December 11th, 2022 • 2h 58m
Shownotes
Every new episode of No Agenda is accompanied by a comprehensive list of shownotes curated by Adam while preparing for the show. Clips played by the hosts during the show can also be found here.
Elon / Twitter
TechCrunch on the 'difficulty' of moderation
To reveal too much would be to expose the processes to abuse by spammers and scammers (who indeed take advantage of every leaked or published detail), while to reveal too little leads to damaging reports and rumors as they lose control over the narrative. Meanwhile, they must be ready to justify and document their methods or risk censure and fines from government bodies.
The result is that while everyone knows a little about how exactly these companies inspect, filter, and arrange the content posted on their platforms, it’s just enough to be sure that what we’re seeing is only the tip of the iceberg.
Elon thoughts
The goal is to become everyone's bank. I'm going to presume Twitter-X will be a controllable token. Possibly the anticipated CBDC.
While the "stack" is being integrated, Twitter needs to be exciting and keep as many as possible engaged.
Once the stack is in place, most will be financially authenticated.
If Laura Loomer's restored account is a "good thing" is debatable. Childpr0n being "expunged" didn't bring anyone to justice. It's probably Neely uploaded already.
What this does, is capture people into discussion. Enter poolboy and Tucker etc etc.
You are being played. This dripping out tweet by tweet is designed to keep the masses engaged and distracted for trinkets.
With that I am done debating. If you want to feel good about Elon the saviour, you can turn the dial in any direction
Elon on Yoel kiddie stuff
Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis
Matt Taibbi on the twitter files
In the rush to get all this done, I chose words poorly. A lot has been made about the line about how I “had to agree to certain conditions” to work on the story. I wrote that assuming the meaning of that line would be obvious. It was obvious. Still, the language was just loose enough to give critics room to make mischief, and the stakes being what they are, they of course did. That’s on me, and a lesson going forward. For the record, the deal was access to the Twitter documents, but I had to publish on Twitter. I also agreed to an attribution (“Sources at Twitter”). That’s it.
Everyone involved with the project, including myself as well as Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger, has editorial control. We’ve been encouraged to look not just at historical Twitter, but the current iteration as well. I was told flat-out I could write anything I wanted, including anything about the current company and its new chief, Elon Musk. If anything, the degree of openness on that front freaked me out a little initially, being so far from any other experience I’ve had.
In our initial meeting, Musk talked about how he thought a “full confessional restores faith in the company,” and everything I’ve seen since seems to confirm he’s sincere about his desire for full open-kimono transparency with the public. He says we’re “welcome to look at things going forward, not just at the past,” and until I run into a reason to believe otherwise, I’m taking him at his word. I’d be crazy not to, considering the access we’ve already been given. This is a historic opportunity, and I think we’re all trying to treat that opportunity with the appropriate respect, which among other things means staying as focused as we can be on the documents, and trying to make as much sense of them as we can, as quickly as we can.
One last quick note. I was very skeptical at first about using Twitter to break these stories. Not only am I not exactly a skilled Tweeter (as, sadly, people have seen in the last weeks), but I worried about the logistical challenge of telling complex stories in 140-character chunks. It seemed impossible.
Two weeks later, I feel differently. In this particular instance, the story has to come out on Twitter. There’s the obvious deep irony of using the familiar drip-drip-drip format and uncontrollable virulality of Twitter to roast Twitter itself. We’re also using an inherently destabilizing medium to expose efforts to turn Twitter into an authoritarian instrument of social control. There’s genius in this. Now I would feel wrong even thinking of doing it any other way.
Nutty Government Content Control Chart
THE TWITTER FILES: The Removal Of Donald Trump, Part 2 | ZeroHedge
Today, in part 2, Michael Shellenberger reveals the chaos that ran wild inside Twitter on January 7th, as the same executives took decisions into their own hands to reassure 'a few engineers' that "someone is doing something about this."
The Removal of Donald Trump: January 7
As the pressure builds, Twitter executives build the case for a permanent ban.
On Jan 7, senior Twitter execs:
create justifications to ban Trump
seek a change of policy for Trump alone, distinct from other political leaders
express no concern for the free speech or democracy implications of a ban
This #TwitterFiles is reported with @lwoodhouse
But after the events of Jan 6, the internal and external pressure on Twitter CEO @jack grows.
Former First Lady @michelleobama...
... tech journalist @karaswisher...
...@ADL...
...high-tech VC @ChrisSacca, and many others, publicly call on Twitter to permanently ban Trump.
Dorsey was on vacation in French Polynesia the week of January 4-8, 2021. He phoned into meetings but also delegated much of the handling of the situation to senior execs @yoyoel , Twitter’s Global Head of Trust and Safety, and @vijaya Head of Legal, Policy, & Trust.
As context, it's important to understand that Twitter’s staff & senior execs were overwhelmingly progressive.
In 2018, 2020, and 2022, 96%, 98%, & 99% of Twitter staff's political donations went to Democrats.
In 2017, Roth tweeted that there were “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE.”
In April 2022, Roth told a colleague that his goal “is to drive change in the world,” which is why he decided not to become an academic
Here’s How The CDC Used A Backchannel With Twitter To Control The COVID-19 Narrative
Twitter set up a portal for government officials and “stakeholders” to submit posts that allegedly contained COVID-19 misinformation for Twitter to review, according to documents released by America First Legal (AFL) on Tuesday.
Twitter officials used the portal to track online posts for review, and invited Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials to enroll, according to documents AFL obtained through its litigation against the CDC. Twitter’s Todd O’Boyle enrolled the CDC’s Carol Crawford in the portal in May 2021 after she sent an email labeled “COVID Misinformation” with links to several Twitter posts who wrote about microchips and “vaccine shedding.” O’Boyle described the channel as “the best way to get a spreadsheet like this reviewed.”
O’Boyle wrote in his response that he agreed that her submissions were “important trends to note” and assured her Twitter would review them.
On Sept. 2, Crawford emailed O’Boyle that a CDC “Lab alert” regarding PCR testing was allegedly “misinterpreted and was shared via social media.” Crawford then flagged the hashtag “pcrtest” to be monitored.
Crawford also asked for Census Department officials to be able to use the Twitter portal to flag COVID-19 misinformation, according to the documents.
“Also, would there be any issues or complications stemming from flagging COVID misinformation on the portal using the existing census.gov accounts that have access?” Crawford wrote May 24.
The Free Press
The Weiss website is structured to support the 2024 presidential bid of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is, not coincidentally, riding atop a multi-staged booster guided by Elon Musk and fueled by Wall Street billionaires.
Ms. Weiss reveals the existence of the top tier of Twitter control officers. “The group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 “cases” a day.”
I find it curious that Ms Bari Weiss mentioned several names in her expose’ yet failed to mention the name or curriculum vitae of the head for the Strategic Response Team, a fellow named Jeff Carlton.
Like former CIA head Mike Pompeo, Mr Jeff Carlton was a former U.S. Naval Intelligence Officer responsible for briefing White House officials where his responsibilities included his former work within the FBI counterintelligence division and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Apparently, these intelligence skillsets transferred nicely to his position as the head of Twitter’s Strategic Response Team.
To put it in brutally honest terms, The United States Dept of Homeland Security is the operating system running in the background of Twitter.
You can debate whether Elon Musk honestly didn’t know all this before purchasing Twitter from his good friend Jack Dorsey, and/or what the scenario of owner/operator motive actually is. Decide for yourself.
For me, I feel confident that all of the conflicting and odd datapoints only reconcile in one direction. DHS, via CISA, controls Twitter.
Wittingly or unwittingly (you decide) Elon Musk is now the face of that govt controlled enterprise.
Put simply, DHS stakeholders, to include the DOJ, FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), are mitigating public exposure of their domestic surveillance activity by controlling and feeding selected information about their prior Twitter operations.
If TikTok is a national security threat, then TikTok is to Beijing as Twitter is to Washington DC.
Great Reset
BOTG - Chips and fabs
Listened to Thursday’s show today and your conversation on chips. I think John's “confusion” on chips is actually listening to the Administration and Congress on this subject. Their expositions and knowledge rarely touch down on Planet Reality. You two know more about this than the combined knowledge of both branches of government.
The Chips act is an industrial policy to make the U.S. basically the lead in all the top value steps the chip supply chain. Which is odd, since; with the exception of the last step--end manufacturing (fabs)--the U.S already leads.
When we look what is an almost perfect Ricardian model of global chip supply chain efficiency circa 2019, (and basically still true today), we have:
A. Chip design – U.S. leads
B. Electronic design automation – U.S. and EU lead
C. Packaging – China leads
D. Materials – global endeavor including China
E. Equipment – U.S. and EU lead
F. Fabrication: Taiwan and S. Korea lead
4. Here’s the real issue: the “onshoring” of fabs in the U.S. will increase the U.S. share of fabs. But once you pile all up all those “made in the USA” chips—who are you going to sell them to? (and they are "made in the USA"-by foreign companies)
5. China consumes 34% of the entire global chips market for all it’s manufacturing.
6. So, unless you move all that manufacturing out of China… while still keeping the export restrictions in place—where are you gonna sell those chips?
Event 201 / Catastrophic Contagion
CDBC / BTC
Anti-money laundering: Council agrees its position on a strengthened rulebook - Consilium
The new EU anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) rules will be extended to the entire crypto sector, obliging all crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) to conduct due diligence on their customers. This means that they will have to verify facts and information about their customers. In its position, the Council demands CASPs to apply customer due diligence measures when carrying out transactions amounting to €1000 or more, and adds measures to mitigate risks in relation to transactions with self-hosted wallets. The Council also introduced specific enhanced due diligence measures for cross-border correspondent relationships for crypto-asset service providers.
Third-party financing intermediaries, persons trading in precious metals, precious stones and cultural goods, will also be subject to the obligations of the regulation, as will jewellers, horologists and goldsmiths.
By limiting large cash payments, the EU will make it harder for criminals to launder dirty money. An EU-wide maximum limit of €10.000 is set for cash payments. Member states will have the flexibility to impose a lower maximum limit if they wish.
Energy & Inflation
Emergency call services, telcos urge EU to protect telecoms networks from power cuts | Reuters
"We are concerned that telecommunications networks may not have been placed on priority sector lists," it said, calling on the EU Commission to work with member states to ensure energy supply is maintained to the grids if power rationing occurs to grant citizens access to emergency services.
Macron Demands People Stop Spreading Panic About Potential Blackouts
Last week, Xavier Piechaczy, the head of RTE said that this winter, France will look to import energy from its neighbours, including Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, and even the United Kingdom, many of which face the prospect of their own blackouts.
While France has traditionally been a net exporter of energy, corrosion issues in its nuclear fleet have reduced the number of active reactors from 56 to 36. This has left the country vulnerable to the soaring cost of gas and oil on the continent following the war in Ukraine.
Australia to cap prices of coal, gas to drive down energy bills | Headlines
Australia will cap coal and gas prices for a year in a bid to shave utility bills for households and businesses hit by soaring costs because of the Ukraine conflict, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Friday. Gas prices will be capped at A$12 per gigajoule (GJ), while the limit for coal will be A$125 per tonne for 12 months, with the government supporting coal producers whose costs exceed that figure, he said.
Germany, Netherlands set out red lines on EU gas price cap
Six European Union countries, including Germany and the Netherlands, have warned that they cannot accept other member states' attempts to lower further the level at which the bloc will cap gas prices, according to an email seen by Reuters.
The group, which also includes Austria, Denmark, Estonia and Luxembourg, laid out their red lines on the proposed EU-wide gas price cap, which countries are aiming to approve at a Dec. 13 meeting of energy ministers in Brussels.
"We are concerned by the lowering of the figures. The figures of the [gas price cap] ceiling and the triggers cannot be lowered any further or replaced," ambassadors from the six countries said in the email to the Czech Republic, which holds the EU's rotating presidency.
The six countries are sceptical of capping prices, which they warn would disrupt the normal functioning of Europe's energy market and make it harder to buy fuel, if gas suppliers divert cargoes to regions where prices are not capped.
The European Commission last month proposed a price cap that would kick in if the front-month contract on the Dutch Title Transfer Facility exceeds 275 euros/MWh for two weeks and is also 58 euros higher than a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) reference price for 10 days.
China
BOTG report: the China stench
Dear AC,
Please share with JCD and other producers, I can confirm there are a LOT of stinky streets and alleys in Chinese cities.
The primary source is the stinky, OLD cooking oil. Most quick food (noodles and fried bread) or mom & pop hole-in-the-wall eateries use GMO corn, sesame, and GMO soy oil, to fry foods. These seed oils go rancid. But they are cheap - so it is rarely replaced (and no one is washing and scrubbing the kitchen).
There is an explanation for the commonality of the stench: The Chinese have a limited faculty for smell.
Most Chinese people have really bad breath, nearly all adult men smoke, most kids have awful body odor, Chinese people rarely wash their hair, and they bathe about every other day during the winter.
So yes, CHINESE cities have an "ethnic" smell.
By the way, American Indians have the best developed sense of smell (remember the writings of the Spanish when they first arrived in Central Mexico?), while Turks and peoples of the Caucus mountain regions have the LEAST. So I guess the Chiners/Mongols share something in common with the Turkmen (haha)
Best
JCJ
Ukraine vs Russia
Paul Whelan BOTG
I know everyone is mad about brittney griner coming home and not the Marine Paul Whelan
So I thought I would take a look at this guy and see what’s up.
I was in the USMC about the same time period 95-99 and I retired from military in 1988-2010 I also worked in law enforcement
This guy is weird something’s up with him. They’re not mentioning this anywhere in the MSM but PW got court martial demoted and kicked out the USMC for theft he got a
BCD Bad Conduct Discharge sometimes called the Big Chicken Dinner.
I see a lot red flags with this dude to me he screams new Lee Harvey Oswald
We’re basically the same age I am a year older
He didn’t enlist until 93 he was 23 to me that’s odd because most people enlist at 18-19
He lied on his resume about his actual experience as cop according to DM.
Some of the agencys never heard of him one of the pictures of him he looks like a kid in a sheriffs explorer uniform which is the cops version of Boy Scouts
This free trip thing he signed for seems weird why he do that and pick Russia
He lists him self as a IT chief?
to me he’s weird
he looks like LHO and in my opinion probably wants to be LHO
He did everything except defect to Russia
I telling you this dude is weird and has all kinds of red flags
I hate to say it but maybe JB bought the right one home after looking at this guy’s profile
He’s not the war hero everyone thinks he is.
He was using other people’s social security numbers larceny, 10 forging checks this sounds like a career criminal while he was in the marines
I wonder if he was taking people’s SSN to try and create his own Borne Identity with fake identities and passports because apparently he’s got multiple passports because he’s Canadian/American/British/Irish.
I think the Russian that caught him probably knew he was poser and just used him to look good for catching a low level America.
the only thing missing from this guys LHO fantasy is marrying a Russian and then coming back and going to Dallas and get caught at the school book depository bldg.
I wouldn’t at this point if the Russias just don’t release him because they realized he’s nothing but a fake poser wannabe LHO.
I telling you watch this guy put in the red book he’s going getting released and come back to America and something weirds gong happen if you know what I mean:
Also he works IT thu Kelley services which is a temp agency I thought which is probably the one way he can get hired anywhere because of the BCD discharge every time I think about this dude more red flags pop up
Big Pharma
Sam Quinones on Meth, Fentanyl, and Homelessness
These two drugs come in such enormous quantities and have such staggering potency that they do the job far more masterfully than drugs have done it before. So you have methamphetamine that is driving people to homelessness, and becoming incoherent and irrational and delusional and paranoid.
Fentanyl is highly, highly addictive, and it’s basically ridding our country of heroin. There’s very little heroin on the streets of America anymore, which is an amazing thing to say. Fentanyl has essentially outcompeted it. Both of those drugs, together and alone, make it so that people will literally refuse treatment, will literally refuse housing even when they’re living in tent encampments, even when they’re living in feces, in lethal temperatures, beaten, pimped out, because they do such a masterful job in potency and in supply of keeping, of thwarting that instinct to self-preservation.
NWO
Megan Markle is a self-fulfilling prophesy
Be like Diana - Die like Diana - Link
VAERS
Weekend reads: Errors in clinical trials; GPT-3 and scientific papers; paleontologist accused of faking data – Retraction Watch
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 278
Ministry of Truthiness
Google must remove 'manifestly inaccurate' data, EU top court says | Reuters
LUXEMBOURG, Dec 8 (Reuters) - Alphabet unit Google (GOOGL.O) must remove data from online search results if users can prove it is inaccurate, Europe's top court said on Thursday.
Free speech advocates and supporters of privacy rights have clashed in recent years over people's "right to be forgotten" online, meaning that they should be able to remove their digital traces from the internet.
2 minute readDecember 8, 202211:05 AM CSTLast Updated 3 days ago
To avoid an excessive burden on users, judges said such proof does not have to come from a judicial decision against website publishers and that users only have to provide evidence that can reasonably be required of them to find.
Big Tech
ChatGPT is no better than Alexa, it just sounds more natural - We don't listen or read anymore, just accept
Prime Time Reset
Food Intelligence
Highly nutritious meat substitutes on the market cannot be absorbed by the human body, study flags
A new study from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, has shown that plant-based meat alternatives commonly found in supermarkets hold high phytate levels. These antinutrients inhibit the absorption of minerals in the human body, making it impossible to absorb the products’ high iron contents.
The study, published in Nutrients, analyzed 44 meat substitutes sold in Swedish supermarkets, mainly made of soy and pea proteins. It also included fermented soy products of tempeh and mycoproteins – fungi.
“All products were high in iron and zinc content but low in bioavailability (except the tempeh and mycoprotein-based products). This means that the minerals pass through the gastrointestinal tract without being absorbed,” Ann-Sofie Sandberg, co-author of the study and professor of food and nutrition science at Chalmers University, tells NutritionInsight.
Mandates & Boosters
LA Times back to masking
I’ve heard it recently — twice, actually — and there’s a good chance you have too: “I’m done with masks.” And I can empathize, but only to a point. As we close in on three years of living with the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s easy to grow weary of the inconveniences and safety measures that no longer seem necessary.
Because hey, you and I are still alive, right? I mean, who actually turns around and goes home from the store anymore when they realize they forgot a mask? Never mind that the virus has killed roughly 1 out of every 300 Americans since March 2020. Or that so-called long COVID remains a potentially life-altering complication for some who survive infection. Or that roughly 400 Americans still die every day from the virus.
ADVERTISEMENT
And that’s before the possible uptick in deaths that may come from this emerging surge, which already appears to be a doozy in Los Angeles County. Writing on the op-ed page, Dr. Eric Topol explains why the emerging dominant COVID variant may evade the immunity we had collectively built up from vaccination and prior infection. After reading Topol’s piece, you might want to reach for that mask:
STORIES
Remote Work Is Gutting Downtowns, Will Cost Cities $453 Billion
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 18:31
Deserted downtowns have been haunting US cities since the beginning of the pandemic.
Before the pandemic, 95% of offices were occupied. Today that number is closer to 47%. Employees' not returning to downtown offices has had a domino effect: Less foot traffic, less public-transit use, and more shuttered businesses have caused many downtowns to feel more like ghost towns. Even 2 1/2 years later, most city downtowns aren't back to where they were prepandemic.
Not unlike how deindustrialization led to abandoned factories and warehouses, the pandemic has led downtowns into a new period of transition. In the 1920s factories were replaced by gleaming commercial high-rises occupied by white-collar workers, but it's not clear yet what today's empty skyscrapers will become. What is clear is that an office-centric downtown is soon to be a thing of the past. With demand for housing in cities skyrocketing, the most obvious next step would be to turn empty offices into apartments and condos. But the push to convert underutilized office space into housing has been sluggish.
Without more-robust policies to address failing downtowns, cities are going to start hurting. Even small declines in foot traffic and real-estate use compounding over time will lead to reduced tax revenue and sales receipts for small businesses, ultimately affecting city budgets. And while city planners are reimagining downtowns, the impact on cities' bottom lines has been devastating; in New York, for instance, the value of commercial real estate declined by 45% in 2020, and research suggests it will remain 39% below prepandemic levels.
Less economic activity in urban cores and a lower tax base could mean fewer jobs and reduced government services, perpetuating a vicious cycle that further reduces foot traffic in downtowns, leading to more decline, more crime, and a lower quality of life. For residents of many downtowns, ghost downtowns will be a visible infliction, and throngs of people crowding into a bus on a Monday morning will be apparitions of a recent past.
The death of great American downtownsThe devastation of downtown commercial districts has been an unmistakable shift in America's largest cities. In San Francisco, the landmark Salesforce tower and other buildings have remained mostly unoccupied as the tech industry has embraced remote and hybrid work. In New York, Meta recently terminated its lease agreement for three offices totaling 450,000 square feet in Hudson Yards and on Park Avenue, taking a significant financial hit. This tracks with trends: San Francisco has faced office-vacancy rates of 34% to 40% in some parts of the city, while in New York about 50% of workers are back in the office.
Even in cities where more workers have returned, like Austin or Dallas, occupancy rates are still only 60% of what they were prepandemic. These shifts follow the unassailable stickiness of remote work; researchers for the National Bureau of Economic Research predicted that 30% of workdays would be worked from home by the end of this year, a huge jump from before the pandemic.
The increased cancellations of office leases have cratered the office real-estate market. A study led by Arpit Gupta, a professor of finance at New York University's Stern School of Business, characterized the value wipeout as an "apocalypse." It estimated that $453 billion in real-estate value would be lost across US cities, with a 17-percentage-point decline in lease revenue from January 2020 to May 2022. The shock to real-estate valuations has been sharp: One building in San Francisco's Mission District that sold for $397 million in 2019 is on the market for about $155 million, a 60% decline.
Other key indicators that economists use to measure the economic vitality of downtowns include office vacancy rates, public-transportation ridership, and local business spending. Across the country, public-transportation ridership remains stuck at about 70% of prepandemic levels. If only 56% of employees of financial firms in New York are in the office on a given day, the health of a city's urban core is negatively affected.
The second-order effects of remote work and a real-estate apocalypse are still playing out, but it isn't looking good. Declines in real-estate valuations lead to lower property taxes, which affects the revenue collected to foot the bill of city budgets. Declines in foot traffic have deteriorated business corridors; a recent survey by the National League of Cities suggested cities expect at least a 2.5% decline in sales-tax receipts and a 4% decline in revenue for fiscal 2022. Last year, Atlanta's tax revenue was projected to decline by 5.7%. Finding and retaining government employees has been a problem in New York, where public-sector salaries haven't kept up with inflation. Day-to-day operations and essential government services such as public transportation, trash collection, and street cleaning would undoubtedly take a hit from hamstrung city budgets.
It comes as no surprise, then, that in recent months the combination of a stagnant flow of tax receipts and hollowed-out downtowns has spooked city leaders. At a recent conference, the mayor of Seattle, Bruce Harrell, expressed concern about tax revenue. "The fact of the matter is there will never be the good ol' days where everyone's downtown working," he said. London Breed, San Francisco's mayor, told Bloomberg that "life as we knew it before the pandemic is not going to go back." In the National League of Cities' 2022 survey, almost a third of cities said they'd be in a difficult financial situation in 2023 once federal funds dissipate. In the event of a recession, things could look much worse.
It's about new housing, stupidWhile there's been a lack of demand for commercial real estate, the residential market has gone into overdrive. A recent NBER paper suggests the new space requirements of remote workers '-- space for a desk or office, or to accommodate the extra time spent at home '-- have helped cause housing costs to skyrocket.
The solution to the office-housing conundrum seems obvious: Turn commercial spaces like offices into housing. Empty offices can become apartments to ease housing pressure while also bringing more people back to downtown areas. But after two years, few buildings have been converted. Jessica Morin, the head of US office research at the commercial real-estate firm CBRE Group Inc., said there hasn't been a "noticeable increase" in conversions. Since 2016, only 112 commercial office spaces in the US have been converted, while 85 projects are underway or have been announced, according to CBRE's data. Despite the promise of new housing '-- one recent study in Los Angeles estimated that 72,000 new homes could be built in the city by converting offices and hotels '-- progress has been slow.
So what's going on? Simply: The costs to convert are often hard for developers to justify. Construction costs are assessed on a building-by-building basis and need to take into account structural issues such as floor layouts, plumbing, and window access. Residential buildings also have to accommodate shared spaces like hallways, meaning they generally have less rentable space than an office building. Rising costs of labor and increasing interest rates may dampen efforts to convert offices to homes and inject more risk for developers. "The cost of construction is just so high, and even if you set aside the specific issues related to conversions and just think about the economics of building anything, it's just gotten very difficult," Gupta told me.
Another barrier for office-to-residential conversions is local housing rules. To turn commercial buildings into housing, they would have to be rezoned '-- which requires input from community members and local officials '-- to meet specific requirements. Codes for everything from lighting to sustainability vary by city, presenting irregular hurdles in project costs and timelines. Housing developers may not want to put themselves in precarious political situations or go through resource-draining approval processes for a high-risk project with potentially significant financial downside.
Gupta's study suggested, however, that continually falling office values may kick off more interest from developers in adaptive-reuse projects. Despite their cost and complexity, they may be better than letting a building sit empty.
The birth of the central social district To avoid a commercial real-estate apocalypse, cities will need to streamline conversions. There are several ways to do this. California has set aside $400 million for adaptive-reuse-incentive grants. New York state approved a $100 million fund for hotel conversions, but the stringent requirements led to only a single developer applicant.
Most impactful on the city level would be land-use planning processes that could help speed up conversions. Laws like the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance that Los Angeles passed in 1999 could help dispense with some of the more onerous city-code hurdles, like parking requirements. Gupta suggested that cities could also adapt their tax codes to make conversions more economically feasible by moving to a land-value tax or something similar. Federal initiatives could provide tax credits to developers to ensure buildings are readapted and could provide support for city planners to assist with redevelopment projects.
Overall, combating the death of downtowns requires a reworking of how we think about cities and the value they provide. The urban author Jane Jacobs proclaimed in her famous 1958 article for Fortune magazine, "Downtown Is for People," that ''"there is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans."
While the central business district characterized downtowns in the 20th century, the latest revitalization of cities will hinge on social value. Remote work has isolated people, and central social districts can be the new lure for cities. Restaurants, coffee shops, and coworking spaces are becoming just as important as industry hubs for a city's economy. The urbanist Richard Florida argued in an article for Bloomberg in August that for cities to survive postpandemic, they must transform into places for robust social connectivity. Dense downtowns in Austin and New York have seen steep increases in rental demand, a sign that people continue to be willing to pay a premium to live in a social district.
The transformation is likely to mean mixed-use 24-hour neighborhoods and downtowns where nearly all daily necessities are within walking or cycling distance of where people live. In Montr(C)al and New York, some open-street programs developed during the pandemic became permanent, allowing people and events to replace moving vehicles year-round or during the summer months. The repurposing of rail yards in Sante Fe, New Mexico, and of elevated train lines in New York into parks shows that adaptive reuse can be applied to park infrastructure as well.
The corporatization of work led to urbanization, but the trend today is a decorporatization of downtowns. Out of previous financial districts, new vibrant neighborhoods could form and reestablish local consumption. It would require infrastructure upgrades and the adaptation of public spaces and streets, but, as Gupta noted, office buildings are already ideally situated "smack-dab in the center of the transit network." Meanwhile, research has linked mixed-use areas with lower crime rates than commercial districts.
The economic health of cities is intrinsically linked to how space is used or unused, and right now downtowns are undergoing a massive shift. Despite the sluggish movement, it's in cities' best interest to figure out how to quickly convert office-centric downtowns into something more suitable for everyone.
Emil Skandul is a writer on technology and urban economics, and a Tony Blair Institute fellow.
Health officials gain guardianship of baby whose parents refused 'vaccinated blood' transfusion | New Zealand | The Guardian
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 17:44
A New Zealand high court judge has ruled in favour of health authorities who sought guardianship of a baby boy after his parents refused to consent to a transfusion of ''vaccinated blood'' in a life-saving operation.
The landmark decision, delivered on Thursday, is expected to have wide-ranging ramifications and has become a focus of protests for anti-vaxxers who held demonstrations outside the courtroom.
The six-month-old known as Baby W will not survive without urgent surgery for a congenital heart defect. His parents said they were unwilling to proceed unless they were given a guarantee he would only receive blood from unvaccinated donors.
New Zealand's health authorities and blood service argued that allowing the parents to refuse vaccinated blood would set a dangerous precedent, in which patients could demand to pick and choose where their blood came from.
The high court decision places the boy in the guardianship of his paediatric heart surgeon and cardiologist ''for the purpose of consenting to surgery to address the obstruction and all medical issues related to that surgery, including the administration of blood'' said Justice Ian Gault in a summary of the judgment.
That guardianship will last from Wednesday until completion of his surgery and post-operative recovery '' likely to be January 2023 at the latest. The parents will retain guardianship in all other matters.
In previous interviews the parents said the baby needed surgery ''almost immediately'' but that they were ''extremely concerned with the blood [the doctors] are going to use''.
Vaccines to prevent severe disease and death from Covid-19 have been found to be extremely safe and effective, with millions of people around the world vaccinated.
The judge noted that New Zealand's blood service had presented evidence from the past six months of a ''significant increase in potential blood recipients asking for blood from unvaccinated donors or asking about directed donation. Similar trends have been noted in other countries.''
The case was filed by the Auckland health service Te Whatu Ora. In a statement last week, interim director Dr Mike Shepherd said: ''The decision to make an application to the court is always made with the best interests of the child in mind.''
EU vice-president is arrested in 'Qatar lobbying scandal' | Daily Mail Online
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 17:43
Vice-president of the EU Parliament Eva Kaili was suspended from her party and Parliament group after being arrested in Brussels on Friday by police investigating alleged lobbying by World Cup hosts Qatar.
Greek socialist MEP Eva Kaili, 44, is being questioned after the arrests of four other people as officers searched 16 properties earlier on Friday.
This is said to include Ms Kaili's partner as well as Luca Visentini, 53, who is the current General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, ITUC.
The ITUC said it was 'aware' of the media reports, but had no further comment to make at present.
Greek socialist MEP Eva Kaili, 44, is said to have been arrested in Brussels on Friday
Belgian police arrested Greek socialist MEP Eva Kaili, 44, in Brussels on Friday evening
It is understood all four of those originally arrested are Italian citizens or of Italian origin.
Kaili is the partner of one of the four, a parliamentary assistant with the European Parliament's Socialists and Democrats group, said a source close to the investigation.
Belgium's federal prosecutor announced the earlier arrests after 600,000 euros in cash was discovered when police raided 16 addresses raids in the capital Brussels.
The prosecutors did not specify the identities of the suspects or name the country involved, saying only that it was a 'Gulf' state.
But a source close to the case confirmed press reports that it was focused on suspected attempts by Qatar to corrupt an Italian Socialist.
Prosecutors had said a former MEP was among those arrested did not identify any of those concerned.
Belgian press reports said the country concerned was Qatar, and named the former MEP as Italy's Pier-Antonio Panzeri, who served as a socialist in the parliament between 2004 and 2019.
Who is Eva Kaili?Eva Kaili, 44, is a Greek MEP and a member of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement and the Greek Socialist Party, called the Pasok-Movement for Change.
In the EU Parliament she is a member of the center-left Socialists and Democrats group - although she has been suspended pending investigations.
She was first elected to the European Parliament in 2014.
Before that, she was a television presenter, anchoring one of Greece's national news programmes.
She was elected as one of the EU's 14 vice-presidents in January 2022.
Eva Kaili, 44, is a Greek MEP and a member of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement
Panzeri, 67, currently heads a Brussels-based human rights organisation called Fight Impunity.
A statement from Belgium prosecutors said: 'Today's searches have enabled investigators to recover about 600,000 euros in cash.'
'Computer equipment and mobile phones were also seized. These elements will be analysed as part of the investigations.'
Investigators 'suspected a Gulf country (of influencing) the economic and political decisions of the European parliament', the statement added.
It alleged this was done 'by paying large sums of money or offering large gifts to' influential figures in the European parliament.
The searches were carried out as part of a wider investigation into 'criminal organization, corruption and money laundering,' and primarily targeted parliamentary assistants, the Belgian federal prosecutor's office said in a statement.
Ms Kaili is a member of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement and was voted in as one of 14 vice-presidents in January 2022. She has been an MEP since 2014.
The center-left Socialists and Democrats group in the European Parliament said that it 'has taken the decision to suspend MEP Eva Kaili's membership of the S&D Group with immediate effect, in response to the ongoing investigations.'
They demanded that what it called 'the unfolding Qatar lobbying scandal' should be added to the assembly's agenda next week so that further details about the affair can be established and an appropriate response considered' by lawmakers.
The former Greek TV news anchor was also suspended by her party at home - the Greek Socialist party, Pasok-Movement for Change.
Pasok said it acted 'following the latest developments and the investigation by the Belgian authorities into the corruption of European officials.'
She recently called Qatar a 'frontrunner in labour rights' after meeting with the nation's labour minister, Politico reports.
In November, shortly before the World Cup started, she met Qatar's Labour Minister Ali bin Samikh Al Marri.
In a video statement posted on Twitter by the Qatar News Agency she said: 'I believe the World Cup for Arabs has been a great tool for... political transformation and reforms...'.
The European Parliament 'recognised and respected' Qatar's progress in labour reforms, she added.
She made similar comments during a speech at the European Parliament later in November, accusing some MEPs of 'bullying' Qatar and accusing them of corruption.
This is despite international concerns about after it was revealed thousands of migrant workers could have died building the tournament's stadiums.
Migrant workers make up more than 2.5 million of Qatar's 2.9 million population and labour conditions have been strongly criticised - particularly in the lead-up to the World Cup.
Doha has implemented reforms to its migrant labour system, but critics insist more work needs to be done to make sure the changes have an impact.
Qatar's World Cup has also been dogged by accusations of corruption surrounding the vote to award the tournament to the energy-rich Gulf state.
The EU parliament's press service declined to comment on the raids while an investigation was underway, but said the assembly was cooperating fully with Belgian police.
Liberal media, Dems erupt over Sinema leaving Democratic Party: 'Still great at being the f---ing worst' | Fox News
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 17:43
Some liberal media pundits and commentators were stunned '-- or not surprised, but still angered '-- Friday morning after Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema announced that she was leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an independent.
The news broke just days after Democrats celebrated expanding a slim majority in the Senate after winning in Georgia. Fellow independents Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont caucus with Democrats, and Sinema has said she will not caucus with Republicans.
Some Democrats, liberal media anchors and political commentators erupted with anger and shock at Sinema's decision, including Democratic operative Adam Parkhomenko fuming, "I see Kyrsten Sinema is still great at being the f---ing worst."
ARIZONA SEN. KYRSTEN SINEMA LEAVES DEMOCRATIC PARTY, REGISTERS AS INDEPENDENT
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., speaks at a news conference after the Senate passed the Respect for Marriage Act at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 29, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Left-wing MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan also reacted to the news: "In the most shocking, surprising, and unexpected news in modern American political history, Senator Kyrsten Sinema is leaving the Democratic Party, which makes sense because 1) she was never really a Democrat, and 2) she can't win a Dem primary in 2024. So Sinema being Sinema'..."
Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who previously claimed that he dated Sinema, roasted her on Twitter: "You are ethically unfit to continue serving as a United States Senator - manipulative, deceptive, messianic, without principles. I urge you to resign your office immediately."
MSNBC analyst Brittany Packnett Cunningham called it "confirmation that she is the worst," and far-left activist Charlotte Clymer wrote, "Her own greed and narcissism is her political party."
"Sinema has been planning this move for years. She's been openly moving toward this with every hypocritical, self-serving move she's made, from climate change to the filibuster. This has been the most cynical marketing effort in American politics and the worst kept secret in D.C.," Clymer wrote, predicting she was trying to at some point join a Republican national ticket.
Sinema has voted reliably with President Biden while in office, however, supporting his agenda 93 percent of the time, according to data website FiveThirty Eight.
Some figures more soberly assessed her decision.
"Obvious point but Sinema was almost certainly going to draw a primary challenge and was going to have a very tough race," MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes tweeted. He also complained that the other Democratic senator in Arizona, Mark Kelly, won his race with "way less drama."
"We don't actually know what's going on in the mind of Kyrsten Sinema, but sometimes we can look at her and we can ask ourselves: What's she thinking?" MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough said on "Morning Joe."
"She is less of an independent and more of an enigma," CNN political contributor Van Jones said on "CNN This Morning," calling her a "confounding political presence."
LIBERALS IN MEDIA ATTACK SINEMA FOR DEFENDING BIPARTISANSHIP, 'FRIENDSHIP' WITH MCCONNELL
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., speaks with Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
"What do you stand for and what do you stand against?" Jones asked, accusing her of "just gumming up" the Democratic Party. CNN reporter Melanie Zanona backed up Jones: "She likes being called an enigma. She probably relishes in that."
Sinema tweeted Friday morning that she has "joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington and formally registering as an Arizona Independent."
In an interview with CNN anchor Jake Tapper, Sinema was warned that Democrats were going to call her "every name in the book." "They're going to call you traitor, an ingrate," Tapper said. It wouldn't be the first time she has been insulted for her unorthodox political views. In September, Sinema was labeled the "worst kind of Democrat" by critics.
LIBERALS BLAST SEN. KYRSTEN SINEMA AS RACIST, 'BIGOT' FOR OPPOSING ELIMINATION OF FILIBUSTER
Sinema similarly defended her decision in an op-ed for the Arizona Republic, arguing that she was "declaring" her independence from "the broken partisan system in Washington."
"When politicians are more focused on denying the opposition party a victory than they are on improving Americans' lives, the people who lose are everyday Americans," she wrote in the op-ed.
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Jeffrey Clark is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. He has previously served as a speechwriter for a cabinet secretary and a Fulbright teacher in South Korea. Jeffrey graduated from the University of Iowa in 2019 with a degree in English and History.
Story tips can be sent to jeffrey.clark@fox.com.
Issue #1290: China is making a move against the petrodollar
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 17:42
via ReutersWhile much of the conversation in the US today is focused on the Twitter files and the fact that it is now becoming very clear that US intelligence agencies were quartered within Twitter's org chart and leading some of the efforts to censor speech on the platform and shadow ban individuals who were exhibiting wrongthink, President Xi from China was in Riyadh wooing the Gulf Cooperation Council and making power moves in international oil markets. This is a theme that we have been covering for years here at the Bent. The prospect of countries like China and Russia convincing those who dominate oil markets in the Middle East to begin settling oil trades in currencies other than the US dollar is something that the US empire should be very worried about. A lot of the leverage that the US has over others in the geopolitical playing field is driven by the fact that countries have to convert their local currencies to dollars when conducting international oil trades. This drives a significant amount of demand for the dollar and is a big part of why the dollar is currently the reserve currency of the world.
Once countries begin settling oil trades in their native currencies demand for dollars will take a material hit. That's why today's news out of Riyadh should be on your radar. There have been small steps that have been taken in the last four years that have gotten us to this point. Mainly, political posturing from Xi, Putin and others explaining their intent to begin making trades in this way. However, it seems that today was an escalation with China signaling that they have the necessary exchange infrastructure in place to begin settling their oil purchases from Saudi Arabia and other producers in the Middle East in yuan. Things should get very interesting from here.
This will come as a shock to many who haven't been paying attention, but this move is not surprising in the least bit. In a world that is becoming increasingly multi-polar as super powers drift further away from cooperation with each other it makes sense that they would not want to benefit who they deem to be an enemy by driving demand for their currency. Why prop up demand for the dollar when the US is sanctioning and/or levvying burdensome tarrifs on your economy? Working a deal with oil producing countries to settle in your native currency is a very logical thing to do.
Keep an eye out on this trend in the coming months. Even though something like this should have been expected your Uncle Marty isn't convinced that this scenario has been priced in.
With that being said, it's a shame for China and others who begin to settle oil trades without the US dollar. If anything, this will only be a successful tactic temporarily because at the end of the day their currencies are poorly designed fiat currencies too. Bifurcating currency markets further should lead to more volatility.
At the end of the day, it only makes sense to settle these types of international trades in an apolitical currency that cannot be controlled by any one party or cabal of parties. Eventually everyone is going to become privvy to this glaringly obvious fact and begin settling their trades in bitcoin. It probably won't be happening in the short or medium-term because the bitcoin market needs to become significantly more liquid before taking on settlement trades of that size, but it is the only logical end state for a world in which trust at the international level is erroding.
Be aware, freaks!
Clip of the day...
Sam Abbassi explains why fiat money will fail. Subscribe to the TFTC Clips channel to get high-signal-bite-sized pieces of content.
Final thought...
Great couple of days in Nashville. Enjoying the Fall weather.
Enjoy your weekend, freaks.
Sleep soundly at night knowing your bitcoin are secured by multisig.If you don't have Braiins on your ASIC you're leaving sats on the table.CrowdHealth BTC is
Grant Wahl "detained" before USA game for wearing rainbow shirt - Futbol on FanNation
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 17:41
An American journalist has claimed that he was "detained" for 25 minutes and initially refused entry to the USA's game against Wales because of his rainbow tee-shirt.
Former Sports Illustrated writer Grant Wahl opted to wear a tee-shirt featuring a soccer ball surrounded by a rainbow to show support for the LGBTQ community.
Homosexuality is illegal in Qatar, where the World Cup is controversially being held, but FIFA had claimed that gay fans would be welcome at the tournament.
Wahl was seemingly not given a warm welcome when security staff at Ahmed bin Ali Stadium spotted his tee-shirt though.
In a tweet to his 840,000 followers, Wahl claimed that he was told: "You have to change your shirt. It's not allowed."
He later claimed in a blog on his substack channel that his phone was confiscated moments after sending the tweet and not returned for around 25 minutes.
Scroll to Continue
During these 25 minutes, Wahl said he was shouted at and ordered to remove his shirt due to it being "political".
Wahl refused and was eventually allowed to enter the stadium, rainbow shirt and all.
One security guard is said to have told Wahl that the intervention had been an attempt to "protect" him from fans inside the stadium who might "harm" him for wearing the shirt.
A FIFA representative apparently apologized to Wahl but the ordeal left him even more concerned.
He finished his blog post by writing: "The entire episode left me wondering: What's it like for ordinary Qataris who might wear a rainbow shirt when the world isn't watching here? What's that like?"
A general view from outside Ahmad bin Ali Stadium during the USA's game against Wales at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar
IMAGO/Focus Images/Paul Chesterton
A Case Study on Raspberry Pi's Incident on the Fediverse || Eiara Limited - Sustainable DevOps
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 17:41
This case study covers the incident of raspberrypi.social, the official Raspberry Pi domain and instance, posting about a new hire on December 8th, 2022 (Aotearoa New Zealand Time), and the subsequent reactions and escalations over the following 8-10 hours.
This case study is most applicable to businesses considering or currently running their own dedicated Fediverse (Mastodon or other compatible software) instance on their own domain name, but some aspects will be applicable to businesses using an account on a hosted instance.
Inciting IncidentRaspberry Pi posted on Dec 8, at about 10pm NZT , about a new hire, Toby, who was previously a police officer who had specialised in building outdoor surveillance equipment using Raspberry Pis.
One of their initial follow-on posts to the criticism was '' SOMEONE needs to keep an eye on us. The stuff we get up to in Pi Towers, I swear'...''
ResponseThe Fediverse considered this behaviour to be poor and responded accordingly.Seeing this behaviour from a well-loved brand like Raspberry Pi was taken as a betrayal of the predominately leftist attitude of many instances, and the many MANY criticisms of this post were met with responses like:
'' He builds lightsabers, James. Chill.'': link '' Bye bye now'': link '' Yes Sebastian. And if you can't chill, you can unfollow. That's how social media works. Just chill.'': link '' Feel free to block or unfollow us'' in response to ''if only they'd not hire cops'': link '' people can follow or unfollow us if they like'' linkEscalation '' bye'', in response to someone saying ''gross'': link, '' bye bye now'' to someone saying being dismissive was eroding trust: link, '' but now you are on ours'', in response to someone saying that RPi wasn't on their blocklist yet: linkBlocking Matt Gray (a YouTube personality) for attempting to offer constructive criticism,Complaining that they are being required to not hire people from other previous professions, after being told that it's not OK : linkcalling criticism ''childish'', and calling concerns unfounded, and that the response was ''bullying'': linkResponding with ''bye bye'' to someone replying that RPi's behaviour was insulting, in light of that person's trauma: linkInsulting a user for being ''unable to read more than a few words in the headline'': link '' Bye bye'' to a user posting that they no longer felt good about RPi in the wake of RPi's hiring of an ex-cop and RPi's subsequent handling of the response: linkOne extremely important response to Raspberry Pi was made by the Curator at artisan.chat, specifically,
On the other social platforms, you are free to be the ill-behaved children in the back of the bus. You're driving a bus here. The expectations are a little different.
ResponseAs the common theme from Raspberry Pi was to tell other users to unfollow them, and blocking any criticism, the Fediverse as a whole was very quick to react.
Due to the very different power dynamics of the Fediverse, it took less than two hours from the initial post and initial harmful replies before the official Raspberry Pi instance started being defederated, noted via the #fediblock hashtag. This public hashtag is a way for administrators to co-ordinate with each other in an attempt to reduce harm to their users, and hitting #fediblock is a strong indicator that an instance is being cut off from the the Fediverse until they improve their moderation abilities.
What Can we LearnMuch of Raspberry Pi's social media response here was drawn completely from how they behaved on Twitter, where blocking and telling people to unfollow works, due to Twitter's lack of moderation.
Fediverse Power DynamicsIn the usual interaction of a multi-user instance with another multi-user instance, individual users who have issues with each other have access to the built-in Report functionality. Well-moderated instances are then able to separate the two (or more) individuals who are fighting, and work to keep the fight from escalating into a Twitter-esque ''Main Character'' effect.
Why This Situation EscalatedThis power dynamic breaks down on the Fediverse when one side of the equation is a small self-hosted Brand instance. In this case, a user who reports a post knows that that post can only be actioned by their own moderation team, and will be ignored by the remote moderation team (if any).
The Fediverse remaining safe requires both moderation teams to work to the same goal. They don't need to communicate with each other (but may), but do need to both assert that behaviour is unacceptable and take steps to amend.
Raspberry Pi declined to do this, which leaves their peers with the only option available in the face of an instance committed to causing harm: defederation.
ResolutionsNow that Raspberry Pi has hit the #fediblock, recovery becomes considerably more difficult. Not only does Raspberry Pi need to withdraw their statements and issue unequivocal apologies, they must also apologise directly to the admins who defederated them, and demonstrate an ongoing commitment to change.
This commitment can be demonstrated through administrative and moderator changes, or demonstrated over a significant period of time. Both approaches will take time for trust to be regained.
RecommendationsOn the Fediverse there is no singular entity such as Twitter, Inc. that financially benefits from the presence of a brand, or benefits from the extra engagement and associated ad sales that controversy will generate.
There is no incentive for other administrators to retain a brand if that brand misbehaves.
As a result, social media managers, going forward, will need to be extremely cognisant of the brand damage they can do not just in the immediate term, but also in the longer term by causing the business account to be banned or the business instance to be defederated.
The business instance being defederated will be a huge blow to any reach that might have been gained, as administrators and moderators seeking to ensure safety for their users are able to remove tens of thousands of their users in a few clicks.
If the brand account is on a hosted instance without their own domain name, such as brand@fediverse.au, an admin or moderator seeing the behaviours demonstrated by Raspberry Pi would almost certainly have banned their account very quickly, as the threat of the full instance being defederated would be extremely high.
Brands seeking to join the Fediverse will need to invest not just in a social media manager, but competent and long-time administration for the instance that is aware of the political dynamics of the Fediverse, in order to ensure that they are able to stay on the fediverse.
Update (Sat Dec 10, 2022)In response to the incident on the Fediverse, Raspberry Pi spoke with Buzzfeed.
Update 2 (Sun Dec 11, 2022)I've been asked to provide my opinion on the Buzzfeed article.
I find the claims that the reaction was not organic, but instead organised via Discord or a forum, to be laughable and I'm of the opinion that those claims demonstrate a support of this case study - the lack of understanding of the Fediverse culture, and being unwilling or unable to adapt to a different culture and mindset required for a markedly different social network.
I would also like to note that this is not the first ''Main Character'' event to have happened on the Fediverse, but I believe it is the first major event since the massive growth experienced in the network since the end of October, 2022.
Mastodon Fediverse Moderation Case Study Raspberry Pi
ChatGPT proves AI is finally mainstream '-- and things are only going to get weirder - The Verge
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 17:35
A friend of mine texted me earlier this week to ask what I thought of ChatGPT. I wasn't surprised he was curious. He knows I write about AI and is the sort of guy who keeps up with whatever's trending online. We chatted a bit, and I asked him: ''and what do you think of ChatGPT?'' To which he replied: ''Well, I wrote a half-decent Excel macro with it this morning that saved me a few hours at work'' '-- and my jaw dropped.
For context: this is someone whose job involves a fair bit of futzing around with databases but who I wouldn't describe as particularly tech-minded. He works in higher education, studied English at university, and never formally learned to code. But here he was, not only playing around with an experimental AI chatbot but using it to do his job faster after only a few days' access.
''I asked it some questions, asked it some more, put it into Excel, then did some debugging,'' is how he described the process. ''It wasn't perfect but it was easier than Googling.''
Tools like ChatGPT have made AI publicly accessible like never before
Stories like this have been accumulating this week like the first spots of rain gathering before a downpour. Across social media, people have been sharing stories about using ChatGPT to write code, draft blog posts, compose college essays, compile work reports, and even improve their chat-up game (okay, that last one was definitely done as a joke, but the prospect of AI-augmented rizz is still tantalizing). As a reporter who covers this space, it's been basically impossible to keep up with everything that's happening, but there is one overarching trend that's stuck out: AI is going mainstream, and we're only just beginning to see the effect this will have on the world.
There's a concept in AI that I'm particularly fond of that I think helps explain what's happening. It's called ''capability overhang'' and refers to the hidden capacities of AI: skills and aptitudes latent within systems that researchers haven't even begun to investigate yet. You might have heard before that AI models are ''black boxes'' '-- that they're so huge and complex that we don't fully understand how they operate or come to specific conclusions. This is broadly true and is what creates this overhang.
''Today's models are far more capable than we think, and our techniques available for exploring [them] are very juvenile,'' is how AI policy expert Jack Clark described the concept in a recent edition of his newsletter. ''What about all the capabilities we don't know about because we haven't thought to test for them?''
Capability overhang is a technical term, but it also perfectly describes what's happening right now as AI enters the public domain. For years, researchers have been on a tear, pumping out new models faster than they can be commercialized. But in 2022, a glut of new apps and programs have suddenly made these skills available to a general audience, and in 2023, as we continue scaling this new territory, things will start changing '-- fast.
The bottleneck has always been accessibility, as ChatGPT demonstrates. The bones of this program are not entirely new (it's based on GPT-3.5, a large language model that was released by OpenAI this year but which itself is an upgrade to GPT-3, from 2020). OpenAI has previously sold access to GPT-3 as an API, but the company's ability to improve the model's ability to talk in natural dialogue and then publish it on the web for anyone to play with brought it to a much bigger audience. And no matter how imaginative AI researchers are in probing a model's skills and weaknesses, they'll never be able to match the mass and chaotic intelligence of the internet at large. All of a sudden, the overhang is accessible.
The same dynamic can also be seen in the rise of AI image generators. Again, these systems have been in development for years, but access was restricted in various ways. This year, though, systems like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion allowed anyone to use the technology for free, and suddenly AI art is everywhere. Much of this is due to Stable Diffusion, which offers an open-source license for companies to build on. In fact, it's an open secret in the AI world that whenever a company launches some new AI image feature, there's a decent chance it's just a repackaged version of Stable Diffusion. This includes everything from viral ''magic avatar'' app Lensa to Canva's AI text-to-image tool to MyHeritage's ''AI Time Machine.'' It's all the same tech underneath.
As the metaphor suggests, though, the prospect of a capability overhang isn't necessarily good news. As well as hidden and emerging capabilities, there are hidden and emerging threats. And these dangers, like our new skills, are almost too numerous to name. How, for example, will colleges adapt to the proliferation of AI-written essays? Will the creative industries be decimated by the spread of generative AI? Is machine learning going to create a tsunami of spam that will ruin the web forever? And what about the inability of AI language models to distinguish fact from fiction or the proven biases of AI image generators that sexualize women and people of color? Some of these problems are known; others are ignored, and still, more are only just beginning to be noticed. As the excitement of 2022 fizzles out, it's certain that 2023 will contain some rude awakenings.
Welcome to the AI overhang. Hold on tight.
France to make condoms free for anyone under 25, Macron says
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 17:31
PARIS (AP) '-- France will make condoms free in pharmacies for anyone up to age 25 in the new year, President Emmanuel Macron announced Friday.
The move comes as the government says sexually transmitted diseases are on the rise among young people, and as this year's exceptional inflation is cutting especially deeply into the budgets of France's poorest.
Girls and women 25 and under already can get free birth control in France as part of government efforts to ensure that young people of all incomes can prevent unwanted pregnancy. Existing measures don't apply to men, however, or specifically address access for transgender or nonbinary people.
Macron had said Thursday that condoms would be free in pharmacies for anyone 18-25 starting Jan. 1. But after a French TV presenter and others challenged him on social networks Friday over why the condom measure did not include minors, the president agreed to expand the program.
"Let's do it," Macron said in a selfie video that he shot from the sidelines of a summit in Spain. He later tweeted: "A lot of minors also have sex ... they need to protect themselves too."
Macron, who was France's youngest-ever president when he was first elected in 2017 at age 39, also promised stepped-up efforts to prevent and test for HIV and other sexually transmitted viruses.
France's state health care system covers some birth control costs but not all, and doctor appointments for low-income patients often require long waits. Abortions in France are available free for everyone.
Several other European countries offer free or subsidized contraception.
Copyright 2022 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Sun, 11 Dec 2022 17:07
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Germany, Netherlands set out red lines on EU gas price cap
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 16:57
BRUSSELS, Dec 8 (Reuters) - Six European Union countries, including Germany and the Netherlands, have warned that they cannot accept other member states' attempts to lower further the level at which the bloc will cap gas prices, according to an email seen by Reuters.
The group, which also includes Austria, Denmark, Estonia and Luxembourg, laid out their red lines on the proposed EU-wide gas price cap, which countries are aiming to approve at a Dec. 13 meeting of energy ministers in Brussels.
"We are concerned by the lowering of the figures. The figures of the [gas price cap] ceiling and the triggers cannot be lowered any further or replaced," ambassadors from the six countries said in the email to the Czech Republic, which holds the EU's rotating presidency.
The six countries are sceptical of capping prices, which they warn would disrupt the normal functioning of Europe's energy market and make it harder to buy fuel, if gas suppliers divert cargoes to regions where prices are not capped.
The European Commission last month proposed a price cap that would kick in if the front-month contract on the Dutch Title Transfer Facility exceeds 275 euros/MWh for two weeks and is also 58 euros higher than a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) reference price for 10 days.
Belgium, Italy, Poland and Greece are among the countries who say a price cap is needed to shield their economies from high gas costs. They want a far lower price limit than the one proposed by the Commission.
EU countries are negotiating the proposal and have already moved to lower the price limit. The latest compromise being discussed is a 220 eur/MWh cap with less stringent conditions to trigger it, according to a document seen by Reuters, although that is expected to be revised further before a deal is reached.
Germany and the other cap sceptics also demanded stronger safeguards in case the price cap caused unintended consequences - which gas market participants have warned could be severe.
They proposed "red light criteria" that would trigger an automatic suspension of the price cap in an emergency, for example if Europe's gas demand jumps. Under the original EU proposal, only the Commission could suspend the cap. (Reporting by Kate Abnett; Editing by Catherine Evans)
The Free Press
Our brains exist in a state of ''controlled hallucination'' | MIT Technology Review
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 16:56
When you and I look at the same object we assume that we'll both see the same color. Whatever our identities or ideologies, we believe our realities meet at the most basic level of perception. But in 2015, a viral internet phenomenon tore this assumption asunder. The incident was known simply as ''The Dress.''
For the uninitiated: a photograph of a dress appeared on the internet, and people disagreed about its color. Some saw it as white and gold; others saw it as blue and black. For a time, it was all anyone online could talk about.
Eventually, vision scientists figured out what was happening. It wasn't our computer screens or our eyes. It was the mental calculations that brains make when we see. Some people unconsciously inferred that the dress was in direct light and mentally subtracted yellow from the image, so they saw blue and black stripes. Others saw it as being in shadow, where bluish light dominates. Their brains mentally subtracted blue from the image, and came up with a white and gold dress.
Not only does thinking filter reality; it constructs it, inferring an outside world from ambiguous input. In Being You, Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, relates his explanation for how the ''inner universe of subjective experience relates to, and can be explained in terms of, biological and physical processes unfolding in brains and bodies.'' He contends that ''experiences of being you, or of being me, emerge from the way the brain predicts and controls the internal state of the body.''
Prediction has come into vogue in academic circles in recent years. Seth and the philosopher Andy Clark, a colleague at Sussex, refer to predictions made by the brain as ''controlled hallucinations.'' The idea is that the brain is always constructing models of the world to explain and predict incoming information; it updates these models when prediction and the experience we get from our sensory inputs diverge.
''Chairs aren't red,'' Seth writes, ''just as they aren't ugly or old-fashioned or avant-garde '... When I look at a red chair, the redness I experience depends both on properties of the chair and on properties of my brain. It corresponds to the content of a set of perceptual predictions about the ways in which a specific kind of surface reflects light.''
Seth is not particularly interested in redness, or even in color more generally. Rather his larger claim is that this same process applies to all of perception: ''The entirety of perceptual experience is a neuronal fantasy that remains yoked to the world through a continuous making and remaking of perceptual best guesses, of controlled hallucinations. You could even say that we're all hallucinating all the time. It's just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that's what we call reality.''
Cognitive scientists often rely on atypical examples to gain understanding of what's really happening. Seth takes the reader through a fun litany of optical illusions and demonstrations, some quite familiar and others less so. Squares that are in fact the same shade appear to be different; spirals printed on paper appear to spontaneously rotate; an obscure image turns out to be a woman kissing a horse; a face shows up in a bathroom sink. Re-creating the mind's psychedelic powers in silicon, an artificial-intelligence-powered virtual-reality setup that he and his colleagues created produces a Hunter Thompson''esque menagerie of animal parts emerging piecemeal from other objects in a square on the Sussex University campus. This series of examples, in Seth's telling, ''chips away at the beguiling but unhelpful intuition that consciousness is one thing'--one big scary mystery in search of one big scary solution.'' Seth's perspective might be unsettling to those who prefer to believe that things are as they seem to be: ''Experiences of free will are perceptions. The flow of time is a perception.''
Seth is on comparatively solid ground when he describes how the brain shapes experience, what philosophers call the ''easy'' problems of consciousness. They're easy only in comparison to the ''hard'' problem: why subjective experience exists at all as a feature of the universe. Here he treads awkwardly, introducing the ''real'' problem, which is to ''explain, predict, and control the phenomenological properties of conscious experience.'' It's not clear how the real problem differs from the easy problems, but somehow, he says, tackling it will get us some way toward resolving the hard problem. Now that would be a neat trick.
Where Seth relates, for the most part, the experiences of people with typical brains wrestling with atypical stimuli, in Coming to Our Senses, Susan Barry, an emeritus professor of neurobiology at Mount Holyoke college, tells the stories of two people who acquired new senses later in life than is usual. Liam McCoy, who had been nearly blind since he was an infant, was able to see almost clearly after a series of operations when he was 15 years old. Zohra Damji was profoundly deaf until she was given a cochlear implant at the unusually late age of 12. As Barry explains, Damji's surgeon ''told her aunt that, had he known the length and degree of Zohra's deafness, he would not have performed the operation.'' Barry's compassionate, nuanced, and observant exposition is informed by her own experience:
At age forty-eight, I experienced a dramatic improvement in my vision, a change that repeatedly brought me moments of childlike glee. Cross-eyed from early infancy, I had seen the world primarily through one eye. Then, in mid-life, I learned, through a program of vision therapy, to use my eyes together. With each glance, everything I saw took on a new look. I could see the volume and 3D shape of the empty space between things. Tree branches reached out toward me; light fixtures floated. A visit to the produce section of the supermarket, with all its colors and 3D shapes, could send me into a sort of ecstasy.
Barry was overwhelmed with joy at her new capacities, which she describes as ''seeing in a new way.'' She takes pains to point out how different this is from ''seeing for the first time.'' A person who has grown up with eyesight can grasp a scene in a single glance. ''But where we perceive a three-dimensional landscape full of objects and people, a newly sighted adult sees a hodgepodge of lines and patches of colors appearing on one flat plane.'' As McCoy described his experience of walking up and down stairs to Barry:
The upstairs are large alternating bars of light and dark and the downstairs are a series of small lines. My main focus is to balance and step IN BETWEEN lines, never on one '... Of course going downstairs you step in between every line but upstairs you skip every other bar. All the while, when I move, the stairs are skewing and changing.
Even a sidewalk was tricky, at first, to navigate. He had to judge whether a line ''indicated the junction between flat sidewalk blocks, a crack in the cement, the outline of a stick, a shadow cast by an upright pole, or the presence of a sidewalk step,'' Barry explains. ''Should he step up, down, or over the line, or should he ignore it entirely?'' As McCoy says, the complexity of his perceptual confusion probably cannot be fully explained in terms that sighted people are used to.
The same, of course, is true of hearing. Raw audio can be hard to untangle. Barry describes her own ability to listen to the radio while working, effortlessly distinguishing the background sounds in the room from her own typing and from the flute and violin music coming over the radio. ''Like object recognition, sound recognition depends upon communication between lower and higher sensory areas in the brain '... This neural attention to frequency helps with sound source recognition. Drop a spoon on a tiled kitchen floor, and you know immediately whether the spoon is metal or wood by the high- or low-frequency sound waves it produces upon impact.'' Most people acquire such capacities in infancy. Damji didn't. She would often ask others what she was hearing, but had an easier time learning to distinguish sounds that she made herself. She was surprised by how noisy eating potato chips was, telling Barry: ''To me, potato chips were always such a delicate thing, the way they were so lightweight, and so fragile that you could break them easily, and I expected them to be soft-sounding. But the amount of noise they make when you crunch them was something out of place. So loud.''
As Barry recounts, at first Damji was frightened by all sounds, ''because they were meaningless.'' But as she grew accustomed to her new capabilities, Damji found that ''a sound is not a noise anymore but more like a story or an event.'' The sound of laughter came to her as a complete surprise, and she told Barry it was her favorite. As Barry writes, ''Although we may be hardly conscious of background sounds, we are also dependent upon them for our emotional well-being.'' One strength of the book is in the depth of her connection with both McCoy and Damji. She spent years speaking with them and corresponding as they progressed through their careers: McCoy is now an ophthalmology researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, while Damji is a doctor. From the details of how they learned to see and hear, Barry concludes, convincingly, that ''since the world and everything in it is constantly changing, it's surprising that we can recognize anything at all.''
In What Makes Us Smart, Samuel Gershman, a psychology professor at Harvard, says that there are ''two fundamental principles governing the organization of human intelligence.'' Gershman's book is not particularly accessible; it lacks connective tissue and is peppered with equations that are incompletely explained. He writes that intelligence is governed by ''inductive bias,'' meaning we prefer certain hypotheses before making observations, and ''approximation bias,'' which means we take mental shortcuts when faced with limited resources. Gershman uses these ideas to explain everything from visual illusions to conspiracy theories to the development of language, asserting that what looks dumb is often ''smart.''
''The brain is evolution's solution to the twin problems of limited data and limited computation,'' he writes.
He portrays the mind as a raucous committee of modules that somehow helps us fumble our way through the day. ''Our mind consists of multiple systems for learning and decision making that only exchange limited amounts of information with one another,'' he writes. If he's correct, it's impossible for even the most introspective and insightful among us to fully grasp what's going on inside our own head. As Damji wrote in a letter to Barry:
When I had no choice but to learn Swahili in medical school in order to be able to talk to the patients'--that is when I realized how much potential we have'--especially when we are pushed out of our comfort zone. The brain learns it somehow.
Matthew Hutson is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a freelance science and tech writer.
12ft | Here's How The CDC Used A Backchannel With Twitter To Control The COVID-19 Narrative | The Daily Caller
Anti-money laundering: Council agrees its position on a strengthened rulebook - Consilium
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 16:38
The EU continues its fight to protect EU citizens and the EU's financial system against money laundering and terrorist financing. In order to enlarge the scope of the existing regulatory framework and to close possible loopholes, today the Council agreed its position on an anti-money laundering (AML) regulation and a new directive (AMLD6). Together with the proposal for a recast of the transfer of funds regulation, on which an agreement has already been reached with the European Parliament, these will form the new EU AML rulebook once adopted.
Terrorists and those who finance them are not welcome in Europe. In order to launder dirty money, criminal individuals and organisations had to look for loopholes in our existing rules which are already quite strict. But our intention is to close these loopholes further, and to apply even stricter rules in all EU member states. Large cash payments beyond '¬10.000 will become impossible. Trying to stay anonymous when buying or selling crypto-assets will become much more difficult. Hiding behind multiple layers of ownership of companies won't work any more. It will even become difficult to launder dirty money via jewellers or goldsmiths.
ZbynÄk Stanjura, Minister for Finance of CzechiaThe new EU anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) rules will be extended to the entire crypto sector, obliging all crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) to conduct due diligence on their customers. This means that they will have to verify facts and information about their customers. In its position, the Council demands CASPs to apply customer due diligence measures when carrying out transactions amounting to '¬1000 or more, and adds measures to mitigate risks in relation to transactions with self-hosted wallets. The Council also introduced specific enhanced due diligence measures for cross-border correspondent relationships for crypto-asset service providers.
Third-party financing intermediaries, persons trading in precious metals, precious stones and cultural goods, will also be subject to the obligations of the regulation, as will jewellers, horologists and goldsmiths.
By limiting large cash payments, the EU will make it harder for criminals to launder dirty money. An EU-wide maximum limit of '¬10.000 is set for cash payments. Member states will have the flexibility to impose a lower maximum limit if they wish.
The EU is committed to fighting money laundering and cutting terrorist financing
Third countries that are listed by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF, the international standard setter in anti-money laundering) will also be listed by the EU. There will accordingly be two EU lists, a ''black list'' and a ''grey list'', reflecting the FATF listings. The Commission will not be required to redo the identification process performed by the FATF. This is to ensure that FATF lists are transcribed in a timely manner and to avoid wasting resources. Once a third country appears on one of these lists, the EU will apply measures proportionate to the risks posed by the country.
In its position, the Council decided to make beneficial ownership rules more transparent and to harmonise them more. In particular, the Council clarifies that beneficial ownership is based on two components '' ownership and control '' which need to be analysed in order to assess how control is exercised over a legal entity, and to identify all natural persons who are the beneficial owners of that legal entity. Related rules applicable to multi-layered ownership and control structures are also clarified. The Council also spells out further how to identify and verify the identity of beneficial owners across types of entities, including non-EU entities. Data protection and record retention provisions are also clarified. This is expected to make the work of the competent authorities easier and faster.
Member states should ensure that any natural or legal person that can demonstrate a legitimate interest has access to information held in the beneficial ownership registers, and such persons should include those journalists and civil society organisations that are connected with the prevention and combating of money laundering and terrorist financing.
The package also foresees i.a. the clarification of outsourcing provisions, the clarification of the powers of supervisors, a minimum set of information to which all financial intelligence units (national centres for the receipt and analysis of suspicious transaction reports and relevant money laundering information) should have access, as well as improved cooperation among authorities.
BackgroundOn 20 July 2021, the Commission presented its package of legislative proposals to strengthen the EU's rules on anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT). This package consists of:
a regulation establishing a new EU anti-money laundering authority (AMLA) which will have powers to impose sanctions and penaltiesa regulation recasting the regulation on transfers of funds which aims to make transfers of crypto-assets more transparent and fully traceablea regulation on anti-money-laundering requirements for the private sectora directive on anti-money-laundering mechanismsNow that the Council has agreed its position on the anti-money laundering regulation and directive, it is ready to start trilogue negotiations with the European Parliament in order to agree on a final version of the texts.
Regulation on the prevention of the use of the financial system for the purposes of money laundering or terrorist financing: Mandate for negotiations with the European Parliament Annexes to the AML regulation Directive on the mechanisms to be put in place by the member states for the prevention of the use of the financial system for the purposes of money laundering or terrorist financing and repealing directive Anti-money laundering: Provisional agreement reached on transparency of crypto asset transfers (press release, 29 June 2022) Progress report on anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism of 7 June 2022 Fight against money laundering and terrorist financing (background information)
Highly nutritious meat substitutes on the market cannot be absorbed by the human body, study flags
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 16:08
09 Dec 2022 --- A new study from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, has shown that plant-based meat alternatives commonly found in supermarkets hold high phytate levels. These antinutrients inhibit the absorption of minerals in the human body, making it impossible to absorb the products' high iron contents.
The study, published in Nutrients, analyzed 44 meat substitutes sold in Swedish supermarkets, mainly made of soy and pea proteins. It also included fermented soy products of tempeh and mycoproteins '' fungi.
''All products were high in iron and zinc content but low in bioavailability (except the tempeh and mycoprotein-based products). This means that the minerals pass through the gastrointestinal tract without being absorbed,'' Ann-Sofie Sandberg, co-author of the study and professor of food and nutrition science at Chalmers University, tells NutritionInsight.
Sandberg details that the mycoproteins did not contain iron but relatively high amounts of zinc. Zinc absorption might be negatively influenced by the fungi cell walls, although it's yet unknown.
''Among these products, we saw a wide variation in nutritional content and how sustainable they can be from a health perspective. In general, the estimated absorption of iron and zinc from the products was extremely low,'' says Cecilia Mayer Labba, lead author of the study.
Plant-based nutritionThe researchers say that although plant-based alternatives made from root vegetables, pulses, fruits and vegetables have demonstrated a low environmental impact, studies showing textured plant proteins' impact on human health are lacking.
The study explains that phytates '' a storage form of phosphorus '' are found naturally in beans and cereals, and when used for meat substitutes, they accumulate while the proteins are being extracted.
Studies showing textured plant proteins' impact on human health are lacking, according to the researchers. However, mineral absorption occurs in the gastrointestinal tract, and phytates form insoluble compounds with dietary minerals essential for health, such as nonheme iron '' iron from plants '' and zinc. This means human intestines cannot absorb these minerals.
''Both iron and zinc also accumulate in protein extraction. This is why high levels are listed among the product's ingredients, but the minerals are bound to phytates and cannot be absorbed and used by the body,'' says Labba.
Meat, fish or greens?Sandberg explains that the most available iron for absorption comes from meat and fish containing heme iron, which is very easily absorbed.
''Meat and fish also contain what is called 'the meat factor' '' muscle tissues or amino acids '' which stimulate the absorption of nonheme iron in the whole meal. Thus there are two reasons for animal protein being superior for iron absorption. Also, zinc absorption is stimulated by animal protein.''
However, she details that it is better to eat greens ''as they are'' rather than meat substitutes because the amount of phytate is usually lower.
This makes them more possible to counteract by adding ascorbic acid containing greens or fruits and activating the phytase degrading enzymes in plants or microorganisms producing such enzymes.
''Tempeh fermentation and sourdough fermentation of bread or lactic fermentation of vegetables, hydrothermal treatment of grains or beans or addition of phytase enzymes,'' Sandberg exemplifies.
Iron deficiency thrivingThe researchers say that it's not only important to look at a product's nutritional content but also to consider whether the body can absorb that content.
''Some of the products we studied are fortified with iron, but it is still inhibited by phytates. We believe that making nutrition claims on only those nutrients that can be absorbed by the body could create incentives for the industry to improve those products.''
The researchers stress that 10 to 32% of Swedish women in fertile age have iron deficiencies and almost one-third of secondary school teenage girls.
Additionally, women are more likely to switch to a plant-based diet and usually consume less red meat than men, putting them more at risk for iron deficiency. It is important to look at a product's nutritional content but also to consider whether the body can absorb it.
Calling for innovationThe study found that one plant-based food item that stuck out was tempeh, although ''not surprising'' as the fermentation process allows microorganisms to break down phytates.
Also shown was that mycoproteins have a high level of zinc. However, how effectively human intestines can break down the cell walls of mycoprotein and absorb the nutrients ''remain unclear.''
''I think the industry can change quite rapidly if focusing on nutritional value, but there is a need for product development. There is the possibility of using enzymes or microorganisms producing phytase enzymes that break down phytate or using fermentation and hydrothermal processing at optimal conditions,'' says Sandberg.
She adds that the industry should focus on mineral bioavailability and add high-quality fat and less salt in further product development.
''Plant-based food is important for the transition to sustainable food production, and there is huge development potential for plant-based meat substitutes,'' Labba concludes.
By Beatrice Wihlander
To contact our editorial team please email us at editorial@cnsmedia.com
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Note to Readers on the "Twitter Files"
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 16:07
Later today, an annotated version of last night's ''Twitter Files'' thread on the removal of Donald Trump, along with new commentary on what's been published so far, will appear here on TK. After a crazy week, during which I've been in the unnatural position of feeling a need to keep quiet, I can get back to writing as usual on this site.
More importantly, I can now explain some things to TK subscribers, not only about the events of the last week, but about where the Twitter project stands and where it may be going. But first, a few words about what's happened to date:
Anti-vaxxer nurse who injected up to 8,600 patients with saline instead of Covid vaccine walks free | Daily Mail Online
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 16:04
Anti-vaxxer nurse who injected up to 8,600 elderly patients with saltwater instead of Covid vaccine walks FREE from court in GermanyThe nurse in Germany jabbed up to 8,600 elderly people with ~saline solutionThe nurse administered the fake vaccines and left people without protectionThe defendant shared anti-vaxxer posts on social media during the pandemicBy Christian Oliver For Mailonline
Published: 09:23 EST, 1 December 2022 | Updated: 10:17 EST, 1 December 2022
An anti-vaxxer nurse who injected up to 8,600 elderly people with saline solution instead of a Covid-19 vaccine has walked free from court.
Red Cross nurse Antje T, 39, jabbed thousands of elderly patients at a vaccine centre in Germany with what she told them was the BioNTech Pfizer vaccine but was just a saltwater solution.
The nurse, who administered the fake vaccines at the Schortens jab centre in Friesland, northwest Germany, was given just six months on probation.
She was found guilty of six counts of intentional assault by Oldenburg District Court, Lower Saxony state, on November 30.
Defendant Antje T, 39, is pictured during the trial at Oldenburg District Court, Lower Saxony, on November 30. She was sentenced to probation for jabbing people with saline solution
Antje T jabbed up to 8,600 patients who were mainly hospital employees, educators and doctors above the age of 70 between March 5 and April 2021, leaving them with no protection against the deadly virus.
Police told the court that she was able to introduce the saline solution undetected, because she was in charge of vaccine and syringe preparation during her shift at the vaccination centre.
But after more than a month she was reported by another employee who saw her use the saline solution instead of the vaccine on six patients on April 21, 2021.
The 39-year-old had additionally posted several social media posts where she openly emphasized her skeptical views regarding COVID-19 vaccines.
When questioned by police, she admitted to using saline solution but had said she only did it because she had accidentally broken a vial containing six shots and was ashamed to tell her colleagues.
She had also claimed that it was a one-time incident, but was immediately sacked after antibody tests that were carried out on the affected people confirmed authorities' suspicions.
The nurse, who administered the fake vaccines at the Schortens jab centre in Friesland (pictured), northwest Germany, was given just six months on probation
In addition, Antje T's licence to work as a nurse has been revoked, media reported.
Following the incident, state authorities urged the fraud victims to register for revaccination and emphasised that it is completely safe.
Antje T in turn was initially charged with 15 counts of intentional assault at the beginning of the trial in November 2022, but nine of them were dropped due to no evidence.
Court spokesperson Torben Toelle said that the prosecutor found evidence that six syringes were changed for saline, leading to the charges, but that they expect this was done to many more.
During the trial on November 30, the shamed nurse apologised in court.
Concerning the defendant's anti-vaxxer posts on social media, Toelle added: 'The accused had shared various conspiracy theories on the Internet and on social media.
'However, the chamber could not determine with the necessary certainty that this set of ideas was the motive for her actions and that she then acted to sabotage a vaccination campaign.'
The verdict can reportedly be appealed within a week.
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Twitter Blue to Relaunch Monday, With Blue Check Mark, Higher iOS Price, Company Says - CNET
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 16:04
Twitter tweeted Saturday that its Twitter Blue subscription service will relaunch on Monday, giving subscribers the now controversial "blue check mark," but this time with some sort of vetting process meant to prevent impersonations on the site. The check mark and other features will cost users $8 a month if they subscribe via the web or $11 per month if they subscribe on iOS, Twitter said.
"When you subscribe you'll get Edit Tweet, 1080p video uploads, reader mode, and a blue checkmark (after your account has been reviewed)," the company said in its tweet thread. It isn't clear what that account review involves, though an image included in the thread mentions the need for a "verified phone number."
New Twitter owner Elon Musk has been fiddling with verification check marks since he took over. Last month, he introduced an $8-per-month Twitter Blue subscription that blurred the line between authenticated individuals and paid accounts. That led to a slew of people impersonating celebrities and corporations, which caused mayhem and prompted Twitter to pause signups for Twitter Blue.
On Saturday, Esther Crawford, a product lead at Twitter, said in her own tweet that "we've added a review step before applying a blue checkmark to an account as one of our new steps to combat impersonation." When asked by a Twitter user if granting the blue check mark would involve verifying a user by way of an ID, Crawford replied, "We don't have ID verification in this update."
Before Musk came up with the idea of combining the blue check mark with the Twitter Blue subscription service, the verification process had traditionally involved things like submitting a government-issued ID and offering evidence that you were a "prominently recognized individual." Musk's pay-for-verification setup had critics saying the blue check mark had become meaningless.
In late November, Musk tweeted a plan that would see companies getting a gold verification check mark, with government entities getting one that's gray. "Blue for individuals (celebrity or not) and all verified accounts will be manually authenticated before check activates," Musk tweeted at the time, saying more details would be provided later. He also said then that individuals could have a smaller secondary logo as well showing "they belong to an org if verified as such by that org."
Saturday's thread from Twitter said the plan for the gold and gray check marks for businesses and government will be going into effect. It also said Twitter Blue subscribers "will be able to change their handle, display name or profile photo, but if they do they'll temporarily lose the blue checkmark until their account is reviewed again." During the recent impersonation chaos, some Twitter users had changed their display names to pose as others.
Twitter didn't respond to an email Saturday seeking more information about the verification review process.
Saturday's Twitter thread also said Twitter Blue subscribers would "rocket to the top of replies, mentions and search," would see half the ads and would be able to post longer videos.
Twitter Blue subscribers who already signed up via iOS for the earlier $8 a month price will get a notification about the new $11 monthly iOS cost and can then choose to subscribe via the web instead, at the $8 rate, Crawford tweeted. Last month, Musk complained about the fees Apple charges developers and companies for customer purchases made via the App Store on iOS.
Crawford said the iOS and web versions would offer the same features, and that Android users can purchase on the web and use Twitter Blue on their devices.
Sir Chris Whitty demands more action to crack down on 'everyone's problem' of air pollution | Daily Mail Online
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 14:54
CAUSE CHILDREN TO HAVE A LOW IQ : Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, found in May 2019 that children born to mothers who live in polluted areas have an IQ that is up to seven points lower than those living in places with cleaner air.
CAUSE CHILDREN TO HAVE POORER MEMORY : Researchers at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health found boys exposed to greater levels of PM2.5 in the womb performed worse on memory tests by the time they are 10.
DELAY THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN : Youngsters who live less than one-third of a mile away from busy roads are twice as likely to score lower on tests of communication skills in infancy, found researchers at Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health in April. They were also more likely to have poorer hand-eye coordination.
MAKE CHILDREN MORE ANXIOUS : University of Cincinnati scientists claimed pollution may alter the structure of children's brains to make them more anxious. Their study of 14 youngsters found rates of anxiety was higher among those exposed to greater levels of pollution.
CUT YOUR CHILD'S LIFE SHORT: Children born today will lose nearly two years of their lives because of air pollution, according to a report by the US-based Health Effects Institute and the University of British Columbia in April 2019. UNICEF called for action on the back of the study.
RAISE A CHILD'S RISK OF AUTISM: Researchers at Monash University in Australia discovered youngsters living in highly polluted parts of Shanghai have a 86 per cent greater chance of developing ASD. Lead author Dr Yuming Guo said: 'The developing brains of young children are more vulnerable to toxic exposures in the environment.'
CAUSE ASTHMA IN CHILDREN : Four million children around the world develop asthma each year because of road traffic pollution, a major study by academics at George Washington University estimated. Experts are divided as to what causes asthma - but exposure to pollution in childhood increases the risk by damaging the lungs.
MAKE CHILDREN FAT : University of Southern California experts found last November that 10 year olds who lived in polluted areas when they were babies are, on average, 2.2lbs (1kg), heavier than those who grew up around cleaner air. Nitrogen dioxide pollution could disrupt how well children burn fat, the scientists said.
LEAVE WOMEN INFERTILE EARLIER : Scientists at the University of Modena, Italy, claimed in May 2019 that they believe pollution speeds up ageing in women, just like smoking, meaning they run out of eggs faster. This was based on them finding almost two-thirds of women who have a low 'reserve' of eggs regularly inhaled toxic air.
RAISE THE RISK OF A MISCARRIAGE : University of Utah scientists found in January that pregnant women are 16 per cent more likely to suffer the heartbreak of a miscarriage if they live in areas of high pollution.
RAISE THE RISK OF BREAST CANCER : Scientists at the University of Stirling found six women working at the same bridge next to a busy road in the US got breast cancer within three years of each other. There was a one in 10,000 chance the cases were a coincidence, the study said. It suggested chemicals in the traffic fumes caused the cancer by shutting down the BRCA genes, which try to stop tumours growing.
DAMAGE A MAN'S SPERM : Brazilian scientists at the University of Sao Paulo found in March that mice exposed to toxic air had lower counts and worse quality sperm compared to those who had inhaled clean air since birth.
MAKE MEN LESS LIKELY TO GET SEXUALLY AROUSED : Scientists at Guangzhou Medical University in China found rats exposed to air pollution struggled to get sexually aroused. Scientists believe it may also affect men, as inhaling poisonous particles may trigger inflammation in blood vessels and starve the genitals of oxygen '' affecting men's ability to become sexually aroused.
MAKE MEN MORE LIKELY TO HAVE ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION : Men who live on main roads are more likely to have difficulty getting an erection due to exposure to pollution, a Guangzhou University in China study suggested in February. Toxic fumes reduced blood flow to the genitals, tests on rats showed, putting them at risk of developing erectile dysfunction.
RAISE THE RISK OF PSYCHOSIS : In March, King's College London scientists linked toxic air to intense paranoia and hearing voices in young people for the first time. They said uncovering exactly how pollution may lead to psychosis should be an 'urgent health priority'.
MAKE YOU DEPRESSED : Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers found in January that that the more polluted the air, the sadder we are. Their study was based on analysing social media users in China alongside the average daily PM2.5 concentration and weather data where they lived.
CAUSE DEMENTIA : Air pollution could be responsible for 60,000 cases of dementia in the UK, researchers from King's College London and St George's, University of London, calculated last September. Tiny pollutants breathed deep into the lungs and enter the blood stream, where they may travel into the brain and cause inflammation '' a problem which may trigger dementia.
Record number of Brits died of alcohol-specific causes. Experts blame covid lockdown as result | Daily Mail Online
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 14:52
A record number of people died last year as a direct result of alcohol abuse with experts blaming lockdown drinking for the 'devastating' rise.
There were 9,641 such deaths in the UK in 2021, which is up 7.4 per cent in a year and up by more than a quarter (27.4 per cent) since 2019, the last pre-Covid year.
The figures, from the Office for National Statistics, only include deaths directly related to boozing, such as alcoholic liver disease, poisoning and some mental disorders.
Adding deaths 'linked' to alcohol, such as some cancers, would see the toll rise further.
A record number of people died last year as a direct result of alcohol abuse. There were 9,641 such deaths in the UK in 2021, which is up 7.4 per cent in a year and up by more than a quarter (27.4 per cent) since 2019
Graph shows: Around three-quarters of alcohol-specific deaths were caused by alcoholic liver disease
Britain isn't boozing capital of Europe, OECD data shows Britain isn't the boozing capital of Europe, official data has revealed.
The UK actually ranks middle of the pack for alcohol consumption, sitting behind both France and Germany.
An Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report found Brits drank 9.7 litres of pure alcohol per adult in 2020 '-- 0.1 less than the EU average.
It was the equivalent of around nine pints of low-strength beer or six large glasses of wine a week.
Latvia had the highest rate with 12.1 litres per adult during the year, while France had 10.4 and Germans drank 10.6.
Britons are urged not to drink more than 14 units a week on a regular basis '-- the equivalent of six pints of lager or 10 small glasses of wine.
The data showed most people were drinking above this on average.
Charities described the figures as 'tragic' and a 'national tragedy' and called on the government to introduce an alcohol strategy and hike taxes the likes of beer and wine to curb demand.
Industry leaders said ministers should instead focus on helping the minority of problem drinkers without hitting those who drink responsibly.
James Tucker, from the ONS, said: 'Alcohol-specific deaths have risen sharply since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, with alcoholic-liver disease the leading cause of these deaths.
'This rise is likely to be the result of increased alcohol consumption during the pandemic.
'Research has suggested people who were already drinking at higher levels before the pandemic were the most likely to have increased their alcohol consumption during this period.'
Rates of alcohol-specific deaths in the UK had remained stable between 2012 and 2019, with a rate of 11.8 per 100,000 people at the end of this period.
But this rose to 14.0 per 100,000 in 2020 and 14.8 in 2021.
This equates to 7,565 alcohol-specific deaths in 2019, rising to 8,974 in 2020 and 9,641 in 2021.
Consistent with previous years, the rate for men remained around double that of women last year, with figures of 20.1 and 9.9, respectively.
Read more: How much booze is in YOUR favourite drink? Scotland and Northern Ireland had the highest rates of alcohol-specific death in 2021, with rates of 22.4 and 19.3.
In England, the North East had the highest rate for the eighth consecutive year at 20.4.
More than three-quarters (78 per cent) of the alcohol-specific deaths in 2021 were from alcoholic liver disease, with 12.1 per cent due to mental or behavioural disorders and 5.8 per cent poisoning.
Dr Katherine Severi, chief executive of the Institute of Alcohol Studies, said: 'This 7.4 per cent rise in alcohol-specific deaths is extremely concerning after the record number of deaths reported in 2020.
'Action must be taken to curb this intolerable trend, which disproportionately affects the less well-off in society.
'Evidence from home and abroad shows fiscal measures are the most effective tools to tackle alcohol harm and reduce inequalities.
'The UK government has committed to reforming alcohol duty to better protect public health and today's data add urgency to these plans.
'Despite opposition from commercial interests, we can't afford to delay or dilute policies that help save lives.'
Graph shows: Alcohol-specific deaths rose in all four UK countries compared to the pre-pandemic period
Graph shows: Alcohol-specific death rates rose in every region in England from 2019 to 2021
Official data has shown the UK actually ranks middle of the pack for alcohol consumption, behind France and Germany
Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, chair of the Alcohol Health Alliance UK, said there will be nearly 10,000 more premature deaths by 2035 if drinking does not return to pre-pandemic levels.
He added: 'It is a national tragedy that the number of deaths caused by alcohol has increased once again across the UK, with every life lost leaving behind a devastating impact on families, friends, and communities.
'Covid-19 saw the number of alcohol deaths increase sharply across the UK, and the continuation of this upward trend in today's figures should raise alarm bells in Westminster.'
Karen Tyrell, chief executive of Drinkaware, said: 'These statistics are absolutely devastating, each number masking an individual family tragedy.
'We know that the heaviest drinkers drank more during the pandemic, and warning signs were missed as people saw each other less and were less able to access support.
'This created a perfect storm and we are now seeing the consequences.
'Drinkaware urges the Health Secretary to come together with experts to create a new coordinated UK wide alcohol strategy to reduce the damage alcohol does to individuals, our public services and to wider society. '
Counsellor David Fothergill, Chairman of the Local Government Association's Community Wellbeing Board, said: 'People with alcohol and other substance misuse problems need the right support and treatment, which councils are committed to deliver.'
'Now, more than ever, we need a concerted approach to tackling the issue of alcohol-related harms. Trends have worsened, and a proactive effort is needed to turn the tide.
'Councils are doing all they can to help keep people healthy throughout their lives and reduce pressure on the NHS and social care, but need the Government to provide certainty over their individual public health grants for next year as soon as possible so they can continue this vital work.'
Matt Lambert, chief executive of alcohol trade body the Portman Group, said: 'Every death is a tragedy for the people concerned and their family and friends.
'The longer-term impact of pandemic drinking for a small group of drinkers continues and there is increasing evidence that targeted, health focused action is needed for those drinking at the highest harm level.'
A Department of Health and Social Care Spokesperson said: 'Alcohol misuse can ruin lives and destroy families, and we are taking action to support those most at risk, with a strong programme under way to address alcohol harms in the UK which has already helped tens of thousands of people.
'This year we have invested £93 million of new funding to rebuild drug and alcohol misuse treatment and services in England as well as increasing the availability of inpatient detoxification beds to help those requiring medically assisted withdrawal. We are also funding specialist alcohol care teams in those 25% of hospitals with the highest need.'
DO YOU DRINK TOO MUCH ALCOHOL? THE 10 QUESTIONS THAT REVEAL YOUR RISKOne screening tool used widely by medical professionals is the AUDIT (Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Tests). Developed in collaboration with the World Health Organisation, the 10-question test is considered to be the gold standard in helping to determine if someone has alcohol abuse problems.
The test has been reproduced here with permission from the WHO.
To complete it, answer each question and note down the corresponding score.
YOUR SCORE:
0-7: You are within the sensible drinking range and have a low risk of alcohol-related problems.
Over 8: Indicate harmful or hazardous drinking.
8-15: Medium level of risk. Drinking at your current level puts you at risk of developing problems with your health and life in general, such as work and relationships. Consider cutting down (see below for tips).
16-19: Higher risk of complications from alcohol. Cutting back on your own may be difficult at this level, as you may be dependent, so you may need professional help from your GP and/or a counsellor.
20 and over: Possible dependence. Your drinking is already causing you problems, and you could very well be dependent. You should definitely consider stopping gradually or at least reduce your drinking. You should seek professional help to ascertain the level of your dependence and the safest way to withdraw from alcohol.
Severe dependence may need medically assisted withdrawal, or detox, in a hospital or a specialist clinic. This is due to the likelihood of severe alcohol withdrawal symptoms in the first 48 hours needing specialist treatment.
9 Million Millennials Moved Back In With Their Parents This Year | ZeroHedge
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 14:49
The good news is that they still have jobs (if one believes the goalseeked propaganda spewed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics). The bad news is taht soaring rents have forced millions of young Americans to move back in with their parents this year, according to a new survey.
As Bloomberg's Alex Tanzi writes, about one in four millennials are living with their parents, according to the survey of 1,200 people by Pollfish for the website PropertyManagement.com. That's equivalent to about 18 million people between the ages of 26 and 41. More than half said they moved back in with family in the past year.
Among those who slunk back to their parents' basement, the surge in rental costs was the main reason given for the move. About 15% of millennial renters say that they're spending more than half their after-tax income on rent.
The disruptions of the pandemic, which triggered massive job losses as well as a spike in housing costs, have driven an unprecedented shakeup in living arrangements. In September of 2020, a survey by Pew found that for the first time since the Great Depression, a majority of Americans aged between 18 and 29 were living with their parents.
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Elon Musk's Twitter Files Are Bait - The Atlantic
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 04:41
He doesn't actually want transparency on the social-media platform.
Erik Carter / The Atlantic; GettyLast night, Elon Musk celebrated the release of a new entry in the ''Twitter Files'' series, which aims to '... Well, that's complicated. It's a supposed transparency project from Musk that, to date, has included giving two independent writers access to internal Twitter communications, as well as to the company's Slack channels. So far, they've produced two threads, each totaling about 30 tweets, purporting to show how Twitter's executives have schemed and colluded to censor political speech for partisan gain. The tweets are breathless, alluding at various points to ''chilling passages'' and ''secret groups'' of executive decision makers.
This latest tranche, released with commentary by Bari Weiss, gave me a look at something I've always wanted to see: a portion, at least, of the social platform's internal moderation systems. The screenshots show how users can be flagged in various ways by the site's employees: We can see that some users are marked as high profile , for example, and that individuals have a strike count, which seems to reference how many times the account has been caught in an infraction of Twitter's rules. Then there are the juicier labels, like Do Not Amplify and the ominous-sounding Trends Blacklist .
As a set of documents, the screenshots are fascinating. But the ''Twitter Files'' entries are sloppy, anecdotal, devoid of context, and, well, old news. (Neither Weiss nor Twitter immediately responded to requests for comment.) Weiss's thread purports to show how Twitter restricted the reach of several large accounts, including those of the Stanford doctor Jay Bhattacharya, the right-wing activists Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, and Chaya Raichik, who operates the infamous Libs of TikTok account. Via the internal screenshots, it argues that Twitter, contrary to its public claims, shadowbanned conservative accounts through a process the company calls ''visibility filtering.'' Similarly, the thread implies that a committee of top Twitter executives known as ''Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support'' acts as a kind of content-moderation black site'--an off-the-books cabal that makes off-the-books decisions on high-profile accounts. (Meta has recently been embroiled in a controversy over a similar ''cross-check'' system.)
Read: Shadowbanning is Big Tech's big problem
The subjectivity of moderation decisions across the social web poses tremendous and complicated problems'--which is precisely why journalists and academics have paid close attention to it for more than a decade. But there's no secret conspiracy: These claims largely comport with what Twitter has publicly stated about its moderation policies over the past few years. Since May 2018, Twitter has noted that it will change how a user appears in the site's search feature if that user behaves in a way that ''detracts from healthy public conversation.'' Twitter has an entire Frequently Asked Questions page dedicated to this type of de-amplification, which it says it does based on a combination of algorithms and human decision making, but not via political ideology.
I do not believe that Elon Musk cares about the thorny particulars of content moderation. By releasing these internal documents selectively, Musk gets to be on the offensive, whipping up a crowd that's eager to cry censorship and shadowbanning. He's not even interested in paying attention to the details: As the first mega-thread dropped, last weekend, Musk admitted that he hadn't actually looked at the files yet'--although that didn't stop him from making boneheaded statements, like suggesting that its contents proved a large-scale First Amendment violation.
Read: Why conservatives invented a ''right to post''
In fairness, the Twitter Files do show that the company makes amplification decisions about certain accounts. And while that's not especially revelatory to people who've paid attention, the files do speak to the immense power wielded by tech platforms. It's a power that makes Republicans and Democrats queasy, albeit often in different ways. As content-moderation experts will tell you, it's a messy system where people can make the wrong call with occasionally disastrous results. In this way, the Twitter Files do what technology critics have long done: point out a mostly intractable problem that is at the heart of our societal decision to outsource broad swaths of our political discourse and news consumption to corporate platforms whose infrastructure and design were made for viral advertising.
The dynamics of the entire affair are Trumpian in the most exhausting way possible. Attempts to engage with the attention hijacker only further his purposes, but ignoring him can feel as if you are letting him get away with distortions and the last word. What Musk seems to really want is to anger liberals, delight his right-wing and reactionary bedfellows, and alienate the mainstream media. This is surely why he releases documents only to writers who've expressed alignment on his pet issues. It would also explain why he tweets disparagingly about former employees, accusing them of being politically biased just a month after urging his nearly 115 million followers at the time to vote for Republicans in the midterm elections. And it is why Musk castigates Twitter's former leadership for its de-amplification policies while promoting a policy of ''freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach,'' which amounts to the exact same thing.
The trolling is paramount. When former Facebook CSO and Stanford Internet Observatory leader Alex Stamos asked whether Musk would consider implementing his detailed plan for ''a trustworthy, neutral platform for political conversations around the world,'' Musk responded, ''You operate a propaganda platform.'' Musk doesn't appear to want to substantively engage on policy issues: He wants to be aggrieved.
Still, it's possible that a shred of good could come from this ordeal. Musk says Twitter is working on a feature that will allow users to see if they've been de-amplified, and appeal. If it comes to pass, perhaps such an initiative could give users a better understanding of their place in the moderation process. Great! But Musk hasn't given any reason to suspect that he cares about transparency, beyond wielding it as a weapon against his perceived enemies. He doesn't engage in good faith with his critics, and he's perfectly fine with a selective release of internal information that's geared toward pleasing his fans. At times it seems his entire Twitter project is little more than identifying perceived injustices from site's past'--biases and so-called abuses of power'--and using them as a playbook to run on his ideological opponents.
And so, what matters more than the content of the Twitter Files is the constant buildup, and the framing of their release as a bombshell act of unprecedented transparency. It signals indisputable proof that the bloodthirsty audience is about to see something big. As is so often the case online, the signal alone seems to be enough. No surprise, then, that the writers behind the Twitter Files and Musk himself are constantly teasing the next installment. The conspiracy that's just out of reach is always more powerful than the one that was (supposedly) revealed.
(6) Twitter on Twitter: "we're relaunching @TwitterBlue on Monday '' subscribe on web for $8/month or on iOS for $11/month to get access to subscriber-only features, including the blue checkmark 𧵠https://t.co/DvvsLoSO50" / Twitter
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 04:04
Twitter : we're relaunching @TwitterBlue on Monday '' subscribe on web for $8/month or on iOS for $11/month to get access to s'... https://t.co/dNcMOpe6un
Sat Dec 10 21:38:08 +0000 2022
Disputing A Parking Fine with ChatGPT - Notes by Lex
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 03:15
Disputing A Parking Fine with ChatGPT This article covers a use case for ChatGPT, an exciting new product by OpenAI.
At the time of writing, it's on the front page of Hacker News. Follow the discussion here.
Recently, on holidays in Far North Queensland, my wife and I parked our rental car in a paid parking lot to visit a restaurant.
I paid using the EasyPark App per the council's instruction on various signs throughout the lot.
When we returned, they had slapped a fine on our Toyota anyway.
I double-checked what I had entered into the app. I mistyped the number plate by one letter. Oops.
Since we have never received a parking fine before, and I had proof of payment, I knew there was a good chance the council would let me off if I sent a letter of explanation.
We had already been experimenting with ChatGPT, and the letter seemed a good test run.
The first response was close but longer than I would like. Plus, I didn't tell it that I was planning to attach a photo of the fine and proof of payment.
That works. Now for a title.
I emailed that* from my phone and a day later received this response.
So you can dispute a parking fine with ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is incredible - I cannot believe how well this technology works. It's like having a talented personal assistant (who is often wrong - need to read their work thoroughly) at your fingertips.
* I used ChatGPT from my phone and didn't screenshot the prompt, so I had to generate a new prompt/response for this blog post. It's similar enough that I'm sure it would work too.
Tell HN: HP printers force you into agreement | Hacker News
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 03:14
Tell HN: HP printers force you into agreement 360 points by bryanlarsen 5 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 179 comments The HP Smart App forces you to agree to use only their ink before you can use their app. That shouldn't be a big deal since modern HP printers work fine out of the box without a driver.
However, after you've printed a bunch of pages, they stop working and display the error message "Printer setup incomplete. Your HP+ printer must be set up using the HP Smart app. Visit 123.hp.com to download the app and complete the guided setup. Any pages you have printed were intended for setup and have been exhausted."
Conveniently, this usually doesn't happen until it's too late to return the printer.
SBF Tried To Destabilize Crypto Market To Save FTX: Report | ZeroHedge
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 03:10
Authored by Ana Paula Pereira via CoinTelegraph.com,
Trades made by Alameda Research were reportedly focusing on depeg Tether's stablecoin...
Trades made by Alameda Research were reportedly focusing on depeg Tether's stablecoin. Image: Cointelegraph.Tether executives and Binance CEO Changpeng ''CZ'' Zhao worried that Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), former FTX CEO, was attempting to destabilize the crypto market aiming to save the now-bankrupt exchange, according to reports on Dec. 9.
Messages seen by The Wall Street Journal of a Signal group chat named "Exchange coordination" reveals an argument between CZ and SBF on Nov. 10 about Tether's stablecoin USDT. Members in the Signal group include Kraken co-founder Jesse Powell, Paolo Ardoino, chief technology officer of Tether, among others.
According to the report, CZ and others in the group worried that trades made by Alameda Research were focusing on depeg the stablecoin, which would have a ripple effect in crypto prices. Binance CEO reportedly confronted SBF:
''Stop trying to depeg stablecoins. And stop doing anything. Stop now, don't cause more damage.''SBF denied the claims in a statement to the WSJ.
The alleged argument on the Signal group happened a day after Binance announced that it wouldn't bail out its troubled competitor FTX, citing ''reports regarding mishandled customer funds and alleged US agency investigations.'' On Nov. 10, Tether's Ardoino also said the company have no ''plans to invest or lend money to FTX/Alameda.''
As reported by Cointelegraph, new details about the failed agreement between Binance and FTX were revealed on Dec. 9. In a twitter thread, CZ referred to Bankman-Fried as a ''fraudster,'' saying Binance exited its position in FTX in July 2021 after becoming ''increasingly uncomfortable with Alameda/SBF.'' SBF was ''unhinged'' at the exchange pulling out, according to Binance's CEO.
In response, SBF claimed that Binance ''threatened to walk at the last minute'', accusing CZ of lying about his role in the deal.
On Nov 11, FTX Group and nearly 130 companies - including FTX Trading, FTX US, under West Realm Shires Services, and Alameda Research - filed for bankruptcy in the United States citing a "liquidity crunch''.
Since FTX's bankruptcy, SBF has been named in seven class action lawsuits and numerous probes and investigations, including a market manipulation probe by federal prosecutors.
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THE TWITTER FILES: The Removal Of Donald Trump, Part 2 | ZeroHedge
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 03:01
The third installment of Elon Musk's release of internal Twitter communications is devoted to the days surrounding the social media company's decision to permanently ban President Trump.
Yesterday, we detailed part 1 - via veteran journalist Matt Taibbi, which focused on the period leading up to January 6th, including details about Twitter executives regular meetings with the FBI and DHS.
Today, in part 2, Michael Shellenberger reveals the chaos that ran wild inside Twitter on January 7th, as the same executives took decisions into their own hands to reassure 'a few engineers' that "someone is doing something about this."
The Removal of Donald Trump: January 7As the pressure builds, Twitter executives build the case for a permanent ban.
On Jan 7, senior Twitter execs:
create justifications to ban Trump
seek a change of policy for Trump alone, distinct from other political leaders
express no concern for the free speech or democracy implications of a ban
This #TwitterFiles is reported with @lwoodhouse
For years, Twitter had resisted calls to ban Trump.''Blocking a world leader from Twitter,'' it wrote in 2018, ''would hide important info... [and] hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.''https://t.co/qaqklHOHjc
'-- Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 10, 2022But after the events of Jan 6, the internal and external pressure on Twitter CEO @jack grows.
Former First Lady @michelleobama...
... tech journalist @karaswisher...
...@ADL...
...high-tech VC @ChrisSacca, and many others, publicly call on Twitter to permanently ban Trump.
Dorsey was on vacation in French Polynesia the week of January 4-8, 2021. He phoned into meetings but also delegated much of the handling of the situation to senior execs @yoyoel , Twitter's Global Head of Trust and Safety, and @vijaya Head of Legal, Policy, & Trust.
As context, it's important to understand that Twitter's staff & senior execs were overwhelmingly progressive.
In 2018, 2020, and 2022, 96%, 98%, & 99% of Twitter staff's political donations went to Democrats.
11. This system wasn't balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right. https://t.co/sa1uVRNhuH pic.twitter.com/K1xmqQ0TrD
'-- Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022In 2017, Roth tweeted that there were ''ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE.''
In April 2022, Roth told a colleague that his goal ''is to drive change in the world,'' which is why he decided not to become an academic.
On January 7, @jack emails employees saying Twitter needs to remain consistent in its policies, including the right of users to return to Twitter after a temporary suspension
After, Roth reassures an employee that "people who care about this... aren't happy with where we are"
Around 11:30 am PT, Roth DMs his colleagues with news that he is excited to share.
''GUESS WHAT,'' he writes.
''Jack just approved repeat offender for civic integrity.''
The new approach would create a system where five violations ("strikes") would result in permanent suspension.
''Progress!'' exclaims a member of Roth's Trust and Safety Team.
The exchange between Roth and his colleagues makes clear that they had been pushing @jack for greater restrictions on the speech Twitter allows around elections.
he colleague wants to know if the decision means Trump can finally be banned. The person asks, "does the incitement to violence aspect change that calculus?''
Roth says it doesn't. "Trump continues to just have his one strike" (remaining).
Roth's colleague's query about "incitement to violence" heavily foreshadows what will happen the following day.
On January 8, Twitter announces a permanent ban on Trump due to the "risk of further incitement of violence."
On J8, Twitter says its ban is based on "specifically how [Trump's tweets] are being received & interpreted."
But in 2019, Twitter said it did "not attempt to determine all potential interpretations of the content or its intent.''
The *only* serious concern we found expressed within Twitter over the implications for free speech and democracy of banning Trump came from a junior person in the organization.
It was tucked away in a lower-level Slack channel known as ''site-integrity-auto."
"This might be an unpopular opinion but one off ad hoc decisions like this that don't appear rooted in policy are imho a slippery slope... This now appears to be a fiat by an online platform CEO with a global presence that can gatekeep speech for the entire world..."
Twitter employees use the term "one off" frequently in their Slack discussions. Its frequent use reveals significant employee discretion over when and whether to apply warning labels on tweets and "strikes" on users.
Here are typical examples.
Recall from #TwitterFiles2 by @bariweiss that, according to Twitter staff, "We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do."
11. ''We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,'' one Twitter engineer told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed.
'-- Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022Twitter employees recognize the difference between their own politics & Twitter's Terms of Service (TOS), but they also engage in complex interpretations of content in order to stamp out prohibited tweets, as a series of exchanges over the "#stopthesteal" hashtag reveal.
Roth immediately DMs a colleague to ask that they add "stopthesteal" & [QAnon conspiracy term] "kraken" to a blacklist of terms to be deamplified.
Roth's colleague objects that blacklisting "stopthesteal" risks "deamplifying counterspeech" that validates the election.
Indeed, notes Roth's colleague, "a quick search of top stop the steal tweets and they're counterspeech"
But they quickly come up with a solution: "deamplify accounts with stopthesteal in the name/profile" since "those are not affiliated with counterspeech"
But it turns out that even blacklisting "kraken" is less straightforward than they thought. That's because kraken, in addition to being a QAnon conspiracy theory based on the mythical Norwegian sea monster, is also the name of a cryptocurrency exchange, and was thus "allowlisted"
Employees struggle with whether to punish users who share screenshots of Trump's deleted J6 tweets
"we should bounce these tweets with a strike given the screen shot violates the policy"
"they are criticising Trump, so I am bit hesitant with applying strike to this user"
Developing...
Stay tuned for part 3 tomorrow, when @bariweiss will reveal the secret internal communications from the key date of January 8th that led to President Trump's ban.
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Twitter Blue to Relaunch Monday, With Blue Check Mark, Higher iOS Price, Company Says - CNET
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 03:01
Twitter tweeted Saturday that its Twitter Blue subscription service will relaunch on Monday, giving subscribers the now controversial "blue check mark," but this time with some sort of vetting process meant to prevent impersonations on the site. The check mark and other features will cost users $8 a month if they subscribe via the web and $11 per month if they subscribe on iOS, Twitter said.
"When you subscribe you'll get Edit Tweet, 1080p video uploads, reader mode, and a blue checkmark (after your account has been reviewed)," the company said in its tweet thread. It isn't clear what that account review involves, though an image included in the thread mentions the need for a "verified phone number."
New Twitter owner Elon Musk has been fiddling with verification check marks since he took over. Last month, he introduced an $8-per-month Twitter Blue subscription that blurred the line between authenticated individuals and paid accounts. That led to a slew of people impersonating celebrities and corporations, which caused mayhem and prompted Twitter to pause signups for Twitter Blue.
On Saturday, Esther Crawford, a product lead at Twitter, said in her own tweet that "we've added a review step before applying a blue checkmark to an account as one of our new steps to combat impersonation." When asked by a Twitter user if granting the blue check mark would involve verifying a user by way of an ID, Crawford replied, "We don't have ID verification in this update."
Before Musk came up with the idea of combining the blue check mark with the Twitter Blue subscription service, the verification process had traditionally involved things like submitting a government-issued ID and offering evidence that you were a "prominently recognized individual." Musk's pay-for-verification setup had critics saying the blue check mark had become meaningless.
In late November, Musk tweeted a plan that would see companies getting a gold verification check mark, with government entities getting one that's gray. "Blue for individuals (celebrity or not) and all verified accounts will be manually authenticated before check activates," Musk tweeted at the time, saying more details would be provided later. He also said then that individuals could have a smaller secondary logo as well showing "they belong to an org if verified as such by that org."
Saturday's thread from Twitter said the plan for the gold and gray check marks for businesses and government will be going into effect. It also said Twitter Blue subscribers "will be able to change their handle, display name or profile photo, but if they do they'll temporarily lose the blue checkmark until their account is reviewed again." During the recent impersonation chaos, some Twitter users had changed their display names to pose as others.
Twitter didn't respond to an email Saturday seeking more information about the verification review process.
Saturday's Twitter thread also said Twitter Blue subscribers would "rocket to the top of replies, mentions and search," would see half the ads and would be able to post longer videos.
Twitter Blue subscribers who already signed up via iOS for the earlier $8 a month price will get a notification about the new $11 monthly iOS cost and can then choose to subscribe via the web instead, at the $8 rate, Crawford tweeted. Last month, Musk complained about the fees Apple charges developers and companies for customer purchases made via the App Store on iOS.
Crawford said the iOS and web versions would offer the same features, and that Android users can purchase on the web and use Twitter Blue on their devices.
Musk Goes Full Pizzagate - TPM '' Talking Points Memo
Sat, 10 Dec 2022 20:22
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December 10, 2022 10:34 a.m.
I've already written about the narcissism/radicalization cycle that took hold of Elon Musk at some point for whatever reasons and has been accelerating at a rapid pace since he finalized his acquisition of Twitter six weeks ago. It keeps accelerating, and in two distinct but interrelated ways I would like to note.
The first is that Musk is now in near constant dialogue with the most rabid conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites in the digital space. He's jumped head first into the ''globalist''/pedophile vortex which was at the heart of the ''Pizzagate'' conspiracy theory and later the entire QAnon movement. He now accuses former Twitter management of intentionally allowing the platform it to become a breeding ground of pedophilia and child sex trafficking. He claims he's shutting the offending accounts down after previous management refused to do so. These accusations have become so totalizing that yesterday Musk drew a rebuke from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who has been one of Musk's bigger supporters during the takeover.
Weekend reads: Errors in clinical trials; GPT-3 and scientific papers; paleontologist accused of faking data '' Retraction Watch
Sat, 10 Dec 2022 16:46
Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 278. There are more than 37,000 retractions in our database '-- which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately '-- or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?
Here's what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
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The Wes Anderson AI artbot craze is a fun trend with big ethical issues - Polygon
Sat, 10 Dec 2022 13:50
The increasing sophistication and ease-of-use in AI art generators has prompted a lot of online debate recently. The ethical issues around copyright and crediting are huge. Users experimenting with programs like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Free AI Art Generator are arguing over endless topics around ownership and creative license, down to the question of whether a particularly effective AI art prompt could potentially be copyrighted, even if the resulting art can't be.
But above all, artists have raised considerable questions around theft of their work to ''train'' AI art generators to produce work in a particular style. Most of these programs work by learning from the styles in the images they've been fed. So if they ingest an artist's distinctive work, that work eventually starts to bleed into the program's new ''original'' creations. But if an artist's style gets digested into a free bot that can regurgitate it and iterate on it in seconds, how's that artist supposed to make a living?
A current AI art trend on social media highlights exactly what artists are concerned about: Users have been feeding AI artbots the names of familiar movies and TV shows, and adding ''in the style of Wes Anderson.''
Anderson (the director of The Grand Budapest Hotel, Moonrise Kingdom, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Isle of Dogs, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Rushmore, and more) is an incredibly distinct visual stylist, and has been a prime target for ''in the style of'' pastiches for years, long before AI artbots were in vogue. Most cinephiles immediately recognize his distinctive look, centering on extremely elaborate and precise set dressing and production design, generally rendered in muted earth tones and pale pastels. He has plenty of familiar touchstones for humorists who are trying to mimic him: the use of chapter titles and other on-screen text, a love of elaborate fixed tableaus, characters with minimal emotional affect and a clipped, precise way of speaking.
On YouTube, creators have been re-editing movies and trailers into satirical versions of Anderson's work for years now, especially following the popularity of The Grand Budapest Hotel. Usually, they're leaning on the absurdity of, say, a horror or action movie rendered with his deadpan intensity and precision. Whenever Wes Anderson imitation moves into a new medium, it often starts with a version of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining '-- probably in echo of the granddaddy of recut YouTube trailers, depicting The Shining as a feel-good rom-com.
This most recent Twitter trend wasn't even the first AI artbot attempt at porting his style into other movies '-- there are similar tweets going back at least to 2020. But the Shining tweet did unleash a fresh deluge of other Anderson pastiches. Some were created in response to the Shining art. Others, created earlier, are being retweeted into the thread by users who've had similar ideas, and want to share their convergent evolution.
This flurry of new ''movie in the style of Wes Anderson'' tweets is a perfect showcase for the reasons artists and creators in particular are concerned about AI-generated art, visual and otherwise. No artbot is going to actually replace Wes Anderson: His work comes from a distinctive voice and artistic mindset. Individual still images aren't going to replace entire movies, and Anderson's films are much more than just the visual imagery.
And all these AI images are funny, in a wry sort of way '-- a parody of his style and a form of creative expression, similar to fantasy casting. The images showcase the creativity of the creators, who are going further and further into exploring what kind of projects the writer-director's style can be applied to.
But even so, it's easy to look at the images above and see how readily AI art generators can devalue an individual artist's style and voice, by making endless creative variations easily available at the push of a button. After a while, the joke gets a little samey. All the images start to look a bit alike. All the signature stylings Anderson has been refining for more than 25 years can be reduced to a single repetitive joke, to the point where his own actual movie stills may not stand out much in the mix.
It's not that we should be alarmist about a simple viral trend on social media. If anything, the Wes Anderson artbot fad is useful proof for artists trying to get programmers to build active protections for their designs and styles into AI bots. It's a useful way to look at the legal and creative problems ahead, by showing off just how sophisticated and elaborate AI art mimicry has gotten. Future AI bots may guard against exactly this kind of specific stylistic imitation. So enjoy your Wes Anderson Star Wars while you have it, just in case. And don't forget that AI pastiche isn't limited to crossbreeding a familiar movie with a familiar style: You can invent new movie ideas, too.
Experts Link Long-COVID, Heavy Exercise to Sudden Heart Attacks Among Indians | Weather.com
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 14:26
Representational image.
(Pixabay/IANS)
As people took to social media about rising heart attacks in the young and seemingly fit people '-- on the street, on the dance floor, at the wedding and the gym '-- leading cardiologists on Monday reiterated that long-term COVID could be responsible in some cases and people must stop unaccustomed heavy exercise regimes.
The hashtag '#heartattack' has been trending on Twitter for the past two-three days, with several examples of sudden heart attacks in those who otherwise seemed healthy and fit.
"A 23-year-old girl (Josna Cotha) fainted and died suddenly (heart attack) at a wedding reception. The tragedy happened while dancing," a user tweeted and posted a video.
Another Twitter user posted a video: "A young man died due to a heart attack while walking".
Cardiologists say the steep rise in people dying unexpectedly of heart attacks is alarming.
"Though we do not have sufficient data and evidence to prove whether this is a COVID-induced phenomenon, this has definitely increased post-COVID. Long-term COVID could possibly be responsible in some cases," Dr Samir Kubba, Director-Cardiology, Max Super Speciality Hospital, Vaishali, told IANS.
Last month, TV actor Siddhaanth Vir Surryavanshi, who acted in popular shows such as 'Kkusum' and 'Kasautii Zindagi Kay', died from a heart attack at age 46. He was working out in the gym when he suffered the attack.
Earlier this year, comedian Raju Srivastava also collapsed in the gym while on the treadmill and passed away after several weeks in hospital.
In 2021, southern superstar Puneeth Rajkumar, also 46, died after cardiac arrest while working out in the gym.
According to Dr Sanjeev Gera, Director and Head, Cardiology Fortis Hospital Noida, COVID or Long COVID may cause persistent inflammation in heart vessels.
"This can rupture silent blockages and cause a heart attack, especially after an unaccustomed exercise like heavy weight lifting, walking on a treadmill, or running in cold weather. The risk increases when there are risk factors for heart disease like high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, smoking or obesity," Dr Gera told IANS.
Indians are at higher risk of heart attacks at a younger age than westerners because of dietary habits, high incidence and prevalence of diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, genetic factors, increasing prevalence of obesity and sedentary lifestyles and smoking etc.
"The atherosclerotic plaque can develop in the coronary arteries early in life and suddenly become unstable with unaccustomed heavy exercise, especially if done without proper guidance and supervision," said Dr Kubba.
Also, most cases of sudden death are due to heart attacks, but every sudden death is not due to a heart attack.
It can also be due to arrhythmia (abnormality in heart rhythm ). The latter could be because of myocarditis (infection of the heart muscle ), silent cardiomyopathy ( weakness in the heart muscle ) and certain genetic disorders.
"We advise a proper screening '-- especially of the high-risk population (diabetics, hypertensives, smokers, people with a strong family history of heart disease, people with high cholesterol, sedentary and obese people etc.) before they hit the gym, participate in a marathon, or do a sudden unaccustomed high-intensity activity," Dr Kubba told IANS.
The screening may include a good clinical examination, ECG and possibly an echocardiogram. Also, the exercise regimen must be supervised.
"No harm in carrying 300-325 mg of aspirin which can be chewed, in case of a suspected heart attack," he advised.
New research has revealed that the risk of death from a heart attack or failure after COVID-19 is very high within the first 30 days of infection but remains heightened for some time afterwards.
The extensive UK Biobank study, published in the journal Heart, linked COVID to a heightened risk of poor cardiovascular health and death, particularly among those whose severe infection requires hospital admission.
**
The above article has been published from a wire source with minimal modifications to the headline and text.
Emergency call services, telcos urge EU to protect telecoms networks from power cuts | Reuters
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 14:04
MILAN/STOCKHOLM/PARIS, Dec 5 (Reuters) - Europe's top telecoms operators and an emergency services lobby on Monday urged Brussels to shield mobile and fixed grids from power cuts, a letter reviewed by Reuters showed, as worries grow about a loss of telecom networks during widespread blackouts.
Europe is facing potential energy rationing and power outages in the wake of the war in Ukraine, putting some key services such as emergency calls and infrastructure like telecoms networks to the test this winter.
Some of Europe's top telecoms executives, including the boss of Orange, have recently voiced their concerns on the matter.
The joint letter sent on Monday is the first formal step by the European Telecommunications Network Operators (ETNO) and the European Emergency Number Association (EENA) to pressure the European Union executive body to step in.
ETNO represents former phone monopolies such as Germany's Deutsche Telekom (DTEGn.DE), Spain's Telefonica (TEF.MC) and Telecom Italia (TLIT.MI), while EENA speaks for more than 1,500 emergency services representatives over 80 countries.
"Should telecommunications networks be subject to planned outages, citizens would risk not having access to communications services for the duration of the outage, including emergency communications," the letter signed by the heads of EENA and ETNO said.
If there is any rationing over the winter, certain services such as hospitals, police services and food production facilities would be prioritised under current plans to ensure the least possible impact if blackouts occurred.
Most public safety answering points (PSAPs) - call centres connecting emergency calls - are already designated as critical infrastructure, the letter said, meaning that every reasonable measure would be taken to ensure that they are not affected by power outages.
But emergency services and telecoms operators are worried that telecoms infrastructure, which relies on connection to the electricity grid to operate, is not marked as critical in some countries.
"We are concerned that telecommunications networks may not have been placed on priority sector lists," it said, calling on the EU Commission to work with member states to ensure energy supply is maintained to the grids if power rationing occurs to grant citizens access to emergency services.
EENA also laid out these concerns in a statement on its website after Reuters reported in September telecoms industry officials feared the grid would not cope with power rationing.
The letter was sent to Ditte Juul Jorgensen, director general of the EU Commission's energy department, and her counterpart at the communications networks department, Roberto Viola.
The Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
COSTLY AND FRAGILEIn Monday's letter, EENA and ETNO also stressed that any back-up solutions were costly and fragile.
"In our experience, batteries and diesel generators placed in mobile base stations are an easy target for vandalism and theft, and maintenance costs are high," the letter said.
"Extending the current limited own back-up energy supply of telecommunication networks is not an option, as it would be not only extremely expensive, but also as such an extension would take years," it said.
France, Sweden and Germany are trying to ensure communications can continue even if power cuts end up exhausting back-up batteries installed on the thousands of cellular antennas spread across their territories.
But currently there are not enough back-up systems in many European countries to handle widespread power cuts, telecoms industry sources have said.
Europe has nearly half a million telecom towers, and most of them have battery backups to run the mobile antennas that last around 30 minutes.
Reporting by Elvira Pollina in Milan, Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm and Mathieu Rosemain in Paris; Editing by Josephine Mason and Jan Harvey
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Macron Demands People Stop Spreading Panic About Potential Blackouts
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 14:04
French President Emmanuel Macron chastised public utility and energy companies for scaring the public with ''absurd scenarios'' of potential blackouts this winter.
Rather than addressing the underlying reasons contributing to the burgeoning energy crisis in France and indeed across Europe, President Macron called for an out of sight, out of mind approach to potential power cuts this winter.
Speaking from an EU-Western Balkans summit in Tirana, Albania on Tuesday, Macron bluntly said ''stop all this'' in reference to discussions surrounding the energy crisis. The French president said that institutions such as the publicly-owned R(C)seau de Transport d'lectricit(C) (RTE) energy utility firm should not ''govern by fear''.
''The role of the government, ministers, operators is to do their job to provide energy, that's all. And then to call everyone to responsibility so that there is sobriety. It's not to start scaring people with absurd scenarios and things like the ones I've heard in recent hours,'' Macron said according to broadcaster BFMTTV.
''We are a great country, we have a great energy model,'' he continued, assuring that ''we will hold on this winter despite the war. So, I ask everyone to do their job.''
Energy Rationing and Shortages Likely in France, Admits Electric Grid Chiefhttps://t.co/zyHgGQndrO
'-- Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) November 16, 2022
Last week, Xavier Piechaczy, the head of RTE said that this winter, France will look to import energy from its neighbours, including Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, and even the United Kingdom, many of which face the prospect of their own blackouts.
While France has traditionally been a net exporter of energy, corrosion issues in its nuclear fleet have reduced the number of active reactors from 56 to 36. This has left the country vulnerable to the soaring cost of gas and oil on the continent following the war in Ukraine.
Even if the country manages to import energy from its neijghbours, Piechaczy said that it is still possible for the country to face blackouts, particularly if it is a cold winter.
French Prime Minister lisabeth Borne, the second most powerful politician in the government behind Macron, has called on the public to reduce their energy consumption in order to reduce the strain on the limited resources available, saying: ''If we all do even more to reduce our consumption, we will not have a cut.''
France to Look to Import Energy from Britain and Others as Winter Power Cuts Loom https://t.co/r2SYwgGVB7
'-- Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) December 2, 2022
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
Google must remove 'manifestly inaccurate' data, EU top court says | Reuters
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 14:03
LUXEMBOURG, Dec 8 (Reuters) - Alphabet unit Google (GOOGL.O) must remove data from online search results if users can prove it is inaccurate, Europe's top court said on Thursday.
Free speech advocates and supporters of privacy rights have clashed in recent years over people's "right to be forgotten" online, meaning that they should be able to remove their digital traces from the internet.
The case before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) concerned two executives from a group of investment companies who had asked Google to remove search results linking their names to certain articles criticising the group's investment model.
They also wanted Google to remove thumbnail photos of them from search results. The company rejected the requests, saying it did not know whether the information in the articles was accurate or not.
A German court subsequently sought advice from the CJEU on the balance between the right to be forgotten and the right to freedom of expression and information.
"The operator of a search engine must de-reference information found in the referenced content where the person requesting de-referencing proves that such information is manifestly inaccurate," the Court of Justice of the European Union said.
The Google logo is pictured at the entrance to the Google offices in London, Britain January 18, 2019. REUTERS/Hannah McKay/File PhotoTo avoid an excessive burden on users, judges said such proof does not have to come from a judicial decision against website publishers and that users only have to provide evidence that can reasonably be required of them to find.
Google said the links and thumbnails in question were no longer available through web search and image search and that the content had been offline for a long time.
"Since 2014, we've worked hard to implement the right to be forgotten in Europe, and to strike a sensible balance between people's rights of access to information and privacy," a spokesperson said.
The same court in 2014 enshrined the right to be forgotten, saying that people could ask search engines like Google to remove inadequate or irrelevant information from web results appearing under searches for their names.
The judgment preceded landmark EU privacy rules that went into effect in 2018 and state that the right to be forgotten is excluded where the processing of personal data is necessary for the exercise of the right of information.
The case is C-460/20 Google (D(C)r(C)f(C)rencement d'un contenu pr(C)tendument inexact).
Reporting by Foo Yun Chee, additional reporting by Benoit Van Overstraeten in Paris; editing by Barbara Lewis, Robert Birsel
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Blackouts will trigger a people's revolt against the new eco-tyranny
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 14:02
Winter is upon us, courtesy of the Arctic blast unleashed by the Troll from Trondheim. We will soon find out whether we can keep the lights and heating on, or whether Britain is about to be plunged into a nightmare of energy rationing, rolling blackouts, three-day weeks and untold human misery.
The proximate cause of our present crisis is Vladimir Putin's despicable invasion of Ukraine, and the resultant reduction in global gas supplies. Yet the Government must shoulder its share of the blame: it prioritised reducing carbon emissions above all else, and neglected keeping prices low or ensuring availability and security of supplies. This winter may turn out to be a dry run for a much greater, self-inflicted disaster, a harbinger of a new normal of permanently insufficient, costly energy supplies that could jeopardise our way of life, upend our politics and trigger a popular rebellion.
We are nearing a turning point for democratic support for environmentalism. Gordon Brown's 2008 Climate Change Act legislated to slash CO2 emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, a seismic shift pushed through with little debate but much superficial public approval. Theresa May strengthened this to 100 per cent by 2050, the ''net zero'' target; again, the public liked the sound of this, if not of Mrs May. China will continue to increase its emissions by more than we cut ours, but our entire ruling class has signed up to this iron-clad legal framework, with no dissent tolerated.
Thanks to technology and markets, it ought to be possible to decarbonise without ruining our society and economy, but 14 years on the revolution is proceeding just about as disastrously as anybody could have imagined. In typical British fashion, our political class has taken all the easy decisions first, and none of the tough ones. The blunders, the groupthink, the demented short-termism and the mind-boggling bureaucratic incompetence have amounted to one of the greatest national scandals of the past few decades.
It's easy to stop extracting fossil fuels or to boast about the decline of our carbon-emitting manufacturing sector, especially when we simply switch to importing goods, oil and gas from abroad, congratulating ourselves on our brilliance. We didn't bother to construct gas-storage facilities or stress-test supply chains for geopolitical risk. We built offshore wind farms and solar but Britain also needed its own Pierre Messmer, the Gaullist who launched France's huge nuclear programme. Instead, we got Nick Clegg: in a humiliating video from 2010, he rejects increasing nuclear capacity because it would have taken until 2021 or 2022 to come online.
The real world consequences are catastrophic. When the wind stops blowing and the solar panels are covered in snow, when all our cars are electric and boilers replaced by heat pumps, where will energy come from? Demand for electricity will surge, but there won't be enough supply. The grid will implode. It may one day be possible to store electricity in giant batteries, but not today. Public rage if and when it all goes wrong will make Brexit look like a walk in the park.
Rishi Sunak's plans are laughably modest: we are now so far behind any rational transition schedule that only an extreme effort, a Manhattan Project for nuclear power, can possibly rescue us from disaster. HS2 should be halted, and its billions urgently diverted to building nuclear power plants.
Political parties have been lulled into a false sense of complacency: the public want to be greener, but not at the cost of suffering extreme material regression. Voters are worried about climate change and wish to decarbonise, but only a tiny minority are fully paid-up to the most extreme, fanatical, anti-human, anti-capitalist version of the environmentalist doctrine. Human nature hasn't suddenly changed: we still want to enjoy economic growth, to live better, longer, richer lives. We want to own goods and travel freely. Few of us want to be poor and cold and miserable. We don't aspire to return to a feudal lifestyle, with our overlords dictating how we can live our lives.
Until now, green virtue has come easily and cheaply. Everybody hates littering and waste. It's not hard to recycle, or to shift to reusable bags. It's a different matter when people begin to be truly inconvenienced (idiots sitting down on motorways) or forced to buy expensive new cars: the anger is immediate. Wait until voters are told they can't fly to Spain, that meat will be taxed, or that power cuts will be the new normal to comply with net zero: there will be a populist explosion.
Politicians everywhere are over-reaching, having drawn an incorrect lesson from Covid, namely that we will be willing to give up on our jobs, prosperity and freedoms in the name of a climate emergency. Germany faces crippling deindustrialisation, to great angst. The Dutch are nationalising and shutting ''polluting'' farms, triggering widespread fury. Switzerland's winter contingency plans are modelled on lockdowns. Electric cars would be banned from non-essential journeys, shop hours cut and streaming services downgraded; sports matches, concerts and theatres could be cancelled.
The public might wear this once because of Ukraine, but it won't tolerate intermittent energy becoming the norm. In typically condescending fashion, France's plans are described as d(C)lestage '' load shedding, getting rid of ballast, of ''non-essential'' energy users '' as if bankrupting businesses were obviously necessary for the common good. We are halfway along F'A Hayek's Road to Serfdom.
So why this new snobbery? One answer can be gleaned from another visionary dystopian classic, Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy. A side effect of individualistic meritocracy, which I otherwise support, is that those who rise to the top become entitled and look down upon everybody else. As Young put it, ''by imperceptible degrees an aristocracy of birth has turned into an aristocracy of talent''. The result is the return of anti-capitalist, neo-feudal attitudes: the elites nudge and compel the masses to do what is good for them, safe in the knowledge that the powerful will retain their privileges, their exclusive ''Zil'' traffic lanes, their private jets.
It won't wash. The politicians have a choice: make greenery consumer-friendly, harnessing technology to preserve the public's quality of life, or face a calamitous democratic uprising.
Sam Quinones on Meth, Fentanyl, and Homelessness
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 13:51
By Benjamin Hart , associate editor at Intelligencer who joined New York in 2017 Skid Row in Los Angeles. Photo: David Swanson/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Sam Quinones has covered gangs, crime, and the border for 35 years, including a ten-year stint at the L.A. Times. He established himself as a leading voice on the opioid epidemic with the 2015 book Dreamland, which told the story of how prescription-drug companies and a sophisticated black-tar heroin operation in Mexico wreaked havoc across the U.S. In his follow-up, 2021's The Least of Us, Quinones focused on the rise of two synthetic drugs: fentanyl, which had become ascendant in the intervening years, and a frighteningly potent form of meth that can quickly inflict tremendous damage on users. The extreme effects of these drugs, Quinones believes, has worsened the homelessness crisis in America. Recently, New York City Mayor Eric Adams unveiled a controversial plan to address that crisis by removing some people from the street involuntarily. I spoke with Quinones about the ravages of meth and fentanyl, how they have exacerbated social problems around the country, and what local and federal governments can do to stem the problem.
>>In your book The Least of Us and in an Atlantic piece last year, you wrote about the rise of very pure meth, which is produced in a different way than the variety that used to flow into the U.S. The effects have been devastating, but this still seems like a fairly under-the-radar phenomenon. Has it gotten more attention since you wrote about it?>>My book highlighted this problem that people were seeing all across the country, and now people are trying to understand why it's happening. And I think more and more people are coming to the conclusion that the meth coming from Mexico is being produced with much more potency. It used to be that a lot of the chemicals they couldn't eliminate from the process were acting as diluting agents, and so people weren't getting 99 percent meth when they bought this stuff, they were getting 50 percent or something like that. And now what you're finding is that new ways of making meth get it to almost a hundred percent. That's very difficult for a human brain to accommodate. I think all of this is coming out now because the book shone a light where none existed before, and showed that people are in fact entering into extreme psychosis. And once they stop using the drug, it takes a long time to move beyond it and for the brain to heal '-- months, perhaps. It's not a day-to-day thing.
I've been hearing this from people who are chemists, people who are in law enforcement. With the attention from the book, you're finding people who are in a position to do the kind of research that I am not in a position to do. As I said in the book, and as I've said pretty much every time I talk about this, I'm not a chemist. I'm not the scientist to understand why this is happening. I'm just the reporter saying this is happening, and it's happening all across the country.
You're describing a social fabric problem that's been exacerbated by the availability of these extremely pure drugs that weren't around before. That applies to fentanyl, too '-- heroin was bad enough, and now there's something much stronger. >>And they're similar in another way too, and that is that both of these drugs don't correspond at all to what consumers are demanding. They correspond almost entirely to the interests, the profits, the lower risk of the drug traffickers involved. They don't need land, they don't need rainfall, they don't need sunlight, they don't need farmers, they don't have any seasons. They can produce year-round as long as they can get the ingredients. And that's the key thing. Mexican traffickers have been able to get ingredients from the world chemical markets through two ports in particular, but several ports probably overall, that allow them to make these quantities that are now covering the United States, coast to coast. That's never happened before.
You write a fair bit about homelessness and how it intersects with drug addiction. You've observed that this meth renders people shells of themselves very quickly. Does fentanyl have the same effect? And how do those two drugs, in your view, exacerbate the problem of people living on the streets in places like L.A. and Portland, Oregon?>>Both of them are intensely addictive, and both of them do a masterful job of what every drug of abuse has always done, and that is to hijack our instinct for self-preservation. These two drugs come in such enormous quantities and have such staggering potency that they do the job far more masterfully than drugs have done it before. So you have methamphetamine that is driving people to homelessness, and becoming incoherent and irrational and delusional and paranoid.
Fentanyl is highly, highly addictive, and it's basically ridding our country of heroin. There's very little heroin on the streets of America anymore, which is an amazing thing to say. Fentanyl has essentially outcompeted it. Both of those drugs, together and alone, make it so that people will literally refuse treatment, will literally refuse housing even when they're living in tent encampments, even when they're living in feces, in lethal temperatures, beaten, pimped out, because they do such a masterful job in potency and in supply of keeping, of thwarting that instinct to self-preservation.
Are there any places that have taken a particularly effective or ineffective approach to this problem, in your view '-- dealing with the humanity of these people whose lives have been shattered while getting them off the streets and somewhere better?>>This is such a new problem, and we've been consumed with COVID for the last two years. Fentanyl was really mostly in the Midwest, and it was only by 2018, 2019 that it had really spread to both coasts and every place in between. Meth has been marching across the country in these staggering supplies since about 2012 or 2013, I would say, but it's also a drug that really doesn't create the headlines fentanyl does.
Because it doesn't kill people as quickly, right?>>It doesn't kill people. It's also like the pure raw face of addiction '-- people out of their minds wandering in the streets, screaming naked like some Allen Ginsberg poem. It's something that people would prefer not to have to face, I think. It's easier to send condolences to someone who's dead than to deal with someone who is out in the streets, out of his mind. And so when it comes to meth, there hadn't been the recognition as a major source of problems in so many parts of the country until my book came out. We're all still talking about the opioid epidemic. And with fentanyl, it hasn't reached national proportions until just before COVID hit, and then COVID took up all the conversation for the last two years.
We are just now trying to figure this all out. You're seeing San Diego, you're seeing L.A., you're seeing New York and different places try to deal with it in one way or another. But it seems to me to have surpassed, in some fundamental way, the ability of any town or county to do much about it. It seems to have graduated to the level of the State Department or a national emergency, where it has to be dealt with via international diplomacy. Seriously, I mean, when you're talking about the supply as being the major issue here, and I think it absolutely is, you're standing in the tide and trying to keep the tide from going out. Since all this has developed, Obama, Trump, and now Biden '-- none of them has really dealt with this issue the way I think, internationally, the way it needs to be.
The scourge of meth and fentanyl is happening at the same time as a movement to legalize softer drugs. Marijuana is legal in 21 states, and Colorado legalized mushrooms last year. There's long been a small group of people who want to go farther and legalize everything, with the idea that it would be a way of reducing suffering and also dealing a blow to sellers. I believe you're against that approach of decriminalization of fentanyl and meth. Is that right?>>I'm not necessarily against it. I'm saying that it doesn't seem to make sense in a time of fentanyl and methamphetamine. You're allowing people to remain on the street selling a drug that they know will hurt somebody and almost certainly kill somebody. To me, that is not a tenable solution long-term. And I think you're seeing why as people die, because families are like, ''Well, why are you allowing this?'' They have a stake in this too. Their loved one died.
Does that extend your view of something like safe-injection sites, which New York is experimenting with now? >>I don't believe we're in a time where we should say no to any solution. I think we've got to try a lot of different things. But keeping people alive by reviving them with naloxone has its own risks. And the risks are that you will, over repeated overdoses, damage your brain, because your brain is getting a deprivation of oxygen each time you go into overdose. You're seeing this now all across the country '-- we've probably never seen so many people overdose on an opioid in the history of the planet as have overdosed in the United States. And then so many of them are revived. But we're seeing now that this is not risk-free '-- that you now have people who are overdosing and developing brain impairment.
I suppose there are ways to run those sites in ways that avoid overdose. But the idea of having a policy that says, ''Well, we're going to provide for you until you are ready for treatment,'' flies in the face, I think, of a reality where people are on the street, living in degradation and exploitation of the most rank manner. So to me it's an idea that maybe we should try, but I think we also need to have some real ideas. I think we need to keep in mind that keeping people on the street is going to be a death sentence. There's a saying on the street, and I've heard it from several people, that there is no such thing as a long-term street-fentanyl user like there was with heroin. There are people who use heroin for 30, 40 years, but with fentanyl, everybody dies. There may be people using it who function in societies to some degree, but eventually everybody dies.
And the other part of fentanyl that I think safe-injection sites need to deal with is the fact that it's a fantastic anesthetic. I've had fentanyl myself '-- used in surgery, it is a revolutionary drug that has made many surgeries possible that weren't before. One way it does that is potency, but another way it does that is that it gets you in and out of anesthesia very quickly. That's the whole benefit of it. Within minutes of having my surgery, where I had a stent put in, I was lucid, talking, ''Hello, how you doing?'' That was not the case with morphine.
And I would say that the mere fact of its ability to bring you in and out very quickly of its effects is what makes it an absolute torment for users. So people who would inject or use heroin twice or three times a day are now finding that they have to use fentanyl four, five, six times a day. That means you basically have to live near the safe-injection site. Your life has to revolve around it. If you have to use fentanyl four, five, six times a day, you're never really moving anywhere away from those sites. That's something like every two, three hours. It's exactly that component of fentanyl that makes it an enormous boon to drug dealers and traffickers, because now you've got people who have to use more often. If they had to use a certain amount of heroin to stay well through the day, to keep the drug sickness away, now you're seeing them use maybe two, three times as much fentanyl.
That means more sales and a more regular customer for the traffickers. It's a torment for users. This is about supply creating demand. There's no heroin addict in America who wanted to be a fentanyl addict. They were transitioned to fentanyl by mixing it into the supply either sloppily or intentionally, and I think a lot of both. And now you've got a whole bunch of people nationwide that are using and demanding fentanyl.
New York City mayor Eric Adams recently announced a plan to remove some people from the streets involuntarily. Does that kind of approach strike you as wise?>>Well, I suppose the devil's in the details in all this stuff. If you provide a place where people can't leave, where they receive significant treatment and a continuum of care that lasts, then I'd say, yeah, this is what needs to happen. If you're just saying, ''We're going to take you out of the street, put you in a place where you can't leave, but you're just going to sit there,'' I'm not sure how that's going to help anybody in the long run, either the city or the person. This debate over involuntary commitment was not really the debate it is now before fentanyl and before methamphetamine. And I believe that's very natural because these drugs have clearly made it so that people are, without a doubt, incapable so often of caring for themselves. And what's more, they provide real public-health hazards through tent encampments and just being on the street. There's more than just that person whose safety is at stake, it frequently seems to me. But it just depends on how you do it. And I suppose that that's what the city of New York's going to be dealing with.
Have you seen any promising approaches in terms of cutting out the supply of this stuff? Has anyone come up with any kind of workable idea?>>No. I lived in Mexico for ten years, 1994 to 2004. I wrote two books about the country. But at no point in the history of the so-called drug war have we seen the kind of collaborative efforts that must take place, that can take place, between Mexico and the United States nationally. And it seems to me that this has to do with complicated issues of history and goes back a long, long way.
But I do believe that this now requires a collaborative relationship between the two countries, but one that does not tiptoe around the truth, which is that Mexico has a real problem with deep corruption in the criminal-justice system. And we have a problem with guns that are being bought here and smuggled south into Mexico, principally assault weapons. The wars between the Mexican drug-trafficking groups erupted in 2005 one year after we allowed our ban on the sale of assault weapons to lapse. That ban lasted from 1994 to 2004. It's not that they couldn't get access to assault weapons, it's just that the numbers were not what it is now.
So they have their issues with corruption. We have our issues with gun trafficking and gun flow, and both of those are part of what creates the impunity down in Mexico that allows these guys to create huge quantities of methamphetamine and fentanyl that now cover the country. I believe this needs to be handled with far more urgency than it ever has been by any American president up to now, and certainly by the Mexican authorities as well. It needs to be made into the issue that it should be, that it can be. And without that, it's almost like any city or county is, again going to be out in the middle of the ocean trying to keep back the tide.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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New Zealand takes custody of ill baby in anti-vax blood case
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 13:12
The New Zealand parents who refused to allow blood transfusions for their sick 4-month-old child unless they came from donors unvaccinated against COVID-19 have been temporarily stripped of medical custody of the baby.
New Zealand's High Court on Wednesday ordered that the infant, identified in documents only as Baby W, be placed into the guardianship of health authorities until after he undergoes an urgently needed open-heart surgery and recovers.
The boy's parents remain his primary guardians and are still in charge of decisions about their boy that don't relate to the medical procedure, according to the court ruling.
The parents' legal battle has been taken up by anti-vax activists, who gathered outside the courtroom this week as evidence was presented.
High Court Judge Ian Gault said he accepted the affidavits of health experts who said there have been millions of blood transfusions performed around the world since COVID vaccines were introduced, and the vaccines hadn't caused any known harmful effects.
Citing evidence from New Zealand's chief medical officer, the judge ruled that there was ''no scientific evidence there is any Covid-19 vaccine-related risk from blood donated'' by vaccinated donors.
The 4-month-old baby will be placed into the guardianship of health authorities until after he undergoes an open-heart surgery and recovers. APThe ruling will likely set a precedent and come as a relief to health care groups that collect and use donated blood.
Baby W's parents had said they had unvaccinated donors willing to give blood for their son's surgery, but health officials argued that such directed donations should only occur in exceptional circumstances, such as for recipients with very rare blood types.
Health authorities also said the unvaccinated donors wouldn't necessarily give them access to all the blood products they might need during the boy's surgery.
The parents used discredited arguments and fringe theories to try to show that mRNA vaccines were unsafe.
The judge said the baby's parents were loving and wanted the best for their son and accepted that he needed the surgery.
The judge also noted the relationship between the parents and doctors had suffered and that they should try to improve it before and after the surgery and be respectful of each other.
Doctors will be required to keep the parents informed at all times about their son's treatment and condition, BBC News reported.
Court rules prevent the baby and parents from being named. Court documents identified the mother as a midwife.
Anti-vax demonstrators support the mother and father of a 4-month-old baby outside the High Court in Auckland, New Zealand. APIn an interview with anti-vax campaigner Liz Gunn published last month, the baby's father talked about his concerns surrounding his son's surgery to treat severe pulmonary valve stenosis.
''We don't want blood that is tainted by vaccination,'' the dad said. ''That's the end of the deal '-- we are fine with anything else these doctors want to do.''
With Post wires
Jets' Max Mitchell out for season while dealing with blood clots
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 13:11
A day ago, there was mystery as to why Jets rookie right tackle Max Mitchell was placed on the NFI (non-football injury) list and deemed out for the season, according to head coach Robert Saleh.
Saleh declined to reveal the reason for Mitchell's NFI designation, and the team, because of medical privacy laws, would not reveal the issue. On Thursday, Mitchell's father, John, said his son had blood clots in his right calf and lung, but that his prognosis is excellent and his career is not in jeopardy.
''He should be fine,'' Mitchell's father told The Post. ''It was an unexpected temporary setback. It should not affect his career long term. His future is promising.''
Mitchell, a fourth-round draft pick out of Louisiana, made his fifth start at right tackle Sunday in Minnesota but was removed in the second quarter because he was ''struggling,'' according to Saleh.
Max Mitchell is dealing with blood clots. APThere was a thought that the issue was muscle spasms, but when Mitchell went for tests on Monday the clots were found. Mitchell is expected to be on blood thinners for a few months.
Special teams coach Brant Boyer on Thursday raved about kicker Greg Zuerlein in the wake of his terrific performance in Sunday's 27-22 loss to in Minnesota, where he kicked five field goals, including a Jets-record 60-yarder.
Boyer said the 60-yarder ''would've been good from 65, 67, somewhere in there.''
''He's got a cannon, that's for sure, and he's a great guy to deal with, great guy to coach,'' Boyer said. ''He has the potential leg talent to break the NFL record [66 yards by Justin Tucker], I really believe that '-- under the right conditions, certainly.''
Boyer said of Zuerlein, whose nickname is ''Greg the Leg'' for his length, ''Nothing fazes him.''
''You see him kick a 60-yarder and everything and it's like he does it every day,'' Boyer said. ''That's how he approaches the game. He's not running around, jumping up and down going crazy. It's like he's been there before, and it doesn't surprise himself that he made that.''
Of the four players who didn't practice Wednesday, three practiced on a limited basis Thursday '-- CB D.J. Reed (flu), WR Corey Davis (flu) and OT George Fant (flu, knee). DL Micheal Clemons (flu) didn't practice for a second day in a row. S LaMarcus Joyner (hip) was limited again, as were OT Duane Brown (shoulder) and S Ashtyn Davis (hamstring).
Jets defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich was asked how he'd assess his defense in the loss at Minnesota.
''Yeah, we didn't play well enough, by any means,'' he said. ''I didn't call the game well enough. I could've adapted earlier in that first half. We didn't tackle like we could've, we had missed [opportinuties] on the ball. It just wasn't characteristic of this group this year.''
Ulbrich also addressed the team's No. 21 rank in third-down defense, saying, ''We had a period of time there like the last four or five games where we were improving and then the last couple, we've kind of fallen off a little bit. It's the short windows that we're struggling with.
''It's a byproduct of a lot of things, but it's me putting these guys in the best position to take advantage of what we got, and the strengths that we have.''
Jets offensive coordinator Mike LaFleur addressed the offense being only 1-for-6 in the red zone against the Vikings, saying, ''The execution was just a little bit off.
''Anytime you're 1-for-6 it's not good enough in the red zone,'' he said. ''You're going to kick field goals, you're going to lose ballgames in this league against good teams.''
On the fateful fourth-and-goal call to have Mike White throw to Braxton Berrios, LaFleur said, ''That was a play that we were extremely comfortable with. I mean we've been running that six or seven weeks in practice, waiting for that opportunity. I know it's a little unorthodox maybe to go empty [backfield] in that situation, but the point was to get people open and we did that, we just didn't execute it to get the touchdown.''
Scientists Have Designed a 'Vagina on a Chip' '' DNyuz
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 13:11
Dr. Don Ingber makes organs for a living. Using flexible pieces of silicone carved with tiny channels, he grows tissues that can mimic the complex physical interactions between cells and fluids, creating malleable, three-dimensional models of organs.
Over the past decade, Dr. Ingber, a bioengineer at Harvard, has made more than 15 of these organ chips, including those simulating lungs, livers, intestines and skin. And now, as described in a paper published last month, he has added a far less studied organ to the list: the vagina.
The ''vagina on a chip'' was made from vaginal cells donated by two women. The model was grown inside of silicone rubber chips the size of a stick of gum, forming channels that were responsive to fluctuating estrogen levels and bacteria. The chip successfully mimicked key features of the vaginal microbiome, the swarming communities of bacteria that play a crucial role in the organ's health, the study found.
The chip is more realistic than other laboratory models of the organ, Dr. Ingber said: ''This walks, talks, quacks like a human vagina.''
He and other researchers are optimistic that the tool could offer a better way to test treatments for bacterial vaginosis, an infection of harmful microbes in the vagina which affects an estimated 30 percent of women every year.
''This is a great development, this system,'' said Dr. Ahinoam Lev-Sagie, a gynecologist at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem who studies the vaginal microbiome and was not involved in the new study. Because of safety concerns, it is difficult for researchers like her to test new treatments for patients with recurring infections, she said.
It's not difficult to find women willing to donate vaginal samples, she said. ''But when you want to explore which medications can work, it's very, very difficult to find women who are willing to participate in these studies.''
The study, which was funded by the Gates Foundation, used the vagina chip to mimic how a real vagina responds to good and bad bacterial environments. The researchers showed that the tissue inside the chip reacted positively to a cocktail of Lactobacilli, a type of bacterium that digests sugars and produces lactic acid, creating an acidic environment inside the human vagina that protects it from infections. When a different type of bacterium, one associated with vaginal infections, was cultured on the chip with no Lactobacilli present, inflammation increased and the cells were quickly damaged.
That reaction is similar to what happens when someone contracts bacterial vaginosis, a condition in which harmful bacteria take over the vaginal microbiome, lowering its acidity and sometimes causing itching and increased discharge.
Bacterial vaginosis is typically treated with antibiotics, but relapse rates are high. When left untreated, bacterial vaginosis increases the risk of sexually transmitted infections and cervical cancer. In pregnant women, it can raise the risk of preterm birth or low birth weight.
Despite these risks, bacterial vaginosis '-- and the vagina itself '-- remains understudied.
''We don't really understand how these processes are triggered by bacteria in the vagina or often even which bacteria are responsible,'' said Amanda Lewis, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who studies the vaginal microbiome. ''As you might imagine, such a crude understanding of such an important physiological system makes for crude interventions or none at all.''
In 2019, Dr. Lev-Sagie and other researchers in Israel published the results of the world's first vaginal microbiome transplants. They transferred bacteria-rich discharge from donors with healthy vaginas into the vaginas of five women who had struggled with recurring bacterial vaginosis. Screening the samples to make sure that they were safe and finding patients that were willing to participate was extremely difficult and took many years.
Other models, in animals or in the lab, are not effective environments in which to test the vaginal microbiome. While the vaginas of healthy humans are made up of around 70 percent Lactobacilli, in other mammals Lactobacilli rarely constitute more than 1 percent of the vaginal microbiome. And when vaginal cells are mixed with bacteria in a flat petri dish, bacteria quickly take over and kill the cells.
Similar drawbacks hamper the development of many drugs, which is why the organ chips are so promising, said Dr. Ingber, who holds a patent for the design of the silicone chip and founded a company that makes and tests them.
''There's been a search for better in vitro models that really mimic the physiological complexity, the structural complexity of tissues,'' he said. ''And so that's what we've done with organ chips.''
In another paper published this week, Dr. Ingber's group showed that an organ chip of the liver was seven to eight times better at predicting human responses to 27 drugs than animal models.
But the vagina chip has limitations, scientists said.
Dr. Lev-Sagie of Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem noted that the vaginal microbiome shifts substantially in response to menstruation, sexual intercourse, hormonal fluctuations and antibiotic use. And other important types of cells in the vagina, such as immune cells, were not included in the study.
''Real life is much more complicated than the vagina on a chip,'' Dr. Lev-Sagie said.
Having a more sophisticated model will require more studies of how exactly the vaginal microbiome works and how it responds to disease, she added. Unlike research on the gut microbiome, which has progressed rapidly over the past decade, work on the vaginal microbiome suffers from a lack of funding.
''In the vagina, we knew that bacteria are crucial more than a hundred years ago,'' Dr. Lev-Sagie said. ''We do the research for many years, but we still lag behind.''
The post Scientists Have Designed a 'Vagina on a Chip' appeared first on New York Times.
401(k) hardship withdrawals hit all-time high, Vanguard says
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 13:10
Thomas Barwick | Stone | Getty Images
The share of retirement savers who withdrew money from a 401(k) plan to cover a financial hardship hit a record high in October, according to data from Vanguard Group.
That dynamic '-- when coupled with other factors like fast-rising credit card balances and a declining personal savings rate '-- suggests households are having a tougher time making ends meet amid persistently high inflation and need ready cash, according to financial experts.
Nearly 0.5% of workers participating in a 401(k) plan took a new "hardship distribution" in October, according to Vanguard, which tracks 5 million savers. That's the largest share since Vanguard began tracking the data in 2004.
Put another way, roughly 25,000 workers took one of these distributions, which allow workers to tap their 401(k) plans before retirement for an "immediate and heavy" financial need.
Meanwhile, savers have been dipping into their nest eggs via other means '-- loans and "nonhardship" distributions '-- in higher numbers throughout 2022, according to Vanguard data.
"We are starting to see signs of financial distress at the household level," said Fiona Greig, global head of investor research and policy at Vanguard.
That said, the overall monthly share of people taking a hardship withdrawal is relatively small and not indicative of the "typical" 401(k) saver, she added.
Americans are 'feeling the pinch from inflation'Nearly all 401(k) plans allow workers to take hardship withdrawals, but employers may vary in their rationale for allowing them.
More than half of plans let workers tap funds to "alleviate major financial pressures," according to the Plan Sponsor Council of America, a trade group. But they more frequently allow withdrawals to cover medical expenses, housing (to buy a primary residence, or prevent eviction or foreclosure), funeral costs or loss due to natural disasters, for example.
Participants can also access 401(k) savings via loans or nonhardship withdrawals. The latter are for workers over age 59½, and sometimes for workers in other circumstances not related to financial hardship (for instance, rolling over assets to an individual retirement account while working).
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Nonhardship distributions also hit an all-time high in October '-- almost 0.9% of participants took one that month, according to Vanguard. And the share of workers taking 401(k) loans rose to 0.9% in October from 0.8% at the beginning of 2022.
Overall, it's a sign that more households need liquidity.
"People are feeling the pinch from inflation," said Philip Chao, principal and chief investment officer at Experiential Wealth in Cabin John, Maryland.
Savers aren't always prudent in their financial decision-making, and many times think of a 401(k) "more like a piggy bank," he said.
The inflation rate has declined in recent months from its pandemic-era peak this summer but is still hovering near its highest level since the early 1980s. The prices consumers pay for a broad swath of goods and services '-- like groceries and rent '-- are still rising quickly. Wage growth hasn't kept pace for the average person.
Meanwhile, federal pandemic-era financial supports have dwindled. A student loan payment pause '-- among the last vestiges of support '-- could end sometime next year. Many households have spent down at least some savings amassed from stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits. The 2.3% personal savings rate in October was a pandemic-era low. Household debt soared at its fastest rate in 15 years in the third quarter. Debt delinquency in Q3 increased for nearly all types of household debt, though remains low by historical standards, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
In 2020, Congress authorized Covid-related withdrawals of up to $100,000 from 401(k) plans as part of the CARES Act. About 1% of participants took such withdrawals each month in 2020, and other types of withdrawals slightly declined during that time.
Why raiding retirement savings is a 'terrible idea'"It's a terrible idea to take money out of your 401(k)," said Ted Jenkin, a certified financial planner and co-founder of oXYGen Financial, based in Atlanta.
The recent uptick in hardship distributions is especially concerning, financial advisors said. Beyond the apparent acute financial need among households, hardship withdrawals carry negative repercussions.
For instance, workers under age 59½ typically owe a 10% tax penalty on their withdrawal, in addition to income tax on pretax savings. This is true for nonhardship withdrawals and loans that aren't repaid, too.
But, unlike a 401(k) loan, savers can't pay themselves back when they take a hardship distribution '-- meaning the savings and its future investment earnings is permanently lost, unless workers can somehow make up for it later with higher savings rates. And many employers disallow workers from contributing to their 401(k) for six months after taking a hardship distribution.
There was an uptick in hardship distributions after Congress passed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, which eased access, Greig said. The law erased the requirement that participants first take a 401(k) loan before being able to make a hardship withdrawal.
Households should weigh all their options for cash before resorting to tapping a 401(k) plan, said Jenkin, a member of CNBC's Advisor Council.
For example, households without an emergency fund might be able to free up money for a relatively small short-term cash need by canceling or reducing membership plans, or by selling little-used or unneeded items on Facebook Marketplace or a garage sale, he said. A short-term loan or home equity line of credit would generally also be better than tapping a 401(k).
We are starting to see signs of financial distress at the household level.
Fiona Greig
global head of investor research and policy at Vanguard Group
Selling investments in a taxable investment account may also be a better option than raiding a retirement account or taking on debt, Greig said. While the stock market is down this year, investors may still be in the black when looking over the past two to three years, she said. They'd owe capital gains tax if they sell winning investments, though; even if they sell those investments for a loss, they can use those losses to derive a tax benefit via tax-loss harvesting.
Consumers should also examine the root cause of their financial need, especially if it isn't due to a one-time, unexpected need, Jenkin said.
"Taking a hardship withdrawal is an effect," said Jenkin. "It's the end product of needing money today.
"Like a business, you have to ask yourself, do I have an income problem, an expense problem, or both?"
Australia to cap prices of coal, gas to drive down energy bills
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 13:09
Australia will cap coal and gas prices for a year in a bid to shave utility bills for households and businesses hit by soaring costs because of the Ukraine conflict, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Friday. Gas prices will be capped at A$12 per gigajoule (GJ), while the limit for coal will be A$125 per tonne for 12 months, with the government supporting coal producers whose costs exceed that figure, he said.
"Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, and we know, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, what we've seen is a massive increase in global energy prices," Albanese told reporters after a national cabinet meeting with state leaders. The government also agreed to provide assistance of up to A$1.5 billion to homes and small businesses, starting from the second quarter of 2023.
The gas price cap will apply to new wholesale gas sales by east coast producers. At A$12, it is less than half the average short term gas price of A$26/GJ in the third quarter, according to data from research group EnergyQuest. The coal price cap will apply to coal used in power generation, the government said. The cap of A$125 is about half the A$249 a tonne average selling price Banpu achieved for its Australian coal in the third quarter.
Gas producers had urged the government not to impose the price cap, saying it would deter future investment in supply, which would be key to driving down prices in the long run, and could damage Australia's reputation for foreign investors. Producers that could be hit by the gas price cap include ExxonMobil Corp, Shell Plc, Origin Energy , Woodside Energy Group, Santos Ltd and South Korean steel giant POSCO International Corp's Senex Energy.
"The uncertainty caused by the federal government's plan to impose a price cap in the eastern Australian gas market has already destroyed the confidence both buyers and sellers need in order to complete the transactions that will ensure energy supplies to households and businesses," a Woodside spokesperson said. Coal producers that will be affected include Glencore Plc , Banpu Resources Australia, a unit of Banpu PCL , Coronado Global Resources and Peabody Corp , which supply coal to power plants in New South Wales and Queensland states.
Coal producers declined to comment until seeing further details on how the price cap would work. The Australian Industry Group welcomed the price caps but said they were not the best solution.
"They will be messy to implement ... but they look likely to be very helpful in dampening the immediate economic pain of this global energy crisis," Ai Group chief executive Innes Willox said in a statement. However, power producers, represented by the Australian Energy Council, said it was unclear whether electricity bills will fall anytime soon, because energy retailers and generators who hedge their risks have already settled their contracts for the next 12 months on the basis of higher prices.
"If more lower priced fuel is available, over time those savings may lead to lower wholesale electricity prices, but that will take time to flow through to end users," Australian Energy Council Chief Executive Sarah McNamara said in a statement.
(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
HHS' Levine Enlists Doctors as Evangelists to Preach Transgender Gospel
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 12:42
Dr. Rachel Levine, a man who identifies as a woman, tried to enlist children's doctors and nurses into the transgender activist movement, urging them to become evangelists and preach the gospel of transgenderism. Anything less would be a betrayal of their profession and science itself, he argued.
Levine, assistant secretary of health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, claimed that there is a large population of biological males who are really female and vice versa, and these people are likely to commit suicide unless doctors pump them with drugs to delay puberty, introduce a hormone disease into their bodies, and perhaps even remove healthy body parts.
Levine, who graduated from Tulane University School of Medicine, further said that opposition to this ''treatment'' represents a hateful attack on science and compassion, one that all good doctors must condemn as damnable heresy.
Of course, his sermon did not speak the plain truth of what he meant. He couched his pseudo-religious view'--that there is a parallel realm of reality where biological males such as himself are really female (and vice versa) and that biology is a lesser reality to be warped in pursuit of this higher realm'--in scientific terms, citing studies about a phenomenon that is imperfectly understood.
Levine made his remarks in a Sept. 22 video message to doctors at the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Pediatrics, urging them to become ''ambassadors'' for what he described as ''gender-affirming care.'' (The video garnered little attention at the time, but it has since surfaced on Twitter.)
He championed ''acceptance'' as a life-saving message; painted opponents of his ideology as driven by an ''agenda'' that has ''nothing to do with warmth, empathy, compassion, or understanding''; and sent forth the doctors as his new apostles.
''I encourage all of you to think of yourselves as ambassadors to your communities, ambassadors for science, ambassadors for compassion, and ambassadors for care,'' Levine intoned. ''These conversations don't have to be limited or restricted to a medical setting. Offer yourselves as informational resources not just for youth but for schoolteachers, principals, school boards, professional organizations, recreation centers, county commissioners, and others who would benefit from this information and your perspective. Please proactively seek opportunities to speak about what you know.''
''Our task is to educate the public in as many forms as possible and we need to have these conversations to question the assumptions that are underlying today's attacks on trans people,'' he added. ''Pushing back the veil of ignorance demands this extra effort and this is the challenge before our profession.''
Levine painted a dire picture of an oppressed people, citing high rates of suicidal thoughts and attempted suicides. He blamed this predicament on a demonic society, dismissing any notion that transgender identity may contribute to mental health struggles.
''There is nothing inherent about being LGBTQ+, nothing inherent about being transgender, that predisposes youth and adults to negative medical and mental health outcomes,'' he said, presenting this conclusion as a scientific fact. ''It is the bullying, the harassment, and the discrimination that particularly transgender youth face, which leads to these outcomes.''
Levine cited one study suggesting that ''youth with at least one accepting adult'--one accepting adult, didn't have to be a parent or a family member'--where 40% less likely to report a suicide attempt.''
Levine urged doctors to join the side of the angels and painted his opponents as demons. After professing that he has ''no room in my heart for hatred,'' he urged doctors to ''work together against this intolerance'' that would dare push back against his worldview.
''Those who attack our community are driven by an agenda of politics and it has nothing to do with medicine, it has nothing to do with science, it has nothing to do with warmth, empathy, compassion, or understanding,'' he said. ''They're rejecting the value of supportive medicine, rejecting well-established science, and simply rejecting basic human compassion.''
Levine's message is far from scientifically sound. Although many national health organizations support ''gender-affirming care,'' the Florida Board of Medicine and the Florida Board of Osteopathic Medicine last month approved a new rule banning puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries for minors.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo had warned that the state ''must do more to protect children from politics-based medicine. Otherwise, children and adolescents in our state will continue to face a substantial risk of long-term harm.''
''While some professional organizations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society, recommend these treatments for 'gender affirming' care, the scientific evidence supporting these complex medical interventions is extraordinarily weak,'' Ladapo wrote to the Florida Board of Medicine.
The Florida Department of Public Health determined in April that ''systematic reviews on hormonal treatment for young people show a trend of low-quality evidence, small sample sizes, and medium to high risk of bias.'' It cited an International Review of Psychiatry study stating that 80% of those seeking clinical care will lose their desire to identify with the opposite sex.
This trend extends far beyond Florida. Karolinska Hospital in Sweden announced in May 2021 that it would not prescribe hormonal treatments to minors under 16.
In June 2021, Finland released medical guidelines opposing such drugs for minors, noting: ''Cross-sex identification in childhood, even in extreme cases, generally disappears during puberty.'' The Finnish guidelines add, ''The first-line treatment for gender dysphoria is psychosocial support and, as necessary, psychotherapy and treatment of possible comorbid psychiatric disorders.''
In April 2021, Britain's National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) concluded that the evidence for using puberty-blocking drugs to treat young people is ''very low'' and that existing studies of the drugs were small and ''subject to bias and confounding.''
Many people who mutilated their bodies in the pursuit of a transgender identity have spoken out against the ''cult'' that ensnared them.
''I'm a real, live 22-year-old woman, with a scarred chest and a broken voice, and five o'clock shadow because I couldn't face the idea of growing up to be a woman; that's my reality,'' Cari Stella said in a disturbing YouTube video.
Other detransitioners have supported the states that have banned drugs that would stunt and potentially sterilize minors. ''I believe every state needs to pass a law that protects our youth in this way,'' Chloe Cole, a woman who desisted from a male gender identity, said about the Arkansas law.
Is it indeed ''compassionate'' to encourage an identity that is false to a person's physical body? Would it be compassionate to tell an anorexic girl who wrongly thinks she is fat that she is right to starve herself? Would such a ''treatment'' for anorexia be right if major medical institutions endorsed it?
Surely medical associations cannot be wrong, correct? History suggests they can be very wrong. ''Progressive'' scientists once endorsed eugenics and lobotomies as the height of medicine. The inventor of the lobotomy received a Nobel Prize, and many Nobel laureates supported eugenics.
All this evidence should inspire humility among those championing experimental ''treatments.''
Yet Levine's dogma will not abide the testimony of heretics. His harvest is plentiful, and the workers are few, so he urges doctors to preach the gospel of ''gender-affirming care'' and drive out the demons who dare say that children shouldn't mutilate their bodies.
Neither HHS nor the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Pediatrics responded when asked whether Levine's speech would constitute an ''inappropriate endorsement of a philosophical or religious outlook.'' Perhaps they're too busy doing catechesis.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we'll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular ''We Hear You'' feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
Urgent Action: FDA Plans to Ban Homeopathic Medicines - UncoverDC
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 12:41
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) swift and deceitful approval of the damaging COVID-19 experimental ''vaccines,'' coupled with the agency's massive campaign to promote the jabs, overwhelmingly supports the fact that the agency gets a large chunk of its funding from pharmaceutical company user fees. Essentially, Big Pharma is a client of the FDA. That realization explains why the FDA'--which is also tasked with regulating the distribution of more natural approaches to healthcare'-- wants to ban vitamins and supplements. On top of that, the FDA has issued guidance designed to make all homeopathic drugs illegal.
In 2015, the FDA held a hearing to evaluate its enforcement policies for homeopathic products, as reported by Alliance for Natural Health (ANH). The now-removed FDA hearing notice announced its intent to ''obtain information and comments from stakeholders about the current use of human drug and biological products labeled as homeopathic, as well as the Agency's regulatory framework for such products.'' These products include prescription drugs and biological products labeled as homeopathic and over-the-counter (OTC) drugs labeled as homeopathic.
According to ANH, homeopathic medicines were intended to be grandfathered when the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act came into being, yet the FDA is completely ignoring this. Similarly, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has its sites set on prohibiting homeopathic treatments. The agency asserts that an over-the-counter homeopathic drug claim that is not substantiated by ''competent and reliable'' scientific evidence is considered deceptive if it doesn't include the following disclaimer: 1) there is no scientific evidence that the product works; and 2) the product's claims are based only on theories of homeopathy from the 1700s that are not accepted by most modern medical experts. As aptly pointed out by ANH, the bottom line is that ''homeopathy lacks hugely expensive drug trials.'' ANH notes:
''The truth is that homeopathic medicines are overwhelmingly safe. One review of safety data from 17 countries between 1978 and 2010 found a total of just 1,159 adverse events. This equates to an average of just over 50 cases per annum across all 17 countries from which studies were conducted. Contrast this record of safety for homeopathic medicines with adverse events from FDA-approved drugs. From 1978 to 2010, there were more than 3.5 million serious adverse events and 571,398 deaths, according to the FDA's database.''
Ignoring the intent for homeopathic treatments to be grandfathered, under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, homeopathic products are subject to identical requirements related to approval, adulteration, and misbranding as other drug products. The FDA website notes that ''Products labeled as homeopathic and currently marketed in the U.S. have not been reviewed by the FDA for safety and effectiveness to diagnose, treat, cure, prevent or mitigate any diseases or conditions.'' The FDA currently approves no homeopathic products.
Highlighting the FDA's aggressive approach to banning homeopathy (despite being historically known for moving incredibly slowly), the FDA and other government agencies are moving quickly (as they did with the untested COVID jabs) to make natural medicines unavailable to American citizens. A look at recent activity at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)'--the recipient of the FDA's draft guidance for homeopathic medicines'--hints at the speed at which they are moving to ban natural therapies. OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is tasked with reviewing significant rules and regulations to ensure adequate consideration of costs and benefits. OIRA also affirms that the agency issuing the rules (the FDA) has made a ''reasonable determination that the benefits justify the costs.'' On December 1, 2022, in an article titled ''Homeopathy Bombshell Coming,'' ANH reported:
''Unsurprisingly, OIRA concluded on November 28th, just eleven days after receiving the guidance from the FDA, that no changes are needed to the guidance'--meaning the FDA can move forward with issuing a final version.''
ANH, founded by Scientific Director Robert Verkerk, Ph.D. , emphasized the stakes with the FDA's attack on natural medicines couldn't be higher. Indeed, as reported by UncoverDC, the FDA has positioned itself to fast-track more and more mRNA jabs for myriad ailments. The FDA's draft against homeopathy effectively declares that every single homeopathic medicine on the market is illegal. Already intently assailing homeopathic products, the FDA draft guidance says:
Any homeopathic drug that has not been considered ''generally recognized as safe and effective'' (GRAS/E) is considered a new drug; FDA has not determined that any homeopathic drugs are GRAS/E; A new drug cannot be marketed unless it goes through the FDA's approval process; No homeopathic drugs have gone through FDA approval. As previously mentioned (and noted by ANH), Big Pharma is a significant client of the FDA. Homeopathic medicines, including supplements and other natural products, compete directly with pharmaceutical products; therefore, the FDA'--the taxpayer-funded agency responsible for protecting public health'--is using its tremendous power to ''tilt the scales in favor of the drug companies.'' Explaining the FDA's attack as an entry point to completely eliminate homeopathic medicine, ANH (which has an urgent Action Alert link below, entitled ''Tell Congress and FDA: Stop the Attack on Homeopathy'') explained:
''And because natural products and homeopathic medicines generally cannot be patent-protected like drugs can, they can't afford FDA-approval and so the health claims they can make are severely restricted. It is one among many ways cronyism is undermining healthcare in this country.''
You can easily write to Congress and the FDA and urge them to stop the attack on homeopathy HERE .
Latest Release of Twitter Files Highlight the Mechanics of Controlling Platform Information, With Former U.S. Intel Officials - The Last Refuge
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 11:49
The latest release of information behind the controversial ''Twitter Files'', comes from Bari Weiss complete with the strategic promotion of a new website [The Free Press] launching via the booster provided by their access to the internal Twitter documents.
Curiously intelligent people will note the Weiss website is structured to support the 2024 presidential bid of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is, not coincidentally, riding atop a multi-staged booster guided by Elon Musk and fueled by Wall Street billionaires.
For the moment, just note and I digress '' but please do not miss the connections.
As noted by the former New York Times journalist, Ms. Weiss states, ''the [website] authors have broad and expanding access to Twitter's files. The only condition we agreed to was that the material would first be published on Twitter.'' You can read the entire Twitter Thread Here, and with that, we look at what the current narrative consists of.
Overall, the story as released walks through the process that Twitter used to control users and as a consequence control the flow of information on the platform. Accounts were subject to restrictions, manipulations and other inorganic engagement controls depending on the ideology of the content being provided.
Twitter had teams set up to attach limiting flags within the Twitter platform that would essentially hide content the platform control officers did not want to see reaching a wider audience. As noted by Twitter employees Weiss writes, ''we control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,'' one Twitter engineer told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed.''
What I find interesting is in segment/tweet #12 where Ms. Weiss reveals the existence of the top tier of Twitter control officers. ''The group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team '' Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 ''cases'' a day.''
I find it curious that Ms Bari Weiss mentioned several names in her expose' yet failed to mention the name or curriculum vitae of the head for the Strategic Response Team, a fellow named Jeff Carlton.
Like former CIA head Mike Pompeo, Mr Jeff Carlton was a former U.S. Naval Intelligence Officer responsible for briefing White House officials where his responsibilities included his former work within the FBI counterintelligence division and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Apparently, these intelligence skillsets transferred nicely to his position as the head of Twitter's Strategic Response Team.
[Source]
You can decide why Ms. Weiss failed to identify this intelligence operative, again '' I digress. However, all of these revelations only align in one direction.
In the background of Jack's Magic Coffee Shop (aka Twitter), was a system set up by the U.S. Dept of Homeland Security.
Controlling information, and ultimately shaping public opinion, was/is the primary responsibility of this internal Twitter network that was/is operating in a public-private partnership with the United States Government.
I have yet to see a single data point from any release that runs counter to the basic outline, in the background of Twitter you find DHS.
Twitter is simply a discovery vector to reveal the larger dynamic of DHS being in control of social media. That was the DHS/ODNI problem James Baker was trying to mitigate by his filtration of the released documents. The ''Twitter files'' are one tentacled element in a much larger story.
#1 Jack's Magic Coffee Shop and #2 The Fourth Branch of GovernmentTo put it in brutally honest terms, The United States Dept of Homeland Security is the operating system running in the background of Twitter.
You can debate whether Elon Musk honestly didn't know all this before purchasing Twitter from his good friend Jack Dorsey, and/or what the scenario of owner/operator motive actually is. Decide for yourself.
For me, I feel confident that all of the conflicting and odd datapoints only reconcile in one direction. DHS, via CISA, controls Twitter.
Wittingly or unwittingly (you decide) Elon Musk is now the face of that govt controlled enterprise.
If you concur with my researched assessment, then what you see being released by Elon Musk in the Twitter Files is actually a filtered outcome as a result of this new ownership dynamic. And with that intelligence framework solidly in mind, I warn readers not to take a position on the motive of the new ownership.
Put simply, DHS stakeholders, to include the DOJ, FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), are mitigating public exposure of their domestic surveillance activity by controlling and feeding selected information about their prior Twitter operations.
If TikTok is a national security threat, then TikTok is to Beijing as Twitter is to Washington DC.
The larger objective of U.S. involvement in social media has always been monitoring and surveillance of the public conversation, and then ultimately controlling and influencing public opinion.
.
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VIDEO - Energy department official accused of stealing luggage from Las Vegas airport
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 18:41
by: Vanessa Murphy
Posted: Dec 8, 2022 / 03:35 PM PST
Updated: Dec 9, 2022 / 06:14 AM PST
LAS VEGAS (KLAS) '-- An energy department official is accused of stealing luggage from Harry Reid International Airport, the 8 News Now Investigators learned Thursday.
A felony warrant was issued for Sam Brinton, a deputy assistant secretary, sources said. The charge is for grand larceny with a value between $1,200 and $5,000, records showed.
Brinton is a deputy assistant secretary of the office of spent fuel and waste disposition, according to the Office of Nuclear Energy's website.
Brinton faces charges for a similar incident at the Minneapolis airport. He was on leave after charges were filed in connection with that incident, an energy department spokesman said in November.
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VIDEO - Catastrophic Contagion - James Roguski
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 13:27
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This is a ''fictional scenario'' that was conducted on October 23, 2022.
It was run by the people who brought you Event 201. CLICK HERE
The ''fictional scenario'' takes place in 2025. Get ready!
In reality, this ''tabletop exercise'' is merely some poorly disguised marketing and promotional materials produced by the people who stand to profit from laws that mandate that nations conduct many, many more such ''exercises.''
PLEASE REALIZE that Article 12 of the ''Conceptual Zero Draft'' of the WHO's proposed ''Pandemic Treaty'' (potentially, a legally binding international agreement) calls for nations to conduct simulation exercises such as ''Catastrophic Contagion.''
The people involved in the production of the videos above did not exhibit acting skills that are worthy of an Emmy, a Tony or an Academy Award, but I do believe that they should receive the following'...
The information below is from the Center for Health Security website.
Leaders must prepare now to make difficult, critically important decisions with limited information in the early days of the next pandemic in order to increase the chances that a dangerous outbreak can be contained at the source.
In the early days of a major new contagious disease epidemic, there could be a brief window of opportunity to stop it from becoming a pandemic. To successfully contain such an outbreak, decisive and bold action would need to be taken in the face of incomplete data, high scientific uncertainty, and potential political resistance. Thinking through such challenges, preparing in advance to react effectively, and practicing through both high-level tabletop and operational exercises should start now.
It may seem like all these critical policy decisions have been resolved during the COVID-19 pandemic, but they have not. In the Catastrophic Contagion simulation, even a group of some of the wisest and most experienced international public health leaders who lived through COVID-19 wrestled with opposing views on whether countries should impose travel restrictions or close schools to try to contain a serious new epidemic that was disproportionately affecting children. The exercise raised a pivotal question: If future pandemics have a much higher lethality than COVID-19, or for example, if they affect predominantly children, would or should countries take different, stronger, earlier measures to contain it, and what are those measures?'¯'¯'¯
These are not purely public health and scientific decisions; they will be made by leaders in the context of political, economic, and social realities that can be anticipated and considered in advance. Through routine simulations and operational exercises, we can strategically prepare for such challenges ahead of time. The more effectively we can reach scientific and practical consensus on the best approach to very hard but foreseeable problems, the more we will be ready in the future to protect lives and national economies.'¯Political leaders, in addition to health leaders, must be at the table during exercises to respond effectively during the next pandemic.
Countries should establish a global network of professional public health leaders who can work together to improve epidemic preparedness and response and strive for consensus on scientific issues in advance of the next major outbreak.
There is no existing worldwide professionalized network of public health preparedness and response leaders who can work together between and during epidemics to better prepare all countries and provide mutual aid and sharing of best practices during serious epidemics. Establishing an international network of national public health leaders, along the lines of the professionalized ''Pandemic Corps'' referred to in our exercise, could substantially help countries save lives and livelihoods during major epidemics and recover more quickly.'¯Political leaders, who are entrusted with keeping their citizens safe, could benefit from consensus views offered by such a group, rather than having to make impromptu, high consequence policy decisions when lives are at stake during dangerous outbreaks.
Countries should prioritize efforts to increase trust in government and public health; improve public health communication efforts; increase the resiliency of populations to misleading information; and reduce the spread of harmful misinformation. In future pandemics, we should continue to expect even more major disruptions from misinformation and disinformation. The WHO can'¯be a globally trusted source, and it can share science and public health information widely, but we should not expect it alone to'¯combat or put a stop to the spread of this mis- and disinformation. Countries need to collaborate to anticipate that threat and prepare to combat it with their own laws and'¯procedures.'¯Just as many types of economic and societal harms can be anticipated and accounted for in pandemic preparedness plans, so too can predictable false or misleading health messaging. Concertedly exploring ways to address this phenomenon on a national level in advance of the next pandemic will be crucial to saving lives.
WHO member states should strengthen international systems for sharing and allocating scarce public health resources.
Groundbreaking global collaborations, such as the ACT-Accelerator and COVAX, were launched during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, public health leaders still lack confidence in current approaches to fairly allocate medical countermeasures during a future pandemic. Even if there were a global commitment around equity for all countries, implementing equitable allocation will continue to be very difficult in the future, especially if there are practical challenges and special requirements like refrigeration or IV administration.'¯Empowering all regions of the world to save lives during a pandemic would increase equitable access to life-saving treatments and vaccines. Therefore, we need to build up manufacturing, distribution, and administration capacities around the world, paying particular attention to countries with poor infrastructure. This should happen now, rather than during a growing pandemic.
It is clear from Catastrophic Contagion that even after the terrible impact of COVID-19, more preparedness work needs to be done, new decisions need to be made, and additional resources committed. We need to expand the limits of our ability to respond.
https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/exercises/2022-catastrophic-contagion/index.html
https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/exercises/2022-catastrophic-contagion/lessons.html
https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/exercises/2022-catastrophic-contagion/videos.html
https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/exercises/2022-catastrophic-contagion/participants.html
https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/exercises/2022-catastrophic-contagion/acknowledgments.html
If adopted (it won't be), Article 12 of the ''Conceptual Zero Draft'' of the WHO's proposed Pandemic Treaty clearly instructs nations around the world ''to conduct simulation exercises.''
I fully realize the benefit of planning, preparing, and practicing in advance of any endeavor. However, very little, if any, of what is done in these tabletop exercises is truly designed to actually help improve people's health.
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by James Roguski
The old system is crumbling, and we must build its replacement quickly.
If you are fed up with the government, hospital, medical, pharmaceutical, media, industrial complex and would like to help build a holistic alternative to the WHO, then feel free to contact me directly anytime.
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VIDEO - San Francisco guaranteed income program for pregnant Black women to expand across California
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 13:17
San Francisco mayor pledges again to crack down on drug sales
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A guaranteed income program that provides monthly checks to Black pregnant women in San Francisco will expand to other counties in California.
The Abundant Birth Project began in June 2021 to serve pregnant women with $1,000 monthly payments over 12 months to 150 people. The program is intended to "reduce the racial birth disparities by easing economic stress."
On Tuesday, San Francisco's Department of Public Health announced a $5 million grant in state funding to expand the program in Alameda, Contra Costa, Los Angeles and Riverside counties for the next two to three years.
CONCERNS ESCALATE OVER SAN FRANCISCO'S RISING CRIME HURTING BUSINESS
(C) iStock Woman feeling the movement of a pregnant woman's baby. iStock It will serve another 425 mothers and "other birthing parents" with funds from the California Department of Social Services, the city said.
"This guaranteed income program helps ease some of the financial burdens that all too often keep mothers from being able to prioritize their own health and ultimately impact the health of their babies and family," San Francisco Mayor London Breed said in a statement. "We hope the Abundant Birth Project serves as a model to address racial birth disparities throughout the region and state, and across the country."
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San Francisco launched the first Abundant Birth Project in partnership with Expecting Justice, which advocates for safe births for Black, Asian American and Pacific Islander women.
The city noted that Black women are twice as likely to have a preterm birth than White women and experience the highest infant and maternal mortality rates because of wealth and income disparities.
Homelessness in America increases as inflation continues to rise
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"For so long, Black women have been excluded from the resources needed to have safe and healthy pregnancies. This funding will provide pregnant people with economic stability during this critical phase in their lives while allowing public health institutions to test a novel and promising public health intervention," said Dr. Zea Malawa, director of Expecting Justice.
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San Francisco recently launched another guaranteed income program for transgender residents. The program will provide low-income transgender residents with payments of up to $1,200 each month for up to 18 months.
VIDEO - Airlines are lobbying for a change to federal regulations that could put one pilot in the cockpit - CBS News
Sun, 11 Dec 2022 03:12
Push for cutbacks in the cockpit
Amid pilot shortage, a push for change in federal regulations requiring 2 pilots on flights 03:43 In the airline business, there are two cost factors the airlines can never control: fuel and labor. And as technology improves '-- and pilot salaries increase '-- there's been a controversial move lately by the industry to try to amend what's known as part 121 of the Federal Aviation Regulations. That's the federal air regulation that requires air carriers to have two pilots in the cockpit at all times.
The airlines have been quietly lobbying that the single-pilot approach would quickly solve the staffing problem caused by the pilot shortage and that technology has vastly improved to allow for safe operation of a single-pilot flight.
There's language in a new bill now introduced in Congress '-- the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill '-- asking the Federal Aviation Administration to reconsider part 121 and to allow the use of a single pilot operation, first in cargo aircraft.
Not surprisingly, airline pilots are loudly protesting this idea, claiming that it would diminish a safety discipline and culture that has been responsible for the safest 25 years in commercial aviation in the history of aviation. Pilots unions argue it's all about the airlines saving money and could compromise safety.
But many recent examples tend to confirm the unions' argument, including a 2015 crash in Europe. A co-pilot of a Germanwings flight locked the pilot out of the cockpit and deliberately crashed the plane, killing himself and 149 other people, giving credence to the ongoing argument that in an airborne crisis you need two pilots working in concert to save the aircraft '-- as was the case in the " Miracle on the Hudson ," when pilots Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles successfully ditched a U.S. Airways flight in New York's Hudson River after the plane hit a flock Canada geese on takeoff and subsequently lost power. All 150 passengers as well as the crew were successfully rescued.
And most recently, an incident about 10 days ago occurred on an American Eagle flight from Chicago to Columbus . Shortly after takeoff, the pilot became incapacitated. The co-pilot was able to regain the controls, declare an emergency, turn the plane around and make a safe emergency landing back in O'Hare, and the pilot died later at a hospital. Had there not been a two-person crew in the cockpit, the story would have had a tragic ending.
In any case, more than 40 countries have appealed to an international aviation agency to revise standards globally to give airlines the option for a one-person cockpit crew, so the fight is just getting started.
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VIDEO - (4) Dan Lyman on Twitter: "Lord of War '24 https://t.co/MH5nq8NH44" / Twitter
Sat, 10 Dec 2022 22:20
Dan Lyman : Lord of War '24 https://t.co/MH5nq8NH44
Sat Dec 10 20:06:38 +0000 2022
Michael Antonakos : @realdanlyman Beautiful
Sat Dec 10 22:14:03 +0000 2022
Lord of the Coins ' : @realdanlyman Why are we already hearing from him and not griner
Sat Dec 10 22:08:59 +0000 2022
Ghost of Puppers : @realdanlyman Can we have him and give the lesbo to Russia?
Sat Dec 10 22:02:42 +0000 2022
David Lee White : @realdanlyman It makes me sick that our overlords decide what we can and cannot see. Get yourself a VPN and watch whatever you want.
Sat Dec 10 22:01:11 +0000 2022
Carter ðð¤ð : @realdanlyman Watching this made me more happy about the trade. A man who loves his Country got to go free.
Sat Dec 10 22:00:12 +0000 2022
John Reston ð--¥ð--¥ : @realdanlyman Bout is correct.Consider for a moment that the closest historical analog to the height of American'... https://t.co/GwWYnuxScB
Sat Dec 10 21:52:52 +0000 2022
Shoota305 : @realdanlyman I stand with Russia ð·ðº who's pushing back against the satanic globalist agenda.
Sat Dec 10 21:39:35 +0000 2022
ð¸ð´unknown user ð¸ð´ : @realdanlyman This guy was a capitalist. That's all. Sure, he profited off the evils of war and bloodshed but so did Lockheed Martin.
Sat Dec 10 21:37:44 +0000 2022
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VIDEO - Tridemic: NYC Health Commish Urges Use of Masks Amid Rise in COVID, flu, RSV '' NBC New York
Sat, 10 Dec 2022 13:53
In the face of high levels of COVID-19, flu, and RSV cases, New York City's health officials have issued an advisory, strongly urging New Yorkers to use masks.
NYC Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan says that the rise in respiratory viruses is the reason as to why the city's health office is recommending, not only the use of masks, but also vaccinations and boosters.
"While respiratory viruses are spreading at high levels in NYC, there are common-sense ways to protect yourself and your loved ones this holiday season: vaccination, boosters, wearing a mask indoors or among crowds and staying home if you don't feel well," Vasan said in a tweet.
While respiratory viruses are spreading at high levels in NYC, there are common-sense ways to protect yourself and your loved ones this holiday season: vaccination, boosters, wearing a mask indoors or among crowds and staying home if you don't feel well: https://t.co/sQgAPLhjMo https://t.co/nmYf7bJiVq
'-- Commissioner Ashwin Vasan, MD, PhD (@NYCHealthCommr) December 9, 2022The city's advisory recommends that everyone should wear a mask at all times while indoors, as well as in crowded outdoor settings. City officials also urge those who are sick and unable to separate from others to wear masks. Additionally, those who are COVID-19 positive should wear masks.
"Wear a high-quality mask, such as a KN95 or KF94 or an N95 respirator, for additional protection," city health officials say.
Doctors across the country and the tri-state are worried about a potentially long winter, as hospitals see a spike in RSV cases, as well as COVID and the flu '-- with concerns mounting. NBC New York's Pei-Sze Cheng reports.
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VIDEO - Family of Paul Whelan, American imprisoned in Russia, says it was warned about Brittney Griner's release
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 13:58
The family of Paul Whelan, a businessman and former Marine imprisoned in Russia on suspicion of spying, said it was told by the Biden administration in advance that he would not be part of the prisoner swap Thursday that allowed the release of U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner.
Whelan's brother, David Whelan, said in a statement that while he can "literally only imagine the joy she will have, being reunited with her loved ones, and in time for the holidays," the inability to also bring Whelan home remains difficult for the family to process.
Follow along for live coverage of Brittney Griner's release.
"That early warning meant that our family has been able to mentally prepare for what is now a public disappointment for us. And a catastrophe for Paul," David Whelan said.
Whelan has been jailed in Russia since December 2018 on charges of espionage, which he and the U.S. government have denied. He was working as the head of global security for an auto parts supplier in Michigan when he was arrested. Russia sentenced him in 2020 to 16 years in jail.
Paul Whelan told CNN in a phone call that he is "greatly disappointed that more has not been done to secure my release, especially as the four-year anniversary of my arrest is coming up," adding, "I was arrested for a crime that never occurred."
David Whelan said gaining the release of Griner, who was detained in February at a Moscow airport after Russian authorities said they found vape canisters with cannabis oil in her luggage, was the "right decision" rather than "waiting for one that wasn't going to happen."
"It is so important to me that it is clear that we do not begrudge Ms. Griner her freedom," David Whelan said. "As I have often remarked, Brittney's and Paul's cases were never really intertwined. It has always been a strong possibility that one might be freed without the other."
A senior U.S. official said the U.S. government had sought to have both Griner and Whelan released as part of a swap with the Kremlin, which wanted the return of Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer who has served 11 years of a 25-year sentence in the U.S. But the official said that Russia has treated Whelan differently because he is accused of spying and that the Kremlin ultimately gave the White House the choice of Griner or no one after different options were proposed.
The official said that Whelan's sister was informed Wednesday about the process to release Griner, a player for the WNBA's Phoenix Mercury, and that another senior U.S. official was able to speak with Whelan from prison Thursday and inform him about the outcome of the negotiations.
Whelan's Russian lawyer, Vladimir Zherebenkov, also said that the deal was an exchange of "one to one" and that choosing Griner, 32, appeared "more humane" because she is a woman and an Olympic champion, while Whelan was in the military and it is "easier for him to be in custody."
Zherebenkov said that negotiations for Whelan continue and that he could be freed in an exchange with Russia in the next couple of months. It was unclear what he bases that on, and a senior U.S. official would say Thursday only that diplomatic channels remain open.
David Whelan downplayed Zherebenkov's suggestion that his brother could be freed imminently, saying on MSNBC that he "would doubt that has any basis in fact" because his brother and the lawyer have not spoken since last year.
David Whelan said the U.S. government remains in an "awkward, tricky position" if Russia is willing to release Paul Whelan only for a Russian spy being held in the U.S. and, as U.S. officials have said, there are no such prisoners.
"I don't think the U.S. has the tools it needs to get Paul home," David Whelan said.
Amid questions about why both Whelan and Griner could not be released together, President Joe Biden said at the White House that "we have not forgotten about Paul Whelan" and that negotiations to set him free would continue.
"I don't want any American to sit wrongfully detained for one extra day if we can bring that person home," Biden said.
Griner's wife, Cherelle Griner, also said from the White House that they would keep fighting for other detainees, "including Paul, whose family is in our hearts today."
The Whelan family was similarly frustrated in April, when another former Marine held in Russia, Trevor Reed, was released in a prisoner exchange. David Whelan said that at the time, they were not warned that his brother was not included in the swap.
While the release of Reed, who was sentenced to nine years in prison after Russian authorities said he assaulted an officer in a night of heavy drinking, was seen as a diplomatic victory for the U.S., the Biden administration maintained that Whelan was a high priority. (Reed's family maintained his innocence.)
The Bring Our Families Home Campaign, an organization that advocates on behalf of Americans who are being wrongfully detained overseas, celebrated Griner's homecoming but stressed that Whelan's case remains urgent.
"Paul Whelan has been let down and left behind at least three times by 2 Presidents," the group said in a statement. "He deserves better from his government, and our Campaign implores President Biden to urgently secure Paul's immediate return using all tools available."
David Whelan called on the U.S. government Thursday to "be more assertive" by ensuring a "swifter, more direct response" when Russia arrests an innocent American.
"How do you continue to survive, day after day, when you know that your government has failed twice to free you from a foreign prison?" David Whelan asked.
He added that his parents are in their 80s and that it will be another Christmas without their son since he was detained four years ago. He said on MSNBC that his parents were able to speak with his brother Thursday and that his brother remains "disappointed."
"Today, I don't really have any hopes," David Whelan said. "I will focus on the work and do what I can to support Paul."
CORRECTION (Dec. 8, 2022, 4:09 p.m.): An earlier version of this article misstated the choice the Biden administration was given over hostages. It was to swap for Griner or no one, not a choice between Griner or Whelan.
VIDEO - German Photographs - Myocarditis After Vaccination | Adding To Dr. John Campbell's Analysis - YouTube
VIDEO - (18) Greg Price on Twitter: "Fox News interviewed a bunch of New York Times employees on strike and it's just as ridiculous as you will imagine: "We find it ridiculous that the company is maintaining its position that is has a unilateral right to
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 13:21
Greg Price : Fox News interviewed a bunch of New York Times employees on strike and it's just as ridiculous as you will imagine:'... https://t.co/x3NGC6b71B
Fri Dec 09 00:12:23 +0000 2022
Rudy Whippet : @greg_price11 After all the energy expended from home in scaring the American public, showing up for work is unfair?
Fri Dec 09 13:21:03 +0000 2022
robertsoave soave : @greg_price11 @CitizenFreePres Well there you have it they want someone to work for their salaries
Fri Dec 09 13:18:44 +0000 2022
MiddleClassWOMAN : @greg_price11 And these are the democrats folks!! ð¤£ð¤£ð¤£
Fri Dec 09 13:15:53 +0000 2022
VIDEO - (169) Miracle on 34th Street - YouTube
VIDEO - (169) KJP storms out of briefing room after throwing temper tantrum - YouTube
VIDEO - Holy Shite '-- Do not mess with Jim Jordan'... '' CITIZEN FREE PRESS
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 12:33
DemonkratMarxists lie.RINOs lie.
It's hard to find a case where a conservative tells a lie.
All people lie; we're all fallible humans. The point is not perfection, but who is striving for perfection versus who lives in accord with ''relative morality'' in which a lie, or even murder, can be twisted into a ''good''. It's the liberals & RINOs who have no qualms against lies, thus they lie often, and loudly.
Conservatives? They believe in good versus bad, thus don't often lie, and generally try to fix their mess after they do lie. We all sin. The point is: only the conservatives try to fix the results of their sins.
Liberals (including RINOs)? They don't give a dannn, probably because they no longer even believe in either heaven or hell.
VIDEO - Perception As Controlled Hallucination | Edge.org
Fri, 09 Dec 2022 12:23
PERCEPTION AS CONTROLLED HALLUCINATION: PREDICTIVE PROCESSING AND THE NATURE OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE
The big question that I keep asking myself at the moment is whether it's possible that predictive processing, the vision of the predictive mind I've been working on lately, is as good as it seems to be. It keeps me awake a little bit at night wondering whether anything could touch so many bases as this story seems to. It looks to me as if it provides a way of moving towards a third generation of artificial intelligence. I'll come back to that in a minute. It also looks to me as if it shows how the stuff that I've been interested in for so long, in terms of the extended mind and embodied cognition, can be both true and scientifically tractable, and how we can get something like a quantifiable grip on how neural processing weaves together with bodily processing weaves together with actions out there in the world. It also looks as if this might give us a grip on the nature of conscious experience. And if any theory were able to do all of those things, it would certainly be worth taking seriously. I lie awake wondering whether any theory could be so good as to be doing all these things at once, but that's what we'll be talking about.
A place to start that was fun to read and watch was the debate between Dan Dennett and Dave Chalmers about "Possible Minds" ("Is Superintelligence Impossible?" Edge, 4.10.19). That debate was structured around questions about superintelligence, the future of artificial intelligence, whether or not some of our devices or machines are going to outrun human intelligence and perhaps in either good or bad ways become alien intelligences that cohabit the earth with us. That debate hit on all kinds of important aspects of that space, but it seemed to leave out what looks to be the thing that predictive processing is most able to shed light on, which is the role of action in all of these unfoldings.
There's something rather passive about the kinds of artificial intelligence that Dan and Dave were both talking about. They were talking about intelligences or artificial intelligences that were trained on an objective function. The AI would try to do a particular thing for which they might be exposed to an awful lot of data in trying to come up with ways to do this thing. But at the same time, they didn't seem to inhabit bodies or inhabit worlds; they were solutions to problems in a disembodied, disworlded space. The nature of intelligence looks very different when we think of it as a rolling process that is embedded in bodies or embedded in worlds. Processes like that give rise to real understandings of a structured world.
Something that I thought was perhaps missing from the debate was a full emphasis on the importance, first of all, of having a general-purpose objective function. Rather than setting out to be a good Go player or a good chess player, you might set out to do something like minimize expected prediction error in your embodied encounters with the world. That's my favorite general objective function. It turns out that an objective function like that can support perception and action and the kind of epistemic action in which we progressively try to get better training data, better information, to solve problems for the world that we inhabit.
Predictive processing starts off as a story about perception, and it's worth saying a few words about what it looks like in the perceptual domain before bringing it into the domain of action. In the perceptual domain, the idea, familiar I'm sure to everybody, is that our perceptual world is a construct that emerges at the intersection between sensory information and priors, which here act as top-down predictions about how the sensory information is likely to be. For example, I imagine that most people have experienced phantom phone vibrations, where you suddenly feel your phone is vibrating in your pocket. It turns out that it may not even be in your pocket. Even if it is in your pocket, maybe it's not vibrating. If you constantly carry the phone, and perhaps you're in a slightly anxious state, a heightened interoceptive state, then ordinary bodily noise can be interpreted as signifying the presence of a ringing phone.
It would work very much like, say, the hollow mask illusion: When people are shown a hollow face mask lit from behind, they see the concave side of the face as having a nose pointing outwards. Richard Gregory spoke about this many years ago. It's a standard story in this area. We human beings have very strong expectations about faces. We very much expect, given a certain bit of face information, that the rest of that information will specify a convex, outward-looking face.
The very same story gets to grips with phantom phone vibrations. It explains the White Christmas experiments, which is certainly one of my favorites in this area. People were told that they would hear the faint onset of Bing Crosby singing White Christmas in a sound file that they were going to be played. They would listen to the sound file and a substantial number of participants detected the faint onset of Bing Crosby singing White Christmas, but in fact there was no faint onset of White Christmas. There was no Bing Crosby signal there at all amongst what was simply white noise. In these cases, our expectations are carving out a signal that isn't there. But in other cases, perhaps someone speaks your name faintly and there's a noisy cocktail party going on, your expectations about what your name sounds like and the importance of anything that vaguely signals what your name sounds like conspire to up the weighting of the bits of the noisy signal that are there so that you hear your name fairly clearly.
The Bayesian brain, predictive processing, hierarchical predictive coding are all, roughly speaking, names for the same picture in which experience is constructed at the shifting borderline between sensory evidence and top-down prediction or expectation. There's been a big literature out there on the perceptual side of things.
Same thing if you're in the shower and a familiar song comes on the radio. Under those conditions, a familiar song sounds an awful lot clearer than an unfamiliar one. People might have thought that was a post-perceptual effect, as if you heard something fuzzy and then your memory filled in the details. But if the predictive processing stories are right, then that's the wrong way to think about it. This is just the same old story where top-down expectation meets incoming sensory signals with a balance that is determined by how confident you are in either the sensory signals or your top-down predictions.
The Bayesian brain, predictive processing, hierarchical predictive coding are all, roughly speaking, names for the same picture in which experience is constructed at the shifting borderline between sensory evidence and top-down prediction or expectation. There's been a big literature out there on the perceptual side of things. It's a fairly solid literature. What predictive processing did that I found particularly interesting'--and this is mostly down to a move that was made by Karl Friston'--was apply the same story to action. In action, what we're doing is making a certain set of predictions about the shape of the sensory information that would result if I were to perform the action. Then you get rid of prediction errors relative to that predicted flow by making the action.
There are two ways to get your predictions to be right in these stories. One is to have the right model of the world and the other is to change how the world is to fit the model that you have. Action is changing how the world is to fit the predictions, and perception is more like finding the predictions that make most sense of how the world is. But it turns out that they're operating using the same basic neural architecture. The wiring diagram for motor cortex and the wiring diagram for sensory cortex look surprisingly similar, and this story helps explain why. Indeed, the same basic canonical computations would be involved in both.
What's most interesting about predictive processing is the way it gives you a simultaneous handle on perception and action by showing they obey the same computational principles. It immediately invites you to think about having a model of the world that simultaneously drives how you experience and harvest information from the world. At that point, there's a standing invitation to stories like embodied cognition and the extended mind.
Once the predictive brain story is extended to the control of action in this very natural way, then there's a standing invitation to start thinking about how we weave worldly opportunities and bodily opportunities together with what brains are doing in a way that is going to make systematic sense of the extended mind story.
Before I go there, it's also worth saying a word or two about where the models that drive the predictions get to come from. Perceptual experience is the construct that lives on the border between sensory evidence and top-down prediction or expectation. That's what you're seeing in the White Christmas case and in the phantom phone vibration case. Just to see a structured world of objects around me means to know a lot about structured worlds of objects, and to bring those expectations to bear on the sensory signal. These are the stories that bring a structured world into view quite generally.
There are some rather nice cases that you can find online if you haven't already of so-called sine-wave speech cases, where speech gets stripped of some of its natural dynamics and what's left is a skeletal version of the speech. When you first hear it, it just sounds like a series of beeps and whistles, then when you hear the actual sound file and play that again, it sounds like a clear sentence being spoken because now you have the right top-down model, the right expectations. It's like hearing a familiar song when it's played in the shower on a bad radio receiver. It's a very striking effect and experience. It gives you a real sense of what is happening when a predictive brain gets to grips with the flow of sensory information.
Once you've played the real sentence, it might be something like, "The cat sat on the mat." So, you first hear beeps and whistles and you hear the sentence. Then you hear the beeps and whistles again, but this time through those beeps and whistles most people will clearly hear the sentence. After a while, you can become a native speaker of sine-wave speech so that you could be played a brand new one and you would hear the sentence through the noise. So maybe it will be useful to play some examples. Here we go.
[Audio samples. Begin listening at: 13:00]
I hope you've now had the experience of bringing a stream of somewhat unruly sensory information under an active predictive model and hearing how that can bring a structured world of words into view. The very same thing is happening in visual perception. It's the same effect that we were seeing in the White Christmas story, where your expectations are so strong that they make you think that there's a signal there when there isn't. But if predictive processing and stories of this kind are on track, then these are all exercises of the same constructive computational story. This is where human experience lives. As a philosopher, it sometimes interests me to wonder where this leaves the notion of veridical perception.
Perception itself is a kind of controlled hallucination. You experience a structured world because you expect a structured world, and the sensory information here acts as feedback on your expectations. It allows you to often correct them and to refine them. But the heavy lifting seems to be being done by the expectations. Does that mean that perception is a controlled hallucination? I sometimes think it would be good to flip that and just think that hallucination is a kind of uncontrolled perception.
The basic operating principle here is that you have a rich model of the world, a generative model, as it's known in this literature. What that means is a model that is not a discriminative model which just separates patterns out and says, "This is a cat and this is a dog," but rather a system that, using what it knows about the world, creates patterns that would be cat-like patterns or dog-like patterns in the sensoria. These systems learn to imagine how the sensory world would be, and in learning to imagine how the sensory world would be, they use that to do the classification and recognition work that otherwise would be done by an ordinary feed-forward discriminator. What that's doing is making perception and imagination and understanding come very close together. They're a cognitive package deal here, because if you perceive the world in this way, then you have the resources to create virtual sensory stuff like that from the top down.
Systems that can perceive the world like this can imagine the world, too, in a certain sense. That grip on the world seems to be very close to understanding the world. If I know how the sensory signal is going to behave at many different levels of abstraction and at many scales of space and time, so I can take the scene as it currently is and project it into the future and know what's going to happen if you hit the can and so on, that way of perceiving the world seems to me to be a way of understanding the world.
It will be very reasonable to ask where the knowledge comes from that drives the generative model in these cases. One of the cool things is that learning here proceeds in exactly the same way as perception itself. Moment by moment, a multilevel neural architecture is trying to predict the sensory flow. In order to do better at predicting the sensory flow, it needs to pull out regular structures within that flow at different time scales, so-called hidden causes or latent variables. Over time, with a powerful enough system, I might pull out things like tables and chairs and cats and dogs. You can learn to do that just by trying to predict the sensory flow itself.
A nice simple case of that will be something like learning the grammar of a language. If you knew the grammar of a language, that would be helpful in predicting what word is coming next. One way that you can learn the grammar of a language is to try again and again to predict what word is coming next. Pull out the latent variables and structure that is necessary to do that prediction task, and then you've acquired the model that you can use to do the prediction task in the future. These stories are a standing invitation to this bootstrapping where the prediction task that underlies perception and action itself installs the models that are used in the prediction task.
There's a pleasing symmetry there. Once you've got action on the table in these stories'--the idea is that we bring action about by predicting sensory flows that are non actual and then getting rid of prediction errors relative to those sensory flows by bringing the action about'--that means that epistemic action, as it's sometimes called, is right there on the table. Systems like that cannot just act in the world to fulfill their goals; they can also act in the world so as to get better information to fulfill their goals. And that's something that active animals do all the time. The chicken, when it bobs its head around, is moving its sensors around to get information that allows it to do depth perception that it can't do unless it bobs its head around. When you go into a darkened room and you flip the light switch, you're performing a kind of epistemic action because your goal wasn't specifically to hit the light switch; it was to do something in the room. But you perform this action that then improves your state of information so you can do the thing you need to do. Epistemic action, and practical action, and perception, and understanding are now all rolled together in this nice package.
It's interesting then to ask, if your models are playing such a big role in how you perceive and experience the world, what does it mean to perceive and experience the world as it is? Basically, what these stories do is ask you to think again about that question. Take the sine-wave speech example and ask yourself when you heard what was really there. Did you hear what was there when you heard it just as beeps and burps? Or did you hear what was there when you heard the sentence through the beeps and buzzes? I don't think there's a good answer to that question. If predictive processing is on track though, one thing we can say is that even to hear it as beeps buzzes is to bring some kind of model to bear, just one that didn't reach as deeply into the external causal structure as the one that actually does have words in it.
An upshot here is that there's no experience without the application of some model to try to sift what is worthwhile for a creature like you in the signal and what isn't worthwhile for a creature like you. And because that's what we're doing all the time, it's no wonder that certain things like placebo effects, medically unexplained symptoms, phantom phone vibrations, all begin to fall into place as expressions of the fundamental way that we're working when we construct perceptual experience. In the case of medically unexplained symptoms, for example, where people might have blindness or paralysis with no medically known cause, or more than that, very often the symptoms here will have a shape that in principle can't have a simple physiological cause.
A nice example is you might get someone with a blind spot in their field of vision. If you ask them what the width of that blind spot is when it is mapped close to the eye and when it's mapped far from the eye, some people will have what's called tubular visual field defect, which means they say it's the same wherever it's mapped. This is optically, physiologically impossible. It's pretty clear in cases like that that what's doing the work is something like belief expectation prediction. It's their model of what it would be like to have a visual field defect that is doing the work.
In this broad sense of beliefs, it doesn't mean beliefs that you necessarily hold as a person, but somehow they got in there somehow. These multilevel systems harbor all kinds of predictions and beliefs which the agent themselves might even disavow. Honest placebos do work. For example, if someone is told that this pill is an inert substance, you can nonetheless get symptomatic relief from those substances as long as they're presented by people in white coats with the right packaging'--mid levels of expectation are engaged regardless of what you, the person sitting at the top, thinks. In the case of medically unexplained symptoms, it looks like they're the physiological version of the White Christmas effect. There are bodily signals there, and if your expectations about the shape of those signals are strong enough, then you can bring about the experiences that those expectations describe, just like White Christmas only done here in this somatosensory domain.
There's interesting work emerging not just on medically unexplained symptoms, but even medically explained symptoms. If people live with a medically explained problem for long enough, they can build up all kinds of expectations about the shape of their own symptomology, which share a lot in common with the medically unexplained cases. The same person with a chronic condition on different days and in different contexts will have different experiences even if the physiological state, the bedrock state, seems to be exactly the same.
There's quite a lot to say about how that should pan out. In some ways, my view is an illusionist view. A large part of this debate over consciousness is misguided because there's nothing there. There's a multidimensional matrix of real things, and among those real things, there's a tendency to think there's another thing and that other thing isn't real. That's one way of thinking about it.
There's a nice paper that came out recently by Van den Bergh and colleagues which was arguing that in the case of chronic effects, chronic pain, for example, an awful lot of ordinary symptomology has very much the character of the symptomology in the medically unexplained cases. So, it puts neuro-typical and less typical cases on a continuum and on par, which is quite interesting.
Acute cases are somewhat different because there you haven't built up those regimes of expectation, and there's a very straight signal being dealt with. Although, even there it seems as if your long-term model of the world makes a big difference as to how that signal plays out. There's a large area here where work on placebo effects, medically unexplained symptoms, autism, the effects of psychedelics, schizophrenia, all of these things are being thought about under this general framework. Maybe this'll be one of the test cases for whether we make progress using these tools with understanding the nature of human consciousness.
We had a visit from Robin Carhart-Harris, who works on psychedelics and is now working on predictive coding. There are some very interesting ideas coming out there, I thought. In particular, the idea that what serotonergic psychedelics do is relax the influence of top-down beliefs and top-down expectations so that sensory information can find new channels. If we think about this in the context of people with depression, maybe part of what goes on there is that we hold this structured world in view, in part by our expectations'--and they're not just about the world, they're also about ourselves'--and if you can relax some of those expectations and experience a way of encountering the world where you don't model yourself as a depressive person, for example, even a brief experience like that can apparently have long-term, lasting effects.
Some of the Bayesian brain and predictive processing folks are doing some pretty cool things, looking at the action of psychedelics and the effects of sensory deprivation. For any of these things, you can ask how would those different balances'--held in place by this prediction meets sensory information construct'--play out under different regimes of neurotransmitters, for example, or under different environmental regimes where you might have a stroboscopic light being flashed at you very rapidly. The University of Sussex has one of these, and it creates surprisingly intense sensations. If you were to sit in it for a couple of hours, you might get full dissociation. Even for a few minutes, you get experiences of colors of an intensity that I've never experienced before.
If you begin to ask what these stories have to say, if anything, about the nature of human consciousness, there are several things to say. The first is that the basic construction of experience is already illuminated just by thinking in terms of this mixture of top-down expectations and bottom-up sensory evidence and the way that mixture gets varied in different contexts and by different interventions. At the same time, there's a strong intuition some people have that consciousness is special and that whatever tools I was using to make progress with the White Christmas experiments and phantom phone vibrations are not getting to grips yet with what matters most about consciousness, which is how it feels, the redness of the sunset, the taste of the Tequila, and so on.
There's quite a lot to say about how that should pan out. In some ways, my view is an illusionist view. A large part of this debate over consciousness is misguided because there's nothing there. There's a multidimensional matrix of real things, and among those real things, there's a tendency to think there's another thing and that other thing isn't real. That's one way of thinking about it.
Among the real dimensions are the perceptual dimension that we've spoken about, the dimension of acting to engage our world. There's a lot of super interesting work on the role of interoceptive signals in all of this. Apart from the exteroceptive signals that we take in from vision, sound, and so on, and apart from the proprioceptive signals from our body that are what we predict in order to move our body around, there's also all of the interoceptive signals that are coming from the heart and from the viscera, et cetera.
One of the effects of the general predictive processing story is that all of this is just sensory evidence thrown in a big pot. How I perceive the external world to be can be constantly inflected by how I'm perceiving my internal world to be. You see this, for example, in experiments where people are given false cardiac feedback. They're made to think that their hearts are beating faster than they are. And under conditions like that, if they're exposed to a neutral face, they're more likely to judge that the face is anxious or fearful or angry. It looks as if what's going on is that our constant intouchness with signals from our own body, our brains are taking as just more information about how things are.
In that sense, there's a Jamesian flavor to some of the work on experience that comes out of predictive processing where the idea is that emotion, for example, is very much tied up with the role that interoception plays in giving us a grip on how things are in the world. William James famously said that the fear we feel when we see the bear has a lot to do with the experience of our own heart beating and our preparations to flee, all of that bodily stuff. If you took all that away, perhaps the feeling of fear would be bereft of its real substance.
I can reduce prediction error by projecting myself into the future and asking what certain things a creature like me'--the way I can see myself to be'--might do, would serve to reduce prediction error in the future. In that way, I turn up as a latent variable in my own model of the world. That seems important in human consciousness, at least. That's part of what makes us distinguishable selves with goals and projects that we can reflect on. . . . The thing that I don't think is real is qualia.
There is something genuine in there that being subtly inflected by interoception information is part of what makes our conscious experience of the world the kind of experience that it is. So, artificial systems without interoception could perceive their world in an exteroceptive way, they could act in their world, but they would be lacking what seems to me to be one important dimension of what it is to be a conscious human being in the world.
To understand that, we need to take a more illusionist stance. To do that would be to ask some version of what Dave Chalmers has lately called the meta hard puzzle or the meta hard question. That would be, what is it about systems like us that explains why we think that there are hard puzzles of consciousness, why we think that the conscious mind might be something very distinct from the rest of the physical order, why we think there are genuine questions to be asked about zombies.
We've got a number of real dimensions to consciousness. One of them is bringing a structured world into view in perception in part by structured expectations. The other one is an inflection of all of that by interoception. You can then ask questions about the temporal depth of the model that you're bringing to bear, and that seems like an important dimension, too. If your model has enough depth and temporal depth, then you can turn up in your own model of the world. Technically here I can reduce prediction error by projecting myself into the future and asking what certain things a creature like me'--the way I can see myself to be'--might do, would serve to reduce prediction error in the future. In that way, I turn up as a latent variable in my own model of the world. That seems important in human consciousness, at least. That's part of what makes us distinguishable selves with goals and projects that we can reflect on. That matrix is real. The thing that I don't think is real is qualia.
To understand that, we need to take a more illusionist stance. To do that would be to ask some version of what Dave Chalmers has lately called the meta hard puzzle or the meta hard question. That would be, what is it about systems like us that explains why we think that there are hard puzzles of consciousness, why we think that the conscious mind might be something very distinct from the rest of the physical order, why we think there are genuine questions to be asked about zombies. What Chalmers thinks is that any solution to the meta hard question, the question of why we think there's a hard question, why we say and do the things that express apparent puzzlement of this kind'--those are easy questions in Dave's sense.
You can say something about how you would build a robot that might get puzzled or appear to be puzzled about its own experience in those ways.
You might think, well there's something very solid about all this perceptual stuff. I can be highly confident of it, and yet how the world really is could be very varied. If you're the sort of robot that can start to do those acrobatics, you're the sort of robot that might invent a hard problem, and might begin to think that there's more than a grain of truth in dualism.
One thing that we might like to do is try to take an illusionist stance to just that particular bit of the hard problem while being realist about all the other stuff, thinking that there's something to say about the role of the body, something to say about what it takes to bring a structured world into view. Do all of that stuff and then also solve the meta hard puzzle, and you've solved all there is to solve. Whereas Dave Chalmers, I'm sure, will say, at that point, you showing us how to build a robot that will fool us into thinking that it's conscious, in certain sense it might even fool itself into thinking that it's conscious, but it wouldn't really because maybe it wouldn't have any experiences at all when it's doing all that stuff.
What Dan has argued there is that maybe we get puzzled because we're fooled by our own Bayesianism here. This model of how things are gets to grips with how we're going to respond, and we then reify something within that nexus as these intervening qualia. But you don't need the weird intervening qualia; you just have responses that come about in certain circumstances. There's a rather natural fit between Dan's approach and these approaches, and they're both a kind of illusionism where we're both saying whatever consciousness really is, it can't be what Dave Chalmers thinks it is.
Dan Dennett's take on consciousness is a perfect fit with a predictive processing take on consciousness. For many years, Dan has argued that there's something illusory here, some self-spun narrative illusion. Predictive processing perhaps gives us a little bit more of the mechanism that might support the emergence of an illusion like that. Dan himself has written some interesting stuff on the way that predicting our own embodied responses to things might lead us down the track of thinking that qualia are fundamental special goings on inside us. I might predict some of my own ooing and awing responses to the cute baby, and when I find myself in the presence of the cute baby, I make those responses and I think that cuteness is a real genuine property of some things in the world.
What Dan has argued there is that maybe we get puzzled because we're fooled by our own Bayesianism here. This model of how things are gets to grips with how we're going to respond, and we then reify something within that nexus as these intervening qualia. But you don't need the weird intervening qualia; you just have responses that come about in certain circumstances. There's a rather natural fit between Dan's approach and these approaches, and they're both a kind of illusionism where we're both saying whatever consciousness really is, it can't be what Dave Chalmers thinks it is.
