Manufacturing MILD
Manufacturing MILD
MILD: A longtime PR word to downplay threats, normalize harms, and manufacture consent by manufacturing doubt.
Locally contracted malaria is happening in Florida now, but CNN and Accuweather felt they needed to emphasize that it’s rare and mostly comes from going to those other countries in their headlines.1 With the Canadian wildfire smoke polluting the air over upstate New York and northeastern Pennsylvania in June 2023, the National Weather Service Binghamton chose to tweet about the horrendous air quality pollution by mentioning how mild the temperatures will be - mentioning the word “mild” twice in one tweet.2 It’s interesting how often the word “mild” is used to portray danger as benign, and even to promote moral disengagement.3 And some even attempt to portray people as having “untreated mental illness” when protecting themselves from smoke inhalation with NIOSH approved N95 masks.4
I suppose there are those who would mock the majority of people who fled Pompeii5 and think the reasonable bet really was getting pyroclasted into a grim posterity by the volcano, but I think most of us believe the people who fled were correct to do so.6 There are still some big shot elites who literally put themselves and others into a watery grave railing against the spectre of a “safety argument” against so-called innovation.7
Normalizing Harm
Normalizing negative effects and harmful outcomes is a cognitive warfare8 psychological strategy to delegitimize health & safety precautions, by manufacturing doubt.9
There are powerful interests who do not want safety precautions and are politically aligned against public health of any kind. They see prioritizing human health as a threat to their profits,10 counter to their long-term goals,11 and standing in the way of their eugenicist12 and pseudoscience-based ideological plans.13 Under the guise of individualism,14 these overlapping interests, including libertarian elites,15 the fossil fuel industry,16 and commercial real estate,17 among others, drive narratives to convince people oriented as conservatives to embrace ignorance on public health,18 and push the notion to everyone that sensible public health policies are hostile and unnecessary, or turn public health upside down, where safety is danger and danger is safety.19 All to put butts in seats downtown for The Economy. People hate the long commutes that benefit the fossil fuel industry, and people who don’t want to get sick tend to avoid working in crowded offices or eating in busy restaurants. So mocking those concerns as “irrational” anxiety, and ridiculing people for their alarm20 is used as a bullying tactic. It’s a long time anti-vax trope21 that’s deployed in climate contrarian propaganda, and to mock LGBTQ+ and Black activists.22
And what are they mocking? It’s perfectly reasonable to NOT want to get sick for days or weeks — the expected course of “mild covid”23 — and put up with that a couple times per year — the expected per person infection rate according to an epidemiologist who cited UK data.24 And most people considering the options would prefer to not risk getting severe Long Covid complications like Physics Girl has been facing since her mild acute case of covid — a formerly energetic Youtuber now often not able to stand up.25 The S in SARS stands for Severe, but even when it’s not very severe, sickness is just not desirable. Most Americans don’t have 2-8 weeks of paid sick time per year,26 and most low-wage workers have none at all,27 so mild is a relative term in that context as well.
It’s entirely normal to avoid sickness and injury, delaying incapacitation and death is the whole driving force of nearly all living creatures since the beginning of time. It’s the whole reason we have doctors and healthcare services. Why even bother with medical science if you just thought people ought to put up with being incapacitated and dying young? But many doctors have allowed themselves to be used as authority figures to manufacture doubt in promoting dangerous things. At one time the government allowed cigarettes to be advertised so widely that people thought it must be alright.28 The power of authority is persuasive.29
"Many people rationalize that if it were really dangerous the government wouldn't let it be advertised. They are wrong in that thinking. It is dangerous and the government does let it be advertised."
- Rick Pollay, Pack of Lies: The Advertising of Tobacco (1992)
Perhaps not surprisingly, historically, this word “mild” was very much a favoured word of the tobacco industry in their PR and advertising.30 People suspected smoking was bad for you and so they would claim a brand was “less irritating” according to doctors.31 They specifically described cigarettes as mild “so as not to provoke anxiety about health, but to alleviate it, and enable the smoker to feel assured about the habit and confident in maintaining it over time.”32
Industries pump out manufacturing doubt33 to portray any and all harms as supposedly mild, or even non-existent. And whenever they’re embroiled in any catastrophes, they typically default to trying to spin perception instead of addressing the harm.34 The elite panic phenomenon unfortunately seems likely for anyone in a position of power.35
🚩 Mild Red Flags 🚩
The word “MILD” has been so abused by PR and propaganda that it now should be an immediate red flag - a sign that it’s time to disengage autopilot, the “System 1” thinking that may accept without question things that sounds pleasant because it’s cognitively easier,36 and engage in critical thinking, so as not to be soothed and cooed into accepting bullshit or danger. The word “NORMAL” should also be looked upon with suspicion, since normal has repeatedly been forced37 as a political slogan38 and PR talking point,39 to try and convince people toward feeling assured that the harm happening is really okay actually. Once you notice the trick, the trick is nerfed.40
In a cognitive attack the whole point is that the target shouldn’t know they’re being attacked in order for it to be really effective. So that’s whole trick to keep the target unaware because if the target becomes aware that they’re being attacked in this way, just by them becoming aware it significantly reduces the effect of the attack.” — Rand Waltzman
MILD and NORMAL are always relative terms.
References:
Accuweather - Malaria cases in Florida, Texas are first US spread in 20 years, CDC warns. The disease is still quire rare in the country. Typically, if Americans get sick with malaria they’ve caught it while traveling overseas in areas where the mosquito-borne disease is more common. By Jen Christensen, CNN, Published Jun 27, 2023 The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning doctors and public health officials about a handful of locally acquired cases of malaria. There hasn’t been a case of malaria caught locally in the U.S. in 20 years. Typically, if Americans get sick with malaria they’ve caught it while traveling overseas in areas where malaria is more common. Malaria is a disease spread when the female anopheline mosquito feeds on a person with malaria and then feeds on another. The mosquito can be found in certain regions in the US, but malaria is still rare in the US. Worldwide there are 240 million cases each year, 95% in Africa. That could change with the climate crisis. Scientists have been warning people that malaria could become more common in the US as temperatures warm.
NWSBinghamton tweet 9:02 PM · Jun 6, 2023 Smoky conditions and mild temperatures expected to continue tomorrow. Persistent northerly flow will continue to maintain smoky conditions from wildfires in Canada, with the smoke keeping high temperatures on the mild side. #NYwx #PAwx.
Moral Sabotage & Community Care Disengaged. Public health has been under attack. Community care and cooperation is natural and desirable. Moral disengagement is anything but normal. By CHLOE HUMBERT - DEC 30, 2022 Euphemistic Language - Using sanitizing terms (eg martyrdom operations) so violent acts are seen as mild or benign. // “Mild” (meaning everything short of being hospitalized in the ICU on a ventilator) “It’s just like a cold” (referring to the first day of symptoms in the acute stage) “It’s no worse than flu” (which does kill some people, but doesn’t cause such a significant increase in cardiac events so it’s not a fair comparison) Long covid “fatigue” mischaracterized as “feeling tired”
People's CDC - COVID This Week / "Finished" COVID Still Infecting Surprised Americans / June 29, 2023 The camp of COVID minimizers continues its march farther into absurdist territory. Oncologist Vinay Prasad, one of the leading COVID minimizers, declared efforts at masking not only against COVID but the smoke in New York City from the Canadian fires without a randomized controlled study were signs of, quote, “an untreated mental illness plaguing public health,” end quote, as if no intervention could be pursued for each new public health threat we face until such years-long study was completed. That take might speak to the quality of Prasad’s COVID commentaries throughout the pandemic. Prasad’s arguments run in parallel to that of OceanGate CEO Stock Rush, who, in retrofitting his submersible with off-the-shelf, out-of-date parts and no safety beacon, argued safety overrated. “You know, there’s a limit,” Rush told a reporter, “At some point, safety is just pure waste. I mean if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything. At some point, you’re going to take some risk and it really is a risk-reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.” End quote. There are no regulations on these submersibles in international waters. The so-called disruptive libertarian entrepreneurs—these titans to reference the submersible’s name—switched to demanding the kind of immediate state intervention they’ve argued against for the rest of us during a deadly pandemic. “If I don’t [get a very positive response from the U.S. government by the time I wake up, declared OceanGate consultant David Concannon, “the whole world will know the names of the people who did not do their jobs.” End quote. Suddenly safety isn’t pure waste. The People’s CDC has never thought safety should be treated so badly. That’s why given the accumulating evidence of COVID’s continued dangers… …The People’s CDC is still fighting for COVID-safe practices, universal healthcare to access treatments, and broader public health overall.
NBC News: Pompeii family's final hours reconstructed. By Rossella Lorenzi, Dec. 11, 2008 75 to 92 percent of the residents escaped the town at the first signs of the crisis.
Elite Panic. Big shots have different goals than the rest of us. Politicians should be representatives, businesses shouldn’t lead, even billionaires can’t seem to buy common sense, and tech won’t save us. By CHLOE HUMBERT, JUL 13, 2023 Only about 2,000 people actually stayed behind in Pompeii to get pyroclasted into a grim posterity, out of around 20,000. The vast majority of those who lived in Pompeii were apparently alarmists who fled the city in an obviously rational fear of a volcano, and so escaped in time and lived out the rest of their lives elsewhere. What led a minority to stay behind? Normalcy bias? Propaganda? Seeing what’s happened in the pandemic, I came to suspect that perhaps elites convinced some essential workers that they needed to stay behind and keep the economy going in Pompeii just in case. We don’t know why those who did stay did so. But of course we don’t ask, in retrospect, why did people flee? We know why people fled - it was a good decision.
BBC News US & Canada - Titan sub CEO dismissed safety warnings as 'baseless cries', emails show. By Rebecca Morelle, Alison Francis & Gareth Evans, June 23, 2023 Mr Rush responded that he was "tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation". The tense exchange ended after OceanGate's lawyers threatened legal action, Mr McCallum said. "I think you are potentially placing yourself and your clients in a dangerous dynamic," he wrote to the OceanGate boss in March 2018. "In your race to Titanic you are mirroring that famous catch cry: 'She is unsinkable'". In the messages, Mr Rush, who was among five passengers who died when the Titan experienced what officials believe was a "catastrophic implosion" on Sunday, expresses frustration with the criticism of Titan's safety measures. "We have heard the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone' way too often," he wrote. "I take this as a serious personal insult." Mr McCallum told the BBC that he repeatedly urged the company to seek certification for the Titan before using it for commercial tours. The vessel was never certified or classed.
Cognitive Warfare First NATO Science Meeting Bordeaux ‒ June 21, 2021 “Cognitive warfare” is one of the ways used by specialists to modify, orient and alter human reasoning for the purpose of conquest, superiority or inferiority of individuals, a group of individuals, groups, or populations. It is based on the knowledge of the cognitive processes mobilized by these individuals in the use and the control of their environment, notably technological, by means of digital technologies. Generally speaking, the aim is to modify the awareness that individuals have of reality in order to make them take erroneous decisions or prevent them from taking necessary decisions.”
Rand Waltzman on Linkedin: Strategies for Manufacturing Doubt (6) Appeal to Mass Media, - Appeal to journalistic balance - Develop relationships with media personnel - Prepare information for media personnel - Invoke the Fairness Doctrine, Take Advantage of Target's Lack of Money / Influence - Silence or abuse individuals by - out-spending - exploiting a power imbalance, Normalize Negative Outcomes - Normalize the presence of negative effects - Reduce importance - Make them seem inevitable
CMD - How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On Covid By Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch | December 22nd, 2021 Lockdown measures drove down cases in the U.S. and likely saved millions of lives globally. But the decline of in-person shopping and work, combined with factory shutdowns in places like China, disrupted the economy. A 2020 report from the corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found the hardest-hit industries would take years to recover. One sector in particular that took a big hit was the fossil fuel industry. Oil demand fell sharply in 2020, placing the global economy on uncertain footing. Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines. Chief among them were groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world. The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.
Aeon - Against longtermism - It started as a fringe philosophical theory about humanity’s future. It’s now richly funded and increasingly dangerous. By Émile P Torres Yet the implications of longtermism are far more worrisome. If our top four priorities are to avoid an existential catastrophe – ie, to fulfil ‘our potential’ – then what’s not on the table for making this happen? Consider Thomas Nagel’s comment about how the notion of what we might call the ‘greater good’ has been used to ‘justify’ certain atrocities (eg, during war). If the ends ‘justify’ the means, he argues, and the ends are thought to be sufficiently large (eg, national security), then this ‘can be brought to bear to ease the consciences of those responsible for a certain number of charred babies’. Now imagine what might be ‘justified’ if the ‘greater good’ isn’t national security but the cosmic potential of Earth-originating intelligent life over the coming trillions of years? During the Second World War, 40 million civilians perished, but compare this number to the 1054 or more people (in Bostrom’s estimate) who could come to exist if we can avoid an existential catastrophe. What shouldn’t we do to ‘protect’ and ‘preserve’ this potential? To ensure that these unborn people come to exist? What means can’t be ‘justified’ by this cosmically significant moral end? Bostrom himself argued that we should seriously consider establishing a global, invasive surveillance system that monitors every person on the planet in realtime, to amplify the ‘capacities for preventive policing’ (eg, to prevent omnicidal terrorist attacks that could devastate civilisation). Elsewhere, he’s written that states should use preemptive violence/war to avoid existential catastrophes, and argued that saving billions of actual people is the moral equivalent of reducing existential risk by utterly minuscule amounts. In his words, even if there is ‘a mere 1 per cent chance’ of 1054 people existing in the future, then ‘the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth 100 billion times as much as a billion human lives.’ Such fanaticism – a word that some longtermists embrace – has led a growing number of critics to worry about what might happen if political leaders in the real world were to take Bostrom’s view seriously.
Longtermism and Eugenics: A Primer. The intellectual lineage of Nick Bostrom’s retrograde futurism. Feb 4, 2023 by Émile P. Torres / Truthdig Contributor Although the modern eugenics movement was born in the late 19th century, its influence peaked in the 1920s. During the 1930s, it was taken up by the Nazis, who actually studied California’s eugenics program in hopes of replicating it back in Germany. Despite the appalling crimes committed by the Nazis during World War II, eugenics still had plenty of advocates in the decades that followed. Julian Huxley, for example, presided over the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962, while also promoting the transhumanist idea that by controlling “the mechanisms of heredity” and using “a method of genetic change” (i.e., eugenics), “the human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself — not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity.” Today, a number of philosophers have defended what’s called “liberal eugenics” — transhumanism being an example — which many contrast with the “old” or “authoritarian” eugenics of the past century, although we will see in my second article for The Dig that the “old” and “new” eugenics are really not so different in practice.
Medpage Today: Report Shows Trump Administration Embraced Herd Immunity via Mass Infection — The strategy likely contributed to many preventable deaths, report notes - by Jennifer Henderson, June 22, 2022 "The concept of allowing herd immunity to develop via natural infection had a major consequence to it," William Schaffner, MD, of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, told MedPage Today. "Natural infection had the capacity to make very many people -- older people, people with underlying illnesses, people who are immunocompromised -- very, very sick." The price that's paid for permitting a virus that is new to a population and capable of making people sick to spread through that population is a lot of illness, hospitalization, and death, he noted. "That price is too high," he added. "We don't do that in public health. What we try to do is protect the weak, not expose them to illness and the risk of dying."
David Troy: Disinformation and its effects on social capital networks, 2023 Culture (i.e. the network) is upstream of politics. The Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci noted that “culture is upstream of politics,” a quote since co-opted by Andrew Breitbart and Steve Bannon. These political technologists understand that they are working at the network level on altering culture, while many people are focused on politics, which is a losing strategy. Relationships determine public health outcomes. Most of the information about a society is found in relationships. Speaking mathematically, a graph depicting a meshed network of 50 people will contain 1,225 relationships. When people talk about “individual” rights, they are willfully discounting the many relationships that may be affected by the behavior of individuals. This should serve as a reminder that any effort to promote specific human behaviors must be evaluated through the possible effects on human relationship networks, and whether those changes are positive or negative.
Jane Mayer, Dark Money. The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, January 2016 Fink was fascinated by the nuts and bolts of power. After studying the Kochs' political problems for 6 months he drew up a practical blueprint ostensibly inspired by Hayek's model of production, but impressed Charles by going beyond where his own 1976 paper on the subject had left off, called The Structure of Social Change. It approached the manufacture of political change like any other product. As Fink later described it in a talk, it laid out a three-phase takeover of American politics. The first phase required an investment in intellectuals, whose ideas would serve as the raw products. The second required an investment in think tanks, that would turn the ideas into marketable policies. And the third phase required the subsidization of citizens' groups that would, along with special interests, pressure elected officials to implement the policies. It was, in essence, a Libertarian production line, waiting only to be bought, assembled, and switched on. Fink's plan was tailor-made for Charles Koch who deeply admired Hayek, and approached both business and politics with the systematic mindset of an engineer. While some might find it disturbing to regard the democratic process as a factory, Charles soon adopted the approach as his own. As he told Brian Doherty, the libertarian writer, to bring about social change requires a strategy that is vertically and horizontally integrated. It must span, he said, from idea creation, to policy development, to education, to grassroots organizations, to lobbying, to political action. Before long libertarian wags had dubbed the Kochs' publicity-shy multi-armed assembly line, the Kochtopus, a name that stuck.
The Guardian - Rightwing war on ‘woke capitalism’ partly driven by fossil fuel interests and allies. Report shows connections of business and rightwing thinktanks to laws aimed at environmental, social and corporate governance. by Dharna Noor Thu 22 Jun 2023 Anti-ESG legislation has increasingly popped up in statehouses over the past two years. In 2021, North Dakota lawmakers passed a law calling for a study of the implications of state funds making investments “for the purpose of obtaining an effect other than a maximized return to the state”. The same year, Texas lawmakers passed a law prohibiting state funds from contracting with or investing in companies that “boycott” fossil fuel stocks, based on a policy passed four years earlier that aimed to prevent Texas from doing business with entities that support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, or BDS, movement, for Palestine. Similar legislation began to appear in statehouses across the country. Last year, Idaho, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Kentucky all passed various forms of anti-ESG legislation. The legislation is unpopular, the authors say, but they still expect to see more of it in the coming years as more policymakers take the energy transition more seriously. “We think this is the latest iteration of climate denial and obstruction and delay,” said Gibson.
The David Feldman Show - Chris Christie Wants A Fight With Trump/News For June 7, 2023 “Then I read in the Wall Street Journal today that commercial real estate in Manhattan is about to go belly up isn't that great news all the major corporations in America say they're cutting down on office space because everybody wants to work at home and this is really bad news for commercial landlords in the next three years 1.5 trillion dollars in commercial real estate loans are going to come due and the landlords can't pay it because the thing about commercial real estate loans is you never pay off the principal you just have to pay the interest with the idea being that the value of the real estate that you own increases so you sell it to pay off the loan when the loan comes due and then you keep the profit that's how you keep flipping real estate but now commercial real estate especially here in Manhattan where I've been feeling really poor and like a loser commercial real estate is empty which means all the landlords downtown are under water they owe more than they're worth isn't that great they owe the banks more than their buildings are worth and unlike Donald Trump or Jared Kushner these poor landlords they can't make deals with Saudi Arabia from the Oval Office to you know to get their loans paid off the commercial real estate bubble is about to pop and I'll still be a loser but I'll have company.” - David Feldman
The New Abnormal podcast - The Country Music Establishment Doesn’t Care If It’s Racist - Sunday, July 30, 2023 Conservatives don’t believe in the concept of public health. It baffles them.
The Economy demands full participation, herd debt paid on an altar of lies. “Public health” is operating, but with the wrong information and the wrong solutions to solve the wrong problems, because those calling the shots have the wrong goals. By CHLOE HUMBERT, DEC 23, 2022 They are being propagandized into blaming, and resenting, the people who have in fact been isolating or otherwise taking precautions to avoid sickness. It’s the only explanation that fits. They’re blaming the people who are masking. They have connected dots - but all wrong. They’ve been given different dots to connect, and they’ve connected them. They are NOT blaming their own covid precautions (that they didn’t do) for ruining their children’s immune systems. They are blaming OTHER people’s covid precautions for ruining herd immunity for their children. And it seems that’s why they want everyone else to unmask and get infected - as if that’d be a good thing when it’s obviously not doing good for the people, especially not the ones winding up in hospital or six feet under.
Teams Human: Alarm is appropriate, the volcano is erupting. By Chloe Humbert, Jul 6, 2022 What led that minority to stay behind? Normalcy bias? Propaganda? I wonder if perhaps elites convinced some essential workers that they needed to stay behind and keep the economy going. Perhaps some felt they had no other good option and just hoped for the best. We will never know the exact stories. But we’re seeing ours play out. Somehow those people were convinced staying behind was okay. What we don’t ask in retrospect, notice, is why did people flee? We know why and we understand they were right to do so. We also don’t ridicule them for having been scared into leaving Pompeii - possibly with fear mongering?
Science Based Medicine - Dr. Vinay Prasad echoes a common antivax trope that portrays concern about a deadly disease as irrational fear. Before the pandemic, antivaxxers likened concern about childhood diseases to mental illness. In the age of COVID-19, Dr. Vinay Prasad accuses medicine of “legitimizing” irrational anxiety and says we should treat COVID like the flu—with one telling omission. In a recent paid Substack, he doubles down and accuses physicians and scientists of anxiety disorders that “interfere with people’s lives”. David Gorski on September 19, 2022 I can see one reason why Dr. Prasad might want to target such monitors as an example of “irrational” anxiety, though. Many of the Tweets advocating them tend to recommend them in schools in order to reduce transmission there, and Dr. Prasad and the Brownstone Institute for which he writes have been nothing if not unrelentingly hostile for a long time to masks (which are portrayed as horrifically harmful) and any other COVID-19 mitigations in schools, such as school closures and virtual learning. Of course, the very title of Dr. Prasad’s little rant should tell you what I’m talking about when I point out that “COVID-19 contrarian” doctors often echo antivax talking points. There was a time when I used to give people like Dr. Prasad the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were clueless that the arguments they were making were not new and, prior to the pandemic, had been staples of antivaccine propaganda going back decades. Indeed, on several occasions, that benefit of the doubt led me to state emphatically and unequivocally that, no matter what I thought of him otherwise, I didn’t think that Dr. Prasad is was any way antivaccine. Nearly a year later, I can no longer say this about Dr. Prasad with nearly much confidence as I used to. As for the other “contrarians,” they have been told time and time again, with examples, that these talking points are old antivax tropes. They either refuse to believe or continue to use them anyway. Truly, the “new school” COVID-19 antivaxxers are coming more and more to resemble “old school” antivaxxers from days gone by.
DENY, DECEIVE, DELAY Exposing New Trends in Climate Mis- and Disinformation at COP27 (Vol 2) Climate Action Against Disinformation, January 2023 Michael Shellenberger - A longstanding critic of the environmental movement, in and around COP27, Shellenberger focussed on a relatively new line of attack: the supposed link between climate activism and mental illness. He continued to produce high-traction posts attacking renewable energy - a long-standing pillar of his outputs - but content discussing so-called ‘narcissism’ and ‘anxiety disorders’ was more prominent. He also launched attacks against ‘woke’ activists by connecting movements like Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ rights to psychological disorder. In the process, he has begun to explicitly reference the Great Reset conspiracy and alleged plans for energy and food shortages.
John Hopkins Medicine - Coronavirus Diagnosis: What Should I Expect? Updated on January 24, 2022 Reviewed By: Lisa Maragakis, M.D., M.P.H. Once symptoms appear, you have entered the acute stage. You may have fever, cough and other COVID-19 symptoms. Active illness can last one to two weeks if you have mild or moderate coronavirus disease, but severe cases can last months. Some people are asymptomatic, meaning they never have symptoms but do have COVID-19.
Your Local Epidemiologist - Riding the COVID-19 waves: 2023 style. By KATELYN JETELINA, AUG 1, 2023 Data from the UK shows that, on average, people get 1-2 infections yearly.
Skepchick - Physics Girl & the Devastating Effects of Long COVID. By Rebecca Watson Mar 31, 2023 Her friends and family write that she is almost completely bedbound, overly stimulated by lights and sounds (a commonly reported symptom of the disease), unable to hold conversations or even manage her own care. When you compare that to her bubbly, vivacious personality prior to COVID, the difference is horrifying.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics - Private industry workers with sick leave benefits received 8 days per year at 20 years of service. March 08, 2019 How many workers can use paid sick leave when they can’t go to work because of illness or other medical concerns? In March 2018, 71 percent of workers in private industry had paid sick leave benefits. About 6 in 10 of those workers received a fixed number of sick leave days each year. Four percent could use sick days as needed, and the rest were in consolidated leave plans, which provide time off for workers to use for a variety of purposes.
Economic Policy Institute: Over 60% of low-wage workers still don’t have access to paid sick days on the job by Elise Gould There is also huge variation in access to paid sick days across the private sector. Full-time workers are much more likely to have paid sick days than part-time workers (86% vs. 51%). Unionized workers have greater access to paid sick days than nonunion workers (87% vs. 76%). At 96% access, workers in management, business, and financial occupations have higher rates than any other occupation category. Services occupations have the least at 62%. Across industrial sectors, paid sick leave also varies greatly.
Pack of Lies: The Advertising of Tobacco (1992) "Many people rationalize that if it were really dangerous the government wouldn't let it be advertised. They are wrong in that thinking. It is dangerous and the government does let it be advertised." - Rick Pollay
Rand Waltzman on Linkedin Cialdini on Persuasion #5 - Authority. Audiences are much more likely to listen to messages from sources they respect or view as experts. Jesus was portrayed as a guerilla fighter in this poster. It was created by the Organization of Solidarity with the People Of Asia, Africa, and Latin America based on a quote from the Columbian priest Camilo Torres who said, “If Jesus were alive today, he would be a guerrillero.” The image also includes a cigarette ad for Viceroys, a drawing of a dentist with a serious look dressed in white saying in a speech bubble “As your Dentist I would recommend Viceroys.” and the caption heading reads Viceroys filter the smoke!
Pollay RW, Dewhirst T - The dark side of marketing seemingly “Light” cigarettes: successful images and failed factTobacco Control 2002;11:i18-i31. The international headquarters of B&W's parent firm, British American Tobacco, counselled that new marketing approaches should “create brands and products which reassure consumers, by answering to their needs. Overall marketing policy will be such that we maintain faith and confidence in the smoking habit . . . All work in this area [communications] should be directed towards providing consumer reassurance about cigarettes and the smoking habit . . . by claimed low deliveries, by the perception of low deliveries and by the perception of `mildness'. Furthermore, advertising for low delivery or traditional brands should be constructed in ways so as not to provoke anxiety about health, but to alleviate it, and enable the smoker to feel assured about the habit and confident in maintaining it over time”
Gardner, Martha & Brandt, Allan. (2006). " The Doctors' Choice Is America's Choice": The Physician in US Cigarette Advertisements, 1930-1953. American journal of public health. 96. 222-32. 10.2105/AJPH.2005.066654. In the 1930s and 1940s, smoking became the norm for both men and women in the United States, and a majority of physicians smoked. At the same time, there was rising public anxiety about the health risks of cigarette smoking. One strategic response of tobacco companies was to devise advertising referring directly to physicians.
World Health Organization - THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY DOCUMENTS WHAT THEY ARE, WHAT THEY TELL US, AND HOW TO SEARCH THEM A PRACTICAL MANUAL (2002) The WHO Tobacco Free Initiative would like to thank Dr Norbert Hirschhorn for the preparation of this document. Sample quotations from the documents on “light”, “mild” and “thin” cigarettes Communication [:] All work in this area should be directed towards providing consumer reassurance about cigarettes and the smoking habit. This can be provided in different ways, e.g. by claimed low deliveries, by the perception of low deliveries and by the perception of “mildness.” Furthermore, advertising for low delivery or traditional brands should be constructed in ways so as not to provoke anxiety about health, but to alleviate it, and to enable the smoker to feel reassured about the habit and confident in maintaining it over time [emphasis in original]. British American Tobacco, 1977 Bates no. 100427792/7800
Rand Waltzman on Linkedin Model Masters of Manufactured Doubt Tobacco Industry Wrote the playbook! Has successfully maintained its clientele for many decades Exploited manufactured scientific controversy about the health effects of active and secondhand smoking Coal Industry Have managed to avoid awarding compensation to many miners "affected" by black lung disease Wielded disproportionate influence in the courtroom Sugar Industry Effectively distracted from its contributions to metabolic and cardiovascular diseases Deflected blame toward dietary fat as a plausible alternative cause for rising population-level chronic disease rates Agrochemical Business E.g., Syngenta, manufacturer of the herbicide atrazine Conducted personal attacks against a vocal critic of atrazine whose research revealed disruptive effects on the endocrine systems of aquatic animals Marshall Institute Think tank comprised of physicists eager to maintain their proximity to government Deliberately misrepresented information to the government to both minimize and normalize the effects of fossil fuels on global temperatures.
Toxic Sludge is Good for You 2002 In today’s corporate culture major PR firms promote crisis management as a necessary business expense. Whenever something bad happens to a corporation, often its first move is not to deal with the actual problem, but to manage the negative perception caused by that problem.
Elite Panic. Big shots have different goals than the rest of us. Politicians should be representatives, businesses shouldn’t lead, even billionaires can’t seem to buy common sense, and tech won’t save us. By Chloe Humbert, JUL 13, 2023 The people in high places and big positions will never panic over the right things - they do elite panic. Left to their own devices, people in charge panic over the wrong things & try to fix things other than the actual crisis because they’re often more concerned with their own position within the status quo, and are more concerned about the upheaval of the status quo, than the damage that upheaval is causing. Ordinary people tend to respond with the appropriate alarm and an impulse to do a practical emergency response to protect oneself and one’s community, but are often at odds with the status quo in doing so, and are often stymied by the very people who should be providing support and leadership. Recognizing this phenomenon is vital in determining strategies to overcome it.
PBS – HACKING YOUR MIND – Living on Autopilot – Episode 101 – Aired: 09/09/20 It’s especially hard to overcome our autopilot biases because, much of the time, we’re not even aware we’re experiencing them. For instance, here’s an autopilot bias I can almost guarantee you’re not aware of — being biased in favor of one person over many people. One of Kahneman and Tversky’s closest colleagues studies how that bias distorts the decisions we make.
Forcing Normal in the Roaring 2020s. Elite panic kayfabe is timeless but not permanent. By CHLOE HUMBERT, DEC 13, 2022 The party photos from the roaring twenties are all from private archives of wealthy elite. That’s who was partying hard to the point of absurdity in the 1920s. The whole period of epidemics and life-threatening infectious disease was somehow memory holed behind a plastered patina of partying pics of elite ladies with bobbed hair smoking in public and their attentive dandies in boater derby hats, supposedly letting loose after the danger of the flu had passed, even though it’s debated whether it had any relation to the pandemic. The Sanitarians knew. Things were not actually safe at this time. This was before the antibiotic era and before the push for public health interventions people died “easily and frequently” from infections. The roaring 20s were a time when many people were not roaring but instead hobbled with infections and wailing over the untimely passing of loved ones. Deaths from infection were not uncommon, nor was disturbing and disruptive infectious disease. Not just in 1918 from flu, but through additional surges of flu through the 1920s, and other types of infections or infections undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. And while the fancy people were whooping it up, there were also people arguing and pushing for public health measures: the Sanitarians. They had their arguments published, and called upon professionals, advocates, and supporters to write their U.S. Senators and Representatives. John M Barry, author of the book The Great Influenza, remarked at a World Health Network meeting webinar that it took more epidemic surges over a decade in the 1920s to actually get legislation through Congress for solutions to this public health problem.
Return to normalcy - From Wikipedia "Return to normalcy" was a campaign slogan used by Warren G. Harding during the 1920 United States presidential election. Harding would go on to win the election with 60.4% of the popular vote. 1920 election. In a speech delivered on May 14, 1920, Harding proclaimed that America needed "not nostrums, but normalcy".[1] Two months later, during a homecoming speech, Harding reaffirmed his endorsement of "normal times and a return to normalcy."[2] World War I and the Spanish flu had upended life, and Harding said that it altered the perspective of humanity. He argued that the solution was to seek normalcy by restoring life to how it was before the war.[3] Harding's conception of normalcy for the 1920s included deregulation, civic engagement, and isolationism.[3] He rejected the idealism of Woodrow Wilson and the activism of Roosevelt, favoring the earlier isolationist policy of the United States.[4]
The Wrong Impact Research. By Chloe Humbert on Medium Jun 25 2023 Impact Research: “Declare the crisis phase of COVID over and push for feeling and acting more normal. Thanks to Democrats, we are nowhere near where we were two years, or even one year ago. Democrats have a tremendous opportunity to claim an incredible, historic success — they vaccinated hundreds of millions of people, prevented the economy from going into freefall, kept small businesses from going under, and got people back to work safely. Because of President Biden and Democrats, we CAN safely return to life feeling much more normal — and they should claim that proudly.”
Freedom of Mind Resource Center podcast - Beware the Metaverse: Dr. Rand Waltzman discusses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet “In a cognitive attack the whole point is that the target shouldn’t know they’re being attacked in order for it to be really effective. So that’s the whole trick to keep the target unaware because if the target becomes aware that they’re being attacked in this way, just by them becoming aware it significantly reduces the effect of the attack.” — Rand Waltzman