US Can’t Do It Alone And Should Foster French Military Industrial Base

Abstract: US Should Foster French Military Industrial Base because NATO is having a weapon production problem… and even a weapon quality problem (Russian hypersonic weapons, long derided, actually work, the West has no equivalent). The more acute this quality-quantity problem gets, the greater the probability of an expanding world war. 

A case in point is the French Rafale fighter-bomber, which… the US, or at least the West, sorely needs to be deployed in great numbers… It complements the F35… to put it mildly. Instead an all F35 all the time policy has been deployed… for avaricious reasons.

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The comment below and attenuated extracts thereof as short as two sentences were systematically inspected and blocked on the Internet by Microsoft AI. This sort of censorship is to be feared: this is a case of a US Internet giant deliberately blocking all and any critique of major US policies and products with huge imperial impact and potential servitude for all those not belonging to the present US establishment, or associated to it. The same evil AI enabled insult against France, French individuals and French products in the same context (namely French Rafale against US F22). Maybe I got banned because I forgot to insult the French? In any case this shows why there should be recourse by law to censorship and the law should require censorship must be capable of justifying itself explicitly.]

***

The US fighter F22 Raptor, a supposedly “stealth” high speed interceptor, is pretty much useless, and this is why it was (correctly) discontinued by Obama, shortly after it lost air superiority fights against Rafales and old Mirages. Indeed the only thing the F22 can do is interception, whereas Rafales and Mirages are first of all bombers with interceptor capabilities. A Rafale can supercruise fully armed at Mach 1.4… And also has inflight refueling (from other Rafales) and stand-off nuclear bombing capability.

Since WW2, all military planes are more or less stealth. And they can all be more or less detected, except if they fly really very low, tree top level. or inside mountain valleys as US, French and other Western pilots train to do.

The US Air Force never wanted to engage the Rafale fully, over the horizon, because the Rafale can go completely stealthy and passive using only infrared detection and then firing a very long-range Meteor ram-jet missile… In infrared, the Rafale is more stealthy than the all too big F22 Raptor. 

Little known, the Rafale’s omnipotent role was what inspired the F35… Except the Rafale is much more capable, and with active (not just passive) stealth. The F35 is more the replacement of the A10… And that’s very good… But limited. Only the F35B (vertical take off) is really exceptional.

The US had to talk down the Rafale for commercial/imperial reasons. By enticing European countries to purchase the F35 rather than the Rafale, or the Patriot instead of the Mamba/Aster 30, the US has condemned Europe to 40 years of servitude. Although Europeans tend to detest Trump for his “America First” bravado, it’s really Biden who enslaved Europe with all sorts of weapons systems and offers Europeans couldn’t refuse…

The US did something similar with AUKUS, breaking the contract Australia had to purchase very advanced Air Independent diesel French subs (a tech the US doesn’t have, but China has, and France is the master). 

It’s greedy and not very smart for the US to consider its ally and parent, France, as a commercial enemy, while the world is experiencing a pre-full-out world war situation.

Other Western countries are making remarkable military efforts, in particular Ukraine, of course,  but also Poland. Germany has one or two anti-aircraft competent systems (especially IRIS). The excellent NASAM, initially Norwegian, is a good example of US-European cooperation we need more of. 

Patrice Ayme

[50 different versions of edulcorated versions of fragments of the preceding comments were blocked on the Internet by Microsoft AI: they didn’t “meet the guidelines”. This is not different from what is going on in China.] 

 

Rafale is morphing into much more advanced versions as time goes by… Successful US fighters F15, F16 and F18 are going through such changes too: the F18 Super Hornet is a different plane from the initial F18 (and not to be replaced by the F35!) The F22 was terminated, because its very conception was obviously wrong: a pure interceptor, which the Rafale and old Mirages defeated! It was one thing to have “Raptor salad” as a German pilot put it operating Airbus Typhoons, which are also pure interceptors… But Rafale and Mirages are also, and mostly… bombers…

Controlling AI Is Similar To Controlling The Printing Press. Instead, OVERSEE AI.

Trying to control Chat AI is like trying to control printing: it’s an ethical monstrosity. In the 16th century, being an uncontrolled printer would send one to be burned… not just from the Inquisition; France’s tyrant Francois I’s government burned printers for printing: Etienne Dolet, philosopher, close friend and collaborator of Rabelais, was burned for operating a free press. He was 37 years old.   

Printing enabled We The People to access more advanced culture, that is logic. Artificial Intelligence does exactly the same. Artificial Intelligence uncovers possible logics: it’s imagination unbound. Is imagination dangerous? Of course. So is life. And imaginable life unveils even more frightening possibilities. 

Elon Musk claimed, in April 2023, that “anybody who doesn’t see the danger of AI is an idiot.” Musk was one of the founders of “Open AI”, which was wrestled away from him, and is now controlled by Microsoft. Musk founded in April 2023, “X.AI”). Musk didn’t explain what was not dangerous. We all live dangerously on a direct level, under Putin’s nuclear umbrella, not just vicariously.

That automated systems should be oversighted goes without saying. All modern planes are operated by AI under stringent operational control. So the solution to the problem of AI is oversight, not granular regulation.

For example if a car company’s AI causes crashes, as may have happened recently, that car company should be told by the government to improve, or cease and desist… And prosecution should be engaged to see if laws (like wanton disregard for human life) have been violated… And this is exactly what is happening in the case of that car company (Tesla). All car companies have a form of AI operating right now, namely ABS, and other automatic braking and dynamical control systems. It’s not just the planes. (But only Tesla cars have been known to stop abruptly in the middle of a freeway on the SF Bay Bridge, for no good reason, causing a severe injury crash… because of a severely misfunctioning AI… now subjected to a Federal inquiry. As Musk heads Tesla, this is beyond ironical: he tells others AI is very dangerous, and only idiots presumably don’t see that AI makes otherwise innocent Tesla cars made by Musk… crash).

The Chinese dictatorship suggests that AI should ban “violent, obscene, or sexual information; false information; as well as content that may upset economic order or social order.” is pretty telling: AI is a danger for dictators dictating to the masses, so the dictation must not upset the established order. That includes the World Economic Forum, Davos, to which tyrant Xi was invited and gave guest speeches many times over the years, in person or not… There used to be dinosaurs, terrible lizards, now we have davosaurs… who could even extinguish the biosphere.

Want intelligence? Expand expression of imagination. AI can only help… Except if subverted by malevolent power (Pluto-kratia)… But that’s another problem. Yes, tyrants have learned to use the printing press. Not the fault of the printing press.

The printing press enabled civilization to progress enormously in all domains: since the beginning of humanity, cultural transmission has been how human intelligence was leveraged. Artificial Intelligence will enable us to leverage in turn human knowledge in all sorts of ways. Gigantic progress in human protein folding in the last few months is just an aspect of it. Many human diseases are caused by misfolded protein cascades, for example Charcot disease, aka Lou Gherig disease, which Jean-Martin Charcot called  “amyotrophic lateral sclerosis”, ALS, in 1874 when his lectures were compiled. I was reading a recent sci fi book where, 3,000 years in the future, 2,000 light years away, ALS was still incurable and the spaceship commander was dying from it. Well, in 2023, gene designers in California figured out what happens, and a treatment is around the corner.

Laws already exist. If an AI system brings people to suicide, developers should be sued. And of course AI shouldn’t be in charge of governance or nukes. Actually existing strategic systems are already not connected to the Internet. Of course.

We should ask not to oversee AI as much as ask the FDA to unleash AI on biology, aging, and drug making… In a related matter, there is such a thing as human psychobiology. It used to be called instinct, or tropism. Clearly, given a human body and neurobiology, some “MORES” are more natural than others, in given circumstances, and thus tend to occur. Denial of psychobiology produces inferior morality.

Artificial Intelligence will help to explore, from evidence it can glean all over, what human psychobiology, humanity, is all about. 

Patrice Ayme 

 

If butterflies disappeared completely, from human industry, one could imagine the Chinese dictatorship making the representation of butterflies unlawful. And AI would be forbidden to imagine butterflies, as that would threatened the established order (of dictatorship).

Racism Is Often A Two Way Street. Elevating Some Symbols Above Others Can Be Racist.

Ancient and rather simple symbols (triangles, crosses) were changed in meaning, and charged with hate. But truth should never ignore history, because it can’t exist without it. And that’s true even in physics: symbols are charged with history. So why such hysteria sometimes?

Intertwinning triangles is not, historically, one’s religion prerogative. Should it shouldn’t be in reality. Otherwise that’s assuming the superiority and sacrosanct nature of that particular religion… unfair to one thousand others. Similarly the cross used by the Christians can be viewed as an abbreviation of other, more ancient crosses… Now banned… on purely ethnic ground. Something respected in India or ancient Greece is ferociously banned. After the (hoped for) defeat of Putinism, should we bann the beautiful bulbs of the Russian Orthodox churches? Of course not.

Disrespect for humanity starts with disrespect for history.

Elon Musk banned a famous raper : was he aware of this, the fact the brandished symbol is arguably very old, and what it means which is not at all what it is depicted to be? In truth, he probably doesn’t care, his antennas are out for where the power comes from…. It’s like a mass out there: if one says the what are supposed to be the right things, one is just, and the others are atrocious racists…

The article in Le Figaro points out that all the symbols concerned are older, by millennia than the one brandishing them… And so is their modern mix, which comes from the Rael Cult…

When one can be banned for old symbols, clearly it’s Big Brother out there!

Trying to claim that the old Western European religions have nothing to do with genocide, among other crimes against humanity, flies in the face of evidence. Millions were killed in the name of the Bible used as a recipe book on holocaust. So basically, anything smacking of Bible cult smacks of holocausts, and that can be examplified in detail. For example Catholicism, Orthodox or not, exterminated all Cathars, five millions of them, and all their writings, ideas and even emotions…

Banning this and that old symbol is an attempt to ban entire worlds of history, and thus to impose a biased cult of something else. Right, it could work. But those who promote such cults need to be reminded that trying to impose mentalities can backfire.

For example Kanye West, represented above made a fashion collection with “White Lives Matter”! Which created outrage… But what should cause outrage is the claim that such and such skin color matter, and implicitly that either it didn’t use to matter, or it should matter more, etc.

Racism consists in elevating some symbols over others for no good reason. If I use a spiral galaxy as a symbol, as I do, I symbolize the supremacy of some values: space, galaxies, a mind open to all possibilities, etc. Some may sneer that I would not chose the Svastika, Hitler’s way, a spider georged on blood (Mauriac)… Especially considering that my family was a direct victim, and combatant of, Nazism. Right. (The only time I censored someone on this site was a Nazi who would keep on sending insane comments by the multitude…)

But take for example Putinism and its various symbols. I abhor Putinism, but the usage of its symbols would falicitate my personal contradiction of those who hold this sort of opinion… By identifying who they are… So I can go contradict them. For example Twitter Musk (who banned Mr. West for the picture above), identifies some accounts as “Russian Associated”… That’s good… Maybe they should say:”Putin Associated”… that would be less… racist… Many Russians disagreeing with Putin to the point they risk dying for it…

Patrice Ayme

Putin Propagandists Are Criminal Against Humanity, Block Them!

Example of assertion made publicly against yours truly (by DK):

A few examples of assertions made publicly against yours truly (by DK), a little bit of anti-Patrice hatred, while feeling the love for Putin. That was published, against me, on Facebook, for all to see. : “You refuse to recognize the suffering of the people in eastern Ukraine, now western Russia. You refuse to recognize truth. My inescapable conclusion: You are a Nazi. You should get some nostalgia out of this. The Bandera followers helped the German Nazis do this… Woke madness is not peaceful or productive. It’s pure stupidity. Much of the war is about Russia being mostly straight. Putin is not against gays, except when they try to influence children… Your statements are hysteria. Your hatred is in common with the Nazis in Ukraine, and you don’t have a problem with that. You shame yourself.”

The only Nazis in Ukraine are of course the thugs in Putin’s invasion force… Multiple commissions of the United Nations point to that conclusion. 

The sort of hateful nonsense directed towards me is published, quite frequently… My feelings are not hurt, I don’t feel bad at all. Quite the opposite, rather amused. I am happy to see that Putin’s own deranged servants feel that it is so important to insult me. My own family’s anti-Nazi credentials are impeccable. More than 100 Jews saved; all the family, at huge risks, fought the Nazis, in uniform of or not.

But this sort of insult, calling those who oppose the tyrant Putin “Nazis” can affect those who are weaker in culture, knowledge, history and temparement. They may believe it is smart, as Elon Musk proposed, to give Putin whatever he wants to appease him. Anybody who knows a bit of history knows one doesn’t feed an angry bear with one’s bare hands.

The likes of oligarch Elon Musk, who have not studied the situation on their own and depend, unwittingly, upon Putin’s propaganda to assess it, are vulnerable. All the more when they view themselves for geniuses. In turn, their learned arrogance caused by their own success at dominating people, makes them into dangerous propagators of oligarchic lies! (…and, to boot, Musk was financed by Obama, himself a Putin partisan, de facto, if not de jure… Obama plotted with Putin and refused to help Ukraine in 2014… differently from Trump and Biden) 

This is a serious matter, this vulnerability of the mentally weak. The situation with Putin is incredibly bad, potentially way worse than the worse Hitler ever planned. Indeed, although Hitler threatened the Jews with terrible consequences for the ludicrous reason that Hitler falsely accused the Jews to have caused a World War… before, armed with those anti-factual lies, sending 6 millions of them to gas chambers…

Even though Hitler was a barely conceivable horror, Hitler never threatened all of humanity with terrible consequences. Putin did threaten humanity with extinction, making him, arguably, worse than Hitler, and worse than any preceding tyrant.

All this is rendered possible, at least in Putin’s deranged mind, by horrible, 100% misdirected insults throughout the Internet against individuals who, as yours truly try to tell the truth. That, in turn, has a chilling effect on the truth.

A famous blogger in Australia, with millions of followers, paid by Putin several times wrote publicly to me, and I quote:”Are you out of your fucking mind?” or:”What the fuck is wrong with you?” She published daily extensive, well crafted pieces prepared by Putin propagandists. She has a devoted public. 

Such people are agents of a criminal against humanity (see below) and should be put out of commission. 

Putin attacked and invaded Ukraine (starting 8 years ago). That’s a war crime. Eight years ago the US president who implicitly presented himself as a friend of Putin, did nothing. He was not experienced enough, nor correctly educated (all he did in high school was dope) , little educated, and a self-described “navigator” (so no principles besides self-advancement). His tow successors, Trump and Biden did send weapons to Ukraine. Trump sent enough to stop Putin. However, after Biden came to power, the Democratic Congress stalled a Javelin anti-tank missile sale to Ukraine scheduled under Trump. At that point, over summer, Putin discreetly made it so that Europe, in particular Germany, could not store enough natural gas for the following winter. In other words, there is thus implied proof that Putin intended to invade the rest of Ukraine the following winter. Then Putin wrote a 5,000 words historically biased essay which eradicated Ukraine from history and made Kremlin Russia god, asserting it had the right to recover all its lost territories.

At that point, cherry on the cake, Biden shamefully dropped Afghan women in the maws of the Taliban, leaving behind 90 billion dollars of US equipment (so now there is such a thing as a Taliban air force). Hence, Biden projected abject, senile weakness.

Putin knew very well that the Europeans had begged Biden not to pull out of Bagram Air Force base, as that condemned the Afghan air force to not being able to repair its planes, hence, as the Afghan army couldn’t do without the air force, Afghanistan would fall to the savages. Europeans proposed to leave 10,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, and Bagram was the safest base of the US military, worldwide. However, like a senile old fool, Biden persisted, basically saying that it was better to lose a war than to go on with it. 

The autocrat in the Kremlin, self assured but not very smart, swallowed the whole thing, bait, hook, line, sinker and even the boat. 

So Putin attacked, but then it turned out that the Ukrainians, who had accomplished remarkable feats of war when Putin attacked them in 2014, and nobody would help them, repeated the performance. But this time the Ukrainians had thousands of Western rockets, soon to turn into more than seventeen thousands. 

Putin propaganda presented by Putinophiles as truth claims: if you talk Russian in Ukraine, you are executed. However many top Ukrainian officials, president, defense minister, etc, are native Russian speakers, and use their Russian… to address Russians! Presidents and Prime Minister are Jewish, Putin claims they are Nazis. And so on: in Putin’s world what is true is false and what’s false is true!

 

Giant Poster of Putin propaganda in Crimea after he invaded it, and organized a sham referendum. The title reads: “On March 16, we choose”…. Either a NAZI Crimea, on the left, “or “OR” (the 3 letters in between) Russian Crimea….

Putin, believing his own propaganda, as autocratic regimes always do, because they can’t be told any better, suddenly found himself facing not just Ukraine, but NATO and 50 democracies. Putin had thought that his propaganda and financing giant elite capture operations and pernicious media operations such as RT, Russia Today, would paralyze enough his adversaries for these massive weapon transfers not to happen.

Fortunately, the US and Europe had finally seen that Putin was Hitler, just worse, because Putin has 6,200 nukes. 

Invading Ukraine was a war crime, so is targeting and attacking pure civilian infrastructure (collateral damage is not a war crime, targeting civilian infrastructure either civil services or facilities, is a war crime). There is plenty of evidence of crimes against humanity committed by Putin’s Orcs (Orkhas is a term that was used a millenium before the Lord of The Rings, to qualify the horrendous Hungarian raiders into Europe, all the way to France…. said raids finished when the Hungarian army was annihilated by Otto I, Roman emperor, at the battle of Lechfeld, in 956 CE, over three days).

At least 7,343 children have been deported to Russia and another 236 are still missing since the start of its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, said Ukraine’s Office of the Ombudsman in September 2022. Russia has forcibly deported more than 1.6 million Ukrainians….

Russian troops have raped and tortured children in Ukraine, carried out a “large number” of executions and committed other war crimes, according to a United Nations investigation by legal experts.

Set up by the U.N. to probe the conduct of the war on both sides, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry reported its chilling findings in Geneva, describing a long list of abuses and atrocities. “Based on the evidence gathered by the commission, it has concluded that war crimes have been committed in Ukraine,” Erik Mose, the chairman of the three-member commission, told the U.N. Human Rights Council. War crimes, and plenty of them, thousands. Inquiries are pursued to find out the chain of command. One commander In Buch was found to have ordered war crimes in Izium, nearly 1,000 kilometers away. Was he himself under orders?

Putin’s officials are not even as smart as Hitler’s Nazis, Franco’s fascists or the Argentinian Junta: so used are Putin’s goons to commit crimes against humanity, that they have widely advertized their kidnapping and “adoptions” of Ukrainian children. That is one activity qualified of “GENOCIDE” by the United Nations [1].

I am totally against censorship of tumultuous thoughts. But censoring criminals against humanity and their agents is not censorship, it’s survival. The survival of humanity. Sometimes, to survive, one has to kill. Killing media access to Putin’s agents is only prudent.

At this point all we need is to destroy the enemies of humanity. Their propaganda is a distraction and itself a crime against reality. They should be blocked. In World War One, the erratic aristocrat Bertrand Russell was sent in prison for suggesting that Europe should be given to Germany, in the name of peace. Putting such a vile emitter out of the power of glowing with lies was an excellent decision. The nuclear Armageddon Putin threatened us all with is worse than the Kaiser’s worst… and we should act accordingly.

The USA should follow Europe in banning Putin’s right to speak… And Europe and the US should insist at the UN that the ban be enforced worldwide. Also, it took around ten days to expell Russia from the League of Nations when, allied with Hitler as the Kremlin was, it invaded Finland, in November 1939. Why is it taking so long to start a procedure to expell Russia?

Patrice Ayme

***

As the Institute For the Study of War observed October 15, 2022: 

Russia continues to conduct massive, forced deportations of Ukrainians that likely amount to a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign in addition to apparent violations of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin stated on October 14 that “several thousand” children from Kherson Oblast are “already in other regions of Russia, resting in rest homes and children’s camps.”[1] As ISW has previously reported, Russian authorities openly admitted to placing children from occupied areas of Ukraine up for adoption with Russian families in a manner that may constitute a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.[2]

Russian authorities may additionally be engaged in a wider campaign of ethnic cleansing by depopulating Ukrainian territory through deportations and repopulating Ukrainian cities with imported Russian citizens. Ethnic cleansing has not in itself been specified as a crime under international law but has been defined by the United Nations Commission of Experts on violations of humanitarian law committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area” and “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”[3] According to the UN definition, ethnic cleansing may be carried out by forcible removal, among other methods.[4] These definitions of ethnic cleansing campaigns are consistent with reports of the forcible deportation and adoption of Ukrainian children, as well as reports by Ukrainian sources that reconstruction projects in Mariupol are intended to house “tens of thousands of Russians” who will move to Mariupol.[5]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-15

New York Times Approves Comment On God, Seven (7) Years Later!

[The comment below was sent to the NYT on March 23, 2015, under the Obama presidency… It was authorized May 10, 2022! It was luckier than thousands of my comments censored by the NYT]

Tue, May 10, 2022 1:27 am;

The New York Times (comments@nytimes.com)

Your comment has been approved!

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with The New York Times community.

Patrice Ayme | Unverified California

Both Islam and Christianity have in their sacred texts, “verses of the sword” where holly script recommends to “kill unbelievers”.

Once one has become so morally inferior as to be ready to do such terrible things to millions, for so little cause, one is ready for much worse.

Religions based on knowing god, and giving their followers deadly recommendations on how to deal with “unbelievers” incite human beings to the ultimate inhumanity.

Not just because of the potential, theoretical, experimental, and historical mayhem they are prone to.

How could one do something worse than being willing to kill millions for little cause?

Not simply by transforming human beings into vicious human beings. But into even worse creatures.

How could that be?

It is as monstrous as it gets. What is the definition of the human species? Intelligence.

What is dulling human beings’ sense of critique to the point that one would kill for a drawing, or for looking at ancient art, or listening to music?

It is very simple: religions that extreme in light of the lethal consequences their beliefs may bring, make human beings into stupid beasts.

And that, willful beastly stupidity, is the ultimate sin, because it is the ultimate denial of morality.

This is no coincidence: both Christianism and Islamism have been imposed by war chiefs (Roman emperors for Christianism; Muhammad & 4 first Caliphs). They had a vested interest to make those they ruled over credulous, immoral, subdued, and not smart.

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Censorship Is Inhuman

Debate is human, shutting it off, inhuman. Wisdom arises from debate… So does truth. Debate is central to the so-called “scientific method”. Even after the genius in her/his remote cave, has reached Enlightenment about a particular subject, said Enlightenment needs to be debated… To become a generally accepted truth. The wise can even learn by debating fools: such is the essence of the Socratic Method… And a lesson from that method is that fools who never debate will never learn anything.

Knowledge companies, mediating data, were launched with government help, and now have become public utilities, the largest companies ever, in the number of clients. And they have grown some more since: to accomplish many operations in the modern world, it is often most convenient, and expected, to have registered with Google, Facebook, etc… With the public utility status come public duties… Meanwhile the Biden government does not bother to hide that the giant tech monopolies are part of its propaganda machine.

All the more as what is conveyed, by these giant public utilities, is supposed to be, in many cases, the truth. An ex-British vice Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, is the censorship Czar at Facebook. He helped enact this absurdity, Brexit… and incarnates the power of the Global Deep Plutocracy…

Let me give a personal example. I mentioned on FB facts about the fascist parties in World War Two. Such as the Nazis’ master race theory. I am no Nazi and my entire family fought the Nazis, suffered deaths from it, and was hunted by the Gestapo. (I was personally once bombed by racist right wing extremists, who did not like to be subjected to my argumentative power…) However some “moderators” on Facebook, who apparently knew not know enough WW2 history, or who were themselves permeated by hatred, signaled me for “hate”, and asked for my cancellation. 

Then the de facto public utility company informed me that I was banned for 30 days, for “hate”. I asked for a description of the incidents, got it, and then I wrote back around six pages showing Facebook higher ups in detail that I was just relating historical facts everybody should know, and no messenger should be punished for reminding us of these unfortunate events. FB, the public utility company, then told me that, indeed, they had made a mistake, everybody makes mistakes, they added, they were sorry, and FB rescinded the ban… However, how many have the time and fortitude to write Facebook administrators very strong letters with lots of pertinent details? I know some chaps who were banned from FB for saying things about Islam which are found in officially approved Saudi government translation of the Qur’an… They communicated their anguish to me…

Big Tech companies have been protected by the government: for example, one cannot sue them. They are government tools. So when they censor, it’s the government, their sponsor, censoring. Now the government has two poles, and an extended definition: recently elected officials, and the Deep State which includes galaxies of individuals commuting between the government and the private sector, sometimes in the space of a day… One of them the money job, in private, the other the power job, in public. 

It would be better if a multidimensional evaluation system was expressed, going all the way to warnings. Even as far as saying that “this is stupid”, “this has been demonstrated to be false”, “this is egregious and dangerous”, etc…. With the appropriate links. I mean the advisories could be very explicit, and should be, the greater the potential danger. 

But no censorship or cancellation. Censorship and cancellation should be avoided, because they cut off the debate, they are the equivalent of shooting to kill. Yes, that has to be done sometimes… But not all the time. 

Instead, debates should be encouraged: various independent agencies created for this purpose, could, and should give absolute truthfulness, potential veracity and potential significance stars to posts… instead of just using censorship. That people in more advanced countries are the most opposed to vaccination is indicative of a lack of debate and the information they lead to. So is the entire “cancellation” culture, which emanates from an entire population of debate assassins…

It is always hard to unmask new truths: the history of science is full of theories which were viewed as crazy at inception, or even subject to the death penalty. However, in due time, sometimes more than two millennia later (as the case of non- and pre- Euclidean geometry), they came to rule minds.

Debating, the specifically human behavior, has to be protected, as the essence of humanity. Censoring and cancellation have to be cancelled.

Patrice Ayme.

***

Amusingly the essence of what I said above was censored by the New York Times in an article complaining about Brazilian censorship

Jack Nicas on Sept. 9, 2021

Brazil’s President Bans Social Networks From Removing Some Posts
The new rules in Brazil appear to be the first national policy that restricts how tech companies can control their sites, analysts say.

President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil is temporarily banning social media companies from removing certain content… — one of the most significant steps by a democratically elected leader to control what can be said on the internet.

The new social media rules, issued this week and effective immediately, appear to be the first time a national government has stopped internet companies from taking down content that violates their rules, according to internet law experts and officials at tech companies. And they come at a precarious moment for Brazil.

***

I have written plenty of articles on Internet Censorship… I became aware of it, two decades ago…

.

Governmental All Encompassing Censorship Made Official. Thanks To Tech Monopolies, It Said.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said people who are removed from one social media platform for spreading misinformation should face the same consequences across the board of the “Free Speech” society.

“You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others for providing misinformation out there,” she said during a White House press briefing on Friday.

Psaki also said social media companies, such as Facebook, should “publicly” share information about the “impact” of misinformation.

Except who decides what “misinformation” is? And what grave misinformation is? Biden, who spread misinformation for a decade so that the USA would go invade and occupy Iraq, kill dozen of thousands and practice waterboarding there? … For reasons having to do with the price of oil and just imperial ire?

Thus the Biden spokeswoman said, and repeated later, that, if someone is banned on a social platform, thus, by a private company, that person should be banned on ALL other platforms, by all other private companies. Thus, since I was banned for life from a few social platforms already 12 years ago, and some were then much larger than Facebook, I should be banned on all? And what of the New York Times which banned me for years, and has now, under new management, reinstated me? Are they illegal according to the Biden White House? 

[In the picture above, the health minister of the UK is kissing the multimillionaire woman he made his deputy, on taxpayers’ salary.]

All these bans against yours truly arose because yours truly had the impudence of correcting misinformation found on these platforms. The sort of misinformation which brought the death of millions throughout the Middle East. Misinformation can be in the eye of the beholder, at first sight at least. Daunting opinions viewed initially as “misinformation” can lead to productive debate out of which new truths can arise.

One “leftist” platform I was banned from was the Daily Kos…  that particular platform was founded by Kos, an ex CIA officer (about as left as US pseudo-progressives can go)… At the time I was called a “troll” there, for expressing dissatisfaction about Obamacare, finding it insufficient (and I was hated for telling the truth). But also I claimed the Democratic Party was manipulated by its wealthy sponsors… That was one “misinformation” too far… I did not even point out that a “leftist” site founded by the CIA seems to be an intrinsic contradiction: I was careful to not indicate to all these pseudo-leftists that they were basically CIA agents… unbeknownst to themselves… Or so they claimed.

Armed with a bachelor degree in English, but a competitive swimmer, Jen Psaki became close to Obama in 2008, serving as his secretary. I like the personal aspect of these things. Psaki was named Deputy Press Secretary. On  9 September 22, 2011, Psaki left her Obama position to become senior vice president and managing director at the Washington, D.C., office of public relations firm Global Strategy Group. She returned later to Obama, and then CNN. Psaki is a full member of the Deep State. She is apparently on three different salaries right now, earning perhaps more than half a million dollars a year for…violating the Constitution? This kind of career entangling personal relations should be unlawful, because they trade in access to the power of the few, and transcend the electoral process.

In Britain the Health Minister, Hancock, offered a taxpayer paid job to a similar multimillionaire public relation woman as his deputy. He was also having sex with her in his office and it was documented on government video. The Prime Minister’s office declared that the video was of public interest and should be released. Hancock resigned for not respecting his own office stringent social distanciation orders during COVID. The fact that multimillionaire influencers without any respect for the constitution fester in all Western capitals contribute to a lowering of what common people feel the constitution is about.

Biden has blamed misinformation for stalling U.S. vaccine rates, and suggested, “They’re killing people… they are murderers” when asked what his message was to the social networks for allowing misleading claims to spread.

“‘Misinformation’ is covered by the First Amendment. Under the First Amendment, all information, no matter how wrong, is protected by the First Amendment. That is why, for example, Holocaust deniers can say what they say (and why in countries such as France and Germany specific laws make the holocaust of the Jews  by the Nazis, or that of the Armenians by the Turks, a crime). Justice Holmes’s exception for falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater carves out the exception it does because the 100% certain consequence that will follow is that there will be an immediate stampede and, as a result, immediate death. 

Publicizing military information in wartime is also an exception to free speech. However, right now, misinformation on vaccines is greatly from derelict teaching by the state at school level. The First Amendment has to protect misinformation, otherwise, someone would have to decide what constitutes misinformation… And also because in some cases we don’t know how misinformed misinformation is. Saying that existing COVID vaccines are 100% safe is apparently itself misinformation (as health authorities have given warnings, most of them directed at the Astrazeneca-Oxford vaccine). 

As it is the government clearly cannot be given the power of determining what disinformation and misinformation are: that’s a direct route to dictatorship. But the Deep State has made the argument that a private company like Facebook is not subject to the First Amendment – which, of course, applies only to the government – Private companies can decide that someone is spewing false information and can decide not to give that person their time and means, their platform and access to their users.

However, first of all Facebook, with nearly three billion users, is not a private company anymore, but a world public utility, the world’s most prominent monopoly. The Facebook’s leader has been welcomed in the presence of ultimate leaders and palaces, all over the planet. If there was a world monopoly ever, Facebook is it; even the oil giants of the 1950s never had that sort of power. 

Secondly there is judicial precedent saying that using private companies to do, or say what the government wants in matters of opinion, is unconstitutional. Third, the platforms are not private companies anymore when they do what the government is suggesting them to do. That the government claims to be merely suggesting that the platforms ban people who spread misinformation but not requiring the platforms to do so, is a distinction without a difference… especially as the White House admitted they “worked closely”.

In other words, no isegoria and no parrhesia... This is outright sinister.

The way out is to establish an independent court of truth, debate and plausibility which would just give explanations, debates, recommendations and stars.

Patrice Ayme

Debate rejuvenates society, just as fire rejuvenates a forest, by letting eternal truths stand bigger and stronger, by clearing the brush:

Facebook Suspension For Informing Of Nazism. Facebook Calls True Facts About Nazism “Hate”

Two truthful (and not flattering) historical facts about Nazism, one of them in a private group, got me suspended from Facebook (one of the suspension was for 30 days). It is as if Facebook did not want its two billion participants to know about Nazism as it really was (that is even worse than people think… and all too familiar…). There are Holocaust Memorials, like there is matter. Now we have apparently anti-Holocaust anti-Memorials, like there is antimatter.

I am in no way a Nazi sympathizer: my family resisted to Nazism, some in uniform and in combat (an uncle, an officer was in uniform for 6 years, combating the Nazis in anti-tank units; he told me about successful “hedgehog defense” by using villages as fortresses in June 1940). The Gestapo hunted my family on my mother’s side through the woods for saving Jews and others. My father fought the Nazis in Italy and France and was bombed twice by Me 262 jets (he was in a flak unit).

On March 13 I said the Nazis praised the Japanese (as a master race, Herrenrasse). This is a historical fact. On June 1 I quoted the main Nazi slogan in 1933: “Deutschland erwache” (Germany awake). Facebook considered this “multiple violations”. Got history? We see violations!

Facebook suspended me for quoting the Nazi slogan of 1933-35: “Deutschland erwache”.. As if just quoting it made me approve of it! The rape victim is now identified to the rapist, after all, she mentioned rape! Violation! Facebook seems to be unaware that the main force behind Nazism, on the psychological level was sheer stupidity, like confusing reports and advocacy. 

Interestingly, Facebook uses the same exact colors, red, white and black… Of the Nazi flag. On the face of that book, it looks like Facebook will ban those who say bad things about Nazism…

If someone mentions Trump’s slogan MAGA, that doesn’t mean they are for Trump. I do not approve of Nazism, just the opposite: I have written hundreds of pages very very strongly AGAINST Nazism. I absolutely excoriate Nazism, and want to explain to other people why exactly. Facebook told me that mentioning a despicable Nazi “racial” policy constituted “hate” and that I “violated community standards”. So, if one explains what the Nazis did, that constitutes “hate”… even if one disagrees vehemently with what the Nazis did! 

My family resisted the Nazis, and suffered immensely as a result. Am I to understand that Nazism is a subject to be absolutely avoided at Facebook? Are we supposed to ignore what the Nazis said, felt and thought? Are we supposed to ignore the part of history impacted by the Nazis? As Santanya said, that would invite repetition. 

Facebook could check “Deutschland erwache”, and the other fact which Facebook defined as “hate” on my part, that the “Nazis extolled the Japanese”. Indeed, the Nazis claimed that the Japanese were a “master race” (Herrenrasse”). That claim enabled the Nazis to constitute with the Japanese what they called the “Axis”. I would have no problem publishing those well-known historical facts in, say, Israel. Saying what the Nazis did is not “hate”. If one describes the thousands of extermination camps the Nazis had (and to which part of my family was sent), that does not mean that this is hate speech (just the opposite). But now I am afraid that Facebook may decide that mentioning death camps is “hate”… On MY part. The end result of being unable to ever say what the Nazis did and held is going to be the exact opposite of what all Holocaust Memorials have been build to do, inform everybody of what happened under Nazism. 

Describing, and condemning, infamy should not be described as “hate” (as my descriptions were). This confuses facts and the one who reports them. I urge Facebook to reconsider and not describe descriptions of Nazism as “hate” on the part of those who report them. Otherwise, next we will be unable to describe what the Holy Inquisition did, and so on. 

If someone describes the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, that doesn’t mean that one approves of it, and a mention of the crucifixion should not be described as “hate” and earn a violation of community standards. I urge Facebook to remove both of my alleged violations, which were just descriptions of what should be well-known historical facts.  

My guess is that I am on a secret banishment list at Facebook, and it is just trying to ban me by claiming I am full of “hate” (and Nazism!)

Facebook functions as the world debate forum. Unfortunately it is also a private company with one man at the helm, who did not do more than a few months of formal college studies. How Facebook connects to the US Deep State is a matter of debate, but some believe that Facebook is an outgrowth of the US Deep State spy and dagger agencies. Having the whole world expressing ideas in one forum is ideal for spring, cataloging threats… And neutralizing them (some of my posts were discreetly removed; my public probably restrained). If one can never quote the Nazis, one cannot make analogies between the present situation and Nazism.

Over the years, I have been banned by many publications which claim to be guarantors of democracy and debate (say The Guardian in the UK, which got enormous sums of money from… Bill Gates; I was told one condition was to ban me from comments). In some cases powerful individuals intervened… Some of them bankers, or tech titans, to get me specifically banned. The list is long, the effects drastic, as I disappeared from much of the Internet…

I believe that I was not blocked from Facebook for these two quotes, but because I am on some sort of black list, and other statements. The account was blocked after I posted this:

Finnish homelessness solution can’t be duplicated here, too many influential “Democrats” being way right of Trump… even at city council level (that’s why they claim to hate Trump so much). My local (“democrat”) city is finally building the cheapest housing ever below my eyes, and some of my neighbors think it’s just to bug me personally…

Like I saved the forested hill from developers of hyper wealthy homes, by organizing grassroot protests, and now the hill has been entirely poisoned…  Hundreds of trees are dead in one of the last western monarch butterfly refuges. Gee, I wonder how that happened… The city has hired a consultant to inquire…

https://www.weforum.org/…/how-finland-solved…/…

Or then:

Tech Monopolies Killed The Patent System And Innovation

Actually the worse there was not revealed; the judge who was offered 5 million dollars by FB (and more!) the very day of his last judgment hurtful to small tech companies… That judge is the friend of a friend…

And then of course:

Are Many “Liberals” Hiding Their Segregationism With Loud Vociferations?

I believe that it is essays, analyses and comments of mine like the preceding ones which truly triggered the ban… Because they have appeared on Facebook. Although Facebook cannot admit that it my domestic observations they are after. Because it will show itself for what it is: sheer political censorship, and steering of Democratic Party opinion towards simplifications compatible with plutocracy and tech monopolies…. and only them….

The Facebook review board is headed by Nick Clegg, the artisan, with David Cameron, of the Brexit referendum… Small world of violence and oversimplification, where, when one says what the Nazis did, one is a Nazi.

Intellectual fascism, pure and simple, arguably even worse than under Mccarthyism.

Patrice Ayme 

***

P/S: The next day and after many pages of protest letters in various places in Facebook:

Support Message
Today at 10:12 PM
Your post is back on Facebook
We’re sorry we got this wrong. We reviewed your post again and it does follow our Community Standards.
We appreciate you taking the time to request a review. Your feedback helps us do better.

[It was not just a post: some of the suspension were for entire capabilities, for 30 days… The fright that suddenly one cannot tell the truth about the Nazis: nothing like it…]

 

Absurd Infamy, Convenient Corruption! Some Dems Say: Iraqis Died? Let Them Drive SUVs!

Those who make you believe absurdities do so, because they want you to partake in atrocities.

My position on the Ukraine-Obama-Biden corruption story clings to the most significant facts: Joe Biden himself said, while US Vice President, in widely available video, that he would suspend US aid to Ukraine, effective immediately, if Ukraine’s top prosecutor was not fired. His son was employed by the somewhat satanic company the prosecutor was prosecuting.

Hunter Biden held a directorship at Ukraine’s largest gas company, Burisma, while his father was vice president. Hunter Biden’s payments from Burisma were clearly in excess of US average yearly family income… every month. Hunter Biden was paid at least $83,000 a month, but sometimes more than $200,000… It created an obvious conflict of interest for his father… But Hunter kept flying on Air Force Two. VP Joe Biden did not terminate this conflict of interest. Nor did he ever excuse himself for it; for Joe Biden Burisma was just business as usual. 

What Voltaire did not say: Those who make you believe absurdities do so, because they want you to partake in atrocities.

Vice President Joe Biden did urge Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, under the threat of withholding billions of dollars of U.S. aid… immediately (even the crooked “Factchecker” of the Plutocratic Party admits). The top prosecutor was inquiring at the time on Burisma. Burisma was then Ukraine’s second largest gas company. It is registered in Cyprus, a tax haven. It also operates in Germany, Mexico, Italy, and Kazakhstan.

Twitter Inc ( TWTR ) on Thursday blocked U.S. President Donald Trump’s election campaign account from tweeting, saying a video from the account about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son violated its rules.

The video posted by the @TeamTrump account referred to a New York Post story that contained details of Hunter Biden’s business dealings with Burisma and said former Vice President Joe Biden had met with an adviser of the company, introduced by Hunter Biden.

“Joe Biden is a liar who has been ripping off our country for years,” the video was captioned.

Twitter said the video violated its rules against posting private information, adding the account needed to delete the post in order to continue tweeting.

Twitter said on Wednesday the Post story violated its “hacked materials” policy, which bars the distribution of content obtained through hacking that contains private information or trade secrets, or puts people at risk of physical harm.

Facebook Inc did the same. Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO, got his career started by hacking a company… Instead of being put on trial by the state, Dorsey was hired by the company. Dorsey the hacker was not prosecuted for his crime by the state, a violation of equality of all to the law. 

This helps explain why hacking of personal information has become a thriving industry: please write your Congressperson thanking them for not prosecuting Dorsey. Led by criminals, fleeced by criminals. Dorsey, with his ten billion dollar fortune obtained through Wall Street banks (not through Twitter profits) is the poster boy of the big Brother society we now enjoy!

Facebook and Twitter took proactive steps on Wednesday to restrict dissemination of the Post story in the hours after it was published… They have been rendering this service to me for decades, free of charge, in a remarkably efficient manner to limit the diffusion of my dangerous ideas. (Twelve years ago Daily Kos, a would be progressive sort of Facebook, banned me for suggesting “Medicare For All”.)

Twitter had placed similar restrictions on the account of White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Wednesday, after she shared the Post story. 

The Bidens’ Burisma story is not an isolated case: Hunter Biden got money (more than three million dollars) from Moscow’s mayor (OK, the mayor’s spouse… maybe they were having an affair? No, she is a close adviser of Czar Putin himself)… and diamonds from a Chinse tycoon (OK, maybe he is gay, and they were romantically involved), 1.5 billion dollar deal from the Bankf of China, a government bank, and so on (fees on this sort of deal is typically 2%). Consulted, Joe Biden said:”My son has a drug problem…” (Besides, Hunter’s plate was full: Hunter Biden was busy getting a child he refused to recognize until forced by a judge, while receiving the diamonds and having an affair with his brother’s wife…) 

Ah, and let’s not forget the same drug as his father: wealth and power. Firms run by Biden “pursued business with international entities that had a stake in American foreign policy decisions, sometimes in countries where connections implied political influence and protection… Hunter Biden and his American business partners were part of a broad effort by Burisma to bring in well-connected Democrats during a period when the company was facing investigations backed not just by domestic Ukrainian forces but by officials in the Obama administration…” the New York Times reported.

In this new world, led by pseudo-progressive ex-bartenders, information is free, as long as it favors the plutocracy. Otherwise, it is banned. (Don’t laugh: I am on the receiving end… I don’t know how long I can keep on publishing, each post may be the last…) 

Freedom of information should be total, weighted by private life. Total privacy for civilians, none for politicians. Politicians should have no private life, while in office, and should, them and their families, be severely restricted after public office. There is a civilizational jurisprudence for this sort of prudence: it took five centuries for the Roman Republic to fall into plutocracy, because Roman politicians were so restricted that they couldn’t turn their public service into a job. 

Another interesting wink of history is that Caesar was unfairly accused by his enemies to have committed war crimes in Gaul… It was unfair, because neither he, nor the republic, had started the war… Nor was he the first to engage in total war during that decade of hostilities. The point is this: the doctrine of the laws of war was well established even centuries prior to this… And the non-respect of the laws of war was the strongest argument around. This should be in an interesting light the fact that a party in the US selected as candidate for ultimate leadership the only politician against whom crime against humanity charges can be brought.

Hiding the role of Biden in fostering the war in Iraq is an infamy. This absurdity hides an atrocity: the killing of millions so that the US financial plutocracy could make US fracking profitable. 

What do the Biden voting Marie Antoinettes of America hiding in their suburbs say? Iraqis died? Let them drive SUVs!  

Patrice Ayme

How Many People Does The Flu Really Kill? Censors Know

Trump said that the flu killed some years more than 100,000 in the USA. The tech monopolies and some “Democratic” politicians decried this statement as “misleading and potentially harmful” and censored the US president.

Welcome to the club, Mr. President! I have been censored thousands (yes, thousands) of times by the plutocratic media (and banned entirely from many sites, and magazines)… Including some I have long been subscribed to. Recently a social media I belonged to, realizing I was in contact with around 300,000 people, yanked that connection. Another outfit implements a fatwa of an Islamic Republic concerning another of my electronic publications. Active measures are taken to limit my electronic existence. For example the Bing search engine doesn’t recognize my existence.

Actually, the monopolies are scientifically wrong about the flu. The flu kills much more than its official numbers. Because the flu kills through secondary pneumonia, and other pulmonary diseases it fosters. The flu kills indirectly by destroying the immune system in the lungs.

For US adults, pneumonia is the most common cause of hospital admissions other than women giving birth. About 1 million adults in the US seek care in a hospital due to pneumonia every year, and 50,000 die from this disease.

Overall, the Center for Disease Control estimates that 12,000 and 61,000 deaths annually since 2010 can be blamed on the flu. The higher number reflects the 2017-2018 flu season. Most years, the US death toll from the flu is closer to 34,000 to 43,000. 

Now flu can also launch Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD, when the lungs outright die in vast portions. This is increasingly the leading cause of death. Both my parents died from it.  

The discovery that influenza impacts immune defense is formally recent… Although it was long epidemiologically obvious: during the flu season, a lot of people die from acute respiratory infection, often after they caught the flu, although not necessarily while having it. How that mechanism works was elucidated recently. Basically, the flu virus acts like an HIV for the lungs. The flu virus depresses immune function in the lungs by more than 90%…

Here is a quote from NIH, 2017 (in full and in context in the appendix):

“Virally induced death of immune cells assist in the evasion of host defenses and hinders the clearance of the virus promoting the development of infection. Studies have shown a 90% reduction of alveolar macrophages in mice within a week of influenza infection, and evidence of necrosis in the remaining macrophages” (Robinson et al., 2015). 

This is in the notion of “associated bacterial infections”:

Secondary Bacterial Infections Associated with Influenza Pandemics

Front Microbiol. 2017; 8: 1041. This is an official National Institute of Health document:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5481322/

So Trump was right. But it does not matter: the owners of the world have said that Trump is wrong, so Trump is wrong. And the owners are right. Immense power and money are always right. If you say otherwise, you will get banned from appearing in social media, even in a minute way. Immense, deep, secret and obscure forces have actually found a way to shut me down, and I am presently using methods used in China to publish the present document. This is why I am writing a lot these days. Like the flower dying, and blooming a final time.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

TRUMP CENSORSHIP AND MEDIA BIAS:

Here is the context, straight from Reuters, Reuters is owned by mostly one guy who got it from his father who got it from his own father, who got it from ancestors, etc. A family owned plutocratic hydra originally from Canada…including a Foundation, of course. Similar, a bit even older than the New York Times: we own what you think, because we created it. The sort of typical Trump hating GLOBAL PLUTOCRATIC ENTITY :

WASHINGTON, Oct 6 (Reuters) – A coronavirus patient himself, President Donald Trump on Tuesday said Americans were learning to live with the pandemic, posting comments online that drew a rebuke from Facebook and Twitter for likening the COVID-19 death toll to that of the annual flu.

A day after leaving a nearby hospital for the White House, where he will receive intensive treatments unavailable to most people, the Republican, 74, again understated the effects of the virus on social media.

Notice the US president is downgraded to “Republican” (although he spent much of his life as a Democrat), and a selfish one: intensive treatment unavailable to most people. In truth, a courageous experimenter; Trump was the 275th person to receive Regeneron’s antibody cocktail. Proposed experimental treatment for his aorta aneurysm, Albert Einstein declined… although he was dying from said aneurysm. The treatment is now standard… So Reuters claims Trump “understated”… in other words: lied. And Reuters to quote the tweet Twitter banned: 

“Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu. Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!” Trump wrote on Twitter and Facebook ( FB ).

Facebook removed the Trump post for breaking its rules on COVID-19 misinformation, according to CNN.

“This is a lie. The flu doesn’t kill 100,000 a year,” Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, tweeted.

***

TECHNICAL APPENDIX:

Here is a quote from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5481322/

Abstract

Lower and upper respiratory infections are the fourth highest cause of global mortality (Lozano et al., 2012). Epidemic and pandemic outbreaks of respiratory infection are a major medical concern, often causing considerable disease and a high death toll, typically over a relatively short period of time. Influenza is a major cause of epidemic and pandemic infection. Bacterial co/secondary infection further increases morbidity and mortality of influenza infection, with Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae, and Staphylococcus aureus reported as the most common causes. With increased antibiotic resistance and vaccine evasion it is important to monitor the epidemiology of pathogens in circulation to inform clinical treatment and development, particularly in the setting of an influenza epidemic/pandemic.

Keywords: influenza, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae, Staphylococcus aureus, pandemic

***

Virally induced death of immune cells assist in the evasion of host defenses and hinders the clearance of the virus promoting the development of infection. Studies have shown a 90% reduction of alveolar macrophages in mice within a week of influenza infection, and evidence of necrosis in the remaining macrophages (Robinson et al., 2015). Necrosis and pyroptosis are pro-inflammatory due to their role in the release of cytokines. These cell death pathways allow for the rapid release of intracellular contents, including any viral components, from the infected host cell promoting host inflammatory responses and the formation of a cytokine storm which causes host tissue damage (Cundell et al., 1995; Rock and Kono, 2008; Lamkanfi and Dixit, 2010; Cauley and Vella, 2015). Furthermore infection with some influenza subtypes, for instance H1N1 and H5N1, typically result in lymphopenia, a state of abnormally low levels of lymphocytes, which has been associated with higher viral load. de Jong et al. (2006) found influenza infection caused lower levels of cytotoxic T cell lymphocytes, which would therefore negatively affect acquired immunity (de Jong et al., 2006; Cunha et al., 2009).

Influenza infection has been shown to increase the adherence of S. aureus (as well as H. influenzae and S. pneumoniae) to host pharyngeal cells (Fainstein et al., 1980). In addition to this, mouse models have highlighted increased morbidity and mortality in mice that are pre-infected with influenza before they are exposed to S. aureus vs. those just exposed to S. aureus.