“The Canadian model”: Any country can weaponize money laundering laws to wage war on dissent; forcing banks, crypto firms to freeze accounts to combat citizens’ thought crime
Canada uses existing money laundering laws to target citizens’ thought-crime, maybe-crime, pre-crime, and petty-crime. Fear not, likeminded leaders; you too have these laws. The FATF AML model is a turnkey, one-size-fits-all version, easily deployed against any country’s citizens.
LIMS*Nucleus is a software program used to manage multi-well plates in an academic or industrial environment. Functionality includes:
Visit the original Laboratory Automation Solutions website.
LIMS*Nucleus has a restricted set of features - multi-well plate management, hit identification, rearraying - and serves as the core of a larger system. Source code is available for modification. The architecture is simple client/server with no middleware or ORM. The client utilizes Bootstrap/Datatables and the database is PostgreSQL The software is packaged as a Guix pack for easy installation/configuration. R/Shiny dashboards can be used to extend functionality.
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Much pontification on the personality/motives of leftists:
Defining a “leftist”: If you think that racism, sexism, gay rights, animal rights, indigenous people’s rights, and “social justice” in general are among the most important issues that the world currently faces, then you are a leftist as I use that term…When we speak of leftists in this article we have in mind mainly socialists, collectivists, “politically correct ” types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like…The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call feelings of inferiority and oversocialization…The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone’s problems for them, satisfy everyone’s needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser…the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior)….rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual’s ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is “inferior” it is not his fault, but society’s, because he has not been brought up properly….If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss….a very important and influential segment of the modern left is oversocialized and that their oversocialization is of great importance in determining the direction of modern leftism. Leftists of the oversocialized type tend to be intellectuals or members of the upper middle class. Notice that university intellectuals3 constitute the most highly socialized segment of our society and also the most left-wing segment.
What is needed is a new revolutionary movement, dedicated to the elimination of technological society, that will take measures to exclude all leftists, as well as the assorted neurotics, lazies, incompetents, charlatans, and persons deficient in self-control who are drawn to resistance movements in America today.
The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social groups. The disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted by the fact that modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to move to new locations, separating themselves from their communities. Beyond that, a technological society HAS TO weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern society an individual’s loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to a small-scale community, because if the internal loyalties of small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system.
Suppose that a public official or a corporation executive appoints his cousin, his friend or his coreligionist to a position rather than appointing the person best qualified for the job. He has permitted personal loyalty to supersede his loyalty to the system, and that is “nepotism” or “discrimination,” both of which are terrible sins in modern society. Would-be industrial societies that have done a poor job of subordinating personal or local loyalties to loyalty to the system are usually very inefficient. (Look at Latin America.) Thus an advanced industrial society can tolerate only those small-scale communities that are emasculated, tamed and made into tools of the system
Much discussion of the Power Process:
1 Goal
2 Effort
3 Achieve or fail
4 Autonomy
…in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.
…government regulations are essential and inevitable parts of our extremely complex society. A large portion of small business today operates on the franchise system. It was reported in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago that many of the franchise-granting companies require applicants for franchises to take a personality test that is designed to EXCLUDE those who have creativity and initiative, because such persons are not sufficiently docile to go along obediently with the franchise system. This excludes from small business many of the people who most need autonomy.
The same is true of scientists generally. With possible rare exceptions, their motive is neither curiosity nor a desire to benefit humanity but the need to go through the power process: to have a goal (a scientific problem to solve), to make an effort (research) and to attain the goal (solution of the problem). Science is a surrogate activity because scientists work mainly for the fulfillment they get out of the work itself…Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research.
Most of the Indian nations of New England were monarchies, and many of the cities of the Italian Renaissance were controlled by dictators. But in reading about these societies one gets the impression that they allowed far more personal freedom than out society does. In part this was because they lacked efficient mechanisms for enforcing the ruler’s will: There were no modern, well-organized police forces, no rapid long-distance communications, no surveillance cameras, no dossiers of information about the lives of average citizens. Hence it was relatively easy to evade control.
The mass media are mostly under the control of large organizations that are integrated into the system… In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.
permanent changes in favor of freedom could be brought about only by persons prepared to accept radical, dangerous and unpredictable alteration of the entire system. In other words by revolutionaries, not reformers…it seems highly improbable that any way of changing society could be found that would reconcile freedom with modern technology.
…regulations will tend increasingly to be replaced by psychological tools that make us want to do what the system requires of us. (Propaganda,14 educational techniques, “mental health” programs, etc.)
The system HAS TO force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior. For example, the system needs scientists, mathematicians and engineers… It can’t function without them. So heavy pressure is put on children to excel in these fields. It isn’t natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study…
No social arrangements, whether laws, institutions, customs or ethical codes, can provide permanent protection against technology. History shows that all social arrangements are transitory; they all change or break down eventually. But technological advances are permanent within the context of a given civilization.
Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.
Then there are the methods of propaganda, for which the mass communications media provide effective vehicles. Efficient techniques have been developed for winning elections, selling products, influencing public opinion. The entertainment industry serves as an important psychological tool of the system, possibly even when it is dishing out large amounts of sex and violence. Entertainment provides modern man with an essential means of escape. While absorbed in television, videos, etc., he can forget stress, anxiety, frustration, dissatisfaction.
Our society tends to regard as a “sickness” any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system, and this is plausible, because when an individual doesn’t fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a “cure” for a “sickness” and therefore as good.
…technicians and scientists carry on their work largely as a surrogate activity; that is, they satisfy their need for power by solving technical problems. They will continue to do this with unabated enthusiasm, and among the most interesting and challenging problems for them to solve will be those of understanding the human body and mind and intervening in their development. For the “good of humanity,” of course.
As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite.
[The elites] will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby.
On those who are employed, ever-increasing demands will be placed: They will need more and more training, more and more ability, and will have to be ever more reliable, conforming and docile, because they will be more and more like cells of a giant organism. Their tasks will be increasingly specialized so that their work will be, in a sense, out of touch with the real world, being concentrated on one tiny slice of reality. The system will have to use any means that it can, whether psychological or biological, to engineer people to be docile, to have the abilities that the system requires…
…it is likely that neither the human race nor any other important organisms will exist as we know them today, because once you start modifying organisms through genetic engineering there is no reason to stop at any particular point, so that the modifications will probably continue until man and other organisms have been utterly transformed.
History is made by active, determined minorities, not by the majority, which seldom has a clear and consistent idea of what it really wants. Until the time comes for the final push toward revolution,31 the task of revolutionaries will be less to win the shallow support of the majority than to build a small core of deeply committed people.
More descriptions of leftists: The leftist is oriented toward large-scale collectivism. He emphasizes the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. He has a negative attitude toward individualism. He often takes a moralistic tone. He tends to be for gun control, for sex education and other psychologically “enlightened” educational methods, for social planning, for affirmative action, for multiculturalism. He tends to identify with victims. He tends to be against competition and against violence, but he often finds excuses for those leftists who do commit violence. He is fond of using the common catch-phrases of the left, like “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “capitalism,” “imperialism,” “neocolonialism,” “genocide,” “social change,” “social justice,” “social responsibility.” Maybe the best diagnostic trait of the leftist is his tendency to sympathize with the following movements: feminism, gay rights, ethnic rights, disability rights, animal rights political correctness…You can’t have a united world without rapid long-distance transportation and communication, you can’t make all people love one another without sophisticated psychological techniques, you can’t have a “planned society” without the necessary technological base.
Discussion of the “Noble Savage”
Kazcinsky refers to a few works () to debunk the idea that primitive societies were absent violence, rape, animal cruelty, environmental damage etc. Politically correct oversocialized anthropologists minimize these attributes of natives out of fear of being canceled.
Description of THE SYSTEM
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On as stable family life:
As someone who never really had one, maybe I am the least qualified person to defend the importance of family. But as someone with more education than I ever expected to receive, maybe I’m more qualified to say we give education more importance than we should.
[…]
I’ve come to understand that a warm and loving family is worth infinitely more than the money or accomplishments I hoped might compensate for them.
[…]
Unstable environments and unreliable caregivers aren’t bad for children because they reduce their future odds of getting into college or making a living; they are bad because the children enduring them experience pain — pain that etches itself into their brains and bodies and propels them to do things in the pursuit of relief that often inflict even more harm.
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In one of my classes at Yale, I learned that eighteen out of the twenty students were raised by both of their birth parents. That stunned me, because none of the kids I knew growing up was raised by both of their parents.
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Even though public assistance in Denmark is widely available and university education is free, disparities in test scores and educational mobility between children raised in wealthy versus low-income families are virtually identical to the US.
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Even when you present opportunities to deprived kids, many of them will decline them on purpose because, after years of maltreatment, they often have little desire to improve their lives.
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An important clue comes from a widely cited 2012 paper in the scientific journal Developmental Psychology. A team of psychologists found that compared to children raised in wealthier families, children raised in lower-income families are no more likely to engage in risky behaviors or commit crimes as adults. However, compared with children raised in stable environments, children raised in unstable environments are significantly more likely to engage in harmful or destructive behaviors later in life. Holding family income constant, the researchers found that the association between childhood instability and harmful behaviors in adulthood remained significant.
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I scored well into the top 1 percent of the most unstable childhoods in the US.
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Given the choice, I would swap my position in the top 1 percent of educational attainment to have never been in the top 1 percent of childhood instability.
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I’ve come to believe that upward social mobility shouldn’t be our priority as a society. Rather, upward mobility should be the side effect of far more important things: family, stability, and emotional security for children. Even if upward mobility were the primary goal, a safe and secure family would help achieve it more than anything else.
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…a comprehensive 1977 study by McKinlay and McKinlay, formerly required reading in almost all American medical schools, found that all medical interventions, including vaccines, surgeries, and antibiotics, contributed only about 1 percent of the decline and at most 3.5 percent.17 Both CDC and the McKinlays attributed the disappearance of infectious disease mortalities not to doctors and health officials, but to improved nutrition and sanitation—the latter credited to strict regulation of food preparation, electric refrigerators, sewage treatment, and chlorinated water. The McKinlays joined Harvard’s iconic infectious disease pioneer, Edward Kass, in warning that a self-serving medical cartel would one day try to claim credit for these public health improvements as a pretense for imposing unwarranted medical interventions (e.g., vaccines) on the American public.
…Poppers can severely damage the immune system…they are very powerful oxidizing agents…virtually all of them [gay men with AIDS] had been heavy users of drugs. They said without a single exception. They had all been poppers users. A study published by Toby Eisenstein showed that nitrites found in poppers are radically immunosuppressive in rodents.
McKinlay and McKinlay [see above]…found that all medical interventions including vaccines, surgeries, and antibiotics accounted for less than about 1 percent—and no more than 3.5 percent—of the dramatic mortality declines. The McKinlays presciently warned that profiteers among the medical establishment would seek to claim credit for the mortality declines for vaccines in order to justify government mandates for those pharmaceutical products
I met with Dr. Fauci, Francis Collins… to complain that HHS was, by then, mandating 69 doses of sixteen vaccines1 for America’s children, none of which had ever been tested for safety against placebos prior to licensing. Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins denied that this was true and insisted that those vaccines were safety tested. They were unable, however, after several weeks, to provide us a citation for a single clinical trial using an inert placebo against a vaccine. In October 2017, Del Bigtree and Aaron Siri— who both attended these meetings—joined me in suing HHS under the Freedom of Information Act to produce the long-promised safety studies.2 Ten months after the meeting with Fauci and Collins, on the courthouse steps, HHS admitted that we were, in fact, correct: none of the mandated childhood vaccines had been tested for safety in pre-licensing inert placebo tests.3 The best of Bill Gates’s African vaccines are all on this list. But Bill Gates also uses a large retinue of much more dangerous and demonstrably ineffective vaccines in Africa—ones that Western countries have actually rejected because of dire safety signals.
“Governments do like epidemics, just the same way as they like war, really. It’s a chance to impose their will on us and get us all scared so that we huddle together and do what we’re told.” —Dr. Damien Downing, President, British Society of Ecological Medicine (Al Jazeera, 2009)
“Fear is a market. To instill fear in people also has advantages. Not only in terms of drug use. Anxiety-driven people are easier to rule.” —Gerd Gogerenzer, Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Educational Research (Torsten Engelbrecht, Virus Mania, 2021)
By 1976, fewer than fifty Americans per hundred thousand died of infectious diseases, and CDC and NIAID were under extreme pressure to justify their budgets. Hyping pandemics became an institutional strategy in both agencies. Pharmaceutical companies and international health agencies, banking and military contractors soon found purchase in the ecosystem, and random pandemics discovered their own self-perpetuating rationale. Dr. Fauci’s critics chide him for routinely exaggerating—and even concocting—global disease outbreaks to hype pandemic panic, elevate the biosecurity agenda, boost agency funding, promote profitable vaccines for his pharma partners, and magnify his own power.
The Pentagon and CIA spooks continued to cultivate bioweapon seed stock. Between 1983 and 1988, Searle Pharmaceuticals CEO Donald Rumsfeld, acting as Ronald Reagan’s envoy in Iraq, arranged for the top-secret shipment of tons of chemical and biological armaments, including anthrax and bubonic plague, to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, hoping to reverse his looming defeat by Iran’s million-man army. Ayatollah Khomeini’s victorious Iranian forces were then routing Saddam in their war over the Persian Gulf. (Rumsfeld - future secretary of defense under Ford and Bush!)
Big pharmaceutical companies are the biggest advertisers on news and television outlets. Their $9.6 billion annual advertising budget buys more than commercials—it buys obeisance. (In 2014, network president Roger Ailes told me he would fire any of his news show hosts who allowed me to talk about vaccine safety on air. “Our news division,” he explained, “gets up to 70 percent of ad revenues from pharma in non-election years.”) I know the role of the news media is not news to you, so I’ll cite just one example: Vaccine mandates are ostensibly based upon the idea that vaccines will prevent transmission of COVID-19. If they don’t prevent transmission, if both the vaccinated and unvaccinated can spread the virus, then there is no relevant difference between the two groups—other than that one group is not complying with government commands.
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Scientific research into the mechanisms underlying side effects of vaccines should investigate, among other things, (1) the effects that vaccine ingredients (like aluminum adjuvants) have on the body; (2) the biochemical interactions between vaccine components; (3) the biochemical interactions among multiple vaccines administered at the same time; (4) genetic characteristics that may increase vulnerability to vaccine injury; and (5) permanent or transient health conditions that may increase susceptibility to injury. In addition, investigation of potentially susceptible subpopulations, such as infants and pregnant women, should be made a priority. The absence of basic research in this field is particularly alarming because current medical science cannot even identify the source of most of the serious diseases and syndromes reported post-vaccination, much less cure them. Such is the case for ADEM,20 optic neuritis,21 Guillain-Barré syndrome,22 transverse myelitis,23 lupus,24 vasculits,25 juvenile diabetes (type 1),26 autism, ADHD, and many other conditions. The shortage of applicable scientific research on adverse events documented in its own report should have prompted the IOM committee to sound a long and loud alarm. The report’s finding that biomedical aspects of post-vaccination conditions are rarely investigated contrasts starkly with the constant assurances from medical authorities that vaccine safety is thoroughly investigated. Yet, instead of sounding the warranted alarm, the committee chose to give the “all-clear”.
No government or formal medical body challenges these offhand dismissals of possible associations between the test vaccine and subsequent adverse events.
Once the vaccine is on the market and widely used, the absence of any documented causal link on the package insert allows healthcare professionals – doctors, nurses, and officials – to categorically dismiss any link between vaccines and most reported serious side effects.
US pediatricians who routinely administer vaccines have no financial motivation to report potential vaccine adverse events. Detailed and accurate reporting can take a significant amount of work, and medical personnel are not compensated for that time. Furthermore, if doctors reported adverse events of vaccines they administered, that could be construed by others as an implicit admission, however informal, of responsibility for any resulting harm. Obviously, neither doctors in private practice nor those working in clinic or hospital settings would have any interest in paving the way for patients or their parents to sue for damages. In addition, doctors, like the rest of us humans, may not be too keen to admit, even to themselves, that medical procedures they recommended and performed might have caused serious harm to their patients.
Their strategy to shore up trust in the vaccine program, then, is to convince the public that “the science on vaccines is settled” and that laypeople should accept the “scientific consensus” of “vaccine experts”.
The truth of the matter, however, is that vaccine science isn’t even remotely objective. The medical establishment conceals from a credulous public the grim reality that vaccine science is largely funded by interested parties which produce studies that advance the funder’s agenda, not the public’s.
Most people are unaware that the institutions funding vaccine science are not objective, their motives are not pure, and the science they fund is neither impartial nor objective.
Health authorities, along with pharmaceutical companies, control most of the vaccine safety research budget. Thus, authorities and vaccine makers fund research projects which are likely to support their agenda…Since securing research funds is so fundamental to a scientist’s career, there is never a shortage of researchers willing to adjust their results to align with the funding institution’s agenda.
“Peer review sometimes picks up fraud by chance,” remarks Richard Smith, “but generally it is not a reliable method for detecting fraud because it works on trust.”
The peer-review process has many other disadvantages, as Smith aptly notes: “In addition to being poor at detecting gross defects and almost useless for detecting fraud, it is slow, expensive, profligate of academic time, highly subjective, something of a lottery, prone to bias, and easily abused.”
John Ioannidis, a renowned researcher at Stanford University who specializes in analyzing the scientific method, explains that scientists have no motivation to critically examine the work of their peers: “There’s no incentive for scientists or other stakeholders to make a very thorough and critical review of a study, to try to reproduce it, or to probe systematically and spend real effort on re-analysis.”
…researchers typically have even less incentive to perform “a very thorough and critical review” of a vaccine safety study. Publicly challenging institutional vaccination policies could severely impair their chances of receiving future research grants and would likely provoke harsh criticism from supervisors and peers.
There is no law or regulation compelling researchers to provide the original data they used to other researchers.
It is also important to remember that medical journals are an integral part of the medical-academic world. They maintain close working relationships withpharmaceutical companies, researchers and academics, and official health bodies. Because this world is united by its unreserved support for vaccines, journal editors have nothing to gain by swimming against the current, even if that means tolerating the occasional breach of scientific ethics.[eeee] Just as researchers and doctors who produce purposely biased vaccine safety research are not chastised or even reprimanded, medical journals rarely, if ever, pay any price for the publication of these studies.
In practice, however, encouraging criticism of your own published research is a double-edged sword. Too much of it could seriously, and possibly irrevocably, damage a medical journal’s reputation.
…publication in a medical journal is not a reliable indicator of study quality or veracity. In the words of Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal : “We have little evidence on the effectiveness of peer review, but we have considerable evidence on its defects. In addition to being poor at detecting gross defects and almost useless for detecting fraud, it is slow, expensive, profligate of academic time, highly subjective, something of a lottery, prone to bias, and easily abused.”
On the childhood vaccine schedule: …key elements of the entire schedule – the number, frequency, timing, order, and age at administration of vaccines – have not been systematically examined in research studies.”33 Furthermore, when a new vaccine is added to the vaccine schedule, no studies are done to examine its effect on the other vaccines on the schedule. Research to evaluate different variations of the schedule, to ensure it is still “optimal” is also never done..
On vaccinating children with mild illness: Thus, a search of the medical literature reveals that the institutional recommendation of vaccinating infants with a mild illness, whether with a specific vaccine or a combination of vaccines, is not evidence-based. With the exception of one weak study of the MMR vaccine, no studies have investigated whether vaccinating mildly ill infants increases the risk of serious side effects, exacerbates the severity of the illness, or prolongs its duration.
On cocooning (requires that members of an infant’s immediate family (including parents, grandparents, and siblings) be vaccinated shortly before the infant’s birth, assuming they will then serve as a protective shield against infection with the pertussis bacterium): This guideline, which is currently practiced in many industrialized countries, was established despite the absence of solid evidence that the vaccine provided such protection. In addition, it is one of the guidelines that the Warfel 2014 study clearly negates. As the researchers point out, “Our data […] suggest that cocooning is unlikely to be an effective strategy to reduce the burden of pertussis in infants.” In fact, the study results suggest that vaccinating family members for pertussis just might increase the risk of infants’ infection, instead of lowering it.
…The clinical trials are “cooked”; adverse event reporting systems are rudimentary by design; biomedical research into vaccine injury is virtually nonexistent; health authorities sponsor biased epidemiological studies, conducted by researchers with huge conflicts of interest; studies evaluating the true benefit of the vaccination program are never done and neither are studies comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated populations; and key vaccination guidelines are not based on sound science. Each item on this list, as well as the totality of the list, testifies to the inconceivable chasm between institutional claims of safety and the reality of vaccine science…
We scrutinized the field from various angles, and from each of those a similar view emerged: Adequate scientific evidence for the safety of vaccines is severely lacking, and health agencies and pharmaceutical companies are deliberately concealing their true harms from the public. This grim reality cannot be attributed to some local failure, a one-time random deviation from proper procedure, or a “standard” bureaucratic failure of some government entity. The individual parts seem to mesh so perfectly that it is very difficult to view them as coincidental and unrelated mishaps. Thus, one must inevitably conclude that all parties involved are engaged in deliberate and systematic efforts to hide the painful, astonishing, and earth-shattering truth regarding the “safety” of vaccines from the public.
CAUSE, EFFECT, AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE SOCIAL WORLD
MEGAN T. STEVENSON
Claim: most reforms and interventions in the criminal legal space have little to no lasting effect when evaluated by RCTs (randomized controlled trials), and the occasional success usually fails to replicate when evaluated in other settings.
…people are only exposed to research that has made it through the distorting filter of research and publication incentives.15 This filter suppresses research that isn’t statistically significant, sufficiently novel, or otherwise exciting.16 Most people are only aware of the tiny set of studies that made it through the sieve. And these studies are biased toward showing that the intervention evaluated was more successful than it actually was…
In the 1980s, sociologist Peter Rossi argued that the failure of social programs was so ubiquitous that it should be known as the Iron Law of Evaluation.
What gets published is the single instance where the spurious causal effect is found. With an infinite supply of research questions, and thousands of scholars looking for interesting research, the literature will be full of false causal claims.
The first scholar to demonstrate a causal relationship between X and Y can reap large professional benefits: prestigious publications, respect from peers,increased likelihood of tenure, etc. But, in a field that rewards novelty, attempts to replicate the original result have little upside for the researcher’s career. If a subsequent study confirms the initial result, it will generally publish in a journal of lower prestige, if at all. If a subsequent study yields opposite results, it may earn the resentment of the original scholar whose work was challenged.54 Young scholars are often advised to avoid attempting to replicate the work of others.
If change is cumulative, then small interventions can grow in influence over time.99 Such low-cost, highbenefit interventions are the holy grail of social engineers.
Under the engineer’s view, social processes are structured and manipulable. RCTs and other causal inference methods are used to map the functioning of themachine, to see what impact a particular lever has. They can be used to identify interventions that yield consistent and replicable success. The uncertainty of reform is minimized because interventions can be piloted before scaling up….When it comes to the type of limited-scope interventions evaluable viaRCT and other quasi-experimental methods, the engineer’s view appears to be mostly a myth. More than fifty years of RCT evidence shows the limits in ourability to engineer change with this type of intervention.
… it teaches us that the social world is full of what I call “stabilizers” and short on what I refer to as “cascades.” …Stabilizers are the set of socioeconomic forces that resist externally-imposed change….” Cascades are forces that magnify small changes, that turn a small intervention into a large and lasting effect…
Types of interventions considered:
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Essentially all securities “owned” by the public in custodial accounts, pension plans and investment funds are now encumbered as collateral underpinning the derivatives complex, which is so large—an order of magnitude greater than the entire global economy—that there is not enough of anything in the world to back it. The illusion of collateral backing is facilitated by a daisy chain of hypothecation and re-hypothecation in which the same underlying client collateral is re-used many times over by a series of secured creditors. And so it is these creditors, who understand this system, who have demanded even more access to client assets as collateral.
…it is now assured that in the implosion of “The Everything Bubble”, collateral will be swept up on a vast scale. The plumbing to do this is in place. Legal certainty has been established that the collateral can be taken immediately and without judicial review, by entities described in court documents as “the protected class.” Even sophisticated professional investors, who were assured that their securities are “segregated”, will not be protected.
These are the key facts:
• Ownership of securities as property has been replaced with a new legal concept of a “security entitlement”, which is a contractual claim assuring a very weak position if the account provider becomes insolvent.
• All securities are held in un-segregated pooled form. Securities used as collateral, and those restricted from such use, are held in the same pool.
• All account holders, including those who have prohibited use of their securities as collateral, must, by law, receive only a pro-rata share of residual assets.
• “Re-vindication,” i.e. the taking back of one’s own securities in the event of insolvency, is absolutely prohibited.
• Account providers may legally borrow pooled securities to collateralize proprietary trading and financing.
• “Safe Harbor” assures secured creditors priority claim to pooled securities ahead of account holders.
• The absolute priority claim of secured creditors to pooled client securities has been upheld by the courts.
Collateral transformation is simply the encumbrance of any and all types of client assets under swap contracts, which end up in the derivatives complex. This is done without the knowledge of the clients, who were led to believe that they safely owned these securities, and serves no beneficial purpose whatsoever for these clients. And here it is! Here is the automated, market-wide sweeping of collateral to CCPs and central banks in a time of market stress: In times of market stress, rapid deployment of available securities may be crucial in mitigating systemic issues. For instance, with better visibility of available securities and better access to them, firms may be better positioned to rapidly deploy securities to meet margin needs at CCPs in times of increased market volatility or to pledge to central banks in emergency situations to gain increased access to the lender of last resort. . . .The automation and standardisation of many operations related to collateral management . . . on a market-wide basis . . . may enable a market participant to manage increasingly complex and rapid collateral demands. And so as we have seen here irrefutably, the objective is to utilize all securities as collateral and hence to have the real practical means to take all securities as collateral.
Q (E.U.): Is the investor protected against the insolvency of an intermediary and, if so, how?
A (N.Y. Fed): . . . an investor is always vulnerable to a securities intermediary that does not itself have interests in a financial asset sufficient to cover all of the securities entitlements that it has created in that financial asset . . .If the secured creditor has “control” over the financial asset it will have priority over entitlement holders . . .If the securities intermediary is a clearing corporation, the claims of its creditors have priority over the claims of entitlement holders.
So, there we have it. In the collapse of the clearing subsidiaries of DTCC, it is the secured creditors who will take the assets of the entitlement holders. This is where it is going. It is designed to happen suddenly, and on a vast scale.
Ask yourself: if they don’t want your money, and they don’t really want or need your stuff, and they’re not trying to help you, what do they want? What’s the point of all of their efforts? This may be difficult to hear: It was deliberate strategy. It was about ultimate, complete power, allowing no centers of resistance. And so, it was about deprivation. It was about subjugation—and it still is, in more ways than we know.
It has been promised that there will be no taxpayer bailout this time—as if that is a good thing. Why? Simply because this will allow the banks to be closed rather than nationalized. Then all deposits and assets will be taken by the “protected class” of secured creditors. This is where it is going.
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APOE (apolipoprotein E) that is involved in cholesterol transport and processing, and it has three variants: e2, e3, and e4. Of these, e3 is the most common by far, but having one or two copies of the e4 variant seems to multiply one’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease by a factor of between two and twelve
The e2 variant of APOE, on the other hand, seems to protect its carriers against dementia
people who carried at least one copy of APOE e2 (and no e4) were about 30 percent more likely to reach extreme old age (defined as ninety-seven for men, one hundred for women) than people with the standard e3/e3 combination.
SNPs (or variants) in FOXO3 that were strongly associated with healthy aging and longevity.
Rising levels of ALT are often the first clue that something is wrong with the liver, although they could also be a symptom of something else, such as a recent viral infection or a reaction to a medication.
acceptable range for ALT is below 33 IU/L for women and below 45 IU/L for men
obese (defined as having a BMI[*2] greater than 30), while roughly another third is overweight (BMI of 25 to 30)
Metabolic Syndrome
high blood pressure (>130/85)
high triglycerides (>150 mg/dL)
low HDL cholesterol (<40 mg/dL in men or <50 mg/dL in women)
central adiposity (waist circumference >40 inches in men or >35 in women)
elevated fasting glucose (>110 mg/dL)
This is why I insist my patients undergo a DEXA scan annually—and I am far more interested in their visceral fat than their total body fat.
The Electric Car’s Shrinking Role in Reducing Oil Demand March 2022
There are over a billion cars globally and over 200 million in the US. The world can produce ~85 million vehicles per year. It would still take over a decade to replace the global car fleet with electric models assuming no growth in total car numbers. Many think that oil demand can't fall faster than this replacement rate or that only autonomous electric taxis can speed the process up. The vehicle count and oil demand relationships are more complex.
Crude oil is a mixture that varies widely based on the geological
conditions it developed in. It can contain gases, liquids, waxes, and
asphalt. Transportation, industry, commercial, and residential sectors
are the significant crude users in the US.
Source: EIA
Roughly 90% of the liquid products go to transportation. A small
amount goes towards heating oil and industrial processes. Asphalt, wax,
petroleum gases, and other products make up most industrial crude oil
demand.
Source: Data from EIA
Transportation fuels in the US are gasoline for cars and other light vehicles, diesel for trucks (like semis), buses, or trains, jet fuel for planes, and residual fuel oil for ships. Only 2%-3% of passenger vehicles use diesel.
Transportation is the driver for crude demand. Refineries have techniques like catalytic cracking that turn heavier wax and asphalt into diesel and gasoline. They have some flexibility to adjust the product mix. Extreme changes would likely need facility retrofits and possibly cause market dislocations for minor components like lubricants.
Americans drive everywhere they go - 87% of trips are by car. But
only 15% of household trips and 27% of household miles are for commuting
to work. Household miles are only two-thirds of total vehicle miles,
and the numbers are pre-COVID and reflect lower telecommuting shares.
Source: Bureau of Transportation Statistics
Most trips are for errands, visiting friends, and other non-commuting purposes. The heterogeneity of trips opens up cars to unbundling and oil demand falling faster than gasoline car numbers.
Gasoline cars will sit in garages for a long time to come. That doesn't mean their yearly mileage will stay the same.
Electric vehicles have lower operating costs than internal combustion engine cars and trucks. These savings come from lower fuel usage and less maintenance. They are usually more expensive to buy upfront because batteries are costlier than fuel tanks. As batteries decline in cost, more applications become economical to switch to electric vehicles and applications with higher annual mileage crossover first. Electric vehicles are already cheaper upfront in applications like delivery vans and will be for virtually every application by 2030.
Shopping and errands make up 45% of household trips. Amazon, Instacart, and other delivery companies keep growing their market share. Instead of a typical household driving 10-15 miles per day for errands, a vehicle serves multiple families driving 80-100 miles per day.
Applications with predictable miles are the sweet spot for electrification. There is no need for a 400-mile battery pack "just in case." Driving lots of miles makes the operating cost reduction from electrification payoff sooner. The replacement cycle for these vehicles is faster because they accrue more miles per year.
Electric vans are already cheaper than gasoline vans in most delivery applications. The adoption speed limit is set by how fast automakers can design and build new electric vans.
In dense cities, electric cargo bikes are cheaper than vans. Their agility allows them to make deliveries faster and their smaller range and capacity isn't a problem.
Vans on long routes work well for less time-sensitive deliveries that are non-perishable. Bots look to take on time-sensitive deliveries.
The smallest class of vehicles, the sidewalk bot, is already scaling rapidly. The smaller and slower the bot, the easier it is to automate. The consequences of a fifty-pound sidewalk robot hitting something at four miles per hour is dramatically smaller than a five-thousand-pound car hitting something at sixty miles per hour. The result is that sidewalk bots have already completed millions of deliveries even as their numbers continue to grow.
Bike lane bots are the next size up and excel at small grocery orders. They go faster, further, and weigh more. They are still in testing but promise grocery delivery at a fraction of what Instacart must charge. Companies like Wal-Mart are already building partially automated grocery warehouses that allow employees to load bots without being forced to traverse the regular store.
Mini-car size bots like Nuro round out the list. Automation is still easier than robot taxis. The vehicle does not need to protect occupants, plus it can travel at reasonable 30 mph speeds and avoid congested streets. Nuro bots have been in testing for Wal-Mart and Dominoes.
Others think bots will travel in tunnels instead of on roads. Pipedream Labs hopes to use bots in a 12" tube to deliver groceries and packages to your house. Like fiber internet, this promises better and cheaper service but slower rollout times due to intensive CAPEX.
The upshot is that large numbers of gasoline car trips can be done cheaper and more conveniently with electric vehicles. These technologies are much more mature than robot taxis.
Mode shifting promises to reduce oil demand even without autonomous taxis.
Cars dominate trips of less than five hundred miles. The hassle of large airports negates the speed of the plane. 6-18 passenger electric commuter planes flying from small airports promise to change the math. The savings from fuel and maintenance mean these flights will be cheaper and faster than driving.
Trips over 100 miles make up around 15% of total household vehicle miles. Electric commuters eating that share would double air passenger miles assuming only one person per car. Air passenger miles are already over 10x higher than transit passenger miles.
These aircraft can eat more traditional hub and spoke flights than their 400-500 miles starting range suggests because of improving battery energy density and their use of small airports. The possible impact is millions of barrels per day in the US alone.
One startup decided to make an electric sea glider instead of a commuter plane because the FAA is slam-packed with applications and won't review new ones for years. Sea glider approvals go through a different department with a shorter line. Better batteries and electric motors kicked off a sprint that will start to see fruition in the late 2020s - assuming some startups live through the FAA process.
People like riding e-bikes better than regular bikes because they can
go faster and further. Many trips in cities are quicker on bikes than
in a car. Trips under 10 miles make up the majority of trips and around
30% of vehicle miles.
Source: Average Trip Miles: Federal Highway Administration – 2008
The main holdup is cities building protected cycling infrastructure that makes riders feel safe. The infrastructure itself is cheap, but it is time-consuming working through planning and engineering departments. Ridership can jump rapidly once that infrastructure does come. The leading cycling cities can have almost 50% of trips done on bikes.
Rental bikes and scooters also have piles of potential. Early deployments were controversial, but things died down because the vehicles were expensive to charge and maintain. Newer models are more durable, and partial autonomy promises to increase value. When humans are riding, the humans steer. The scooter drives itself when there is no rider. The scooter can reposition to a better area, park itself correctly, move to a charger, or head to the location of the next rider. Costs go down while value goes up. Like the sidewalk bots, the technical challenge is manageable, especially with teleoperators that can intervene when there is trouble.
Light electric vehicles pair well with Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). BRT lines are another inexpensive technology that is difficult to move through city bureaucracies. BRT and light electric vehicles could provide speedy mass transit to American cities of any density without breaking the budget.
Multi-car households tend to have one car that sees more miles because of a longer commute or always being used for joint trips. If a family buys one electric vehicle, it would be rational to use that car as much as possible due to its lower operating costs.
Tony Seba is known for his radical opinion on electric, autonomous vehicles. Several years ago, he predicted rapid adoption of electric robot taxis that would be cheaper to use than owning a gasoline car. We'd send our gasoline cars to the scrap heap and ride electric Ubers.
Instead, we have seen incremental progress. Firms like Tesla, Comma.ai, and Mobileye keep improving their inexpensive driver-assistance software, but it still needs supervision. Competitors like Waymo and Cruise have built expensive, fully autonomous highway speed vehicles geofenced to small areas. Slow speed and fixed-route driverless bots and trucks have also made progress.
The flexibility of electric drive trains means that even if we get driverless cars, other form factors will unbundle many car trips. Traffic makes unbundling even more likely. A Seba vision world would lead to vehicle miles roughly doubling from additional empty trips between fares, not accounting for new demand. The autonomous revolution requires reforms to price road access and increase capacity through new tunnels, toll roads, or using current road space more efficiently. Regulatory hurdles and environmental reviews that drag on for years ensnare congestion pricing schemes like New York City's. Cheaper and more convenient substitutes, like delivery bots and e-bikes, should have strong demand.
Falling consumer oil demand looks much more like driving the Camry 6000 miles per year instead of 12,000 miles rather than a shiny new electric car in every garage or robot taxis swarming everywhere.
Trucks use about a quarter of ground transportation fuel. Their electrification promises to have an outsize impact on oil demand.
Until recently, most believed that long-distance battery-powered trucks were not possible. Automakers try to make electric passenger cars as light as possible to improve their range. Trucks carry heavy loads that sap batteries. But if you use high-energy-density battery cells, take care to reduce wheel friction, and have an aerodynamic design, you can make a practical truck. The Tesla Semi drives 10 hours per day (the legal limit for drivers) and only charges on breaks. Its total cost is lower than diesel trucks.
The Tesla Semi is not in mass production. The reason is that it is a battery hog. And the batteries it needs are nickel-based cells that are in short supply. Tesla makes more money putting nickel cells into luxury cars than semis. The chip shortage doesn't help, either. Designs like the Tesla Semi won't come to fruition until energy-dense cells are more available.
There is also a long tail of trucks and buses that run less often. An example is a farmer's truck he only uses for harvest. But most of the fuel usage comes from the everyday trucks that are first in line to switch.
In response to the shortage of nickel-based cells, automakers are trying to substitute lithium-ferro-phosphate (LFP) cells into vehicles. LFP batteries are not as energy-dense as the lithium nickel chemistries like NCA or NMC. The lower energy density poses a problem for heavy trucks because it diminishes their range. Adding more batteries adds more weight and takes away weight for hauling goods. While LFP might work for local trucks running on "bread routes," they don't work for long distances. Drivers would waste hours charging instead of driving.
Automation alters the numbers. A self-driving truck doesn't care how many times it has to charge or when it has to, only the total charging time. LFP charges as fast as nickel-based chemistries. A robot driver can stop more times to recharge with minor time losses and can drive many more hours of the day. The total time charging is roughly 15% when using superchargers. Lower operating costs overwhelm any advantage a driverless diesel truck would have in hours driven.
Most trucking automation improvements are incremental. An example is Wal-Mart using limited numbers of driverless trucks. They travel between stores and distribution centers on fixed routes, making the automation challenge easier. In the same spirit, trucks may only be driverless on interstates at first. Trucks can drive themselves between cities while local drivers meet them and drive them to the final destination. Trucks increase utilization, and truck drivers get much better jobs.
BLS estimates that there are two million heavy truck drivers in the US. In 2019 there were 281,000 sales of Class 8 Trucks (semis), and some of these drivers likely drive smaller trucks. Truckers replace their trucks more often than passenger cars because a fully utilized truck might be driving 200,000 miles per year. Partially automated trucks could double the yearly mileage by bypassing driver hour limits. The active fleet could meet the target for complete electrification in less than four years if one million trucks are the target.
Traditional trucks have unique engines, transmissions, fuel tanks, and emissions abatement technologies. Electric trucks can share components with passenger cars. Tesla designed their Semi to share motors, inverters, battery packs, and other accessories with the Model 3 sedan and Model Y crossover. Production can ramp quickly and benefit from economies of scale.
Once more nickel mines open or partial automation allows LFP batteries, the transition can happen quickly. A partially autonomous electric truck would reduce trucking costs by 50%-70%. Road pricing and capacity increases become a requirement as that pricing would increase shipping demand and induce switching from trains. Electric commuter planes could clear up space by removing cars from interstates.
For whatever reason, charging seems to be a popular topic. Chargers are simpler than fuel pumps and underground tanks. Tiny startups like Tesla pre-2015 were able to finance a nationwide charging system that covered most interstates. There are standalone charging businesses competing as well. Adding strategic chargers along interstates or at existing truck stops seems well within the market's capability.
Trucking fuel demand could see a several million barrels per day decrease in the US in a relatively short period through electrification and the spread of automation.
Electrification is terrible for oil companies. Or is it?
Predicting usage is difficult, but demand has a gravity to it. OECD countries have already decreased oil demand for decades while all increases have come from emerging markets, especially China. Automakers can only manufacture new cars and trucks so fast. Electrification will speed up OECD demand decline while blunting increases from emerging markets.
Before the pandemic, I thought peak demand would happen around 2027. It seems more likely now that peak demand was 2019, and we will see a plateau before significant decreases around 2030.
Even small changes in the supply/demand balance move oil prices dramatically. Both supply and demand are relatively inflexible, so the pace of electrification matters. If oil demand decreases by 2% per year, oil companies could still have bumper profits. Each year existing production declines 5%-7%, so prices must reflect the cost of finding and developing new supplies even at 2% yearly declines.
The nightmare scenarios mostly happen for oil companies when demand decreases faster than natural decline. COVID showed us what that looks like with massive short-term demand destruction and oil markets going haywire. A similar disjointed market seems unsustainable early in the transition because gasoline and diesel users see low prices that delay switching to electric options.
It may seem like a 5%-7% decline is the limit for demand decline, but that isn't true. The United States used increasing domestic production to cover sanctions or interventions in Libya, Iran, and Venezuela that reduced oil production. Woe is to Mohammed bin Salman if he saws up another journalist when oil is $20 per barrel and demand is declining swiftly. Liberals, environmentalists, the oil lobby, and every other American would favor sanctions on Saudi oil.
Being an American oil producer might not be so bad as long as you can weather short periods of ultra-low prices.
Liquid fuels are difficult to displace from long-distance planes, ships, and plastics manufacturing. Because liquid fuels are pricey on an energy basis, synthetic fuels using dirt-cheap solar or wind could be economical. $60 per barrel of oil equates to ~$35/MWh. New solar is under $30/MWh today. Assuming a conversion efficiency of around 33%, the breakeven to make fuels would be ~$12/MWh. That is well within possible future non-grid tied solar technology costs.
Synthetic production pathways tend to produce relatively pure products. The barrel of crude could be unbundled, similar to how car trips might be. Changes in transportation demand could incentivize a wide range of new production capacity in chemicals that aren't classic synthetic fuels to replace crude byproducts.
Once synthetic fuels are below the marginal finding cost of oil, operators will only produce existing reserves. Traditional oil reserves can stay viable much longer than natural gas in competition with synthetic fuels. Gas has higher fixed costs that synthetic fuels can exploit. Transporting oil is so cheap that low production cost reservoirs can produce long into the future without government intervention.
A $100/tonne carbon tax adds ~$43 to a barrel of oil. Taxes would have to be steep to eliminate production that often has total costs under $20 per barrel. Many barrels will be going into industrial uses and won't burn, anyway. Cheap direct air capture technology can make existing oil reserves more valuable because it makes it harder for synthetic fuels to compete if it sets a cap on carbon taxes.
The economics of future oil production are hard to predict.
My original guestimate on peak demand comes from the difficulty of building millions of cars, trucks, planes, and batteries. E-bikes and other light electric vehicles are the only technology that could surprise. Their constraint is local governments' desire to build infrastructure.
Once more factories start up, the pace will hit an inflection point. Oil demand will start falling at a rate that allows high enough oil prices to continue to incentivize switching. There will be stops and starts or switching back and forth, similar to how natural gas and renewables are displacing coal in the US electricity market. Eventually, oil-burning capacity will retire, and there will be little support or service for more expensive internal combustion engines.
Oil sales will eventually stabilize as applications like plastics and jet fuel make up an increasing portion of demand. Traditional oil production will become a sleepy industry as synthetic fuels emerge and set the marginal cost, stopping most new development. The more oil production Americans take off the market through war or sanctions, the smaller the rump of traditional producers will be.
The diverse applications of electric power trains combined with increasing automation and a wide variety of battery chemistries promise to revolutionize transport and transport fuels.