MRSKSMALLSWORLD Rodger Goddell calls for unity in the NFL. Said the league should have listened to players about radian concerns in response to nfl players calling on league to condemn racism and support its black players. Share your thoughts on Goodell or the situation at hand thanks

By ROBERT MACKEY

Buffalo Police Said Protester With Head Wound “Tripped and Fell.” Video Shows They Lied.

Robert Mackey June 5 2020, 5:47 a.m. (theintercept.com)

POLICE OFFICERS IN Buffalo, New York used excessive force to disperse a protest against police brutality on Thursday, shoving a 75-year-old protester who posed no threat to them so hard that he fell to the ground and sustained a bloody head wound.

Although the incident took place outside Buffalo’s City Hall, in daylight and in full view of witnesses, including at least five journalists, the Buffalo Police Department initially said in a statement that, during a “skirmish involving protestors, one person was injured when he tripped & fell.”

However, that account of what happened was quickly revealed to be a lie. Just over 20 minutes after the police statement was made public, the local NPR affiliate WBFO released distressing video of the incident, which clearly showed that the man only fell to the sidewalk in Niagara Square and hit his head because two officers he tried to talk to shoved him roughly.

Although the masked, elderly man hit his head hard on the pavement, and immediately began bleeding from his ear, one officer who had pushed him was stopped from aiding him by another officer who pushed him toward a younger protester, who was sitting on the city hall steps holding a “Black Lives Matter” sign. None of the other officers made any immediate effort to help the injured man. One officer did, however, order the reporter who was filming the incident, Mike Desmond of WBFO, to clear the area.

The injured man was hospitalized in serious, but stable condition, according to local officials. He was identified as the veteran activist Martin Gugino by his friend Mark Colville, one of seven Catholic anti-nuclear activists affiliated with Plowshares, a nuclear-abolition movement, currently awaiting sentencing for breaking into the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in St. Mary’s, Georgia, in 2018, on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“This is my good friend, Martin Gugino,” Colville wrote on Twitter. “A longtime activist and political thinker; has struggled to close Guantanamo as a member of Witness Against Torture; a man of deep faith who spends much of his free time visiting prisoners in Attica. And he’s battling a catastrophic illness.”Mark Colville@AmistadObrero

Here’s Martin Gugino (holding the “Resist Racism” sign) in 2016 outside the DOJ in Washington, DC, where Witness Against Torture was demanding murder charges be brought against the Cleveland police officers who executed a child named Tamir Rice. Today he fights for his own life.

Martin Luther King’s belief that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Gugino added: “What he doesn’t say there, is that it doesn’t bend itself; we have to bend it. We have to go out into the culture and act justly, act morally, do good, and little by little it will bend the culture towards justice. And some of the times, the culture doesn’t want to be bent, and so there’ll be conflict, and that’s just part of it.”

–Martin Gugino

Last week, Gugino posted a YouTube statement addressed to the federal court in Brunswick, Georgia where Colville is awaiting sentencing in support, in which he had cited Martin Luther King’s belief that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Gugino added: “What he doesn’t say there, is that it doesn’t bend itself; we have to bend it. We have to go out into the culture and act justly, act morally, do good, and little by little it will bend the culture towards justice. And some of the times, the culture doesn’t want to be bent, and so there’ll be conflict, and that’s just part of it.”

Earlier on Thursday, Gugino had tweeted a photograph of an event in Niagara Square at which state and local officials called for police reform. He also wrote that “COVID is a factor,” for protesters against police brutality and racial injustice to consider and noted that he had a cough. “I can take extra measures to counteract” the risk of infection, he added, but noted there is also a risk “of getting pummeled.”

Video of the incident recorded from across the street by a photojournalist named Anthony Nelson showed just how disproportionate the forceful police action to clear the square was. As the 8 p.m. curfew passed, the officers advanced in military formation despite facing just a handful of protestersKatie Gibas@KatieGibasTV

Current situation in #Buffalo as police work to enforce the 8 p.m. curfew in Niagara Square. Caution: there is some vulgar language in the video. Tune to @SPECNewsBuffalo for the latest. Video Courtesy: Photojournalist Anthony Nelson

About 90 minutes after the close-up video was posted online, and prompted national and international condemnation, the mayor of Buffalo, Byron Brown, announced that the two officers had been suspended without pay, pending an investigation.

Brown, however, appeared to endorse the police perspective that force was required to clear the square. The man was injured, Brown wrote, “after a physical altercation between two separate groups of protesters participating in an illegal demonstration beyond the curfew.” There was no evidence in the videos from the scene of any altercation before the police surged forward at the few protesters who remained in Niagara Square. An earlier demonstration, demanding justice for George Floyd, the black security guard murdered by a white police office in Minneapolis, had ended peacefully, after fist bumps between police officers and protesters.Ali Ingersoll@Ali_IngNews

Police came over to talk to people who have become familiar faces to them, saying if they stay on the sidewalk and leave by 8, there won’t be issues.

Police just left.

Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz issued a more forceful statement than the city’s mayor. “Simply put, the officers must be held responsible for their actions, not just fired,” he wrote on Twitter.

The incident, just one of dozens of examples of excessive force caught on camera in the past two weeks, stirred outrage both because the target was an elderly, peaceful protester and because the initial police statement made it obvious that the incident would have been covered up but for the presence of a witness with a video camera.

The two suspensions were denounced by the president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, John Evans, in an email obtained by Madison Carter of the local ABC News affiliate, WKBW. “I can tell you they tried to fuck over these guys like I have never seen in my 54 years,” Evans wrote. “It is despicable.”Madison Carter@madisonlcarter

WOW. email sent from PBA President John Evans to members.
“I can tell you they (@BPDAlerts) tried to f*%k over these guys like I have never seen in my 54 years.”@WKBW

Evans argued that since the officers “did nothing wrong” and were “simply following orders,” he had decided that the association would not pay for the legal defense of any officers from Buffalo’s Emergency Response Team who might be charged with wrongdoing “OVER BULLSHIT… related to these protests going forward.”

Following that email, all 57 members of the police department’s Emergency Response Team reportedly resigned from the unit, although not from the police force. Spectrum News in Buffalo reported that Evans confirmed that the officers had quit their unit “to support the two suspended officers, and in disgust of how the administration is handling the entire incident.”

“These guys did nothing but do what they were ordered to do. This is disgusting!!!” Evans wrote in a public post on the Buffalo PBA website.

“These protest’s/riots should not be taken lightly!!” he added in a text message with idiosyncratic punctuation. “Last nights rioters were from Bflo NY- Not out of towners… We still don’t have a rifle equivalent to the criminals AR’s and AK’s.”

The injured protester, Martin Gugino, issued a statement through his lawyer on Friday afternoon confirming that he remains in serious but stable condition but is “alert and oriented.”
Jeff Russo✔@JeffRussoWKBW

JUST IN: Statement from Martin Gugino, the man pushed by Buffalo Police Officers, via his attorney. “He appreciates all of the well wishes he has received and requests that any further protests continue to be peaceful.” ⁦@WKBW⁩

Updated: Friday, June 5, 2:55 p.m. PDT
This article was updated to report remarks from the president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association and to note that the injured man was identified as the veteran activist Martin Gugino by his friend Mark Colville, one of seven Catholic anti-nuclear activists affiliated with Plowshares known as the Kings Bay 7.

CONTACT THE AUTHOR:

Robert Mackey robert.mackey@​theintercept.com @RobertMackey

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Frankfurt School (German: Frankfurter Schule) is a school of social theory and critical philosophy associated with the Institute for Social Research, at Goethe University Frankfurt. Founded in the Weimar Republic (1918–33), during the European interwar period (1918–39), the Frankfurt School comprised intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents who were ill-fitted to the contemporary socio-economic systems (capitalist, fascist, communist) of the 1930s. The Frankfurt theorists proposed that social theory was inadequate for explaining the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics occurring in ostensibly liberal capitalist societies in the 20th century. Critical of capitalism and of Marxism–Leninism as philosophically inflexible systems of social organisation, the School’s critical theory research indicated alternative paths to realising the social development of a society and a nation.^[1]

The Frankfurt School perspective of critical investigation (open-ended and self-critical) is based upon Freudian, Marxist and Hegelian premises of idealist philosophy.^[2] To fill the omissions of 19th-century classical Marxism, which could not address 20th-century social problems, they applied the methods of antipositivist sociology, of psychoanalysis, and of existentialism.^[3] The School’s sociologic works derived from syntheses of the thematically pertinent works of Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx, of Sigmund Freud and Max Weber, and of Georg Simmel and Georg Lukács.^[4][5]

Like Karl Marx, the Frankfurt School concerned themselves with the conditions (political, economic, societal) that allow for social change realised by way of rational social institutions.^[6] The emphasis upon the critical component of social theory derived from surpassing the ideological limitations of positivism, materialism, and determinism, by returning to the critical philosophy of Kant, and his successors in German idealism — principally the philosophy of Hegel, which emphasised dialectic and contradiction as intellectual properties inherent to the human grasp of material reality.

Since the 1960s, the critical-theory work of the Institute for Social Research has been guided by Jürgen Habermas, in the fields of communicative rationality, linguistic intersubjectivity, and “the philosophical discourse of modernity“;^[7] nonetheless, the critical theorists Raymond Geuss and Nikolas Kompridis opposed the propositions of Habermas, claiming he has undermined the original social-change purposes of critical-theory-problems, such as what should reason mean; the analysis and expansion of the conditions necessary to realise social emancipation; and critiques of contemporary capitalism.^[8]

“The world we’re in is not based on Genghis Khan being the strongest. it’s now based on who is the smartest in some sense. The free market allows anybody to go out there and sell you stuff. What you have to be good at is actually not consuming the bullshit. That’s actually the watermark at this point. It’s not “Can you avoid the lion?” The lion now is hidden. Like it’s venus flytraps now as opposed to lions. We’re not trying to avoid Genghis Khan. We’re tying to stop ourselves from eating so much McDonalds or developing the cigarette habit. Our jungle now is the people out there who are tempting us to watch porn. Whoever can steal your attention is stealing your juice, is stealing your creative potential and essentially ruining your changes of having a good future.”

–Stefan Fox

Outwitting the Devil: The Secret to Freedom and Success

by Napoleon Hill (Prólogo), Michael Bernard Beckwith, Sharon L. Lechter (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Mark Victor Hansen (Foreword) 

Napoleon Hill wrote this book in 1938, just after publication of his all-time bestseller, Think and Grow Rich. This powerful tale has never been published, considered too controversial by his family and friends.
Using his legendary ability to get to the root of human potential, Napoleon Hill digs deep to identify the greatest obstacles we face in reaching personal goals: fear, procrastination, anger, and jealousy, as tools of the Devil. These hidden methods of control can lead us to ruin, and Hill reveals the seven principles of good that will allow us to triumph over them and succeed.

Annotated and edited for a contemporary audience by Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Three Feet from Gold co-author Sharon Lechter, this book is profound, powerful, resonant, and rich with insight.

(Goodreads.com)

✊? If you feel you need to unfriend me …see ya??https://www.kimjoneswrites.comGo like Kim's page https://www.facebook.com/darktonekim/

Posted by Ron Edwards Jr. on Tuesday, June 2, 2020

Matt Orfalea Happy Father’s Day! Father has trouble fathering stubborn son. It’s not easy being a dad. This is for the fathers. And the sons. by Orf / Matt Orfalea PERSONAL LINKS —————————- http://www.Youtube.com/Orfhttp://www.Facebook.com/FrigginOrf‬‪http://Twitter.com/0rf‬ ORF PLAYLISTS ————————- Grandma: http://bit.ly/11ofSe0 Sketches: http://bit.ly/17OEsMo In Public: http://bit.ly/12xvTn1 Animation: http://bit.ly/11D5xK6 Orf 2nd Channel, http://bit.ly/11gk5Uu Thanks for watching! Orf Help us caption & translate this video! https://amara.org/v/cAB5/

How hard is the hard problem of consciousness?

2nd June 2020 (iai.tv)

Berit Brogaard 

| Miami philosopher of mind Berit Brogaard has published on synaethesia, savant syndrome and the emotions. Her recent books include On Romantic Love and The Superhuman Mind.

Dimitria Gatzia 

| Professor of philosophy at the University of Akron

Our efforts to solve the hard problem of consciousness will require significant scientific progress and a paradigm shift in what we consider an acceptable answer to this philosophical puzzle. 

In his book The Conscious Mind, consciousness researcher David Chalmers  distinguishes between what he calls the “easy problems” of consciousness and the “hard problems.”

The easy problems are those that can be satisfactorily solved by providing a mechanistic explanation based on the methods of scientific disciplines such as computer science, neuroscience, biology, and cognitive psychology. The easy problems include those of offering explanations of our ability to discriminate, categorize, attend to, and report on environmental stimuli; how information is integrated from different sensory modalities; and how internal body maps are used to guide our movements when we perform actions. Even if a complete explanation of these problems is not currently available, there is little doubt that one can be provided by employing scientific methodology. While solving these problems is an important step toward a complete account of consciousness, this doesn’t give us the whole picture. This is where the hard problems of consciousness enter the picture. These problems concern the phenomenal aspect of experience, or what it is like to have an experience, say, what it is like to experience bright pink, have a headache, or imagine your boss as a centaur.

There are several hard problems of consciousness – or aspects of the hard problem, if you wish. One is that of explaining why we have subjective and qualitatively rich experiences when our brain processes information from the environment, which we use to solve problems and act on the world. This problem is hard because it is highly plausible that we could do everything we do without any corresponding conscious awareness. For example, there are people who get out of their bed and complete complicated actions while still asleep. We call it “sleepwalking.” But walk is not all “sleepwalkers” do.

Scientific explanations of consciousness don’t offer any insight into the subjective and qualitative aspects of experience.

Rob Wood, a former chef, cooked spaghetti Bolognese, omelets, and fish and chips during his sleep. Computer expert Ian Armstrong was observed by his wife mowing the lawn naked at 2 a.m. while asleep, and some have even commit murder. In the early morning of May 1987, Kenneth Parks, a 23 year-old father and husband from Toronto,  got out of bed and drove 23 kilometers from Pickering to the house of his wife’s parents, where he proceeded to bludgeon them to death with a tire iron. After careful examination of the case, the experts could find no explanation of the crime other than sleepwalking. He was later acquitted of the double homicide in court. It has been scientifically demonstrated that people who sleepwalk (or sleep-cook or sleep-kill) are in a phase of deep sleep and have no conscious awareness of their surroundings.

Yet cooking spaghetti Bolognese, mowing the lawn or driving while navigating traffic lights and stop signs requires that the brain processes complex information and uses that information to guide the body. Such cases show that we are capable of processing and responding to information from our environment without any corresponding conscious awareness. Something similar is arguably going on when we perform routine actions while our attention is elsewhere, for example driving home, on auto-pilot, as it were, and not remembering how we got there.

If consciousness is not needed for us to respond to the environment, then why do we have it? It seems that consciousness must have played some causal role in evolution in order for it to have evolved. But if our ancestors could have succeeded in the survival game of evolution without any conscious awareness, which is highly plausible, then how could consciousness have been advantageous to our ancestors. One possibility is that rather than being a direct product of adaptive selection, it is an evolutionary byproduct – or what is also called a “spandrel.” Linguist Noam Chomsky, for example, has argued that our “language faculty,” that is, our innate ability to produce linguistic phrases with the same underlying grammatical structure, may have evolved as a spandrel. Similarly, one can imagine that consciousness evolved as a spandrel as animal brains reached a certain level of neurological complexity.

Berit Brogaard, Karl Friston and Hilary Lawson debate the independence of reality

One problem with this explanation of how consciousness evolved is that it seems to presuppose that once consciousness evolved as a spandrel, it then took on a function that provided selective advantage. It is easy to see how language may have been advantageous to humans, even if it evolved as a spandrel. Not so with consciousness. So, the spandrel explanation doesn’t help explain the selective advantage of consciousness.

A more plausible suggestion is that consciousness is a causal product of its neurological realizer, which is to say that given our laws of nature, consciousness is inseparable from its underlying realizer. Thus understood, consciousness is an emergent property. Emergence, in this sense, is a familiar scientific phenomenon. Being liquid, for example, is a property that emerges when H₂O molecules are structured in a particular way.

While plausible, a complete account of consciousness goes beyond a conventional scientific account of how conscious experiences and brain states are causally connected. There are two interconnected reasons for this. One is that conscious states and their realizers have conceptually distinct properties. As Chalmers has argued, we could have had the same  physical and functional constitution while lacking the capacity for consciousness. Our unconscious counterparts, in this sense, are eternal sleepwalkers of sorts, or what Chalmers calls “philosophical zombies.” Of course, if we had been philosophical zombies, the laws of nature would have had to be very different. Perhaps they would have been such that no matter how H₂O molecules bind to each other, they will never be in a liquid form. We don’t really know.

If consciousness is not needed for us to respond to the environment, then why do we have it?

If, however, conscious states and their realizers have different properties, as this line of argument suggests, then conscious states are not identical to their realizers. So, regardless of how many truths we uncover about how the brain gives rise to consciousness, this is never going to give us a complete account of consciousness.

The other reason that using conventional scientific methods to account for the causal connection between conscious experiences and brain states does not provide us with a complete account of consciousness is that scientific explanations of consciousness don’t offer any insight into the subjective and qualitative aspects of experience.

This is the lesson of philosopher Frank Jackson’s (1982) Mary argument. Mary is an excellent neuroscientist confined to a black-and-white room with black-and-white computer screens hooked up to external cameras. After years of studying in her room she eventually knows everything about colors discoverable through the use of conventional scientific methods. Yet when she finally leaves the black-and-white room and sees a bright pink tulip for the first time, she learns something new: what it is like to see bright pink. As she knew everything about colors discoverable through the conventional sciences prior to her release but nonetheless learned something new after her release – namely, what it was like to see bright pink – no scientific explanation of her experience of bright pink can be regarded as complete.

In “What It’s Like to Be a Bat” philosopher Thomas Nagel (1974) offers a different version of this argument. Nagel argued that we humans will never understand what it’s like to be a bat, in part, because we are unable to understand what it’s like to use echolocation to identify objects and navigate our environment.

Echolocation, or what is also known as “bio sonar,” requires producing a sound, detecting the echo the sound makes when it is reflected from nearby objects, and then using this information to identify objects and navigate the world. The reason we humans are unable to understand what it’s like to be a bat is analogous to the reason Mary was unable to understand what it was like to see in colors prior to her release from her black and white room, but where Mary fails to understand what it’s like to see in colors because of her unusual environment, we fail to understand echolocation because we lack of the sensory capacity for echolocation.

There are numerous examples of these kinds of limitations in terms of our abilities to understand what it’s like to do something or what it’s like to be someone else. Most of us don’t fully understand what it’s like to have wings and use them to fly, and if you have never used a  parachute, you don’t really know what it’s like to go parachuting.

Although simulations of experiences do not currently count as explanations, it is possible that the progress in virtual reality technologies will prompt us to change our conception of what can count as explanation.

Laurie Paul has argued that our lack understanding of what it will be like for us to do something we have not already done presents a serious limitation to our ability to make an informed decision about whether or not to do it in the future. One of her best known examples is that of what it’s like to be a parent, which she argues that we cannot really know prior to becoming parents, which prevents us from making an informed decision about whether we want to have children. We can, of course, do our best to imagine what such potential futures will be like, but our imaginary capacities are highly limited and will never give us full or even close to full insight into what the possible future would be like.

So, what are the prospects for solving the hard problems of consciousness? In our view, solving the hard problems requires both significant scientific progress and a paradigm shift regarding what can count as an acceptable explanation.

It is plausible that we can account for the makeup of consciousness in terms of the science of the future. If, for example, consciousness is composed of certain fundamental particles or fundamental forces we have not yet discovered (e.g. a “menton”), then that would explain why we cannot equate conscious states and their realizers (Brogaard, 2018). The answer may simply be that consciousness and its realizer are not composed of the same basic constituents. In that case, the relationship between conscious states and their realizers would be analogous to that between the magic mushrooms (psilocybin) you are about to illegally consume and the informational changes that result from the information processing in the brain, ultimately resulting in hallucinations and synesthetic experiences (Brogaard & Gatzia, 2016). The mushrooms are made of molecules, which in turn are composed of atoms, and so on. The informational change is an abstract semantic entity. Both the mushrooms and informational change can be accounted for scientifically, for example by using the scientific methods of chemistry and computer science. But they are made up of different constituents.

As for the problem of explaining the phenomenal aspect of consciousness, we can achieve some level of understanding of the subjective and qualitative aspects of the conscious experiences we have had ourselves. When Mary is released from her prison, she will gain insight into what it’s like to have color experience. If you jump out of an airplane, you will gain insight into what it’s like to do so. And if you become a parent, you will have some insight into what parenting is like.

But how can we come to understand what it’s like to have experiences we haven’t had ourselves? One way we might be able to approximate this type of understanding is through realistic simulations of the experiences. As virtual reality becomes increasingly sophisticated, we may become much better at simulating exotic experiences that we currently cannot grasp, such as echolocation. As technology advances, it may even be possible for us to use simulation to gain insight into exotic (low-level) properties such as the many shades of red, green, or blue experienced by creatures that have more than the three cone types that are available to most humans. Although simulations of experiences do not currently count as explanations, it is possible that the progress in virtual reality technologies will prompt us to change our conception of what can count as explanation. If simulations can serve as explanations in terms of helping us gain insight into “alien” experiences, then perhaps the solution to this aspect of the hard problem is right around the corner.

---

References

Brogaard, B. (2018). “In Search of Mentons: Panpsychism, Physicalism and the Missing Link”, in Panpsychism, Godehard Brüntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla (eds), Oxford University Press, 2018.

Brogaard, B. Marlow, K. (2015). The Superhuman Mind, New York: Penguin.

Brogaard, B., Gatzia, D. E. (2016) “Psilocybin, Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, Mescaline, and Drug-Induced Synesthesia” (Chapter 83). In Victor R. Preedy (Ed.) Neuropathology of Drug Addictions and Substance Misuse, Volume 2: Stimulants, Club and Dissociative Drugs, Hallucinogens, Steroids, Inhalants and International Aspects (pp. 890-905)

Chalmers, D. J. (1995) Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3): 200-19.

Chalmers, D. J. (1996) The Conscious Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chen, P-J., Awata, H., Matsushita, A., Yang, E-C., and Arikawa, K. (2016) “Extreme Spectral Richness in the Eye of the Common Bluebottle Butterfly,” Graphium sarpedon. Front. Ecol. Evol., 4:18. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2016.00018

Jackson, F. (1982) “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 32(127): 127-136.

Nagel, T. (1974) “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83 (4): 435-450.

Paul, LA (2014) Transformative Experience, Oxford University Press.

ESSAY

by Amaud Jamaul Johnson

Amaud Jamaul Johnson explores the loneliness and fear that arise in the wake of inexplicable tragedy where personal losses highlight histories of suffering and the deep uncertainties of our time.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
—James Baldwin¹

Our neighbors, Robin and Beth, were murdered. They lived across the street and a few doors down from us. We had been under “Safer at Home” orders in Wisconsin for just two weeks, still cycling through stages of grief over canceled plane tickets, hotel reservations, and sporting events, trying to figure out how to homeschool our kids while also working online. I was obsessed with cable news and staring at my checking account. I think I wanted to believe the pandemic was a hoax, or I was waiting for an “all clear,” the opposite of a tornado siren. I kept telling myself: You’re from Compton. What can this world throw at you that wasn’t already waiting at your doorstep to terrify you as a child? Of course, this was an eternity ago, before two weeks became two months, when researchers were just beginning to question the summer, and there was complete silence about the fall. I was moving through the world in a fog. Every chart predicting the spread of the virus was a kick in the stomach. This was the end of March, early spring, which for the upper Midwest can mean the dead of winter. A jogger found Robin’s and Beth’s bodies in a ditch in the UW Arboretum less than five minutes from their home.

Robin was barefoot. He was still in his underwear. Beth was wearing socks and she was in her nightclothes. They were taken from their home in the middle of the night, marched through the cold early spring air, and shot in the back of their heads. It’s all unspeakable. This ranks pretty high on the list of our worst fears. Someone might say they were shot like dogs, but I can’t imagine an animal being put down like that. Something won’t allow me to picture their final moments. They were regular fixtures on our block, not that they did anything to draw attention to themselves. They had three children. Robin was a youth soccer coach. He was quiet, a little awkward socially, but friendly. Beth was outgoing. She was a runner. She often got out early and was done with her jog before the school day began. Beth was a physician and worked in family medicine. She was energetic and had an infectious smile. Who could have imagined this? I know the truth of living is dying, but the nature of our deaths is kept from us. What we are left with is faith and our fears.

I felt a tightness in my chest. I didn’t want to mention this to my wife, but then she started complaining about a similar feeling. Everyone we talked to in the neighborhood had the same sensation, like it was becoming increasingly difficult to breathe. Shock isn’t the right word to describe our reaction to the murders. I still don’t believe it. This feels like a prank. All of it. It’s as if we’ve slipped into an alternate universe. The hardest part of our quarantine is the waiting, the silence. Thoreau said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I felt desperate, and this quiet consumed me. I know the best advice is to assume you are ill, that you should see yourself as an asymptomatic carrier. But I wonder if the virus is a symptom, that we’ve actually been ill for decades and are only now struggling to name the cause of this plague. Of course, politicians argue over what’s most profitable: prevention or the cure. We were contemplating the ripple effects of the virus: who might slip into poverty, what it would mean to lose our loved ones and not be able to publicly mourn them. The run on toilet paper and bottled water, on meat and guns, tells you everything you need to know about our national character.

While this response to fear is particular, our anxieties are like small tributaries feeding into something very old and much larger than COVID-19. Maybe you are not religious, aren’t concerned about global warming; maybe you have to google the term “food insecurity,” believe terrorism is the product of people who “hate freedom.” Even within our perfectly manicured bubbles, or the echo chambers of our online communities, it’s hard to not feel vulnerable. Stress is relative and few of us escape this world without our share of concerns. Fear of the apocalypse is a fear of losing control; it’s about powerlessness. While I wouldn’t equate this anxiety with vanity, loss is personal. I’m not sure if people weep for others or if they are afraid that what happens down the street or around the corner will eventually arrive at their front door. People don’t want to be inconvenienced. If the barbershops, beauty shops, and nail salons are closed—the golf courses, our favorite brunch spots, the dive bars, our churches, temples, mosques—how do we define ourselves? Who are we without our routines? How do we shape our days? What becomes our new ritual? Our new identity? Who are we when our choices and opinions are snatched from our hands? This becomes our hour of desperation. What is an apocalypse if not the lack of control, and a limited ability to adapt to a changing world?

Rome is 2,273 years old. People have lived in Damascus for 11,000 years. If history has taught us anything it’s that the world doesn’t end, but our bubbles become unstable and empires fall. Our lives can change in an instant. Perhaps living is trying to cheat death? Perhaps the way we imagine success is tied up in how we imagine our legacies. Our pursuit of property or awards, the impulse to chisel one’s name on the entrance of a building, our attempts to reach back from the grave. We dream of fame or amassing so much wealth that our descendants will become future Anderson Coopers and Julia Louis-Dreyfuses, heirs who want to be defined by their career, not their family name.

One of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, “Time Enough at Last,” stars Burgess Meredith. Meredith plays Henry Bemis, a bookish and severely farsighted bank teller stuck in a bad marriage. Early in the episode, his wife asks him to read from a collection of modern poetry. This initially appears to be a romantic gesture. He opens the book and discovers she’s blacked out all the words, highlighting her contempt. Reading is more than a guilty pleasure for Bemis. He’s an outlier in an anti-intellectual world, where he’s subjected to constant ridicule. He’s stealing a few moments on his lunch break to read in the only quiet place he can find, the bank vault, and almost as soon as he settles there’s a great explosion. When he emerges, the world he knew is gone; he’s become the lone survivor of an atomic war. Bemis was trapped among the living. Books provided more than an escape from his responsibilities; the aggression and cruelty surrounding him made Bemis appear almost childlike or alien.

Like many Twilight Zone episodes, the genius of “Time Enough at Last” is simple: Be careful what you wish for. Dreams blur into nightmares. On the verge of suicide, Bemis finds the ruins of the public library, and he’s overwhelmed with joy. Finally, he has the time to read undisturbed. He’s organized stacks of books, planning out his months and years. In the final scene, Bemis is distracted, stumbles, and breaks his glasses. His world has become a blur. He literally can’t see past the end of his nose. The scene fades with him repeating: “It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair at all.” The episode closes with Rod Serling’s voice, echoing John Steinbeck and Robert Burns: “The best-laid plans of mice and men…”

I’m not afraid of solitude, but like Bemis, I think Hell is loneliness. And the loneliness I’m referring to here is when we believe we are alone in our suffering, that our pain is unique, and therefore, unjust. Because I’m an introvert, in the earliest stages of the pandemic I had so much energy. I exercised. I slept well. My wife joked that I was like Kirsten Dunst’s character in the 2011 film Melancholia, a person who feels the most at peace when the sky is falling. I was anxious, but I believed I was uniquely equipped to handle self-quarantine. I had my books and pounds of coffee. Of course, this was a form of hubris. It’s easy to turn your back on a crowd when there is a crowd, but it’s difficult to excuse yourself from an empty room.I wonder if the virus is a symptom, that we’ve actually been ill for decades and are only now struggling to name the cause of this plague.

Why do we think we can escape the struggles of our ancestors?

Why are our only functional metaphors during this crisis, the only way we communicate value and meaning, the language of business or war? The President called the virus, among other names, our “invisible enemy.” Other officials said this was our 9/11 moment, our Pearl Harbor, our Vietnam. Only a small percentage of our citizens have military experience, which doesn’t include three of our last four presidents. As a child and grandchild of veterans, I’m not diminishing the sacrifices members of our armed forces have made. But what does this rhetoric suggest about our national imagination, about our limited understanding of courage, about other forms of bravery? Economists and politicians began to calculate the number of possible deaths and the ages of those most vulnerable compared to dips in the stock market, literally placing value on a pound of flesh. I get that some people lack empathy. The concept of “social responsibility” is a political football that’s been punted back and forth across generations. From its founding, this nation built its economy from the bones of the dead. From the transatlantic slave trade to the construction of the transcontinental railroad, acceptable losses were always a part of the equation. In its most vulgar form, capitalism doesn’t blush at the sight of blood.

Naturally, we want to believe that as people we progress, that each generation learns from the past. So often we’re shaken into realizing that we experience time as a pendulum rather than a ladder to climb. Why do we think we can escape the struggles of our ancestors? What inoculates us from the emotional and psychological pitfalls they faced? There isn’t anything obscure about the history of plagues. The influenza pandemic of 1918 and the Red Summer of 1919 are recent and relevant. Real acts of power are language-based; they are housed in metaphors, as politicians attempt to rename and redirect the narratives of our individual lives. While these battles between political parties, debates on preserving our individualism and recognizing the value of collective struggle, exhaust me, it’s these waves of cruelty, these performances of ignorance, that knock me off-balance.

Our myths and proverbs scream from the shadows: “Make plans and God laughs.” We fear we’ll be judged indiscriminately, being swept up as if none of our life decisions mattered. The old texts are our collective subconscious. We’re afraid of an Old Testament God, who looks into us or through us, who weighs the spirit and finds us wanting. If our fears are inherited, then so is our understanding of nostalgia. Maybe we’re nostalgic for other people’s nostalgia. Whenever I feel overwhelmed or hopeless, I consider my grandparents’ life in the 1940s, migrating from Texas to Los Angeles. History helps me to feel less alone in the world. And the past only makes sense if I can make it personal. I’m our family historian, so I have a wealth of stories: places and names, birthdates and obituaries. When I’m trying to make sense of the past, I think: Who in my family was born during the Great Depression? How old was my great-grandmother when the Titanic sank? My family’s stories provide me with an anchor in the past; time gets small. As much as these echoes can provide strength, sometimes we’re plagued by the same old demons. Waves of bigotry or self-delusion we thought we outlasted return in our children. Live long enough and you learn the dead won’t stay buried. As much as we’d like to draw strength from our collective past, the contradictions nostalgia attempts to sanitize return to make us ill. Just as we equate health with the language of business and courage with war, we tend to weaponize definitions of freedom. As Hannah Arendt questions the distinctions between the freedom to act and liberty from persecution, we are often at odds with the responsibilities of individuals within a community.

What one might call an apocalypse is most likely our failure of vision, the edge of imagination. Struggling to see a way forward, we lament our childhoods while pitying our children for being born too late. Maybe there’s a narcissism barring us from picturing a world beyond us. Hasn’t it been true of the last century that every generation believes it’s living in “the last days?” An apocalypse is a product of history, not the end of history. How might the descendants of slaves or the survivors of the Holocaust think of the apocalypse? In the first few paragraphs of “Notes of a Native Son,” James Baldwin describes the experience of burying his father on the day of a race riot in Harlem: “here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along.” Personal loss frames broader political struggle. This sentence is a preamble to the prophetic sentiments expressed in his best-known work, The Fire Next Time.

Through luck, love, or misfortune, our lives take shape. What we can’t shake is the fear of judgment. Whether you think the planet is fighting back or God is balancing accounts, faith, like forms of justice, relies on accountability. If this isn’t true, then maybe we will be survived by our self-righteousness and our guilt.

The two boys accused of Beth and Robin’s murders are just a year older than my oldest son, and were students at his high school. They are teenagers, grown-children. Their possible motives are still a subject of speculation, which is the source of another conversation and is at best cliché. Whatever drives a person to commit such a violent act is tragic for everyone involved. The words we often gravitate toward—senseless, unspeakable—highlight our inability to comprehend certain behaviors.

The pandemic caught everyone off guard. We burrowed deeper into our silos. We stare out our windows. On my street the silence is so loud; the stillness is full of agitation. This stillness is a form of chaos. We’ve been playing out different scenarios. Will we get sick? What about our parents? How long will our children stay out of school? What will happen to small businesses? Will we end up unemployed? How long before we run out of money? What will people do during desperate times? Robin and Beth’s fate was a fear we were afraid to voice. And we couldn’t mourn them, not publicly. It’s too soon to understand what’s happening, or to measure the toll of this pandemic. I’m afraid of optimism. It’s easier to anticipate violent storms and flooding. What frightens me now is how each week a new wave blindsides us: police brutality, protests, rioting. When all is said and done, when COVID-19 becomes something academic, when our culture willfully abandons memory of the plague, and this story is reduced to the property of archives, how will our neighbors be remembered? The magnitude of this moment consumes the individual. Like so many swept up in this sadness, they had plans. We had plans. It’s not fair. And I’m having the hardest time figuring out how to let go.FootnotesCredits

• WriterAmaud Jamaul JohnsonAmaud Jamaul Johnson is the author of Darktown Follies and Red Summer. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, his honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and the Dorset Prize. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, and Best American Poetry. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His latest book, Imperial Liquor, was published by the Pitt Poetry Series.

Posted on June 4, 2020 by Ellen Brown (ellenbrown.com)

More than 100 companies are competing to be first in the race to get a COVID-19 vaccine to market. It’s a race against time, not because the death rate is climbing but because it is falling – to the point where there will soon be too few subjects to prove the effectiveness of the drug.

Pascal Soriot is chief executive of AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish pharmaceutical company that is challenging biotech company Moderna, the U.S. frontrunner in the race. Soriot said on May 24^th, “The vaccine has to work and that’s one question, and the other question is, even if it works, we have to be able to demonstrate it. We have to run as fast as possible before the disease disappears so we can demonstrate that the vaccine is effective.”

COVID-19, like other coronaviruses, is expected to mutate at least every season, raising serious questions about claims that any vaccine will work. A successful vaccine has never been developed for any of the many strains of coronaviruses, due to the nature of the virus itself; and vaccinated people can have a higher chance of serious illness and death when later exposed to another strain of the virus, a phenomenon known as “virus interference.” An earlier SARS vaccine never made it to market because the laboratory animals it was tested on contracted more serious symptoms on re-infection, and most of them died.

Researchers working with the AstraZeneca vaccine claimed success in preliminary studies because its lab monkeys all survived and formed antibodies to the virus, but data reported later showed that the animals all became infected when challenged, raising serious questions about the vaccine’s effectiveness.

Moderna has gotten fast-track approval from the FDA and managed to skip animal trials altogether before rushing to human trials. Its candidate is a “messenger RNA” vaccine, a computer-generated replica of an RNA component that carries genetic information controlling the synthesis of proteins. No mRNA vaccine has ever been approved for marketing or proven in a large-scale clinical trial. As explained in Science Magazine, RNA that invades from outside the cell is the hallmark of a virus, and our immune systems have evolved ways to recognize and destroy it. To avoid that, Moderna’s mRNA vaccine sneaks into cells encapsulated in nanoparticles, which aren’t easily degraded and can cause toxic buildup in the liver.

These concerns, however, have not deterred the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which is proceeding at “Warp Speed” to get the new technologies tested on the American population before the virus disappears through mutation and natural herd immunity. HHS has already agreed to provide up to $1.2 billion to AstraZeneca and $483 million to Moderna to develop their experimental candidates. “As American taxpayers, we are justified in asking why,” writes William Haseltine in Forbes. Both companies have attracted billions from private investors and don’t need taxpayer money, and the government’s speculative bets are being made on unproven technologies in the early stages of testing.

The argument at one time was that the magnitude of the crisis justified the risk, but the virus is now disappearing of its own accord. The computer-modeled projection of 2.2 million U.S. deaths issued by Imperial College London (a business partner of AstraZeneca), triggering shutdowns across the United States, was subsequently found to be “wildly” overblown. The model was described in the UK Telegraph on May 16^th as “the most devastating software mistake of all time.” The researchers wrote that “we would fire anyone for developing code like this” and that the question was “why our Government did not get a second opinion before swallowing Imperial’s prescription.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has also revised its projections. Experts disagree on what the new data means, but according to an expert at the Montreal Economic Institute, “The most likely CDC scenario now estimates that the coronavirus mortality rate for infected people is between 0.2% and 0.3%. This is a far cry from the 3.4% figure that had been put forward by the WHO at the start of the pandemic.”

In other news from the CDC, on May 23^rd the agency reported that the antibody tests used to determine whether people have developed an immunity to the virus are too unreliable to be used.

But none of this seems to be dimming the hype and the deluge of investment money being thrown at the latest experimental vaccines. And perhaps that is the point of the exercise – to extract as much money as possible from gullible investors, including the US government, before the public discovers that the fundamentals of these stocks do not support the media hype.

Moderna: A Multibillion-Dollar “Unicorn” That Has Never Brought a Product to Market

Moderna in particular has been suspected of pumping its stock price with unreliable preliminary test data. On May 18^th, Moderna’s stock jumped by as much as 30%, after it issued a press release announcing positive results from a small preliminary trial of its coronavirus vaccine. After the market closed, the company announced a stock offering aimed at raising $1 billion; and on May 18^th and 19^th, Moderna executives dumped nearly $30 million worth of stock for a profit of $25 million.

On May 19^th, however, the stock rocketed back down, after STAT News questioned the company’s test results. An antibody response was reported for only eight of the 45 patients, not enough for statistical analysis. Was the response significant enough to create immunity? And what about the other 37 patients?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called the results a “catastrophe” for the company. He wrote on May 20^th:

Three of the 15 human guinea pigs in the high dose cohort (250 mcg) suffered a “serious adverse event” within 43 days of receiving Moderna’s jab. Moderna … acknowledged that three volunteers developed Grade 3 systemic events, defined by the FDA as “Preventing daily activity and requiring medical intervention.”

Moderna allowed only exceptionally healthy volunteers to participate in the study. A vaccine with those reaction rates could cause grave injuries in 1.5 billion humans if administered to “every person on earth”.

A volunteer named Ian Haydon buoyed the markets when he appeared on CNBC to say he felt fine after getting the vaccine. But he later revealed that after the second jab, he got chills and a fever of over 103°, lost consciousness, and “felt more sick than he ever has before.”

Those were just the short-term adverse effects. Long-term systemic effects including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, autoimmune disease, and infertility can take decades to develop. But the stage is already being set for mandatory vaccinations that will be “deployed” by the U.S. military as soon as the end of the year. The HHS in conjunction with the Department of Defense has awarded a $138 million contract for 600 million syringes prefilled with coronavirus vaccine, individually marked with trackable RFID chips. That’s enough for two doses for nearly the entire U.S. population. One hundred million are to be supplied by year’s end.

Fortunately for vaccine manufacturers and investors, they do not have to worry about the drugs’ side effects, since the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and the 2005 PREP Act protect them from liability for vaccine injuries. Damages are imposed instead on the US government and US taxpayers.

What Moderna could have to worry about, however, is criminal action by the Securities Exchange Commission. By May 22^nd, Moderna’s stock was down by 26% from its earlier high, making its 30% rise on a misleading press release look like a “pump and dump” scheme. On CNBC on May 19^th, former SEC lawyer Jacob Frankel said its stock offering on the heels of hyped news was the type of action that would draw scrutiny by the SEC, and that it could have a criminal component.

Why All the Hype? Moderna’s mRNA Vaccine

It wasn’t the first time Moderna’s stock had skyrocketed on a well-timed press release. On February 24^th, the World Health Organization said to prepare for a global pandemic, collapsing stock markets around the world. Most stocks collapsed, but Moderna’s shot up by nearly 30%, after it reported on February 25^th that testing on humans would begin in March. Mega-investors made tens of millions of dollars in a single day, including BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, which made $68 million just on February 25^th. BlackRock was called “the fourth branch of government” after it was tasked in March with dispensing up to $4.5 trillion in Federal Reserve credit through “special purpose vehicles” established by the Treasury and the Fed.

Moderna has other friends in high places, including the Pentagon. Several years ago, Moderna received millions of dollars from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as well as from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Moderna’s stock has more than tripled this year, taking it to a market cap of over $22 billion. STAT News called it “an astonishing feat for a company that currently sells zero products.” Many of the companies actively developing COVID-19 vaccines have longer and more impressive track records. Why all the investor interest in this “unicorn” startup that went public only in 2018 and has no record of market success?

The major advantage of mRNA vaccines is the speed with which they can be deployed. Created in a lab rather than from a real virus, they can be mass-produced cost-effectively on a large scale and do not require uninterrupted cold storage. But this speed comes at the risk of major side effects. In a 2017 TED talk called “Rewriting the Genetic Code,” Moderna’s current chief medical officer Dr. Tal Zaks said, “We’re actually hacking the software of life ….”

As explained by a medical doctor writing in The UK Independent on May 20^th:

Moderna’s messenger RNA vaccine … uses a sequence of genetic RNA material produced in a lab that, when injected into your body, must invade your cells and hijack your cells’ protein-making machinery called ribosomes to produce the viral components that subsequently train your immune system to fight the virus. …

In many ways, the vaccine almost behaves like an RNA virus itself except that it hijacks your cells to produce the parts of the virus, like the spike protein, rather than the whole virus. Some messenger RNA vaccines are even self-amplifying…. There are unique and unknown risks to messenger RNA vaccines, including the possibility that they generate strong type I interferon responses that could lead to inflammation and autoimmune conditions.

A lab-created self-amplifying virus encapsulated in nanoparticles that evade the cell’s defenses by stealth sounds a lot like the “stealth viruses” that are classified as “bioweapons,” and that could explain DARPA’s interest in the technology. In a 2010 document titled “Biotechnology: Genetically Engineered Pathogens,” the US Air Force acknowledged that it was studying “genetically engineered pathogens that could pose serious threats to society,” including “binary biological weapons, designer genes, gene therapy as a weapon, stealth viruses, host-swapping diseases, and designer diseases.” DARPA was behind the creation of both DNA and RNA vaccines, funding their early research and development by Moderna as well as by Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc.

In December 2017, over 1,200 emails released under open records requests revealed that the U.S. military is now the top funder behind the controversial “genetic extinction” technology known as “gene drives.” As investigative reporter Whitney Webb observed in a May 4^th article, “these genetic ‘kill switches’ could also be inserted into actual humans through artificial chromosomes, which – just as they have the potential to extend life – also have the potential to cut it short.” Biowarfare is forbidden under international treaty, but the army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick says its investigations are to “protect the warfighter from biological threats” and to protect civilians from threats to public health. Even assuming that is true, are the army’s technicians proficient enough to tinker with the human genetic code without hitting a kill switch or two by mistake?

The military is thinking about war, the pharmaceutical companies and investors are thinking about profits, the politicians are thinking about getting the country back to work, and even the regulators are bypassing proper safety tests in the rush to get the entire global population vaccinated before the virus disappears. It is left to us, the recipients of these novel untested GMO vaccines, to demand some serious vetting before the military shows up at our doors with their prefilled RFID-chipped syringes some time later this year.

________________________

Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.  She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.