Pasta News Network - New Zealand

It can become necessary when the enemy is simply too strong and an army needs to leave the battlefield to avoid a crushing defeat, or it can be simply to pull back to reach an area that is easier to defend.

Trailing National in the polls, Ardern has decided to retreat and present a smaller target to opponents by postponing the implementation of contentious policies or reducing their scope.

These have already included delaying a draft plan in response to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples until 2024, while watering down “hate-speech” legislation, and immigration restrictions for nurses.

Anything that is unpopular and unwanted will have the volume turned down until after the elections, should Labour win they will resume their scheduled program. A program that will only continue to further extremism (on both sides of the spectrum), identity politics and division.

Great read with a lovely ending.

Over the past year, German security researcher Matthias Marx and a small group of researchers at Chaos Computer Lab, a European hacker association, have bought six SEEK II (Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit) on the popular auction website, according to the NY Times.

They contained biometric data at detainment facilities, on patrols, during screenings of local hires, and after the explosion of an IED. Officials at the time were concerned over a rash of shooting in which Afghan police and soldiers fired on American troops, and were hoping that biometric data could help identify any possible Taliban agents within their bases.

This is fine.

Anthony Fauci is finally gone from his government perch. Let us recall that it was he who set this calamity in motion, squandering his credibility, while taking down public health and much else with it. More than anyone, he bears responsibility, even if he was acting on others’ behalf. That is especially true if he was carrying out a hidden agenda (take your pick of theories).

There was already growing political and societal panic on March 11, 2020, when the House Oversight and Reform Committee convened a hearing on the new virus circulating. Fauci was the key witness. The only question on everyone’s mind came down to the most primal fear: am I going to die from this thing, like in the movies?

How "The Science" got science wrong in the early days of the plandemic.

Mass amateurization refers to the capabilities that new forms of media have given to non-professionals and the ways in which those non-professionals have applied those capabilities to solve problems (e.g. create and distribute content) that compete with the solutions offered by larger, professional institutions.

Mass amateurization is most often associated with Web 2.0 technologies. These technologies include the rise of blogs and citizen journalism, photo and video-sharing services such as Flickr and YouTube, user-generated wikis like Wikipedia, and distributed accommodation services such as Airbnb.

While the social web is not the only technology responsible for the rise of mass amateurization, Clay Shirky claims Web 2.0 has allowed amateurs to undertake increasingly complex tasks resulting in accomplishments that would seem daunting within the traditional institutional model.

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” - Clay Shirky

I think this observation is brilliant. It reminds me of the clarity of the Peter Principle, which says that a person in an organization will be promoted to the level of their incompetence. At which point their past achievements will prevent them from being fired, but their incompetence at this new level will prevent them from being promoted again, so they stagnate in their incompetence.

The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions (like a company, or an industry) can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem.

This.

Depending on the overall magnitude and quality of the memory response and the incubation period of the pathogen, it can be eliminated prior to the establishment of the infection. Elimination of the pathogen even before it can infect a host cell and replicate, ideally directly at the site of entry, is referred to as sterilizing immunity (see Box 1 for glossary of terms). Antibodies are the main mediators of sterilizing immunity, but T cells may contribute to the elimination of infected host cells before the pathogen starts to replicate. By definition, sterilizing immunity prevents pathogen transmission.

The money shot:

Strong humoral responses in the upper respiratory tract might be necessary for protection from the infection at the site of virus entry, but potent mucosal immunity is not easy to achieve by vaccination.

A vaccine injected into the deltoid, that only stimulates a spike (S) protein response and not spike (S) + nucleocapsid (N) as would a natural infection, is not going to help there either.

A very accessible paper worth sharing.

All-cause mortality by week in Australia shows that there was no detectable excess mortality 13 months into the declared pandemic, followed by a step-wise increase in mortality in mid-April 2021, synchronous with the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine prioritizing elderly, disabled and aboriginal residents.

The excess mortality in the vaccination period (mid-April 2021 through August 2022; 14% larger all-cause mortality than in recent pre-vaccination periods of same time duration; 62 million administered vaccine doses) was 31±1 thousand deaths, which is more than twice the deaths registered as from or with COVID-19.

In addition, a sharp peak in all-cause mortality (mid-January to mid-February 2022; 2,600 deaths) is synchronous with the rapid rollout of the booster (9.4 million booster doses, same time period), and is not due to a climatic heatwave.

Excess mortality in Australia is causally associated with the COVID-19 vaccine. The corresponding vaccine injection fatality ratio (vIFR) is approximately 0.05%.

Awkward.