PP NewsBrief: 2021-06-14

We need to begin to reclaim control over the institutions which have such oversized roles in our lives. As you read this people work tirelessly to see to it that you are dumb and docile. Let's stop them.

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Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?

"Had Narrative Science – a company that trains computers to write news stories—created this piece, it probably would not mention that the company's Chicago headquarters lie only a long baseball toss from the Tribune newspaper building. Nor would it dwell on the fact that this potentially job-killing technology was incubated in part at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Those ironies are obvious to a human. But not to a computer.

At least not yet.

For now consider this: Every 30 seconds or so, the algorithmic bull pen of Narrative Science, a 30-person company occupying a large room on the fringes of the Chicago Loop, extrudes a story whose very byline is a question of philosophical inquiry. The computer-written product could be a pennant-waving second-half update of a Big Ten basketball contest, a sober preview of a corporate earnings statement, or a blithe summary of the presidential horse race drawn from Twitter posts. The articles run on the websites of respected publishers like Forbes, as well as other Internet media powers (many of which are keeping their identities private). Niche news services hire Narrative Science to write updates for their subscribers, be they sports fans, small-cap investors, or fast-food franchise owners.

And the articles don't read like robots wrote them:

Friona fell 10-8 to Boys Ranch in five innings on Monday at Friona despite racking up seven hits and eight runs. Friona was led by a flawless day at the dish by Hunter Sundre, who went 2-2 against Boys Ranch pitching. Sundre singled in the third inning and tripled in the fourth inning ... Friona piled up the steals, swiping eight bags in all ...

OK, it's not Roger Angell. But the grandparents of a Little Leaguer would find this game summary—available on the web even before the two teams finished shaking hands—as welcome as anything on the sports pages. Narrative Science's algorithms built the article using pitch-by-pitch game data that parents entered into an iPhone app called GameChanger. Last year the software produced nearly 400,000 accounts of Little League games. This year that number is expected to top 1.5 million.

Narrative Science's CTO and cofounder, Kristian Hammond, works in a small office just a few feet away from the buzz of coders and engineers. To Hammond, these stories are only the first step toward what will eventually become a news universe dominated by computer-generated stories. How dominant? Last year at a small conference of journalists and technologists, I asked Hammond to predict what percentage of news would be written by computers in 15 years. At first he tried to duck the question, but with some prodding he sighed and gave in: "More than 90 percent."

...

Hammond assures me I have nothing to worry about. This robonews tsunami, he insists, will not wash away the remaining human reporters who still collect paychecks. Instead the universe of newswriting will expand dramatically, as computers mine vast troves of data to produce ultracheap, totally readable accounts of events, trends, and developments that no journalist is currently covering.

That's not to say that computer-generated stories will remain in the margins, limited to producing more and more Little League write-ups and formulaic earnings previews. Hammond was recently asked for his reaction to a prediction that a computer would win a Pulitzer Prize within 20 years. He disagreed. It would happen, he said, in five.

...

The startup's first customer was a TV network for the Big Ten college sports conference. The company's algorithm would write stories on thousands of Big Ten sporting events in near-real time; its accounts of football games updated after every quarter. Narrative Science also got assigned the women's softball beat, where it became the country's most prolific chronicler of that sport.

But not long after the contract began, a slight problem emerged: The stories tended to focus on the victors. When a Big Ten team got whipped by an out-of-conference rival, the resulting write-ups could be downright humiliating. Conference officials asked Narrative Science to find a way for the stories to praise the performances of the Big Ten players even when they lost. A human journalist might have blanched at the request, but Narrative Science's engineers saw no problem in tweaking the software's parameters—hacking it to make it write more like a hack. Likewise, when the company began covering Little League games, it quickly understood that parents didn't want to read about their kids' errors. So the algorithmic accounts of those matchups ignore dropped fly balls and focus on the heroics.

Narrative Science's writing engine requires several steps. First, it must amass high-quality data. That's why finance and sports are such natural subjects: Both involve the fluctuations of numbers—earnings per share, stock swings, ERAs, RBI. And stats geeks are always creating new data that can enrich a story. Baseball fans, for instance, have created models that calculate the odds of a team's victory in every situation as the game progresses. So if something happens during one at-bat that suddenly changes the odds of victory from say, 40 percent to 60 percent, the algorithm can be programmed to highlight that pivotal play as the most dramatic moment of the game thus far.

Then the algorithms must fit that data into some broader understanding of the subject matter. (For instance, they must know that the team with the highest number of "runs" is declared the winner of a baseball game.) So Narrative Science's engineers program a set of rules that govern each subject, be it corporate earnings or a sporting event. But how to turn that analysis into prose? The company has hired a team of "meta-writers," trained journalists who have built a set of templates. They work with the engineers to coach the computers to identify various "angles" from the data. Who won the game? Was it a come-from-behind victory or a blowout? Did one player have a fantastic day at the plate? The algorithm considers context and information from other databases as well: Did a losing streak end?

Then comes the structure. Most news stories, particularly about subjects like sports or finance, hew to a pretty predictable formula, and so it's a relatively simple matter for the meta-writers to create a framework for the articles. To construct sentences, the algorithms use vocabulary compiled by the meta-writers. (For baseball, the meta-writers seem to have relied heavily on famed early-20th-century sports columnist Ring Lardner. People are always whacking home runs, swiping bags, tallying runs, and stepping up to the dish.) The company calls its finished product "the narrative."

...

The Narrative Science team also lets clients customize the tone of the stories. "You can get anything, from something that sounds like a breathless financial reporter screaming from a trading floor to a dry sell-side researcher pedantically walking you through it," says Jonathan Morris, COO of a financial analysis firm called Data Explorers, which set up a securities newswire using Narrative Science technology. (Morris ordered up the tone of a well-educated, straightforward financial newswire journalist.) Other clients favor bloggy snarkiness. "It's no more difficult to write an irreverent story than it is to write a straightforward, AP-style story," says Larry Adams, Narrative Science's VP of product. "We could cover the stock market in the style of Mike Royko."

Once Narrative Science had mastered the art of telling sports and finance stories, the company realized that it could produce much more than journalism. Indeed, anyone who needed to translate and explain large sets of data could benefit from its services. Requests poured in from people who were buried in spreadsheets and charts. It turned out that those people would pay to convert all that confusing information into a couple of readable paragraphs that hit the key points.

Narrative Science, it so happened, was well placed to accommodate such demands. When the company was just getting started, meta-writers had to painstakingly educate the system every time it tackled a new subject. But before long they developed a platform that made it easier for the algorithm to learn about new domains. For instance, one of the meta-writers decided to build a story-writing machine that would produce articles about the best restaurants in a given city. Using a database of restaurant reviews, she was able to quickly teach the software how to identify the relevant components (high survey grades, good service, delicious food, a quote from a happy customer) and feed in some relevant phrases. In the space of a few hours she had a bot that could churn out an endless supply of chirpy little articles like "The Best Italian Restaurants in Atlanta" or "Great Sushi in Milwaukee."

(Narrative Science's main rival in automated story creation, a North Carolina company founded as Stat Sheet, has broadened its mission in similar fashion. The company can't compete with Narrative Science's Medill pedigree and so has assumed the role of a feisty tabloid in a two-paper town. It too got its start in sports, writing accounts of Major League and big-college games as well as creating a trash-talk generator called StatSmack. After realizing that turning data into stories presented an opportunity far larger than sports, the company changed its name to Automated Insights. "I used to put limitations on what we do, assuming our stories would be specific to data-rich industries," founder Robbie Allen says. "Now I think ultimately the sky is the limit.")

...

...even if Narrative Science never does learn to produce Pulitzer-level scoops with the icy linguistic precision of Joan Didion, it will still capitalize on the fact that more and more of our lives and our world is being converted into data. For example, over the past few years, Major League Baseball has spent millions of dollars to install an elaborate system of hi-res cameras and powerful sensors to measure nearly every event that's occurring on its fields: the velocities and trajectories of pitches, tracked to fractions of inches. Where the fielders stand at any given moment. How far the shortstop moves to dive for a ground ball. Sometimes the real story of the game may lie within that data. Maybe the manager failed to detect that a pitcher was showing signs of exhaustion several batters before an opponent's game-winning hit. Maybe a shortstop's extended reach prevented six hits. This is stuff that even an experienced beat writer might miss. But not an algorithm.

Hammond believes that as Narrative Science grows, its stories will go higher up the journalism food chain—from commodity news to explanatory journalism and, ultimately, detailed long-form articles. Maybe at some point, humans and algorithms will collaborate, with each partner playing to its strength. Computers, with their flawless memories and ability to access data, might act as legmen to human writers. Or vice versa, human reporters might interview subjects and pick up stray details—and then send them to a computer that writes it all up. As the computers get more accomplished and have access to more and more data, their limitations as storytellers will fall away. It might take a while, but eventually even a story like this one could be produced without, well, me. "Humans are unbelievably rich and complex, but they are machines," Hammond says. "In 20 years, there will be no area in which Narrative Science doesn't write stories."

For now, however, Hammond tries to reassure journalists that he's not trying to kick them when they're down. He tells a story about a party he attended with his wife, who's the marketing director at Chicago's fabled Second City improv club. He found himself in conversation with a well-known local theater critic, who asked about Hammond's business. As Hammond explained what he did, the critic became agitated. Times are tough enough in journalism, he said, and now you're going to replace writers with robots?

"I just looked at him," Hammond recalls, "and asked him: Have you ever seen a reporter at a Little League game? That's the most important thing about us. Nobody has lost a single job because of us."

At least not yet."

From 2012, thanks to @themorrigan1973 for highlighting it.

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Pregnant women in Australia & New Zealand need not wait until after delivery to get Pfizer jab, updated vaccination advice says

"Noting that “the risk of severe outcomes from Covid-19 is significantly higher for pregnant women and their unborn baby,” a joint statement from the two groups said that: “Global surveillance data from large numbers of pregnant women have not identified any significant safety concerns with mRNA Covid-19 vaccines given at any stage of pregnancy.”

“Furthermore, there is also evidence of antibody in cord blood and breast milk, which may offer protection to infants through passive immunity,” the release said, suggesting that getting a jab during pregnancy could potentially extend a level of temporary immunity to the baby before and after birth.

A separate RANZCOG statement noted that, while the vast majority of infected pregnant women would experience mild or moderate cold/flu-like symptoms, there was also a greater potential risk of complications, including reduced lung function, increased oxygen consumption, and changed immunity.

...

Due to the relatively low prevalence of the disease in Australia, RANZCOG had previously advocated a cautious approach and recommended that pregnant women wait to see what the risks associated with the vaccine were before deciding to get the shot.

Meanwhile, the New Zealand government’s vaccine rollout plan in March had designated pregnant women as a priority group, along with some 1.7 million people who are deemed to be at higher risk if they contract the disease, such as diabetics.

...

Though noting a lack of data on the “safety of Covid-19 vaccines in lactating women” or the “effects of mRNA vaccines,” the statement said such vaccines are “not thought to be a risk to the breastfeeding infant.”"

If you're still turning your country into a penal colony and locking everyone in their homes at the smallest sight of disease what exactly is the point of also encouraging pregnant women to get the experimental jab?

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In the Tales Told by Sewage, Public Health and Privacy Collide

"...Christian Daughton, a retired environmental scientist from the Environmental Protection Agency...

...

The tool Daughton was eager to share with the Navy begins at the toilet. He first proposed it 20 years ago: analyzing sewage to see what it says about public health. The field, called wastewater-based epidemiology, began in the early 2000s with researchers isolating the residues of illegal drugs to understand community-wide use. But over the last two decades, wastewater-based epidemiology expanded to look at the remains of other substances, such as pharmaceuticals and alcohol; pathogens, to identify existing and emerging infectious diseases; and substances made in the body that illuminate the overall health of a given population. The research can happen at a single wastewater treatment plant, or scale up to capture information from an estimated three-quarters of the U.S. population and roughly 25 percent of people worldwide.

Daughton and other experts believe wastewater-based epidemiology — which is fast, inexpensive, and adaptable — could help transform public health in the United States, where, according to a 2013 report by some of the leading health researchers in the country, residents have shorter life expectancy, higher rates of obesity and chronic disease, and the worst birth outcomes compared to peer countries. Sewage monitoring could help address these challenges by providing unbiased health snapshots of entire communities — regardless of access to health care or participation in testing or surveys.

In the 20 years since Daughton first published the idea, countries all over the world have made wastewater analysis a standard public health measure — and they’ve been able to use this existing infrastructure during the Covid-19 crisis. But Daughton and others feel that the U.S., which produces 34 billion gallons of wastewater daily, has yet to adequately leverage this health information to fight Covid-19 and other health challenges.

As the first months of the pandemic played out in the U.S. and Daughton read the news over breakfast, he knew that had sewage testing been in place as the pathogen began to spread, it may have saved lives. But, at the time, few American health officials were even familiar with the field. It wasn’t until months later that communities in the U.S. began actively looking at sewage to help curb the pandemic — and a media frenzy ensued in late May....

...

The history of sewage epidemiology reveals what has shackled its development in the U.S.: concerns over privacy and stigmatization, politicians making decisions about scientific research, and a lack of dedicated funding. Experts believe the field holds enormous potential for tackling existing and future health threats....

...

...a group of Italian scientists took up Daughton’s idea, and looked for hints of cocaine in sewage and in the county’s largest river — the Po River, where treatment plants dump wastewater from about 5 million people.

In 2005, the Italian team released an alarming study that concluded that the Po carried the equivalent of about 160,000 lines of cocaine each day, an amount far higher than national estimates of cocaine use — so high it surprised the scientists themselves. The Italian study, Daughton explained, showed his idea worked and set off an explosion of interest in this new type of wastewater research.

European scientists embraced the approach and founded the Sewage Analysis Core Group Europe, or SCORE, a multinational consortium aiming to launch widespread sewage analysis for drugs. In their first study, published in 2012, SCORE researchers analyzed wastewater from 19 cities across 11 countries, essentially conducting a urinalysis of some 15 million people. The EU adopted sewage testing as a standard for monitoring drug use and provided multiyear funding to help SCORE scientists collaborate and establish best practices. SCORE started training graduate students — the next generation of scientists — in this new field, laying the groundwork for a collaborative approach for using wastewater analysis to address public health.

Soon after the project in Italy, the U.S. dipped its toe into wastewater testing for illegal drugs. In 2006, David Murray was chief scientist at the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Tasked with advising the White House and guiding policies to reduce both drug supply and demand, Murray was frustrated by a lack of information....

...

Murray had been in touch with Daughton and knew about the work in Europe. So he set up a feasibility study at a handful of wastewater treatment plants around Washington, D.C., to look for the signs of cocaine use. “We were very excited,” Murray remembered. If the project was successful, he said, it could give researchers what they lacked when it came to drug control policy: reliable data on consumption.

But it wasn’t long before Murray started getting pushback. No one wanted their city to be labeled the cocaine capital of the country. There also was a public perception of “government scientists looking in your toilet to bust you for smoking a joint,” he said. Even though wastewater testing involved pooled samples that couldn’t identify individuals, households, or even neighborhoods, the perception was that it invaded people’s privacy. Congress killed the project and yanked most of Murray’s $40 million research budget. “We lost a real opportunity,” he said.

...

...China instituted national wastewater surveillance for illegal drugs as well, and officials there have used wastewater data to help communities understand whether anti-drug campaigns are working and, in at least one case, to help track down and arrest a drug manufacturer.

Gradually, researchers began to look beyond illegal drugs, scouring wastewater for residues of legal substances such as tobacco, alcohol, and prescription medications. And they began to consider the social environment of the data. A study in Greece, for example, used wastewater data to understand health impacts from the county’s debt crisis that began in 2009. When Greece slashed public health spending and experienced nearly triple the usual unemployment rate, wastewater analysis revealed that the use of antidepressants, drugs used to treat high blood pressure, and ulcer medications shot up. In Australia, researchers tied key health factors to socioeconomic and demographic conditions by linking sewage information on drug use, alcohol and tobacco use, diet, and more to census data.

While fears over invasion of privacy and stigmatization of communities blocked the field in the U.S., other countries found ways to address these concerns. In Australia, government officials made drug data public, helping to normalize the program and increase transparency. “Most places are quite open to this if it has benefits to the community,” said Jake O’Brien at the University of Queensland, a partner in that country’s national wastewater testing program for drugs. And in Europe, SCORE established ethical guidelines for wastewater analysis projects, while the EU’s drug monitoring agency continues to publish an annual report on drug use trends informed by sewage data, surveys, and other sources.

...

But using wastewater to investigate broad health measures presented other roadblocks in the U.S., said Rolf Halden, an environmental health engineer at Arizona State University. Halden and colleagues have done some of the most robust wastewater-based epidemiology work in the U.S., investigating exposure to harmful chemicals and developing — in collaboration with the City of Tempe — an online dashboard of sewage-derived opioid data for use by health officials. As Halden explained, federal funding for health research is typically distributed according to which disease or specific health challenge investigators are trying to address, such as cancer, heart disease, or hepatitis. With wastewater research, investigators are often tracking multiple markers of health. “We don’t fit into any of the bins,” he said. Striking out time and again on funding requests, Halden said, “we were doing this on a shoestring.”

Then, a couple years ago, things began to look up for Halden — and the broader field of wastewater-based epidemiology in the U.S. In 2019, the National Institutes of Health granted $1.5 million to his team to develop an early warning system for flu outbreaks, the first effort in the U.S. to leverage national sewage data to track a viral spread. Looking to the sewer to stave off viral outbreaks is not new. Israel and other countries have been monitoring wastewater for the poliovirus for decades, and in 2013, after being declared polio-free, Israel was able to quash a potential outbreak by quickly vaccinating nearly a million children after routine sewage testing detected the virus. As in Israel, Halden and his team aimed to use sewage testing like doppler radar, identifying potential flu hot spots and tracking the movement of the illness across the country.

...

Shortly after Chinese researchers isolated SARS-CoV-2 in January 2020, researchers across the globe began to try to figure out how to detect it in wastewater. When Daughton learned of the virus, he saw the danger right away. His first thought: Sewage testing could help stop the spread. He raced to publish a paper on wastewater analysis, submitting it just days after the first stay-at-home orders went into effect in the U.S. in March. The paper published in Science of the Total Environment two days later.

...

By early summer, Daughton’s approach was in use on six continents and in nearly every U.S. state. As researchers all over the world jumped into wastewater testing, they realized that sewage provided a picture of the virus in communities days — sometimes even up to two weeks if clinical test results were delayed — before clinical tests and could give officials a jump start in responding.

Wastewater analysis could reach entire populations, especially in places that lacked the resources for adequate Covid-19 testing. It was also comparatively cheap. One study estimated that nearly three-quarters of the U.S. population could be tested for Covid-19 through sewage analysis in as little as 48 hours, at a cost 15,000 times less than the current gold-standard, PCR testing. Data from sewage analysis would include infected people who showed no symptoms — people who weren’t likely to be otherwise tested, but whom the CDC has estimated are responsible for about half of all SARS-CoV-2 transmissions. While wastewater sampling can’t identify who is infected, the results could help officials direct testing supplies and alert local health officials to upcoming spikes in the virus before patients crowded into hospitals.

...

...In order to look at local sewage data, many communities relied on CARES Act funding and partnered with universities for analysis. Hundreds of towns and cities in 43 states and provinces participated in a free wastewater testing program offered by Boston-area startup Biobot Analytics, which bills itself as the first company in the world to commercialize data from sewage. The firm, which ran pilot programs before Covid-19 hit to work with communities to measure opioid residues in wastewater, pivoted quickly to look for SARS-CoV-2 in the spring and raised $4.2 million in venture capital to work with local governments on sewage surveillance for the virus.

...

...Starting last spring, the NSF granted hundreds of thousands of CARES Act dollars to wastewater-based epidemiology projects focused on SARS-CoV-2, including establishing the first Research Coordinated Network in the field, a NSF-funded effort to support collaboration among researchers. “It’s been like a gold rush,” said Halden. The EPA released information to the public about a pilot wastewater analysis project the agency was conducting in Ohio involving multiple treatment plants in Cincinnati and prisons in the state. The goal of the project was “to work out some of the kinks” in methods, according to Jay Garland, a senior research scientist at the EPA. And the CDC announced a plan to ramp-up a national wastewater surveillance database by the end of 2021.

It’s not yet clear whether these efforts will translate into the kind of nationwide, government-supported programs already in place abroad, which Daughton and others believe will be vital to create a viable system of wastewater-based epidemiology in the U.S. “We can’t get there if the focus remains on local projects,” he said. Halden agrees. “The informational power of wastewater is horribly underestimated in the U.S.,” he said, and a countrywide effort is “direly missing.”...

...

But not everyone is willing to have their sewage monitored. Already, some U.S. communities, such as a handful in North Dakota, are refusing to participate in wastewater testing because of concerns over privacy. “Nobody wanted it,” said Natalie Bugbee, a city commissioner in Tioga, North Dakota, where town officials rejected an offer from the state to test sewage for SARS-CoV-2. Because a sizable population of workers from out of town come and go on nearby oilfields, “it wouldn’t be a fair analysis of our local community,” Bugbee said. Locals also worried that sewage testing could trigger a shutdown of the town.

Privacy concerns and stigmatization issues are likely to remain challenges to sewage analysis in the U.S. “People are rightly or wrongly suspicious when you have government testing,” said Margaret Foster Riley, an expert on health care law at the University of Virginia.

“What we need to do is have public discussions about what it may mean to have your wastewater tested,” she added."

These people can't accept that they don't need to know everything. Nor can they ever. The best they will achieve is the most dangerous of all: the illusion of understanding.

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CDC to convene ‘emergency meeting’ on rare heart condition linked to Covid vaccines

"Though a previous CDC notice said the cases of myocarditis were “rare,” affecting just a small fraction of nearly 130 million fully vaccinated people in the US, another document issued two weeks later noted that there was a “higher number… observed than expected,” namely in those aged 16-24. Most experienced symptoms after their second dose of the vaccine.

Tom Shimabukuro, a vaccine safety official for the CDC, told CBS News that some of the reported cases will likely be ruled out after closer review, though he added that the preliminary information is “consistent” with what Israeli researchers have found in vaccine recipients. Last week, Tel Aviv’s Health Ministry said the condition is likely linked to immunizations, particularly for young men.

While rare, other side effects have been tied to the coronavirus vaccines previously, with several reports of spinal cord inflammation known as transverse myelitis. As of late March, however, out of nearly 9,500 negative reactions reported to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), only nine cases of the condition were confirmed in recipients of the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson shots, according to a study published in Oxford’s QJM journal."

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China gives Sinopharm green light to use Covid-19 vaccine on children aged 3 to 17

"Beijing has given its approval to Sinopharm for one of its vaccines to be administered to children between the ages of three and 17, after Sinovac’s shot was given the green light for use on youngsters last week.

Speaking to reporters on Friday, Shao Yiming, a researcher at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said Sinopharm’s Beijing Institute of Biological Products subsidiary had been granted approval to use its vaccine on children and adolescents.

The approval means the vaccine, which is administered in a two-dose regimen, can be given to those aged between three and 17. In May, it was granted emergency approval by the World Health Organization...

...

As of June 10, China has administered a total of 845.30 million Covid-19 vaccine doses, but there is still some way to go if it is to inoculate all of its 1.4 billion people. While Beijing has not specified the number of first and second doses given, it’s believed that only around a quarter of the population has been fully vaccinated."

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The War of Corporations on Our Children

"The older generation takes a strange pleasure in reiterating comments about the absence of responsibility, the lack of focus and the indulgence of young people, using these arguments as a means of excusing the bleak future that their children and grandchildren face. Those arguments are rarely original, but rather they are force-fed to baby boomers by the media as a means of relieving them of all responsibility and of distracting them from the true causes of the tragic shifts that they observe obliquely.

It is assumed that for reasons unknown, somehow, young people are less capable, less attentive, less motivated and less concerned with planning for their careers and their futures. This argument makes the previous generation feel somehow more worthy and superior and that is precisely the hook that is lodged in the sweet treat.

...

To be sure, the breakdown of a sense of community, of the concepts of personal responsibility and of ethical commitment among youth is a sad reality. It is accompanied by isolation, loneliness, and uncertainty about the future that undermines all aspects of life.

But the problems that our children face are not brought on by themselves, but rather the result of a brutal assault on their childhood by corporations that seek to dominate their values and their thinking from the cradle on so that they are unable to think for themselves, unable to create their own communities, or their own lives, and dependent on content, and on relations, supplied by those corporations, and the investment banks that lurk behind them.

When our children should be playing outside, catching frogs in the woods, building forts out of tree branches, or helping their parents to plant lettuce and carrots—and thereby understand the relationship between humans, water, soil and nature, they are encouraged, compelled, to get all information from the television or internet which is dominated by these multinational corporations, organizations that see our children not as future citizens, or as the building blocks for a constitutional democracy, but as consumers to be mined and manipulated so as to increase profits.

When our children should gain wisdom and insight from their own experiences, from their interactions with friends and teachers, and should learn first from their parents and grandparents, uncles, aunts and neighbors, they are forced to watch television, to surf the internet and to play various video games from an increasingly young age. Their parents are told that exposure to technology will make their children competitive and modern—it is a sickening lie.

...

We must understand that the commercial advertising with which our children are bombarded is not primarily aimed at selling products. The primary agenda of what had degenerated into brainwashing and propaganda is to inculcate in them a passive, dependent, reactive and flippant attitude that will render them incapable of thinking for themselves, of searching for solutions on their own. They are indoctrinated to turn to the media, controlled by corporations, for solutions to every aspect of their personal lives.

...

As a result of such behavior modification, the capacity of the individual to read and comprehend long and complex texts, to understand multidimensional problems in the economy and society, and to engage others in meaningful dialog is destroyed. A few years soaking in the narcissistic consumer culture forced on youth produces people incapable of anything other than working to feed themselves and releasing accumulated stress by indulging in self-centered video games, pornography, food consumption, or action films.

...

When this political crisis, this social disaster, is brought up in polite conversation, the knee-jerk response is that we must make our messages brief and dumb them down so that youth will listen. No one in the room suggests that we need to create a culture so as to protect our youth from this war, to allow them to focus, to concentrate, to read and digest books, to enjoy art and music, and to create it themselves.

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The commercial media, advertisers and entertainment moguls have intentionally created a culture of forgetfulness. We are trained by the media to forget what happened yesterday, to lack any historical perspective on politics, culture, society and technology. But if we cannot remember our past, other than the slick images fed to us by the media, then we cannot establish our own interpretations, and democracy becomes impossible.

So also, we forget what happens to the plastic that we dispose of. We forget what the implications for the world of foreign wars are. We forget what will happen to future generations if we continue to destroy the ecosystem in the pursuit of a narcissistic consumption culture.

...

The Constitution defends freedom of speech for the citizen. It does not grant corporations the right to brainwash and destroy the minds of citizens from childhood, rendering them incapable of making their own decisions.

As long as this criminal operation is tolerated, we will have no democracy and no government. This criminal operation must end now and the kings of advertising and public relations must face jail terms for their criminal actions against our youth, their use of technology and marketing to enable the “rape of the mind.”

Corporations, banks and the advertising and public relations firms that they fund are destroying our minds, and our ability to perceive reality. Because they attack stealthily the means by which we perceive, we are unaware of the tremendous damage that they do. Just as the brain does not feel pain, so also our schemata for perception of the world are blind to how they are undermined by false narratives and stimulation aimed at behavior modification.

Nothing less than a revolution can end this war on our children, this extermination campaign against our future."

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A Hard But Simple Way to Detoxify American Politics

"I suggest something relatively simple but by no means easy. Restoring some amount of health and normalcy to our society will mean accepting that our crisis is spiritual in nature and that the solution is profound moral transformation. No spending bill, media blitz, or electoral victory (no matter how large) will suffice adequately to confront this challenge at its root.

The primary, driving force in American life today is resentment. The “oppressed”—sexual and racial minorities, women, the disabled, immigrants, and so on—resent those whom they have been told oppress them—straight, white, heterosexual Christian men. And the “oppressors” in turn resent those who have viciously and baselessly smeared them as moral monsters: racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic. The so-called oppressed resent their so-called oppressors because they perceive themselves as victims of hostile forces outside of their control, while the so-called oppressors, in turn, resent the so-called oppressed just as fiercely and also out of a sense of victimhood—because, in their case, they have been unjustly maligned without any recourse.

...

That resentment holds such a privileged place in our politics and culture makes sense, since resentment activates, in a twisted way, the human need for justice, which, according to Federalist 51, “is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.” Because justice sits at the heart of politics—a people’s common life, its means of pursuing the common good and human flourishing—it is only a matter of course that its perversion, resentment, is similarly central. So, how can we dispel resentment and restore our collective sanity?

By recognizing resentment’s active presence and operation in our lives and then resolving to abandon the supposed “right” to vengeance that it seems to license—to stop daily feeding our revenge fantasies.

It will help to make this concrete. Those who join Alcoholics Anonymous are invited to journey, using “the Big Book” and with the help of a sponsor, through the 12 Steps, a path of spiritual awakening and growth that, if diligently followed, frees them, one day at a time, from their compulsive use of alcohol. After taking the first three steps—recognizing that they are powerless over their behavior and that their lives have become unmanageable, that a higher power can restore them to sanity, and that they need to turn their will and lives over to the care of their higher power each day—they arrive at Step Four: “Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”

...

Typically they find that “[r]esentment is the ‘number one’ offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else. From it stem all forms of spiritual disease . . . [and] we have been spiritually sick. When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically.”

...

But what makes doing this so difficult is that “this world and its people were often quite wrong.” In other words, the alcoholics are, in some sense, justified in being resentful. They really have been wronged; it was not all in their heads. So, how does this inventory help alcoholics overcome their destructive urge to nurse their grudges?

They come to resist that urge because, in examining their resentments list, they come to see that those who had harmed them were also “spiritually sick,” just as they themselves were (and still are), and because they make a conscious effort to “[p]ut . . . out of [their] minds the wrongs others had done, [and] resolutely looked for [their] own mistakes.” In so doing, the alcoholic learns to take responsibility for himself and extend grace and mercy to others, just as he wishes to be treated and how he would treat a dear friend. Critically, he learns to forgive so as not to be imprisoned by his emotions and cut off from growth and healing.

...

For alcoholics, “to drink is to die.” In a similar way, unless the American people, all of them, can learn to give up their resentments—and the poisonous, righteous fury they license—we will continue to indulge our compulsive, addictive rage, which eventually will destroy us."

========

THIRD member of FDA advisory body resigns, calls Alzheimer's drug approval ‘worst in recent US history’

"Three scientists from a FDA advisory committee have resigned after the US food and drug regulator rammed through the approval of a controversial drug to treat Alzheimer’s disease in the face of near-unanimous opposition.

Ten out of 11 members of the Peripheral and Central Nervous System Advisory Committee voted against approving the drug aducanumab, with one voting “uncertain,” during the hearings in November 2020. On Monday, the FDA granted it accelerated approval anyway.

“This week, the aducanumab decision by FDA administrators was probably the worst drug approval decision in recent US history,” wrote Aaron Kesselheim of Harvard and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts – who became the third member of the committee to resign in protest this week.

The agency switched to accelerated approval “at the last minute,” based on the “debatable premise” that the drug’s effect was likely to help patients, but “this pivotal question was not discussed at the Advisory Committee meeting, and its premise was specifically excluded from discussion,” Kesselheim wrote. Furthermore, some of the questions asked of the committee were “worded in a way that seemed slanted to yield responses that would favor the drug's approval.”

...

Developed by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Biogen and Japan’s Eisai, aducanumab  – also known by the trade name Aduhelm – was touted as the first treatment that directly targets the cause of Alzheimer’s disease, instead of merely helping to ease its symptoms. Biogen’s stock surged at the news that the intravenous treatment – the cost of which is estimated at $56,000 a year – had been greenlit by regulators.

Aduhelm is a monoclonal antibody designed to remove a substance called amyloid from the brain of Alzheimer’s patients. Doctors are not in agreement whether this is the cause or the symptom of the disease that presently afflicts an estimated six million Americans. Clinical trials were halted in 2019 after the drug was not shown to be effective, but Biogen “re-analyzed” the data and told the FDA that some patients who received higher doses had shown a slower rate of decline than others.

The FDA then argued that the drug “is reasonably likely to predict a clinical benefit to patients,” even if it did not show clear clinical benefits in slowing down the progression of Alzheimer’s."

========

Not even wildlife can go undetected: Australia trains AI road cameras for KOALA ‘facial recognition’

"A team of artificial intelligence specialists from Griffith University in South East Queensland have been working on high tech cameras they plan to install at koala crossings on the east coast of Australia. Their aim is to train the equipment to use ‘facial recognition’ technology on the animals, to be able to better understand koalas’ patterns, if any, in crossing the roads.

The study plans to challenge their AI equipment to not only distinguish koalas from other animals, but to be “powerful enough” to determine individual koalas. To create recognition patterns, researchers will team up with koala conservation groups and sanctuaries in the area, who can describe certain koala appearances and movements.

...

Specialists say they will be analyzing this data to try and understand how the cuddly creatures are moving across habitats and whether they need any assistance while crossing the roads in particular. “The goal of this project is to set up an AI-based monitoring facility to monitor the koalas’ road crossing behaviors, so that we can analyze how many koalas are using the facilities to cross the road using underground pathways or the above-road crossings,” Zhou said.

...

Australia, a member of the Five Eyes alliance, already boasts one of the most advanced mass surveillance networks, and Sydney has recently made it to the list of top 10 “most surveilled cities in the world” outside of China."

This is a great play. You've hid the sinister aspect of increasing AI surveillance capabilities behind a cute, cuddly koala.

========

Man in Pelosi’s Office Discusses Jail Conditions for January 6 Detainees

"Richard Barnett, 60, traveled from his home in Arkansas to hear Donald Trump’s speech then made his way to the Capitol complex. He entered Pelosi’s office, where a few photojournalists just happened to be stationed; Barnett put his feet on the desk, posed for the cameras, and left Pelosi a note. (He is quite a character, I can safely say after a lengthy phone interview.)

...

That incident started a legal and personal nightmare for Barnett, who spent nearly four months behind bars before a federal judge finally released him in April.

...

...Like dozens of people charged with offenses related to the Capitol building protest, Barnett was ordered to remain behind bars in a D.C. jail with no chance to make bail even though he has no criminal record and faces no violent charges.

Joe Biden’s Justice Department, nonetheless, is seeking pretrial detention orders for many Capitol Hill protestors; in some cases, prosecutors argue the defendants pose a threat to society because they doubt the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

This has led to the creation of a Shawshank of sorts for January 6 detainees. The government, according to Barnett, opened up a shuttered jail facility specifically to house January 6 detainees. The accused are in restrictive housing, ostensibly to protect them from the jail system’s general population—but the conditions are anything but special.

Upon arrival at the D.C. jail, January 6 defendants are ordered to quarantine for two weeks to follow COVID-19 rules. Detainees are not allowed to leave the quarantine cell for any reason.

Once the quarantine period is over, detainees are moved to another permanent unit, which is not unlike the quarantine quarters. “First off, all the cells are contaminated with black mold, even the sink we are supposed to drink out of,” Barnett said. “The guards gave us some kind of cleaner but it didn’t really work.” The cells are roughly 70 square feet with a concrete slab for a bed, a toilet, and a sink.

Detainees are held in solitary confinement conditions for 23 hours a day. Breakfast, Barnett said, arrives at 3:30 in the morning and is inedible “slop.” Dinner usually consists of bologna.

During their one hour of free time each day, detainees must attend to all personal business including hygiene such as a shower....

...

The guards, Barnett said, go out of their way to make life harder for the detainees. “It is purposeful and deliberate collusion, to make every facet of your existence miserable,” Barnett said. This includes instances of physical abuse; guards slammed Barnett’s face into the concrete floor at one point. After confronting the guards for not following prison rules—Barnett read the Department of Corrections inmate handbook when he arrived—and accusing one guard of sexual harassment, Barnett was placed in the D.C. prison’s general population as punishment.

Another detainee, Barnett recounted, was attacked in his cell in the middle of the night, handcuffed and beaten “senseless,” Barnett said. He suffered extensive injuries. “They damn near killed him.” Another young man with evident emotional issues was heavily maced by guards one night when he had some type of breakdown. “I shouted at them to leave him alone.”

...

The prison’s library, the guards told the detainees, is closed. Access to law books and other reading material is nonexistent, Barnett said. The detainees started their own newsletter with paper and pencils purchased through the commissary. They also sing the National Anthem at 7:00 each night to lift morale. “These guys are patriots.”

Attorney-client privilege also is nonexistent, Barnett and his lawyers, Joseph McBride and Steven Metcalf, told me. There is no privacy during discussions and video calls can take up to two weeks to schedule.

...

I asked Barnett what he would like to tell the American people about what’s happening. “Very simple, pray for the guys who are still in there,” he said. “They’re not working and have a family to support. Help pay their bills.”

Barnett and his lawyers will soon launch a website where people can donate and learn more about his experiences and follow his trial. (GoFundMe, his lawyer said, won’t permit accounts to help raise money for January 6 defendants.)

“Freedom is not free,” Barnett said."

========

Nevada Takes Step Toward Making Election Fraud Part of the Normal Process

"Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak signed a bill into law Wednesday creating a permanent mail-in voting system and other reforms that will inevitably increase voter fraud.

The bill passed along party lines in the state Assembly and Senate, both controlled by democrats.

“At a time when state legislatures across the country are attempting to roll back access to the polls, I am so proud that Nevada continues to push forward with proven strategies that make voting more accessible and secure,” Sisolak said in a statement to the Epoch Times.

...

Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington are the other five states that have existing permanent mail-in-voting systems, in which voters are automatically sent mail-in ballots around election time.

Under the new Nevada law, every registered voter will receive a ballot for all elections unless they opt out by submitting a written notice. It also allows the clerks to verify signatures manually or electronically, and to establish requirements for an electronic device to verify signatures.

...

Additionally, the law allows for same day voter registration."

========

Post-Pandemic Metamorphosis: Never Going Back

"...Recall that first order effects: every action has a consequence. Second order effects: every consequence has its own consequence. We can also think of these as direct (first order) and indirect (second order) effects.

The pandemic's first order effect was to shut down the frenzied hamster wheel of American life. The consequence of the pandemic--shutdown--had its own consequence: people had the opportunity to experience life outside the frenzied hamster wheel, and ask themselves why they tolerated the dead-end purposelessness, demeaning rigidity and life-draining stress of the whole spinning contraption.

For a great many people and dynamics, the pandemic was a transformative catalyst, and there is no going back to pre-pandemic "normal." Many people experienced a liberty and expansiveness they'd either never experienced or forgot that such things even existed. This experience triggered a Metamorphosis, and they're never going back to pre-pandemic "normal" because "normal" was a nightmarish landscape of exploitation, drudgery, pathology and meaningless servitude.

...

Though none of the spending orgy cheerleaders seems to have noticed, global tourism caught a potentially fatal disease in the pandemic's shutdown, as residents discovered their cities, beaches and neighborhoods were actually beautiful and liveable again once the tourists all went away.

While all the corporations and investor-"hosts" profiteering from overcrowded, ruined cities and islands cheer the return of the millions, the residents are vowing to never go back. In Venice, the residents don't want the giant cruise ships returning ever again. In Hawaii, only 14% of the residents approve of a return to the pre-pandemic crush that was ruining the state.

Freed of the burdens of tourism, people are now asking cui bono, to whose benefit? The apologists and PR hacks answer is always the $10/hour dead-end jobs, but the residents no longer buy the bogus PR, as they realize all the "benefits" flow to distant investors, not residents.

...

People caught on that the returns on the frenzied hamster wheel of "normal" have been diminishing for decades, but everyone was too busy to notice. They all attributed their burnout, exhaustion and emptiness to specifics within their own lives, but now they've awakened to the reality that burnout, exhaustion and emptiness have always been systemic, i.e. the consequence of the system as the returns for participants diminish with every passing day."

========

Culture, Self and Law

"Self produces manifest culture, and then that culture shapes self. First, self is externalised as an expression — some kind of act or presentation. The expression appears as an object, a thing in the world, which is related to other objects, which are then reappropriated by man back into the self.

...

If self is unselfish this process ultimately begins “beyond” culture, with consciousness, to which the reappropriated modifications are subject to some kind of evaluation — I can reject the bullshit music, the ugly council estate, the advertising lies and the witless jibber-jabber.

If, however, self is fundamentally egoic, consciousness is given no freedom to operate, and the caddis case is formed almost entirely from without, walling up inner quality, and with it, genuine individuality.

...

...just as if one person screws another down and forces words into her head it is no longer a conversation, so if society (culture plus self, or selves) fills its schools and lines its streets with messages that all say the same thing, with no way of escape, then we are no longer individuals participating in a society, but stackable storage units for whomever or whatever is filling us with the things we are forced to feel, eat, look at, think about and energetically engage with; in short, build our selves with.

Culture was once built from nature, and, more intimately, from the unselfish origin of that which nature and culture have in common. This is why pre-civilised man considered nature and culture to be identical. The more culture came to be built from itself, the less it served the essence of man, until it came to compel man to accept its objective validity or suffer the consequences. Not in an overt tyrannical sense, but in the unalterable fact of its existence.

You can think away culture or pretend it doesn’t matter — ignore, say, the rules of language or pretend that they are dispensable, but you will be punished, mocked, excluded, brought back into line or killed. Likewise, if your social self is at odds with your individual self, then all kinds of problems are on their way. This does not mean that I must be something other than my social self, but that I am continually compelled to harmonise the two, and if I can’t — if I cannot be in the world who I feel I really am—then I will suffer in the world, as everyone who is honest does.

Ego keeps this suffering at bay by endlessly affirming its social self. As that most unreal and egoic of sources, the average Teevee-American has it, ‘I am a cop, it’s what I do…’ ‘I am a mother, it’s what I do…’ Or, alternatively, ‘This is my town, these are my people’.

...

...Not that there is anything wrong with inhabiting a role, nor with identifying with a community, nor that there aren’t always elements of self that do not fit into what is required by the social world; rather that ego hides from itself in its social representation.

Man may be psychologically and spiritually deformed by his activity within the egoic group or institution, he may work in a mechanical manner, in mediated environments, in order to produce or manage things which have no recognisable human meaning, and he may be forced to conceal his horror and disgust behind an upbeat mask of emotional management, but if there is no truth beyond a self-constructed from the group, he will defend his deformity, and consequent duplicity and misery, as truth.

All criticisms of the group are taken to be criticisms of the self — ‘I am mortally offended by your prejudice’ — and all criticisms of the self are taken to be prejudice against the group — ‘It’s not because you are repulsed by my moral deformity, it’s because you are racist/homophobic/anti-white/anti-American etc’.

The seamless unity of self and society in the egoic mind explains man’s total blindness to systemic constraints, and to the fundamental paradigms of the system. They are one with his ego, which is why, today for example, man spends so much time thinking and talking about voting, about reforming teaching, about having fairer laws, about creating cleaner motorways and so on and so forth; but not a word on how disabling democracy is, or education, or law, or transport, or the encompassing system, which is as invisible to him as water is to a fish, or anger is to a van driver.

The social self and its inner component, the personality, are maintained through communication, through constant confirmation (either explicit or implied) of who I am to others. When there is nobody to validate my personality, it dies, which is why solitude is so necessary to people with character — who need to periodically let their personality wither away in winter so that spring life might grow—and so terrifying to people without character, who must exist in a constant stress of forced blooming for the world.

Likewise, if a critical avenue of personality-confirming communication is permanently disrupted—if a lover leaves, or a mother dies, or self is forced to live in another country, cut off from its culture—the whole world crumbles. The egoic self, forged through the shared reality created with a partner, a family or a society, is ripped out.

This is why people stay in abusive relations and in abusive societies. Leaving the objective world of the known is to be plunged into chaos, a fate worse than death for ego, which may even choose death in preference.

Loss of self-reinforcing dialogue is not just a threat to the individual self, but to the social body, which provides all kinds of ritualised means by which the disrupted self is expected to deal with its disarray and return soothed and placated to the ‘normal’ world. A spouse torn apart by the death of a partner is fine, we can accept and sympathise; but if the grief is too noisy or outstays its welcome, then the social world will take measures to exclude it, quarantine the infection as it were, and remove conspicuous misery from the scene, so that production and consumption can smoothly proceed.

...

It’s fine for a man to masturbate to high-budget porn, or for a woman to spend a month on safari, but to actually do something about their dreams, particularly the genuinely wild ones, is out of the question, and again, if substitutes are not functioning, the machinery of social meaning must step in to make sure such desires are suppressed or channelled into something ‘productive’, or at least that the dreamer is reminded that if they are not, he can expect to pay an horrendously high price to realise them.

The most potent and pervasive threat to selfish society is not in this or that criticism, loss or disruption, but in consciousness itself; which is everywhere and at all times. Consciousness must therefore be continually suppressed, and man’s relation to it, to ever-present unselfish quality, continually managed.

This is largely done, on a social level, through laws, legitimations, taboos and totems. These are the rules of society — the ‘walls’ of cliched thought, feeling, sensation and activity — which range from everyday non-verbal norms of behaviour (we greet in such and such a way, we react to bad news in such and such a way), through more explicit linguistic formulations of what is right and proper (the shared ethics of society, encoded in its wisdom, its maxims, its proverbs and even its jokes), through the art, myths and folk tales of a culture (by which we learn what is appropriate or tasteful, and what is to be condemned), through the explicit legal codes of a civilisation or of its various institutions, up to, finally, the various sacred justifications or secular theories which explain, in the most abstract sense, why things are as they are.

...

Note that men and women must be continually reminded of these justifications and continually enjoined to affirm their commitment to them, just as communities of belief must be continually reinforced and protected. Human beings are never far away from their original nature, and easily forget what has been programmed into them from without.

...

Laws, legitimations, taboos and totems, being self-justifying and self-created, are entirely causal. The notion of law is coterminous with the notion of causality; a non-causal law is a contradiction in terms. In reality there are, ultimately, no laws in nature, in consciousness or in human affairs, because there is, ultimately, no causality in them; the world today was no more caused by the world yesterday than the morning was caused by the night before.

The laws we find in history (e.g. Hegel’s or Marx’s), or in nature (e.g. Aristotle’s or Newton’s), or in society (e.g. Confucius’ or Comte’s), or in consciousness (e.g. Leibniz’s or Freud’s), are products of self, and therefore only applicable to self; occasionally useful, as facts and causes are, but with zero qualitative truth.

The truth of an individual or society moving through ‘time’, like that of a tree, like the meaning of an act or the essence of reality, are invisible to causal consideration, which can only perceive a tumult of interrelated bits and pieces, slices and sections, and shrink-wrapped events, never the whole; which means it can never give an appropriate response to the whole (except by accident) which becomes impossible as soon as laws are set, and [directly or indirectly] enforced.

This is why people without direct experience of reality, isolated from it by money, power, fame, technology or drugs, rely on laws and legitimations, and give them the same existential status as experience. When it comes to right or wrong, for example, they cannot trust their experience, because they do not have experience, and so they cleave to factual-casual calculation.

Property is inviolable, therefore stealing is wrong; a man steals an apple, therefore he must be punished, no matter how wealthy the supermarket he steals from. Context — the history of the supermarket, the functioning of the market, the state of society — and consciousness — compassion for the man, empathic understanding of his life — cannot be allowed into consideration. To do so would disrupt one’s entire life.

...

When these ideas harden into eternal truths — when, in the management phase of civilisation, they are codified or written down, in holy texts or in statute books, or in the consciences of men and women — they serve, and can only serve, that which is incapable of abandoning facticity and causality, the inherently dishonest, selfish and violent ego. This is why you can’t trust a law-abider."

========

Texas to build its OWN border wall as Governor Abbott ramps up illegal-immigration feud with Biden

"The security push will include enlisting state and local law enforcement officers to arrest illegal aliens for crimes ranging from trespassing to criminal mischief to drug smuggling. Abbott said prosecutors will be called upon to obtain convictions, and additional jail space will be provided to accommodate the expected surge in prisoners.

Those efforts will help create an environment in which illegal aliens don't want to cross into Texas “because it's not what they were expecting, it's not the red carpet that the federal administration rolled out to them,” Abbott said. “They are going to jail in the state of Texas.”

The state government also will help Texas landowners obtain compensation from the federal government for damages resulting from Biden administration policies."

========

The Myth of Authority

"Humans are incapable of looking after, organising, protecting or ruling themselves. They need someone or something in power to do it for them. This creed emanates from every pore of the owner, the professional, the state, the institution and the egoic, unconscious parent.

Often the message is an explicit exhortation, or order, to respect authority, obey the prince or know your place, but usually, in the highly developed system, The Myth of Authority is implicit, an unspoken assumption that a world which has the power to command you and I, is normal, right and natural.

Obedience is fostered and sustained by rewarding those who submit and by punishing those who rebel. Schools are structured to identify and filter out children who ‘don’t play well with others’, who ‘voice strong opinions’, who are ‘disruptive’, ‘insubordinate’ or have ‘a relaxed attitude’; admission panels of elite universities and interviewers for top jobs are hyper-sensitive to threats from those who might turn out to be intractable; records, references and even whispered reputations, increasingly systematised, follow trouble-makers to their grave; and if, somehow, someone who is resistant to authority finds their way through this minefield to a position of influence, they will be worn down, undermined and, eventually, ejected.

...

It seems that the typical manager is, at best, an unimpressive human being, and, more usually, skilled in little more than dithering, hiding facts, manipulating information, obfuscating class-relations, rolling over like a puppy when those above him shift their weight and paying lip service to fine qualities and instincts while stamping them out whenever they actually appear.

But these are all precisely the qualities which the system demands. Actual intelligence, competence, originality, human-feeling, generosity and integrity are, if they come into conflict with these core values, instantly and automatically rejected.

Underpinning the global filtering mechanism for compliance, an equally vast programme exists to validate it. History, biology, anthropology and psychology are all employed to justify, on the flimsiest evidence, the idea that human beings are rigidly hierarchical, selfish, warlike, in need of power to function or simply blank slates that exist to be programmed by whoever has their hands on the control panel.

Standard system history teaches us that only power is real or meaningful and the corporate media show us, over and over again, in its fawning reports of royalty (alive and dead), its lavish costume dramas, its celebrity gossip, its fascination with Big People and its uncritical coverage of politics[2] that power is either normal, necessary and unavoidable, or that it does not really exist.

And in some crucial respects, it no longer does. The final stage of the system has migrated a large part of the exploitative architecture of its earlier forms into the psyche of the individual. The disciplinary machinery of institutions still exists, as do positions of authority within armed forces, prisons, governments and so forth; but the uploading of large portions of the self, the digital exploitation of human communication and emotion, and the development of automated techniques of surveillance and control, have led to an introspection or privatisation of key aspects of systemic subjugation and power.

Just as collective urges for sociability and communication have been redirected towards exclusive desires and personal ambitions, so frustration at the boss or the dominant classes is now directed at one’s own lack of creativity, health, happiness, productivity, marketability or will-power.

...

The Myth of Authority is one of the foundational myths of the system. If man realised, in his own experience — rather than as a mere theory — that the source of meaning is his own experience, his own consciousness, and that he does not need to be told what to think, what to feel, what to want and what to do, the system would vanish like a bad dream on waking. But of course this bad dream has a much greater hold on him than any sleeping nightmare, as the source of his conditioning is not merely a mistaken intellectual belief, a system-serving lie that he has picked up on the way, but his entire self, shaped from birth to accept the form of the given world as ultimate reality.

This is why systems-man is such a pathetic coward; his self, from the moment it enters of the world, is deformed into a subservient appendage to the Way Things Are. As soon as he can walk his steps are directed towards a life made by others; his games are provided by others, his explorations shaped by others, his learning given from above and his life decided for him. The world he looks upon — overwhelmingly, massively, powerful — is entirely mediated, entirely made by other minds.

He doesn’t have to learn to submit to these others, or ever even think about them, he is completely dependent on the reality they have made for him and so, by the time he is an adult, he is anxious about upsetting authority, apathetic about resisting injustice, unable to think for himself and terrified of sticking his neck out.

...

The advanced system, of course, makes it very easy to be a coward.

Why, for example, should I stick my head above the parapet when I am in a trench full of strangers? Who cares if a few Jews or a few foreigners vanish? Who cares if a few radicals or dissidents go missing? Who cares if someone with integrity gets fired or arrested for their integrity?

Who cares—I don’t. Not really. I don’t even know these people.

And yes, yes, I know, it is sad and terrible that rainforests are being cleared and communities uprooted and all those poor folk in foreign lands have to work in nasty factories to make my trousers, but I’ve got more important things to worry about. There is just no real, concrete, reason to worry about my neighbours, my colleagues, the hundred species that went extinct today, or the people who make all the objects I use; and so the courage to do so also appears abstract and unreal.

Compounding this unreality is the glacial progress of the system, which makes it even more difficult to revolt. Those who own or manage the system, understanding that humans are more likely to resist sudden changes, work at the same piecemeal pace, enslaving their peoples and annihilating nature by degrees.

...

Because the Myth of Authority, the idea that we need a person, a group, a system or our own alienated consciences to tell us what to do, is an inherent consequence of living within the civilised system, it is common to all civilised ideologies; to communism, capitalism, monarchism, fascism, professionalism and nearly all religious traditions.

Each of these constituent ideologies makes a great deal of its differences to the others, of its own unique claims to legitimacy—our leaders were chosen by the working class / meritocratic education / the free market / science / God… but yet, strangely, the result is always the same. One group of people telling another group of people what to do and making a misery of life on earth for everyone and everything they, or the system they manage, control.

Earlier I mentioned ‘you and I’, because you know and I know that we don’t need these people. We don’t need laws to know what’s right and wrong, or states to direct every aspect of our lives, or institutions to tell us how to live, or telephones to direct our desires and evaporate our embodied selves. Although we might need the authority of tradition, or of wisdom, we don’t need the authority of systemic dominance and control; yes, but, perhaps you’re thinking; it’s them—they are the problem! Without princes or parliaments or professionals they would be out of control, they would be rapin’ and pillagin’, they would be sick and stupid and inefficient and unable to control themselves.

Yes, maybe, but we can deal with them, for they are our neighbours. They are human, and within reach. Shape the world into a monolithic ziggurat with unimaginable power at the top and nothing but automated phone lines between the planet-wide base and the glittering peak, automate exploitation and plug it into our own needs and desires, and we are left devouring ourselves and swiping at ghosts in an electronic vacuum."

========

Wokeism as Salem Daydream

"Marxism is merely the patina; our enemies are neither Marxist (nor culturally Marxist) in any serious sense of the word. Frankly, they lack the intellectual heft for that. Instead, they are Christian heretics.

Wokeism is not so much Marxism as it is a splinter heresy of Puritanism. Wokeism’s antecedent is not 1950s communism, but late 1600s Salem. The Woke, while they may be superficially atheist, represent repackaged and corrupted vestiges of Puritan religious belief.

In lieu of God, the Woke speak of History. Where once you found a priesthood of all believers, you find today “my truth” as a restatement of justification by faith. In lieu of redemption by belief in Jesus Christ, the Woke adopt redemption by belief in Wokeism.

Each class of intersectionally oppressed peoples—black, brown, immigrants, refugees, LGBTQ+, it doesn’t really matter—are transmutations and contortions of the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. Eschatological doctrine becomes environmental Armageddon. Systemic racism and intersectional oppression incorporate an invisible (other than to the specially trained) world of pervasive evil, Satan’s unseen and cunning corruption of the Sinners (who have no rights the Saints are bound to respect).

Jesus may be so Woke that he’s mostly out of the picture, but even He is called upon from time to time to attack an actual Christian for not understanding the true teaching of Jesus, which is, regardless of the actual words in the Gospels, super-Woke.

...

...Historically, there have been many such dangerous heresies. For example, Fra Dolcino, a 14th Century heretical fanatic, splintered from Franciscan thought. Fra Dolcino was so enamored with the poor that he and his followers attacked and burned villages, in his twisted mind redeeming himself and the villagers he liberated from their homes (and lives).

It would also not be the first time that a Christian heresy embraced a secular doctrine, eluding identification of their thought as Christian at all. The Averroists of the University of Paris in the 13th Century, dispensed with revelation altogether in favor of Averroes’—also known by his Arabic name, Ibin Rushd—understanding of Aristotle.

Finally, central to this thesis are the American Puritanical heresies of Salem, heresies so corrupting they induced the once upright and far-seeing American Puritans to twist their understanding of law and morality until, on the basis of “spectral” evidence, they were hanging young girls like geranium plants in spring.

Wokeism is a child of Salem’s twisted gospel, a radicalized version of the Christianity, rooted in a tapestry of heresies and perversions of the Christian faith.

...

...while the Woke adopt Marxist and postmodern concepts to articulate their claims, oligarchic interests simply have taken Marxism and translated it into a religious zealotry which furthers oligarchic interests, inducing key portions of labor (or what used to be the middle class) to defend open borders and global interests against the interests of unskilled and semi-skilled labor of a high value.

More by accident than design, out of self-interest rather than any plot or conspiracy, oligarchic interests have taken the vestiges of American Puritanism—which is bred in the American bone—and created a redemptive theology which co-opts Marxism and Progressivism to support the interests of oligarchic monopolies. “Workers of the world unite, to support intersectional interests!”

How does one know Wokeism is not Marxism? Everything is on Wokeism’s list to implement except the only important thing for a Marxist: actual revolution.

...

As Jonathan Swift noted, one can’t reason people out of a position that they have not been reasoned into. We are in for a long religious struggle with Wokeism and oligarchy. It will be a battle, but I predict not one of reasoned ideas in the rarified intellectual circles of Marxists and Classicists. Rather we are in for an unpredictably fierce clash with a corrupted but no less intractable religious piety that has been harnessed by an uncommonly selfish interest."

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Tokyo Olympics will constantly monitor foreign journalists via GPS under Covid restrictions

"Tokyo Olympics President Seiko Hashimoto confirmed on Tuesday that all foreign journalists covering the Games will be under permanent surveillance via GPS to ensure they remain within permitted zones under Covid restrictions.

...

The tracking technology will be used to ensure that reporters remain within the restricted Olympic zone or face having their passes revoked for a breach of the strict Covid restrictions.

“To make sure that people don’t go to places other than the places where they are registered to go, we will use GPS to strictly manage their behavior,” Hashimoto said in a statement.

...

While it’s not clear if athletes will face the same type of tracking, they are expected to be placed under tight restrictions, which will include daily testing to ensure they are not infected with and spreading the virus.

Excluding permitted athletes and officials attending the Olympics, the Japanese prime minister announced on February 9 that foreign nations would be prevented from entering the country, with border restrictions imposed to prevent the import of new strains of the pandemic that could speed up the spread of the virus."

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Pharmacist who tampered with Covid-19 vaccines after claiming they could alter people’s DNA receives 3yr jail sentence

"Steven Brandenburg was jailed for three years and ordered to pay $83,800 in compensation to his former employer after he “purposefully removed” a box of Moderna vaccine vials from a hospital refrigerator during two successive night shifts in late December 2020, the Justice Department said in a statement. It’s believed that he tampered with more than 500 doses of the drug.

Before his conduct was discovered, 57 people were administered doses from the spoiled vials, which need to be stored at a specific temperature to remain effective.

During his sentencing on Tuesday, Brandenburg told US District Judge Brett Ludwig that he was “desperately sorry and ashamed” for his actions.

Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton of the DOJ’s Civil Division said that Brandenburg’s efforts to destroy vaccine doses during a national public health emergency were a “serious crime” and that authorities would stay vigilant in order to protect “life-saving vaccines” from other acts of sabotage.

...

While intentional sabotage appears to be a rare occurrence, there have been several cases where vaccine doses have been improperly stored, causing headaches for health officials.

In January, a janitor is said to have accidentally spoiled 1,900 doses of the Moderna vaccine after unplugging a freezer at a Boston pharmacy."

#Hero. Too bad more freezers didn't get left unplugged.

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China’s WeChat announces a bunch of new content restrictions

"Unsurprisingly, some of the banned activities underscore Beijing’s authoritarianism. These include a ban on nose picking, putting underwear over the head, fortune telling, and displaying tattoos. Other violations echo what is already censored in the world’s largest country, such as gambling and politically sensitive content.

Tencent also banned “vulgar” content on WeChat live streams, which include focusing the camera on “sensitive” body parts, spanking, and “seductive lip licking.”

The list also includes pieces of clothing women are not allowed to wear, such as fishnet stockings. Women are also not allowed to host live streams while wrapped in only bath towels or bed sheets."

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Words That Mean Nothing

"Much of the time that we think we are talking about ​“issues,” we are actually talking about words. One side will argue against one definition of a word, while the other side argues in favor of a different definition of a word. Each side can claim that the other is not addressing the issue, because the issue is defined differently on each side. In this way, political debate can carry on unimpeded by any barriers of mutually agreed upon terms, like separate superhighways rushing on at full speed in opposite directions. This characterizes a large amount of political discourse in this country: Torrents of people talking about different things, all of whom assume that they are talking about the same things.

There is much hand-wringing today over the idea that misinformation and conspiracy theories and omnipresent propaganda have created a situation in which Americans don’t seem to have a single set of mutually agreed upon facts. That is true. But it does not capture an even more elementary flaw in what we are doing. We allow entire ​“issues” to be created and to be talked about endlessly in the national political media without ever determining what those issues mean.

The absurd effect of this failure is twofold. First, it allows bad faith political actors to purposely exploit this rhetorical vulnerability in order to smear the other side by inflating the definition of bad things to include whatever the other side is doing. This is standard issue political scumbag behavior, and is to be expected. Worse, though, it creates a self-reinforcing cycle in which widespread use of some vague, ill-defined term convinces the public that this term is something important, driving media coverage and creating impenetrable towers of meaninglessness that come to dominate our partisan political landscape.

If you can push a bullshit issue into ​“everybody knows” territory, you can get away with never having to define it at all. What does it mean? Stupid question. Everybody knows this is an issue.

...

To attempt to have any kind of good faith debate on any of these topics is the political equivalent of trying to hold back an ocean wave with your hands. It’s just going to go around you. We can’t expect politicians to stop creating these sorts of terms. After all, undefined words that serve to make the other side look bad and can never be pinned down enough to make your side look like hypocrites are the pinnacle of real world political speech. What we can expect, though, is for the media not to get sucked into this stupid and meaningless game, to serve as a mechanism that reinforces the idea that unreal things are real. None of these pseudo-issues should be written about in respectable publications or spoken about on the airwaves until they have been subjected to a relentless and scrupulous defining of what they do and do not mean....

...

...When someone instead spends all their time talking about things that seem undefinable, it is probably because they find reality to be an uncomfortable topic."

The general premise is good but it appears the author falls prey to their own biases based on the specific examples they use in the piece.