Author Archives: marcia

The 11 Dimensional Brain

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Blue Brain Team Discovers a Multi-Dimensional Universe in Brain Networks

Posted on June 12, 2017 in Neuroscience

Using mathematics in a novel way in neuroscience, the Blue Brain Project shows that the brain operates on many dimensions, not just the three dimensions that we are accustomed to.

For most people, it is a stretch of the imagination to understand the world in four dimensions but a new study has discovered structures in the brain with up to eleven dimensions – ground-breaking work that is beginning to reveal the brain’s deepest architectural secrets.

Using algebraic topology in a way that it has never been used before in neuroscience, a team from the Blue Brain Project has uncovered a universe of multi-dimensional geometrical structures and spaces within the networks of the brain.

The research, published today in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, shows that these structures arise when a group of neurons forms a clique: each neuron connects to every other neuron in the group in a very specific way that generates a precise geometric object. The more neurons there are in a clique, the higher the dimension of the geometric object.

PR neuroscience news topology blue brain project markram

Topology in neuroscience: The image attempts to illustrate something that can not be imaged – a universe of multi-dimensional structures and spaces. On the left is a digital copy of a part of the neocortex, the most evolved part of the brain. On the right are shapes of different sizes and geometries in an attempt to represent structures ranging from 1D to 7D and beyond. The “black-hole” in the middle is used to symbolise a complex x of multi-dimensional spaces, or cavities. Courtesy of the Blue Brain Project

“We found a world that we had never imagined,” says neuroscientist Henry Markram, director of Blue Brain Project and professor at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, and co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Frontiers, “there are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to eleven dimensions.”

Markram suggests this may explain why it has been so hard to understand the brain. “The mathematics usually applied to study networks cannot detect the high-dimensional structures and spaces that we now see clearly.”

If 4D worlds stretch our imagination, worlds with 5, 6 or more dimensions are too complex for most of us to comprehend. This is where algebraic topology comes in: a branch of mathematics that can describe systems with any number of dimensions. The mathematicians who brought algebraic topology to the study of brain networks in the Blue Brain Project were Kathryn Hess from EPFL and Ran Levi from Aberdeen University.

“Algebraic topology is like a telescope and microscope at the same time. It can zoom into networks to find hidden structures – the trees in the forest – and see the empty spaces – the clearings – all at the same time,” explains Hess.

In 2015, Blue Brain published the first digital copy of a piece of the neocortex — the most evolved part of the brain and the seat of our sensations, actions, and consciousness. In this latest research, using algebraic topology, multiple tests were performed on the virtual brain tissue to show that the multi-dimensional brain structures discovered could never be produced by chance. Experiments were then performed on real brain tissue in the Blue Brain’s wet lab in Lausanne confirming that the earlier discoveries in the virtual tissue are biologically relevant and also suggesting that the brain constantly rewires during development to build a network with as many high-dimensional structures as possible.

When the researchers presented the virtual brain tissue with a stimulus, cliques of progressively higher dimensions assembled momentarily to enclose high-dimensional holes, that the researchers refer to as cavities. “The appearance of high-dimensional cavities when the brain is processing information means that the neurons in the network react to stimuli in an extremely organized manner,” says Levi. “It is as if the brain reacts to a stimulus by building then razing a tower of multi-dimensional blocks, starting with rods (1D), then planks (2D), then cubes (3D), and then more complex geometries with 4D, 5D, etc. The progression of activity through the brain resembles a multi-dimensional sandcastle that materializes out of the sand and then disintegrates.”

The big question these researchers are asking now is whether the intricacy of tasks we can perform depends on the complexity of the multi-dimensional “sandcastles” the brain can build. Neuroscience has also been struggling to find where the brain stores its memories. “They may be ‘hiding’ in high-dimensional cavities,” Markram speculates.

Original research article: Cliques of Neurons Bound into Cavities Provide a Missing Link between Structure and Function

Citation: Reimann MW, Nolte M, Scolamiero M, Turner K, Perin R, Chindemi G, Dłotko P, Levi R, Hess K and Markram H (2017) Cliques of Neurons Bound into Cavities Provide a Missing Link between Structure and Function. Front. Comput. Neurosci. 11:48. doi: 10.3389/fncom.2017.00048

This research was funded by: ETH Domain for the Blue Brain Project (BBP) and the Laboratory of Neural Microcircuitry (LNMC); The Blue Brain Project’s IBM BlueGene/Q system, BlueBrain IV, funded by ETH Board and hosted at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS); NCCR Synapsy grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation; GUDHI project, supported by an Advanced Investigator Grant of the European Research Council and hosted by INRIA.

from:     https://blog.frontiersin.org/2017/06/12/blue-brain-team-discovers-a-multi-dimensional-universe-in-brain-networks/

EMF’s, Bird Deaths, & More

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AND ABOUT THOSE BIRDS DROPPING DEAD FROM THE SKY

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… AND ABOUT THOSE BIRDS DROPPING DEAD FROM THE SKY…

by Joseph P. Farrell

While various platforms are rushing around censoring any mention of potential connections of [ELECTROMAGNETIC TECHNOLOGY REFERENCE CENSORED] to [THE STORY THAT EVERYONE IS SICK OF HEARING ABOUT WHICH HAS BEEN CENSORED], J.H. found an intriguing paper that indicates that my hypothesis about those sudden bird deaths being due to electromagnetic tests of some sort may be true. Here’s the article:

Cardioprotection from stress conditions by weak magnetic fields in the Schumann Resonance band

Now, citing just a bit from the abstract, and from the beginning of the body of the paper, we read this (from the abstract):

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of extremely weak magnetic fields in the ScR first mode frequency range on the spontaneous contractions, calcium transients and Creatine Kinase (CK) release of rat cardiac cell cultures. We show that applying 7.8 Hz, 90 nT magnetic fields (MF) causes a gradual decrease in the spontaneous calcium transients’ amplitude, reaching 28% of the initial amplitude after 40 minutes of MF application, and accompanied with a gradual decrease in the calcium transients’ rise time. The mechanical spontaneous contractions cease after the ScR fields have been applied for more than 30 minutes, when the calcium transient’s amplitude reached ~60% of its initial value.The influence of the ScR MF was reversible, independent of the field magnitude in the range 20 pT-100 nT, and independent of the external DC magnetic field. However, the effect is frequency dependent; the described changes occurred only in the 7.6–8 Hz range. In addition, applying 7.8 Hz, 90 nT MF for 1.5 hours, reduced the amount of CK released to the buffer, during normal conditions, hypoxic conditions and oxidative stress induced by 80 μM H2O2. We show that the ScR field induced reduction in CK release is associated with a stress response process and has a protective character. (Emphases added)

And this, from the main body of the paper:

The ability of a cardiomyocyte to contract depends on the proper operation of many biological processes. Calcium ion transients are the key mediators between the mechanical contractions and the cardiac action potentials which initiate the contractions. The calcium influx and the calcium release from the Sarcoplasmic Reticulum (SR) in phase 2 of the action potential increases the free calcium concentration in the cytoplasm. This free calcium triggers the physical contraction mechanism. We therefore examined the ScR MF influence on the mechanical contractions and their triggering calcium transients as a basis for a more thorough investigation. In addition, in order to examine whether the impact is of a protective or a destructive nature, we examined the influence of ScR MF on CK release during normal, hypoxic and oxidative stress conditions. The dependency on the MF characteristics: magnitude, frequency and additional DC MF was studied in order to understand the physical mechanism behind the phenomena. (Emphasis added)

It is interesting to note that the authors of the paper are wondering if the impact is of “a destructive nature.”

But reading that statement in the abstract – “The mechanical spontaneous contractions cease after the ScR fields have been applied for more than 30 minutes, when the calcium transient’s amplitude reached ~60% of its initial value.” –  would seem to be an answer in the affirmative.

So what does that mean? Very simply, that magnetic fields within the range of the Schumann cavity resonance, which is about 8 Hz, cause interference with biological cells’ ability to process calcium transients necessary for cardiac cells – in this case of rats(the rodent kind, not the human kind) – to contract. Or to put it even more simply, under certain conditions of external electro-magnetic stress, those calcium-transients’ ability to influence contractions dissipates, and voila, instant cardiac arrest, an arrest which might, under certain circumstances, cause cellular pathologies that look like something else. And in any case, it might indicate that something like this mechanism is  behind all those sudden and strange drops of flights of birds, stone cold dead, out of the sky, which were, let us recall, explained away as “sudden onset bird flu.”

In any case, there’s another point implied by the paper, and that is that cellular responses can be triggered by the electromagnetic environment, and if they can be triggered by that environment, it’s but a very short step to the notion that that environment can be engineered to create certain cellular responses, and from there, it’s but yet another short step to the notion that this could be engineered to work in tandem with other technologies, like nano-technology (Dr. Lieber, anyone?) or viruses.

But of course, we’re  not supposed to be thinking along those lines, of the possibilities of [ELECTROMAGNETIC TECHNOLOGY REFERENCE CENSORED] in relationship to [THE STORY THAT EVERYONE IS SICK OF HEARING ABOUT WHICH HAS BEEN CENSORED].

It’s already five o’clock.

Gee…

…Time to get the latest corona virus update from Dr. Grouchy (rhymes with Fauci).

See you on the flip side…

from:    https://gizadeathstar.com/2020/04/and-about-those-birds-dropping-dead-from-the-sky/

A Mine on the Moon

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TRUMP: TIME TO MINE THE MOON WHILE OBSERVATORIES CLOSE

TRUMP: TIME TO MINE THE MOON WHILE OBSERVATORIES CLOSE

While we’re all sick of hearing about Covid19 and the daily propatainment ministry campaign to keep everyone indoors and cowered, there’s been a strange reaction  going on “up there”, in space. In the last few weeks, for example, we’ve seen stories about (1) the European Space Agency cancelling a probe to Mars because of the virus, (2) strange videos of a “something” near the Sun looking for all the world like Ezekiel’s wheels-within-wheels, which Never A Straight Answer (NASA) once again reassured us was all a trick of light and shadow and an artifact of image processing, nothing to see here, move along, and (3) then, as if someone wanted to say “not so fast,” we’ve seen strange videos of “some things” flying around the Moon. More tricks of light and shadow and processing artifacts, perhaps.

Meanwhile, to reassure everyone that life goes on as abnormally as possible, the USSA has launched some satellites on Mr. Musk’s rockets, while astronomical observatories around the world are closing down for – you guessed it – the corona virus, according to this story shared by M.G.:

COVID-19 forces Earth’s largest telescopes to close

Ponder that one a moment. In all our previous “flu-demics” and medical emergencies  from the HIV scare of the 1980s to SARS, we’ve never shut down observatories.

Ever.

It’s almost like Mr. Globaloney doesn’t want any pesky science-and-nerd-types seeing something “out there” that Mr. Globaloney doesn’t want them to see.

However, in the “you just can’t make up this soap-space-and-virus-opera” department, as all this propatainment ministry nonsense from “I’m-connected-to-Bill-Gates-who-wants-to-vaccinate-everyone-and-chloroquine-produced-by-Bayer-in-1934-is-not-a-cure-because-I-want-a-vaccine-so-I-can-make-lots-of-money-with-Mr.-Gates” Dr. Fauci in his daily White House sponsored fear-and-trembling updates goes on, President Trump found enough time to sneak away and sign an executive order.

The subject?

Mining the Moon (thanks to S.R., B.H. and many many others who shared versions of this story):

Trump signs executive order supporting space mining, Russia criticizes the move

It makes me wonder, with some “things” flying around close to the Moon, and observatories shut down, just what the heck is going on. Now on the one hand, talk about Moon and asteroid mining has been going on for a while, and I’ve blogged about the topic repeatedly. Back in 2014 at the Secret Space Program conference in San Mateo, Nuttyfornia, I talked about some of those bearer bonds scandals, and how some of those “fake” bonds had space messages going on all over the place. On the front of some of these bonds, which the federal goobernment (which has given us some of the nuttiest explanations for things on record, from magic bullets to airplane fuel melting buildings which collapse in a pancake at freefall speed) assured  us were fakes, you had on the front of said bonds the picture of the president who fell victim to said magic bullet, while on the back of the “bond” you had pictures of the Moon, the Lunar Excursion Module from Apollo days, and the space shuttle. I began to think that space assets were the way that Mr. Globaloney would attempt to write off all that bad paper he had created in the financial system, when – lo and behold – we were told that all that bad paper amounted to a mere 14- to 17,000,000,000,000,000 dollars, several times the amount of the gross domestic product of the entire planet. But what a coincidence, articles then began to appear that some rocky asteroid X,Y,Z out there was worth (you guessed it) about 14- to 17,000,000,000,000,000 dollars in titanium, platinum, gold and all sorts of other stuff, all we had to do was go out and mine it. (Isn’t that nice? We could actually have a gold standard and back all that bad paper with something other than Christine LaGarde’s numerology.)

Now, if you’ve been following along during all this propatainment ministry narrative, you’ll have noticed a raft of strange financial stories that somehow manage to evade mention by Dr. I-want-to-vaccinate-everyone-and-make-lots-of-money Fauci. Stories like the Fed taking reserve requirements to zero (yes, I said ZERO), and the German state-owned bank Kreditanstalt fur Wiederaufbau thumbing its nose at the EU, the European Central Bank and all the Brusselsprouts and telling German businesses and no one else’s businesses that it was prepared to prop them up with virtually unlimited credit until the Fauci crisis… er… I mean, the corona crisis was over. (How does that song go? Deutschland uber alles?) Interestingly enough, while Kreditanstalt was promising lines of credit and liquidity as high as the Moon (patience, we’re getting back to that), its headquarters was nonetheless located down here on Earth in Frankfurt in the German state of Hesse, which headquarters other financially sound institutions like the European Central Bank, and that pillar of financial responsibility, Deutsche Bank, which was caught red-handed shorting stocks before two buildings collapsed of airplane fuel fires and pancaked into lower Manhattan a few years ago. Then, lo and behold, in Yet Another Amazing Coincidence, the finance minister for the German state of Hesse decided to walk in front of a train and ended up smeared all over railroad tracks just a few days after Kreditanstalt made its generous announcement because (we were told, but not by Dr. Fauci!) that he was depressed over the corona virus.

Now, to put a fine point to all this Amazing Coincidence, it looks like Mr. Globaloney created the Fauci crisis as a crisis of opportunity to achieve several objectives, one of which is some sort of financial reset, and with that, we’re back to Mr. Trump and the Moon mining executive order. It’s one thing to talk about mining the Moon, but quite another to order it, by an executive order no less, and that during a Fauci crisis that looks like a financial reset.

To put it country simple: it looks like Mr. Globaloney is in a big hurry to get out there and mine those space assets… and to be extra sure no one keeps an independent eye on what he’s actually doing (or not doing but claiming to do), best to shut down those observatories.

Yea… I know… that’s really really off-the-end-of-the-high-octane-speculation-twig. But with everything else so crazy, why not?

See you on the flip side…

from:    https://gizadeathstar.com/2020/04/trump-time-to-mine-the-moon-while-observatories-close/

Follow the Money

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My conversation with State Senator and doctor who exposes Medicare payouts for COVID-19 patients

by Jon Rappoport

As you’ll see by end of this article, the specific decisions about money mentioned here affect life and death outcomes for patients.

A state senator has suddenly come out of nowhere and made big news.

My conversation with Minnesota State Senator, Dr. Scott Jensen, took place after I read the explosive statement he made to FOX News, on April 9th. So let’s start with his earlier FOX statement [1]:

“Right now Medicare has determined that if you have a COVID-19 admission to the hospital you’ll get paid $13,000. If that COVID-19 patient goes on a ventilator, you get $39,000; three times as much. Nobody can tell me, after 35 years in the world of medicine, that sometimes those kinds of things [don’t] [have] impact on what we do…”

I reached out to Senator Jensen, and obtained clarification. Jensen told me his remark pertained to patients with Medicare coverage. And the 2 payouts he mentioned are standard insurance payments from Medicare which would go to the hospital.

Of course, he explained, some hospitals have a pay-share plan with their staff doctors. Therefore, a windfall for the hospital is passed along to those doctors.

Jensen told me: Take a Medicare patient who is diagnosed with simple non-COVID pneumonia. The hospital would receive a one-time Medicare lump-sum payout of $4600.

However, if that Medicare patient is diagnosed with COVID-19 pneumonia, the Medicare coverage is a one-time $13,000 payment. And if the hospital puts that COVID-19 pneumonia patient on a ventilator, the one-time payment is $39,000. NOTE: It doesn’t matter how long these patients stay in hospital—there is only going to be one lump-sum insurance payment.

So, I infer, there are several types of financial incentives for hospitals—

ONE: Diagnose as many people as possible with COVID-19.

TWO: Diagnose as many people as possible with COVID-19 who have light symptoms—making it easy to move them out of the hospital quickly.

THREE: Put as many COVID patients as possible on ventilators for as short a time as possible.

Under the heading of “diagnose as many patients as possible with COVID-19,” there is also the key question of what constitutes “a COVID-19 patient”—and how the use of that label can be multiplied and manipulated. Senator Jensen made a few choice comments to FOX on this subject as well.

From FOX News: “Dr. Scott Jensen, a Minnesota family physician who is also a Republican state senator, told ‘The Ingraham Angle’ Wednesday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) guidelines for doctors to certify whether a patient has died of coronavirus are ‘ridiculous’ and could be misleading the public.”

“Host Laura Ingraham read Jensen the [CDC] guidelines, which say: ‘In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID cannot be made but is suspected or likely (e.g. the circumstances are compelling with a reasonable degree of certainty) it is acceptable to report COVID-19 on a death certificate as ‘probable’ or ‘presumed.’”

“In response, Jensen told Ingraham the CDC’s death certificate manual tells physicians to focus on ‘precision and specificity,’ but the coronavirus death certification guidance runs completely counter to that axiom.”

“’The idea that we are going to allow people to massage and sort of game the numbers is a real issue because we are going to undermine the [public] trust,’ he said. ‘And right now as we see politicians doing things that aren’t necessarily motivated on fact and science, their trust in politicians is already wearing thin’.”

“…Jensen then told Ingraham that under the CDC guidelines, a patient who died after being hit by a bus and tested positive for coronavirus would be listed as having presumed to have died from the virus regardless of whatever damage was caused by the bus.”

“…Jensen also reacted to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s response to a question about the potential for the number of coronavirus deaths being ‘padded,’ in which the NIAID director described the prevalence of ‘conspiracy theories’ during ‘challenging’ times in public health.”

“’I would remind him that anytime health care intersects with dollars it gets awkward,’ Jensen said.”

Here is where everything Scott Jensen is saying can turn very grim—

As I’ve reported [2], New York ER doctor, Cameron Kyle-Sidell [3], has made public statements about the misuse of ventilators with supposed COVID-19 patients. He’s stated that some of these patients actually have functioning lungs. Their immediate and dire life-threatening situation is straight oxygen deficit, as if they have high-altitude sickness. But pressure on the lungs, applied by the use of ventilators via standard rigid protocols, he says, can cause damage, and even death.

Imagine what would happen if another way—NOT ventilators—was found to usefully and safely deliver oxygen to these patients.

The hospitals wouldn’t get their huge $39,000 payout for each Medicare patient put on a ventilator.

What do you think a hospital would say…what decision would the hospital make…would the hospital allow a better and safer and necessary delivery system for oxygen? For every labeled “COVID-19 patient” whose desperate emergency is a straight deficit of oxygen?

Would the hospital forego all those huge Medicare coverage payouts?

SOURCES:
[1]: Minnesota doctor blasts ‘ridiculous’ CDC coronavirus death count guidelines
[2]: COVID and a 5G connection?
[3]: Dr Cameron Kyle Sidell. E R & Critical Care Dr From NYC

from:    https://nomorefakenews.com/

TIme for UN-LOCKDOWNS!

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EPIDEMIOLOGIST: CORONAVIRUS COULD BE “EXTERMINATED” IF LOCKDOWNS ARE LIFTED

by Mac Slavo of SHTFplan

Finally, we have begun to hear solutions that don’t require the government to enslave the population and people to give up their basic human rights in order to fight COVID-19.  One epidemiologist has now said that if we want to “exterminate” the coronavirus, lockdowns will need to be lifted immediately.

Knut Wittkowski, previously the longtime head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at the Rockefeller University in New York City, said in an interview with the Press and the Public Project that the coronavirus could be “exterminated” people were allowed to lead normal lives, free from the shackles of house arrest politicians have placed on them. We need to shelter only the most vulnerable parts of society until the danger had passed, not lockdown everyone.

When asked about Anthony Fauci, the White House “medical expert” who for weeks has been propagating fear in the public and predicting significant numbers of COVID-19 deaths in America as well as major ongoing disruptions to daily life possibly for years, Wittkowski replied: “Well, I’m not paid by the government, so I’m entitled to actually do science.”

The veteran scholar of epidemiology has warned that the ongoing lockdowns throughout the United States and the rest of the world are almost certainly just prolonging the coronavirus outbreak rather than doing anything to truly mitigate it. On top of that, the government has destroyed the most financially vulnerable people by prohibiting them from making a living.  “Going outdoors is what stops every respiratory disease,” Wittkowski said.

And he isn’t the only doctor who says people need to go outside to get their vitamin D in order to fight off the virus. “[W]hat people are trying to do is flatten the curve. I don’t really know why. But, what happens is if you flatten the curve, you also prolong, to widen it, and it takes more time. And I don’t see a good reason for a respiratory disease to stay in the population longer than necessary,” he said according to a report by The College Fix. 

Many politicians claim flattening the curve prevents hospitals from being overrun.  But few hospitals have had problems keeping up with COVID-19 patients.


“With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity. About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won’t even have recognized that they were infected, or they had very, very mild symptoms, especially if they are children. So, it’s very important to keep the schools open and kids mingling to spread the virus to get herd immunity as fast as possible, and then the elderly people, who should be separated, and the nursing homes should be closed during that time, can come back and meet their children and grandchildren after about 4 weeks when the virus has been exterminated,” he added.

Instead, the mainstream media took to fear-mongering and the government has instituted martial law in parts of the country to lock people in their homes to try and prevent the spread of the coronavirus.  As we have all seen going into a month worth of lockdowns, the only thing we have achieved is a guarantee this virus will come back and millions of people won’t be able to make ends meet for months or possibly even years.  The damage done to society and some people’s livelihoods is irreparable.  This lockdown experiment has been an abject failure and one that should never be repeated again.  If people cared about their basic rights as human beings, they would have never allowed any government official to get away with closing their business and placing them on weeks of house arrest.

Wittkowski stated that the standard cycle of respiratory diseases is a two-week outbreak, including a peak, after which “it’s gone.” He pointed out that even in a regime of “social distancing,” the virus will still find ways to spread, just more slowly:

You cannot stop the spread of a respiratory disease within a family, and you cannot stop it from spreading with neighbors, with people who are delivering, who are physicians—anybody. People are social, and even in times of social distancing, they have contacts, and any of those contacts could spread the disease. It will go slowly, and so it will not build up herd immunity, but it will happen. And it will go on forever unless we let it go. -Dr. Knut Wittkowski

But if the lockdowns are lifted, and the chains removed from humanity, governments will be seen for what they really are: masters willing to use tyranny and destroy lives for profit. Don’t expect any government to relinquish power so willingly.

from:    https://www.silverdoctors.com/headlines/world-news/epidemiologist-coronavirus-could-be-exterminated-if-lockdowns-are-lifted/

More Covid 19 Facts Not to be Found in the MSM

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April 12, 2020

New studies
  • Stanford professor of medicine John Ioannidis concludes in a new study that the risk of death from Covid19 for people under 65 years of age, even in global „hotspots“, is equivalent to the risk of a fatal car accident for daily commuters driving between 9 and 400 miles.
  • In a serological pilot study, German virologist Hendrick Streeck comes to the interim result that the lethality of Covid19 is at 0.37% and the mortality (based on the total population) at 0.06%. These values are about ten times lower than those of the WHO and about five times lower than those of Johns Hopkins University.
  • A Danish study with 1500 blood donors found that the lethality of Covid19 is only 1.6 per thousand, i.e. more than 20 times lower than originally assumed by the WHO and thus in the range of a strong (pandemic) influenza. At the same time Denmark has decided to reopen schools and kindergartens next week.
  • A serological study in the US state of Colorado comes to the preliminary conclusion that the lethality of Covid19 has been overestimated by a factor of 5 to a factor of 20 and is likely to be in the range between normal and pandemic influenza.
  • A study conducted by the Medical University of Vienna concluded that the age and risk profile of Covid19 deaths is similar to normal mortality.
  • A study in the Journal of Medical Virology concludes that the internationally used coronavirus test is unreliable: In addition to the already known problem of false positive results, there is also a „potentially high“ rate of false negative results, i.e. the test does not respond even in symptomatic individuals, while in other patients it does respond once  and then again not. This makes it more difficult to exclude other flu-like illnesses.
  • A Swiss biophysicist has for the first time evaluated and graphically displayed the rate of positive tests in the US, France, Germany and Switzerland. The result shows that the positive rate in these countries is increasing rather slowly and not exponentially.
  • Dr. Daniel Jeanmonod, emeritus Swiss professor of physiology and neurosurgery, recommends in an analysis: „Think deep, do good science, and do not panic!„
  • US researchers conclude that local air pollution greatly increases the risk of death from Covid19. This confirms earlier studies from Italy and China.
  • The WHO concluded at the end of March that, contrary to earlier assumptions, Covid19 is not transmitted by aerosols („through the air“). Transmission mainly takes place through direct contact or by droplet infection (coughing, sneezing).
  • The German-American epidemiology professor Knut Wittkowski argues in a new interview that the Covid19 epidemic is already declining or even „already over“ in many countries. The curfews had come too late and had been counterproductive, Wittkowski argues.

from:    https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/

UPDATE: Facts About the Coronavirus

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A few factors to consider from an update dated April 12, 2020 from the Swiss Propaganda Research Institute:
US
  • In the US, the authorities now also recommend that all test-positive deaths and even suspect cases without a positive test result be registered as „Covid deaths“. An American physician and state senator from Minnesota declared that this was tantamount to manipulation. Furthermore, there would be financial incentives for hospitals to declare patients as Covid19 patients. (Some humour on this topic).
  • A Covid19 field hospital near Seattle in Washington State was closed after only three days without admitting any patients. This is reminiscent of the hospitals built at short notice near Wuhan, which were also mostly under-utilized or even empty and were then dismantled after a short time.
  • Numerous media reported on alleged „corona mass graves“ on Hart Island near New York. These reports are misleading in two respects: firstly, Hart Island has long been one of the best-known „cemeteries of the poor“ in the US, and secondly the mayor of New York declared that no mass graves are planned, but that „unclaimed“ deceased (i.e. without relatives) are to be buried on Hart Island.

Here is the link to the rest of the update, including country-by-country analyses,  (please scroll down to the April 12th report):  https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/

Buckminster Fuller

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Buckminster Fuller’s Three Keys to Waking Up & Changing the World

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Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller was one of the most brilliant thinkers of the 20th century, an architect and designer who created inventions like the geodesic dome. He saw the best in humanity, and had a vision for how we could engineer a world with enough for everyone. Here’s three critical things we can learn from him.

Buckminster Fuller was one of the most brilliant thinkers of the 20th century, an architect and designer who made it his mission to advance the evolution of humanity and to “do more with less.” He created inventions like the geodesic dome (most prominently seen in Disney World’s Epcot Center) and the Dymaxion car, and sought to use technology to benefit humanity, specifically to provide cheap shelter and transportation for the world. Though his inventions have not been widely adopted (yet), his theories and ideas have influenced the world in many key ways (if you’ve ever heard anybody in an office meeting use the word “synergy,” for instance, you’ve just heard a Fullerism — he popularized the phrase to mean doing more with available resources).

Fuller’s key idea is that we have enough resources to house, clothe and feed everybody on the planet, but we aren’t doing so. His mission, then, was to create systems solutions that would allow us to properly use the resources we already have for the good of all, instead of maintaining inequality.

Here are three key concepts that Buckminster Fuller embodied that can bring immense value to your life, whatever you do:

1. Your life does not belong to you.

 

As a young man, Fuller worked in a textile mill, in the US Navy and in the meat-packing industry. In his twenties, he founded a company with his father-in-law to build lightweight housing—but the company failed. By the age of 32, he was broke and living in public housing in Chicago; his daughter died of complications from polio and spinal meningitis. Deciding he was a complete failure and responsible for his daughter’s death, Fuller became a heavy drinker and decided to kill himself. On the verge of suicide, he had a transcendental insight—his life was not his own property; it belonged to humanity. He then pledged to dedicate the rest of his life to “an experiment, to find what a single individual [could] contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.” (This would be an example of the “deal with God,” little publicized compared to the “deal with the Devil.”)

2. Don’t change people—change the environment.

 

Buckminster Fuller was an architect, on a mission to change our species, traditionally the role of religious reformers. But his approach was different—he realized that it’s nigh-on impossible to change people. He instead sought to change the environment around people, prompting inventions like the geodesic dome and Dymaxion house: simply seeing or walking around in such structures could shift people’s idea of the possible and prompt them to start rethinking their assumptions. Instead of grabbing and shaking people and shouting “The world’s on fire!” he created environments that demonstrated a possible solution.

3. We have enough for everybody—to see how, think of the world as a whole system.

 

Fuller thought of the world as a whole system, instead of as disconnected nations and warring tribes. (This type of thinking is still the number one thing we need as a species, and is less common than you might believe.) He coined the phrase “Spaceship Earth” to describe where we are, famously stating that “The most important fact about Spaceship Earth: an instruction manual didn’t come with it.” If we can think of the world of a coherent system, we can begin to address resource-waste problems as a whole instead of leaving some to die while others have too much.

Fuller’s work is extensive and complex to say the least—if this starting point has raised your curiosity, check out A Fuller View, which is a collection of introductory essays by other people explaining his key concepts. It’s a great and quick read.

from:    https://ultraculture.org/blog/2017/04/28/buckminster-fuller/

Look Elsewhere!

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6 Ways to Break the Hypnotic Spell of the Mainstream Media

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Mainstream Media They Live

Here’s six steps to filter out media noise, break the hypnosis of the mainstream media, and get to the information that truly matters.

There is no information age. It doesn’t exist. There is only the Age of Noise. Because although we now appear to have an infinite ability to see everything that’s going on in the world at once, from photos of the world from space to the fact that our friends are indecisive about what to eat tonight, we have no ability to filter that information and sort for what matters. We have no reliable media gatekeeper. We only have the so-called “mainstream media,” which is just the advertising wing of multinational corporations.

We used to pay people to filter information for us: these were called professional journalists, writers and artists, whose job it was to dive into the sea of information and come back up with pearls for us. But we don’t pay those people anymore, because the media conglomerates that have consolidated into only a few massive holdings since the 1990s have realized that they don’t have to.

They don’t have to because their interest isn’t providing real information or truth, their interest is in providing content that gets as many people as possible to look at it, in order to get the most advertising money possible, because that’s how they get paid and can afford the salaries and insurance costs of the large staffs they need to do what they do. That’s their daily reality. And so they’re in the business of giving people what they want.

Since the 90s, the trend has increasingly been to cut out professionals and get people to generate their own content. That means reality television, YouTube, Facebook. No big budgets needed and far more profit gained. Since everybody is a star now, everybody is constantly generating more free content than we can ever consume. And so professional creatives have gone the way of the dinosaurs, and instead of getting reporting on, say, Karen Silkwood blowing the whistle on nuclear power, or Gary Webb’s expose of CIA drug trafficking, you’re getting reporting about how some celebrity is in a Twitter feud.

We have no more professional gatekeepers. We are scattered to the four winds, drowning in Facebook feeds or aggregation blogs. These mega-blogs, which we have mistakenly expected to replace mainstream media outlets, are in the same position: largely beholden to the tastes of their audiences, and stuck having to keep people happy with unchallenging, crowd-pleasing content to drive traffic to their site advertisers so that they can eat.

So where does this leave the information-poor individual who hopefully wants to get their head over the waterline enough to start to see the things that actually matter?

It means you have to be your own media gatekeeper. Flat out. You can’t outsource that job to somebody else anymore, because the mainstream media, or the alternative media, or Blog X, Y or Z, are not going to comprehensively do that job for you the way you need it done. They’re too beholden to economics, ratings and their own viewpoints and reality tunnels. And more and more, they’re probably not able to do that job because they’re not properly trained for that job, and I don’t mean just bloggers, because these days very few people who work in the mainstream media have any journalistic training at all. Nobody can get the information you need for you, you’ve got to do it yourself.

Luckily, we’ve got tools that can help us do that. Here’s a few beginning steps:

1. Decide what matters.

Faced with infinite information, you’ve got to decide up front what you’re going to filter for, at least initially. You’ve got to restrict your data to some extent, which sounds counterintuitive, but is necessary. You don’t need more information, you need more information about the things that matter. I suggest that the things that matter are, simply, information that can directly positively effect the welfare of you and your family, and information about the general welfare of the planet.

2. Use web tools to automate your info intake.

Everybody on the web is largely in the same position: grab info from a few news sources (like AP or Reuters) and then recycle it into blog content. They’re using the same tools as you to get their info. So cut out the middleman. I recommend setting up Google Alerts, for a start, to give you info about the issues you actually care about instead of waiting for somebody else to. Beyond that, I highly recommend using an RSS aggregator like Feedly to dump a lot of media outlets into an easy-to-digest feed. Work done upfront will pay off in time saved later. Reddit is also an excellent tool, as long as you stay off the dreaded, time-sucking front page and keep to subreddits pertinent to important topics.

3. Expand outside of your demographic bubble.

Whoever you are, you fit a demographic, which means that the mainstream media specifically tailors content that it knows you will like for the shows you watch and blogs you read, so advertisers can sell you products they’ve determined your demographic buys and use the language and images they know you will respond to, all in order to get you to make that purchase.

Expand out of the box they’ve decided you fit in. Read blogs and consume media from sources outside of your demographic, and that definitely means outside of your political and religious persuasion. Otherwise you’re blinkered not only to things that are going on around you, but also to parts of life you might be ignoring.

4. Read a book.

You still won’t get nearly as good of an info download from months on the Internet as you will from reading a well-researched, info-dense book, a book which, never forget, can represent years or decades of professional research and experience rather than an afternoon spent dashing off a blog post to throw out into the netherworld. Don’t stop reading, and reading better and more challenging books. The Web is really only a menu of culture; don’t forget to eat the meal.

5. Think critically.

Understand what confirmation bias is, and always consider the source of an article. Who wrote this, and what’s their agenda? What are they selling? Do they cite their own sources? Is this from a professional journalist/writer or from some wackadoo or salesman spouting off on the net? To dig deeper, get this excellent, comprehensive primer in critical thinking skills.

6. Meditate.

Sounds potentially hokey, but there is no better discipline for learning how to shut off what is pointless bullshit and go only for what actually matters than meditation, because in learning to control one’s own thoughts internally, dealing with external noise becomes immensely easier.

Information is power. Know how to get it. Don’t outsource it to the mainstream media to do it for you.

(The image and clip above are from They Live. If you haven’t seen this classic film, you must; it’s actually the best primer on seeing through social hypnosis and the mainstream media that you could hope for. Watch it here!)

from:    https://ultraculture.org/blog/2017/05/03/mainstream-media-hypnosis/