Tycoons demonizing remote work. đ Of course Marty Makary is Trumpy. đ§ The brain is a physical organ.
A "red-brown" scam in the UK has been an assault on the chronically ill and everyone, and it's infected the world with misinformation.
đNote: Yes, this is a time of huge gaslighting, and it has a lot to do with elite panic. We must all choose our media carefully and disengage from garbage in the information space.
Tycoons demonizing remote work in an agenda to deliberately wreck the government & future society.
My letter to reps:
Remote work is a part of modern society and should be prioritized wherever it can be in order to facilitate disability accommodation, tamp down fossil fuel expense and emissions, and reduce the spread of disease. Telework is a necessary part of a functional future society and should be incentivized in government work and private industry, wherever at all possible.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
Government Executive - Trumpâs âDOGEâ commission promises mass federal layoffs, ending telework The incoming administration will handle large-scale RIFs with compassion, Vivek Ramaswamy says. November 18, 2024 01:40 PM ET âSo this is a historic opportunity. We're not actually going to squander this.â He added that reductions to telework and relocating agencies would help motivate employees to leave government voluntarily. He called it a âdirty little secretâ that most federal workers âdonât even show up to work.â About 80% of the federal work hours are currently spent in-person, according to a recent Office of Management and Budget review, and more than half of federal employees do not telework at all because their jobs are not conducive to it. Of those who do telework, employees on average spent about three-fifths of their time on site. âIf you require most of those federal bureaucrats to just say, like normal working Americans, you come to work five days a week, a lot of them won't want to do that,â Ramaswamy said. âIf you have many voluntary reductions in force of the workforce in the federal government along the way, great. That's a good side effect of those policies as well.â
Many people in various jobs in various industries public and private legitimately work remotely. A lot of CEOs work remotely. A lot of business owners work remotely.
This attempt to marry telework to the old disinformation cliche trope of âpeople don-wanna workâ is dishonest. Tycoons want to âshrink the government in order to drown it in the bathtubâ because they donât want to pay taxes, and thatâs the dirty little secret laid bare here â they donât want to pay taxes, and they donât want anyone to create a functional society for people. They want a rigidly enforced class society made up of tycoons and all the rest, with everyone in servitude under a microscope marching to their petty self-serving orders. Iâm guessing a lot of Trump voters work remotely, because in a modern society it is a norm! I suspect that even Trump voters donât actually want to go backwards on this. What about Elon Musk futuristic fans? Do they think ending modern remote options in various fields should happen? It doesnât really make sense that these tech moguls are so against modern tech solutions, right?
Nobody is fooled â It doesnât make sense for anybody but the billionaires.
This anti-telework agenda is about tycoons who donât want to pay their fair share after getting rich exploiting the rest of society. This agenda against work from home is about tycoons who are jealous that talented people choose to work for the government, doing work that is a benefit to society, and want to force them into bullshit jobs in private industries, just to avoid in-person office work for various reasons, including disability (declared or undeclared). This hostility to remote work is about commercial real estate wanting butts in seats downtown for the economic finances of real estate moguls and the investors that treated real estate investments like a casino. The pandemic accelerated a trend toward telework already happening, and ramped up real estate investor exposure to loss, and they want to socialize that loss. And this anti-telework agenda is about fossil fuel interests wanting everyone to continue arduous fuel-intensive pollution laden dangerous harrowing commutes to jobs that donât need to take place in an office, and which are often done more efficiently remotely.
đď¸ In the news
Could Avian Flu Cause Our Next Pandemic? â Let's not bury our heads in the sand by Claire Panosian Dunavan, MD, Contributing Writer, MedPage Today November 16, 2024 "Given what we've already seen in some of these farms where barn cats drink the milk and end up with aggressive illness and a 50% fatality rate, I specifically mentioned: if people like to drink raw milk...the pets in their house probably drink it too." Finally, what if a cow with asymptomatic A/H5N1 infection went to slaughter? As Ostroff reminded me, certain people also feed raw-beef products to their pets. In fact, while at FDA, he sometimes oversaw national recalls after Salmonella or another bacterial pathogen contaminating such products sickened not just a pet but humans in the same household. In 2025, ingesting raw milk, beef, or chicken could be one more way a pet could get sick, shed A/H5N1 virus in its respiratory secretions or stool, and thus expose its owner.
Important Context Oct 4, 2024, 8:05âŻAM - A Koch-Funded Lawfare Group Is Suing The Biden Admin To Protect Vaccine Skepticism New Civil Liberties Alliance is back again. Walker Bragman Over the years, Koch family foundations have showered NCLA with money. From its inception in 2017 to 2022, the group got $3 million from the Charles Koch Foundation. Stand Together Fellowships, formerly known as the Charles Koch Institute, gave it $2 million between 2020 and 2021. Stand Together Trust, another Koch family group, gave $1 million in 2022. DonorsTrust, meanwhile, a donor-advised fund preferred by Koch network donors, has funneled $5 million to the organization between 2018 and 2022. NCLA has other major corporate-aligned backers as well. The 85 Fund, the funding group of Trump judicial adviser and legal activist Leonard Leo, who has helped stack the judiciary with far-right judges, gave $1 million in 2020.
Marty Makary is a covid contrarian, cozy with anti-vaxxers.
Marty Makary has been making the rounds for ages on everything from CSPAN and CBS to The Ralph Nader Radio Hour. But make no mistake, there's good reason heâs welcomed into the seedy MAGA ranks of Trumpy Trumpworld. Heâs just another doctor in the infect-everyone club with people along the lines of Scott Atlas.
He was part of the symposium of covid contrarians celebrating the anniversary of The Great Barrington Declaration. In 2020 he was a Fox News contributor. A while back Makary was quoted in a far-right media outlet that sells supplements, an industry some say fuels the right-wing political world, in an article that was attacking Paxlovid, dangerously and wrongly telling people not to use it for covid, for reasons that didnât make sense. Sure, many doctors sometimes get these things very wrong. But the strange part was that Marty Makary was confusing Paxlovid with Molnupiravir, an entirely different drug, and attributing the way Molnupiravir works to Paxlovid, which is not accurate. Thatâs a troubling mistake to make.Â
But then Makary is also a surgeon who actually mocked hand washing in a Congressional hearing, where he was brought in to testify by Republicans along with other Great Barrington Declaration natural herd immunity infect-everyone proponents. Itâs odd how Trump has a reputation for germaphobia and yet two cabinet picks are actually notoriously known for anti handwashing. The other being Pete Hegseth who has such a laundry list of other things wrong with him you may have missed the handwashing thing - but thatâs something that certainly stuck with me.
Marty Makary is apparently famous for the off-base factoid that medical errors are a leading cause of death even though his math doesnât add up at all.Â
In August 2021 he co-authored an anti-mask op-ed with Trumpy doctor Cody Meissner who now chants anti-vax herd immunity crap at FDA vaccine meetings. In September 2021 he was pushing natural herd immunity, even after vaccines were available - which was essentially promoting needlessly letting babies get sick unvaccinated, a view shared with the notorious and sad Vinay Prasad, and Tracy Hoeg, someone with behaviour so unsettlingly right-wing that people only talk about some of it in private whispers.
So at some point you have to let go of the hopium that heâs some kind of moderate centrist who and both-sides things. This doctor shouldn't be normalized at all. He is NOT normal, no matter how much the media tries to manufacture mild on various and sundry Trumpy cabinet picks, or people wish-cast that nothingâs as bad as feared. Marty Markary is very much a Trumpy weirdo. And I wish people with platforms would stop being fooled, or somehow incentivized, into this truth-teller type nonsense when his math was all built on exaggerated fictions. And his opinions seem built on contrarianism.
I really wouldnât trust this person for medical information, and I certainly donât trust his politics.
Important Context - Everything You Need to Know About Donald Trumpâs FDA Pick Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary has spent years promoting fringe pandemic views and attacking the U.S. government. Walker Bragman Nov 20, 2024 He has authored multiple books on the subject including 2019âs âThe Price We Pay,â which argued that costs were simply too high. With the pandemic, he has emerged as a popular figure on the political right for his particular brand of contrarianism, which has included falsely asserting in a February 2021 op-ed that the U.S. would achieve COVID herd immunity by April of that year. Even before COVID, Makary was controversial. In 2016, he was behind a widely rebuked study in the British Medical Journal purporting to find that medical error was the third leading cause of death in the U.S. Shortly after publication, the editors-in chief of BMJ Quality and Safety debunked the findings.
Eric Weinstein & Jeffrey Tucker sore over not being A-List in MAGA.
They see themselves as âdissident expertsâ and theyâre disappointed that the anti-expert movement doesnât necessarily want wrong experts either, maybe just lackeys.
Eric Weinstein quote tweeting Jeffrey Tucker on Twitter: âMAGA doesnât understand how administration Jobs work. If dissident experts were so hungry for jobs for personal gain they wouldnât have been living on scraps and berries fighting this war against Washington before Trump ever came on the scene. They sacrificed their comfort for the country often scraping by. That is not the class of people asking to be made Treasury secretary on Twitter. The MAGA picture of expertise is wrong. Expertise didnât fail. What failed is which experts we went with for 32 years. We just have the wrong experts everywhere. Donât be afraid of non MAGA dissident experts. But they arenât going to fall over themselves to beg for a position. The interpretation of MAGA and the campaign not reaching out is this: The transition team doesnât understand the dissident expert landscape and doesnât seem to care to either. Itâs about loyalty.â
Sam Explains Eric Weinstein's New Batcrap Conspiracy - The Majority Report - Nov 16, 2024 Sam Seder: âthe dude is literally on Twitter talking about how he should be brought in for at least one of these rolesâ
A âred-brownâ scam in the UK has been an assault on the chronically ill and infected the world with misinformation.
If this isnât proof of what a relatively small group can accomplish - or ruin with sabotage - I donât know what is.
Far Left or Far Right? Posted on 1st November 1998 Living Marxismâs interesting allegiances By George Monbiot. Published in Prospect Magazine, November 1998 The two organizations share a strangely one-sided conception of freedom, celebrating and defending the âfreedom toâ of those with the power to act, while dismissing threats to the âfreedom fromâ of those who might be affected. So, limiting the scope of racist publications insults our humanity, even though they might incite racists to beat up black people, while restricting car use is a fundamental assault on liberty, even though being hit by cars is now the commonest cause of death for children between the ages of one and fourteen. âIt is those who have suffered the most,â LM tells us, âwho should be listened to the least.â Both organizations also appear to believe that the weak and vulnerable are best served by being allowed to fend for themselves, without interference from âdo-goodersâ and âpuritansâ. Left to their own devices, both adults and children are capable of resisting tobacco advertising, alcopops, paedophiles and pornographers, whatever the imbalance of power between perpetrator and victim may be. Indeed corporations, LM appears to suggest, should be free to do whatever they want, except sueing LM for libel. But the similarities end with the ideology. While the Libertarian Alliance is a shabby, disaggregated outfit, LM is professional and well-organized. Glossy, well-written and cleverly edited, distributed largely for free, supported by its own research organization and an excellent website, the magazine seems to have no shortage of money, yet no obvious sources of major funding.
Sometimes people are not what they would like us to believe.
The Guardian - Maeve Boothby OâNeill died because of a discredited view of ME. How was this allowed to happen? George Monbiot Fri 18 Oct 2024 Two stalwarts of LM were the sisters Claire and Fiona Fox. Claire Fox became one of Nigel Farageâs Brexit party MEPs, before Boris Johnson made her a peer. Fiona Fox was one of several RCP alumni who, in the early 2000s, founded or took key roles in science communication groups. She became the first director of the Science Media Centre (SMC). This positioning at the interface between science and the media of members of the group was not easy to explain. Most, including Fox, appeared to have no background in science. But she had written an article for the RCPâs journal appearing to suggest that ME is caused by losing your âframework for understanding the worldâ. These organisations came to dominate the mediaâs understanding of certain scientific issues. Science is huge, complex and confusing. They offered simplicity: these are the big stories, this is how to understand them, these are the scientists to talk to. Though it was highly controversial, the SMC championed the âbiopsychosocialâ school of ME/CFS research and promoted its favoured treatments, especially cognitive behavioural therapy and graded exercise therapy. The story it seemed to push hardest concerned abuse and harassment by angry patients of scientists with a psychological view of the illness. The media ran and ran with it.
It always seems to come back to eugenics and accelerationism, doesnât it?
The brain is a physical organ.
I found an article about inappropriate things professionals in healthcare settings have been heard saying, and a lot of it is pretty bad. But it was nice to see a doctor in a medical publication saying what Iâve been saying for years: The brain is a physical organ.
MedPage Today - The Worst Thing I've Heard a Doctor Say â Awkward, offensive, cringe-inducing things colleagues have said by Mikhail Varshavski, DO October 17, 2024 My name is Jake Goodman and I'm in my last year of psychiatry residency. The worst thing I have ever heard a doctor say about a patient was, "It's all in his head. It's not real." In our head is a really complex thing called a brain. It's an organ just like any other organ in your body and it can get sick, just like with your other organs. If your pancreas gets sick, you can get pancreatitis. If your lungs get sick, you can get emphysema. If your brain gets sick, you can get depression or anxiety, [post-traumatic stress disorder], psychosis, and insomnia. It's in our heads, but that doesn't make it not real. It's as real as any other medical condition.
I think often calling something psychosomatic is a cop-out by clinicians for stuff they donât understand or whatever medical science hasnât figured out already. Which is why it gets applied often to people with Long Covid and various post-infection conditions that are poorly understood, or even poorly studied so far. And it's why there's this weird carve out for mental health where it's not treated as healthcare, for example by having separate insurance coverage for âbehavioral healthâ - a term that seems to indicate the purpose is controlling behavior rather than relieving suffering.
I go further and say that the assertion of âpsychosomaticâ or âall in the headâ is actually based in superstition.Â
Political abuse of behavioral science and mental health. Chloe Humbert Apr 12, 2024Â Anyone who tells you a health issue, mental illness or physical illness, is âpurely psychologicalâ is telling you they believe in superstition and metaphysics, they are not talking about medical science, because the brain is a physical organ, and there is no thought or behaviour divorced from the human body in scientific terms - only in supernatural or religious terms.
Quote:
âThe way voting on comments works, the way certain things rise to the top, the way it governs what becomes visible and what doesnât, that all winds up kind of pulling the strings on the discussion in a way that is not necessarily visible to you if this is the only way youâve ever known it.â
â Jason Pargin, on the podcast The New Abnormal, Sept 22, 2024