped to do.
I don’t have a problem with Greenwald critiquing the rotten Democratic Party. I have a problem with how those to his right use his critiques. He can’t control that, but he can communicate knowing that. Him going on Carlson isn’t bad by itself, he has presented in the past at libertarian conferences and did a great job, but similar to Dore, if he doesn’t use the opportunity to put forward some ideas from the left he is being used in a particular way towards particular ends, and he knows it. If he has problems with the Democrats (who doesn’t these days), he should have problems with the other rotten party, often for very similar reasons.
My personal thinking on Greenwald, who I do appreciate, is that he was targeted by Obama and Clinton and the like, and that would impact anyone. He has a first hand experience on being on the receiving end of attacks from the neoliberals and I think that has resulted in him focusing his attacks on them in turn. I understand it on a human level, and he does seem to support Lula in Brazil and was fighting the good fight there. But, I think an objective look at him at this point is that he is someone that is useful to people on the right, who want to use him towards particular ends I don’t agree with. So, how he engages in the space they have provided him matters a lot to me, and I have not always been happy with how he engages on places like Carlson’s show. I also have a problem with pretending that Tucker is anyone but a bratty trust fund kid that sometimes gets it right. Thinking of him as being anti-establishment in any way is absurd in the extreme. He is part of the oligarchy, just as Trump was. If he provides a space to someone on the left, use it wisely and think about how to get people in that audience to be more open to some of the ideas on the left. Would Tucker have someone on though continuously that makes leftist ideas easier to digest? I don’t think so. He finds Greenwald useful, and Greenwald probably finds him useful. Greenwald sometimes does that, Dore doesn’t really, and that to me is the problem. People could see that there are principled people on the left that have reasonable stances, and they are willing to critique Democrats (a right wing party). Or, their critiques can be used as a means to make it seem like the Democrats are uniquely problematic in some way that they aren’t. On foreign policy, I see little difference, they are horrible but horrible in ways that are a bit different.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply.
It is difficult to imagine how to propagate ideas in our toxic, corporate media and Greenwalds copious talent as a self promoter is easily bent by their framing.
But I do see the Democrats as being more problematic than the Republicans because of effectiveness. Of course they don’t do any of what they run on any more than the Republicans do, but they are much more effective in implementing Republican policies than is the party to which those policies are native. Hillary crafted and AEI health rationing plan into something Obama could implement and that is successfully killing people at scale. The Republicans propose lethal policies, Democrats sugar coat them and stuff them down our throats.
I don’t know. The Republicans fully support brutal economic war against Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia (among others), and they pose no threat to the country, just to US capital and pose an ideological challenge. The Republicans support reactionaries around the world, have almost no one willing to challenge Israeli war crimes, don’t care about the impact climate change is going to have on foreign policy (which the Pentagon and State Department even started noting decades ago when they started to opine on the “coming resource wars”), among other things. Explaining how utterly corrupt the Democrats are and how bad they are on foreign policy is an easy sell, but I think they are both horrible, just in different ways. There are no shortage of war profiteers in the Republican Party. Who was instrumental in pushing us into Iraq, among other places? If the Democrats are worse, to me, it is more than anything in helping to put down minor challenges to the bi-partisan war consensus. Hard to really challenge that when we are so economically reliant on war.
I guess I see the Democrats as equally culpable in all the foreign policy evils you enumerate.
In the same way they’ve rubberstamped a Republican judiciary, they’ve been rubber stamping Imperialist Capitalist foreign policy since Kennedy lost part of his head between D&R administrations.
I’ve enumerated here before the list of “regime change” operations since the founding fo the CIA and there’s no break in the steady tempo.
I’ve enumerated here before the list of “regime change” operations since the founding fo the CIA and there’s no break in the steady tempo between D&R administrations.
Edit fail
We aren’t economically reliant on war, really.
If we wanted to we could shut down the armaments industry and the government could pay the people who no longer have jobs. No more bombs, and nobody starves.
We’ve already proven that we can pay people not to work, although my understanding is other countries have proven it far better than the US has. Here we get $2000 = $1400.
Slash military spending to what is actually needed for defense, and we could easily afford to fund infrastructure, healthcare, education, as well as reduce the deficit and probably cut taxes, to boot.
Note that I remain silent about what the economic effects of such a policy would be, but an awful lot of defense company executives have vacation homes in exchange for offering the average frustrated taxpayer nothing of comparable value.
Greenwald also seems to pass on low-grade right-wing attacks on Democrats. I think that the huffing and puffing about the lab leak hypothesis, for example, is far exaggerated. And sometimes it seems that Greenwald has adopted bot-sides-ism, which I think is more or less true in foreign policy but not otherwise, Insofar as I’ve been able to tell, Greenwald tends toward libertarianism.
Team D already has plenty of people to make their case. Glenn, for better or worse, seems attracted to underdogs.
So does Team R, which is hardly an underdog.
>Big Pharma May Finally Lose This One Daily Poster
So after 20 years there may be a pilot project to allow importation of drugs from countries like Canada, even though we know most drugs are manufactured in foreign countries. At this rate we may get M4A in 200 years.
But two decades later — as wildly profitable drugmakers continue to mercilessly hike medicine prices — there may finally be some good news…Then again, drugmakers have funneled more than $30 million to Democrats since 2016, and the last election cycle saw them deliver more cash to Democrats than Republicans, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. Biden’s campaign raked in more than $13 million from donors in the pharmaceutical and health products sector — and while his HHS secretary Xavier Becerra voted for importation during his time in Congress, Biden has also stocked his administration with officials linked to the drug industry, which is frantically trying to block the administration from permitting importation.
On the lab leak, I doubt that we will know for years and probably decades, but that certainly not prevent those with an axe to grind on both sides from making frequent loud claims. The most sinister of these are the ones pushing conflict with China, so I stand firmly on the natural-origins side. Friends of mine claim that what’s really important here is Truth (and Honesty, and Science), but it will be a long time before that will be the case. Right now it’s a political football, and it will stay that way for quite awhile.
The reason for you taking “firm stand on natural-origins side” is not reasonable, though understandable.
It is incumbent, to the extent that you have the time and resources, to dig deep to find the truth otherwise you are just a spectator watching shadows on a digital walls…and maybe that’s anyone can be in this techno-democracy we live in (can I even use democracy anymore without putting it in quotes?)
“to dig deep”
Tell me, how are you going to do that? Do you have access to information that the rest of us don’t have? Is there someone on the inside of this lab leaking actual data? This China lab leak has become so politicized that it is extremely hard to separate any author’s intentions from actual fact. All we have now is circumstantial evidence, and yes, circumstantial evidence is enough to convict but you can never be sure if you’ve convicted the right perpetrator or not.
Right now, all you can do is accept or reject the “shadows on a digital wall”, depending on why you “believe” – nothing more.
“Tell me, how are you going to do that? Do you have access to information that the rest of us don’t have? ”
There are some, not many granted, respectable independent journalist who you will not find easily. I follow their work very closely. Not sure it’s appropriate for me to list them here. I’m sure that in addition to NC, you access and consume many other sources as well.
How we come to hold a view is a complex process, interacting with others who have an interest in the topic, such as I’m doing with you now, is also a part of that dynamic. So I believe that it is more than just “belief” and that I am exercising some kind of logic, reason, and analysis as to how I come to view topics such as this, otherwise it’s just ego inflation, or “Puffery” as St. Paul would say.
You just gotta Do Your Research, buddy.
The Truth is Out There.
Maybe eventually, maybe never. But not now, buddy. At this point no one knows, and it will take awhile.
It is perfectly reasonable, if the intent of those raising the origin hypothesis is to enshrine a self-serving lie as the sense of the people. In fact, anyone trying to sell war to the American people or facilitating the sale is a traitor to Homo sapiens as a whole.
What if the intent is to have a moratorium on gain of function research that can create deadly viruses by enhancing their ability to infect people? Are we supposed to put our heads in the sand and wait for the next lab leak to happen instead of having a discussion about risk versus benefit and lab security?
“can I even use democracy anymore without putting it in quotes?”
No.
We are all grasping at shadows. Make your efforts as if you were the last honest person on earth, but never mistake the “as if” for a “because.”
When the pentagon propaganda funnel amplifies a story, it can be strongly presumed to be BS. There is no need to try to dig through their excrement, by the time you find a kernel, they will have made a new reality, as Rummy said.
I came across an ad for a game on my iPad – I don’t remember the name – but it showed a house with a roof on fire, a broken lamp on the floor, and a toilet overflowing. The object of the game was to decide what to take care of first. There are a lot of bad things happening, but shouldn’t we be working on what is most important first? Sure, knowing what caused the disease to get loose is important, but it is as important as putting our effort into eradicating the virus worldwide or finding cures?
To me this China lab story is just a distraction to woo us away from realizing that our house is on fire. And besides, isn’t it just a pot-kettle-black story? Yes, China didn’t handle the disease well when it broke loose, but then neither did we. Are we supposed to now forget that?
I agree on distraction…first aliens and now essentially “who killed kennedy” on lab leak. I personally don’t see why it matters, and don’t think we’ll ever know. In the meantime…
Historian, I agree with you and Tegnost. I don’t know if I care how it happened. Who exactly would you trust? The US lies about everything. Washington has absolutely no shame, lecturing other countries on Human Rights after locking up people on Guantanamo. Torture. This country lets people die rather than give them health care.
Why would I believe anything our oligarch run government would ever tell me. Especially since we never ever see any proof.
Just find the animal host. The longer it is not found, the odds lean more towards an unnatural origin.
Identifying and Tracking SARS-CoV-2 Variants — A Challenge and an Opportunity NEJM
There’s no reason that this shouldn’t be done. Huge proponent. You could easily tie this to some kind of citizen science sampling (lets say you found yourself a couple ticks on your dog, you can submit these sorts of samples as well)
There are labs collecting all kinds of frozen samples for other studies, probably many asymptomatic ones as well in those other patient samples. Compile the leftovers with a variety of research groups, and fund it.
Not being a climber of the Financial Times paywall I have not read “How ‘Creative destruction’ drives innovation and prosperity.” However that very title begs the question “What does the non-creative destruction of the private equity business model drive?”
Maybe they think that all destruction is creative?
“destruction” does perform a “filtering” function, but the traits that are selected for by this function might not be beneficial to the human race at large.
Hey, Chuck. If you put that article title into Google, the first result will be for the Financial Times. When you click it, it will open up normally for you.
Conclusion summarized from FT: if people are secure in their livelihoods they won’t fear “creative destruction”: to be secure they need constitutional democracy, active civil society independent institutions and “free media”.
None of which criteria exist anymore anywhere.
So, this is just the latest “epicycle” rationalization for sustaining the unsustainable status quo.
Oh yes, and from the body, “degrowth” can’t work, so only capitalism, as defined in the summary above which doesn’t exist anywhere and never really has, can save us from capitalsim.
Typical TINA tautology from the Financial Times.
“Myanmar pushes ASEAN to the brink”
No. No, it’s not. Whenever I see something from the Lowy Institute I always am reminded of the American Enterprise Institute for some reason. Right now there is a trend to try to militarise and subvert organizations internationally. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is one such example. This article is helpful in suggesting models for how ASEAN should organize itself such as the Organisation of American States (OAS) in the Americas. Yeah, that would be the one that tries to overturn elections and attacks other South American nations that do not toe a neoliberal/neocon line. Good example that. What the author really wants is that ASEAN should turn itself into a sort of eastern NATO. Other countries do not appear eager to join the Quad so if ASEAN could be converted, then so much the better. Then a modified ASEAN could start putting military pressure on countries such as Myanmar. Yeah, nah!
I sort of bought into the Fed’s talk of supply chain disruptions being the reason for “temporary inflation.”
However with the recent CPI print, I wanted to share a boots on the ground story. I was at a rural Lowe’s yesterday picking up a few things for projects around the house. The prices were shocking.
One of the big surprise jumps in prices was on anything plastic. Rubbermaid totes, the kinds you use to store items? $19. I remember as a kid when those were $5. For tarps, there wasn’t a single tarp that was under $20. One of the tarps on the shelf was over $100.
I’ve never seen prices like these for goods that are quite basic.
I read the notice Lambert linked to yesterday from the tip manufacturer and it said the cost of polypropylene had gone up 75% over the past year due to increased demand during the pandemic, and the storms in TX have limited production of the source material. I imagine that is the case for most plastics.
What worries me about this phenomenon is the idea of “price stickiness.” Basically, temporary conditions will drive up the prices of various items. Aftyer the ‘temporary’ situation has abated, the price does not come back down to anywhere close to the original starting price. Someone ‘skims’ the difference and wealth is yet again “enclosed” in favour of the upper reaches of the social heirarchy.
Was thinking about that very thing the other day, too-that these higher prices are the new normal and they won’t be going back down no matter what happens. You said it a lot better than I could.
We have seen that over and over. We will continue to pay whatever they decide to make us pay and certainly no one is going to do a darn thing about it.
There have been acute shortages of irony-causing inflationary mirth, which in turn has affected the one-liner market as a knock on joke. Experts blame it all on the seriousness of our times, and hope for better gibes.
Although the allegations are against a man who died in 2008, it’s good to see sunlight on his purported evil deeds with college-aged young men. If I didn’t know any better, I’d suggest it’s another example of college elite leadership protecting a known deviant amongst them.
Doesn’t look good for a revered football coach. No fan of UM but the history of Schembecler vs Woody Hayes is remarkable.
I am a 1979 graduate of the University of Michigan. During the fall of my senior year, in November or December of 1978, I consulted with Dr. Robert Anderson. I had a knee injury, and he was the sports medicine doctor at Health Service.
Fortunately, he didn’t mess with me in any way. And I thought that his diagnosis and prescription were right on point.
During the semester break, I was at home in Pennsylvania with my parents. Since all three of us were Michigan alums, we had to watch the Rose Bowl, Michigan vs. USC in Pasadena. Game day was January 1, 1979.
During the game, I saw something that has stayed with me to this day. After one play, the TV cameras went to Anderson on the sidelines. He was flat on his back, knocked out cold. I seem to recall that the refs called time.
While I was a high school student, I was a photographer for the school paper and yearbook. I covered football games, and I noticed that everyone gave the team doctor plenty of space. He was a highly respected man in that town — still is, in fact. No one would have dreamed of running into him.
So, I can’t help wondering if Anderson was targeted on a late hit away from the ball. Might be something worth looking into.
That’s exactly my point. For some we will all be spectators watching shadows. It’s not a matter of choice. Even if I were competent in virology. genetics, epidemiology, and immunology, which I absolutely am not )and I doubt you are) , unless I had access to the relevant information I’d be in a poor place to come to any conclusions. So I will remain agnostic.
Meanwhile, there’s a loud, ignorant debate going on between ideologues, and for what little it’s worth, for now I will take the natural-origins position in that debate in the shadows.
With respect to the article on the lower-income individuals not being able to stay at home, I’m not sure you needed a study to prove that–some of us (including myself) knew that from Day 1.
However, pointing that out at the time was not politically correct–to some degree it still isn’t–and has often resulted in accusations of wanting to kill grandma or otherwise being a horrible person.
The working class has been written out of the narrative.
To represent their interests as you did, even in conversation, is micro aggression because it points out to the “liberal” twit you’re likely talking to that they’ve written the working class out of the narrative in favor of their own interests which pangs their guilty conscience making you an agressor.
This “snowflake” sensibility of “microaggressions” almost requires the shamelessness of Trump as a response because it can and will take offense at anything from pronouns on out as transgressions requiring new institutional structures. For working class stiffs who don’t have the time for this infinitely recursive naval gazing, the two heuristic responses on offer are stoic restraint, moving on ASAP from the discussion, or Trumpian shamelessness, the latter being more fun and emotionally satisfying.
I tend to find neuroscience articles like this one a little weird. First, there’s the bit of strawmanning, mentioned in the article, that goes on: so neuroscientists had assumed that these “representations” were “stable” (at least in the mouse piriform cortex) and didn’t “drift” and now it appears that they do. That’s an interesting finding—and it certainly would be good to find out why that drift is occurring—but it’s not like the assumption was based on much of anything—it was just that, an assumption.
But the truly odd part for me is trains of thought like this:
The “brain” doesn’t have to “make sense of what might have triggered that activity”—it’s not like it’s some sort of external observer—“the bunch of active neurons” is what the organism, the mouse, experiences as a smell when it’s exposed to a certain stimulus. The mouse knows what it is smelling or seeing, to the extent that it does, because, well, that’s the way its nose and brain work—for all we know, it might know that because its “neural responses to smells…are continuously changing.” The brain doesn’t have to sit there and figure out what the nose is smelling—the action of the neurons firing, stable or drifting, is what the mouse experiences as smell.
Nothing new there. The brain is not a computer. Whocoodanode…
It’s actually worse than that. They’re basically adopting Aristotle’s 2400-year-old “copy theory” of perception, updating it with modern-day terminology (“representations”). They then turn the brain into sort of an external observer which has to figure out what these “representations” mean—especially problematic if they won’t stay put, apparently—rather than viewing the neuron activity as the perceptual behavior (smelling) brought about by the stimulus (the odor molecules) at the neuron level.
“China is vaccinating a staggering 20 million people a day”
Maybe we should put China in charge of vaccinating the world. They are doing 20 million people a day? Over three-quarters of the countries in the world have less than 20 million people living in them-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_(United_Nations)
Militarys and energy… oh Puh Leeze… one of the best and brightest, Amory Lovins, “Soft Energy Paths” , was trying to right the ship in the 70’s. He was shanghaied and lured away from general service to humanity by the US Military in the 80’s. 40 years ago. To solve their impending energy disaster.
The irony, of course, is the energy used by the military to secure OUR globally sourced energy, oil, and resources.
S L I C C
representational drift. The Brain Isn’t Supposed to Change This Much (the article’s URL).
Well, maybe. The article mentions this midway: ‘The hippocampus is also involved in learning and short-term memory. You’d expect it to overwrite itself, and thus to continuously drift. “Up until now, observations of representational drift were confined to brain regions where we could tolerate it,” Schoonover said. The piriform cortex is different. It’s a sensory hub—a region that allows the brain to make sense of the stimuli around it. It ought to be stable: How else would smells ever be familiar?’
If I recall correctly, the hippocampus is involved in mediating right-brain and left-brain interactions. For those who are strong proponents of right-brain / left-brain differences and interactions, there is the idea that the sides of the brain supplement and correct each other. That’s one resolution that is “tolerable.”
So it may be that “representation drift” is handled by right-brain/left-brain interaction and balancing. It is well known that the brain has plenty of redundancies.
Or another “tolerable” resolution: By consciousness.
People keep asking what the cause of consciousness is and what its purpose is. If the brain is reacting to, as well as processing information so speedily and efficiently, there likely is something that is the “umpire,” for lack of a better word. That would be consciousness.
I am not sure why scientists are so taken aback by the extent of change, the constancy of change. Herakleitos remarked on this phenomenon years ago, as did the Buddha. It’s a central idea in Epicurean philosophy and in Lucretius’ poem On the Nature of the Universe.
RE: Neuroscientists Have Discovered a Phenomenon That They Can’t Explain The Atlantic.
“Neuroscience’s own representations of the brain still have plenty of room to drift….”
And still kind of caught up in that binary thinking ala computer.
As if, like stuck to performing one event at a time, animals or people are only sensing one thing at a time.
Why would a mouse or any animal ever be smelling only one thing at a time? Seeing only one thing at a time?
It doesn’t matter what one is “looking at”…I look at one empty water bottle in my room and there is a guitar and books behind it. I look at another empty water bottle and there is a cap and a box near it.
Animals, with their advanced sense of smell, is probably smelling everything the researchers are doing around them as they are given items to smell.
Then the time that passes brings other experiences to our interpretation of the world around us.
Teen Vogue–dept of false analogy?
McCarthy falsely accused the USG of being corrupt. Trump correctly accused “the swamp” of being corrupt. Of course one can certainly accuse Trump of being a demagogue but it would be a different sort of demagogue than McCarthy. Indeed it seems to have been his opponents who are more prone to glib accusations without evidence.
It seems to me the current McCarthyism is coming from the ID politics trunk of the Democratic Party.
The disruptions of livelihoods and blackballing are being done by the CIA “liberals”.
Language has become so twisted now it’s almost impossible to actually name things.
“Language has become so twisted now it’s almost impossible to actually name things.”
Confucius has something to say about names. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names#:~:text=In%20Confucianism%2C%20the%20Rectification%20of,what%20they%20ought%20to%20be%22.
“If you want justice on earth, start by insisting on exact definitions of words.”
i find it telling that Roy Cohn was McCarthy’s strategist and tactician. he was also a friend of Trump Sr., and became a surrogate father to Donald. McCarthy’s career was built on constant attacks, all based on lies. Donald learned well
Also legal adviser to Rupert Murdoch. Small world.
“Fermi’s Other Paradox”
Interesting question here. So if we had interstellar flight and discovered a planet whose people were living in the equivalent of the 19th century, what would we do? Establish first contact with them and share our technology. Try to exploit them like we would have in our 19th century? Waited until they had developed interstellar fight and contact them? Study them on the quiet? Using an example from “Star Trek Enterprise”, what if we saw that they were dying out but we had a cure? Do we go in and give it to them or let nature take its course? What if somebody had done that for the earlier Neanderthals? Moral questions galore here-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8k5HbspfrA (4:53 mins)
Hello Rev, good qustions. I look at it this way. If the others (alien beings) have enough wherewithal to even get here, they would theoretically have enough wisdom/knowledge to simply “observe”. In addition, if they either lived quite long term or had very deep memory capacity, they again would simply observe. We likely wouldn’t be the first place they visited so they perhaps would have much patience and ability to see long term phases and consequences (of not simply obseriving). We, on the other hand, won’t make it that far. We have no patience, no long term memory and certainly not long lives.
How many times have we said “I’ll never drink 4 pints again” and then a few months later you wake up with a hangover, again? We are the type of beings that will cut down a tree to see how old it is. No patience, no long memories, and just a bit too much greed (but that’s another discussion).
Extraterrestrial misdirection.
It’s people who have repeatedly and often “accidentally” stumbled on technology that cannot be released into the world such as it is.
A Classified Career – Dr. Paul Czysz
I hope that it is not a matter of everybody keeping radio silence-
https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Radio_Silence
There are no extraterrestrials at work here.
It’s just people.
People who have achieved and who have elected to maintain compartmentalization on knowledge and technology that would inevitably lead the rest of you humans to an abrupt Great Filter.
If it hadn’t been for Mars Air going bankrupt in the 60’s, negating my return trip, i’d be back on the red planet, content.
We look just like you, and there’s lots of us that got shut out in such a fashion. I’ve heard from friends back home that have related you wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to keep out of eyesight with those damned rovers, especially now the Chinese are at it as well.
I’m with Sagan. For the most part, a 19th century world would be an anthill on the other side of a mountain to a space faring society. The planets themselves wouldn’t be particularly interesting. It would be like 20th century Indian Reservations after the US took all the good stuff or the “primitives” in Brave New World. They would be irrelevant to a large extent.
The villain in the video game series Halo are religious nuts intent on conversion because the game designers wanted an alien menace that would be interested in bothering Earth and still be defeated.
NURIA: Picard, why should a people so advanced want to learn about us?
PICARD: We were once as you are now. To study you is to understand ourselves. -Star Trek: The Next Generation.
This makes some sense.
Waited until they had developed interstellar fight and contact them?
I think this would be more a case of dealing with the equivalent of galactic zoning laws and the more primitive civilizations ability to interfere. There is no “private property” in space by international treaty, but at some point, the situation will have to be addressed. Unlike European colonizers, the planets don’t have prizes and the locals wouldn’t make suitable labor for their needs. Where is our local zoning office? I hope someone goes there before a planned highway goes through our system.
what if we saw that they were dying out but we had a cure?
Ugh, that was a dumb episode. Your description doesn’t do it justice. It was bad.
The Red Scare: How Joseph McCarthy’s Anti-Communist Hysteria Left a Mark on the U.S. Teen Vogue
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
My father spent his teenage years getting to know fascism up close, and then communism for a spell before immigrating to the USA in 1952 to have a passel of anchor babies, and told me how terrified he was of McCarthyism, and Nixon in particular because he used the same tactics as the aforementioned tag teams in the old country, heavy on innuendo & slander.
I was barely a blip during McCarthy’s heyday but one can hardly overstate the huge impact that era had on the left and their response to authority in the sixties when it was (mostly) over. One could even argue that Vietnam–the biggest tragedy of that time–came about because JFK and LBJ feared being called “soft on Communism.”
Therefore it’s very distressing that our current ruling class wants to go back to the witchhunting. And btw this is yet another diff between McCarthy and Trump. The WASPy fifties elite was all for Red baiting. Whereas our current cultural elite almost universally against Trump
“One could even argue that Vietnam–the biggest tragedy of that time–came about because JFK and LBJ feared being called “soft on Communism.”
exactly!
David Halberstam’s book “the best and the brightest” has as its thesis that the foreign policy establishment immediately after the world war was very much “no land war in asia,” that france’s civil war in vietnam was in conflict with our anti-colonialism.
McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts drove all these far east experts out of both the state department and the newly-named department of defense. anti-communism became the only-acceptable default foreign policy. Kennedy’s freshman speech in the senate was about the communist threat to vietnam, calling for the Eisenhower administration to support france. McCarthy-ism thus led directly to the vietnam war
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03681-2
“Immunogenicity of Ad26.COV2.S vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 variants in humans”
“On Having Elitism”
Elitism is a condition one first acquires and then one has-a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “upper class” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Elitism renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target lower class peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and political-econimical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Elitisms’s infiltrated appetites-to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of wealth redistribution. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure — the guillotine notwithstanding.
>>>
One wonder if Dr. Moss wasn’t being cheeky, but in this day and age, who can tell.
>Whiteness
Call the monster by its name: Bourgeoisie.
Lambert, just in case you’re still looking at candidates for Bird Song of the Day:
https://twitter.com/disappoptimism/status/1398276776267239428
Pentagon announces new classified programs to counter China…
We cannot tell you what we will do, Send $1 Billion at once! /s
I would think that Tariffs and repatriation of Jobs would be the best strategy. It is hard to understand how the Pentagon is going to displace the flood of Chinese made consumer goods.
Is this another “Be ssen to be doing something, ineffectively” program?
On “whiteness.” I seem from my perspective people getting angry and fed up because “whiteness” protects people from being accountable for the way they treat others. Whiteness can bait and complain, and retaliate with impunity if their target responds. A lot of “targets” are so fed up they don’t see that they are being baited, and don’t care. They just see the disrespect and have had enough of it. Whiteness can see everyone else as “the help” and be backed up by law for disrespecting it. The customer (“whiteness”) is always right. So yeah, white privilege is a thing in a lot of circumstances still, long after The Civil War.
Agree. You don’t have to buy into any of this woke nonsense to recognize that white folks get a break from the cops in a way that black folks do not. Sorry Lambert, I think folks is an OK word, it’s equitable in my opinion.
And who gets the nod at job interviews, and college applications, or at the public schools which shape all of us so indelibly over our first two decades? For whites to ignore that has long been an issue with me, a white male.
As an avid NC lurker, of course I agree that class is a huge driver of all of this, the main one, and that working class people have to stand together. But there is no question that race still divides us. My plea to NC readers is to not overlook that. The nonsense over Critical Race Theory is a distraction. But the underlying cause is real.
Is the Blue-on-Black violence problem a Police Oppression problem? Or a White Privilege problem because Blue-on-White violence affects a lower percent of the White population than Blue-on-Black violence affects of the Black population? If you want to solve the White Privilege problem when it comes to policing, we can raise the level of Blue-on-White violence to the same percent of the White population as what Blue-on-Black violence now is. Just have police kill enough Whites to make the percentages equal out. No more White Privilege!
So, is it a White Privilege problem?
From above we have a few reports of decisions not to vaccinate. I am still going to and fro on it. I will not become one of the vast guinea pigs for Moderna or Pfizer. I am reluctant but not adamant about the J&J vaccine. I have periodically sought out appointments here in NYC. Short of walking into Javits Center being able to schedule a J&J shot with my schedule and allowing for an ability to be unavailable for a few days was impossible. There are now even fewer possible locations for a J&J dose. If I wanted one of the mRNA doses I could pretty much walk into any nearby pharmacy doing vaccinations and walk out with a card half an hour later.
There was a news report of thousands of doses of J&J vaccine expiring at the end of the month in the last few days. This was when only a couple of weeks ago they were reporting that the manufacturer was unable to produce enough and was millions(?) behind causing shortages. I find that, well incompatible.
They actively suppress information regarding and use of inexpensive but effective treatments.
It isn’t just that they are determined to go with a “treatment” program that enriches big Pharma, they have determined which pharmaceutical companies will be raking in monies presumably endlessly.
Meanwhile I await the day that no one pays for Covid tests or for vaccine boosters. We know they are coming. (If not getting the booster means multiple tests at $65 a test…)
The future is so bright for the owners and management of the winning companies I imagine they are looking into yachts and space shots.
Whoever in the links said they could not afford a bad outcome from the vaccine, I am just like them, with conditions that have been said to cause problems. I am in a position to wait, and continue to wear a mask and not travel. No one has my back, and I am sure I am not alone.
I did get the J&J vaccine a week or so ago, reluctantly, but they basically came to me – mobile clinic at a diner 5 minutes from my house with no wait. I also work in an industry that requires a lot of travel. My employer has not required vaccinations although they encourage it, but the countries we travel to may.
That’s it though – I will not be getting a booster if or more likely when those supposedly become necessary. If I get sick, I’ll take my chances with the “horse meds” which are already known to have no long term effects in humans.
Active suppression? You hit that nail right on the head.
Here’s a link to one of those suppressed treatments:
https://covid19criticalcare.com
In what world are any of the vaccines a greater threat than the virus itself? And it’s not just hundreds of thousands of deaths, many of those wh survive have long term health problems.
“Public gathering is not a right in The Constitution”
Rep Jared Huffman
Hmmmm…..Freedom of Assembly? You know, that First Amendment thing?
He tried to shut down public debate at a meeting where one first had to show proof of vaccination to enter the building, then backtracked and said “the honor system.”
He had to face an angry crowd of citizens and did a fair job of trying to save face. One of his main campaign contributors, genetic engineering BioMarin, prominently besmirched on the signs.
Watch the video of the narrative collapsing.
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Anti-vaccine-Bay-Area-Jared-Huffman-town-hall-vaxx-16236646.php
After saying the EPA under her tenure had no responsibility in Flint MI, in 2017, McCarthy joined Pegasus Capital Advisors, a private equity firm, where she serves as an operating advisor focused on sustainability and wellness investments.
How did all of Biden’s “advisers” get their jobs?
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/12/david-dayen-american-prospect-joe-biden-cabinet
Incompetent people fail upward in Washington. They received a lot of practice in the Clinton and Obama administrations.
For a comprehensive treatment of Fermi’s Paradox, I highly recommend Isaac Arthur’s youtubes on the subject, eg. Fermi Paradox Great Filters: Rare Earth.
The FLICC piece is so fantastic, thank you so much for linking it!! It’s not just hard sciences, of course: the humanities has grown really self-indulgent and logically lazy, too.
On the list of specious techniques, I’d add for the humanities *obscuring meaning and transparency of argument and evidence with obscure and impenetrable jargon*.
Not in academic writing so much, but literally in public discourse! The worst possible way to do outreach.
I have noticed in many cases that if one is able to understand the words, the sentences still won’t make sense, or the terms are masking logical fallacies or non sequiturs.
representational drift ? I think the authors would do well to read up on private language and Wittgenstein before they thouroughly tie themselves up in even bigger knots
Taibbi on Rising talking about free speech, journalism, and the political elites in both parties. ~12 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF1JoQIxwF0
As I suspected, the author of that ” On Having Whiteness” article was a severely pale male of AngloSaxoNordiCeltic extraction of some kind.
I wonder how long this pus can keep oozing from the Orifices of Higher Learning before a whole lotta buncha Steerage Americans rebel, one way or another. ” We? White Man? I’m not White. I’m Polish”.
Its just a matter of time.
Remember that college administrators have come to think of themselves as representing their institutions — certainly not the professors!
So, this administrator is telling everybody else what is (and is not) ok to say.
How long, I wonder, before the phrase “self-hating white” gains currency?