Category: Uncategorized

Manslaughter by not-vaccine

Italy is investigating the AstraZeneca not-vaccine:

Italian prosecutors have opened a manslaughter investigation today after a music teacher died on Sunday – a day after receiving AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine. 

The judiciary in Biella, in northern Italy, opened a preliminary probe into the death of 57-year-old Sandro Tognatti, whose cause of death remains unknown. They stressed that there is no link to AstraZeneca’s vaccine at this stage and the probe is intended to establish whether anyone has a case to answer.

It came as Italians woke up to fresh lockdown restrictions today, with 13 of the country’s 21 regions now in a ‘red zone’ meaning schools, restaurants, shops and museums have to close, and people cannot leave their homes except for work, health or other essential reasons.

Another seven regions have been declared ‘orange zones’, meaning shops and beauticians can remain open except during a night-time curfew, while all other venues have to close and travel outside the local area is restricted. Just one region, Sardinia, is in a lockdown-free ‘white zone’. 

Italy also temporarily banned the use of all AstraZeneca vaccines amid fears it causes blood clots, with France and Germany also enacting bans and saying they are waiting for European regulators to give guidance…. It comes after Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and Bulgaria also suspended the jabs. Austria, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have impounded one batch of vaccines thought to be linked to clots.

But it’s perfectly safe, paisan!  

You will NOT talk back

The media is systematically eliminating the ability to comment on their relentless propaganda:

As of Feb. 1, we are removing comments from most of Inquirer.com. Comments will still be available on Sports stories and our Inquirer Live events, and there will be other ways for people to engage with our journalism and our journalists, including our letters section, social media channels and other features that our readers have become accustomed to, as well as new capabilities that we’re developing.

Commenting on Inquirer.com was long ago hijacked by a small group of trolls who traffic in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This group comprises a tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience. But its impact is disproportionate and enduring.

It’s not just Inquirer staff who are disaffected by the comments on many stories. We routinely hear from members of our community that the comments are alienating and detract from the journalism we publish.

Only about 2 percent of Inquirer.com visitors read comments, and an even smaller percentage post them. Most of our readers will not miss the comments.

For more than a decade, we’ve tried to improve the commenting climate on our sites. The goal has been to create a forum for a civil, open exchange of ideas where readers could offer relevant feedback and criticism of our work.

Over the years, we’ve invested in several methods to try and accomplish this. None of it has worked. The comments at the bottom of far too many Inquirer.com stories are toxic, and this has accelerated due to the mounting extremism and election denialism polluting the national discourse. You deserve better than that.

What’s telling about this is that large media organizations like the Inquirer could easily institute a system that would prevent trolling. For example, they could permit only actual subscribers to the physical newspaper to comment, just to suggest one of many possible solutions. Their real objection, of course, was their inability to control the comment narrative.

This isn’t to say that the constant trolling and hasbara isn’t a legitimate problem. It is a problem, though an easily solvable one. But the media has never been interested in anyone actually being able to talk back to them.

Regardless, this won’t affect their traffic at all. Commenters vastly overestimate their own significance, as they tend to make up less than one percent of the readership of any given Internet site. That’s why I find it amusing whenever I receive an email informing me that I should be concerned that some would-be commenter finds it impossible to leave his very important opinions here for our edification.

The last laugh

In 2008, the self-proclaimed Bad Astronomer attempted to mock my grasp of science and scientists:

“I happened to notice I was getting some traffic sent my way from Voxday, an ultraconservative blogger who has a history of saying ridiculous things — sometimes so ridiculous it’s indistinguishable from satire. Unfortunately, of course, willful ignorance has quite an audience these days, and just in case it’s not satire, I decided to reply….

“Your conclusions are way off the mark, for two reasons: you misinterpreted/misunderstood what scientists did, and then you misapplied it. First, 5{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} of the Universe is normal matter and energy. About 23{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} or so is dark matter. While we don’t know precisely what it’s made of, its existence has been conclusively proven, and it was using scientific methods that proved it (its existence was speculated due to odd motions of galaxies, its impact on observations predicted and then confirmed).”

This scientistic posturing did not cause me to change my opinion. And five years later, I noted that scientistry appeared to be moving in my direction. Seven more years have gone by and the case for “dark matter” is looking more grim than ever.

Observations of galactic rotation curves give one of the strongest lines of evidence pointing towards the existence of dark matter, a non-baryonic form of matter that makes up an estimated 85{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} of the matter in the observable Universe. Current assessments of galactic rotation curves are based upon a framework of Newtonian accounts of gravity, a new paper published in EPJ C, by Gerson Otto Ludwig, National Institute for Space Research, Brazil, suggests that if this is substituted with a general relativity-based model, the need to recourse to dark matter is relieved, replaced by the effects of gravitomagnetism.

The main role of dark matter, Ludwig points out in the paper, has historically been to resolve the disparity between astrophysical observations and current theories of gravity. Put simply, if baryonic matter — the form of matter we see around us every day which is made up of protons, neutrons and electrons — is the only form of matter, then there shouldn’t be enough gravitational force to prevent galaxies from flying apart.

By disregarding general relativistic corrections to Newtonian gravity arising from mass currents, and by neglecting these mass currents, Ludwig asserts these models also miss significant modifications to rotational curves — the orbital speeds of visible stars and gas plotted against their radial distance from their galaxy’s centre. This is because of an effect in general relativity not present in Newton’s theory of gravity — frame-dragging or the Lense Thirring effect. This effect arises when a massive rotating object like a star or black hole ‘drags’ the very fabric of spacetime along with it, in turn giving rise to a gravitomagnetic field.

In this paper, Ludwig presents a new model for the rotational curves of galaxies which is in agreement with previous efforts involving general relativity. The researcher demonstrates that even though the effects of gravitomagnetic fields are weak, factoring them into models alleviates the difference between theories of gravity and observed rotational curves — eliminating the need for dark matter. The theory still needs some development before it is widely accepted, with the author particularly pointing out that the time evolution of galaxies modelled with this framework is a complex problem that will require much deeper analysis.

Ludwig concludes by suggesting that all calculations performed with thin galactic disk models performed up until this point may have to be recalculated, and the very concept of dark matter itself, questioned.

You simply have to laugh at the complete lack of credibility and self-awareness on the part of these scientists. They blithely shift between estimating that dark matter accounts for 23 percent and 85 percent of all matter in the universe without ever stopping to think that this variance means that their base model is almost guaranteed to be fundamentally wrong. 

And this is why it is vital to distinguish between actual scientody and the parade of groundless assumptions and backdated mathematical models that are the basis for scientistry.

The lesson, as always, is this: when scientists start manufacturing epicycles to explain anomalies, their core assumptions are incorrect.

The curiouser is off the charts

I wonder how the mainstream news will explain this anomaly away. Is reality on tape delay? Where are the live events actually taking place? The televised video looked like it was being filmed somewhere sunny, while Washington DC was overcast and grey. Also, you’d think the very loud ambulance siren would be heard from the “White House” feed.

Curiouser and curiouser….

Birds of a feather

 It will come as no surprise to learn that Woody Allen and Jeffrey Epstein were “close friends”:

One thing Woody Allen is not afraid of is defending powerful men who have been credibly accused of sexual misconduct. He’s served as one of Roman Polanski’s most vocal defenders, saying the fugitive filmmaker is “a nice person” who’s “paid his dues” for raping a 13-year-old girl and then fleeing the country, and in the immediate wake of the sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein, accused the movie mogul’s victims of conducting “a witch hunt” against him, before walking it back.

And then there’s his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

It’s not clear when Allen and Epstein first crossed paths, though the two were longtime friends and neighbors on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for years. The director and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, have been photographed a few times leaving the financier’s townhouse—including in September 2013, five years after Epstein pleaded guilty to child prostitution charges, when a Page Six headline declared: “Woody Allen pals around with child-sex creep.”

Epstein “was hugging him and talking close to his ear,” and “had his arm on Woody’s shoulder,” one witness told the tabloid, adding that the pals appeared to enjoy a stroll down Madison Avenue before arriving at Epstein’s seven-story mansion.

Diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen joined this walk, along with his friend, filmmaker Håkon Gundersen, who told the Norwegian newspaper DN last October: “I heard that Epstein knew Woody Allen and several other famous film producers. With my background, I thought it was very interesting.”

When Allen arrived, Epstein allegedly told Gundersen, “Here you will meet someone else who is also very interested in film.” Gundersen said they all visited Central Park for about two hours that day before heading back to Epstein’s home. (Woody Allen and Soon-Yi did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.)

Around the same time, Epstein hosted another dinner at his New York home, where he introduced Allen to a connection at MIT. Joi Ito, former director of the MIT Media Lab, “met other influential individuals at meetings with Epstein, including Woody Allen, a senior executive at the Hyatt Corporation, and a former prime minister of Israel,” according to a report commissioned by the school on its ties to Epstein.

MIT staff even raised the possibility that Epstein would bring Allen to campus during his October 2013 visit. “Ito expressed concern that inviting Epstein and Woody Allen to campus could create a public relations headache for MIT,” the report states. Apparently citing the Page Six story, Ito tried to dissuade Epstein from bringing Allen. “Since you two were just in the news recently, I wonder if that might be bad,” Ito emailed the financier.

How ironic that back then, MIT was more worried about the bad press from Woody Allen…. And as usual, it’s not mentioned that Epstein and Allen happen to share a certain ethnicity with Messrs. Weinstein and Polanski. What ARE the odds?

Surviving civil collapse

This harrowing account of living through the 1992 LA riots is more a treatise on what not to do than anything else, but it is extremely educational about what may be in the cards in various cities this summer:

I was supposed to meet my wife at Soup Plantation, a well known restaurant down the road. I couldn’t get her on the mobile. When I got there and parked, there was a queasy air amidst all the shopping mall splendour and people had a frightened look in their eyes that I had never, ever seen before. The easy listening music in the restaurant was so mundane it was hard to reconcile with the outside windows, which had fire engines, police cars and people running on foot outside. I had planned to just eat quickly with my wife and go home, because I was having trouble absorbing the idea that this thing was possibly even worse than I might have imagined. I thought South Central was so far off, truth is it was about five minutes down the road.

People in the restaurant were watching the television reports, which were growing increasingly more feverish and seemed to just show one new burning building every thirty seconds. I was trying to keep a calm demeanour and went to explain to my wife what was happening.

All of a sudden, a woman in the restaurant screamed. A guy dropped his tray and soup went everywhere. A man was standing in the doorway of Soup Plantation and wobbling on his feet. Blood was gushing out of his forehead which had a nasty gash running right down to his ear. He yelled “They’re coming! They are next door in the mall!! They’re tearing everything to pieces!”

You could have heard a pin drop. Then the restaurant exploded with activity and EVERYBODY was crawling over the women and children trying to get to their cars in the parking lot outside. I’m talking blind panic here, people smacking into each other like they could not give a fugg less about any human in the world outside of themselves. A guy floored his Subaru and tore the toll gate right off the booth. Everybody else was following him out, the attendant was gone. There was cars hitting each other like bumper buggies at the carnival, nobody seemed to care, everybody wanted to get out to the street.

When we made it out onto the highway, I got my first look at the skyline since I left Rodeo Drive. It looked like the fires of hell were consuming half of the city. My wife was crying, she thought it was the end of the world.

I have to admit, I had absolutely no idea things were that bad. Definitely read the whole thing. And I couldn’t help but laugh at how bitterly the guy regretted listening to his wife about leaving the house unarmed on a literal milk run. It’s epic.

Seven Kill Tiger comes to life

 In THERE WILL BE WAR VOL. X, the late Jerry Pournelle and I published a haunting story called “Seven Kill Tiger” by Charles W. Shao. It even anticipated the use of vaccine programs to administer genetic weaponry. An excerpt.

Philip Thompson was reading a report of a small measles outbreak in Ecuador when a knock on the open door to his office disturbed him. He looked up and saw it was Scott Berens, one of his junior analysts, standing in the doorway.

“You heard about Ecuador, Dr. Thompson?” the younger man asked.

“Reading about it now. Looks as if the government has it under control.”

“They caught it early enough. It’s the Tungurahua province again. That’s been a problem area for the Ministry of Health since 1996. The vaccination program misses too many of the indigenous children.”

“Understandable.” Thompson put the report down on his desk. “What’s on your mind, Scott?”

“Do you remember that unknown outbreak in northern Zambia we started tracking six months ago?”

“I thought that was a false alarm.”

“It was, insofar as we were able to determine that it wasn’t Ebola, which was the initial concern. And there were only 142 cases and 26 deaths before it burned itself out, so we didn’t even bother sending anyone over to investigate.”

Thompson clicked his tongue against his lower lip, wondering where Berens was going with this. The young man was a bright young doctor and had graduated in the top ten percent of his class from Johns Hopkins, so he assumed Berens must have a good reason for bringing such an obscure incident to his attention.

“Are you saying we should have?”

“No, it’s just that I was reading over the statistics, as part of a paper I was thinking about writing on east Africa, when I noticed an anomaly.”

“What’s that?”

“The population of the nearest town. It’s mostly Chinese. I think they have a big mining camp up there.”

Thompson shrugged and spread his hands. “It’s hardly a secret that China has been moving into Africa in a big way for the last two decades. They have hundreds of such towns.”

“True, but that only explains why the Chinese were there. It doesn’t explain why most of the cases, and all of the deaths, were African. Only five Chinese were affected and all five recovered. Beyond the basic statistical odds involved, you would think the native population would be more resistant to whatever virus makes its way out of the jungle, not more susceptible to it.”

Thompson frowned. Berens was right. It was an anomaly. And if there was one thing he had learned after 22 years at the Center for Disease Control, it was to pay particular attention to anomalies.

“Good catch, Scott. Dig into it and see if it’s really just a mining town or if the PLA happens to have any laboratories or science facilities in the area. Not necessarily where the outbreak took place, but anywhere in the surrounding area. They went dark on the bio-war front a few years ago, and it may be that some of their test facilities were moved from Xi’an to Africa. This just might give us some insight as to where they went.”

“Do you think someone got careless and a bio-weapon escaped the lab, Dr. Thompson?” There was an eager glint in the younger man’s eyes that made Thompson smile despite himself. Such a discovery, even if it was never published in any of the public journals, could be the making of Berens’s career, and both of them knew it.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Scott. Go and see what you can find about this mining town, what is it called?”

“Mpolokoso.”

“Right.” He didn’t even bother trying to pronounce it. “Look into what the Chinese are doing there and we’ll see if it could have any connection to this mysterious outbreak. Write it up and email it to me; I’ll call you when I’ve had a chance to read it and think it over.”

“Will do, Dr. Thompson!” Berens made a mock salute with the paper and disappeared from the doorway.

Thompson leaned back in his chair, reflecting on the unwelcome news. Unlike his young subordinate, he already knew they weren’t likely to find any evidence of laboratories, research facilities, an escaped bio-weapon, or even anything that was conventionally considered to be a bio-weapon. Conventional bio-weapons didn’t discriminate between Asian and Sub-Saharan haplogroups. Genetic weapons, on the other hand, were designed to do just that. And he very much doubted that whatever it was had been released accidentally.

After consulting his contact list, he tapped in the number for Fort Detrick. A young enlisted woman answered the phone.

“US-AMRIID. How may I direct your call?”

“This is Dr. Phil Thompson of the CDC. Get me Colonel Hill, please.”

“Right away, sir.” She paused. “The CDC… is this urgent, sir?”

He smiled grimly. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to determine.”

Now consider how that fictional scenario, published in 2015, compares with this recent report published by Gordon Chang, a critic who has historically been skeptical of Chinese capabilities.

In 2017, Chinese media first reported CCP’s intention to construct a national DNA database. But this year, a think tank in Canberra, Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) released a report that revealed the key details and the scale of the operation for the first time and noted that for several years China has been collecting DNA from men, as well as school-aged boys across the country. Even though the Chinese government said that the database will help to track down criminals, the report described the operation as part of government efforts to strengthen social control.

As per the recent report, Chang claimed that China has the ability to collect very sensitive information about people from outside the country. They can do that by “buying American companies which have DNA profiles, subsidizing DNA analysis for ancestry companies, and hacking.” He said that internationally accepted QR codes for the travel in and out of China were another way the CCP government was expanding its database throughout the pandemic time.

According to him, China’s access to more than 80 million health profiles gave the authorities the ability to create dangerous bioweapons capable of destroying specific ethnic groups. Dominating the biotechnology industry was very important to China, said Chang and added that the country was probably trying to develop some diseases, which target not just everyone in the world but only certain ethnic or racial groups. “We’ve got to be concerned that the next disease is more transmissible and more deadly than the novel coronavirus,” he added.

Another Magic Dirt fail

Big Tech discovers that India is where the Indians are:

Last year, allegations of caste bias got a public airing some 8,300 miles away from the IIT campuses. On behalf of the Indian Cisco Systems employee who alleged he’d been discriminated against based on his caste, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing brought a suit in San Jose against the company and two other Indian employees. All three were graduates of IIT Bombay.

American law protects workers from disparate treatment based on a handful of characteristics, including race, sex, religion, and disability status. This was the first time, though, that anyone had argued those protections should extend to Dalits. The complaint said that the unnamed employee had faced discrimination by two upper-caste managers since 2015 and that he’d reported one to human resources for outing him as a Dalit and informing colleagues he’d enrolled in the IIT through affirmative action. The employee said the discrimination had continued under the second manager.

Cisco denied the charges. “We have zero tolerance for discrimination and take all complaints of unfair treatment very seriously,” a spokesperson says. “In this case, we thoroughly and fully investigated the employee’s concerns and found that he was treated fairly, highly compensated, and afforded opportunities to work on coveted projects.” In its response to the suit, Cisco made an additional argument: Because caste isn’t a protected category under U.S. civil rights laws, the allegations are immaterial and should be stricken. The court recently denied Cisco’s petition to move the case to arbitration, and the company has filed an appeal.

Advocacy groups in the U.S. have weighed in on both sides. The Hindu American Foundation filed a declaration in support of Cisco, saying that though it vehemently opposes “all forms of prejudice and discrimination,” the state’s case “blatantly violates the rights of Hindu Americans.” Meanwhile, the Ambedkar International Center, a Dalit advocacy group, filed a brief in support of the state, encouraging the court to acknowledge caste discrimination and set a precedent prohibiting it. “American civil rights law has little experience with the Indian caste system, but it is very familiar with the idea of caste: the notion that some people are born to low stations in life in which they are forced to remain,” the motion reads.

The case inspired a flood of tech workers to tell their own stories. A U.S.-based Dalit advocacy group, Equality Labs, told the Washington Post in October that more than 250 tech workers had come forward in the wake of the Cisco suit to report incidents of caste-based harassment. Thirty Dalit engineers, all women, also shared a joint statement with the Post that said they’d experienced caste bias in the U.S. tech sector.

For years the industry has been criticized for doing too little to rectify a culture seen as hostile to women, Black people, and Latinos. In response, companies have held town halls, instituted anti-harassment training, and made very public promises to do better. On caste, though, executives have largely pleaded ignorance. Microsoft is a rare exception: The company, whose CEO, Satya Nadella, is Indian-American, says that it’s received a few complaints of caste bias and that it has more work to do. Google, for its part, says it will investigate any discrimination claims based on caste; it wouldn’t say whether it had received any, and Pichai didn’t respond to Businessweek’s requests for comment.

Another Indian-American executive, Shantanu Narayen, has been CEO at Adobe Inc. since 2007. The company employs hundreds of Indian expats, including more than 100 who graduated from an IIT. In an interview with Bloomberg TV last year, Narayen, a graduate of an engineering school (though not an IIT) in his native Hyderabad, rejected the idea that any of Adobe’s Indian workers might show bias based on caste. What the company “has always stood for and our founders instituted as the way of creating this company is equality for all,” he said. “We have not had any of those issues.”

It would be naive for U.S. companies to assume that Indian hires leave their prejudices on the subcontinent, says Sarit K. Das, a professor of mechanical engineering at IIT Madras who until February was director of IIT Ropar. “Graduates carry this to Amazon or Google or wherever, and the feeling toward the other person is that you didn’t make it like me, you are inferior,” he says.

Ram Kumar, a Dalit alum of IIT Delhi, has worked in the tech industry for more than two decades, with stints at Cisco, Dell, and other companies. When he arrived in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s, he found “another mini-India arranged by clusters of Indian hierarchy,” he says. Whereas dominant-caste Indians might see expat communities as sources of professional networking and support, Kumar avoids them. “People will try to segregate you once they find out your caste,” he says. As a matter of self-preservation, “I’ve avoided good opportunities when I see that the CEO or CTO is Indian.”

My favorite is the way Cisco and The Hindu American Foundation have filed suit for the right to discriminate by caste. Just like our Founding Fathers!

Physician, heal thyself

A recent Financial Times review of Jordan Peterson’s new book underlines why it is a very bad idea to take lessons from life’s losers:

Fifty pages into Jordan Peterson’s new book, Beyond Order, I called the FT books editor. I don’t think we ought to review this, I said. I explained that the author had suffered three years of emotional and physical hell, which he dispassionately catalogues in the book’s introduction. He’d become addicted to an anti-anxiety drug, which he started taking after he drank some apple cider that didn’t agree with him.

He’d tried to come off the drug, had been suicidal and diagnosed with schizophrenia — after which he flew to Moscow against his doctors’ orders to a hospital where they put him in a coma for nine days to help with the detox, after which he had to relearn how to walk. He ended up in a rehab clinic in Serbia — and also contracted Covid-19.

Over those same three years, his wife nearly died of cancer, and he had to deal with the stress of going from being an obscure Canadian psychology professor to a global sensation doing a 160-stop world tour and being watched by 200m people on YouTube.

I told the editor that, apart from the brief and riveting “Overture” describing this trip to hell, the new book was so far unreadable. It is billed as a book to comfort us in these unstable times and connect us with our inner strength, partly by showing how much of “life’s meaning” is to be found by reaching beyond the ordered domain of what we know.

At first glance, the result certainly seems chaotic. One minute Peterson is telling you to imagine who you could be and aim at that, then he’s on about ancient alchemists, then discussing unwelcome letters one might receive from the tax authorities, then back to some mystic stuff about Jupiter and Mars, leading to an extended account of how the snitch in Quidditch, the game played at JK Rowling’s Hogwarts, symbolises chaos. The poor man must have been unwell when he wrote all this, so it would be unfair to trash it.

I even wondered why the people at Penguin had rushed to publish it, when they should have told him to wait until he was better. 

Here is a more useful rule for life than any Jordan Peterson has on offer: don’t take advice from suicidal drug addicts. 

The costs of convergence

 Are now hitting the NFL hard:

Even though the NFL managed to play all 256 regular-season games and all 13 postseason games, the league lost a large chunk of money due to the pandemic. According to Ben Fischer of Sports Business Journal, the league saw its revenue fall from $16 billion in 2019 to $12 billion in 2020. The league had expected to generate $16.5 billion last year, before the pandemic changed everything.

That’s a 27 percent decline in revenue, in just one year. Sound familiar?

From Corporate Cancer:

It’s one thing to simply claim that something is bad, it is another to demonstrate exactly how bad it is. Once a corporation contracts Stage Five convergence, it can go downhill very fast.

How fast? On average, as a rough estimate, up to 20 percent in just one year. This decline can take place in terms of either revenue or units….

While the NFL continues to publicly dismiss its declining ratings as a temporary problem, the fact is that they caused the league to fall short of its predicted 2017 revenue of $14 billion and knocked the league considerably off the track of its revenue target of $25 billion by 2027. A four-percent reduction in annual revenue may not sound like much, but it represents a 10.7 percent decline in expected revenues which is not insignificant to any business, no matter how big it is. Indeed, there are even some who believe that this unnecessary, convergence-caused debacle may represent Peak NFL.

Keep in mind that the TV money is actually increasing while the viewership is declining. This is a fragile situation; it’s more likely that the future will see an NFL with annual revenues of $8 billion than $25 billion in real 2020 dollars. 

And it’s not the pandemic. The pandemic should have boosted TV ratings. The NFL’s real fear should be that it did….