How dogs tracked their humans across the ancient world Science
And Now, a Sinkhole Full of Rats New York Magazine. Very on-brand for 2020.
Too few companies disclose financial hit from climate change, regulator says Reuters
Big Tech shows its resilience to pandemic and politics FT
M.T.A. Slashes in Service Could Erase 450,000 Jobs NYT
Zeta leaves over 2.1 million customers without power and at least 6 dead after battering Gulf Coast CNN
Authorities Urge Orange County Residents To Stop Building Additions Onto Homes Currently On Fire The Onion
#COVID19
A room, a bar and a classroom: how the coronavirus is spread through the air El Pais (DJ). See also COVID-19 Airborne Transmission Tool Available Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. The tool was developed by José Luis Jiménez (linked to at NC here, here, and here).
Public health antibody screening indicates a six-fold higher SARS-CoV-2 exposure rate than reported cases in children Cell. Bavaria. From the Highlights: “SARS-CoV-2 dual antibody strategy yielded 100% specificity and >95% sensitivity. Childhood surveillance finds 6-fold higher antibody prevalence than reported cases. Half of the antibody positive children were asymptomatic.”
COVID-19 Outbreak at an Overnight Summer School Retreat ― Wisconsin, July–August 2020 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. It looks to me like the Summer School actually did make an effort at social distancing, though obviously not enough. “Classes were held in outdoor pavilions with approximately 20 students per class seated <6 feet (<2 m) apart at tables. Teachers wore masks during class and were socially distanced from students at all times.” This sentence caught my eye: “All illnesses were mild to moderate, and no hospitalizations or deaths occurred.” This makes me think that there really may be a dose-response relationship.
Effectiveness of Face Masks in Preventing Airborne Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 American Society for Microbiology. This paragraph caught my eye: “It has been reported that the stability of the virus in the air changes depending on the droplet/aerosol components, such as inorganics, proteins, and surfactants, suggesting that the permeation efficiency of masks is also affected by the components of viral droplets/aerosols…. Further detailed analysis will be required to reveal the precise relationship between the protective efficiency of masks and the components of viral droplets/aerosols.”
COVID-19 transmission—up in the air The Lancet
* * * COVID-19 outpatients – early risk-stratified treatment with zinc plus low dose hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin: a retrospective case series study (pre-proof) International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents (an Elsevier, peer-reviewed journal). n=141. From the Conclusion: “Risk stratification-based treatment of COVID-19 outpatients as early as possible after symptom onset with the used triple therapy, including the combination of zinc with low dose hydroxychloroquine, was associated with significantly fewer hospitalizations.” The author, Zelenko’s, “Protocol” in layperson’s terms. Zinc stans rejoice! Zelenko’s political views.
Chart of Latin American Covid treatments:
An excellent summary of Latin American #COVID19 treatment guidelines by @cla_cor despite lack of evidence many countries recommending drugs like HCQ, LPVr, Azithro, Ivermectin, etc. #ChasingTheSun @IDWeek2020 pic.twitter.com/vTexvpN962
— Carlos del Rio (@CarlosdelRio7) October 22, 2020
BLACK: no evidence; GREEN: Recommended (strong); YELLOW: recommended (weak); RED: not recommended. LIGHT BLUE: not mentioned in each country guidelines. DIVIDED COLOR in a box (Peru): Infectious Disease society gives an opposite recommendation to official government guidelines.
The ‘very, very bad look’ of remdesivir, the first FDA-approved COVID-19 drug Science. Whoops.
* * * What Bats Can Teach Humans About Coronavirus Immunity JSTOR Daily
Robust neutralizing antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 infection persist for months Science. From the abstract: “Here we report that the vast majority of infected individuals with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 experience robust IgG antibody responses against the viral spike protein, based on a dataset of 30,082 individuals screened at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. We also show that titers are relatively stable for at least a period approximating 5 months and that anti-spike binding titers significantly correlate with neutralization of authentic SARS-CoV-2.”
The US could have 50 million vaccine doses before it’s ready to use them Quartz
* * * United to test all passengers for COVID-19 on select London flights ABC
COVID-19 Is Killing My People—And No One Seems to Care The Atlantic
‘You’re Out of Your Mind if You Think I’m Ever Going Back to School’ NYT
225,000 couples owe a collective $3.7 billion for weddings that didn’t happen in 2020 Yahoo Money
The next pandemic: where is it coming from and how do we stop it? FT
China?
China regional GDP data shows growing economic divide, exacerbated by coronavirus South China Morning Post
China’s Failing Small Banks Are Becoming a Big Problem Bloomberg
The Huawei war Evgeny Morozov, Le Monde Diplomatique
Cambodia launches blockchain-powered peer-to-peer payments, hopes it crushes cash The Register
India
Gold Sales in India’s Festival Quarter Seen Weakest Since 2008 Bloomberg
UK/EU
Labour party suspends Jeremy Corbyn over anti-Semitism report FT Corbyn’s response:
You don’t usually need an account to view public profiles tho but this is the screenshot! pic.twitter.com/9zK6UuBNeF
— ? (@beeJ_w) October 29, 2020
Jeremy Corbyn to fight suspension from Labour after EHRC antisemitism report comments – as it happened Guardian. Sanders take note.
The long winter – why Covid restrictions could last until April The Spectator
Tunisian carrying Quran fatally stabs 3 in French church AP
Inside the Secret Banking Heavyweight That Aims to Revive Italy Bloomberg
Brexit
Why are British people protesting U.S. farm imports? The Counter. You’ll eat it and like it.
New Cold War
Russian group offered Catalan separatist leaders 10,000 soldiers, judge says Politico
Russiagate
Russian in Cyprus Was Behind Key Parts of Discredited Dossier on Trump WSJ. And the deck: “A Wall Street Journal investigation points to the identity of ‘Source 3′ as a disgruntled PR executive with a ‘vast network’ of sources.” What a cesspit.
Trump Transition
Pence absent from Covid-19 planning calls for more than a month Politico
Democrats prefer ‘scalpel’ over ‘jackhammer’ to reform key U.S. internet law Reuters
Wilbur Ross Remained on Chinese Joint Venture Board While Running U.S.-China Trade War Foreign Policy
2020
Are Dead People Voting By Mail? Evidence From Washington State Administrative Records (PDF) Democracy & Polarization Lab, Stanford University
‘Dude, I’m Done’: When Politics Tears Families And Friendships Apart NPR
2 charged after explosives found in van amid unrest in Philadelphia over Black man’s death ABC
Our Famously Free Press
Glenn Greenwald Leaves The Intercept, Claiming He Was Censored NYT
The Extraordinary Pierre Omidyar Mark Ames and Yasha Levine, NSFWCorp. From 2013, still germane.’
“It’s A Head Fake”: Anonymous’s Big Reveal Calls New York Times’ Sourcing Into Question Vanity Fair. Indeed. It’s a sad day when the Times platforms anonymous officials, instead of anonymous intelligence officials.
Cities across the U.S. are defying FOIA laws, indefinitely delaying requests MuckRock
Intelligence Community
Top U.S. officials were briefed on an active threat against Pentagon leaders, say five officials NBC
Invisible 9/11s: Only the CIA Can See How US Is Attacked By Nations It Targets Caitlin Johnstone, Consortium News
Health Care
How Much Has The Number of Uninsured Risen Since 2016 — And At What Cost To Health And Life? Health Affairs
Class Warfare
These 6 skills cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence World Economic Forum. Worth a read. First, they came for the working class…
He Made a Minor Mistake Filling Out an Unemployment Form. Then the State Demanded $14,990 From Him. Pro Publica
The struggle between success and succession FT
Common Ownership and the Corporate Governance Channel for Employer Power in Labor Markets (PDF) Marshall Steinbaum, Antitrust Bulletin
The Remarkable Value of Thinking Broadly: A COVID-19 Trifecta (interview) Zeynep Tufekci, MedScape
The Epigenetic Secrets Behind Dopamine, Drug Addiction and Depression Quanta
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
194 comments
Comments are closed.
There’s a pair of articles at Resilience.org that highlight a pair of important current discussions, both of which have been well covered at NC.
The first focuses on the debate taking place around Degrowth:
The second article, “Make Life, Not Work,” is another look at a Job Guarantee vs. a UBI:
Long uphill fight on the second point, against the power of “You don’t work, you don’t eat.” Nice to think about, though. Imagining all those George Bush types with that artistic impulse to paint. And all the square miles of canvas and tera-gallons of paint and brushes to be worried into existence and distributed, and all the wall space needed to be constructed to display…
I do believe, in fact I have witnessed on several occasions, that there is a good portion of the population that would be just fine living a much simpler, very low impact way of life. The problem is that you quickly fall behind and drop off the “civil society” level of life and begin to suffer and die when you are not really hustling to “make a living”.
two good points you bring up and i get your direction, however
imo, which Work needs a little clarifying:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/work
With an exponentially expanding population and arithmetically shrinking resource base, growth cannot continue, at least without people being reduced to starvation and rags.
With an exponentially expanding debt and interest load and arithmetically shrinking wage base, interest payments will soon consume almost 100% of income.
Make life, not work. Make love, not money.
A possible slogan for a possible emerging greenlife betterculture?
>Glenn Greenwald Leaves The Intercept, Claiming He Was Censored – NYT
Before I circle back and follow some of the links in Yves Smith’s Post I thought I’d read the NYT article. What I found interesting is the use of the world “tantrum” and the picture at the top indicating that GG has a husband. The author, sub rosa, buttresses Ms Reed’s statement below, re-directing the cause of his leaving to a character attribution associated with his sexual orientation.
It’s sad to see some friends and family downplay this event, in effect supporting the security state and the subornation of the press, because of their limbic system and hate for Trump overriding their intellect.
Ms. Reed added that his post on his departure was “teeming with distortions and inaccuracies — all of them designed to make him appear a victim, rather than a grown person throwing a tantrum.”
“It is Glenn who has strayed from his original journalistic roots, not The Intercept.”
Reed is the one who sounds petulant here —
seems she’s been cast (or self-cast) as hatchet for the brand.
Without question GG gave them a black eye and I applaud his integrity.
Don’t worry. She’ll soon be out of a job. Without Greenwald who gives a flip about The Intercept?
Omidyar does care. With this event, ‘The Intercept’ is now ‘officially’ his own personal “Ministry of Propaganda.” Considering the public animus towards Silicon Valley oligarchs, Omidyar et. al. need all the “positive” public relations they can buy.
There’s still Lee Fang, but I expect he’ll leave soon as well.
Glenn is only the latest to be declared an ‘unperson’ by our liberal elite.
With regard to the other link on Greenwald, about Omidyar, is that nobody to me has ever explained exactly why he put so much money in to the Intercept, which for at least a while was a genuinely high quality source of journalism. He certainly convinced quite a few cynical, hard nosed journalists that he was genuine about wanting to support radical journalism. And he did put serious money into the project, this was not a little side hobby for him, not at a quarter of a billion dollars (or so its claimed).
I wonder if there was a vague idea about herding all the good journalists into one pen, where they could be controlled. If so, it doesn’t seem to have worked. And if that was the intention, why the creeping ‘mainstreaming’ of the outlet? It really doesn’t make much sense to me.
> And if that was the intention, why the creeping ‘mainstreaming’ of the outlet?
At least reading Greenwald’s Substack article, it seems like the censorship was both horizontal (many of the “journalists” there opposed any kind of anti-Biden reporting) in addition to vertical.
Re herding into a pen–there was plenty of such criticism when The Intercept started and perhaps Greenwald himself needs to answer to some of it. Many said he was doing a deal with the devil.
If, as I.F. Stone said, “the only way to ensure freedom of the press is to own your own,” then handing over the keys to an oligarch may have made the ultimate outcome inevitable.
But the key point is that he did resign and stand up for his principles despite an insecure life situation (armed guards patrolled, perhaps still patrol, his property in Brazil after death threats over his Bolosonaro coverage).
The best propaganda outlets serve up lots of truth. It’s how they get you to read their propaganda.
Omidyar is known for his links to secret services. It is a well worn intelligence path.
To close down dissenters who have credibility, first you will infiltrate their group (media, political, internet).
Then slowly, slowly you bring in new “supporters” (your own people) to foment acrimony, discord and disorganisation. Your undercover guys accuse dissenters of personal failings. Subvert the dissenter’s work. Turn the dissenter’s allies into disaffected and confused or angry bots.
At some stage the dissenter will be kicked out, or life will be so miserable they will quit. Then either the group falls apart of becomes another arm of the operation.
So the Guuardian. The Intercept. The UK Labour Party. Sanders?
And I fear the Cochrane Organisation has gone this way – big Pharma?
Hard to believe this article by Will Solomon is on counterpunch, but it’s illustrative of what has happened to these folks. This is all they have to say? Am I just overreacting? Are folks so jaded by journalistic malfeasance that it’s hard to get their ire up about anything?
Greenwald and others in his niche (like Matt Taibbi, who has taken a similar turn) might counter that they serve as reliable, and perhaps anti-partisan, media critics, in reaction to a hegemonic, neoliberal media elite. This may be partially true, but the justification appears increasingly irrelevant as they come to identify—admit it or not—with one side of the partisan divide. This is to say nothing of the fact that their insistence to the contrary ultimately lends cover to the far right, who are able to launder their media through the ‘contrarian’ niche…at this point, unless he alters course, he is a spent—and possibly dangerous—voice in US politics.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/30/what-happened-to-glenn-greenwald/
For anybody on Counterpunch, of all sites, to be following this line is an invitation to gallows humor. Few of the older sites were subject to more of exactly that line of attack than Counterpunch.
Yeah, what happened to them? I used to read them regularly and they’ve really gone downhill in recent years. I think the turn for the worse may have started after Cockburn’s death. Maybe time to change the name to Pullingpunches…
Honestly, it feels like EVERYWHERE is going downhill. About every site I can think of that was good leftist reporting even just a few short years ago has gone progressively downhill. I don’t quite know what’s going on. At least the rot hasn’t effected NakedCapitalism, one of the few places I’ve read for many years that hasn’t become more and more neoliberalized. Whatever is going on, there are becoming fewer and fewer safe havens.
Western culture and society in general has been going downhill for some years IMO…
Its area of concern is narrow, but I also like Stupidpol on reddit:
Their favourite academic is Adolph Reed, Jr., whom they quote:
Admittedly it’s mostly a stream of outrage and offensive behaviour (there is some sexism in particular). None of which bothers me – I think offense is a necessary part of a vibrant public sphere. And they’re not all socialists. Their alternative to censorship is to require people of other ideologies to self-identify, often with self-mocking labels. But every now and then there are in-depth discussions. I get the feeling there is a core group of thoughtful, informed people who mostly go there to vent, then sometimes geek out in their areas of expertise.
This looks like a lot of fun, thanks!
As John Adams said — at least in 1776 — “This is a revolution, dammit! We’re going to have to offend SOMEbody!“
Counterpunch under St. Clair has never been a friend to Greenwald who they consider one of those dreaded libertarians. I think that might be different were the more broadminded Cockburn still around.
Counterpunch’s fundraising drive seems especially desperate this time around.
No more than any of the other left wing sites.
Have you seen the latest shows on streaming tho?
St. Clair has made a specialty of dunking on anyone that he perceives as too willing to work with people that St. Clair doesn’t approve of.
Witness his frantic personal attacks on Caity Johnstone.
Which led to the departure of the great Diana Johnstone (according to her).
St. Clair was under no obligation to keep Counterpunch going after Cockburn died so I guess he figures it’s his baby now. But many of the earlier writers are now gone.
Its not just a little bizarre, its also quite incoherent. Greenwald has never hidden his hostility to a far right agenda, just as he has never hidden his belief that the way to change peoples mind is to engage and talk.
I understand that Greenwald is known as a somewhat difficult person to deal with and so there may be some personal animosity at work with erstwhile colleagues, but the only explanation I can come up with for such a half hearted attempt at a take-down (I note that he gives no concrete examples or links to his complaints) is that some on the left simply cannot accept anyone who rejects woke activism as anything but a right wing stooge, even someone who has been as outspoken on LGBT rights as Greenwald. Greenwald actually discusses this in some detail on Rogan’s show this week.
I actually saw him give a talk at the Kennedy School of govt way back when (before Snowden et al) and I can see why people don’t like him. he answered questions in a tone and a flow that brooked no reply. That manner sometimes actually obscured the substance and quality of his message.
Even though St. Clair is obviously not the social libertarian that Cockburn was, this dunking on Greenwald from members of the old left is nauseating. Whatever antipathies they might have developed for him – and I’m sure there were plenty given how often he would cite his colleagues’ ratings or number of followers – he has put his life at risk now multiple times because he believes that much in his work as a journalist.
Another thing I’ve noticed at work here is social media’s maximization of our reactionary tendencies. There is no benefit to defending someone after this kind of feeding frenzy has begun, which explains why there’s maybe 5 journalists on Twitter actually going to bat for him. The rest are just piling on and showing, yet again, that they don’t have the moral fortitude to actually do their job.
There’s at least one extremely valid line of criticism to be leveled at Greenwald: the way he essentially privatized the Snowden leaks, turning them into a trove he could periodically mine for articles. He turned them into a gravy train to make bank off of.
Only they were actually the private property of Omidyar, and access to them was completely shut off in 2019. Snowden leaked that information with the intent of the general public seeing all of it. Who knows how much of it has never, and now probably will never, be seen by the public.
Great job Glenn. You handed the keys to a massive leak of intelligence data to a guy with close ties to the intelligence state. Idiot.
If this were the case then why hasn’t Snowden complained. The both of them seem to have an amicable public relationship.
*Easy* to believe that dreck appeared on “Counterpunch,” the mouthpiece of the late Alexander Cockburn who, with Prof. Chomsky, were (and have always remained) by far the two most influential soi-disant “Leftist” apologists for the coup d’état of November 22, 1963.
Shocking.
A journalist either works for the Party, or he works for the Truth. He cannot serve two masters.
If Greenwald pursues the truth honestly (even partially, for every pursuit of truth is partial), if his work is well-reasoned and supported and accurate, does it matter what “side” he “identifies with”? (Notice Solomon’s reduction of the public realm to just two sides.) Does it matter if Greenwald is an arrogant jerk? (I’m not saying he is: I’m saying I don’t care if he is.)
In democratic societies, institutions are in tension so that each can critique and correct the others without being entirely absorbed by them. It is not the job of journalists to make politicians’ jobs easy: not even – especially not! – those of the “good” politicians.
As I understand it, the “total” in “totalitarian” refers to the complete integration of society, its institutions and its members. It forms a single organic whole of which every part is an organ. Everyone is on the same side, with no room for dissent.
No matter how noble the cause or the party, this creeping conformity, this infusion of politics into every moment of life, is the road to totalitarianism. If the tension between truth and action is dissolved, given enough time that is inevitably where we will end up.
I am continually shocked to see journalists, who possess a unique role in balancing democracy, demonstrate that they have no understanding of the special responsibility that makes them matter. They want to be one with the Party, just like everyone else.
Cancelled.
They are casting people out at such a fast rate that pretty soon there will be nobody left in the club.
The outcasts will form their own club and then the insiders will demand to get involved.
the Salon de Refuses!
with hindsight, did pretty well
Don’t you love how “gay-bashing” has now once more become respectable under Trump. But not by Trump himself but by his opponents? Even the Gray lady herself came out with a gay Trump-Putin cartoon only two years ago. So much for LGBTQ.
I remember when The Progressive put out a cover with Obama and McCain embracing. My mailman gave me a strange look for a few days. Seems like an eternity ago.
Perhaps Glenn is entitled to an apology at this point, but I’m not holding my breath.
The FBI has confirmed that Hunter Biden has been under investigation for money laundering since 2019. The case is ongoing according to the DOJ. According to Fox News, Hunter Biden’s laptop was subpoenaed by the FBI in connection with the money laundering investigation. I look forward to more farcical explanations by the media as to why there is nothing to report on here.
Republicans are setting up Hunter Biden to be an albatross around Joe’s neck if/as he assumes the presidency.
Problem with that strategy is that it will be pretty easy to retire Joe Biden for health reasons and put in Kamala.
That’s a good observation. The same would have been said about Clinton is she had won. The philosophy of we either win or we make it so that they can’t oppose us explains a lot.
I’m not so sure about the further installation of Ms. Harris though. I believed that if that were going to happen Joe was going to have an episode prior to the election. Now I think the old bird plans to hang on with the same death claws that Pelosi uses. This isn’t a team of rivals scenario. Biden and Harris do not like each other. The donors like Harris. She has no popular or political constituency. The voters and other people seem to have actually rallied around Joe. If he abdicated his elected position I think we’d see the civil war so many have been fretting about.
Great perspective, I can totally see what you mean about how Biden and Harris are rivals. That should be an interesting ride.
Biden is also going to have to populate his cabinet with his other rivals (ala “Team of Rivals” as Lincoln did), as any president has to do on entering office. Likely it will be a lot of neolibs/neocons from between the two parties. I expect Mittens will get a seat, although traitors are usually hated by everyone. He may put Bernie on there just to shut the left up, but summarily ignore him.
Bernie has been suggested as secretary of labor but I think that is a very long shot. He plays ball with Democrats but they don’t throw him any bones in gratitude from what I’ve seen… they hate him.
Kamela “Sejanus” Harris?
Every classics scholar knows who that was and what he represented. That covers about .08% of the voting population.
I suggest a more appropriate term understandble to most:
The KAMALEON
“A creature famous for its ability to change it’s color and blend in with the environment in which it travels and feeds.”
Oh, to see the fear and despair on her face:
https://youtu.be/_ZPXs15nQQs
I guess it depends on who you are whether you see that scenario as a problem or not.
I don’t believe for a minute that the establishment ever wanted Joe Biden as president. I do believe that there was a contingent that wanted Harris, because she is a good idpol neoliberal who checks all the right boxes, and she was the first to throw her hat in the ring for president. I’m sure she had some encouragement for that, as she’s already shown her willingness to give corporate criminals a get out of jail free card, and there are plenty of those on the Republican side.
The blob made the calculation that Joe Biden was the only Democrat candidate who could have beaten Bernie Sanders on one particular weekend during the primaries, and if Bernie won that weekend he’d be unstoppable, so the establishment forced the others out and went with Biden for that reason only, to buy them some time. Biden was the safety net if it turned out the dogs wouldn’t eat the dogfood represented by the other non-sanders candidates.
Biden is bad, but he does have a better sense of the political moment than Obama, so there is always a risk Biden will go off and do his own thing that isn’t there with O’Rourke.
Joe Biden doesn’t have a firm sense of what his handlers fed him for breakfast at this point.
FBI said yesterday that based on the hard drive they interviewed both Joe and Hunter. That kills the claim that the hard drive is a “smear”. The remaining contents will demonstrate that the family entered into investment partnerships directly with the top people in the CCP, including the CCP intelligence operations. Sorry Joe-bots, they have the bank wire transfer receipts. Obama appointed Joe to pressure China with the “pivot to Asia”, he announced numerous initiatives but then did not follow through on any of them. If “Joe” gains control of The White House the Repubs will have RussiaGate times 100 to throw at him, this time with actual sources and documents on the record. So in short order its President Kamala. My prediction is they will name
CIA operativeL’il Pete Buttigieg as VP.And still no sourcing. Why?
LOL check back in 6 months. Traitor Joe is toast.
Oh yes. The big reveal is ALWAYS somewhere out there in the future. Caught in a traffic pattern behind a Kenyan birth certificate.
But based on anything that can be produced NOW, you appear to be in the fabrication biz.
You would have noticed perhaps The Great Firewall (no, not of China) working vigorously to seal information off from the electorate. We don’t (yet) execute dissidents attempting to retrieve information the organs of the state do not wish them to have so many are working to do exactly that.
And as I said, lets rendezvous in 6 months and see.
The case will be ongoing until Biden is President and then it will be gone.
Minor quibble: It was a justice department official (anonymous, of course) who made the claim, not an FBI spox. It used to be the FBI never confirmed or denied an investigation if one was ongoing. I think that was true about the Justice Department, but, of course, that’s changed since Watergate.
I don’t wish to link to it, but it appears that Glen Greenwald’s censored article is published on ZeroHedge.
I’m hoping to track it down at the author’s “official” site: the article is as much an indictment of the MSM as it is of the Bidens.
It’s also linked to in the separate article on NC about Greenwald’s resignation.
Oops, didn’t see that.
Here is how Matt Taibbi concludes his piece on GG quitting.
To me this is the death knell of American journalism, if it wasn’t the MSM’s total lack of coverage on the Assange trial, and failure to come to his defense. I think this might be the final blow. By the way, GG did a good job explaining the circumstances on “The Rising” this morning and defending himself against critics.
A few years ago, reporters had the intelligence community on the defensive. Now, reporters are ratting each other out on their behalf, with the aim of creating an absolute political monoculture. Having pushed out one of journalism’s most accomplished members, they’ve nearly succeeded.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/glenn-greenwald-on-his-resignation
Another little triumph for the chorus of Mockingbirds. One little propaganda/censorship victory after another, to complete that long-game plan:
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” William Casey, CIA Director 1981-1987 https://newspunch.com/cia-disinfo-program-is-complete-they-actually-said-this/
Oh, tell the mopes that this is just another “conspiracy theory,” making sure they swallow the spin given to the phrase, which once had a very different meaning: https://ampoli.com/the-origins-of-the-term-conspiracy-theory/
TheMight Wurlitzer grinds out another in the almost infinite string of victories for the preservation and extension of the Narrative…
I note that Glenn Greenwald has provided numerous specific examples of how and why The Intercept wanted to bowdlerize his article. His examples and the article itself are both abundantly sourced.
The Intercept only provided allegations that are so vague and broad that it is impossible to respond to them.
Covid could present a situation where dead people voted by mail. I suspect it has happened. A person could mail in their vote, contract covid and die before Election Day.
This has happened before. Snowbirds, nursing home residents and so forth.
I didn’t think there was any checking off of dead people in the voting list. I wonder how they’d know.
> These 6 skills cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence World Economic Forum.
Total horsecrap. Hospitality as the highest calling? Airy fairy talk about
yeah.
open at random a book by stephen covey and, eyes closed, place your finger on a page.
repeat seven or eight times, and you end up with this missive from Davos man.
wife, as a teacher, must do “continuing education”….little classes, usually at the regional TEA place, that teach them about things like active shooters or how to integrate dyslexics or how a new datagathering interface must be massaged…
all of these involve powerpoints, and are loaded with Key Phrases(tm) and unecessary acronyms(UA) and much bafflegab.
i watch the zoom versions over her shoulder, and wonder: “if this is widespread behaviour, how does anything at all get done?”
this is, after all, the way everything from elementary schools to global corporations, to large governmental organisations talk to themselves.
surely this represents an opportunity,somehow
if this is widespread behaviour, how does anything at all get done?”
isn’t that the whole point?
Notice they put management in there. Twice actually, assemble teams of people to solve problems, and skill two was directing teams to develop an idea, I bet you could make a fake AI program that’s just a fancy interface and random numbers and have it perform those two tasks.
Creativity is the only one of the three that, imo, will outlast AI as currently constructed. There is a vastness between having and stealing an idea.
i’d like to meet the AI that can do what i do in a given day.
just went to the dump…immediately identified 12 2×4’s that shouldn’t be in the landfill, but should instead, frame in the windows on the turkey house, and several other** things.
oh, and look…a pile of deer bones on the side of the little road to the dump….looks like potential art, to me.
**(the rudimentary AI in the spellcheck decided that “opther”(big fingers/new keyboard) should likely be “pother”. not something i’d rely on to order milk)
Hate to nitpick, but “AI” vs “the AI”. I gently suggest that it would take many to replace the non-creative activities of your life. As for bone art, I suggest, less gently, that the “art” of AI is a very very long way from seeing art in a pile of bones, where art is defined as that, whatever form that is, which reveals another, previously hidden, truth found on the other side of the gauze. I think James Baldwin said that, but it would take too long to find and I’ve bread in the oven.
To the contrary, it’s basic physics. P=I^2*R. There is no power without resistance. Robots have no will to bend. Class isn’t about the service, it’s about the burden.
“How dogs tracked their humans across the ancient world”
There is one section that I am not so sure about. It says ‘But dogs show no such “gene flow” from wolves. Instead, the wolves gained new DNA from the dogs—a one-way street.’ A coupla years ago I saw a doco on the Inuits who had huskies as dogs obviously. The Inuit explained that when they saw their huskies start to lose the attributes that their wolf cousins had, they would release female huskies when they came on heat out into the wild where they would mate with wild wolves. Then when the Huskies returned, several months later they would give birth to a litter of huskies infused with wolf DNA, although they did not put it that way.
Re: ‘You’re Out of Your Mind if You Think I’m Ever Going Back to School’
This story is beyond sad. I want my kids to go back to lean social interaction. But if parents of minorities feel it is better to keep their kids out of school, because of social interaction…..
Kids cant learn social interaction outside of school?
Better social interaction I would say. Remembering my own school years and watching my 15 year old suffer from the same rules based nonsense and needless competition.
2 charged after explosives found in van amid unrest in Philadelphia over Black man’s death
The link needs to include the id parameter:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/charged-explosives-found-van-amid-unrest-philadelphia-black/story?id=73919058
In fact, the site’s url parser ignores the second story-title-lie path component as long as it’s not blank, this link works too:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/-/story?id=73919058
Re Glenn Greenwald – this looks like a cluster in multiple directions, including Glenn, and I’m a fan.
No relative of a government official should be doing what Hunter Biden did, taking $50k a month from a foreign corporation that had designs on access to his father. It’s entrenched corruption no matter the last name, Bush Biden Clinton Trump. Fixing this probably means some sort of permanent special prosecutor to scrutinize all business dealings of this sort.
So much of the original story raises questions, the tale of the laptop for starters, which Glenn didn’t appear to question in his piece I read. Instead, he went straight into examining the emails, none of which he had actual access to (the laptop and hard drives). Then there’s the intentional timing of the release – how long has the story has been held in reserve? I suspect the intent of the story was to “flood the zone with sh!t”. How are media outlets supposed to deal with that? By the time the smoke clears the damage has been done, that’s the purpose of “flooding the zone.”
I tried to comment on his Substack article, but only subscribers ($50) can comment. That has the same effect as censorship. That article, btw, is quite long and hard to follow, the story is so new it hasn’t been distilled. Great writing is brief, no longer than it needs to be, so Glenn’s diatribe comes off as a first draft that needs serious editing. Or is he also “flooding the zone?”
Clearly Giuliani has an axe to grind. Clearly Glenn values his journalistic integrity over everything else, but I am left with the sense that he has overlooked a few steps, starting with questioning the laptop’s authenticity, the motives of the main players and his own willingness to ignore the timing of it all. Which resulted in the loss of journalistic integrity for all involved.
I don’t have any idea of how to counter “flooding the zone” – unless it’s editors who insist on the basics of “who, what, when, where, why.”
What a mess.
An idea that’s discussed in comments and in links sometimes is to make the US election cycle more like other countries where campaigns are much more time limited and the resultant discussion and media coverage also become time limited. Say the US election cycle was 6 months long. No political ads on any medium prior to then, no political ads on any medium after then. Might that fix some of these issues? I think so. It would also limit the amount of spending on these campaigns and bring the costs in line with what people who haven’t sold their souls could reasonably raise.
Some would call that censorship. As a candidate without million$ for campaigning, shortening the cycle would be a good thing. No, a great thing!
So much of our election process is terrible, so much churning of money, so much hyperbole and fear mongering.
I used to work for Joni Mitchell. When asked what she thought about the music business, she would say, “Not enough muse, too much ick.” There is plenty of ick in politics, and my opinion is that the more people we get involved at the local level, the better. This is regardless of Party, but I may be naive despite being a Democratic nominee for Congress 2 times now.
My take is that we are in a massive transformation of our society, which may lead to its complete dissolution or a rebirth. I’m hoping for the rebirth but def keeping my eyes open.
Best…H
Hank4KY.com
“I’m hoping for the rebirth but def keeping my eyes open.”
you and me, both, man
and good luck with your campaign.
#3 on your Contract(https://hank4ky.com/Contract-For-Rural-And-Working-America.pdf) is near and dear to me.
Thx for link, Amfortas. Downloaded to study, Hank!
Thanks for taking the time to look at it. And please feel free to reach out, my info is at the end of the Contract. When I talk about support for small, family, co-op and subsistence farms, I say, “If your farm has a CEO we’re probably not talking about you.”
In the spirit of Thomas Frank, we’re trying to offer a viable alternative to the fake populism of the Republicans. And, since the Democratic Party hasn’t really been involved here for awhile, we are organizing to be the Party we need in Rural and Working America. I spoke in Danville on Wednesday; when I said, “We need a new Democratic Party in Rural America, one that sees us and pays attention to us”, lots of approval from the crowd.
Best…H
Hank4KY.com
The original, and great, Augustus Owsley Stanley represented your second district of Kentucky from 1903-15. Anti-prohibition, anti-U.S.Steel, anti-KKK. The even greater Augustus Owsley Stanley was his grandson. May their spirit inspire the voters! And the very best of luck to you.
Thank you, much appreciated.
Best…H
Hank4KY.com
Ah, Dancing Bear himself. Quite the molecular juggler.
It might also help if we can ban political ads althogethe.
You mean like the NY Times sitting on story for over a year? Would it have made a difference in the Kerry v. Bush election?
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-dec-20-na-media20-story.html
In general, one must ask what other stories have “expired” under editorial discretion and what, if anything, might have changed if the story had been published?
One might also ask why journalists weren’t asking the hard questions once the Impeachment drums started sounding. Heck, beyond Biden, they could’ve asked the hard questions during the Obama administration and the Ukraine coup.
Years and years go by. But yeah, timing is everything these days, isn’t it?
Since Glen is a reporter, one might expect he has been aware of this situation for a long time, perhaps as long as the FBI. Since he is an international reporter, he has likely received information from people with knowledge of the facts that have shared data with him. Since he is an independent reporter, he has taken the facts he has and reported them to the dismay of his editors, who felt it necessary to censor them. Since he is a real independent reporter, he is unlikely to share the names of his sources and appears to have information that has been prohibited by some one/thing that doesn’t want key parts of the story to be told, or data paths to be linked that show a connection that can’t be undone that will spell doom for those involved.
Since he is a real reporter, he has scooped thousands of others that any number of my have been aware of the story but constrained by their own personal problems with their government, the truth, the facts, their paycheck, their sponsor… (fill in the blanks)
Real Reporter is a term that only a few qualify for. If no one has noticed, please recall that all of the investigative reporters are independent now and have been for years. No news “scoops” come from main stream reporting now, because their editors get their marching orders to edit content or prohibit content that offends someone. The “Stenographer” effect has destroyed most reporting and it becomes obvious in the first paragraph when the story is framed in such a way as to avoid, defer, mislead, direct, confuse and otherwise distract a reader already confused by the meme ( I do hate this word as a noun) put forth in the MSM that will then defend that meme to the death of their reputation, with all the dishonesty of propaganda being delivered to them before they begin to write. How many reporters have a list in front of them before they write telling them what is and what isn’t going to get by the editor?
It isn’t reporting if it isn’t factual. It isn’t reporting if it is propaganda. Based upon what is left out of the summary of news, most people in most nations wouldn’t know if a story was factual.
When news is filtered, it loses its connection to reality. When a billionaire starts a news agency, ask yourself why. When the #1 reporter contradicts the billionaire, who would you believe?
I wonder why Glenn joined the billionaire’s news agency before asking about its purpose. Was he naiive?
I wondered at the time. Seems that he provisioned himself with an iron-clad contract. Smart and savvy, tat Greenwald.
I wonder how reporters can avoid working for billionaires or mega corporations today. NYTimes, WaPo, WSJ: all owned by billionaires. Then there’s the print media consolidation starting in the 1980’s closing or absorbing more and more independent papers.
https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/covering-america-journalism-professor-christopher-daly/
We know what consolidation in banking, leading to the tbtf condition, has done to banking.
We know what monopolies in tech have done to the interenet.
Not surprising that consolidation in print/online media has had the same bad effect.
note: The above linked 2013 article was written before Wapo, NYTimes, and WSJ were bought by billionaires in whole or part from the longtime family owners.
There was an excellent story (dont have the link but I’m sure its out there) about a CNN reporter who contacted a Morocco expert to assist with a story she was writing about “the kingdom falling apart”. The man replied “but its not falling apart in the slightest, they are more popular than ever with the people”. CNN gal said “well that’s the story Atlanta told me to write so that’s the one I’m writing, my contacts in the UAE are helping”. Next time you read a “news” story by the MSM.
Biden has never denied the laptop is his. Biden’s signature appears on the work order. Biden’s lawyer asked the repair shop to return the laptop. Biden has never said the emails are fake. The FBI seized the laptop as part of their investigation into Hunter Biden regarding possible money laundering. All these facts are easily found if you look for them.
As far as the motives and timing go, do they matter most? Or do the answers to two questions: are the emails true and is it in the public’s interest to know the ramifications. At this point I would say Yes to both.
Great journalism takes time, this story needs more work before we can be sure of any conclusions. I don’t have any conclusions yet, other than any sort of cozy business relationships between relatives of US officials and corporations are corruption. The facts you present have too many open interpretations, and that’s just one of the problems with reporting this kind of stuff right before an election.
“Biden has never denied the laptop is his.” So therefore, it’s his? Or that he hasn’t denied it?
“Biden’s signature appears on the work order.” Confirmed to be his? How can we know it isn’t a forgery?
“Biden’s lawyer asked the repair shop to return the laptop.” What is the purpose of this request? I can think of a few, such as forcing RG to show his hand or to look for evidence of tampering.
“Biden has never said the emails are fake.” Or that they aren’t.
“The FBI seized the laptop as part of their investigation into Hunter Biden regarding possible money laundering.” Seized? I thought the shop owner sent it to the FBI after making a copy of the drive which he sent to Rudy. And, if it were seized, there’s more than one reason to do so, not all of them leading to Hunter.
“All these facts are easily found if you look for them.” All of these facts are inconclusive, and missing from GG story.
“As far as the motives and timing go, do they matter most? Or do the answers to two questions: are the emails true and is it in the public’s interest to know the ramifications. At this point I would say Yes to both.”
There is no way yet to know how many or if any of the emails are true, and that is critical. Still think they should be made public as if they are? Ready to bet your life on any of this? Not me.
The whole thing may turn out to be just as Rudy presented it. Or it may turn out to be a “flood the zone” action. Who the hell knows? I like Joe Rogan, but he’s an opinionator, it’s his job to entertain with his opinions and personality.
“Healthy skepticism demands evidence.” It also demands that we be complete. I don’t think we’re there yet.
Best…H
Skepticism Is precisely why the press should demand the Bidens respond to questions about this. Joe is being accused of being corrupt by credible news organizations and he refuses to answer the most basic questions. Just tell us the emails are fake if they are.
I think he should pull a Trump. Something like:
“I don’t know. I mean, really, I don’t have any idea. People come up to me all the time, people who say they know me, have their picture taken with me. That doesn’t mean I know them. I may know them, or perhaps I met them at a party or business meeting or sat next to them on a plane somewhere, but there are literally millions of people like that. I have a good memory, a great memory, maybe the best ever, but nobody can remember all those people. Look, I even have people who come up to me and claim that I’m their father. Happens all the time. Sometimes I humor them, sometimes I let my lawyers talk to them. But, I’m a celebrity. It happens all the time. Are you a celebrity? I mean, an A-list guy? You know what I’m talking about. Hunter, you say? I know lots of guys that hunt. I’ve got a meeting. Jill, honey, can you finish up here?”
WobblyTelomeres
October 30, 2020 at 1:03 pm
+ 1000
With regard to “facts” and “timing:”
The laptop was dropped off, “repaired,” abandoned, and subpoenaed by / turned over to the fbi in 2019. In “fact,” the fbi was in possession of the laptop in December, 2019 while the house was “impeaching” the president over trying to get information on this very issue.
The first presidential primary was two months away.
The repair shop owner has said that, knowing what was on the hard drive, he expected the information to be used during the impeachment hearings. When no mention of it was made, he smelled a rat and went public.
Just as in 2016 with the Weiner laptop, the “timing” is the result of the fbi’s failed attempt to suppress information damaging to its preferred candidate and, as per usual, corporate media needs to recover the fumble by relentlessly manufacturing “questions” about its provenance, and depending on the public to “forget” that it has seen this movie before. Ad nauseam.
It’s the same con that’s been run so many times over the years, especially the last four, and fewer and fewer of the marks are falling for it. If you really are a candidate for public office, you’re not doing yourself any favors by running it yet again.
I read that Hunter didn’t pay the bill for the repair and therefore it was abandoned. How can the lawyer ask for it back? I see Daddy Biden’s hand in there somewhere. Hunter didn’t want to pay the repair bill but paid a money to a lawyer? I also suspect that the FBI is dragging their feet to help Biden because they don’t want to help the Orange Devil.
Just so the revulsion is complete. Joe got Hunter a senior spot in The World Food Program. There was emergency aid going to feed 2 million starving Zimbabwaeans and Hunter diverted some of the funds. In detail on the hard drive among the 48000 emails. Hunter also saved every doc as PDF. And Beau’s Foundation was all about “protecting children”. Im afraid there is not barf bucket in the world that is large enough.
Lessons and tricks that the Bidens learned from the Clintons!
“If” I am a candidate: Hank4Ky.com
I understand and appreciate skepticism.
Do me a favor and share some links that prove at least one of the things you are saying. More than one is better.
Also, I am here as my real name and identity. Please consider contacting me directly, you can find my info on the website. I’m not looking to win an argument on the interwebs, I’m looking to help build a community, and I’m looking to learn. Warning: I will be asking for your help.
Best…H
Hank4Ky.com
https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2020/10/yes-the-hunter-biden-emails-are-authentic-by-larry-c-johnson.html
Thanks for posting the link.
This is an opinion piece written by a blogger with a general slant to what he writes. He doesn’t offer any proof, it’s just a re-telling of a story he was told. It’s presented in a very supportive fashion, none of the details (like why go to New Mexico to contact the FBI) are questioned.
With the exception of personally vouching for the father of the repairman, the author was not present at any of the events described. No one is under oath, no one has been cross-examined. It may all be as it’s presented or there may be several concealed or fabricated details. The entire tale could be BS, there’s no way to know. Yet.
My first father-in-law told me, “If you hear I’m dead, come to the funeral, make sure it’s an open casket, and bring a hat pin.”
Best…H
Hank4KY
From my initial comment: “No relative of a government official should be doing what Hunter Biden did, taking $50k a month from a foreign corporation that had designs on access to his father. It’s entrenched corruption no matter the last name, Bush Biden Clinton Trump.”
Seizure is a term of art for a law enforcement officer taking a thing into their possession under some official authority. In particular, it’s no longer unclaimed property that they are obligated to return to Hunter.
I would suggest listening to his recent Rogan interview – he does discuss some of the issues you bring up that he doesn’t mention in some of his printed work from the last few days.
Great #Covid-19 coverage today!
I wish NC could make the Links subheads into hot links. For example, I have friends and siblings who are medical professionals but who are severely infected by TDS. They refuse to read NC out of fear their biases will be disconfirmed, but they could not stop themselves from reading NC if I could send them a daily link directly to NC’s “#Covid-19” coverage.
Simple. Just send them an email. In the body, copy in the title and immediately below it the link. Take you about several minutes to do. As each person gets that email, they can see what it is about by the title and only have to click on the link to go to that page. Here is an example-
“COVID-19 transmission—up in the air” The Lancet
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30514-2/fulltext
But that doesn’t give NC the visits. I like the idea of the Topic Links more
You’re quite right. Maybe send them each article title and a few sentences as a teaser with the URL for that day’s NC page so that they can go for it themselves. Might even become habit forming for them. :)
You can lead the horse to the water but….
It’s not easy to change people’s mind when it comes to politics or religion.
https://hotair.com/archives/allahpundit/2020/10/29/thats-trump-barr-dumped-u-s-attorney-charge-sdny/
Read this with a reminder that the gatekeeping goes both ways, though. It’s a story of a sitting president and his lackeys meddling in the prosecution of a foreign entity that was undermining his own foreign policy in order to curry favor with Turkey’s sleazebag ruler, for reasons that remain unclear. It’s real news. But most of righty media will suppress it or spin it as aggressively as big media is spinning and suppressing the Hunter Biden stuff, even though the Times has Trump’s former National Security Advisor on the record along with some two dozen other sources.
…
The SDNY has spent the last several years prosecuting Halkbank, a Turkish state-owned bank, for various crimes, including evading U.S. sanctions on Iran. That’s Trump’s own policy, of course, aimed at pressuring the Iranian regime financially to force them to make concessions on their nuclear program. According to the Times, not one but two of Trump’s attorneys general, Bill Barr and former acting AG Matt Whitaker, leaned on the U.S. Attorney in charge of the case to go easy on the Turks and drop parts of the prosecution. How come? Well, Erdogan appealed privately to Trump more than once to intervene, fearing that a harsh financial penalty imposed by the U.S. could wreck the bank or that the investigation could lead to his own inner circle.
=========================================
Turkey for Thanksgiving
Turkey has had strong representation is Washington for decades. I don’t know if you remember the case of Sibel Edmonds back in 2002 who found that the Turks had infiltrated the FBI and were manipulating the data flow. She was fired as a whistle-blower and it got so bad that the courts ruled that where she was born, when she was born, and the languages she is fluent in were all classified as state secrets.
Even more recent, do you remember that Michael Flynn who Trump made National Security Advisor in January 2016 and was sacked the next month and whose case is still going though the courts? He was registered as a foreign agent too in 2016 but not as an agent for Russia for which he was accused of but for Turkey. I have read that Turkey has a very good foreign intelligence service.
> Turkey has had strong representation is Washington for decades.
This. In the 2008 campaign Blessed (now Saint) Barry swore up and down that if he were elected he would be the US President who at long last acknowledged the Armenian genocide. Surprise, surprise: after 20.1.09 there was nary a peep.
The advance guard is here in force, we were forced at talon point to sign the deed over {news flash: Earthquake in Turkey} to our place when overwhelmed with 30 of them in generally a single file line, which fittingly is the number of pins one must knock down in 3 consecutive strikes in order to be so honored with the nom de plume.
I had endured peacocks previously, but they’re more onesy-twosy see me-dig me types with horror film music as vocal tracks, and luckily found somebody to buy the place which came with them, suckers.
Wild turkeys were different, a lot of mutual gobble and disrespect ‘HEY, i’m walkin’ here!’ kinda stuff, and at first I thought, was it me?, but nope, here’s a tale of woe from back east on wiki. If only I hadn’t been so subservient towards the flock to the point where i’m doing chores for them now. One of them caught me calling it Neo-Jurassic, and pecked me with it’s snood, and it still smarts.
It’ll be interesting to see what the turkeys do with the place?
lol.
spend some time with a herd of 30 geese, especially when they’re nesting.
if you’re wearing a light colored shirt(long sleeve is better) you can raise your arms as if they were wings, and they’ll back down.
prolly works with turkey’s too…although it’s been decades since i had any of those(building turkeyhouse, today)
as you indicate, show no fear.
I was ambushed by a flock of geese whilst picnicking at a local island park some years ago. Well, it wasn’t exactly an ambush, but we had run out of bready kinds of things to feed them and they did not *did not* appreciate my potato salad. Perhaps it was the radishes, they never said. We fled in terror to a park patrol guy who was fortuitously passing by. He turned to his partner and deadpanned, “Well, have they killed anybody this year?” Partner replied that he didn’t think so. Much embarrassed, we returned to our picnic spot. I fumed at being a person who wouldn’t say ‘boo’ to a goose. I tied the sleeves of my jacket around my waist like an apron and when the geese reappeared I flapped it at them (advice from a fairytale), saying “Boo and BOO!”. It worked as the fairytale had foretold, the geese waddled off, although swearing under their breath.
Moral of the story: to know if you are the sort of person who wouldn’t say ‘boo’ to a goose, you have to try it.
First, they came for the working class… Lambert
“They” being, in large part, what has been for centuries government-privileged private credit cartels, aka “the banks”, and the most so-called “credit worthy” of what has been, in essence, the PUBLIC’S credit but for private gain.
So much then for the success of labor cartels to fight government-privileged money cartels.
The proper, permanent solution has always been ethical finance of automation and also land reform to solve the related problem of rentiers.
I saw some conversation about lived experiences yesterday and thought I’d share this link with everyone
New Discourses
Its a pretty cool site, has many articles that go into the history and meaning of the various woke philosophies. Most are hyperlinked to each other like a wiki.
I dig Helen Pluckrose.
been mostly agreeing with her for a while over at Areo.
astonishment at how silly we are comes through deliciously in her wit.
“If one wants to confidently be or become not-racist, a clear understanding of racism is necessary. We believe this clear understanding has become almost impossible to attain in the present circumstance because there are so many conflicting and complicated definitions of “racism” competing with one another. Our solution to this is to combine them into a simpler definition of racism: the placement of social significance into racial categories for the purposes of negative prejudice or discrimination, especially when generating conditions for the belief in the superiority or inferiority of some races as compared with others. If one understands this definition of racism clearly, being confidently not-racist is a straightforward matter of consistently not doing that. People who wish to be or become not-racist, or who wish to increase their sense of confidence in their status as not-racist, can then undertake any variety of exercises to help them identify if they are doing that and then stop it. Those who are not doing this can be confident that they are not racist.”
(https://newdiscourses.com/2020/10/how-to-be-not-racist/)
she’s got a standing invitation to my campfire((now with a Bar!)
“If one wants to confidently be or become not-racist,…”
This is crux of the issue and is what needs to be addressed. Why is it that everyone is becoming more confident being racist? Fix that and everything else will follow.
FUD=Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt=> Precarity…and then left wondering what happened, and here’s this loudmouth on the radio with a simple explanation, and viola!= down the racialist hole we go.
prior to trumptimes, overt racism was on the way down…due to exposure to Others, as well as a long term sort of organic change in how people treated such ugliness….it had become impolite, even in rural texas, to behave that way, and overt racists were shunned and had backs turned upon them.
a large portion of the racialism we’re seeing today is engineered by ptb and their minions.
anything to keep us from discovering our commonalities.
Thanks for this! One little excerpt:
“Everything is problematic”
Very nice to hear this from a perspective that is clearly still anti-oppression and not reactionary.
I’ve been a fan of this site since it started, and I think I have recommended it in the past: if I haven’t, I should have done. The writers have stronger stomachs than I do, and put their intellectual Hazmat suits on to trek through this garbage and critique it in a much more patient and scholarly fashion than most of us would have the patience for.
As regards “lived experience”, the obvious point is that you are not living that experience now (or not only now, anyway), but it’s a type of memory. Not only are memories fallible, it turns out that they are constructed and modified after the event, and that people are entirely capable of remembering things that never even happened. A better word than “lived experience” would be “prejudice.”
It’s as though these people having been playing a game of telephone. It started in Germany, round about 1890. There was a debate among mathematicians and philosophers about new numbers which some of them had recently introduced. There were several attempts to resolve the issue by appeal theories of the nature of number. So, Dedekind wrote a book on what the numbers are and what they should be. And Husserl wrote a book too on the philosophy of arithmetic. Husserl, a mathematically inclined philosopher, took an empiricist approach to the problem, a la Hume. We ought, he thought, get clear on what we mean by ‘number,’ and that’s a matter of clarifying the idea of number. To do that, just describe the essential features of your own thinking when you perceive that there are some number of things, such as three books on your desk. Just “look and see” what your own thinking is like, describe it, and that’ll clarify as much as is possible the meaning of ‘number.’ In general, we are supposed to defer to such thinking when doing philosophy, dutifully describing the features we find it to have, as opposed to assuming that our thinking must have certain features because of something Kant said about it or engaging in experiments aimed at identifying causes of thinking. Husserl also conceived of this thinking as private and held that each of us could be absolutely certain about its features. So, he’s very much a follower of Descartes. Anyway, Husserl was fond of using the term ‘Erlebnis’ to talk about these thoughts, so conceived: private, original meanings, about which each of us can be certain. The standard, rough translation of ‘Erlebnis’ is ‘lived experience.’ The funny thing is that a lot of the Theory informing wokeness in the USA is itself derived from French sources, especially those 1970s French philosophers who became wildly successful in American English departments in the 1980s. Those French authorities, while often using bits of Husserl’s jargon, are opposed to all things Husserlian. So, retention of the term ‘lived experience’ makes very little sense. It is also worth noting that there are no such things as lived experiences as Husserl conceived of them, so that’s a problem too.
Yup. I sometimes wonder whether the infection of American English departments with so-called “French Theory” largely retailed by Americans who don’t understand French (or Theory) wasn’t a clever plot by the French to destroy academia in the US in retaliation for …oh, lots of things.
It feels, too often, like an international multi-generational Dadaist romp.
Whoops. Flashback. Sorry bout that.
Thank you for this, it looks quite interesting.
“Yet this lack of clarity at the heart of discussing “systemic racism” isn’t a bug – it’s a feature.“
Yeah, I like this site a lot.
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/10/theres-no-such-thing-as-systematic-racism/
“Rather than learning how to do mathematics, then, your children will be taught to ask questions like how mathematics is used to maintain racial oppression—for it must, according to Critical Race Theory“
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/10/schools-teaching-kids-social-justice/
This site is a goldmine!
Why the Record Turnout Vote may Not Matter
https://jackrasmus.com/
The above article seems to complement the war-gaming in yesterday’s Water Cooler, how Trump could win via the Electoral College, in the courts, and through a combination thereof.
I am unfamiliar with the author, but he raises some interesting possibilities, and reinforces my opinion that things will become very drawn out and messy as the polls begin to close Tuesday and the prospect of a non-contested election is soundly crushed.
City of Memphis approved first major indoor event. December 1st, University of Memphis will play first basketball game. 3,000 people will be allowed to attend at the FedEx Forum. Nothing but greed and stupidity.
In other news here, Amazon and FedEx are hiring almost every person with a pulse. Paying $15 to $18 an hour. Expect massive volume for Christmas. Food distributors like Sysco and US food have lost almost all their drivers. Can’t get supplies delivered. PFG running radio ads saying will pay $70,000 a year plus $10,000 signing bonus for CDL drivers. This is causing wage inflation across sectors here in town. All the big chain restaurants will switch to robots soon. Many of high schoolers not attending classes in person are working full-time jobs and up to 45% of online students are failing.
When I was there in April, there seemed to be some respect for social distancing and quarantine, but that seemed to quickly fade come May. June and July… …most seemed to be acting like all was normal (aside from loose mask requirements) and I could not believe the crowds at restaurants and shopping centers.
I hope you don’t take offense, between that and the traffic offenders, your region is infected with a particularly intense kind of stupid– glad I got out after four months.
No worries. You haven’t said anything I don’t know.
emptywheel take on GG leaving.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2020/10/30/glenn-greenwalds-self-hack-i-could-go-on-and-on/
Of course.
“Jeremy Corbyn suspended from Labour Party after anti-Semitism report”
This development is so disgusting this. They may have so many people walk away from the Labour Party over this that they could rename it the Omelas party.
Very depressing & made worse for me as due to me being away from home, I was able to watch Starmer who appears to have the charisma of a used bagette on Sky News justifying it, I imagine that they plan to woo the UK equivalent of the PMC & moderate Tories, so need to crush the socialist elements – sound familiar ?
I got confirmation the other day from an old female friend & long term Green party supporter & one time local counsellor that the above method of fishing now also applies to them , but with a much larger emphasis on the Woke part of it The last straw for her came about due to being referred to as a non-trans-woman, which being as she is a a pretty strident feminist is hardly surprising.
Have picked up on Social media many Labour members stating that they will cancel their memberships & I expect we will end up with yet another least worst option….good poodle, Austerity, same old shite basically – I hope Clive shares his wisdom in relation to all of this.
Nothing would please the right of the Labour Party, ensconced in parliament as many of them are, than the departure of lots of energetic young leftists. Enthusiasts for changing the world must disturb these sinecurists. They joined the Labour Party to further their career not to engage in politics!
I really believed that the campaign of lies about antisemitism had done its job. Labour lost the 2019 election and Corbyn and his circle were out of power. But it seems that they will not be satisfied till the Left is entirely purged from the party. Maybe they really intend to destroy the party?
No comment until after the NEC election vote is counted!
Denial And Lies Are ‘Almost An Intrinsic Part Of An Epidemic,’ Doctor Says Fresh Air (36 minutes)
Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound And Enduring Impact Of Coronavirus On The Way We Live. author Nicholas Christakis [medical doctor and sociologist] says we’re likely to be living with pandemic-related social restrictions into 2022 — even if an effective vaccine is developed.
Whose votes will be counted?
“Kavanaugh issued his screed against counting every ballot [Wisconsin] on Monday in an error-riddled opinion that baselessly cast doubt on the legitimacy of mail ballots. Alito took his turn on Wednesday, claiming that Pennsylvania’s election will be “conducted under a cloud” and preserving the option of junking late ballots after Election Day. But he was just warming up for Gorsuch, who issued another opinion on Wednesday attacking North Carolina’s election.” https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/10/north-carolina-pennsylvania-neil-gorsuch-supreme-court-ballots.html
“8th Circuit Panel Orders Segregation of Late Arriving Ballots in Minnesota, With Strong Hints Late Arriving Ballots Will Be Excluded from The Count” https://electionlawblog.org/?p=117784
Voter non-fraud:
From today’s link:
“Among roughly 4.5 million distinct voters in Washington state between 2011 and 2018, we estimate that there are 14 deceased individuals whose ballots might have been cast suspiciously long after their death, representing 0.0003% of voters. Even these few cases may reflect two individuals with the same name and birth date, or cler- ical errors, rather than fraud.” https://stanforddpl.org/papers/wu_et_al_2020_dead_voting/wu_et_al_2020_dead_voting.pdf
I have the impression that there is an homology between the Right’s views on elections and on capital punishment — just as (in this view — not defending it; just describing it) it is better to execute possibly innocent but wrongly convicted prisoners in order cast a wide enough net that no capital offender in custody goes unpunished, it is better to disqualify large numbers of valid ballots in order that no fraudulently cast ballot be counted.
Maybe that’s a story some rank-and-file people tell themselves, but the politicians and judges making these decisions and fomenting this “concern” know there’s nothing to back up their claims of fraud, and that they’re authoritarians interested in maintaining power.
They’re also allowed to be authoritarian because courts are despotic and the public seldom challenges them. The best example of challenge is protests and riots in the wake of the mistrials of so many people and cops who have killed innocent black people. Why trust a system that is rigged, better yet, why participate. Regardless of this election, I suspect the next four years will see an upheaval against the courts. A serious step in the erosion of the country.
Whose votes will be counted?
How about only those who are conscientious enough and respectful enough of their responsibility for the “integrity” of the process to get their votes in on time?
This goddamn “election” has been going on since 11/9/2016, the day after Donald Trump was–legitimately–elected. One of the precious few things both sides agree on is that there are very few “undecideds” this time around. What possible reason could there be for making such a huge judicial issue out of “votes” that come in after the deadline instead of hammering home the need to get your sacred “vote” in on time?
The “Transition Integrity Project’s” stated intention to exploit confusion over the vote count to attack the legitimacy of the election if biden does not prevail, is reason enough to demand a hard and fast deadline beyond which votes will be considered invalid, as far as I’m concerned. This whole thing smells like trying to give thousands of locked and loaded lawyers some mud to root around in.
Some of us “oldsters” remember Chicago, 1960, and the JFK / Nixon contest. While there is still some controversy over Mayor Daley’s holding back the vote count until he saw which way the wind was blowing, and then delivering a squeaker for JFK, the Kennedys reportedly thought delaying the vote count was key. According to the Baltimore Sun, 2016:
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1995-01-12-1995012117-story.html
But Katniss, if the postmark is good then the postmark is good.
Voters shouldn’t have to pay for the mess the Trumpkins have made of the Post Office. And a democracy (ha ha but stick with me here) is about reflecting the will of the people, not some stick-figure dance to some arbitrary rules. We have the military for people who somehow enjoy that.
The Parliamentary systems are so much better at this.
How about when those who have responsibility for design, execution, or judicial intervention in the process decide to change the rules – particularly at the last minute, particularly during a public health crisis, particularly when the postal service is being undermined – they do so in the direction of making sure everyone can vote and every vote counts?
Federal law gives the states up until 6 days before the meeting of the electors to count the votes. June 25, 1948, ch. 644, 62 Stat. 673. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/3/5
How about only those who are conscientious enough and respectful enough of their responsibility for the “integrity” of the process to get their votes in on time?
Gotta agree with a different chris above. Mailing on time (that’s the roolz) should be quite good enough. If anything, there should be a sizeable penalty for the Post Office for each instance of late delivery (ie, ‘voter fraud’!!!!), and those penalties should be delegated right up to the Post Master, *personally*.
Hard times when we should have to consider such measures, but blame where blame is due.
This is what gets me about the cries of “Voter Fraud”. It’s laughable that anyone would risk voting more than once to literally +1 the vote total for your team . The probability your individual voter fraud affecting the outcome is tiny. Mail in ballots can all be collated and crosstabbed against voter rolls and election day voting if anything they are more secure, moreover, the postoffice can track the ballot from it’s mail box so “stuffing the mail” is easy to sport too. The post office NSA meta data collection ensures this.
Now if you control the counting or the ballots – well now you’ve got a chance to properly put your fingers on the scale. I’m with Lambert, paper ballots, hand counted in public.
“Russian group offered Catalan separatist leaders 10,000 soldiers, judge says”
Gawd. I think that I lost a few IQ points just reading that article. And it’s not like I have a lot to spare in any case. A Russian group? Are they sure that it wasn’t a Nigerian Prince? As it was during the Mikhail Gorbachev era, it may have actually been the Russian mafia. Seriously! And how were they going to get 10,000 men into Spain exactly? Send four or five passengers ships full of Russian “tourists” to Barcelona? Maybe Spanish Customs would have found something amiss with so many tourists named Ivan? Would Spanish customs have also found artillery pieces, rifles, ammunition & flamethrowers among the supplies of towels, sun-block, swim-shorts and beach umbrellas? Would the beach-buggies have aroused suspicion with so many of them having turrets? Journalism is so sad these days (sigh!)
10,000 Russian soldiers.
Logistics, how does it work?
Thank you Rev, my diaphragm needed the exercise – first belly-laugh of the day!
Personally I think you have IQ points to spare.
During a summer soccer championships in France a few years ago, where both England and Russia were competing, some as usual drunken English hooligans started rampaging in the sun and smashing up bars and tables etc. They got into fights with Russians and got whupped. Of course, much of the British media immediately accused the Russians of being specially trained military personnel sent by Putin for that very purpose. Maybe they were a stay behind crew in the south of France, ready to skip over the border to Catalonia when VVP clicks his fingers.
Something similar happened when Russians and Ukrainians were vacationing in the same resorts in Turkey in 2014-15. Ukrainians tried to start fights, got beat up, but the impressive part is that the Turkish cops sent into quell the internecine fighting also got beat up.
Beating up a Turkish cop is no mean feat.
I just read that as “Spanish Croutons”; infectious spirit of your post. TGIF!
“United to test all passengers for COVID-19 on select London flights”
So all these passengers will actually be acting as free guinea pigs. And if they refuse to be tested, they cannot board that plane. And the test itself is not top of the line. And any sick passengers or those with temperatures will be screened out beforehand. And when it is all done, the airline industry will say ‘See? All safe now. So let’s start packing those airliners again!’ probably based on that one flight. The boss of QANTAS just came out today and demanded that all the States must open their borders to airlines because his pay packet and his company shares may suffer otherwise. He actually did not say the later but you know that that was what he was really worried about.
select London flights
I await with ‘bated breath to see which flights they ‘select’.
Don’t worry. Nobody ‘important’ will be on those flights. They’ll be warned off beforehand.
https://3riversnews.com/trus-to-resume-on-campus-learning-thursday-nov-5/
* 15 years ago there were over 150 students going to school K-8 here, and since then 300 single family homes have turned into AirBnB’s and the like, and it isn’t as if 8 year old Tiffany and 10 year old Brad, with their parents Bob & Betty Bitchin’ from Burbank are substitute students during their short sojourn around these parts.
In an argument about how great a threat Iraq was to US homeland, my mother responded to a group of defense reps at a cocktail party in Manassas, Va, “And just how is this army from Iraq expected to invade the US, on their magic carpets?”
Well, this doesn’t make much sense. Comment meant as reply to Rev Kev’s at 9:57 am
regarding 10,000 Russians….
The only really sit down restaurant/bar in town was a nice place nicknamed ‘A Liver Runs Through It’ and then got sold to somebody on the far right politically, and their mask policy was lifted from Eric Cartman… ‘I do what I WANT!’… as in no policy.
I don’t get out much, and there’s a large ‘blue line’ old glory draped on the front of the eatery, said flags seem to be a signifier of political bent, no?
A recent 1-star review of the River View:
https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/new-study-reveals-major-vitamin-d-defi-to-solve-problem-of-vitamin-d-deficiency
I found this for the COVID fanboi’s to kick around. This was of particular interest:
“ For adults and children, you should know that the vitamin D3 form is superior to D2, as the former raises and maintains serum 25(OH)D levels much more efficiently.”
Speaking of Vitamin D deficiency, ‘A new study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism finds that more than 80% of over 200 COVID-19 patients in a hospital in Spain had vitamin D deficiency, suggesting that vitamin D may play a role in immune system function as it pertains to the novel coronavirus.’
https://sputniknews.com/society/202010291080919930-over-80-of-covid-19-patients-at-spain-hospital-had-vitamin-d-deficiency—study/
Interesting, thanks. Can someone go bang on KP’s van?
Here in PA, there’s massive panic about mail in votes, since SCOTUS made noises about not ruling to accept late ballots. Democrats are going crazy about it.
All that stuff about “make your plan to vote” has now gone out the window and Democrats are calling people to tell them to change their plan to vote.
I consider myself to be a bright guy, but the entire mail in voting system in PA is gibberish to me. I stopped paying attention the moving target months ago: when and how you are to drop things off, what all the applications I’m getting in the mail amount to, what you can and can’t do on Election Day, and so on. It must be incredibly complicated to the average Pennsylvanian.
It’s insane that would should be a very simple process (paper ballots, hand-counted with witnesses), voting has now become so difficult and politically charged that courts are intervening. A real sign of a failed democracy.
Martin Gurri on fire at Discourse penning “The Missing Presidential Candidate” only thing he leaves out is Sanders. Gurri is right about everything else. And saw a mention of ad-busters here, remember them for fomenting occupy.
Thanks for the tip! I had not read Gurri or the Discourse before, but found myself in a fun rabbit hole reading their stuff.
This piece on thinking big and on a system wide level about democracy is good too:
https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2020/08/18/the-rise-and-fall-of-institutions/
Marshal McLuhan anyone, from Martin Gurri, “In a real sense, the digital environment represents the triumph of the image over the printed word. Because it provides the illusion of immediacy, the visual is viscerally persuasive: not surprisingly, the web-savvy public has learned to deploy images to powerful political effect. A photo of Mohamed Bouazizi burning alive sparked the protests in Tunisia that inaugurated the Arab Spring in 2011. As I write, we are flooded with images from dozens of U.S. cities in turmoil, a visual argument about the fragility of government control.” from September. author Revolt of the Public
“Cambodia launched a blockchain-powered peer-to-peer payment system and it’s hoped the scheme reduces use of cash and helps to control the novel coronavirus.”
They don’t have any microwaves in Cambodia in which to destroy virus on paper? There’s no sunlight? No bleach?
In light of the new data on fomite transmission being far less important than previously believed, it looks more like a 100% tax collection, 100% resident tracking, authoritarian control mechanism.
Just think what Pol Pot could have done with a phone data and spending control system. No need for torture death camps, just deny his millions of “enemies” the ability to earn or buy food.
So some interesting insights on Covid safety. I’m US based and have thought our citizens are abysmal in their response to protection (mask wearing particularly). Media seems to portray a message that Europe citizens are much better.
A good friend in Germany advised his wife and daughter are positive. Wife contracted it through a professional training class she held where folks were “socially distanced and proper hygiene but not masked as it was not necessary because of distancing”. Making assumption this is an indoor training.
The “blame” has been put on a woman who arrived for the training sick and refused to leave until forced to.
Now, why wouldn’t they have worn masks? I found this extremely stupid.
In that situation as with almost any place where humans come in contact with other humans, you would need to wear a bio-suit to avoid infection. Or keep your vitamin D and Zinc levels up and try to live healthy.
“I think it’s widely believed now that you can acquire it through the eye. …”
“We were really struck that ACE2 was clearly present in the surface cells of all of the specimens.” In addition, the researchers found that the eye’s surface cells also produce TMPRSS2, an enzyme that helps the virus enter the cell.”
“In addition, people [unconsciously] rub and touch their eyes a lot. So there’s certainly already the vulnerability.”
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200526/can-you-catch-covid19-through-your-eyes#:~:text=Conjunctivitis%2C%20commonly%20called%20pinkeye%2C%20could,gritty%20sensation%20in%20the%20eye.
Which then begs the question – was this training necessary? why not do it on a webex?
I don’t get it.
He Made a Minor Mistake Filling Out an Unemployment Form. Then the State Demanded $14,990 From Him.
He should pay it back. One dollar a month, with the cost of the the stamp deducted from the payment.
They look like a lovely couple that can eventually contribute to this country, when It is over, and I wish them the best of luck.
Yup. Naomi Klein joined the dark side a while ago. In April she backed calls to censor the Planet of the Humans film. The last few years have really revealed how many journalists on the left are careerist strivers who will gladly sacrifice their principles in exchange for a status boost.
I share your assessment of Naomi Klein. Watching “Planet of the Humans” was a real eye-opener. The criticisms it received and the sources of those criticisms eliminated any doubts I had about my snap judgments of the ‘stars’ of “Planet of the Humans” after watching them captured in that documentary in situ. Between Bernie’s vote for the CARES Act and my impressions from watching “Planet of the Humans” I am left feeling very bleak … and angry.
See, Russians are bad. Very Very Bad. Sort of like the way Jews were, not so long ago. They can never be trusted. Because “disinformation”.
Unless those Russians say something that we want to hear. *Those* Russians can be trusted entirely.
The epigenetics article was fascinating, thanks. Some of it was beyond my paygrade but bits of the tech came back to me given that I watched presentations by “big epi people” like George Davey-Smith in the early days back around 2001ish. The study presents some important expanations for the mechanism of action of “modern” anti-depressants which hitherto were not understood and indeed led to unexplained suicides.
You see on patient experience boards how SSRIs/SNRIs in the first week can “boost energy” but don’t actually act on the depression. I’ve seen clued up lay people hypothesise that it is this “ability to ACT on feelings” – when the feelings themselves haven’t been addressed – that led to some suicides. This new-found “ability to end it” is dangerous. However, the month or so delay before the “feelings themselves” are dealt with remained a big unknown pharmacologically. Now we have a potential explanation. Incidentally the H3 histone is heavily implicated (but in a different way) in why the “old” MAOIs work….it’s ironic that something known to work for 60 years is now getting attention in helping explain how more modern so-called better meds work.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the SC’s obvious political rulings and comments on counting mail in ballots if in 2 or 4 years Republicans once again dominate mail in voting the SC will rule being postmarked by election day will be good enough to be counted. The SC’s recent actions have convinced me that if Trump tries and gets enough GOP controlled State legislatures to win to replace the EC electors chosen by the voters with electors chosen by the legislatures that the SC will rule , probably 5-4, that the electors chosen by the legislators should be the ones counted.
Thank you for the Quanta post on “Epigenetic Secrets Behind Dopamine…..” Best thing I’ve read in a long time. I’d think they are assuming we will assume that these selective RNA to cell nuclear DNA communications are somehow done throughout a critical mass of cell DNA to make a difference in controlling or stopping the expression of certain genes – (Epigenetics). This, to me, implies a high level of coordination on the DNA level. Call me a mystic – but it’s only mystical until you can observe it – and they just did. “Lamarck would be proud.” Indeed he would. I also think this should stuff a sock in every physician’s mouth when s/he says “It’s all in your mind, just be mindful.” I think it also puts to rest the smug neglect associated with the “placebo effect.” Yes there is a phenomenon that we see in a “good attitude” – but it doesn’t come from a blissful mantra – it comes from your H3-histone/Seratonin/Dopamine/RNA/nuclear DNA interaction. Which is truly far more mystical than the ‘power of positive thinking’ which is usually about as effective as breathing into a paper bag. Loved this research. I’m sure they will soon find the connection from the soma chemistry back to the germ cell chemistry. How else?
RE: 6 Skills AI Can’t Replace
I see “creativity” on there, but AI is making sure creatives do not get paid
Effectiveness of Face Masks in Preventing Airborne Transmission of SARS-CoV-2
******
“Our data will help medical workers understand the proper use and performance of masks and determine whether they need additional equipment to protect themselves from infected patients.”
Study is for medical workers not the public.
The problem with this constant barrage of Masks Good studies it that they never look at the complete picture. They optimize the study; it is not done in the real world.
First, I see people taking off and putting on masks frequently. Fiddling, touchng and adjusting them. Or taking it out of their pocket to go into a store. Experts have said this type of usage may cause more problems than it prevents.
Secondly, masks are also to be washed frequently. Are people really doing that? Keep in mind these masks are collecting pathogens.
Thirdly, some studies indicate that prior exposure to flu, colds may help when one encounters Covid. These masks may then be preventing healthy exposure to other viruses. Mask now; pay later.
Fourthly, some experts have suggested that masks make people more confident and therefore less likely to follow more successful preventions such as hand-washing and social distancing.
Five, what is the damage to mental health with people constantly being masked and reminded that death, disease, pestilence lurk in the natural world? What is the mental damage done to children living in such a constant state of fear, stress and anxiety?
Let’s see a real study that addresses all of the above rather than these limited, cherry picked studies to reinforce a predetermined result. Surely no one would object to that; it would be real science.
Effectiveness of Face Masks in Preventing Airborne Transmission of SARS-CoV-2
******
“Our data will help medical workers understand the proper use and performance of masks and determine whether they need additional equipment to protect themselves from infected patients.”
Study is for medical workers not the public.
The problem with this constant barrage of Masks Good studies it that they never look at the complete picture. They optimize the study; it is not done in the real world.
First, I see people taking off and putting on masks frequently. Fiddling, touching and adjusting them. Or taking it out of their pocket to go into a store. Experts have said this type of usage may cause more problems than it prevents.
Secondly, masks are also to be washed frequently. Are people really doing that? Keep in mind these masks are collecting pathogens.
Thirdly, some studies indicate that prior exposure to flu, colds may help when one encounters Covid. These masks may then be preventing healthy exposure to other viruses. Mask now; pay later.
Fourthly, some experts have suggested that masks make people more confident and therefore less likely to follow more successful preventions such as hand-washing and social distancing.
Fifthly, what is the damage done to people suffering with various respiratory or other afflictions? I have yet to see any study on who should not wear masks, for instance those with anemia, COPD or other health conditions which may be aggravated by mask-wearing. This seems particularly odd that health officials have ignored this possible health risk. Who cares—mask the Herd.
Six, what is the damage to mental health with people constantly being masked and reminded that death, disease, pestilence lurk in the natural world? What is the mental damage done to children living in such a constant state of fear, stress and anxiety?
Let’s see a real study that addresses all of the above rather than these limited, cherry picked studies to reinforce a predetermined result. Surely no one would object to that; it would be real science.