Scientists find evidence of humans making clothes 120,000 years ago Guardian (The Rev Kev)
Can Flight Attendants Tell If You Don’t Put Your Phone Into Airplane Mode? Conde Nast Traveler
Italy’s Book Doctor Craftsmanship Quarterly
New York Times essay complains it’s ‘sexist’ for Elizabeth Holmes to be held accountable for Theranos disaster Fox (The Rev Kev)
Why Facebook is using Ray-Ban to stake a claim on our faces MIT Technology Review
36,000 gigatons of carbon heralded history’s biggest mass extinction Ars Technica
It was complete pandemonium’: the towns grappling with bear attacks bear attacks Guardian
#COVID-19
Droplets with coronaviruses last longer than previously thought Medical Express (RM)
Coronaviruses with a SARS-CoV-2-like receptor-binding domain allowing ACE2-mediated entry into human cells isolated from bats of Indochinese peninsula Research Square. Preprint.
Bats in Laos caves found to carry coronaviruses that share key feature with Sars-CoV-2 The Straits Times
***
FDA Panel Backs Pfizer Booster for 65 and Up, Rejects Broad Use Bloomberg
VIRTUAL MEETING Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee Video of the FDA meeting.
mRNA Covid-19 Vaccines in Pregnant Women New England Journal of Medicine
Vaccine nasal sprays aim to ‘shut door’ on virus Japan Times (saywhat?)
***
Coronavirus: Over 86% of Mumbai’s population has antibodies, shows fifth sero survey Scroll
North Africa virus cases plummeting after summer spike France 24
Facebook deletes accounts of German anti-lockdown group Deutsche Welle
***
After the California Recall, Gov. Newsom Should Reflect on COVID Missteps Capital & Main
Alaska once had the highest vaccination rate. Now it’s in a COVID-19 crisis. ABC
COVID-19 relief money could help pay for Alabama prisons Montgomery Advertiser
The tangled history of mRNA vaccines Nature (Dr. Kevin)
mRNA’s History- And Its Future Science (Dr. Kevin)
Biologists Rethink the Logic Behind Cells’ Molecular Signals Quanta (David L)
Biden Administration
Biden Doctrine appears in the Persian Gulf Asia Times (The Rev Kev)
Biden team ratchets up counter-terrorism talk — but to what end? Responsible Statecraft
The US is turning oil-rich Nigeria into a proxy for its Africa wars Grayzone
Russia
Apple and Google Go Further Than Ever to Appease Russia WIRED (RM)
NOVICHOK SECRET PARALYZES BRITISH DOCTORS FOLLOWING GERMAN DOCTOR’S DISCLOSURES Dances with Bears. John Helmer.
Russian Film Crew Beats Tom Cruise to Liftoff, Readies First Feature Shot in Outer Space Variety
Waste Watch
Britain’s fruit and veg farmers cut 2022 planting after widespread waste FT
CLEARING THE TINDERBOX Science
Burned trees and billions in cash: How a California climate program lets companies keep polluting Phys.Org (RM)
The Big Lie That’s Destroying the Wild Horses of the American West Counterpunch
Are we eating ourselves to extinction? Guardian
Class Warfare
Does America Hate the “Poorly Educated”? TK News. Matt Taibbi.
Companies are Getting Rid of Drug Tests Because They Can’t Find Enough Workers VICE
The revival of the anti-monopoly labor tradition… https://t.co/e4SUjwlDcq
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) September 17, 2021
Our Famously Free Press
This is a really bad look. https://t.co/i2e5e8451y
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) September 17, 2021
Where Was All The Investigative Journalism On US Airstrikes The Last 20 Years? Caitlin Johnstone
The only reason the Pentagon was forced to admit its drone strike story was false is all eyes were on Kabul, which enabled the NYT’s superb investigation proving the story was false. But usually, the same thing happens and they don’t get caught – thanks to media stenographers. pic.twitter.com/vr0dXaciyi
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 18, 2021
Those reports about scores of Afghan civilians killed by US troops firing wildly after the airport suicide bomb have been totally buried.https://t.co/sCxgPhGS9Q
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) September 18, 2021
The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killer Robot NYT
China?
France recalls ambassadors from US and Australia in protest over submarine deal South China Morning Post
Aukus: France recalls envoys amid security pact row BBC
Iran denounces ‘unilateralism’ as it becomes full SCO member Al Jazeera
China Evergrande turns to advisers who helped fix debt debacles at Lehman, Noble Group, Luckin Coffee as investors brace for losses South China Morning Post
Evergrande Gives China an Impossible Equation to Solve Bloomberg
‘China’s Lehman Brothers moment’: Evergrande crisis rattles economy Guardian
Embattled Evergrande warns of growing default risks as pressures mount Reuters
India
New India-US Partnership Could Lead To More Equitable Climate Action India Spend
Myanmar
Junta health minister ‘rebuffed’ UN official’s request for greater humanitarian access in Myanmar – sources Myanmar NOW
Occupy Wall Street
Occupy Wall Street at 10: It Was Annoying, But It Changed the World Jacobin. Doug Henwood.
Occupy Wall Street Changed Everything New York Magazine
Drew this during #Occupy, which began 10 years ago today. pic.twitter.com/uYl9c98mYJ
— Dracula Awareness Activist (@bombsfall) September 17, 2021
Antidote du Jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
226 comments
Comments are closed.
Scientists find evidence of humans making clothes 120,000 years ago
They might have been inspired by orangutans and chimps improvising hats.
I’m often surprised by the assumptions of post-industrial revolution humans and the portrayal of “primitive” people from ancient times. There likely have been civilizations in the distant past that we have never found evidence of. People 100,000 years ago had the same brains, the same opposable thumbs and the same nervous systems as we do today. They were just as clever, perhaps more so, as they could not rely on gadgets.
Well, if you believe books like “Against the Grain”, large-scale settled agriculture and animal husbandry were the big ecological wrong turns that got us into the situation we’re in now, so maybe our ancestors were smart/lucky to get by without “civilization”…
Some of the tribes on the Pacific Islands could memorize incredibly complex kinship patterns & genealogies because of Cross-Cousin marriage, knowledge they carried about in their heads. Some anthropologists have hypothesized that that their “primitive” art is really a record of this. And the Australian aborigines had memories of ancient water sources thousands of years old embedded in their oral cultures to be utilized in times of drought. Human culture, oral and written is as important, or perhaps more so than genes, and we ignore its transmission at our peril.
re: Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians. NYT
If it happens once, or once in a rare while, you might call it ‘a tragic mistake’. But when it happens over and over and over again, it’s not a mistake: it’s a strategy, to induce terror in the population.
Hmm, inducing terror in the population. When it becomes systematic, one might even call it Terror-ism.
More likely, the strategy is short-term planning addressing the urge to “take prompt action” rather than think about how best to counter the problem. Just as the “body count” metric during the Vietnam War was used to convince the US public that the US was winning, drone strikes are used primarily for convincing the US public that we are “fighting back against terrorism.”
What’s really happening with drone strikes is, as many have observed, more of a recruiting poster for Al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, etc. When someone’s family and/or friends are killed, the thirst for revenge grows.
Prediction: within 20 years, we’ll see drone strikes against US civilians from groups seeking revenge for their dead friends and relatives.
…or perhaps those drone strikes against US civilians will come from those who own and operate the current crop of drones. The militarisation of US Law enforcement with surplus weaponry has been under way for some time.
“That is really not a matter I am terribly interested in.” –Colin Powell on Iraqi casualties in the Gulf War, 1991.
“I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.” — Madeline Albright on the deaths of 500,000 children in Iraq, 1996
How anyone thinks we’re the good guys in our wars is beyond me. Heck, Timothy McVeigh talked about learning the value of “collateral damage” to send a message while serving in Iraq. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2001-06-11-0106110030-story.html
Working link for Biologists Rethink the Logic Behind Cells’ Molecular Signals:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/biologists-rethink-the-logic-behind-cells-molecular-signals-20210916/
Fixed it – thanks!
The John Helmer post link isn’t working.
Someone said this worked yesterday:
In Google’s search box, type the website or page you’re trying to see.
Beside the URL, click the down arrow.
Select “Cached”.
You are now viewing the cached page.
Alternatively, type the word “cache” in front of the web page’s URL. i.e. “cache:https://examplesite.com“.
So in this case, pasting this into your address bar –
cache:http://johnhelmer.net/novichok-secret-paralyzes-british-doctors-following-german-doctors-disclosures/
– should work. (I’ve just tried, and it does, but then so does the raw link from here. Copy and paste the whole thing though – just clicking on the coloured bit is just the original link!)
No problem with mobile FF browser.
GF: Sorry you are having a problem with the John Helmer link.
I just checked the link and it works for me.
What browser are you using?
firefox, and I’m getting “Error 521 web server is down”.
its possible the site is down and those for whom its working have a cached version from prior to the outage.
I can’t get to it with Firefox, but I can open it with Chrome.
Can’t say I’m surprised its not a valid 521. As a dev who often works with http, the errors we return for a web request aren’t necessarily an accurate diagnosis of the problem. Computers don’t do context very well. And by very well I mean you’re lucky if its even in the correct ballpark.
I’m getting the same thing, also on firefox.
I think there are some parallels between this and industrial supply chains. Old-fashioned supply chains tended to be messy, organic, evolutionary and resilient. One part could mutate, or get knocked out, and the whole would carry on. Or new functions could be added in easily. All rather like the messy ways cells use signalling molecules. Then came just-in-time supply chains, all super-efficient, and super-fragile, falling to pieces if there was an earthquake or pandemic. Like scientists early assumptions about and models of these cellular systems.
I’d recommend economists and the like skim through it – big emphasis on skim if the subject is alien and unfamiliar! You may find some of the science a bit daunting, but you might get some insight and inspiration nonetheless. Messiness and redundancy can make systems versatile and accurate!
”Italy’s Book Doctor Craftsmanship Quarterly“
—————
This article didn’t mention a simple rescue for wet books that I learned while doing my Masters in Library Science. Admittedly it isn’t feasible for the quantity and value of books and manuscripts discussed in this article but it does work. A wet book, if it hasn’t soaked for a long time, can be rescued fairly well by being placed in the freezer! Once frozen, the ice crystals can just be brushed off the pages. Next time you accidentally drop a book in the tub or leave one out in the rain, pop it in the freezer for a couple of hours. If it hasn’t been too thoroughly soaked you may not have any signs of water damage at all. Sometimes the pages remain somewhat wavy or wrinkled. I tried this once and it was almost like a miracle, the book was fine. Many factors involved – quality of paper, length of time wet (quickly into freezer is best). Libraries used to include having negotiated access to a large commercial freezer somewhere nearby as part of their disaster plan.
Thank you for this brilliant fix. I am definitely going to try it the next time my cats decide that the water in the glass would look better on top of my reading material!
I read the 1966 World Book encyclopedia from aardvark to zydeco, mostly in the bathtub when I was a youth, and one time fell asleep and the ‘M’ volume went in the drink. I’m looking at it now, and wished i’d put it in the freezer, as I caught hell from mom & dad.
Me too. World Book then was great! Bloke knocked on our door in Burnie, Tasmania, and my parents bought it on a time payment plan. We didn’t have much money, and it really stood out on the book shelf.
I wonder if it’ll work for my laptop? Reminds me of the peanut butter in hair for gum. Good call.
Apparently submersion in dry uncooked rice is supposed to work for a wet phone. You’d need a lot of rice for a laptop!
And remove the battery immediately before placing in dry rice!! Removal of electrical power reduces potential damage to circuits and corrosion of printed circuit board traces.
Tried it and it does not work. Rice not hygriscopic enough.
Buy commercial silica geanuakes (cheap) and store in an airtight box.
When I was an undergrad in the 1980s, one of the smaller campus department buildings was victim of a midnight arson by a recently-fired employee. Thousands of books of varying value were soaked by the fire response. As it happened, my department in the engineering school had a large industrial-scale vacuum tank. Books went in, air was sucked out, within a few days all was dry, thanks to the same reason the boiling temperature of water drops with increasing altitude. Doubt it would kill most microorganisms, but one could add a zapping with gamma rays (as is used in processing of some foods) to do that. I still have one of the thus-dried volumes, which ended up going unclaimed – a nice hardcover volume of Courant & John’s Methods of Mathematical Physics, Volume 1, only very slightly warped as a result of its experience.
Where Was All The Investigative Journalism On US Airstrikes The Last 20 Years?
Airwars has done a better job than many of keeping track of them.
https://airwars.org/
and https://www.iraqbodycount.org/
Also from AntiWar, I was intrigued by this story that did not get followed up by the news cycle. The policy and military ramifications of removing U.S. air defense systems from Saudi Arabia represent a major sea change but there has been almost no discussion nor analysis. You can also bet that is these systems are not being put into mothballs: they are being deployed somewhere else right now.
https://news.antiwar.com/2021/09/12/us-removes-air-defenses-from-saudi-base/
The article in Links today called “Biden Doctrine appears in the Persian Gulf” talks about those U.S. air defense systems being removed.
Thanks for the link. I had missed this entirely. Arabia has been acting increasingly independently of late. Curious as to the impetus for this movement.
Ian Perkins
September 18, 2021 at 7:44 am
The Pentagon’s Lies About the August 29 Drone Strikes Were Spread For Days By An Unquestioning Media
Over and over, US security services lie and corporate media spread them uncritically. This is a particularly vivid case. Watch:
The Pentagon’s Lies About the August 29 Drone Strikes Were Spread For Days By An Unquestioning Media
rumble.com
Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald
It’s hard to overstate how common this behavior is. I’m not speaking here with 20/20 hindsight now that the Pentagon admits its story was false. I published a video on August 30 – one day after – criticizing the media for its complete lack of skepticism about these drones strikes
Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald
The only reason the Pentagon was forced to admit its drone strike story was false is all eyes were on Kabul, which enabled the NYT’s superb investigation proving the story was false. But usually, the same thing happens and they don’t get caught – thanks to media stenographers.
==================
I am not going to say NYT’s superb investigation is the most absurd thing written in the history of the universe – things can always be worser…
But I am actually curious, after 20 years of MSM complete credulity about “surgical precision” of drone strikes, WHY the sudden, universal, lockstep outrage…just as we are leaving???
Hard for me to imagine there would have been this outrage if we had not been leaving…
In 2015 (during the Obama administration) whistle blower Daniel Hale gave the Intercept secret Army documents showing during one five-month period, more than 90 percent of those killed by US airstrikes were not the intended targets. The Intercept published them in its ‘Drone Papers’. I could find no evidence that the NYT deemed this fact news worthy at the time. Hale was just recently sentenced to 45 months in jail under the Espionage act.
Suddenly the MSM and Army seemed shocked, shocked, that such “tragic accidents” could happen. What changed?
Also worth pointing out the repeated obfuscation in the news when they have an ex-Obama or Bush staffer on and fail to mention their current employers or credentials. “FORMER defense secretary” sounds good on those news shows. “CURRENT Raytheon board member” does not.
I’ll believe the media is serious about this new turn when they start questioning their well paid guests about conflicts of interest.
“after 20 years of MSM complete credulity about “surgical precision” of drone strikes,”
Probably the strokes are precise.
The choice of target, or how targets are selected, is questionable….because it is based on human desires and information. Some of which will be driven by questionable motives, and accurate assessment of the target,s motives.
I recall some boys herding goats being slaughtered because the US Military considered their behaviors “suspicious.”
When the US Military use the word “Intelligence” one would hope, sometimes a vain hope, that they were using intelligence.
The fault is not in the Military. It is in the Military’s masters.
If the US wanted “friends” in Afghanistan, Farming Practices, fertilizer, , and Water Management would have made the Afghani’s into friends.
The fault is not in the Military.
Yes, it is. Following orders is not a defense of war crimes. They are as guilty of murder as their higher ups.
I am wondering if the drone operators have any exposure to the intelligence used in target selection.
As far as we can tell from the many tell-alls from ex-drone operators, no they don’t get told anything other than targeting detail.
Astute and honest comment.
> Following orders is not a defense of war crimes. They are as guilty of murder as
> their higher ups.
In theory, yes. In real life, however, it is rather less unambiguous, as you would know if you had ever been one of the lower downs. And, sorry, but ‘war crimes’ is a loaded term. It ranges from Hiroshima and Nagasaki all the way down to urinating on the corpse, or slicing off the ear, of a dead enemy. So let’s look more generally at ‘following orders’.
In basic training, recruits are bombarded incessantly for three months with the indoctrination that all orders must be followed immediately and without question. In one class, for less than five minutes, lip service may be paid to Nuremberg but at the same time it is made crystal clear that differentiating between lawful and unlawful orders is — in a phrase popular here at NC — ‘above their pay grade’. I think it is fair to say that your average soldier is not a thoughtful person. To succeed and survive in the military, you shine your shoes and say ‘YES SIR!’
I wish I had access to miltary law annals. It would be very interesting indeed to compare court-martial convictions for disobeying orders vs. court-martial acquittals on the grounds that the order was improper. I suspect that the former are numerous while the latter are very few and far between.
Good points and makes me understand better the perennial practice of “fragging” by the lower ranks.
It ranges from Hiroshima and Nagasaki all the way down to urinating on the corpse, or slicing off the ear, of a dead enemy. So let’s look more generally at ‘following orders’.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My neighbor was a recently arrived Marine machine gunner in a tank near Hue during the Tet Offensive, whose commander wore a garland of 18 ears, and he reckons he killed between 150-200 people following orders.
He mentioned one episode last time we talked, 6 villagers and a like amount of water buffalo were walking in a rice paddy about 100 yard away when the tank commander told him to open up, and he protested, but was shot down by the guy who was all ears, screaming ‘WHO IS IN CHARGE OF THIS TANK?’ buuuuuuuuuuuuuuurp, down they all went.
There was a soldier tried in Los Angeles for “dead checking” wounded Iraqis, that is executing wounded Iraqi “enemy combatants”. Maybe it was this soldier:
https://www.democracynow.org/2004/11/16/war_crime_caught_on_tape_u
Anyway, the soldier’s defense was that he was simply following his training and the court accepted this defense. The U.S. siege of Fallujah, presided over by “Mad Dog” Mattis if I remember correctly, over the deaths of 4 Blackwater mercenaries had many war crimes. The city was blockaded. Any males not young boys or old men were barred from leaving. U.S. snipers shot everybody and anybody, including ambulance drivers. White Phosphorous, a chemical weapon, was used. The city was destroyed. Other Iraqi cities were also destroyed, but didn’t receive the press coverage Fallujah did.
I remember reading an account by a U.S. blogger in Bagdad, where an Iraqi warned him not to photograph U.S. soldiers because he would be shot. Maybe U.S. behavior in Iraq eventually improved– I am not sure, but initially it was a bloodbath. Families would be shot up at U.S. checkpoints if they didn’t follow the signs correctly, which may have been in English.
I know of a few examples of people who refused to deploy to Iraq. There was a Lieutenant who refused to go to Iraq because the war was illegal and he was eventually acquitted. There was a fellow named Carl in the National Guard (which was illegally sent to Iraq) who refused to go and tried to seek asylum from Canada. Carl had been in the military before, was very anti-imperialist, and enlisted in the National Guard before 9/11 only because he was a month away from becoming homeless. He was not a pacifist and did not claim to be a conscientious objector. There was another soldier who went to jail rather then go to Iraq. It is true U.S. soldiers, like all soldiers, are indoctrinated to follow orders. The U.S. military leadership is lousy.
During the Vietnam war, many U.S. soldiers eventually turned against the war.
I’m surprised that military intelligence isn’t on show at the oxymoron museum
I was a little surprised that she mentioned many, possibly most, of the casualties were caused by “panicked gunfire” from the U.S. troops. That’s not panic, that’s stamdard doctrine. If your unit is fired on the first thing you do is fire your weapon outward from the center of the unit. You do not look for a target, you pull the trigger. This is not in basic training, but is in the next level, which used to be called Advanced Infantry Training for those going into several of the combat arms, and practiced in many field exercises. It was used to good effect (in their view) by the Viet Cong. As an American unit was passing through a small town or village, a single sniper could fire off a magazine at them from cover, and the Americans would shoot up the area, usually killing several local people and making sure the survivors hated Americans. I’m sure the Taliban used that knowledge and our media would never reveal it. Also, civilians who knew about it from Vietnam are mostly dead now.
Consortium News recently held a discussion about the Afghan war which included Scott Ritter:
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/08/31/watch-cn-live-afghanistan-the-20-year-disaster/
At the end of the program, Ritter is asked what he thinks happened at the airport. He does not think the U.S. marines were firing into the crowd because they are trained not to “spray and pray”. He thinks the shooting was probably done by some Afghan soldiers who were also present, but an investigation is needed.
“‘China’s Lehman Brothers moment’: Evergrande crisis rattles economy”
There will be a difference between how China handles this massive problem and how the west would deal with it. As was proven back in 2008, the wealthy can crash the world’s economy through greed & recklessness but none of them have ever seen the inside of a prison cell. In China when the wealthy do stuff that works against the country, they too never see the inside of a prison cell. In fact they are never seen again at all.
China Evergrande turns to advisers who helped fix debt debacles at Lehman, Noble Group, Luckin Coffee as investors brace for losses
“At this moment, offshore bond holders should already be fully aware of the possible haircuts, which is very likely to happen. If it pushes to the extreme and go into the liquidation, the offshore bond holders may get nothing.”
Michael Hudson had a succinct comment on this yesterday:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/09/links-9-17-2021.html#comment-3608058
So far as I’m aware the number of foreign bondholders would be fairly minimal. Its been known for a very long time that companies like Evergreen were dodgy, so any foreign investors would have just held relatively small amounts as a high risk, potential high profit investment. Many may well be selling them at a huge discount back into ‘connected’ Chinese circles anyway to retrieve some of their investments so I’d be amazed if anyone outside China gets a direct hit with this. If there are, they are too stupid to trade.
It seems that most bondholders are not actually traders, but contractors who accepted bonds as payment up front for works. So stiffing bondholders would be devastating not just for numerous small businesses (many owned by Party members), but could cause chaos for any Chinese company that issues bonds for normal operations – i.e. most of them. So the Chinese government will have to thread very cautiously on this.
There are no easy answers for the Chinese government on this, which is why they are buying time with all this high level manoeuvring. The problem is that the longer they take doing this, the more internally connected people will centre themselves to make sure someone else takes the hit. In previous major bankruptcies in China, its been pushed onto the banking system to deal with it, which in turn has paid for it by lowering interest payments – i.e. pushing the cost onto regular Chinese people. Which of course makes worse the forces encouraging ordinary Chinese to invest in risky property deals as a means to protect their savings.
Shooting all the bankers doesn’t make the stolen money reappear. The biggest con of capitalism is that we’re often fighting over nothing; imaginary numbers inside a computer that are just made-up estimates of some paper’s worth backed by nothing. Not to defend bankers, of course, but the more a country leans into capitalism the more capitalism consumes. Remove the speculators, and it’s back to the basic, cash value of things. This is not an easy adjustment for any country.
Growth is a major part of this, as it’s one of the few things capitalists (used) to be able to cling to. If all the speculators are taken out and shot for destroying pension funds, state banks, and national champions then there won’t be any new gamblers to build the next generation of computer chip factories, nuclear reactors, or missiles with.
Foreigners are unlikely to receive it well, either. The more people killed the less willing Americans will be to actually go to China, sign contracts and trade USDs for products. Already US firms are having trouble stocking shelves as their Chinese orders are backordered without their consent, doing this to staff and humans is likely to cause an exodus out. Not an easy maneuver… this sort of thing tends to be a revolution or cause one.
Facebook.Raybans: “The glasses will become a perpetual viewfinder, emphasizing each wearer’s perspective over the experience of being in any group. As a result, people wearing them may be more drawn to capturing scenes from their unique point of view than actually participating. Also, since more than one person at a time might be wearing the glasses in any given group, this effect could be magnified, and social cohesion could be further fragmented…”
When the next trains come, people won’t believe they are real.
Biden would have been better off visiting Warm Springs, it would definitely make it easier to spin this as the “New FDR” calmly assessing the problems of the day.
From an email from The Lancet:
As students in the UK and elsewhere return to school, substantial concerns have been
raised about the potential for increased COVID-19 cases and hospitalisations,
particularly in view of the ongoing spread of the highly transmissible delta
variant. Alongside these concerns is the already considerable detriment to
children’s education that has resulted from pandemic mitigation measures, including
lengthy school closures and self-isolation requirements for COVID-19 contacts.
However, whether self-isolation policies actually reduce the risk of onward
SARS-CoV-2 transmission in schools is unclear. An Article
(https://info.thelancet.com/e3t/Btc/RF+113/cs6tF04/VVvYWf8s_KgcN1M2hL_Pk8KwW8DFYQL4xClqBN8Qx5655mNXrV3Zsc37CgYL0N6VkXSDT69x8W4HFSKP6BHzT8W8DRB3n8yZzC4W4h4cDp47rTNQW2vYcSZ9fhftBW8D-P8t14TY4xW1BD0Cp4QflYJW4r2VN89cRjypVHS9GF3q9xY_W8dt-3f3bLhL4W6J-tQB7S2_k0N7P-qnGkHDsQW142dJS1XgSbKW7H4TSd7C2QdVW37vl7m5JsbSnM8LywzjKxGwN6GkkJYm6rLhVgKR0C3-kDNdW7GNGHJ26d2NVW2HpS0F990xMVW7Hy_m27KQ0bDW5Ppnf62rzDrqW7wpD9F16pK2FW68Wbjr30kZ4vW6JxgXr6xpx0jW2ynwR13_SDX-W9jywfd80kMTVW3lP5cS7_PZXHVH-wXQ5yP23zW4YGNCc3CzxzZW1r6Wg47vWn79W4SKTf-99426g3fhr1
) published in The Lancet suggests that students who come into contact with
confirmed COVID-19 cases might be able to stay in school, provided they test
negative for COVID-19 for 1 week.
In a cluster-randomised controlled trial done in 201 schools in England from
April-May 2021, schools were randomly assigned to self-isolation of school-based
COVID-10 contacts for 10 days or voluntary COVID-19 testing using lateral flow
devices for 7 days, with contacts remaining in school provided they test negative.
There was no difference between groups in the number of symptomatic PCR-confirmed
infections over the 10-week study period (59·1 vs 61·8 per 100 000 individuals per
week), with voluntary testing resulting in a 39% relative and 0·70% absolute
reduction in school days missed due to COVID-19. These data provide reassurance that
daily lateral flow testing might allow students who are exposed to COVID-19 cases to
safely remain in school.
This is nuts this analysis. I searched that paper and found no mention of the word ventilation and this whole theory depends on the idea that everything can be controlled by testing. It would not have worked with the original Wuhan strain and I doubt that long term it would ever work with the present delta strain. Colour me suspicious but I am going with the idea that this paper was put together using only statistics and given a veneer of respectability by being published in The Lancet so that the UK government can insist that students stay in school so that their parents can keep on going to work. This has been a constant government aim in many countries since early last year this – that students have to go to school so that their parents stay working in the economy. You know what we need? Remember those old movies where people wear badges that tell how much radioactivity they have been exposed to? That is what we need. A patch worn on our arms and as soon as we are infected, it turns red and we know to isolate then. That would be great that.
Hmmm…. Scarlet Lettres de cachet.
Interesting. This is the sort of research I was hoping to see. Was Britain mostly delta by April/May?
Schools in my region of the US have already moved towards keeping “close contacts” (however limited that definition is already) in the classroom.
This policy is based around necessity, rather than concern for public safety, since the teachers qualify as “close contacts” in most classroom settings and substitute teachers are few and far between these days.
Saw mention the other day – in Water Cooler I think – where at one school if a kid comes up infected, only those kids immediately surrounding them are put into isolation. That makes it sound like this virus is still a fomite-spreader instead of via the air. When I think about it, this is a good method this. A good method of infecting kids that is.
Glenn is overstating his argument on this one case— parts of the press did give the family’s account of the drone strike while others passed on the Pentagon story unquestioningly. And the NYT did a superb job. But in general the press has been awful, with rare exceptions here and there.
As I mentioned above, when whistle blower Daniel Hale gave secret Army documents to the Intercept showing that during one five-month period, more than 90 percent of those killed by US airstrikes were not the intended targets the NYT showed no interest. Could it be the MIC is now using the NYT to punish Biden for the pull-out? Does that equate with the NYT doing a superb job?
I think Milley is the red meat to be served to calm the noisy crowds.
The Pentagon’s admission is the good “cause” to make it happen.
NYT is just s tool.
A scene in the film “Manhunter” (remade as Red Dragon) shows a conversation between Hannibal Lecter and FBI agent Will Graham. The mad genius serial killer gets the Fed to admit he is not smarter than he, and asks if that is so how did he catch him? The agent responds that he had one advantage, Lecter is insane.
I can’t help but be reminded of this scene every time I think of the “competition” our leadership has put us in with China. Crazy is certainly on display when we escalate the scale and probability of nuclear war as with the Australian submarine move a few days ago.
But our twisted world view, and it’s disadvantages, are more clearly analyzed in the media reaction to the Evergrande story. The ignominy of our “Lehman moment” wasn’t so much the collapse of the bank, but our response to that collapse. A socialization of risk and privatization of profits, via bailouts, that continues unabated to this day.
Chinese authorities seem to be indicating their willingness to give the “big guys” massive haircuts to help administer an orderly default. They seem to not be biting on the creditor driven fear mongering of damage to the economy. In some regards they understand that if some capitalists lose money and housing prices go down, then that’s just peachy. Of course the financial media believes that to be the end of the world, after all these people paid for Dick Fuld’s yacht.
All in all, this episode highlights the advantage the Chinese have over us. We are insane, bound to a system that elevates select constituencies over the common welfare at every turn. Be it debt defaults or defense spending.
They seem to not be biting on the creditor driven fear mongering of damage to the economy.
I am about halfway thru Taibbi’s The Divide ( The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth …
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17834864 ) and he is mauling Holder’s Collateral Cosequences memo–which enabled the music to keep playing.
I hope someone powerful in China has read it.
Yes, we gave up the pretense of the fight even before the conflict arrived. As I think Holder’s memo predated the GFC by nearly a decade. But Holder and his fellow travelers love showing their belly, lap dogs love belly rubs.
Oh yes, they’re shook. As much as I’d rather see him suffer the rest of his days alone without clicks, have a squizz at this imperial cope from Francesco Sisci in Asia Times, invoking Hannibal and the Western Roman Empire to justify “necessary” “reforms” for bloody sake:
1. No, they don’t. Neolibs don’t think, they wishcast, just like Sisci is doing here.
2. Yes, yes it is just one reason of billions to destroy or damage any and every elite relationship that forms without mass consent. Nobody is entitled to have their ideas carried by others. No larp is worth dying for. Especially not this one.
What can you say to Francesco? Of course he misunderstands the position of Roman power relative to Carthaginian at the start of the Punic war. He misunderstands that unlike Hannibal, China has no need of “conquering Rome”, much less holding the financialized wastelands of the US. And finally he forgets that Roman swords weren’t “made in Carthage”.
I do find it adorable that he finishes his Victor David Hanson impersonation with a realization that if the existing order is destroyed then he’s out of a job.
Guys like this think history repeats itself in a literal manner. They think we’ll have a “guns of august” scenario in the Taiwan strait. The first shot of this war when it happens will be fired by the Chinese, and it will be their demand that we settle accounts in Yuan. Otherwise Christmas is cancelled and Beau Biden jr won’t get the GI Joe with the karate chop arm.
Just had a chance to read this article and it is weird. Trying to compare the US & China with Rome & Carthage is a mighty long bow to draw. And if anything, the US would be the one of the position of Carthage as it was an established power while Rome, like China, was a rising one. In any case, the comparison is a bad fit.
But his claim that ‘free trade and closed frontiers cannot co-exist in the same world’ is just ridiculous. What is he going to say next? ‘Resistence is futile?’ Having different economies in the same world would work to having resilience. Can you imagine the mess the world would have been in the past two years if China had had a neoliberal economy?
But where he says ‘If China were to decide to really open its economy and political system, it would benefit America, no doubt, but it will not be harmful to China, quite the contrary.’ that claim is risible. And saying that ‘there could be solutions for it’ is just so much hand-waving. If I was Chinese and was looking at the mess that the neoliberal economic system had wrought on the west, I would see zero incentive to become a neoliberal economy myself.
President Biden, 78, hits the beach…..12,000 Haitian migrants set up camp under a bridge in Texas
*********************************
Whew that’s a relief. I was concerned for a while we might experience some “transitory” wage inflation. But it looks like the ruling class has that one covered.
On a related topic (that topic being getting stuff into good old US of A), still reading articles boarding towards panic on how very hard it is to get goods into into the US because ports and shippers are jammed to capacity. Also too, soaring prices or shelves of those good sitting empty of stock (79 cent French made dinner plates are gone from Ikea shelves. When asked when they might be back in stock, clerk looked at her device and said “maybe end of September it’s a deliver problem”). Wonder if they’re being scalped on Ebay? I’m told that’s a real job according to BLS.
Question: Why aren’t headlines pushing real, actual solutions to the jammed ports/overloaded shippers….Like
Make Stuff in USA, bring jobs back to America or just make new ones?
Shouldn’t there be a Federal tax credit for that or something? We could call The Jobs Act, or the Make America Great Again Act. Or just call it “Infrastructure”.
Funny thing no one talks about that and no panic like headlines on how that could solve the shipping crisis, supply crisis, shortage crisis, inflation crises, employment crisis…..
Tax credits have questionable results. What kind of tax credit is going to justify US production? Leaving was to get around unions, environmental regulations, and the SEC. A crime is China for an American CEO means nothing. Why would a Steve Jobs type invest in moving a factory to the US when half his shtick is getting away with bullying employees? He doesn’t want a union type environment. Then industrial policies of the developed world are way more than tax credits, so building factories makes sense.
Is the USA still capable of building factories, or would it have to ask the Chinese to do it, at least if it wants them this century?
There is hoopla about tool maker shortages, but books exist and people can be smart. It’s not the age of vellum scrolls and cathedral makers. One problem is the cost of training has bee put on individuals. Without guarantees, who is going to become a toolmaker? Would be students will gravitate to their cost/benefit analysis of what will get jobs. Then of course, life happens, so there are disruptions. Student debt horror stories. Housing, transportation.
When the first world is doing this and the US isn’t, factories aren’t going to materialize regardless of tax credits. We let criminal cartels like Amazon operate which besides not paying sales tax for years, undercutting competition, it now lists it’s own products for less than the platform it provides to hurt competition.
NotTimothyGeithner
When the first world is doing this and the US isn’t, factories aren’t going to materialize regardless of tax credits.
This is just flat out false. See my post below. I am working at Devens, Massachusetts. The factory the company started building last year from the ground up, is almost complete. We are all creating SOP’s for the work to be inside the factory and doing lab training for our job once the factory is up and running. The company has also built factories in New Jersey and Oregon, and Europe. Further, I leaving this company due a a pay rate disagreement to join another similar company in Burlington, Massachusetts, which also has a new factory it recently build.
The suggestion USA can’t build factories or is not building factories, is totally untrue.
Very few modern companies have the capacity to build their own factories. The norm is ‘latchkey contracts’ where someone else builds the factory up to operating standards. The world leader in this is actually an American company (I can’t mention their name as I used to work for them), so I would say that yes, there is the capacity within the US to do this, although at what scale i don’t know. Some companies – Amazon in particular – are incredibly efficient at rolling out new plant, albeit the much simpler type of process like a distribution warehouse or data centre.
The key problem it seems to me for American manufacturing is not building the final product – its building the multiplicity of parts needed to make a mobile phone or a 737 or a Tesla. This ecosystem of small manufacturers is where the Asian countries win hands down (and to a lesser extent, in Germany and its wider hinterland). It would take decades to build that back up.
We produce a product and spill over goes to three local machine shops helping us. What do you think this hinterland development models look like here at a small scale if not exactly like what we do? https://www.promodeler.com
But does that model scale into the macro, and can you prove it? How much can we make with the machine tools we have, as opposed to the machine tools we wish we hadn’t sent to China decades ago for scrap? And how quickly, assuming we had prints lined up and ready to go, would we get parts?
Guessing by your site, I’m pretty sure you’re enjoying the table scraps of the “defense” economy there in SoCal, which is a good example of the power of government subsidies to direct economic activity from which civilians can benefit.
Why would it take decades? It seems that Asia replaced all of our plants in less than 2 decades. We wouldn’t have to be starting from scratch. There’s certainly some institutional memory of how to build and run a factory. As Timbers just below points out, at some scale or other it’s being done as we speak. I have to believe it’s more a matter of will than of ability.
Ian Perkins
Is the USA still capable of building factories, or would it have to ask the Chinese to do it, at least if it wants them this century?
Ian, USA absolutely can and is building factories with good jobs and good wages. I work in Devens, Massachusetts. We have our new factory built from the ground up from scratch, almost completed. The company has other similar factories it built in New Jersey and Europe for It’s therapy to fight cancer.
I am leaving this company because the will not adjust my pay to market rate, to another company that offered me a market wage, doing similar work in Burlington, Massachusetts, which has an “old” factory and new one they recently built.
Many say America can’t build factories.
That is simply not accurate. America can, and is, building factories right here in USA.
Granted I don’t know much about the companies building these factories, but I have seen the workers and they are mostly local Americans performing the work. Without getting into cultural identity issues, I will just say they appear disproportionately local Americans to my eyes.
I didn’t intend my comment to be taken at face value. I don’t doubt the USA can still build factories, but I do wonder about its capacity to do so, compared with China’s. For every one built by the US, at home or abroad, how many does China build?
Building a factory is a very different thing than operating it properly.
During the early days of China’s industrialization spree, a relative of mine flew across the Pacific several times to try to straighten out a small shop’s procedures. Therei was a substantial time lag from “making something” to “making it right”, as in within critical tolerances. (he was quite unhappy, for it was his own Amerian job in a US factory which was being outsourced/destroyed)
A fairly local town used to be a major industrial center. Every single plant was finally moved to the un-unionized US South, to Mexico, or to China. The “skilled trades” were the keystone in those places. It takes a lot of know-how to move a 600 ton press into its hole, then set it up so it’ll run properly. More specialized workers must be able to quickly repair electrical and hydraulic and tooling problems. Those skill sets have mostly withered away in the US, and would take years to replace.
I get it. But honestly, who cares how many factories we can build vs China? This isn’t about China, or how we compare to her.
This is about doing what’s right for us, about helping ourselves and the people here in USA. It’s about bringing back production to the USA and reaping the benefits of that, for ourselves…regardless weather we do it faster or slower than China. It’s doing what benefits us, not racing against China or someone else.
Because it is still worth it to us, even if others do it faster, or slower.
no one will debate this guy for obvious reasons, its why there is all this distraction about trump
Franklin argued, the American manufacturers could not survive unless they were protected from low-wage competition
GDP in america under protectionism was far superior for workers than nafta billy clintons poor GDP performance
To sum up, the free-trade/market policies are policies that have rarely, if ever, worked
Few countries have become rich through free-trade, free-market policies and few ever will.
Dr. Ha Joon Chang plainly through historical records proves that free trade is bad for the poor and democracy
http://www.profitatanyprice.com/2015/04/free-market-policies-rarely-make-poor.html
Defeatist reasoning. The tax credits we give to those who close US production and move those jobs overseas seem to worked out quite well. Ending those would be a start, as would ending subsidies to build more ports for imports and instead spending it on tax credits for domestic production.
Defeatist reasoning.
Is it OK for common folk to identify and say this out loud nowadays?
Clearly you’ve been thinking to much.
Have you been having ‘happy thoughts’ also?
Triffens paradox.
Manufacturing stuff here would play hell on the euro dollar market.
Can’t have a reserve currency and our cake also.
The stimuli do not provide the desired responses anymore, if they ever did. At best, they pay most of the labor and construction burden and let the develoepr walk away with the profits. All so that the Puritans don’t have to be tormented late at night by nightmares of “masterless men”.
Let a thousand Foxconn adult daycares bloom.
because of nafta billy clintons disastrous policies that so thoroughly sold out america to wall street and the chinese communist party, americans can no longer make a aspirin, a protective medical glove, a computer chip, cars, military equipment, jet engines, fighter jets, planes, rocket engines, you name it, nafta billy sold it out.
gutting free trade would take away power from transnational corporations and re-empower local communities and citizens.
free trade imploded in 2008, and has never regained what it lost, under the virus free trade imploded even further, exposing the scam that it is, and it will take many years if ever, if it can even regain what it lost in 2020
free trade allowed capitalism to use global space as a lawless sea outside of any political control.
free trade offered capitalists a number of “exit” strategies when confronted with pressure from workers and citizens.
free trade is a steamroller of local economic structures and social institutions
free trade has given employers enormous blackmail power against workers as they can easily shift their plants to other countries if they feel wages are too high
comparative advantage is simply the one with the worst human and environmental degradation wins
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/07/genoa-g8-summit-protest-anti-globalization-economy-national-capitalism
We aren’t doing Ricardo’s comparative advantage between nations anymore. The ability of capital to transplant itself where it likes, with minimal friction or discomfort, has elevated the importance of absolute advantage among beggars.
Exactly. I don’t know how well that “comparative advantage” thing applied in Ricardo’s day, but in ours, with the mobility we have from the top of the economy to the bottom, the term “comparative advantage” can only signify a BS argument.
Question: Why aren’t headlines pushing real, actual solutions to the jammed ports/overloaded shippers….
Answer: These guys spent the better part of the century since the Red Army took Berlin, finding a way to crush labor power in the US. They succeeded. They’re not going to turn the ship around because the price of milk is up. So long as shareholder value is rising they’ll sail this ship off the edge of the world, all the while shouting about the evil Chinese on megaphones made in Guangzhou.
its been proven by historical records that free trade actually impoverishes workers rather than enriches them
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2011/09/30/1000000-economists-can-be-wrong-the-free-trade-fallacies/
Research
Lectures
Debunking
Reports
Links
1,000,000 economists can be wrong: the free trade fallacies
By Steve Keen | September 30, 2011 | Debtwatch
Research
Lectures
Debunking
Reports
Links
1,000,000 economists can be wrong: the free trade fallacies
By Steve Keen | September 30, 2011 | Debtwatch
How many times did the Daily Mail complain about Trump hitting his golf courses almost every weekend, but seems fit to paint Biden as being out of touch? Reminds me of that stand-up political comic Mark Russel back in the 1980s, who did a schtik when the press would print “President out of of touch!”, where Reagan snapped back “No, I’m in charge!” Then when some tragedy occurred, the press would fire back “So you WERE in Charge!”, and the Gipper replied: “No, I was out of touch…..”
Reduction in greenhouse gases and even more so if in country manufacturing is built along rail lines and also near resource supply. Also, the marine shipping concerns weasel out of tax obligations where ever they operate but love to squawk for protection with national militaries whenever they face pirating.
There you go again with the Practical Thinking and Practical Solutions.
Drink your TINA and keep those thoughts to yourself. ;-/
With all this talk of who can build factories fast enough in a time when we need to be shutting open factories down strikes me as a little anachronistic. We’re not the “young nation” bursting at the seems with productivity. We’re a collapsing society that can’t decide if it wants to destroy itself though civil war or make the Earth incapable of supporting even a pared down version of our civilization.
This interesting piece refers to a European Green thinker named Lachat who had this to say about productivism:
The bolded assertion continues to be borne out in the Covid crisis. In the United States, they were so desperate to keep people tied to their pre-Covid place of work that they came up with the crazy PPP scheme. The elites were terrified at the prospect of all these people who no longer had to report to the boss every morning or whenever the boss deigned to schedule them.
We have to figure out how to reduce the living standards of a majority of the U. S. population–some a little, some a hell of a lot–while shoring up essential needs for the bottom 25%, all while stopping the growth of carbon emissions immediately and bringing them down from there as rapidly as can be done without loss of life. That’s how desperate the situation is. Unless everyone wants to wait around for Fauci to come up with magic vaccines that cure all goodthinkers of all diseases and Elon Musk to fire a rocket at the sun that he promises will reduce the amount of thermonuclear activity just enough to counterbalance global warming. (Cyborged versions of Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis will pilot the ship. The true-to-life documentary will be titled “Back to Normal (Them Was the Good Old Days)”. Hey, it’s an IMAX screen so it can have a long title.
@ timbers
Those 12,000 Haitian migrants who set up camp under a bridge in Texas? The federal government did do something about that. They had the FAA declare a no-fly zone over that area so that news channels could not send drones over to get more footage of their plight for broadcast.
Don’t give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Don’t send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I’ll declare a no-fly zone if the press gets too nosy.
“Apple and Google Go Further Than Ever to Appease Russia”
No they didn’t. If they had not decided to follow Russian law in Russia, they would have had the full weight of the Russian state get on their case. And Google is already trying to dodge fines imposed on them by Russia by playing hard to get. Last week US Ambassador John Sullivan was summoned to explain the role of US companies in the election with proof given of all sorts of interference such as them trying to subvert the ban which they demanded an answer to. And I suspect that the answer ‘But they are private companies doing that!’ is just not going to cut it.
Stuff like this is not hard to work out if you reverse positions. So as an example – it is the US 2022 midterms and the Russians put up an app through Google & Apple to tell American voters how best to make their vote count to get rid of Democrats running for office. Can you imagine what people like Rachel Maddow, CNN, MSNBC and assorted Senators & Reps would be saying? They would be going ballistic. I would call that a case of electoral interference that and it would cause an uproar on the American political landscape. You would hear about nothing else until the 2024 elections. But it is OK when we do it.
Do you think that Apple and Google should have a right to ban this hypothetical app before the US 2022 midterms? If yes, then you should celebrate the Russian ban. I suspect you don’t want them to do it in the US and I don’t want them to do it in Russia.
Also the app has not been created by Americans. Maybe you can tell me how exactly they have done it? Not to mention that most of the recommended candidates are communists, Spravedlivaya Rossiya and other tame opposition.
Apple and Google already have such a right.
And whether in the United States or Russia they do not have the right to ignore the demands of the duly constituted authorities, such as they are.
They can comply or they can withdraw from a given market.
We are presently seeing more than enough censorship activities in the Land of the Free to keep me busy enough. I think I’ll let the Russian citizenry handle their end
That’s right, but in this case there was nothing even remotely resembling due process
Sussmann Indictment…
How fast will Alpha Bank sue him for libel / defamation? They have been pretty aggressive on that front.
Would the work of technology company be considered a campaign contribution?
And what exactly does “pending” mean here: “who were receiving and analyzing Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract;” These guys where getting paid by the US government when they where working on behalf of the Clinton Campaign?
Does anyone know who those people are? Who they worked for at the time?
“Ray-Ban to stake a claim on our faces”
‘To build the metaverse, Facebook needs us to get used to smart glasses.’
So in order for Facebook to profit off all of us, even those that never want a Facebook account, we are expected ‘to learn to live’ with surveillance by any jerk wearing a pair of these glasses. When Google Glasses came out back about 2014, it did not take long for people to get hostile over wearers from potentially filming them in bars, restaurants, etc. and people went after them. In the present political climate, can you imagine the possibilities of this becoming a sort of Snitch-Vision? You would have political parties, private organizations, etc. issuing them in order to get ‘incriminating’ evidence of behaviour by others. When the article said that figuring out who is wearing Facebook’s glasses will be more challenging, they were correct. So what it means is that anybody wearing Ray-Bans will have to be assumed to be guilty unless proven otherwise. Maybe make an active campaign to make Ray-Bans become the glasses that you do not want to own. Otherwise, when you come across a person wearing them, best to smile and say ‘cheese!’
And wear Ray-Bans any time you’re around cops.
It would be useful to onboard/load an attorney as soon as a police encounter is initiated. They could then interact with police via a speaker leaving the wearer to remain silent. Probably would be out of reach cost wise, but also probably worth it?
This plays out as the reverse of the “Magic” sunglasses in “They Live!”
Now, when you put on the glasses is when you begin to not see the propaganda. You have become a part of the program.
When the general population figures this game out, I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing news reports about random strangers hitting the Magic Ray-Bans wearers in the head with blunt instruments.
Human nature.
See, Roddy’s epiphany: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiMLJAZajxg
If you had on a pair of 5052 Ray-Bans, would the middle be considered Area 51?
Please. Let us not descend excessive [harrumph] silliness.
Ok, i’ll try and reel myself in.
5052s? If that is the price, where does the decimal point go?
Now, Area 51 would be considered the Vanishing Point, so, there is that. $5052 Ray-Bans.
5052’s are the iconic type of Ray-Bans, the pair the Blues Brothers wore along with every would-be hipster since the 50’s…
I was an iconoclastic “hipster.” I couldn’t afford a pair of Ray-Bans.
Avaitors were the ‘shades’ of choice in the crowd I pretended to be in.
Anecdote: I was a museum guide when the Google glasses came out some years back. They weren’t that commonplace but they were definitely around. I came to be able to spot them, in addition to the logo, because of the way that wearers would position their heads and shoulders to maintain shots while I was addressing them. Basically moving as if they were looking through a camera.
The wearers definitely seemed to be of a type. I would classify them as snide tech-boi’s, all men as far as I remember, and often exuding this bizarre sense of satisfaction as if they were getting one over on everyone else. They ALWAYS had this self-satisfied grin on their faces and were often mildly but consistently rude. The kind of people who snigger if you have a phone that’s a few years old and feel compelled to mention it.
Jordan Klepper did a segment on the Daily Show years back where he interviewed iGlass wearers, I tried to hunt it down but no dice. It’s pretty funny, there was one bit where one of the wearers, a woman, comments that they are “explorers” because they are wearing the glasses. The group seemed to take this claim seriously. Klepper ripped into them, saying something to the effect that Chuck Yeager was an explorer, the Western pioneers were explorers, Magellan was an explorer, you guys are a bunch of jerks spying on people or something like that.
Bottom line: these things do not bode well. They definitely set people against one another, as in the wearer feels they enjoy some kind of upper hand. Maybe that will fade as they become commonplace but then who knows what social dynamic will replace it?
need portable EMP unit to burn these up. kill it with fire
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/09/18/world/science-health-world/coronavirus-vaccine-nasal-spray/
Working link for japan times.
Fixed it – thanks!
About that NYT Theranos Holmes article:
1. Theranos under Holmes did bad things.
2. Others in Tech, largely male, do bad things.
3. They all should be held to account.
Item 2 got an overlarge share of focus, to the detriment of readers.
Holmes embarrassed too many people publicly. She was one of Obama’s great innovators he used to gripe about kids demanding Healthcare among other issues. Many of these investor types are relatively anonymous, but her targets were a who’s who list of DC. Ugly celebrities who peddle their supposed expertise.
Whatever you think our Tech overlords, they are usually just greedy and boundlessly selfish. By any reasonable ethical standards, selling what amounts to fake medical treatment is a different order of sociopathy.
I think the NYC (and others, like the Guardian) are desperately trying to make us forget all those glowing articles they wrote about Holmes, long after it was clear to anyone with half a brain that she was selling snake oil.
If there is a clear, strong case to be made that Musk, Zuckerberg, etc. committed crimes, by all means throw the book at them. You might argue that the harms they have done ought to be criminal. So be it. It would probably just be simpler to have regulations and enforce them. But regulation, broadly speaking, ain’t criminal law; and to try and equivocate the general ethical wrongdoing of tech CEOs with a nakedly obvious prima facie case of criminal fraud because feminism (she was just too ambitious!! too bossqueen for this world!!) is risible. If you want to be a rich and powerful asshole bosslady, make sure you actually have something to sell first.
An interesting thing about Theranos is how some of the US Elite were hoodwinked, apparently mostly by Holmes’ charms. The book, Thicker than Water by Tyler Shultz, grandson of George Schultz a premier Elitist documents how the web was woven. Other notables were also drawn in like Mastermind Hank Kissinger and noted ambulance-chaser David Boies, now chasing down the elusive Andy of Buckingham. The docu on this scam is also very revealing.
It makes one wonder if the Elite, or at least some of them, actually believe their own fictions. A good test of this would be to find out how many have actually been vaccinated or have taken other alternative measures.
Tyler Shultz wrote a book about that? Good for him. When he tried to warn his grandfather – the Washington insider George Schultz – his grandfather not only refused to listen but virtually disowned him and pressured him to shut up about what he had found out about Theranos. In fact-
‘Tyler went to his grandfather’s house to discuss the allegations, but was surprised to encounter Theranos attorneys there, who pressured him to sign a document. Tyler did not sign any agreements, even though George pressured him to: “My grandfather would say, like, things like ‘your career would be ruined if [Carreyrou’s] article comes out.'” Tyler and his parents spent nearly $500,000 on legal fees, selling their house to raise the funds, in fighting Theranos’s accusations of violating the NDA and divulging trade secrets.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Shultz#Theranos_scandal
“The Big Lie That’s Destroying the Wild Horses of the American West”
I think that I know what happens to all those wild horses after they have been rounded up. Wife saw a story last week of all these American horses rounded up and sent across the border to Mexican abattoirs. Don’t ask me if they ever come back in another form or not.
You ought to see all the horse trailers leaving town the past few days on account of the KNP Fire. There must be 500 horse power here, and judging from what i’ve seen-27 of them get ridden regularly, the rest are really expensive big pets that eat you out of house and home.
A friend has a backhoe and one of the services he offers when Mr. Ed expires is to dig a hole deep enough to bury the horses delecti, it isn’t as if you can flush them down the toilet like a prized goldfish who went scales up on you.
‘the rest are really expensive big pets that eat you out of house and home’
I have no idea what you are talking about (glances sadly outside my window at the sight of a mini-herd of horses having their breakfast in our paddock).
These horses end up in Mexican slaughter house. The horse rescue people fight this as best they can by buying the horses from the feed lots usually for more than the slaughter houses pay. Most of these horses run around 200.00 to 250.00 US dollars. Many of these horses captured by the US Govt. end in slaughter. They claim to try and sell them to people, however with so many horses needing homes and wild horses requiring saddle breaking etc.
They are more difficult to sell. This is done for the cattle industry, you know those people that get to use public land and do not pay anything for that use. No horses should be sent to Mexico for slaughter. Please support ending this cruelty, as well as the helicopters sent to run these horses down. The US government does not need to control the numbers of wild horses, they need to scale back the cattle industry which causes huge environmental degradation on every level including public health.
The classic movie ‘The Misfits’ raised my consciousness at an early age (Trailer 1:35)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sswlbhQpk1A
Thanks Nikkicat and wol. That this is going on by our U.S. government is horrific. Reminds me of state authorities legalizing the killings of wolves mercilessly to cater to and appease the cattle industry. IIRC, even paying a rancher for a cow killed by a wolf ( sometimes with no actual proof of cause), was not sufficient for many “ranchers”. These particular ranchers have made it crystal clear that they act on their either hatred of wild wolves, or horses, or just enjoy having their fiefdoms of power or enjoy bloodlust. It is egregious that they expect and feel entitled to use public land and do not pay anything for that use.
The only group actively fighting the BLM’s pogrom against allegedly federally protected free roaming horses and burros is Wild Horse Education.
Several other groups have signed on to a devil’s compact with HSUS (Humane Society of the United States) et al to get special status as ‘caretakers’ of the pathetic few animals left in designated preserves in exchange for basically standing aside and wringing their hands.
Counterpunch is one of the very few who carry anything remotely resembling the truth about the hideous cruelties being carried out against the horses and burros who Nixon promised federal protection.
Whether it’s big cattle, big mining or big oil, the horses are an impediment to wholesale looting of the commons.
More captured horses and burros are now in wretched gulags now than in their entitled natural state.
If you think this isn’t a preview of coming attractions for others, think again.
Its reported in the Korean media today that the French have offered to help ROK build nuclear powered submarines.
I can stand corrected on this, but I think one reason why this has raised such ire with the French is that there was an unwritten agreement among the major powers that they would not sell nuclear powered subs on the open market. The submarines the French were intending to sell to Oz were expensively redesigned nuclear subs with diesel and battery replacing the reactors. I wonder now if the French are going to start something of an arms race in Asia if they offer their subs more widely. The Russians too might be interested, they are negotiating with Vietnam over IAP versions of their subs, they could well go the whole way and sell them more up to date versions.
Re. nuclear subs, PK, the other day you made the comment regarding thorium/molten salt reactors that if they were that great then national militaries would have been using them on SSNs.
In fact, the second nuclear sub the US built, the USS Seawolf, launched in 1955, did have a a liquid metal cooled (sodium) reactor — called the Submarine Intermediate Reactor (SIR) or Liquid Metal Fast Reactor (LMFR) — after Alvin Weinberg talked Admiral Hyman Rickover into it.
It was massively problematic ….
“Although makeshift repairs permitted the Seawolf to complete her initial sea trials on reduced power in February 1957, Rickover … decided to abandon the sodium-cooled reactor. Early in November 1956, he informed the Commission that he would take steps toward replacing the reactor in Seawolf with a water-cooled plant similar to that in the Nautilus. The leaks in the Seawolf steam plant were an important factor in the decision but even more persuasive were the inherent limitations in sodium-cooled systems. In Rickover’s words they were “expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.”
See the chapter, Fast Reactor Development in the United States
Thomas B. Cochran, Harold A. Feiveson, and Frank von Hippel
https://fissilematerials.org/library/rr08.pdf#page=101
The language above is polite. If the molten sodium had burst out of confinement in a submarine, the sub could have been lost with all hands as anyone who recalls their grade school demonstrations of what happens when you mix sodium and H2O will recall.
Addenum: Weinberg made the thorium reactor work for the reactor part of the nuclear-powered bomber project (what killed that project was the appearance of ICBM). So I don’t know if the practical possibilities for civil power use are as insuperable as some believe. What scares the crap out of me are the thorium reactor’s proliferation possibilities, contrary to the general hype and myth.
‘U-232 and the Proliferation-Resistance of U-233 in Spent Fuel’
by Jungmin Kang and Frank N. von Hippel
https://fissilematerials.org/library/sgs09kang.pdf
Yes, there is a fascinating history of attempts to use alternative designs in submarines going back to the 1950’s. The Russians went even further – their Alfa-class submarines used lead-bismuth reactors and had stunning performance. They could sprint faster than Nato torpedoes (41 knots). But the reactors proved too problematic and they abandoned the design.
This is the very long history of innovative modular reactors. Exciting early performance followed by…. quiet abandonment, often for opaque reasons (nobody wants to admit to having blown billions on a bad design). One day they’ll get it right. But I’ll believe it when they are more than just prototypes or press releases.
It’s my understanding that there’s a written agreement among 191 countries called Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. It is rather vague regarding nuclear propulsion for naval vessels, but only to assert the treaty doesn’t limit treaty parties technologically compared to non-parties.
Since USA and Australia are both parties to the agreement, nuclear submarines – especially those using highly enriched uranium as fuel – would be breaching the spirit of the treaty if not the letter. Which I think Iranian foreign minister already pointed out.
The uranium used in most (but not French!) subs is weapons grade, and will turn into weapons grade plutonium and also provide tritium which is needed for triggers of explosive nuclear devices.
The article link to The Scroll re: Mumbai antibody test levels appears to be missing the h in https://
https://scroll.in/latest/1005666/coronavirus-over-86-of-mumbais-population-has-antibodies-shows-fifth-sero-survey
Fixed it – thanks!
Charles Hugh Smith:
Ministry of Manipulation: No Wonder Trust and Credibility Have Been Lost
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept21/ministry-manipulation9-21.html
About manipulation of the cost of living, Social Security, and the stock market bubble(s).
Thanks for this, Flora.
I like Blunt and Short.
The 2 charts (Market Growth and .025% Wealth Growth) make the 2008 timeframe a conspicuous starting point.
Then there is that Stock Tip for players:
Speaking of magic, look at how the stock market hits a low and then roars higher the same day every month. The “market” manipulation is so obvious that Comrade Powell of the Federal Reserve Politburo doesn’t even bother explaining it. The Politburo cronies just buy the dip, the Fed and its proxies (Blackrock, cough-cough) jam stocks higher and the Fed’s cronies pocket billions–as shown on the chart below of the billionaires’ soaring Fed-generated wealth.
Some coincidence that the 19th is so, so, so repetative.
It was complete pandemonium’: the towns grappling with bear attacks bear attacks Guardian
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I’m so used to Sierra black bears being so mellow, they’re almost like big goofy dogs in comparison to grizzly bears that occasionally do in a human bean up north.
Nobody has been killed by a bear in Cali since 1875, and it was a grizz that done the deed.
I feel a little guilty about finding amusement amid misfortune, but it seems to have been a pretty canny bear. As the article tells us:
I would’ve thought the bear’s night vision was good enough without the goggles.
Until I hopped over to the article, I thought it was going to be about “bear attacks bear” attacks, presumably where a bear attacks a bear, and then one or both of them go on to attack one or more humans.
Western Montanan here. I have hiked, backpacked, fished, hunted and canoed in griz country since I was a child. I’ve only been lucky enough to have seen griz a little less than a dozen times even despite this.
I found this article odd, they talk about the Ovando attack then talk about Southwestern Montana and Yellowstone. Ovando is due east of Missoula, and just south of the Glacier National Park/Bob Marshall Wilderness corridor which has always had the highest density of griz in the lower 48. I wonder if this is because the writer was more familiar with Yellowstone but it means a bit when you talk about a town that refused to take griz seriously when they live in an area where there have been griz forever.
Grizzly predatorily attack humans only when they have become habituated to seeing humans and food together. This was the root cause of the famous Night of the Grizzlies attacks in Glacier and pretty much every other predatory attack in Glacier. Ovando didn’t take this seriously. Ovando didn’t have bear proof garbage cans. A quote in the article even showed how foolish they were when someone talked about black bears poking through garbage. I only saw them when I passed through Ovando this year. If people don’t clean up attractants, bears will become habituated to humans and some will decide to eat humans. I’m sure that the bear will be found to have been hanging around eating garbage. It is even possible that a resident was feeding wildlife and the bear was one of those.
We are pretty used to bears in my part of Montana, pretty much always have. The expansion of their territory only really became apparent to me in the late 90s when campgrounds in some areas switched to grizzly precautions. The rules are simple. Clean up your garbage, use bear-proof containers and garbage cans, and clean up your fruit if you have fruit trees. If you go backcountry in bear country, hang your pack or use a bear canister, carry bear spray, never cook, eat or keep food in your tent.
“Clearing the tinderbox”
This is a fascinating article this and could be the basis of a win-win agreement. Loggers are assured of a steady supply of timber to log in thinning out those forests which will provide plenty of work. Fires to burn off all the stuff on the ground will be more easily done & controlled and will result in less damaging fires going forward. Wukchumni in previous comments has talked about how you could just ride a horse through the trees in colonial times as that was what forests looked like. Most of the crowded ones of today are not the way that it is supposed to look. By recreating the forests of the past, everybody seems to win here.
The trees that need to be removed are rarely useful enough to mills to pay for the transport etc. While thinning is very needed, plans that involve timber production are doomed to fail. The mature trees are needed where they are with the scruff removed around them. One could produce ample wood chips for biochar etc. in areas with decent road networks but not much timber. I have heard of formerly well designed sales where the right to cut the big stuff was written in at the last moment to please industry which devastated the ecological value of the project and set the stage for fires again in the future. A great use for legions of surplus labor from a jobs guarantee is fire proofing our forests (also known as cleaning up after the timber and development industries). There is at least one (Russian made I believe) small transportable industrial mill designed for 16 inch or so diameter logs I saw years ago which are great for homesteading use but not economically competitive given the subsidies big timber get.
Some good news for Iran
https://thecradle.co/Article/analysis/2019
It also means almost all of Afghanistan’s neighbours are now in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Yes it does with a total population 3.5 billion people. Iran will now be able buy things they need that Amerika and puppets block sales on. Trade’s a winner and war not so much.
I was surprised myself at your figure for the population under the SOC and found that you are quite right. An article says ‘SCO with the current membership covers close to 50% of the world population and accounts for about one third of the world’s GDP.’ And with that Iran will proceed to make its currency bullet-proof against the dollar as they will probably use Iranian Rials or perhaps Chinese Renminbi if not direct trade. And in size the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is massive-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Cooperation_Organisation#/media/File:SCO_latest_map_update.png
> the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation
Sounds like the TPP except not…
Remember the “Co-prosperity Sphere?”
Read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_East_Asia_Co-Prosperity_Sphere
And now it doesn’t have the USA based right at its centre in Afghanistan. Its members don’t see eye to eye on everything, but at least where they do, they can go ahead with it if they can get the Taliban’s agreement.
cool piece on Moldova/Transnistria’s FC Sheriff
Interesting! One can go a LONG time and not come across a reference to Transnistria.
Related, I worked on a great documentary about the history of the Roma which featured Transnistria, unfortunately not in a positive light…
http://www.apeopleuncounted.com/
Devin Nunes learned from his master that if you file endless defamation lawsuits for tremendous amounts of money, people take notice-which is the whole game, and to date all of them have been tossed out by judges, but that was then and this is now.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/17/scary-court-victory-devin-nunes/
re: booster shots. I haven’t seen any info that indicates that they are any different from the original vaccines. That they are basically the same thing and the booster shot just refreshes the original vaccine as it declines in efficacy. Is that correct?
Yes and no. The interactions that a 3rd shot would produce are not well understood. So even though it’s the same shot, you’re not the same person who got the first two exposures. Also, there’s not a lot of science describing how to apply any boosters yet. Or whether to even apply the same boosters. Might the effect be better if a person who was originally inoculated with Pfizer to receive a Moderna booster? There’s not even really good evidence that a 3rd shot would help the immunocompromised. The reason people think they might need a 3rd shot is because they didn’t react well to the first set. But if they didn’t react to the first set as intended, what makes anyone think they’ll react as needed to a 3rd shot?
People want to think that a 3rd shot will perform as you describe. But there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that it will for most people. If you’re interested in hearing a thorough discussion about this topic, listen to the latest episode of This Week in Virology (aka TWIV). Those scientists do a good job of discussing the problem and come down on the side that boosters should not be distributed.
Thank you for the info!
From my (uninformed) point of view, the mix-and-match strategy makes lots of sense, especially if the same-brand boosters are just more of the same.
What do we know about the Novavax vaccine? – Expert Q&A
I’m going to be paying a lot of attention to this one.
This has been becoming more and more obvious over the past few weeks. It may indeed be directly responsible for the terrible numbers coming from Israel – where the relative risk reduction for the vaccine (They pretty much only used Pfizer) is now down to 16%. And cases after large swaths have received the 3rd booster are now going parabolic. Once an RRR is below the 25% level – we begin to approach the level of worthless.
https://news.yahoo.com/big-gap-between-pfizer-moderna-034719881.html
I have been carefully counting the exact vaccination information on every single one of the breakthrough cases I have been seeing ( assuming if they actually know).
I work in an area that was predominantly Moderna for the first several months because that was all we had.
It has been interesting to note that since August 1st, precisely 72.7% of the breakthroughs have been vaccinated with Pfizer. (Remember the large predominance of Moderna in my area – making the number all the more striking). All but 2 of the vaccinated admissions that I have had since August 1st have been with Pfizer.
Fascinating.
Either the dosing schedule, the dosing amount or something about the freezing/delivery is causing them to fail more rapidly. Or it could be something with the actual biochemical mechanics of the vaccine itself. Above my pay grade.
However – this has been a topic of conversation for weeks among colleagues both local and far away. Being noticed everywhere. Not that the news media would say a word for months – somehow the flood gates are being opened right now.
FYI – the discussion in the past few weeks at the FDA to only booster the Pfizer patients was most decidedly NOT because Moderna and J&J were tardy with the paperwork and Pfizer got theirs done first as multiple media stories put forth. Tardy paperwork for a multi billion dollar pharmaceutical my ass. Use your brains.
I like how the yahoo news article describes the conclusions of the research attesting to this waning efficacy as:
should’ve read NC!
That is interesting. As I recall, Pfizer chose to go it alone and not receive help or funding from the NIH. I wonder what decisions they made in that vacuum that are coming back to hurt them now?
Also, and this really isn’t Christian of me, but I do feel a bit of schadenfreude for the people who early on bragged that Pfizer was the better shot and made them elite. Seems like they should have kept their mouths shut.
Pfizer eased storage requirements in late February so that special purpose freezers weren’t needed. Analysts should be able to compare results from those vaccinated before and after that decision.
I always thought the cold chain issues with the vaccines may have led to many people getting spoiled doses, without anyone knowing it. If Pfizer was more likely to be ‘spoiled’, that could account for the larger-than-expected difference in relative risk reduction.
> I always thought the cold chain issues with the vaccines may have led to many people getting spoiled doses, without anyone knowing it.
There was this, back in December 2020: Pfizer decision to turn off temperature sensors forced scramble to ensure Covid-19 vaccines kept ultra-cold STAT:
I never understood that either. I got the Pfizer one because that’s what the place I went to had to give me. Didn’t make me feel elite. Made me feel like a lab rat in an experiment.
I was surprised when friends and family congratulated me on getting Pfizer shots. I certainly didn’t choose my flavor of vax and no one knew what was best or whatever at the time. I was told how lucky and special I was. It was the one celebrities were getting!
For my part, I nearly collapsed when I received the shot because (due to NC) I had some idea that I was being used as a lab rat. I have no fear of needles at all, by the way. I did not engage in the rah-rah as most folks I know did although I did feel some relief at the thought of being protected.
When people would tell me how great it all was, I would relay the experimental nature of the vaccines and how it was all a toss of the dice at this point. One anti-vaxxer I knew thanked me for hearing him out and for not waving pom-poms in his face like others were. Everyone else looked at me as if I were a bit ungrateful.
Now, when I tell people that Pfizer is apparently second rate and that my immunity is like .03 and a half % or whatever anyway, I don’t get a corresponding level of sympathy and concern from them. When I tell them my white blood cell count after the second shot was, in my doctors words, “Borderline.” with no other indications as to why that might be no one says “Oh my God, that’s terrible!” Instead, I get empty nods of acknowledgement and then they move on to whatever pops into their heads next.
Ah, but to note. To feel elite about getting a big Pharma shot ,of any brand , one is already a pitiful person. Pitiful cause the person obviously sees themself as one of the cool kids. Its as childish as high school brats, who think they are in the in crowd. Also, feeling like you are ” a lab rat” is an intelligent observation.
A tangential question here. Has there been any discussion about a killed virus vaccine? All I get when I raise the subject with the medicos that I encounter is Pfizer or Moderna, not even the J&J.
Thanks for taking the time to educate us.
Ambrit, I think there may be concerns about ADE in connection with a killed virus vaccine.
> Has there been any discussion about a killed virus vaccine
Sinovac and Coronovac are both killed virus. It looks like both are is effective against hospitalization and death “in real world settings” following its two dose regimen. Hard to sort this because the propaganda for and against national champions is so great, but this article looked legit to me. (The venue is open access but peer-reviewed; from Taylor and Francis).
Of course, neither are available in the United States….
“Of course, neither are available in the United States….”
That’s what I was afraid of.
It seems that “ye olde style” vaccines are being consciously suppressed in America for various reasons. I would not be surprised to see both sneeringly referred to as “Commievac” due to their sources.
Checking up the two at Wikipedia leads to the following ‘article.’ It claims that Sinovac and Coronavac are one and the same. Curious. I keepseeing them mentioned in tandem, as if they were two separate items.
This entire mess with the vaccines is a classic example of a Neo-liberal Cluster-blog.
Cynical old me must fall back upon received wisdom: “Follow the money.”
Stay safe!
Neo-liberal did you say?
From NY1 about Biden’s next week UN meeting
Biden to convene virtual COVID summit at U.N. General Assembly
“Build Back Better: A reference to Biden’s domestic agenda, leaders will discuss partnerships to address emerging threats and the creation of a “sustainable health security financing mechanism,” per the White House.”
https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2021/09/17/joe-biden-covid-united-nations-general-assembly
“sustainable health security financing mechanism” with “partnerships”. ooooh.
Yes. I want to get on that gravy train!
I get the feeling that “…discuss(ing) partnerships to address emerging threats…” is a new version of the old “form a committee” to study the problem dodge
There are so many ‘Weaselwords'(TM) in that short snippet I despair of ever getting an accurate translation.
Stay safe!
CoviVac is such a vaccine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoviVac_(Russia_COVID-19_vaccine)
Now, to get it to America.
Actually, I wonder what would happen if someone tried to arrange privately to distribute CoviVac here? I suppose the vaccine would need government approval that it was safe, but otherwise could this be stopped by the government?
Houston, we have a problem. (Actually a misquote – but close enough).
Said during an event from my childhood. When a major American scientific and technical achievement was having severe problems. Integrity, honesty, courage and ingenuity saved the day during that crisis. We are about to find out if this country still has it or not. We will see.
I got home from work last night – and watched about 3 hours of the FDA meeting video from yesterday. I have the benefit of being a physician and I possess the learned ability to cut right through the bull shit and recognize at least partially what is going on.
The Pfizer part was the standard issue “drug rep” bullshit I have come to be so accustomed to all my life. All talk no substance. Lots of manipulation of data. Lots of threads that make no sense with the statistics at hand.
The real concern for me was when the safety experts began to talk. I must admit that rage filled my heart. All these months of “perfectly safe, perfectly effective” really took a hit. I will put it like this.. These experts were saying things about the safety issues with these vaccines that would have had them censored instantly from Twitter, Facebook or YouTube. I am surprised that YouTube has left the video up. MC Escher could really have a field day with the hole these tech companies have dug for themselves.
It clearly has gotten the attention of many of my medical colleagues as well. We are going to see how this all plays out.
I guess I have little faith in our current establishment. After all, these Pfizer problems have been somewhat known for months. I have been hearing things for quite a while. AND YET – that is the vaccine the FDA gave full approval to. I honestly do not know if there is anyone left with the integrity to stamp out all the corruption.
Sorry guys, rant off. I do feel some vindication after watching that – that all these safety issues I have been seeing may have some substance. I just do not know where we go from there. It seems to me the die has been cast and the American people are entrenched on all sides.
This is exactly the worry public health officials for generations have had when we combine medicine with politics.
Lately I feel like anyone with integrity is kept as far away as possible from the levers of power. Almost like it’s directive number one.
“After all, these Pfizer problems have been somewhat known for months. I have been hearing things for quite a while. AND YET – that is the vaccine the FDA gave full approval to.”
And the full approval did not allow for a public comment session.
Please, IM Doc, please rant all you want. Not a single one of my doctors has ever considered the effects of these vaccines on my health as far as I can tell. In fact, my GP only grudgingly gave me Vitamin D supplements and was downright curt when I innocently inquired about ivermectin. She literally said it’s safety isn’t well understood, which I knew at the time was untrue. My GI noted that my white blood cell count had dropped mysteriously but it was up to me to discover that others had had a similar reaction to the vaccines. My shrink was dismissive of my acute concerns about protein spikes lodging in bone marrow although there were other doctors saying it was a thing. As far as I can tell, the medical establishment has drank the Kool-Aid along with everyone else.
My GP is a really nice guy who seems to be fairly timid. He goes strictly by the book. He told me that he wouldn’t consider prescribing Ivermectin should I test positive because it hasn’t been approved as a treatment for Covid-19 (not the words he used, but I forget) by the FDA.
This bunch have mixed some mescalin in with the Kool Aid. [Said Kool Aid is Purple. Neither Red nor Blue, but a blend. A Royal blend.]
Thanks, IM Doc, for telling us about the meetings. I looked into it, and I believe this is the link to the full 8 hours of meetings/presentations that were held to ultimately vote on whether to extend the boosters to all or just 65+. I believe there is a public comment section in this meeting according to the agenda.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQevYc2jX7Y
It’s definitely interesting. I did have to look up how to advance the video in 10 second increments (hit the letter ‘l’). Also the committee features at least 1 of the people who recently announced her resignation. After watching bits of these meetings, I can see why she would be insulted that booster decisions were made without any normal inputs and discussion.
oops, this was linked above. sorry!
C-Span’s Washington Live is including a discussion today with the FDA’s Dr. Offit about boosters and child vaccinations:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?514731-5/washington-journal-dr-paul-offit-discusses-boosters-vaccines-children
IM Doc, the Yahoo writers refer repetitively to “vaccine effectiveness rate”. These are all examples of the incorrect usage of the “relative risk reduction” statistic that your referenced previously, are they not? I am just asking for my own clarification – no other point intended. Thanks!
I think you are correct. Having followed relatively closely, I don’t recall hearing any measure of effectiveness against infection, and AFAIK, the data hasn’t been released, and may never have been measured. The company-provided results did not report on testing for asymptomatic covid among vaccine guinea pigs, which seems like either a massive oversight, or, more likely, a strategy for not learning/reporting what you don’t want to know/reveal.
The FDA panel’s rejection yesterday of mRNA booster shots for young adults is the first breach in the Pharmacutical Insurance Medical Plexus (PIMP) money extortion scheme. This cannot be hidden anymore. The vaccines have side effects to young men and women. There are significant numbers of breakthrough cases from fading efficacy. Also they do not prevent viral transmission. Reportedly 20 to 50% of the vaccinated are getting infected. Some are super-spreaders. This is what is driving the increased number of COVID cases in highly vaccinated nations; Israel, UK, and Iceland. Plus, in the USA, this was abetted by an incompetent CDC whose models indicated that coronavirus would be gone next month so they prematurely ended masking and social distancing for a “summer of freedom”.
Like the Soviet Union, corporate/state propaganda stops working when it no longer reflects reality. Anti-mRNA-vaxx Americans are media targets of shaming and scapegoating. Marketing falls apart when jabbed friends, relatives, colleagues and acquaintances catch COVID and some die.
The only way to prevent a pandemic driven economic/political collapse from the mRNA vaccine failure is to do everything else that works; masks, social distancing, home testing, quarantines, contact tracing, ventilation, air filters, early treatment, work/school bubbles, and restoration of a functional taxpayer funded national/local public health system. End the vaccine mandates and passports. They simply will not work. Find alternative treatments. Fire all past and present political/corporate government appointees. Close the corrupt CDC and NIH.
rumor has it locally that only 30% of ferry workers are vaxxed and they’ll be canned for not vaxxing. People are trying to come up with alternate plans and expecting to have to use other methods to get to the mainland…in the fall stormy season. I’m wondering whether inslee can call up the guard to crew the ferrys
I had a memory that one of Pfizer and Modern used a modified spike protein, stabilised in the unbound form (i.e. a protein shape designed to raise antibodies against the virus in the form in which it attacks) but the other used unstabilised spike.
It turns out I was wrong, both use a modified spike – and both used pseudouridine to evade detection of human like mRNA rather than uridine, as a nucleotide of mRNA. However I also found a fascinating critique of the mENA sequence design choices here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8310186/
1) Apparently Modern has uniformly replaced certain wildtype spike codons from the viral RNA with more stable / accurately transcribe human codons. Pfizer has only replaced the minimum number, on the reasoning that too many if a given codon will exhaust the local stock (around the ribosome transcribing the mRNA) of tRNA matching that codon which offers up the relevant amino acid. The 3-4x bigger Modern mRNA dose may be a consequence of an mRNA transcription bottleneck which Pfizer avoids.
2) Pfizer and Modern take different approaches to the start and stop codons. Errors of one in a hundred to one in a thousand result in improperly transcribed proteins (too long, too short).
So, the Pfizera vaccine may well perform differently to Moderna as there are some very different choices in the modified mRNA architecture even if they both use the same pre-fusion protein sequence.
My hunch though is the mRNA is just too clean a technology for the immune system. The immune system works by mounting a response to invasion and the invading hordes are all slightly different and the combinatoric response of the immune system amplifies that variation. mRNA brings a rifle to a blunderbuss/hand grenade/aerial bombardment fight. It would not surprise me if AZ and other approaches provoked a broader, longer lasting response.
So, just an anecdote about my looking for a new doctor and our illustrious medical system. So last October I noted that my aerobic capacity was falling. After several heart tests by my doctor, his advice was continue as is. Which, being the cynical sort I am, I suspected was because he wanted to continue to do various heart tests to benefit his practice instead of referring me to a cardiologist. But when he found out I had gone and found my own cardiologist (thank heavens I have the kind of insurance that I don’t need referrals to see a specialist), he decided that infact I did have cardiac arrthymia. Nice. (I posted a while back about my trip to the emergency room and my ablation – my heart problems was not hypochondria). And after a bloody incident with the blood thinner he prescribed, and the fact that I WAS NEVER CALLED BACK after a call to his office, I decided to fire his a$$.
So now I am looking for a new doctor, and I looked into this thing called MDVIP. A concierge service of doctors.
Anyway, every site I go to on the internet now has a physican from MDVIP in an ad. Fine. Except NONE of them are in the state of CA!!! After I filled out the internet form for this service, a telemarketer called me, and of course, it turns out NONE of the very few MDVIP physicians in Fresno are accepting new patients.
I wonder about the people who buy advertizing, and if they EVER look at their own ads. Come buy something from us that we don’t actually have…
Ah, but the fact that you called “proves” that the advertising “works.” Thus, the advertising company can publish glowing hagiographies about itself, and lure in more suckers, er, investors. As you point out, clicks are not sales. Someone needs to rethink their advertising strategy. Oh, wait. We’re now dealing with a stock market that is heavily weigheted with stocks that, in a simpler, saner time, would have been considered to have been fraudulent prospects due to their astronomical Price to Earnings ratios.
Essentially, today’s stock market manipulators have been “shorting” reality. Well, every “short” eventually rebalances.
I eagerly anticipate the time when the financial class as a whole has to “take a haircut,” at Dr. Guillotine’s Barbershop.
Stay safe!
That reminds me of an issue I’m currently trying to resolve. My eye doctor has been “fired” for reasons I won’t get into, and I’ve been looking for a replacement.
In my part of Indiana these people seem to believe it’s their God-given right to work with the public while unvaccinated. In the calls and visits I’ve made so far, the person I’m talking to gets very huffy about their “rights”. They also claim “medical privacy”.
They surely do have all those “rights”, but they’re not going to get my business.
Fresno Dan, perhaps do tele-medicine via China. Some doctors in China reportedly have you pay them if you are well…… not if you get sick. I like that logic. Great short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K5SycZjGhI (See 1:50) Or, better yet, go to China. Oh well, you may get sick on the plane. Well, maybe just stay in Fresno.
Stay safe, fresno dan. I hope that you can find a doctor worth his medical degree. Seen the same happen where we live too which makes it very frustrating.
> Anyway, every site I go to on the internet now has a physican from MDVIP in an ad. Fine. Except NONE of them are in the state of CA!!!
I seem to recall Google does this a lot. Search (for example) for a plumber, and you don’t get a list of local plumbers, you get a bunch of rent-seeking middlemen like you got.
I have often found Google Maps to be better. It’s possible to find local businesses by searching on likely names, in this case “Medical” or whatever. (A sign that Google is completely siloed internally, or else they’d be able to crapify their services uniformly, which would provide, I imagine, fracture points to break the company apart.)
Good for you, Fresno Dan!
May all you Doctors be in the top 10% and may you seldom need their services.
So the NY Times points out moral hazard in the availability of a treatment! A treatment! Because the “vaccine resistant” might not get vaccinated! How degenerate to even suggest such a thing. Shouldn’t we be trying to save lives however we can?
They Shunned Covid Vaccines but Embraced Antibody Treatment
And the headline is doused in contempt as well.
Granted to the extent that this might promote viral evolution, that is worth being concerned about. But as a device to beat the “vaccine resistant”, that’s bizarre.
pretty sure we need to find scientific justification for only using mAbs in the fully vaccinated.
wait on it.
top comment:”We need to stop trying to reason with these people. We need to create consequences for their choices. Not until we do that will they see how important their “freedom” is to them. You want an anti-body treatment instead of a vaccine, no problem, $2,000 out of pocket please. Weekly COVID testing because you won’t get vaccinated, cash or charge? You want an ICU bed, back of the line. Insurance premium due – pay up. It’s not enough to shame them (although they deserve it), they need to own their decisions which are currently owned and shared by the rest of us.”
> We need to create consequences for their choices
From the class that brought us Iraq, the financial crash, the mortgage crisis, our health care system, and of course, the virus itself, via international flights into New York, from where it spread to the rest of the counrtry. “Those people” really shouldn’t be yammering about consequences for their actions.
NOTE Notice also that they are, as the PMC do, leveraging their gatekeeping potential. In fact, I’m just waiting for the argument that we should not do Medicare for All because universal coverage would mean we can’t punish people for doing the wrong thing by denying them care.
like this: only social credit scores above 95% gets you Medicare
Theatre update:
I’ve been tracking theatre re-openings. (Didn’t you know — the pandemic is over!! Broadway’s BACK!!!)
I came across this info.
The Muny is a huge outdoor theatre in St. Louis that opened on July 26 to full seating capacity of 11,000.
https://muny.org/muny-to-now-open-at-full-capacity/
Then I happened to find this:
https://muny.org/muny-cancels-final-three-performances-of-chicago/
Thanks for this!
China Evergrande turns to advisers who helped fix debt debacles at Lehman, Noble Group, Luckin Coffee as investors brace for losses—-South China Morning Post
Evergrande Gives China an Impossible Equation to Solve—-Bloomberg
‘China’s Lehman Brothers moment’: Evergrande crisis rattles economy—-Guardian
Embattled Evergrande warns of growing default risks as pressures mount—-Reuters
What should follow is a revisitation of current global central bank policy from a historical backward looking glance, all based on the foundational child like faith and confidence that speculative asset prices only go up and that the same faith and confidence will endure, along with the unending rise in the prices of speculative assets. It is hard to ignore both the repetitive nature of history and what appears to be hard wired human behavior(s); where, for example:
1. “Once the fall of a bubble begins only a central bank or lender of last resort can stop it. Central banks “know how to handle financial crises: throw money at them, and after the crisis is over, mop the money up”[Kindleberger, 2000, 214].”
2. III. Nine Steps for Modeling Bubbles: “Fifth, the number of market participants grows large enough to bring in buyers who are normally outside the fray, causing the asset’s price to further deviate from its fundamental value. Fervor spreads “as firms or households see others making profits from speculative purchases and resales, they tend to follow: ‘monkey see, monkey do'” [Kindleberger, 2000, 15]. The “gullible” public plunges into the market, pushing positive feedback to the point of “mania.” “Manic” speculation detaches itself from truly valuable objects and follows objects of more questionable value. People concern themselves only with becoming rich rather than with understanding the process by which their wealth accumulates.”
“A Bubble on the Mighty Mississippi: An Application of a General A Bubble on the Mighty Mississippi: An Application of a General Model of Speculative Bubbles to the Mississippi Bubble of Model of Speculative Bubbles to the Mississippi Bubble of 1716-1720—- Alex Knight—-Major Themes in Economics
Volume 4 Article 6 Spring 2002
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1025&context=mtie
How long global central banks can maintain a “Step 5” ‘steady state’ remains to be seen. Historical past examples seem to suggest that the inevitable is a certainty, that is Step 5, followed by Steps 6-9.
I see that two of Gavin Newsome’s young children have tested positive for Covid-19.
This will be interesting to watch both to see what treatments they recieve and how other members of the Aristocracy react now that it is becoming clear that they and theirs are not immune.
I hope the kids come through this well, they will be getting an early lesson in what it is like to be a football
“This will be interesting to watch both to see what treatments they recieve and how other members of the Aristocracy react now that it is becoming clear that they and theirs are not immune.”
**********
The alternative press should really get on to this issue. For instance, in professional sports, where your health is your career, some athletes have balked at injections. And, vaccine failure could become a serious issue for the Oligarchs who own the pro sports teams.
Hard to believe, that many of the well-educated are not seeking alternative strategies/treatments for themselves and their families. Doctors included.
Another interesting scenario would be in a Covid lawsuit grilling the Judge as to his injection status. Maybe the jury too.
Why do so many misspell his name, is it supposed to be funny adding an ‘e’?
Last year I started asking friends & family who they knew that had Covid, and for a long time, just a few. Things have really changed now and it is much more prevalent. I don’t think it respects power.
> Why do so many misspell his name, is it supposed to be funny adding an ‘e’?
It took me awhile to get that straight; I don’t think people are trying to do anything. Since the Newsom clan are California oligarchs, perhaps Californians are more familiar with the correct spelling.
Alaska theatrics. Per worldometer they are averaging under 2 deaths a day
Apparently, the IDF isn’t murderous enough for some folks:
https://thecradle.co/Article/analysis/1992
“Writing in Haaretz, military correspondent Amos Harel gleefully reported that, in fact, the Israeli army has just as free a hand as ever to kill Palestinian children at will.
“The claims about restricting the soldiers … are groundless,” he wrote. “During the incident, sharpshooters fired 43 bullets, wounding 35 Palestinians and killing two, one of them a 12-year-old child.”
As reported above, the child was actually 13, but the sheer callousness at play here from ‘liberal’ Israel is notable.”
Naked Prepperism: Do’s and Don’ts
So I’m using up my dried beans for “regular life” meals and replacing them with canned beans for when SHTF. The dried beans take up waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much water, fuel for my rocket stove, and time. Canned beans are cooked and come with their own water.
Don’t toss out the bean water! It isn’t harmful and it has a lot of flavor and nutrients in it. Plus you don’t have to dip into your water supply that much to heat them up.
The rocket stove will burn pellets, twigs, and bbq briquettes but the briquettes don’t produce a flame. I’m going to reserve those for emergency heating situations, start ’em on the patio then carefully move them inside and place them on a heat resistant surface to provide some warmth. (Our super pointed out that the buildings heat is all electric and they have had issues in the past. A three day power outage in January would be problematic.) Also, you don’t have to fill the stove to capacity every time, I filled mine halfway with wood pellets and it produced a nice, tall flame that burned at least a half an hour before dying off. I could easily heat up beans and corn and make some tea to boot.
Strange days.
I fear you’re making a mistake with this strategy. Water and fuel will be a whale of a lot easier to find than food if the fit ever hits the shan.
Why not stock both? Canned food for short term issues, and carefully stored dry stuff for longer ones. An issue with canned beans is the high Sodium level – a can I’m looking at now has 370mg per half cup. An problem with dry beans is that after they get a bit of age they MUST be pressure cooked. Few modern folks understand what’s involved with this old technology, either in terms of safety or necessary equipment.
Thank you for this, ZS, I had no idea that dried beans require pressure cooking after a certain point. I just thought it was quicker.
I have a small stockpile of fuel for the rocket stove and I could scavenge more if I needed it. I stole everyone’s bbq briquettes from the basement storage; they stole mine all summer when everyone was grilling. I spent yesterday chopping up pieces of wood laying around in the back yard to store them. I’ll chop up the neighbor’s deck if I have to. I’ll chop up the neighbors if they try to stop me.
I’m kidding, I will work with my neighbors as best I can. But they did steal my briquettes so fair’s fair.
But water is a tough one. I’m in Brooklyn and there are no natural bodies of water nearby. I have one of those super efficient water heaters that holds less than a gallon in storage. Hooray for modern technology. :/ I have jugs of water, water bags, I’m collecting empty 5 gallon buckets from the super, and I have this behweemeth in storage:
https://waterbob.com/
It’s shaping up that I will only be able to prepare for relatively short terms situations, say a month plus. I really can’t doom-stead as I would very much like to do. Fresh foods are out, unless you count squirrel stew and pigeon pie. Eating one of those creatures in the city is probably equivalent to eating a bowl of industrial waste. Dried foods, at least beans, would tear through my water and a lot of fuel as well. It seems that I’m stuck with canned stuff although I am constantly reassessing the situation and looking for new ideas.
I fear you’re making a mistake with this strategy.
especially if one must assume a can opener…
OT, its quite the torrential downpour here in northern AZ. We thought monsoon was done. Feel for any place experiencing flooding or mud slides. But, its happiness for us. Nice to end on an upbeat note. As our fellow commenter says, Stay safe. Hope weekend is nice.
We have had a wet weekend so far here in the North American Deep South. The outer bands of Ida gave us three inches of rain over two days last week. We are 22 inches of rain above “normal” for the year, (almost 68 inches of rain for the year so far,) or about 50% above “normal.”
Stay safe! Be sweet!
If you were to hook up a 2 inch galvanized pipe to your modem and sent any excess you can spare to me online, I have a similar setup here to receive it via satellite.
Ah! Is this like the Acme brand dessicated water?
They are reporting more press than protestors at the DC J6 rally.
Compare that with the more massive rally they had this year for Medicare for All and silence from the press.
I’ve lost use for all this BS.
Bret Harte
There less comment than I would have hoped on that preprint research paper announcing the discovery of SARS-CoV2 spike domain in wild bat populations in Laos. This is big news. One of the key building blocks of SARS-CoV2 was available from nature.
The Straits Times article then mangles the science, almost as if on purpose. It chooses to report “no evidence for a lab leak” and then misrepresent the furin site as something acquirable from nature.
Read what they wrote and then what the cautious scientists wrote.
Straits Times
“No evidence supporting the lab-leak theory has emerged. Last month, the United States intelligence community ruled out the possibility that Sars-CoV-2 was developed by China as a biological weapon, but no consensus was reached on its origin.
The lack of furin cleavage may be explained by insufficient sampling in bats, or by acquisition of the furin cleavage site during chains of transmission in an alternate animal host, or during unreported circulation in humans in the early stages of the outbreak when the virus may have caused few symptoms, the authors said.”
Research Paper (my CAPS emphasis)
“However, we found no furin site in any of these viruses on sequences determined from original fecal swab samples, devoid of any bias associated with counterselection of the furin site by amplification in Vero cells16. Lack of furin cleavage may be explained by insufficient sampling in bats, or by acquisition of the furin cleavage site THROUGH PASSAGES OF THE VIRUS IN AN ALTERNATE HOST or during an early poorly symptomatic unreported circulation in humans. FINALLY, WHERE THESE INTERGENOMIC RECOMBINATIONS AROSE AND THE EPIDEMIOLOGICAL LINK WITH THE FIRST HUMAN CASES remains to be established.”
The ST chose to write “chains of transmission in an alternate host”, implying endemic/epidemic spread of the wild virus in an animal species whereas the scientists very carefully wrote “passages of the virus”, which admits of both natural spread and the lab technique of repeated passage (e.g. in ferrets) for gain of virulence of human viruses.
The careful scientists finished on a point ignored by the ST entirely: that we don’t know where the recombinations required to piece SARS-CoV2’s furin cleavage site with wild hACE2 binding bat spike occurred nor how they got into a human population. Again, the scientists are very carefully not to rule out the hand of man in this, for example by lab leak.
Media stenographers!
RE: Coronaviruses with a SARS-CoV-2-like receptor-binding domain allowing ACE2-mediated entry into human cells isolated from bats of Indochinese peninsula Research Square. Preprint.
First things first: thanks a lot for this link.
I hope this article is clearly understood and IMNSHO, it throws lots of sand into the lab leak theory even if the origin of SARS CoV 2 remains unknown. It simply characterizes, in the most extensive way so far, coronavirus present in bat populations in Indochina mainly in genus Rinolophus very much like the well-known RaTG13 isolated by the Wuhan lab from Yunnan caves.
First, it shows that this RaTG13 is not the most proximal ancestor of SARS CoV 2 but there is yet an unidentified ancestor that might have evolved by recombination between some bat sarbecovirus: Some similar to this RaTG13 and some others that could be similar to the newly identified bat sarbecovirus. Some of them, but not RaTG13 have receptor binding domains with high homology to SARS CoV 2 and truly able to infect human cells with ACE receptor that are effectively neutralized by human anti-SARS CoV 2 antisera. SARS CoV 2 is very much a mosaic of bat sarbecovirus sequences and the results indicate that recombination and virus exchange among bat species is quite common.
This is obviously a question of concern since one of the conclusions that you get is that Rhinolophus sarbecovirus still have potential to be the source of new virus that might become the origin of human diseases and epidemics. Thus, the factors that increase the frequency of zoonosis should somehow be controlled via either elimination of transmission routes through the commodification of wild animal meat, scales or fur and/or the introduction of sanitary checks in such routes plus epidemiologic monitoring. The second alternative implies regulatory measures in those markets and would probably kill what is quite an informal business.
There remain many unanswered questions and similar analysis should be done to identify reservoirs and intermediate species, if, and as soon as those activities are resumed (hopefully not). Even if some residual activity remains at local level some sanitary checks would be advisable.
Naked Prepperism: Water storage
So I have been collecting 5 gallon buckets from my super, they have the high powered soap they use to clean the floors in them. I cannot store water in them directly as they are tainted. However, in a stroke of prepping brilliance, it occurred to me that I could use the big trash bags in the basement to triple line the buckets! I just bumped my short term water storage capacity up to 40 gallons! It pays to scrounge around when you are prepping.
@Zachary Taylor and tegnost: A brief response to your earlier points, unfortunately I cannot prep for the long term as much as I would like, so cans it is for now. I have purchased low-sodium beans to mix with my saltier stock when the times comes. As for a can opener:
https://www.madcityoutdoor.com/products/tru-spec-p-38-can-opener?variant=23548234503¤cy=USD&utm_medium=product_sync&utm_source=google&utm_content=sag_organic&utm_campaign=sag_organic
Finally, apologies to JLS for my morbid sense of humor earlier. It’s how I deal.
Something for the end of the day. Remember AOC talking about the women who designed her ‘Tax The Rich’ gown which she wore a week ago and described her as a refugee and a woman of colour? Yeah, about that. She was a refugee OK – but from Toronto, Canada. And she is dating a billionaire. And has been avoiding paying her taxes. And apparently not paying her own interns-
https://twitter.com/MozFrame/status/1439727351663898629
A graduate of the AOC Institute of Performative Arts.