Clown Rapport
“A clown actually can be the loneliest place because you’re in there on your own and you have to be able to read your audience, in a short couple of minutes you have to be able to get a rapport going with them and interact and feed off them.” - Clown Shortage
The message of this artwork is "fuck you, hog, you'll take what we give you," and I actually think it would be more offensive to waste your time and mine by critiquing the component art here in good faith. The unique never to be repeated ever on The Immutable Blockchain name for this piece is simply "pepe". Let's not pretend anyone involved in actually profiting off of hashmasks as either corporate heads or cryptoart speculators is looking at these because they just love the backgrounds. If I like some of the pieces, the best I can do to honor them is to excoriate the artists' bosses. - oddball media crit
The United States’ wealthiest citizens— including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post; Tesla founder Elon Musk; Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates; and billionaire investor Warren Buffett — do not appear in the documents.*
*There are no North Americans in The Panama Papers because our billionaires do not need to do backflips and dirty tricks to avoid paying taxes. Being in the Panama Papers indicts North American not the countries that force billionaires to hide their wealth. :)
Garth’s Border Garden Sanctuary
In this article, we aim to develop a political economy of mass hysteria. Using the background of COVID-19, we study past mass hysteria. Negative information which is spread through mass media repetitively can affect public health negatively in the form of nocebo effects and mass hysteria. We argue that mass and digital media in connection with the state may have had adverse consequences during the COVID-19 crisis. The resulting collective hysteria may have contributed to policy errors by governments not in line with health recommendations. While mass hysteria can occur in societies with a minimal state, we show that there exist certain self-corrective mechanisms and limits to the harm inflicted, such as sacrosanct private property rights. However, mass hysteria can be exacerbated and self-reinforcing when the negative information comes from an authoritative source, when the media are politicized, and social networks make the negative information omnipresent. We conclude that the negative long-term effects of mass hysteria are exacerbated by the size of the state. - COVID-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria
While most of those attending Tuesday's Washington for Jesus rally listened to sermons forecasting the second coming of Christ, a small band of people with bare feet and white robes roamed the fringes of the crowd, telling others that Jesus had already returned.
Members of the group call themselves Christ's Family, and are led by Jesus Christ Lightning Amen, a 43-year-old, bearded recluse who, they say, is the reincarnated Christ, and California police say is Charles Franklin McHugh.
Their precepts forbid sex, materialism and the killing of animals for their meat or their skins. They admonish outsiders to "take those dead animals off your feet" and go barefoot. They smoke marijuana, which they say is a God-given herb. And they believe, "We're the true Christians. We live the life of Christ."
Traveling coast to coast "like the wind," the group rejects all work (they are working for God), sleeps in parks and sometimes searches for food in garbage cans ("salad bowls") outside restaurants and grocery stores. - Wapo
Merck COVID-19 pill success slams Moderna shares, shakes up healthcare sector
It would not be unusual for BARDA to consider a drug like EIDD-2801 (technical name for Merck pill - EIDD stands for Emory Institute for Drug Development which is the company that Merck bought the rights from). But Bright notes in his complaint that "similar experimental drugs in this class had been shown to cause reproductive toxicity in animals, and offspring from treated animals had been born without teeth and without parts of their skulls." - Science.org May 2020
EIDD-2801 Is and Example of Trump Pushing Bad Science: Rick Bright’s complaint points to the influence of industry over the Trump administration’s coronavirus response.
Both the Australian and a Canadian provincial government are amping up development of digital identity systems. The province of Ontario is seeking to build on the launch of a new framework for digital ID and authentication industry standards announced by Canada in September, while Australia has struggled to find a secure solution which protects privacy. Australia will be rolling out the new ID in the first half of this year, and Ontario will be focusing on delivering its program over the next two years. - wheeeeee