I will NOT mention the “debate” till well further below. Starting with Biomedical.
Biomedical. Starting with my comments regarding an item from the last edition about a gathering in upstate New York in November 2020.
Recording of full day workshop near Hudson, New York, from Nov. 15, 2020, a week before the lock down officially ended in New York State. Eric Francis Coppolino, 6/25/24.
[Link to the program page at Planet Waves dot FM]…
My comments: the presentations (each segment has its own audio) by Cowar and Kaufman are really good, particularly considering it’s November 2020. But the segment i really liked is the one for the audience questions put to them and their responses. Really sophisticated audience for that early in the game, surpassing much if not most of the “health freedom” ranks of today. One guy does challenge them with a “paper proving isolation and sequencing of the virus” which they are quite familiar with and proceed to shred, in spite of his attempts to shout over them.
And, Mike Stone has an article about the general methodology of Virology.
The Magic Trick, Mike Stone, 6/2824.
I was recently in a discussion on Twitter with a user who was utterly convinced in the power of vaccination to end “viral” diseases. This person believed that smallpox had been successfully wiped off the face of the Earth through the injection of toxins directly into the bloodstream and that the defeat of polio was well within our grasp through these same methods. It did not matter one iota to this individual that the evidence supporting the belief that vaccines led to a decrease, and in some cases “elimination,” of a particular disease was entirely fraudulent. No matter how hard I tried to pull the curtain back in order to reveal the magic tricks that had successfully led to the diehard indoctrination, this person resisted and fought feverishly to maintain the illusion. The cognitive dissonance was unfortunately too strong to overcome.
While I may not have reached this one individual, I never let a good opportunity to help others pass me by. Throughout the conversation, I was reminded of previous research I had done regarding the sleight of hand used with the polio and smallpox vaccines to make them look successful. While the official narrative was that the vaccines prevented the transmission of the invisible “viruses” which stamped out the associated diseases, there were more obvious reasons for the apparent decrease in cases. As I felt that I had just barely scratched the surface of this subject previously, I felt compelled to dig a bit deeper during this conversation in order to present the information as faithfully and as accurately as possible. I am collecting that information here in the hopes that this article can be used in the future to help break the indoctrinated free from this vaccine spell that they currently find themselves a slave to.
“The decline in infectious diseases in developed countries had nothing to do with vaccinations, but with the decline in poverty and hunger.” – Dr Buchwald, M.D.[Link]
While we have been regularly subjected to the praises of vaccination with stories promoting the magical abilities of these unnatural injections to stop disease, when one looks at the statistical evidence collected over the years, an entirely different picture emerges. For instance, the below charts were taken from Greg Beattie’s book “Vaccination A Parent’s Dilemma.” The graphs were created from the official death numbers recorded in the Official Year Books of the Commonwealth of Australia.
It is clear that many of the diseases that are commonly vaccinated for decreased dramatically before any vaccine was ever introduced. In fact, both Typhoid and Scarlett fever declined without any vaccine whatsoever. These same trends were noted in other countries such as the USA and England. The improvement in these diseases was not due to vaccines but were instead the direct result of better sanitation and waste removal as well as easier access to fresh food and clean water. There is no reason to give any vaccine credit for the sharp drops in disease already in a steep decline prior to their introduction. For more on these precipitous declines, please see this excellent article on Whale.to.
The realization that these diseases declined without the presence of any vaccines is pretty damning in and of itself. However, there is a trick that is regularly utilized in order to create the illusion that the introduction of a vaccine was the reason for any decrease and eventual disappearance of a specific disease and its associated “virus.” This trick is the reclassification and rebranding of the exact same symptoms of disease into many other separate and new diseases. This shuffling of the same symptoms into different categories is another factor, along with better sanitation and nutrition, for a perceived decrease in these diseases. This can be easily demonstrated by looking at both smallpox and polio as, even though these diseases are said to be either “eradicated” or close to it, the same symptoms still persist under various other names. Let’s take a look at both of these situations and see what we can reveal about the magician’s tricks.[Examples aplenty]…..
Hopefully the magic tricks utilized to create the appearance of the effectiveness of the vaccines has become clearer now and will no longer be effective to persuade anyone on the fence. When a “virus” needs to be either eradicated or minimized, all it takes is hiding the symptoms of disease under various names and disguises with either a new “viral” and/or bacterial cause. This decrease can also be helped along by reducing or eliminating environmental toxins associated with the same symptoms of disease and by changing the diagnostic criteria in order to make diagnosis less likely as seen in the case with polio.
We have seen this same situation with “Covid-19.” When the flu and other respiratory “viruses” needed to disappear for ‘Covid” to emerge, the symptoms were lumped into “Covid” along with many other unrelated ailments. Remember “Covid toes” and MIS-C, a.k.a. frostbite and Kawasaki disease? Cases of all “non-Covid” diseases dropped dramatically, even cancers and heart attacks. However, once the vaccine needed to be shown to be effective, “Covid” cases decreased while the “flu” and “RSV” re-emerged along with other respiratory diseases and ailments. They can keep this magic trick going as long as we continue to get hoodwinked by their theatrics. However, if you can see past the illusions, they will have to come up with new tricks in order to fool you. Let’s continue to unveil their deceptions until they have nothing left to pull out of their hat.
And, an item which is more 4IR but has strong Biomedical implications, given the item from the last edition about Nicole Shanahan’s interview and enunciation of the RFK Jr goal of Blockchain government providing “health care for all,”
Replatforming Global Finance | Sergey Nazarov at Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT), ChainLink, 6/12/24, 35 minutes.
The Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT) welcomed Chainlink Co-Founder Sergey Nazarov to explore how Chainlink and blockchain technology unlock the future of onchain finance.
0:00 Introduction
2:01 Market Overview
5:22 Company Roles
10:01 Tokenization Challenges
15:32 Institutional Lending
25:01 Retail Market Focus
30:11 Evolution of Credit
My comments. What i saw was basically a company’s ad for a technology which enables someone operating on any Chain (i.e. Blockchain-based system) the ability to employ asserts in this chain to function on any other chain platform, without having to start an account on the other platform, as basically all the chains become linked. These could be capital assets chains, or public chains. (explicit mentioned). Ethereum (favored by Shanahan) as well as CBDC chains and others are all available for the pickings.
Any notion of separation between and autonomy of chains, as sold by Shanahan, is either delusional or highly deceptive. Blockchain based government managed by AI financed by Bitcoin and legitimated by public health is a panopticon, part and parcel of a global panopticon.
4IR. From a couple of months ago, a key writer on “alternative” media has left and gone independent, exposing a rather sinister side of these “alternatives.” Segments.
...and starting something new Ken Klippenstein, 4/30/24.
I resigned from The Intercept today in order to pursue a new kind of journalism here on Substack, one more hard-hitting than what’s possible in the corporate world. The Intercept has been taken over by suits who have abandoned its founding mission of fearless and adversarial journalism, and I can’t continue in an environment where fear of funders is more important than journalism itself. On a brighter note, though, I’m leaving DC to move back to Wisconsin, excited to embrace independence both in my journalism and from the Washington bubble……
I want to take it to the billionaires, expose the fraud and avarice of the national security state and the corporation, and explore a concept I have of a Journalism 2.0. I am not going to bother clearing my reporting with so-called “experts” at think tanks bankrolled by head-chopper authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia, by military contractors, or by billionaires. And I’m certainly not going to hide behind weasel words like experts say, journalism’s device for pretending like they’re being objective. No weird, disembodied voice of God narrating everything in the omniscient third person, either. For the first time in my career, I’ll be free to report without the straitjacket that is the dated norms of journalism 1.0. And if you want the charade where journalism pretends to be interested in Both Sides, turn on NPR.
Here’s why you should read me here: I’m going after the rich, who hide their insatiable greed behind well-publicized, tax-deductible philanthropy. I’m going after the bureaucrats, who blather about public service and sacred oaths and then run for the corporate revolving door to cash in while manipulating the federal agencies they once ran. I’m going after the retired generals on TV and on the lecture circuit holding forth on every war despite their failure to ever win one. I’m going after anyone described as a “luminary,” the squeaky clean, feel-good types who spout platitudes while harboring deep, dark secrets. I’m going after the journalistic priesthood, like Judith Miller’s editor for her bogus Iraq WMD stories, whose punishment was being made editor-in-chief of ProPublica (salary: $480,000) and chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board. And any public figure confused about what young people are so mad about or how people could be dissatisfied with an economy where most Americans can’t afford to own a home.
My decision to go independent was a long time coming, but the final, precipitating event was the corporatization of The Intercept over the past few months…….
It was a straightforward article detailing Bezos’s [The Amazon-based billionaire whose empire is expanding daily] $50 million charity grant to the retired Admiral William McRaven (whose wife sits on the board of a charity linked to Bezos), calling the contribution a “racket.” The story seemed like vintage Intercept fare. One of our founders, Jeremy Scahill, made an excellent Academy Award nominated documentary about McRaven. My story was essentially a factual overview of McRaven’s own considerable wealth, and it noted the irony that the $100 million grant Bezos gave to McRaven and celebrity Eva Longoria was the exact same amount of money that the Bezos-owned Washington Post lost this past year. The story practically wrote itself.
Enter the Intercept’s general counsel David Bralow, who said he had problems with the article. He didn’t have legal concerns. Bralow instead thought it inopportune, saying that attacking Bezos might not sit well with the Intercept’s own billionaire donor, Pierre Omidyar, especially at a time when he was keeping the organization afloat.[SNIP]…….
My comment: Omidyar is the founder and head of Omidyar Network, self-styled "philanthropic investment firm," composed of a foundation and an impact investment firm. Blockchain-based impact investing, anyone?]
And, from one of my Substack’s favorite blogs, some items to think about.
Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation. Vincent Kelley, 6/28/24.
Contemplation
This month on Handful of Earth featured an extended review of Adrian Daub’s book, What Tech Calls Thinking. My intention in writing this review was not only to evaluate the book, but also to propose the question of whether the tech-critical left and tech-critical right can unite against Big Tech. After reading and reviewing Daub’s book, I am skeptical about this possibility at the current juncture. While contemporary left and right criticism of tech abounds, it appears that many of the motivations behind these respective critiques are divergent.
On the one hand, the critique of tech from the right relies on a concept of human essence that is met with suspicion from the social constructionist left. On the other hand, the critique of tech from the left focuses on issues of social inequality and marginalization that can be anathema to right-wing political dispositions.
Though I rely on the categories of “left” and “right” as a practical shorthand in the review, consistent readers of Handful of Earth will know that I reject these terms as overarching political categories. My hope is that the critique of the “technological mindset” can help bridge the gap between self-identified leftists and rightists. However, this will not be as simple as building utilitarian political coalitions. Coalitions are desperately needed but, in the effort to build them, we cannot lose sight of the motivating reasons for engaging in a particular form of politics in the first place. Without an attention to reasons, motivations, and philosophical commitments, political coalitions will be short-lived and superficial.
I hope that Handful of Earth is a place for my readers to reflect on the deeper reasons that lie behind surface political positions and alliances, reasons that most mainstream (and alternative) outlets simply do not have the time or interest to explore.
Provocation
“[I]f we’re unable to impose limits on ourselves, the world will eventually do it for us. Technological civilisation is self-limiting: it is not, as the technological order suggests, possible to separate ourselves from the world in order to master it. Progress…will eventually run out of resources to consume; and even if we escape this trap, it will eventually run out of adults willing to tolerate the tension between resonance and modernity long enough to bear and raise children. No amount of technology will fix this, any more than technology will fix climate change; because the resource being mined to exhaustion in our intimate lives is resonance. And you can’t fix a shortage of resonance using the mindset that is causing the shortage.”
Mary Harrington , “The End of Never-Ending Progress?”[Link]
And, from the same blog,
Special edition on the economy. Vincent Kelley, 6/21/24. Two segments.
“Degree? Yes. Job? Maybe Not Yet.”
The Washington Post reports on recent college graduates’ struggles in the job market: “[T]he U.S. unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-olds has climbed sharply in the past year, from 6.3 percent to 7.9 percent as of May — the largest annual increase in 14 years, excluding the early shock of the pandemic. That setback is just the latest hitch for the 2 million people projected to get bachelors degrees this year. Many started college in 2020 by logging into Zoom classes from their childhood bedrooms instead of moving into dorms and clambering into lecture halls. They’ve missed out on internships and in-person mentorships, and in many cases are graduating with thinner resumes than their predecessors.”
“Why Has Trump Stopped Attacking Big Business?”
At BIG by Matt Stoller
, Matt Stoller compares the populist vocabulary and policies of 2010s Donald Trump with his significantly more pro-corporate 2020s persona. After a 2016 campaign in which “he feuded incessantly with corporate America, telling a story about big business as part of the corrupt establishment trying to outsource jobs and replace American workers with cheap labor,” Trump followed through on many aspects of his campaign rhetoric. He “withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, renegotiated NAFTA, and raised tariffs on Chinese imports. The press pretended that this stuff was mostly fake, but it wasn’t. For instance, the Trump administration blocked imports of lumber from a Peruvian exporter based on concerns over illegal harvesting, the first use of environmental standards in trade law ever by the U.S. government. As another example, there’s now a wave of Mexican labor organizing spurred by the labor provision in the new NAFTA.”
In contrast, post-presidential “Trump sounds like he is the coalition leader of the Republican establishment. He’s still funny, and he’s still weird, and still iconoclastic in terms of his personality. But in terms of what he promises, he’s mostly stopped challenging big corporations, except in cultural terms acceptable to Wall Street. At the Business Roundtable and elsewhere, for instance, Trump offered a cut to corporate income taxes and a rollback of rules on corporations, especially the oil industry.”
While Trump’s pivot away from economic populism does not seem to be hurting him in the polls so far, Stoller highlights the following Financial Times poll which indicates that Americans no longer view the former president as an economic populist:[Graphic, with the poll results]
And, last night, the world was witness to a debate between an incumbent president struggling to defend his miserable record, while losing the ability to even pretend to be coherent, and a previous president with no qualms about telling lies which are easy to catch, believing that being remotely truthful no longer matters at all. While Biden has enabled the pursuit of genocide in Gaza, Trump called him “a Palestinian,” as if that’s inherently an insult. Both favor a very militaristic foreign policy. Both enforced the “COVID” Psy Op and insist it was real. Presidential elections have been a charade since the 18th Century, but last night made this obvious to all but the most thick-skulled and deluded.
And, several more articles on the material factors which make any notion of 4IR, Meta-Society, etc a non-starter. Starting with an items about the overall tech situation.
https://olduvai.ca/?p=68741 [Copy and paste]
Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLXXXII–Tech ‘Solutions’ Are Us. By olduvai in Economics, Energy, Environment, Geopolitics, Liberty, Survival on June 27, 2024. Segments.
Pre/history is pretty clear that virtually every complex society over the past dozen millennia or so has eventually ‘collapsed’. This ‘collapse’ appears to result from diminishing returns on societal investments in complexity along with overexploitation of the natural environment, especially the resources required to support growing complexities.
Further, those societies that pursue novel technological innovations to sustain their growth tend to ‘collapse’ faster than those that do not. In fact, adoption of a misguided innovation can lead to ‘collapse’ relatively quickly, in just a generation or two. The most ‘sustainable’ societies are those that focus upon ‘labourtasking’ that leverages human and draft animal power (as opposed to technology) which serves to severely limit ecological destruction and drawdown of resources.
Rather than pursue a more sustainable path (although labourtasking is still not fully sustainable since complexities of large human groupings, even if based upon manual labour, are still resource/energy dependent and encounter diminishing returns as they grow leading to eventual ‘collapse’), we are increasingly pursuing complex and heavily resource-dependent technologies–a sure recipe for a quick and broad ‘collapse’.
Not surprisingly, this approach (and the narrative that it’s fully doable, clean/green, and sustainable) is being heavily marketed and pushed by those at the top of our power/wealth structures that stand to profit immensely from the pursuit (including academia)—to say little about the geopolitical resource wars this path spawns and that seem to be growing and spreading as we bump up against biophysical limits evermore seriously. That many (most?) support this approach is not surprising given the vast propaganda/marketing machine of our ruling caste and the vilification of dissenters.
Further, our current experiment with a global, industrial-based society has turbo-charged this ‘technotasking’ approach via its leveraging of hydrocarbons and economic machinations (i.e., debt/credit creation to pull growth from the future). The past two centuries in particular have witnessed incredible population and economic growth. While some view this as positive, this one-sided perspective completely ignores the ecologically-destructive enterprises involved and that have spread to almost every corner of the globe. And all of it, of course, depends very much upon exponentially-increasing energy/resource extraction and production, the pursuit of which has already encountered significant diminishing returns.
Part of the reason so many buy into the technotasking approach is because of the perceived ‘success’ our species has encountered over the past dozen or so millennia in using it, but this completely ignores/denies so much of the negative impacts; impacts that are metastasizing as our population and energy/resource demands grow exponentially—consider for a moment the requirements being bandied about to support the AI ‘revolution’; a pursuit that is estimating energy needs that far, far surpass current abilities and are calling for a tripling/quadrupling (or more) of our current energy/resource production/extraction.
As for a 2050 plan for a “world of 7 billion middle class affluent consumers”, we can make all sorts of ‘scientific’ predictions based upon possibilities founded upon our technological prowess and human ingenuity, but the hope of exponential growth of our exploitive and extractive consumption has already bumped up against the limits to such a path and we are increasingly seeing the negative impacts and consequences. It’s just that in our unique story-telling way we have created a world where inconvenient reality to our wishes/hopes are denied/ignored/rationalised away.
Untestable mathematical models of the future can be devised to support anything. Sure small-scale prototypes might suggest some marginal possibilities but use one flawed assumption in the modelling to propose global adoption and the conclusions that suggest success are less than meaningless–they are dangerous, especially if we adhere to the precautionary principle.
Yes, we will likely continue to pursue these damaging and unattainable ‘solutions’ since the world’s profiteers (especially the media, financial institutions, and political systems) are pushing/supporting them. And many (most?) will support them because the idea of limiting our growth/expansion has been broadly vilified and we have been conditioned to believe such a path is our ‘right’ and that everything has a ‘solution’—if just enough resources are thrown into them–we just need to believe.
And, signs of collapse around us.
This Is What Collapse Looks Like, Dave Pollard, 6/20/24. A segment.
Complex systems, societies and civilizations are inherently fragile, because they have all these factors to juggle and all these interrelated potential points of weakness that can easily give way. Human societies simply do not scale well. It is just not in our nature to live in massively complex, dependent, anonymous societies that must be ever-more-tightly controlled to keep them from flying apart. That is why all civilizations eventually collapse. And this — what we are seeing all around us — is what collapse looks like.
I would argue that the honest answer to all of the questions in the table above is no. And that there is no possibility of avoiding the collapse of all these systems. No one is to blame for that. We built up these systems the best we could, based on how we were conditioned, and what we thought we knew and what we thought should work. We didn’t deliberately create them to be fragile, increasingly dysfunctional, and easily subject to collapse. But the end result of all our actions is a civilization falling inexorably apart. It’s tragic, but it’s the only thing that could have happened.
All we can do now is watch it crumble, and adapt ourselves as best we can as, in waves, collapse transforms every aspect of how we live. We can’t fully prepare for it, because we can’t know even approximately how it’s going to impact us, or when, even if our lives are relatively simple and self-sufficient. Our best-laid plans to return to the land could be smashed by desperate marauders with bump stocks. Or we might be among the billions migrating from a part of the world that can no longer support human life, to one that possibly can.
This is what collapse looks like.
And, some reasons why collapse is inevitable. Posting only the opening part.
10 Reasons Our Civilization Will Soon Collapse. A deep dive into the problems world leaders have let spiral out of control.. Alan Urban, 10/15/23.
That’s right. Our entire global industrial civilization is going to collapse. And soon, which means within the lifetimes of most people alive today.
I realize this is quite the claim, and a pretty terrifying one if you’re under 50 or so. In this article, I will list 10 problems the world is facing, each of which could cause the collapse of civilization all on its own. Which means, if even one of these problems isn’t solved, our civilization is doomed.
Before I continue, let me explain what I mean by “collapse.” First of all, it doesn’t necessarily mean that humans will go extinct. While that is certainly a plausible scenario given the many existential threats we are facing, I still believe it is unlikely. Small groups of humans survived in very difficult conditions for tens of thousands of years.
By collapse, I mean a breakdown of social institutions like governments and economies, followed by a dramatic decline in the human population. I realize that’s still kind of vague, so here’s a more specific definition I found in the book, How Everything Can Collapse.
It says, “A collapse is the process at the end of which basic needs (water, food, housing, clothing, energy, etc.) can no longer be provided [at a reasonable cost] to a majority of the population by services under legal supervision.”
As society breaks down, life will get simpler and simpler. By the late 21st century, people will be living the way they did in the early 19th century.
How do I know this? Let’s start with humanity’s biggest problem. No, it’s not climate change. It’s something most people have never even heard of.
1. Overshoot [SNIP]…….