Jessica Burn Notice – wat3rm370n

Why I don’t subscribe to Doomer Wildfire, and you probably don’t want to either.

I have a problem with Jessica Wildfire’s influence brand because she habitually platforms fatalism and pseudoscience as a monetized influencer. I use the term brand, because we have no way to know what’s behind this online persona. Not all fellow travelers are allies, and sometimes influencers are not even fellow travelers.

In an essay talking about a fear of possible shortages of standard medicines,¹ she places links for purchasing dubious preventatives for covid. Jessica Wildfire listed copper nose wands and an unproven nasal spray before masks and vaccines. These pseudoscience products have been heavily promoted on social media targeting especially high risk people who are finding it increasingly difficult to avoid exposure because of the abandonment of public health measures.

The image is a screenshot of text that states The best course of action here is to not get sick. I’ll tell you what I’m doing: We donated three excellent air purifiers with HEPA filters to my daughter’s school. We bought Coway and Rabbit Air. Here’s a list of solid brands. We’re using Enovid. We’re using Copper Rescue. We’re wearing 3M Aura masks everywhere we go. We’re not really going anywhere. — and the list continues with other things — (Note: After pushback in the comments about putting masks below unproven remedies, she moved those items below masks on the list, but still kept the product links.)

Science-Based Medicine’s Steven Novella debunked the unproven copper wand treatment for cold virus back in 2019, explaining that, “a lot of modern snake oil is based on some science” and that it’s “extremely useful for marketing” ²— clearly all bunk stories start with a kernel of truth. Viruses and bacteria can’t live on copper. But apparently that’s about as far as its usefulness goes — maybe countertops. Some copper products are already on the FDA covid fraud list.³ There’s no good reason for sticking a wand up your kid’s nose. And since it’s marketed to go deeply it could far too easily result in injury. The other product placed in the list is NOT the first hormonal birth control pill from the 1960s, though it shares the same name. The drug is a nasal spray that’s on a U.S. FDA import alert list⁴ as NOT known to be safe and effective as marketed. Also it’s only being studied as a potential treatment⁵ for covid — not a preventative — not even the people studying it view it to be like a vaccine or shield. But it has been heavily marketed on social media with a dishonest innuendo of prophylactic protection from transmission, something not even asserted in the study, but potentially appealing to those desperate to attend risky activities at a time when there’s a huge pressure campaign to unmask everybody.⁶ Even though this marketing has been expressly prohibited by the FTC.⁷

I’ve not seen any disclosure that Jessica Wildfire is receiving money for product placement links. But some influencers, even big ones, fail to disclose direct payments.⁸ Some countries do not even require disclosure, and since we have no idea who this influencer really is, we don’t know where she is. And this isn’t the first time someone has wondered about that: Noel Holston sarcastically uses the headline: “The Truth about Jessica Wildfire” to write a piece on Medium about how he doesn’t know what the truth is about Jessica Wildfire — he says: “I couldn’t find where she went to college, much less where she teaches.”⁹

The Truth about Jessica Wildfire by Noel Holston on Medium — March 13, 2022. “As for her being a “Top writer” in a variety of subjects, my searches turned up her blog, which cross-references her Medium contributions and Medium profile, and three slight books available for purchase on Amazon.com that have only a dozen or so purchaser reviews or star ratings each. No bylines at Slate, Salon, POLITICO, Reason, not even Huffington Post. And yet she’s credited on her Medium page as having 101K followers.”

A discussion between Matthew Remski and Julian Walker on Conspirituality podcast comes to mind — about how wellness influencers find “transitive properties that could move across different categories.” Finding multiple niche audiences is clearly a way to make money in the influence business. And much of the social media influencer economy is driven indirectly. An influencer covers a topic, or pushes a particular narrative or product, and they find that they can reliably get views, boosts, likes, paid patrons, and subscribers. It’s not that difficult to encourage — people are able to learn fast what products have this kind of money behind them and the preferred frame that reliably attracts money. Those with the cash to spend need only cast about for the eager. One need not be directly employed as a “Russian asset” or directly paid by a fossil fuel company or a specific billionaire — or anything so on the nose.

And if Jessica Wildfire is just a writer who happens to be a pro-Russia lefty, angry about the war, or seriously just feels Ukraine is losing, why express that by boosting right-wing guru Jordan Peterson with a link to Piers Morgan?

Yes, that Jordan Peterson.

Jessica Wildfire promoted the libertarian anti-mask anti-vax self-help fanatic right-wing influencer. She didn’t need to reference Jordan Peterson to write about Russia — she’s done that on other occasions.

Jessica Wildfire: Vladimir Putin Has Weaponized Food, His Secret Failsafe, June 9 2022. “They cheered when Russian tanks blew up. They treated war like a football game, because that’s all Americans understand anymore. Well, the fun’s over.”

I don’t know any Americans like that in real life. Who is she referring to? What is she even talking about? Many big money sources seem interested in boosting demoralizing content — or in the words of Leonid Volkov quoted in the New Yorker, to make the discourse “so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it.”¹²

Jessica Wildfire could be promoting instead people calling on their member of congress¹³ about the concerns she shares about — pandemic, war, or whatever. That’s how actual policy change can happen. That’s why the right-wing organizes¹⁴ people to show up at school board meetings,¹⁵ to churn out letters to your Democratic congressman, and to get out the vote to elect any and all Republican candidates. But Jessica Wildfire won’t tell you that — instead, in May 2022, she says without citing evidence (because it’s not really true), that politics is probably too slow to be of much use.¹⁶

Jessica Wildfire: May 8, 2022. “There’s still something to be said for engaging in the political process, but it’s slow and grinding work. It won’t save us in the short term. Political activism takes a long time.”

No it actually isn’t and doesn’t. Just over a year ago there was a letter campaign I found on social media saying to write or call the White House to ask to have free N95s provided to the public,¹⁷ so I did, and a few weeks later President Biden made free N95s available to the public.¹⁸ All I did was use the White House contact page,¹⁹ it was hardly “grinding work” and it just took a couple minutes. And yet in January 2023, Jessica Wildfire insists, again without evidence (because it’s not true) that the government won’t make masks accessible,²⁰ even though the Biden administration had made N95s available already in the past.²¹

Jessica Wildfire: January 14 2023. “Our governments should’ve made masks accessible to everyone. But because they won’t, we’ve stepped up. My family is doing the government’s job for them, because it’s the only way to protect our child.”

This supposedly “covid conscious” writer fails to mention that there’s currently a letter campaign calling for the free N95 mask program to be restarted again.²² There are also multiple ways to advocate for masks in schools including lawsuits.²³ Her piece says there are fine lines between advocacy and “badgering” — but since when is writing your elected officials called badgering? Heck, some activists are doing birddogging — a valid political tactic.²⁴ Characterizing people who lobby elected officials as “annoying” is silly. There’s a whole legitimate profession for it. These officials are elected and are supposed to respond to constituents, that’s how a representative democracy works.

Jessica Wildfire: January 14 2023. “In some cases, it really is too dangerous to advocate for masks and indoor air quality. In some places, it really will get you physically harassed or even attacked.”²⁵

Suggesting parents might be physically attacked for calling on elected representatives is a complete manipulation of reality via a cognitive trick called “System 1” autopilot hijacking²⁶ — a well understood dishonest sales tactic. The assertion invokes the news stories you’ve heard about bizarre school board meetings where public officials have been intimidated. That’s a problem, but if you stop and think this through it really doesn’t hold up — that it is “too dangerous to advocate.” Physically attacked by who? A member of the school board is going to attack a parent? They’re the ones getting intimidated though, by parents or riled citizens. Hopefully she’s not suggesting you become one of them. How many school principals are going to physically attack a parent for sending a letter requesting HEPA filters in the classroom? She is invoking the stories of incidents at school boards that were actually designed to make civic engagement seem harrowing. Some people have been rude and unruly toward school board members over issues like mask mandates or Black History or trans students, but I can’t find any reports of any parents getting threatened, certainly not for asking for air purifiers. Sure there were some ridiculous pandemic denier accounts on Twitter who preposterously came out against air filters — probably purely as attention seeking — but that’s not real life. Getting physically attacked by school officials is just not a thing and I don’t know why Jessica Wildfire wants you to worry about it. She surely doesn’t think the only advocacy you can do is to show up at some school board meeting when Nazis are there²⁷ and aggressively go toe to toe with them? Nobody sensible would float such an innuendo that advocating at schools might require going it alone against rogue astroturfed right wing phone company mobs.²⁸ I find this all concerning though because there are other things from the Jessica Wildfire brand that seem to hint and dance around the topic of violence. Only just a little flirtation with being l’agent provocateur, of course. The vague suggestions that you become a prepper,²⁹ or that you have a duty to get rude.³⁰

Conspirituality Podcast — 136: Virtual Strongmen (w/Ruth Ben-Ghiat)

“With regard to strongmen, conspirituality folks fantasize about violence, but not too much violence. I think it’s a movement that needs its authoritarians to perform strength more than to exert it. And to me this suggests that they’re not really that dissatisfied with the status quo. Everybody wants a revolution, but these guys really want to make it happen through supplements and ball tanning and reciting course miracles.”

“They’re part of a depoliticization project.”

— Matthew Remski, Conspirituality Podcast³¹

There are still political options with a longstanding tradition, rooted in democratic norms, taking place right now, such as organizing to get federally funded ventilation and filtration upgrades in schools,³² or pushing for policies to ensure schools are up to air quality standards for virus mitigation.³³ If you don’t want to participate in the political process, fine, but don’t dishonestly claim that it’s not happening.

Jessica Wildfire: January 14 2023. “I was persistent, even pushy. I said the uncomfortable things, that Covid was more like HIV than the flu, that Covid was never going away”

Jessica Wildfire suggests parents compare COVID to HIV when talking to the school³⁴ — so that probably will increase the chances of being viewed with trepidation or skepticism, she’s not wrong about that. These weird niche social media silos are almost perfectly designed to encourage people with pandemic related concerns to sound similar to Qanon — reciting inaccurate talking points and remedies. Copper and silver, pastes or sprays, compare it to the flu, compare it to AIDS. Yes, this stuff would make most people uncomfortable. And what’s so weird about this is that there is simply no need to “do your own research” or make exaggerated claims since the documented facts on the CDC website³⁵ are plain and speak for themselves about the very real risks³⁶ of Covid and Long Covid. It’s been reported in Forbes,³⁷ Fortune,³⁸ Financial Times,³⁹ and Bloomberg.⁴⁰ No need to seek out fringe publications. The controversy is hype to keep eyeballs on social media, disconnected and endlessly searching and seeking instead of working to promote public health prevention measures politically and in the community. And Jessica Wildfire seems to bask in making herself and her target audience into solo weirdos with secret special knowledge⁴¹ and seems to luxuriate in making the most simplest of civic engagement sound monumentally hard.⁴²

Jessica Wildfire: January 14 2023. “Just remember, it’s obviously not going to be easy. It took us both a lot of energy. It was difficult. It was uncomfortable. We didn’t hedge or qualify. We laid down the grim facts, and we didn’t care if they thought we were paranoid or crazy.”

It doesn’t have to be this big a deal folks, it really doesn’t. And the truth is people are advocating,⁴³ agitating,⁴⁴ demonstrating,⁴⁵ and commenting at public meetings,⁴⁶ for better policies all over the U.S. — it’s not weird at all to be doing so, and I link to news stories about it in my newsletter regularly. Why does Jessica Wildfire not do that? And people are hardly alone in their efforts. But Jessica Wildfire’s Substack has multiple instances of promoting this ridiculous narrative of activism being so lonely, arduous, and difficult. Some letter campaigns involve just pushing a few buttons, for pity’s sake. So just stop the gaslighting. There are established organizations that already exist who are giving people tools with good information for advocating,⁴⁷ and organizing to get equipment funded in schools. Groups are working to press their local governments⁴⁸ and transit systems,⁴⁹ or utilize legal levers.²³ We’re not alone in some bleak world. We have each other. And the people involved in activism and advocacy — disclosure, I’m one of them — are hardly humourless bores⁴⁵ with nothing but lamentations and critiques.

We certainly don’t need to dive into some weird gloomy balloon fever dream fantasy about being part of a network of disconnected cults.⁵⁰ Why wallow in dark dystopian imaginings of the night? Any minute now I expect Jessica Wildfire to produce some John Titor⁵¹ content. The present situation is weird enough because a few rich libertarians want to push the idea that a mask requirement in a doctor’s office is tantamount to full communism. Jessica Wildfire’s offerings are hardly the only spin zones that trick people into pluralistic ignorance,⁵² believing that they’re a special minority when really our biggest concerns are the same concerns a majority of our fellows actually share. But some people won’t find the caring and passionate allies advocating with a bright vision if they stay stuck flirting with the event horizon of time sink think pieces written by clout chasing social media big shots. Community care is the solution to the problems we face as a civilization. Jessica Wildfire wants you to conflate hope with hopium,⁵³ and maybe you’ll be complacent with despair, and believe the lie being pushed in the name of the Economy⁶ that avoiding sickness is a minority issue, when it’s not — it affects all of us — and nobody really likes getting sick. Hidden in plain sight, the truth is that most American voters want mask rules⁵² — not just want masks — most people want actual mask mandates.

About 20 million people participated in the first Earth Day in some way on April 22, 1970⁵⁴ and this environmental campaign started amid the turmoil of the Vietnam war — yet by the end of 1970 we had The National Environmental Protection Act & the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act by 1972.⁵⁵ Two years. Nixon was the president at the time, by the way. Of course things change. Things change all the time. Normal changes quite easily⁵⁶ in fact, and only change is constant. It’s not effortless, but no, Jessica Wildfire, political action doesn’t have to take a really long time. But it sure takes longer when it’s being sabotaged by influencers who discourage people from productive activities and direct people instead to false promise pseudoscience and an endless social media rabbit hole of informational learned helplessness.⁵⁷

Conspirituality Podcast — 136: Virtual Strongmen (w/Ruth Ben-Ghiat)

“They don’t express political aspirations because the industry is narcissistic. It doesn’t really point itself toward any kind of collective action or the difficult work of party politics. None of these people are interested in building coalitions. They want to have affiliate networks, but they’re not going to do deep canvassing and try to convince people to vote. They want people to buy their shit.”

“They’re part of a depoliticization project.”

— Matthew Remski, Conspirituality Podcast⁵⁸

And if you think there’s no way a mask wearing writer could be a right-wing wellness influencer, I’m afraid I have to inform you about the red-brown alliance,⁵⁹ the infiltration of left movements⁶⁰ where chaos agents even mess with community support groups,⁶¹ and how far-right libertarian fever dreams have infiltrated liberal scientists⁶² with their weird religious ideas⁶³ about how we need to do aggressive individualism and maybe even sacrifice human lives today in order to, brace yourself, create “value” in artificial simulated humans billions of years in the future.⁶⁴ Yes this Longtermism stuff is that out there, and there’s tons of money being splashed around to push it everywhere.⁶⁵

Jessica Wildfire: May 8, 2022. “Progressive survivalism means taking care of yourself, so you can make a future for civilization, one based on sustainability and empathy. We don’t want to just fend for ourselves.”⁶⁶

Jessica Wildfire is an influencer by trade and so I don’t know what she really believes. I’m not saying she believes in anything. The point is that some people don’t realize the nature of her online presence and that influencers sometimes take advantage of those unfamiliar with advertising hooks and gimmicks that sell products and also ideas. To be an influencer of course means she has a way of ingratiating herself into hearts and minds by telling her audience what they want to hear. People see what they want to see because the influencer leaves things vague and open ended enough to facilitate that, while inserting the ads or narratives. It’s also quite alluring to be told you’re special, that you have special knowledge, that you’re smarter than other people.⁴¹ Maybe that you’ll survive when others won’t? Disease is neither fair nor just and this would qualify as ableism at best, or worse, could be characterized as eugenics.

I think most people would not actually buy into that if they engaged in critical thought about what that’s really saying. But most of the time people don’t think about it — we stay on autopilot.⁶⁷ Or sometimes people also don’t want to believe it. There has been such fierce defense of her — almost like a lover’s defense might manifest. I’ve heard some claims multiple times from different sources which is a little suspicious, so I’d like to address them, since none hold any water and are based on people being either unaware or unwitting.

“But she has some pieces that give some good information sometimes.”

You can’t say a broken clock is a good tool because it happens to show the correct time this minute or occasionally. When you boost a link to one article, people will subscribe, and get the other issues sent to their inbox that contain bullshit pseudoscience or unproven remedies, or messages erroneously telling people lies like “We’ve worn out our vaccines and treatments.”⁶⁸ For someone who claims that she’s not anti-vax, she’s willing to depress the vaccine drive with that line, and this might also dissuade people from seeking still effective treatments if they do get infected. This could cost lives. A little good information? Is it really worth the cost? Good information is available elsewhere too and without the pseudoscience and de-motivational messaging.

I would not eat good food that was poisoned.

Broken clocks are wrong most of the day.

“She’s just a covid cautious person who got fed up and started a substack.”

Except in September 2021 Jessica Wildfire’s substack was about how you can be a successful influencer like she already was.⁶⁹

Jessica Wildfire is hardly hiding her light under a bushel, and definitely didn’t start a Substack merely to sound off about the pandemic.

“She’s just a young journalist trying to make a name for herself and break into the business.”

But she doesn’t even use her own name. She’s not even trying to be a journalist either. She’s already broken into the influencer business, and she’s so much in the big time that other influencers back in 2018 were pointing to her work as a guide.⁷⁰

In 2020, she wrote stuff on Medium like “Please Stop Putting Idiots on The News,” and “The Left Has More in Common With the Right Than You’d Think,” and “How to Please Her Better in Bed,” and “My Husband Will Never Know I Used to Own a Sex Doll,” and by 2021 she was writing stuff on Medium with titles like: “Here’s How It Really Feels to Own an Entire Bitcoin,” and “We Don’t Live in a Democracy, and Maybe We Shouldn’t Try,” and, perhaps ironically, “Anger Porn Is Getting Us Nowhere. It needs to stop.”

She has hundreds of paid subscribers to her Substack, and 125,000 followers on Medium. Also 150 Ko-fi supporters. Even the most conservative estimates say she’s making some money at this gig, and her business predates the pandemic.

Listen, everyone needs a job, and some jobs suck, and many are not really making the world a better place, so this isn’t about judging the person or people who are behind the Jessica Wildfire brand. That’s not the issue here. It’s the fact that people are trying to tell me and others that she’s just a concerned citizen trying to educate people about covid, and that’s just not what’s going on here. I’m a little tired of coming across people who are spuriously asserting stuff along the lines that she’s just a girl standing before the cruel world speaking her truth and needs to make a little cash. Even if she posts a useful link once in a while or makes some obvious point, the fact remains that she’s an influencer who seems to be motivated currently to push fatalist narratives on the topics of disease and war. She celebrates social media cargo cult programming into a dev null event horizon. If you haven’t heard these terms before: a “null device discards all data written to it but reports that the write operation succeeded”⁷¹ and computer programming code that serves no useful purpose but is included “ritualistically” is called “cargo cult”⁷² — and this does sound like what a lot of social media is all about, doesn’t it? Shouting into a void, we get feedback, but it’s merely a hollow echo of the tangible. In the 2016 documentary Hypernormalisation, Adam Curtis blamed this issue for a lot of problems in our world today.⁷³

Hypernormalisation Documentary, 2016, by Adam Curtis.

”The liberals were outraged at Trump. But they expressed their outrage in cyberspace so it had no effect. Because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead ironically their waves of angry messages and tweets benefitted the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. one online analyst put it simply — angry people click. It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead it became a fuel that fed the systems of power making them ever more powerful.”

I think it’s important to be honest about this. People retweet or post a link and feel like they did something. And all that’s happened is that Jessica Wildfire has promoted unproven remedies, misinformation, and seems to be committed to promoting a sense of dark resignation. This influencer is on a gig, so let’s not pretend she’s just a rando blogger who’s giving people permission to doomscroll a bit as a treat. I don’t like people trying to gaslight me and other people about the truth of what’s going on in social media platforms right now. The truth is that people are being hardline demoralized by the flooding of the zone with confusion⁷⁴ and moral disengagement.⁷⁵ I would like to reject that shitshow, and keep the focus on community building, effective communication, and unadulterated science.

We don’t have to let all the noise in.

References:

OK Doomer – Everyone’s Getting Sick, and We’re Almost Out of Drugs. Here’s why, and what I’m doing. By Jessica Wildfire, Dec 16 2022 We let Covid rip, and now we have a ton of sick people. We don’t have enough medicine to go around.

Science Based Medicine – Zapping a Cold with Copper. Will an overpriced piece of copper prevent or treat the common cold? The science is not there. By Steven Novella on November 13, 2019 But a lot of modern snake oil is based on some science. This is extremely useful for marketing, because you can cite the relevant science and pretend to be all legitimate. What makes such products snake oil is that they are making claims that go well beyond the existing science. Typically this amounts to taking basic science or pre-clinical evidence and then skipping over decades of clinical research to make specific unsupported clinical claims. This can superficially seem reasonable, especially to those without medical expertise, but even many experts who should know better fall for this fallacy. If, for example, a certain substance increases a marker of immune activity in a petri dish, it seems reasonable to extrapolate to the hypothesis that it may increase immune activity in an organism and help fight infections or cancer. However, such simplistic (if compelling) extrapolations have a very poor track record. In one review, only 1% of such basic science mechanisms led to a treatment even decades later.

US Food & Drug Administration – Fraudulent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Products 05/28/2020 StayWell Copper Products “Germ Stopper” products ; 04/21/2020 Copper Touch, LLC “Sani-Bar GK95” and “Sani-Disc GK95D”

US Food & Drug Administration – Import Alert 66-41 KATOM QP LTD, Date Published : 11/15/2021

The Lancet – SARS-CoV-2 accelerated clearance using a novel nitric oxide nasal spray (NONS) treatment: A randomized trial, Monika Tandon, Wen Wu, Keith Moore, Stephen Winchester, Yuan-Po Tu, Christopher Miller, et al. Open Access Published:July 12, 2022 DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lansea.2022.100036 Implications include decreasing the duration of COVID-19 infectivity, possibly reducing hospital admissions, diminishing disease severity and disease transmission. The findings from this study can be used as supporting evidence for the use of NONS for patients with recent infections to reduce their risk of illness progression.

Teams Human – 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 want to drive every last segment of the population who’s been taking precautions to “get out there” and into full economic participation to serve The Economy. Everyone. They want everyone in the pool, and I suppose that’s not worked out so well. As it turns out a great many people are not buying into this scheme, and they’re continuing “Long Social Distancing.”

Federal Trade Commission – Consumer Alert – Nasal spray’s unsupported COVID-19 treatment claims are not up to snuff. By Seena Gressin, Attorney, Division of Consumer & Business Education, FTC, October 28, 2021 Many of us would like to believe a marketer’s claims that an over-the-counter nasal spray can prevent or treat COVID-19. Luckily, the law sets a high standard of proof before a marketer can say its product can prevent, treat, or cure a serious disease. The law requires competent scientific evidence. In its latest case targeting fake COVID-19 cure claims, the FTC says that nasal spray maker Xlear, Inc., broke the law by promoting its saline sprays as effective treatments for COVID-19 without scientific proof. The FTC says that since at least March 2020, Xlear and its president used deceptive or unsubstantiated claims to promote their nasal sprays on their websites and in YouTube videos, social media posts, and magazine advertorials. For example, the defendants said the sprays would protect against the virus “for up to four hours, helping keep you and others around you safe.” The FTC staff warned the defendants in July 2020 that they were unlawfully advertising their products. According to the complaint, the defendants told the staff they would remove the claims from their websites and other platforms, but continued using them.

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission – Press Release – SEC Charges Kim Kardashian for Unlawfully Touting Crypto Security – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – 2022-183 – Washington D.C., Oct. 3, 2022 The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced charges against Kim Kardashian for touting on social media a crypto asset security offered and sold by EthereumMax without disclosing the payment she received for the promotion. Kardashian agreed to settle the charges, pay $1.26 million in penalties, disgorgement, and interest, and cooperate with the Commission’s ongoing investigation. The SEC’s order finds that Kardashian failed to disclose that she was paid $250,000 to publish a post on her Instagram account about EMAX tokens, the crypto asset security being offered by EthereumMax. Kardashian’s post contained a link to the EthereumMax website, which provided instructions for potential investors to purchase EMAX tokens.

The Truth about Jessica Wildfire. By Noel Holston on Medium – Mar 13, 2022

I couldn’t find where she went to college, much less where she teaches. The only college-employed Jessica Wildfire I could find, the one at Tennessee, is not her. I couldn’t find Splattered anywhere. I did find Splatter, which is the quarterly newsletter of the Washington Arts Education Association (WAEA). Its masthead lists no Jessica Wildfire. No editor, for that matter. As for her being a “Top writer” in a variety of subjects, my searches turned up her blog, which cross-references her Medium contributions and Medium profile, and three slight books available for purchase on Amazon.com that have only a dozen or so purchaser reviews or star ratings each. No bylines at Slate, Salon, POLITICO, Reason, not even Huffington Post.And yet she’s credited on her Medium page as having 101K followers.

Conspirituality Podcast – 136: Virtual Strongmen (w/Ruth Ben-Ghiat) – Jan 12 2023

Vladimir Putin Has Weaponized Food, His Secret Failsafe. By Jessica Wildfire. June 9 2022 “They cheered when Russian tanks blew up. They treated war like a football game, because that’s all Americans understand anymore. Well, the fun’s over.”

The New Yorker Magazine: The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks. By Adrian Chen, July 27, 2016 The real effect, the Russian activists told me, was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space. One activist recalled that a favorite tactic of the opposition was to make anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Then Kremlin trolls discovered how to make pro-Putin hashtags trend, and the symbolic nature of the action was killed. “The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,” the opposition activist Leonid Volkov told me.

People’s CDC Letter Campaign – Tell elected reps: Maintain healthcare coverage , we need robust public health infrastructure. Jan 12, 2023 Rationing healthcare capacity – invoking crisis standards of care – three years into a pandemic, instead of creating a robust public health infrastructure? President Biden and Members of Congress, our Elected Representatives, Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, we need you to treat the pandemic like the ongoing public health emergency it is. We need you to embrace a comprehensive approach to public health based on layers of protection and public policies aimed at protecting the most vulnerable people among us.

JSTOR Daily – The Radical Right-Wing Housewives of 1950s California. The mobilization of housewives in 1950s California echoes through US national politics in the twenty-first century. By: Livia Gershon, April 4, 2022 Between COVID-19 mandates and arguments about critical race theory, conservative activists are making education central to their political arguments, activating a particular group of women voters. This isn’t the first wave of such activists. As historian Michelle Nickerson writes, women were a central, if often little-noticed, part of the highly influential southern California conservative movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. Some of these activists had high profiles, like Marion Miller. After marrying her husband she discovered that he was involved in counterespionage work. The couple moved to Los Angeles, and Miller eventually joined him as a volunteer spy for the FBI. She became the secretary at the Los Angeles Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, which had ties to the Communist Party. She later published her story in Reader’s Digest, and then as a memoir. But many of the women Nickerson profiles operated in a quieter way. Most of the groups she looks at weren’t explicitly for women only, but they met during the day and focused on areas like children, education, and spirituality that were understood as women’s business. They organized letter-writing campaigns, promoted right-wing literature, and threw their support behind conservative candidates. Before the 1952 election, they organized babysitter groups to make sure women had time to vote. And, by the 1960s, they helped open more than 35 conservative bookstores in the Los Angeles area.

NPR – A look at the groups supporting school board protesters nationwide, October 26, 2021, By Anya Kamenetz Melissa Ryan founded the consulting firm CARD Strategies, which tracks right-wing extremism. She says this kind of activity usually begins with real anger — in this case, on the part of parents, at COVID school shutdowns and restrictions like masks. But it’s not entirely grassroots and spontaneous. “The flames are being fanned by national money and resources,” she says. “It’s basically the same groups and funders that were funding the Tea Party and frankly, it’s the same tactics.”

Jessica Wildfire: May 8, 2022. “There’s still something to be said for engaging in the political process, but it’s slow and grinding work. It won’t save us in the short term. Political activism takes a long time.”

Michelle Ko @michelleko2d on twitter 9:00 AM · Dec 26, 2021

We need all of our voices together to call on @WhiteHouse for free N95 masks and tests for all. #FreeMasksTestsNow #FreeN95sForAll #OmicronIsHere @APAMSA @SNMA @LMSA @PNHP @MiMentorOrg @NHMAmd @NationalMedAssn

NPR – The Biden administration will give out 400 million free N95 masks, January 19, 2022. By Rachel Treisman The Biden administration plans to send 400 million N95 face masks to give out free through pharmacies and community health centers, part of an effort to increase access to high-quality masks to control the spread of COVID-19. The government will ship masks from its stockpile starting at the end of the week. Some will be available late next week, with more available in early February, the White House told reporters. The move comes after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidance last week to emphasize N95s — and as the government starts to mail at-home test kits to Americans.

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Jessica Wildfire: January 14 2023. “Our governments should’ve made masks accessible to everyone. But because they won’t, we’ve stepped up. My family is doing the government’s job for them, because it’s the only way to protect our child.”

CNN – Biden administration to distribute 400 million N95 masks to the public for free. By Jeremy Diamond and Paul LeBlanc, CNN, Wed January 19, 2022 “To ensure broad access for all Americans, there will be three masks available per person. In addition to this program, thanks to the administration’s efforts, these high-quality masks are in ample supply and widely available to American consumers,” the official said. The 400 million non-surgical N95 masks amount to more than half of the 750 million stored in the US’ Strategic National Stockpile, a figure that tripled over the last year as the White House sought to boost reserves. The US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention recently advised that well-fitting respirators approved by the National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health – such as N95 masks – offer “the highest level of protection” against Covid-19.

Mandate Masks US – Letter Campaign – Urge the White House and Congress to Provide Free N95 Masks! Dec 18 2022 The White House needs to launch a program to provide free N95 masks to the public. Right now, in many cities and states across the country there is no distribution of free N95 masks to the general public.

WTOP News – Students with disabilities win dispute over masks in Va. public schools by Dick Uliano | December 12, 2022 Parents of students with disabilities in Virginia public schools have won a major legal dispute, winning the right to require mask-wearing by teachers and students to help protect their children against COVID-19. One of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s first acts was to stop mandatory mask wearing in public schools, signing executive order number two in January that left the decision of masking in the hands of parents. But parents of disabled kids immediately filed a federal lawsuit, arguing that accommodating mask-wearing at school is a right covered by federal disability laws.

Indivisible – Bird-Dogging Guide: Get Them on The Record Bird-dogging is best done with a group of people that are dedicated to getting a candidate on record and can take on a variety of necessary roles. Your squad should be nimble, fearless, and dedicated to tracking down candidates (even if it means listening to the same stump speech over and over again). At the very least, you need two people to pull off a successful birddog — one person to take action and one person to film or take a photo. An ideal squad has at least one person for each of the following roles (or two, or three, or four so you can sub in based on availability).

Jessica Wildfire: January 14 2023. “In some cases, it really is too dangerous to advocate for masks and indoor air quality. In some places, it really will get you physically harassed or even attacked.”

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.

Byline Times – The Radical Right Interests Behind the School Boards Race Row. A series of seemingly grassroots, parents group turned the USA’s school boards election into a vicious row over race – but who are the radical right interests behind the ‘concerned moms’? By Sian Norris and Heidi Siegmund Cuda, 15 November 2021 Those school boards have now become a target for far-right groups such as the Proud Boys, with the Republican Party and its base turning education – and particularly education on race – into its latest front of the culture war. That war is inflaming real-life violence at schools across the country. The violence has included deposits of dead rodents on school board members’ doorsteps and the unfurling of Nazi flags at meetings. Last week, members of the neo-Nazi group showed up at a New Hanover County school board meeting. They covered their faces, which was ironic considering the meeting was to discuss mask mandates.

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The Guardian: Conservative Texas phone company fueling extremist takeover of schools by Erum Salam, Mon 5 Sep 2022 A conservative Texas-based phone company is planning a takeover of political offices in the US state, starting with public schools. Patriot Mobile, which calls itself “America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider”, has been fueling an extremist conservative movement taking over curriculum in public schools across Texas. Leigh Wambsganss, the executive director of the company and its political arm, proudly declared victory in 11 out of 11 school board seats in the last election cycle in school districts around the Dallas-Fort Worth area on behalf of the company and conservative American Christians.

OK Doomer – We’re Never Getting Back to Normal. You Don’t Have to Pretend Anymore. This is it now. Jessica Wildfire. Jan 18 2023 If you haven’t already, you have full permission to start prepping for a life of scarcity and uncertainty.

OK Doomer. You Have The Right to Be Rude. You Could Even Call It a Duty. There’s an ancient Greek word for it. Jessica Wildfire. Dec 31, 2022 When they go low, you go rogue. The point of parrhesia is to say or do something unexpected. It’s to disrupt the normal power dynamics in communication. It’s to flout rules and conventions. It’s to command attention and reject norms. That can include sarcasm, ridicule, or reflecting someone’s toxic masculinity right back at them. You could call it, “a taste of your own medicine.”

Conspirituality Podcast — 136: Virtual Strongmen (w/Ruth Ben-Ghiat) “With regard to strongmen, conspirituality folks fantasize about violence, but not too much violence. I think it’s a movement that needs its authoritarians to perform strength more than to exert it. And to me this suggests that they’re not really that dissatisfied with the status quo. Everybody wants a revolution, but these guys really want to make it happen through supplements and ball tanning and reciting course miracles.” “They’re part of a depoliticization project.” — Matthew Remski, Conspirituality Podcast

PBS News Hour – How COVID funding could help improve air quality in schools, Jun 17, 2022 By Liz Szabo, Kaiser Health News “This is a huge deal for schools,” said Anisa Heming, director of the Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit that promotes ways to improve indoor air quality. “We haven’t had that amount of money coming from the federal government for school facilities for the last hundred years.” Still, many school administrators aren’t aware that federal funding for ventilation improvements is available, according to a survey published in May by the Center for Green Schools. About a quarter of school officials said they did not have the resources to improve ventilation, while another quarter were “unsure” whether funding was available, according to the survey.

Source NM – Clean air in schools could become New Mexico law. Public School Ventilation Act would help keep students, staff and teachers healthy, sponsor says. BY: AUSTIN FISHER – JANUARY 17, 2023 A legislative proposal — with backing from unions representing New Mexico teachers and sheet metal workers — seeks to change that. COVID is highlighting the need for action on ventilation systems, said Rep. Christine Chandler. She and Rep. Joy Garratt, a former educator, are sponsoring House Bill 30, which would create the Public School Ventilation Act. “Having good airflow and good systems in place will affect staff health and student health in a way that’s very important,” Chandler said.

Jessica Wildfire: January 14 2023. “I was persistent, even pushy. I said the uncomfortable things, that Covid was more like HIV than the flu, that Covid was never going away”

CDC – Long COVID or Post-COVID Conditions, Updated Dec. 16, 2022 Long COVID can include a wide range of ongoing health problems; these conditions can last weeks, months, or years. Long COVID occurs more often in people who had severe COVID-19 illness, but anyone who has been infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 can experience it. People who are not vaccinated against COVID-19 and become infected may have a higher risk of developing Long COVID compared to people who have been vaccinated. People can be reinfected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, multiple times. Each time a person is infected or reinfected with SARS-CoV-2, they have a risk of developing Long COVID. While most people with Long COVID have evidence of infection or COVID-19 illness, in some cases, a person with Long COVID may not have tested positive for the virus or known they were infected.

CDC – COVID-19 Risks and Information for Older Adults Older adults (especially those aged 50 years and older) are more likely than younger people to get very sick from COVID-19. The risk increases with age. This means they are more likely to need hospitalization, intensive care, or a ventilator to help them breathe, or they could die. Most COVID-19 deaths occur in people older than 65. Other factors can also make you more likely to get very sick from COVID-19. These include not getting vaccinated, or having underlying medical conditions— like chronic lung disease, heart disease, or a weakened immune system. Often, the more health conditions you have, the higher your risk of becoming very sick if you get COVID-19.

Forbes – Covid-19: Long Term Brain Injury. William A. Haseltine, Mar 14, 2022 A recent study by Frontera et al. of the NYU Grossman School of Medicine evaluated the cognitive function of Covid-19 patients six months after they were hospitalized for Covid-19. To their surprise, over 90% of their total cohort reported at least one neurological symptom. Among those that had not experienced neurological complications while hospitalized, 88% reported new cognitive symptoms. These cognitive impairments seem to be separate and apart from damage due to hypoxia, or the lack of oxygen to the brain, often experienced by those hospitalized for severe Covid-19. Reportedly, some individuals that recover from mild or asymptomatic infection may later develop complications that are not immediately apparent.

Fortune – Strokes, heart attacks, sudden deaths: Does America understand the long-term risks of catching COVID? There are early signs that COVID infections and reinfections are leading to more life-threatening conditions, says physician and author Carolyn Barber. BY CAROLYN BARBER October 06, 2022 In a study that included patients from the initial wave of the pandemic, scientists from the University of Florida found that survivors of severe COVID-19 had two-and-a-half times the risk of dying in the year following illness compared to people who were never infected. Of note, nearly 80% of downstream deaths were not due to typical COVID complications like acute respiratory distress or cardiac causes. “The results suggest that a severe impact of COVID-19 exists beyond the cost and suffering of the initial hospitalization,” says Arch Mainous, one of the study’s authors.

Financial Times – The growing evidence that Covid-19 is leaving people sicker. The potential impact on heart and brain disease poses challenges to healthcare systems globally. Sarah Neville in London AUGUST 30 2022 Researchers found that rates of many conditions, such as heart failure and stroke, were substantially higher in people who had recovered from Covid than in similar people who had not been infected. A separate analysis of VA data, published in March, suggested that in the “post-acute phase” of the disease, people with Covid “exhibit increased risk and burden of diabetes”. “What’s particularly alarming is that these are really life-long conditions,” says Dr Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of research and development at the VA St Louis Health Care System and clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St Louis, who led both pieces of research. While just 4 per cent more people contracted heart failure following a Covid infection than those who had not been infected, “because the number of people infected with Sars-Cov-2 in the world is colossal, even small percentages will translate into huge absolute numbers.

Bloomberg – Covid Is Way More Lethal to Kids Than The Flu. By Madison Muller, June 3, 2022 Millions of kids get sick with the seasonal flu each year. But although it can be dangerous — especially for those who are unvaccinated — it’s much less lethal than Covid. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, childhood flu deaths during the regular season have ranged from 39 to 199 since 2004. Meanwhile, in 2021 alone, more than 600 children died from Covid-19, according to the analysis done by Jeremy Faust, a professor at Harvard University Medical School and physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

You’re Not a Fearmonger. You Have Sentinel Intelligence. Some of us are cursed to hear the future. Jessica Wildfire DEC 19, 2022 If you have sentinel intelligence, then your brain can aggregate and sift through extraordinary amounts of information in a very short period of time, especially when it comes to seeing latent or hidden dangers. You don’t get stymied by what Clarke and Eddy call the “magnitude of overload.” In a lot of ways, it’s a superpower.

Jessica Wildfire: January 14 2023. “Just remember, it’s obviously not going to be easy. It took us both a lot of energy. It was difficult. It was uncomfortable. We didn’t hedge or qualify. We laid down the grim facts, and we didn’t care if they thought we were paranoid or crazy.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer – These parents are making DIY air purifiers for Philly schools. They want one in every city classroom. “This is a necessary mitigation that we need as soon as possible, but it doesn’t get anyone off the hook for the bigger problem,” district parent Lizzie Rothwell said. by Kristen A. Graham, Updated Sep 22, 2022 The group estimates it would cost the district about $750,000 to place the air-filtration devices in each of its classrooms. The school district, with 114,000 students and 300 buildings, many of which are over 75 years old, is coping with billions in unmet facilities needs. Those unmet needs often include poor ventilation systems. Some rooms lack any mechanical ventilation whatsoever. “Nobody thinks that there’s a DIY way to fix our facilities,” said Lizzie Rothwell, a district parent leading the project. “This is a necessary mitigation that we need as soon as possible, but it doesn’t get anyone off the hook for the bigger problem.” Rothwell plans to testify before the school board Thursday night.

Princeton bus drivers intend to strike in October if bus company won’t agree to paid time off. Madeline Mitchell – Cincinnati Enquirer – September 27, 2022 “We are living in the age of COVID, when people have been sick and contagious and had to miss work through no fault of their own,” union field representative and lead negotiator Derryl Hall said in the news release. “And these drivers and monitors had no paid time off the job. Many of them had to come to work with COVID because they couldn’t afford to take days off work and not be paid. It’s just not right.” Hall said 88% of union members who attended a meeting last week voted to endorse a strike, set to begin Monday, if an agreement isn’t reached.

Teams Human – Christmas caroling in protest to bring back masks – Letter Campaign to Urge the White House to Provide Free N95s – Petition Extend paid sick leave to railway workers – #VigilAgainstCovid – an online campaign where people posted pictures of their doors in Australia to object to being stuck behind them to protect themselves & others. By CHLOE HUMBERT, DEC 19, 2022 Senior & Disability Action caroling action at Oakland City Hall in California, to demand the city reinstate the mask mandate in city-owned buildings to protect everyone from viral airborne transmission.

Teams Human – Senior & Disability Action brings receipts on masking “comfort level” at San Fran health com meeting Jul 8, 2022 Senior & Disability Action public comment at San Francisco health commission meeting points out the empty promises of revisiting measures and the perspective of at risk and seniors in the community on the lack of action.

People’s CDC The People’s CDC is a coalition of public health practitioners, scientists, healthcare workers, educators, advocates and people from all walks of life working to reduce the harmful impacts of COVID-19. We provide guidance and policy recommendations to governments and the public on COVID-19, disseminating evidence-based updates that are grounded in equity, public health principles, and the latest scientific literature. Working alongside community organizations, we are building collective power and centering equity as we work together to end the pandemic. The People’s CDC is volunteer-run and independent of partisan political and corporate interests and includes anonymous local health department and other government employees.

Teams Human – Priscilla Grim public testimony at New York City Council hearing on COVID – Nov 16, 2022

Teams Human – Australian petition calls for National Cabinet health advice & minutes – PCDC letter campaign to Biden & Congress – National Nurses United petition for worker protections – People speak out for masks on transit during public comments at the MTA board meeting in New York City by CHLOE HUMBERT, OCT 3, 2022 This month’s MTA board meeting had a number of people testifying to call out the awful MTA transit posters and call for caring for one another with a NYC transit mask mandate to protect accessibility for all transit riders.

Disinformation and its effects on social capital networks. By Dave Troy, 2021-2023 A network of disconnected cults cannot support a functional democracy. Some minimal level of cross-cutting social connections between networks of interest must be maintained in order to support a functional pluralistic democracy. Too many cultish groups, each unwilling to compromise, produces the kind of “bundled aggrieved factions” that are useful to populist fascist leadership. It is therefore in the interest of populist fascists to promote social atomization and to destroy cross-cutting social ties. We don’t live in a post-truth era; we live in an age of influence. It is fashionable to suggest that we live in a post-truth era, or that we are suffering from a kind of “truth-decay.” This is false; rather, we are experiencing a rise in the use of the tools of influence, that is the tools that alter social capital networks, to produce so-called “islands of dissensus.” (DiResta; Hassan) In response, we must reject the idea that objective truth is unknowable and instead re-wire social networks in ways that allow for a baseline level of shared reality. Truth is not a social construct, but belief is.

John Titor – From Wikipedia John Titor and TimeTravel_0 are pseudonyms used on the Time Travel Institute and Art Bell’s Post-to-Post forums during 2000 and 2001 by a poster claiming to be an American military time traveler from 2036.[1][2] Titor made numerous vague and specific predictions regarding calamitous events in 2004 and beyond, including a nuclear war. Inconsistencies in his explanations, the uniform inaccuracy of his predictions, and a private investigator’s findings all led to the general impression that the entire episode was an elaborate hoax. A 2009 investigation concluded that Titor was likely the creation of Larry Haber, a Florida entertainment lawyer, along with his brother John Rick Haber, a computer scientist.

Teams Human – Don’t fall for Pluralistic Ignorance on Masks – Letter campaign to the White House: Provide Free N95 Masks – NIH must stop Long COVID trials on debunked remedies. Pandemic deniers have been so riled up and it’s not good for families or our community. By CHLOE HUMBERT, JAN 2, 2023

You Don’t Need Hope. You Need Courage, and You Might Already Have It. A philosophical play date. Jessica Wildfire Jan 15 2023 Enlightenment philosophers revived the ancient cautions against hope, observing its close kinship to fear and superstition. Hope wasn’t so different from belief in angels or ghosts. Nietzsche was hope’s biggest critic. He saw hope as “the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” He was talking about metaphysical hope, the static emotion we cling to instead of taking action. He believed hope on its own was worthless. Americans watered down all this philosophy. They turned hope into a meme, forgetting all the caveats and fine print. Now most people seem to think of passive hope as a good thing, and they regard bold action as a bad thing. They prefer activists who act civil and polite.

Library of Congress – Today in History – April 22 – Earth Day Earth Day was first observed on April 22, 1970, when an estimated 20 million people nationwide attended the inaugural events at tens of thousands of sites including elementary and secondary schools, universities, and community sites across the United States. Senator Gaylord Nelson promoted Earth Day, calling upon students to fight for environmental causes and oppose environmental degradation with the same energy that they displayed in opposing the Vietnam War. By the twentieth anniversary of the first event, more than 200 million people in 141 countries had participated in Earth Day celebrations. The celebrations continue to grow.

Commemorating Earth Day with a Little Legislative History Jonathan Coppess Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics University of Illinois April 22, 2022 farmdoc daily (12):55 Forged in the wake of an oil spill and by the flames of a burning river, history demarks the origins of the modern environmental on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, amid the troubles and turmoil of the Vietnam War at the end of the tumultuous 1960s. Within the first four years of its existence, the movement achieved an unparalleled, impressive legislative and political trifecta. The National Environmental Protection Act (1970), the Clean Air Act (1970), and the Clean Water Act (1972) were all enacted by strong, bipartisan votes across two congresses. In addition, President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 with Congressional acquiescence.

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Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, 2013 (Very little repetition is needed for a new experience to feel normal!) … A single incident may make a recurrence less surprising. Some years ago, my wife and I were vacationing in a small island resort on the Great Barrier Reef. There are only forty guest rooms on the island. When we came to dinner, we were surprised to meet an acquaintance, a psychologist named Jon. We greeted each other warmly and commented on the coincidence. Jon left the resort the next day. About two weeks later, we were in a theater in London. A latecomer sat next to me after the lights went down. When the lights came up for the intermission, I saw that my neighbor was Jon. My wife and I commented later that we were simultaneously conscious of two facts: first, this was a more remarkable coincidence than the first meeting; second, we were distinctly less surprised to meet Jon on the second occasion than we had been on the first. Evidently, the first meeting had somehow changed the idea of Jon in our minds. He was now “the psychologist who shows up when we travel abroad.” We (System 2) knew this was a ludicrous idea, but our System 1 had made it seem almost normal to meet Jon in strange places.

Psychology Today – Giving Up: Informational Learned Helplessness. It’s exhausting when it’s hard to figure out what is true and what is false. December 23, 2021 | Susan A. Nolan, Ph.D., and Michael Kimball, Reviewed by Jessica Schrader The plodding repetition of conspiratorial lies can lead to “cognitive exhaustion.” But it goes deeper than that. Peter Pomerantsev, author of the book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, popularized the concept of “censorship by noise” in which governments “create confusion through information—and disinformation—overload.” In time, people become overwhelmed, and even cognitively debilitated, by the “onslaught of information, misinformation and conspiracy theories until [it] becomes almost impossible to separate fact from fiction, or trace an idea back to its source.” And so “censorship by noise,” particularly common in regions governed autocratically, leads people to experience crushing anxiety coupled with a markedly weakened motivation to fact-check anything anymore. They may then “like” or share information without critical review because they lack the energy and motivation to take the extra steps to check it out.

Conspirituality Podcast — 136: Virtual Strongmen (w/Ruth Ben-Ghiat) “They don’t express political aspirations because the industry is narcissistic. It doesn’t really point itself toward any kind of collective action or the difficult work of party politics. None of these people are interested in building coalitions. They want to have affiliate networks, but they’re not going to do deep canvassing and try to convince people to vote. They want people to buy their shit.” “They’re part of a depoliticization project.” — Matthew Remski, Conspirituality Podcast

Dave Troy Presents, The Red-Brown Alliance with Alexander Reid Ross S1E20, August 17th 2022 People talk about “horseshoe theory,” but where does it come from? The idea of a “red-brown alliance” has been part of political discourse for decades, and plays up on the notion that the very far left and very far right have common interests in countering the status quo. Alexander Reid Ross is a geographer and political historian who has written about this phenomenon extensively. Tracing it back to its roots, he also has documented instances of where he has observed this in his own activism — which has sometimes earned him criticism. Dave talks with Alex about the history of this phenomenon and what we can do about it going forward.

The Intercept – THE INFILTRATOR – How an Undercover Oil Industry Mercenary Tricked Pipeline Opponents Into Believing He Was One of Them. by Alleen Brown, December 30 2018 For months, a man calling himself Joel Edwards had posed as a pipeline opponent, attending protests, befriending water protectors, and paying for hotel rooms, supplies, and booze. He told some people he had a job with a hotel that allowed him to travel, others that he was a freelance journalist reporting on the pipeline resistance. But five former contractors for TigerSwan, the secretive security firm hired by Energy Transfer to guard the pipeline, confirmed to The Intercept that Joel was an undercover intelligence operative. His real name was Joel Edward McCollough, and he had been sent to collect information on the protesters, explicitly targeting those who were down on their luck. Horne, who struggled with addiction, appeared to be a perfect target. McCollough passed along what he learned to his superiors at TigerSwan, who attempted to use the information to thwart protest activity and identify people or plots that represented threats to the pipeline. Traces of his surveillance turned up in TigerSwan’s daily situation reports, which were written for Energy Transfer and at times passed to law enforcement.

ILoveAncestry.com – COINTELPRO against the Black Movement of the 1970s Government covert action against the Black Movement also continued in the 1970s. Targets ranged from community-based groups to the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika and the surviving remnants of the Black Panther Party. In Mississippi, federal and state agents attempted to discredit and disrupt the United League of Marshall County, a broad-based grassroots civil rights group struggling to stop the Klan violence. In California, a notorious paid operative for the FBI, Darthard Perry, code-named “Othello,” infiltrated and disrupted local Black groups and took personal credit for the fire that razed the Watts Writers Workshop’s multi-million dollar cultural center in Los Angeles in 1973. The Los Angeles Police Department later admitted infiltrating at least seven 1970s community groups, including the Black-led Coalition Against Police Abuse.

Salon – Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right. What once seemed like a bracing intellectual movement has degenerated into a pack of abusive, small-minded bigots. By ÉMILE P. TORRES, PUBLISHED JUNE 5, 2021 New Atheism appeared to offer moral clarity, it emphasized intellectual honesty and it embraced scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality. It gave me immense hope to know that in a world overflowing with irrationality, there were clear-thinking individuals with sizable public platforms willing to stand up for what’s right and true — to stand up for sanity in the face of stupidity. Fast-forward to the present: What a grift that was! Many of the most prominent New Atheists turned out to be nothing more than self-aggrandizing, dogmatic, irascible, censorious, morally compromised people who, at every opportunity, have propped up the powerful over the powerless, the privileged over the marginalized.

Salon – Understanding “longtermism”: Why this suddenly influential philosophy is so toxic. Whatever we may “owe the future,” it isn’t a bizarre and dangerous ideology fueled by eugenics and capitalism. By ÉMILE P. TORRES, AUGUST 20, 2022 Longtermism is a quasi-religious worldview, influenced by transhumanism and utilitarian ethics, which asserts that there could be so many digital people living in vast computer simulations millions or billions of years in the future that one of our most important moral obligations today is to take actions that ensure as many of these digital people come into existence as possible. In practical terms, that means we must do whatever it takes to survive long enough to colonize space, convert planets into giant computer simulations and create unfathomable numbers of simulated beings.

Dave Troy Presents – Against Longtermism with Émile Torres – S1E23 – August 25th 2022 Émile P. Torres: “One way to understand it is, the argument that he presented in a paper titled “Astronomical Waste” – which was actually recently retweeted by Elon Musk just a couple months ago – this assumed in a particular ethical framework called total utilitarianism. And so basically an easy way to understand this theory is to begin with the utilitarian notion of what persons are. So people for total utilitarians are essentially the containers of value. And what is value? Value can be defined in various ways – the simplest way is just pleasure. Pleasurable experiences or happiness. And so people are these containers of pleasurable experiences and the aim then is to maximize the total net quantity of this value in the universe. And one way to do that of course if you have a population, you enhance the quality of life of those individuals. So you make them happier, you know, however one might go about doing that. But so you increase the happiness of those individuals. But another way is to actually increase the number of individuals there are. So if you have more value containers in the future, and if those value containers contain net positive amount of value, then you’ll end up with more total value in the universe. So from the total utilitarian perspective our aim then is to increase the number of these value containers in the future to the limit. You know the more the better. And one way to do that then, which Nick Bostrom discussed in his 2003 paper was to not just colonize space and you know terraform exoplanets, and live as biological beings on these planets spread throughout our future light cone. But also then to convert planets into a material called computronium, which is a configuration of matter that’s optimized for computations. And so once you do that you have these planet-sized computers and on these planet size computers you could run simulations. And you could fit way more people, way more value containers, in these simulations than you could just on planets. So the goal then is to, from this total utilitarian perspective, is to colonize space, convert planets into giant computers and simulate trillions and trillions of happy people. That’s the way you maximize value. Maximizing value again is our sole moral obligation in the universe.” Dave Troy: “Right and so let’s unpack this for people that might have missed you know a key step in there. I mean when you talk about converting a planet into a computing device that is then going to host I guess containers of artificial general intelligence that can basically host the same kind of happiness that a human allegedly can. That’s a pretty weird abstraction for like what constitutes useful intelligence or you know a notion of being human or alive or conscious. But yet they’re considering this very hypothetical construct as actually putting you know weight on the scale against living breathing people here on planet Earth today in 2022 who have real needs. So let’s not neglect the future computronium AIs that might exist in the future. Am I reading this right?” Émile P. Torres: “Yeah, that’s right. The aim is just to maximize value. And since there could be so many of these individuals in the future living happy lives. As it happens there is almost nothing said about why exactly these individuals, trillions of them, living in computer simulations, would be happy. But the assumption is that they could have these net positive lives, lives that are worthwhile, or lives that are half-decent, and as a result you know you can just end up with this astronomical amount of just impersonal value in the future. And so they would not say that current people don’t matter. The thing is that there could be so many more people in the future than there are people in the present by many many orders of magnitude, that the idea was, that the best way to, the thing that you ought to do, is focus on ensuring that these beings come into existence.”

Salon – Selling “longtermism”: How PR and marketing drive a controversial new movement. For star author William MacAskill and the “longtermist” movement, marketing, PR and brand management are crucial. By ÉMILE P. TORRES, SEPTEMBER 10, 2022 Longtermism emerged from a movement called “Effective Altruism” (EA), a male-dominated community of “super-hardcore do-gooders” (as they once called themselves tongue-in-cheek) based mostly in Oxford and the San Francisco Bay Area. Their initial focus was on alleviating global poverty, but over time a growing number of the movement’s members have shifted their research and activism toward ensuring that humanity, or our posthuman descendants, survive for millions, billions and even trillions of years into the future. Although the longtermists do not, so far as I know, describe what they’re doing this way, we might identify two phases of spreading their ideology: Phase One involved infiltrating governments, encouraging people to pursue high-paying jobs to donate more for the cause and wooing billionaires like Elon Musk — and this has been wildly successful. Musk himself has described longtermism as “a close match for my philosophy.” Sam Bankman-Fried has made billions from cryptocurrencies to fund longtermist efforts. And longtermism is, according to a UN Dispatch article, “increasingly gaining traction around the United Nations and in foreign policy circles.” Phase Two is what we’re seeing right now with the recent media blitz promoting longtermism, with articles written by or about William MacAskill, longtermism’s poster boy, in outlets like the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Guardian, BBC and TIME. Having spread their influence behind the scenes over the many years, members and supporters are now working overtime to sell longtermism to the broader public in hopes of building their movement, as “movement building” is one of the central aims of the community.

Jessica Wildfire: May 8, 2022. “Progressive survivalism means taking care of yourself, so you can make a future for civilization, one based on sustainability and empathy. We don’t want to just fend for ourselves.”

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Australian Army Occasional Paper No. 8 The Effectiveness of Influence Activities in Information Warfare by CASSANDRA BROOKER Kahneman also clarifies how sequence matters—that is, a ‘halo effect’ increases the weight of first impressions or the first entry on a list, to the point where subsequent information is discarded. Kahneman explains this mental shortcut as a combination of the coherence-seeking System 1 thought process generating intuitive impressions, which a lazy System 2 then endorses and believes.

We’re Never Getting Back to Normal. You Don’t Have to Pretend Anymore. This is it now. OK Doomer, Jessica Wildfire, Jan 18 2023 “We’ve worn out our vaccines and treatments.”

OK Doomer – Give Your Readers a Killer Opening. Don’t overdo it. Jessica Wildfire, Sep 26, 2021 The writing is still crafted, just not as obvious. You can describe a study. A lot of posts take a study from a research journal, and then describe it as a story. They do more than just report facts and data. They make you feel like you’re there, watching everything go down. After describing the study, the writer then broadens to tell us how that specific study illustrates the key point they want to discuss. We tend to think academic writing and research is dry, but it’s usually not. They’re usually researching aspects of human nature and behavior we see every day. We get the advantage of talking about it without all the dry language. We get to be more conversational.

The Secrets Behind Jessica Wildfire’s Medium Success. By Finding Tom 162K subscribers, Jul 16, 2018 I hope you enjoy my breakdown of her Medium strategies and why she does so well.

Null device – From Wikipedia In some operating systems, the null device is a device file that discards all data written to it but reports that the write operation succeeded. This device is called /dev/null on Unix and Unix-like systems, NUL: (see TOPS-20) or NUL on CP/M and DOS (internally \DEV\NUL), nul on OS/2 and newer Windows systems[1] (internally \Device\Null on Windows NT), NIL: on Amiga operating systems,[2] and NL: on OpenVMS.[3] In Windows Powershell, the equivalent is $null.[4] It provides no data to any process that reads from it, yielding EOF immediately.[5] In IBM operating systems DOS/360 and successors[a] and also in OS/360 and successors[b] such files would be assigned in JCL to DD DUMMY. In programmer jargon, especially Unix jargon, it may also be called the bit bucket[6] or black hole.

Cargo cult programming From Wikipedia

Cargo cult programming is a style of computer programming characterized by the ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose. Cargo cult programming is symptomatic of a programmer not understanding either a bug they were attempting to solve or the apparent solution (compare shotgun debugging, deep magic).[1] The term cargo cult programmer may apply when anyone inexperienced with the problem at hand copies some program code from one place to another with little understanding of how it works or whether it is required. Cargo cult programming can also refer to the practice of applying a design pattern or coding style blindly without understanding the reasons behind that design principle.

Hypernormalisation Documentary, 2016, by Adam Curtis. ”The liberals were outraged at Trump. But they expressed their outrage in cyberspace so it had no effect. Because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead ironically their waves of angry messages and tweets benefitted the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. one online analyst put it simply — angry people click. It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead it became a fuel that fed the systems of power making them ever more powerful.”

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” Brain fog mischaracterized as no worse than being a bit punchy and forgetful. Exit wave (minimizing the significance of human suffering happening)