rian johnson took all that time, put in all that effort to make glass onion a fantastic period piece to the first four months of pandemic, a prescient narrative that anticipates the stupidity of rich billionaires, and then pulled the rug from under us because the world of benoit blanc just straight up doesn't have the mona lisa anymore

after jared has now confirmed on that podcast that the last scene of the show will just be sam + dean, i hope everyone can stop speculating about cas being there. he is not. (that of course doesnt mean hes not in the ep at all)

For those who WANT to actually listen, you can see it here (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jared-padalecki-returns/id1256754097)

While I intend to talk on this statement left by the Nonnie there's a few other things to talk about. For those specifically interested in THIS QUOTE, it’s part “Ten” in my notes.

Before I go on, lemme say, I keep saying Misha *isn’t* in the final *shot.* I can also say *ten thousand times* that “the final shot” is NOT THE SAME THING AS THE “FINAL SCENE.” I don’t know how many times I have to beat this into people’s heads. The “Final scene” may not even BE the final shot because for all you know, the last final scene is something like around scene 50 and the last 10 shots are some Swan Song montage with a dialogue. Scenes are also composed of *multiple shots* on the regular, and *very rarely* shot in order. So actually, it depends on what you even consider a ~scene~ but a shot and a scene are not the same thing. No matter how many times people choose to misunderstand this, this will continue to be true. 

As it is, the board already going up to 47 was high. Not unheard of, but high. I absolutely do not think anybody should be surprised if that’s actually closer to the last 5 minutes of the episode and the next 10+ shots are literal full blown montage. Because once again, and I can not emphasize this enough, they are not teleporting to a bridge at the end of the fucking show. I repeat, they are not, in the last 20-40 seconds, teleporting to a bridge at the end of the fucking show. And they weren’t on that location any other day. 

But I also know this fandom takes anything that’s in shorthand and blows it up into the worst case extremization, so I’m actually going to address this and even tag @curioussubjects and @winchestersingerautorepair and point out that Jared talks about “the last time Sam and Dean see each other” -- so enjoy that. See you on the other side, brother.

Okay so first, as a general note related to everything, that particular podcast is a mess. There is literally 17 minutes of nothing related to Jared at the start. It's a mix of sadness about how he knew a relative was dying, sadness, people's sad facebook messages which I get, losing someone is sad--but then a bunch of nonsense about ads and swag and sponsors. Like to anyone preparing to actually listen, you can skip to about 17 minutes in.

One: Confirmed they started quarantining (J2 at least) on Aug 2. 14 days gave them a few days before filming. But they refused to break quarantine even to walk the dogs to not reset the quarantine period. (This is one of the first things they talk about after the barrage of ads and other things)

Two: Jared has some great insight on how and why to let a dog go. He jumped it a little sooner than I would I think, but he talks about knowing when they're in pain or suffering. He gave assistance to her bad hips and other things through late life but saw when the spark left her and she wanted to go. Someone will probably try to problematize this but as someone that witnessed someone refusing to put down their dog while she spent half of her day having seizures and shitting herself, huffing, being terrified and unable to move, that was impressive. (This starts somewhere around 22 and goes to about 31:30, it's about a ten minute segment.)

Three: after this they actually go into the show, it also lets us know that the podcast is *recorded early on in filming*. It's talking about the first few days he left for filming. This wasn't just-now recorded. This is a few weeks old, like most Inside of You podcasts are.

Four: Jared ignores social media a lot, he confirms.

Five: He goes on having to talk about saying goodbye to a 15 year friend, never having gone more than 5 months without playing Sam, the process of being in the moment. It boils down to staying distanced from social media and your phone to be in the internet, which can actually add to feeling alone. (This may not be true for everyone, but I can definitely see why it feels so for Jared--he admits it's somewhat escapism.) Rosenbaum debates what counts as connection, but Rosenbaum also doesn't deal with a bajillion shitty comments from all his fandom lanes. He uses the podcast as an example, which is entirely different than Jared talking about ignoring twitter or instagram.

(Commercial break at 39 for a counseling/therapy service, runs to about 41 then one for a toothbrush rofl goes to about 43:15, so basically a 4 minute commercial break)

Six: Jared talks about his clinical anxiety impact on the final shooting and everything and why it was so important to have his dog with him during quarantine. He started terrified about it but got 4-5 days in and realized it was great. The wife and kids even considered going with him but he said it was okay and declined. After 45 he goes on complimenting his wife and the work she does at home.

Seven: He goes back to March 12 being the last day of filming back before covid and everyone had to run home on Friday the 13th of March LOL. So Supernatural got cursed on Friday the 13th. Rolling back to everything Gen has to do with the kids and the routine, goes back to talking about her. Talks about being the New Toy from dad being home so much. But then back to August first day of shot as an outdoor shoot. How early it was. So 21pt1 was an outdoor shoot. They continue to go on and on about how hard having kids is, if rewarding, until after 50 minutes. This converts into a conversation with his psychiatrist about his kids, his mom's birthday during social distancing, and all kinds of other commentary. Difference of psychologist vs psychiatrist. Loves sugar cuz he couldn't have it as a kid, etc.

Eight: This bit carries them all the way out past the hour mark. Just before the hour is where the "pain" section from the promo comes from. It turns into mortality and fear of death. Turns into stuff like natural childbirth. So from an hour to 1:03:00 it goes on, then it turns into another ad break that goes to about 1:07:15

Nine: How emotional the ending is, reading the script every day, remembering places start after the 1:07:15 commercial end. First week they shot up the old highway for example. Jared saying goodbye to locations he knows. Very bittersweet. There are no pickup shots because of covid.

Ten: The final scheduled moment, what you're talking about, and Jared tried very very VERY difficultly. (1:08:30 or so) -- he struggles and says "The last time Sam and Dean see each other is the last time Jared and Jensen see each other, if that makes any sense." He refused to say what the last scene was. It will be the last filming camera moments together. Which unto itself uh, hi, yes, welcome to every speculation I ever had, see you on the other side brother. Because it's the last time they see each other.

Eleven: After a bit about being emotional, they talk about Jared’s arrest, the trolling about orange jumpsuits from the crew, and asking what happened. Jared doesn’t even entirely know what happened, says it’s not an excuse, but the cliff’s notes are he was filming in Van, then he flew to Austin, he had a double date with Gen and two friends, he went to his friend’s bar (we alllll know Stereotype), they split some wine, a cocktail, hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept, bachelorette parties and show fans bought him drinks, he doesn’t know what even happened, he thinks he was blacked out, got pulled down by his hair and thought he was in a fight. He hasn’t had a drink since, he was like absolutely fucking nope. He literally wonders if he was drugged in the drinks he took from other people, but either way, he’s completely stopped drinking. It goes into them settling and actually the people thinking he was drugged, which is why the legal followthrough was light.  This goes out to almost 1:20:00.

Twelve: Around then he goes on about Walker’s pickup period, how and when shooting normally works, and it’s all kinda in the air because of Walker, shortseasons because of covid etc. 

Final question blast:

Supernatural movie?: Jared hopes so

Channel chuck norris?: Make Walker his own, has nothing to do with Chuck’s walker even if he grew up watching it in texas, new character, new story, new era.

Paranormal experiences of his own?: He has seen some things, experienced some things he can’t explain, but as far as specifically, “definitively no but possibly yes.”

Talked with Chuck Norris at all?: Not talked to him directly, their “people” have talked, had to give his blessing though because Chuck Norris co-owned the rights. Part of the EP group and ownership.

If you had a chance, what superhero would you play: He’s heard Nighthawk from fans, he kinda sits there quietly thinking and has a hard time. Screentested for the Superman McG movie in 2004 but didn’t get it.

The car wasn’t in either of their contracts. Jared actually goes on that despite images Jared’s actually the car guy more than Jensen. It wasn’t in either of their contracts but they kinda just knew it was gonna happen. He goes on about his favorite cars, his car books and parts books since he was a kid, etc.

-----------

Following through on this, I HAVE to keep saying. 47/A47 is, I would bet 5 dollars on it right here and anyone that wants to bet against it can leave a comment in the notes so I know who owes who money, Sam and Dean having their final talk already post major resolutions with a few more ends to tie up, saying their pre-goodbyes, and shot 60 is Sam and Dean’s final shot of going separate ways, with Sam on one side and Dean on the other. 

Today i woke up to fight again.

Tw; r slur against myself. A slight mental health warning.

I'm stable for now but my journey into the unknown has only just started.

I made bookmarks to keep me company, i hope you like my shitty tt content.

I wrote out a letter but tumblr destroyed it ao here's a v2 again...

Revisiting of the past, i guess this year i got many things I've never been able to do but i was hoping I'd have a psych to med me but covid has wrecked everyone left right and centre and for me it also has ruined some of my stability.

There's alot we could talk about but for now the only next siganfant date might be right.

I'd tell you it was the day we met not in person but online.

It seems to far i say but but it's been 7 years for me to be awoken to forgetting your out there, i don't know what tommrow, brings or my programs or anything but i wish you were talking to me but that's a risk i can't afford.

But i would send you some of my paycheck because it's your money just as it is mine.

Vemmo doesn't work here but paypal, i hope you don't spend it all on lingerie but if you did I'd understand.

I need to sort a few bills that I didn't plan for such as moving and storage but i might be back in Wellington next year.

I'm not sure how long I'll be gone everyday is another day to wait for the mental health service team to transfer notes and files.

This year has been a roller-coaster and I'm sorry i dragged you into it i had to wait but i couldn't stop thinking about you for 7 years so something had to break, i guess it was my old mind and my fragments of time.

I've done many things but not everything i saved some for you.

I must admit these muscles are kinda nice but not finished, but my shoes that let me walk without pain not knowing i had flat feet this year I've done my head to toe but my head ended up costing me more then i relaized.

Especially that one night in a bar i remembered the movie trilaier you must remember that, it reminded me of you and hurting you so my thoughts got stuck in bewteen loving you and seeing you hurt badly because of a fucking movie trilaier.

Now I'm stable but not fully recovered.

Keep an eye on my social media, i hate that you call me weak you don't even know how strong i am for putting up with mental health issues for 22 years and ultimately being destroyed... I like indie and alt because it's my safe music but i listen to anything from jazz to metal it depends on my mood but i didn't want to scare you off but if you looked at my playlists it's not like we both like the same things anyway deathgrips to hardstyle oh hardstyle 2012 headhunterz i wonder if you kept my music taste pdf now it's been destroyed by time.

I hate to admit it but I've tried dating but it's always you that it comes back to.

When someone asks about forrest gump and i explain that life is unplanned but you go where the wind takes you and i wanted to say my wind is a girl that loved me even if she didn't know everything about me but knew enough to say she knew i was troubled.

Unfortunately she tried to help me but now it's psychologists unpick my brain I tried to explain things but people don't understand my words...

I wish you were holding my hand but i can feel it from afar.

No matter how far i am no matter how close i wanted what's best for you and it came across in all the wrong ways, mental health issues and autism combo...

I cared so much about us that I told myself i was the reason you were sad and dragged down so i left, you couldn't see it but i was fighting myself.

Now I'm home and rebuilding awaiting more tests and intake for a program, I wish my country had better mental health systems but I've been low priority because I'm not at harm to myself because i made you a promise and harm to others i explain what happened and they don't care.

If only you could see what's going on behind the screen. But i know your smart, but i know I'm currently a fucking retard.

If only we had a normal relationship building bridges would be easier but now i relaize the only way we could of was digital again but i told you to ignore me because i was starting to feel things i hadn't in years such as happiness and love and ultimately the bad side of my mental health came back..

I guess i learnt we have to be more careful.

I blame myself for this because i lied to you.

I broke my rules i had in place but maybe there had to be new rules...

There's so much i could tell you.

A

Y

X

R

1160

survey by pandaphant

What was your first kiss like, and who was it with? It was with my ex-girlfriend; she was spending the night and the time just came for us to kiss. It was scary, but they were very encouraging so I felt a whole lot comfortable in the end.

Do you have to be in love with someone to sleep with them? In my case, yes. I know this isn’t a prerequisite for a lot of people though, and that’s okay too.

What's your favorite kind of bear? Not too obsessed with bears but I like polar bears and pandas, heehee.

Would you rather see a movie at a theater or at home on DVD? At this point? A theater. Pre-pandemic me would’ve preferred to watch movies at home because I find the cinemas too loud and too dark – and movie tickets cost like a bitch – but now I just want that life back.

Have you ever sent a FWD because you were afraid? I have no idea what this is. I’m reading this as ‘forward,’ as in sending forwarded messages; but I’m not sure if I’m accurate.

Are you still madly in love with that *someone*? No. There’s still love in there, but it’s no longer the in-love kind of love; and the love I do have is also considerably tinged with resentment.

Have you ever waited for someone? Like...in relationships? I’ve never been in that kind of situation before.

You've been given access to a time machine. Where and when do you go? I’d love to go back to an early point in my last relationship and end it off as soon as I saw the first red flag, instead of ignoring and tolerating the next 487897839473 that followed.

Would you ever date more than one person at a time? I would never be in an open relationship. I’m cool with it and I have friends who are in one, but it’s not my preference.

Would you rather have pancakes or waffles? Waffles. We have pancakes pretty often at home already; I also find waffles a lot more versatile as well.

Do you hate any of your friend's S.O.s? No. Hans is a delight; I’m friends with both Andi and Leigh so that works out well for me; and I’ve never met Jo’s girlfriend but I bet I’ll like her anyway.

What do you eat on your waffles? Either with bacon or fried chicken. Then with maple syrup and whipped cream on top of the waffles too, yum.

Have you ever had a major crush on someone that never found out? I had a happy crush on JM that never went out within Kate, Jo, and myself. He was objectively physically attractive and it was just nice to look at him sometimes, but it never developed into anything emotional and I definitely did not have any intention to flirt or cheat, because bleck.

What is one thing that has changed your life, either good or bad? I think this pandemic has brought about a lot of changes.

What is a juggalo? A juggalo is someone who is a fan of Insane Clown Posse. I only know this because I’ve confused it for gigolo a billion times.

Do you like to cuddle? Only with the right person.

Have you ever drank alcohol? Yes.

Which is your favorite punctation mark? Semicolon and em dash. So basically I like hacks to make my sentences longer.

What is one trait you could not put up with in another person? Refusing to acknowledge their toxic habits or actions and staying the way they are because “this is who I am.” That shit makes me absolutely nauseous.

If you could have any super power, what would it be and why? I’d love to time travel just to satisfy the budding historian in me.

Have you ever worn leg warmers? No. I’m not sure what those are, either.

What's your favorite way to wear your hair? These days I style it in either a very high ponytail, almost like Ariana Grande-esque; on more relaxed days it’s in a low side ponytail.

If someone made a movie about your life, what would you want it to be named? Y’all know how much I dislike questions like this that force me to get creative, so I’m moving on.

What makes you really mad? All shapes and forms of injustice.

What do you like to do for fun? Trying out new things – I’m always down to try hiking, attending a cooking class, rock climbing, archery, etc, as long as I’m with at least one person.

What eye color do you prefer in a significant other? No preference but seeing as how most Asians have dark brown eyes anyway, I’d go with that because I doubt I’d end up with someone from a different race.

American Eagle, Hollister, or Abercrombie? Eugh, none of these.

What's your favorite ice cream topping? Hot fudge and/or chocolate chips.

Have you ever rebounded...or been someone's rebound? No.

Why is your best friend your best friend? They both understand me and my needs, and we simply click insanely well in our respective relationships.

If there was one thing you could do differently, what would it be? If the pandemic never happened, I could be driving to the office everyday, experiencing nightlife, meeting new people and expanding my circles, and overall making the most out of my 20s. That kind of life would have been nice.

Do you have commitment issues? Commitment was never an issue to me. It’s trust that’s been ruined for me.

What do you do when the lights go out in a thunderstorm? Groan out in frustration and gather with my siblings in the living room.

If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do today? Just buy a crap ton of food and share it with loved ones. Then spend most of the time with my dogs.

Where do you live? Philippines.

Are you scared of spiders? Not as much as most people are.

What's your favorite band? Paramore.

If you had to do one which would it be, skydiving or bungee jumping? Skydiving. I’ve already done bungee jumping so it would be cool to try something completely new.

Do you answer your phone when it's your mother? I’d say it’s 50/50. If I have nothing much going on I’ll pick it up; but if I’m busy at work I’d have to reject it.

Do you own anything with peace signs on it? I don’t think so, but maybe. Idk it’s always possible.

Do you every buy anything at Bath & Body Works? I don’t, but this question is very timely since I had just watched Safiya Nygaard’s vlog about buying every single Bath & Body Works scented candle in existence and combining them into one candle. I had no idea they had SO many candles??? And all of them have pretty names and notes??? Thanks to her I literally placed a couple of their candles in my shopping cart at like 2 AM last night hahaha.

Do you like candles? I do now. I definitely see the hype haha.

What'd all you wear this week? House/loungewear.

Do you know any hippies? No.

Do you refuse to use public bathrooms? Yeah, even before the pandemic I refused to use them unless I absolutely had to go. The idea of sharing a toilet with hundreds of other people is just so icky, even though I don’t let my butt touch the toilet seat.

Do you know anyone that had Swine Flu? I don’t think so. I now know people who’ve gotten Covid, though – both from family and my circle of friends.

How'd you get your last booboo? Cooper’s leash, when he was tugging on it.

‘There’s still a presence out there reminding people not to speak about JFK’s killing’

Oliver Stone is not a fan of “cancel culture”. “Of course I despise it,” the Oscar winning filmmaker says, as if utterly amazed that anyone needs to ask him such a dumb question. “I am sure I’ve been cancelled by some people for all the comments I’ve made…. it’s like a witch hunt. It’s terrible. American censorship in general, because it is a declining, defensive, empire, it (America) has become very sensitive to any criticism. What is going on in the world with YouTube and social media,” he rants. “Twitter is the worst. They’ve banned the ex-President of the United States. It’s shocking!” he says, referring to Donald Trump’s removal from the micro-blogging platform.

It’s a Saturday lunchtime in the restaurant of the Marriott Hotel on the Croisette in Cannes. The American director is in town for the festival premiere this week of his new feature documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, in which he yet again pores over President John F Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963.

“I am a pin cushion for American-Russian peace relations… I had four f***ing vaccines: two Sputniks and two Pfizers,” Stone gestures at his arm. The rival super-powers may remain deeply suspicious of one another, but Stone is loading himself up with potions from both sides of the old Iron Curtain.

He has recently been travelling in Russia (hence the Sputnik jabs) where he has been making a new documentary about how nuclear power can save humanity. He also recently completed a film about Kazakhstan’s former president Nursultan Nazarbayev which – like his interviews with Vladimir Putin – has been roundly ridiculed for its deferential, softly-softly approach toward a figure widely regarded as a ruthless despot.

Dressed in a blue polo shirt, riffing away about the English football team one moment and his favourite movies the next, laughing constantly, the 74-year-old Oscar-winning director of Platoon, Wall Street, Natural Born Killers et al is a far cheerier presence than his reputation as a purveyor of dark conspiracy thrillers might suggest. He is also very outspoken. For all his belligerence, though, Stone isn’t as thick-skinned as you might imagine. I wonder if he was hurt by the scorn that came his way when his feature film JFK was released in 1991.

“I was more of a younger man. It was painful to me,” the director sighs as he remembers being attacked by such admired figures as newscaster Walter Cronkite and Hollywood power broker Jack Valenti for listening to the “hallucinatory bleatings” of former New Orleans DA Jim Garrison when JFK came out. “It was quite shocking actually because I thought the murder was behind us. I did think there was a feeling that 30 years later, we can look at this thing again without getting excited. But I was way wrong.”

Garrison, of course, was the real-life figure portrayed by Kevin Costner in the film; he was the original proponent of the theory that the CIA were involved in the killing of the US president, after his 1966 investigation. Garrison wrote the book On the Trail of the Assassins, on which the movie was partly based.

Even the director’s fiercest detractors will find it hard to dismiss the evidence he has assembled about the JFK assassination in the new documentary. Once I’d seen it and heard him hold forth, I came away thinking that only flat-earthers can possibly still believe that Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy all on his own. It’s that convincing.

Stone blitzes you with facts and figures about the Kennedy killing and its aftermath. At times, he himself seems to be suffering from information overload. “I am sorry. There are so many people,” he apologises for not immediately remembering the name of Kennedy’s personal physician, George Burkley, who was present both at Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy was first taken, and then at Bethesda, where the autopsy took place. Burkley was strangely reticent when giving evidence to the Warren Commission.

“I think there’s still a presence out there which reminds people not to speak. I’ve heard that in, of all places, Russia,” Stone says. He was startled to discover that the Russians knew all about his new documentary long before it was discussed in the mainstream press. “They said, ‘We heard about it.’ I said, ‘How?’ They said, ‘We have our contacts in the American intelligence business. They are not very happy about it.’”

Stone believes that no US president since Kennedy died has been “able to go up against this militarised sector of our economy”. Even Trump “backed down at the last second” and declined to release all the relevant documents relating to the assassination. “He announced, ‘I’m going to free it up, blah blah blah, big talk, and then a few hours before, he caved to CIA National Security again.”

The veteran filmmaker expresses his frustrations at historians like Robert Caro, author of a huge (and hugely respected) multi-volume biography of President Lyndon Johnson, for ignoring the evidence that has been turned up about the assassination.

“I can’t say [LBJ] was involved in the assassination,” explains Stone, “but it certainly suited him that Kennedy was not there anymore and he covered up by appointing the Warren Commission and doing all the things he did.”

Stone tried to cast Marlon Brando in JFK in the role as the deep throat source Mr X, eventually played by Donald Sutherland.

“I realise now I am grateful that he turned it down because he knew better than I that he would make 20 minutes out of that 14-minute monologue and it wouldn’t have worked.”

Nevertheless, he filled the film with famous faces. He thought that having familiar actors would make it easier for audiences to engage with what was an immensely complicated story.

Getting Stone to stop talking about JFK is like trying to pull a bone from a mastiff’s jaws. To change the subject slightly, I ask if he is still in touch with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He is and is utterly horrified at how Assange is being treated, especially given that Siggi the Hacker, a key witness in the extradition case against Assange, admitted recently that he lied. Stone praises Assange’s partner Stella Morris as “the best wife you could ever have. She really is smart, she’s a lawyer … he has two children. He can’t even touch them or see them. It’s barbaric. It indicates America is declining faster than we know. It is just cutting off dissent.”

The mood lightens when I invite Stone to discuss some of his favourite films. He recently tweeted a list of these, which included Darling starring Julie Christie, Joseph Losey’s Eva starring Stanley Baker and Jeanne Moreau, and Houseboat, a frothy comedy starring Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. “I love films, always have. People don’t know that side of me. I could go on forever.”

Between his darker and more contentious efforts, Stone has made a few genre films himself, for example the underrated thriller U-Turn starring Sean Penn and Jennifer Lopez. He notes, though, that even when he tried a sports movie, he ended up right back in the firing line. The NFL was furious about his 1999 American Football film, Any Given Sunday. “They (the NFL) are arrogant, very rich people who close down any dissent, so I had to change uniforms and names… but they got the point.”

Last year, Stone published the first volume of his autobiography, Chasing the Light, which took him from childhood up to his Oscar triumph with Platoon. It was well received but it didn’t make nearly a big enough splash for his liking. “There was a curtain of silence about that. Maybe it is Covid… it was not reviewed by many people,” he says. “I wish the timing had been better. The publisher was terrible. They didn’t really promote anything. So now I have to start over again if I am going to do a second book, which I would love to do. But I have to find the right publisher.”

The book contains a barbed account of Stone’s experiences as a young screenwriter working in London for British director Alan Parker and producer David Puttnam on Midnight Express. “I wrote about it in the book, so you got my point of view. They were not very friendly people. I gave my criticism of Parker that he had a chip on his shoulder. He was from a poor side of the English. There is this phenomenon you see in England of hating the upper classes until they approve of you.”

No, they didn’t stay in touch. “And Puttnam is a Lord, right? He reminds me of Tony Blair. He is such a weasel.” For once, Stone feels he has overstepped the mark. He doesn’t want to call Puttnam a weasel after all. “Put it this way, Tony Blair is a weasel. I wouldn’t trust Tony Blair. Puttnam is a supporter of Blair. Let’s leave it at that.”

On matters English, he isn’t that keen on soccer either. He watched the semi-final between England and Denmark but had no intention of tuning into the final.

“Soccer is a different kind of game. It’s a different aesthetic. It is constant movement. The United States game allows you to re-group after every play and go into a huddle and so it becomes about strategy. I still enjoy it although people think I am brutal.”

Ask him why he so relishes American Football and he replies that he “grew up with violence in America … we were banging – cowboys and Indians, a lot of killing and that stuff. How do you get away from that? We weren’t playing with dolls.”

Stone’s feelings about the US are deeply ambivalent. He is old enough to remember a time in the late 1940s and early 1950s when “everything in America was golden” and part of him still seems to love the country but his mother was French and he talks about the US as a nation now in near terminal decline.

Perhaps surprisingly, his real political hero isn’t JFK. It’s the former President of France, Charles de Gaulle. “He said no to NATO and he said no to America. He understood the dangers of being a satellite country to America. You have no power in Europe. Don’t kid yourself. The EU is just an artificial body that was amazingly stupid in cutting off Russia and cutting off China too now.”

He doesn’t much like Boris Johnson either. “Boris, listen. He’d simply throw you in jail in a second.” He rails against the English for holding Assange in Belmarsh prison.

When he is not on a crusade or unravelling a conspiracy, Stone relaxes through Buddhist meditation. “Moderation in all things,” the man who came up with the phrase “greed is right, greed works” says with no evident sense of irony. He enjoys hanging out with his friends. “I have a nice life. I’m lucky,” he says before quickly adding, “I wish I had been more honoured and respected in my lifetime, but it seems that I took a course that is in conflict with the American Empire.”

Stone’s films have had relatively few strong female characters. Ask if he welcomes the #MeToo movement and the challenging of old gender norms and he gives a typically contrary answer. “It cuts both ways, though. There are reasons for patriarchy through the centuries,” he says. “Tribes tend to have a strong leader. You need strong leaders, but I do see the feminine impulse as being important, especially when situations become too militant. The feminine impulse, I’m talking about the maternal impulse not the Hillary Clinton/Margaret Thatcher version of feminism. They’re men. They’re not women,” he says. “I don’t want women in politics who want to be men. If a woman is a woman, she should be a woman and bring her maternalism. It’s a leavening influence.”

The director deplores the rush to judge historical figures about past misdeeds from a contemporary point of view. “I am conservative in that way… don’t expect to rejudge the entire society based on your new values.”

He met with Harvey Weinstein in Cannes a few years ago to discuss a potential Guantanamo Bay TV series. “At that point, maybe he knew he was on the ropes; he was delightfully charming and humble.” The project was scuppered by the scandal that that engulfed the former Miramax boss, who is now behind bars as a convicted sex offender. Stone’s gripes with Weinstein are less to do with his sexual offences than with the way that he attacked films like Born on the Fourth of July and Saving Private Ryan to boost his own movies.

“The press loved him [Weinstein]. Don’t forget, they loved him in the 1990s,” he says, remembering the disingenuous way in which Weinstein portrayed himself as the underdog taking on the big, bad Hollywood system.

“I think he robbed Cruise of the Oscar, frankly,” Stone huffs at the intensive Weinstein lobbying which saw Daniel Day-Lewis win the Academy Award for Best for My Left Foot, denying Tom Cruise for Born on the Fourth of July in the process.

Stone acknowledges his status in Hollywood has diminished. “All that’s gone. The people have changed,” he says of the days when the studios doted on him and his films were regularly awards contenders. Now, he’ll often finance his work out of Europe. He is developing a new feature film (he won’t say what it is). “Never say die, never say it’s over,” he says of his career.

Stone is based in Los Angeles and also has “a place in New York”. During the pandemic, he still managed to travel to Russia to make his nuclear power/clean energy documentary. “I got my shots over there because the EU is so f***ing stupid,” he says of the of the Europeans’ refusal to recognise the Sputnik vaccine. “It’s ridiculous, part of the political madness of this time.”

Now, he is putting all his energy into his new documentary about nuclear power. He waves away the idea that the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters show what can go wrong – they were accidents.

“Accidents you learn from. If there were not a few crashes, how would you fly?” he says. It’s a line that somehow seems to express his entire philosophy of life.

-Geoffrey Macnab interviews Oliver Stone, The Independent, Jul 15 2021 [x]

a starting point, not the sum total

The magazine Harper’s recently published a feature in which a bunch of writers talk about “life after Trump.” They cover various topics: reality, tabloids, movies, relationships, manners, imagination, gold, conversation, punctuation, apologies, golf, literature, and Trump himself. Some of the writers are covering their usual beats: “literature” is covered by the book critic Christian Lorentzen, “movies” by film critic A. S. Hamrah. And some writers cover topics that I know from Twitter they’re already interested in: I’ve seen a number of tweets from Jane Hu, for instance, with quotes on Adorno’s thoughts on punctuation, which also opens her Harper’s piece. Other writers speak to subjects that seem more random, like Liane Carlson’s examination of the decline of the public apology that we saw so often in the early 21st century (with Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, and their like) or Yinka Elujoba on gold: the color, the substance, why it appeals to a certain brand of aristocrat in a certain type of declining empire.

A few of the pieces are inane—showing what can happen when you assemble a piece by giving a bunch of writers a topic to just do whatever they want; different people take mandates differently, and they won’t always be deep—they won’t always be hits. For instance, there’s not much to “Golf” by David Owen. Basically: golf was staid and boring when he first took it up in the early 90s, then it became kind of cool with Tiger Woods’s fame in the late 90s, or at least something people knew about and many people watched, and then all that was undone by Trump’s love of golf the last four years. And that’s well and good, but who cares. Ultimately, Owen’s contribution registers as a marginal blip in the midst of more robust discussions.

But the most inane entry might be Eileen Myles’s contribution to the feature. It’s ostensibly about “relationships.” What it’s actually about is Myles’s feelings. We’ve established before how much I’ve come to distrust writing about how we feel about major developments in politics or about disasters like climate change, rather than the developments and disasters themselves. And at least Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory is a genuine attempt to explore something, even if there are moments when the essays in it drift into ponderousness or sentimentality. In fact, I’ve come to feel less harshly about Gabbert’s book as I’ve thought about the pandemic the last few weeks—how unreal a number like 400,000 deaths feels to me, and how I struggle to know whether this is a natural response. Is a pandemic, with its enormous scale of death, a hyperobject, a phenomenon so vast it can’t really be countenanced by a single human mind? Do large-scale tragedies ever feel real and not abstract to those living through them, when they’re this diffuse? Or is this flatness I feel unique, a sign of some special psychic damage in those of us who are alive today, from social media or the ubiquity of news in the times we live in? I’m more willing to grant that this, how to countenance disaster, is Gabbert’s question; she certainly engages it thoughtfully.

Myles is not thoughtful. It’s striking to read their contribution after you read, say, Hamrah’s brief, potent account of the streaming services’ ascendance in the COVID era, now that we’re all stuck at home and at the mercy of whatever pricing schemes the streaming giants want to set for the movies they release if we want any (legal) entertainment, and how this reflects similar moves last century by studios to force theaters and theater-goers to pay for shit movies as well as better ones. Or Mike Jaccarino’s recent history of tabloids: how Trump depended on them to inflate his image in the 90s and aughts, and how the dynamic reversed over the course of his presidential race and term, with the task of tracking changes in Trump’s image now sustaining them—revealing again the inversion of structures like the media over the course of neoliberalism’s evolution and aftermath. Myles’s piece, so focused on them and how they felt about Joe Biden winning the presidency in 2020, is just so narrow by comparison. Even Charles Yu’s account of the damaging effect the Trump presidency has had on (consensus) “reality” is more interesting. It’s flawed, to my eye, because it so often presents what Trump supporters or QAnoners believe as merely an inferior narrative, a fiction they’ve subscribed to at least somewhat consciously and don’t want disturbed, as though they were all ostriches sticking their heads in the sand rather than people inhabiting the same physical space as Yu himself. And you’re never going to succeed at changing someone’s mind if you’re just convinced they’ve subscribed to a false and inferior narrative—because, as Lauren Oyler notes in her contribution to “Life After Trump,” differences in opinion often come down to different interpretations of the same facts. But even Yu’s contribution is interesting, because it’s not just Yu talking about himself as though his own experience is ours.

Myles’s piece, on the other hand, is just “I, I, I, I, I.” “I was crossing lower Broadway to look at a show,” they write: “I’m a fan…of the work of the artist named Sky Hopinka,” “I had allowed that monster”—Trump—“into my body,” “I went inside the gallery,” “I could hear [the spoken parts of the Hopinka exhibition] pretty well,” “I was in Texas during the earliest parts of COVID and I stayed there for a while and I was keenly aware that this was the first true crisis I had missed in New York”—and on it goes.

And Myles is so irritatingly convinced that their “I” is heroic, or part of a heroic “we,” standing in opposition to Trumpists and to the people in Chelsea, bourgeois and apolitical, who aren’t happy when they see a friend of Myles’s, Joe, pumping up the crowd at the election celebration:

He put his Biden-Harris T-shirt on which was brilliant. Everyone cheers when they see him. He’s like a sign. He starts acting like a sign, saying yay to everyone. Women always say yay, some couples won’t. Or they say a little. Not everyone in Chelsea is happy. They’re doing their Chelsea thing. Shopping, getting some food. This is a disruption. It’s like they didn’t even know there was an election.

I’m not on the side of the Chelsea shoppers here. I’m not on the side of anyone who’s indifferent to their environment, or who sniffs at a public display of any kind of emotion, enforcing some arbitrary idea of seemliness. But how radical is an election, really? How much does this one ultimately change? It’s a minor fluctuation in a long interregnum. I see these lines of Myles’s and I think, If you were really radical, you’d know that. You’d know that, and you wouldn’t devote this piece that professes to be about relationships to celebrating yourself and your milieu as though it speaks for the Chelsea shoppers’ or for mine. You’d think about the world you were in. The whole world, not just your part of it.

Some of the frustration of reading “Relationships” in the larger context of “Life After Trump” is the frustration of watching someone practice a mode that’s been outmoded as though it were still revolutionary. It’s part of Myles’s project as a poet to write from their own perspective. And it was likely groundbreaking or at least interesting when they first began writing: a way to speak to the experience and subjectivity of artists and creatives in late 20th-century America and make that real to those who did not know that world. Or a way to speak to those who wanted to join that world. It’s a poor mode now, in this time. Artists have long been integrated into the mainstream and the market—they’re no longer a vanguard. They’re not even people whom the mass media organs of the culture consciously turn to for a reflection of what life looks like now and what it could look like in the future. (Here, I’m thinking Sontag, Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, whoever—a small and biased set of examples, but the ones that come to mind.) The work of artists now feels like just another kind of content you might prefer to consume, just another piece of fodder for an identity (say, “literary person”) that you can espouse—and the presence of even critical artists and creatives is a marginal one that you, again as an individual consumer, can pay attention to if you like or just as easily ignore.

What’s more, in a time marked by widespread use of social media, everyone’s a poet of Myles’s type today. Everyone’s a relentless “I,” broadcasting their feelings and impressions of situations and history, talking about what everything and anything that happens feels like for them and what it means for them. I’m doing it right now! And I read magazines like Harper’s and Bookforum and the London Review of Books and more for a break from that mode—or a practice of it in which the “I” is a starting point, not the sum total. That is, when it comes to writing about the culture, I’m looking for writing that goes beyond the “I” to say something genuine about the world we’re in. Something that helps me understand that world better and then to change it.

It’s been One Hell of a Year in the US and its “Not Over with Yet!”

What is really going on in the US? Lots of people are having a difficult time, and see more of the same, if not worse, for the future. Most Americans are just thinking about one more stimulus check, just before Christmas, with so many unemployed, locked down with COVID restrictions, etc. And they should not get their hopes up too much, as they may be waiting for a long time.

All the while the US government is working to get Covid-19 vaccinations to the American public, but now they want strings attached, as people have not only lost faith in the government but the public health system. One proposal, from former congressman John Delaney of Maryland, aims to link the provision of stimulus checks to getting vaccinated, which is virtual blackmail.

Herd Immunity or Herd Mentality?

Since there’s such massive censorship, especially in the mainstream media and on social networking sites, people who would never otherwise give much credence to far-fetched allegations are now starting to believe there’s a conspiracy, or a “cluster-fuck” of conspiracies, starting out with Russiagate, Crossfire Hurricane Investigation, which proved to be the proverbial witch-hunt.

In light of everything that transpired during its run up, the recent US elections have really opened a Pandora’s Box. Take for instance absentee ballots. Several people claim they’ve seen boxes full of postal ballots not collected or counted after hours. According to Jackie Pick, a volunteer attorney in the State of Georgia who presented the evidence to the state Senate, said four suitcases ‘come out from underneath a table at the site while there was no election supervisor present’. But…. if they’re mail-in ballots, they would be for Biden anyway, right?

The mainstream media continue to totally dismiss claims of voting irregularities and fraud, without being willing to address the fact that the thing is remotely possible, claiming that Trump is merely “crying foul over the results”. But this only adds fuel to an already roaring fire. For example, CCTV evidence recently presented to a Georgia Senate Judiciary Subcommittee shows poll workers waiting for observers and media to leave before accessing ballot-stuffed suitcases from under a table, but no one has bothered to explain this, considering it not worthy of a democratic country’s attention.

Bearers of Bad News

Why is it necessarily to look elsewhere, to “off-the-wall” media outlets for alternative views on the election? Some of their insight into election cyber security, diverting votes by electronic means, Dominion Voter Machines, and old-fashion vote rigging is starting to make sense, and a democracy should be concerned about such claims, not treating them as part of sour rhetoric.

Some are now claiming that large transfers of money were made by Chinese investors prior to the elections, which brings a smile to my face in the light of Biden and his son Hunter, and a plethora of allegations of corruption involving them, including influence peddling and other backhanded moves, reported by the New York Post and other non-mainstream publications and outlets. Such stories, and even more scandalous ones, are quickly discounted or not reported in the respectful American mainstream media. They call that fact-checking.

However, a range of pundits and born again types, also not to be believed, are saying that 5 or 6 counties (cities) in the US were able to control the entire election process, and had known in advance what would be the outcome. In these same 6 cities the voting count was held up due to water problems, and allegedly people were robbed of their votes. There were also water main breaks in those same cities: Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Las Vegas, Phoenix…, and a few other cities also decided the election: Dallas Milwaukee and Seattle.

It is more than sheer coincidence that all these allegations are buttressed with the erosion of fundamental rights that Americans hold so close, free speech, majority rule, an array of constitutional rights and mainstream values. There is little doubt that the mainstream media, especially news networks such as CNN, have been manipulated in recent years, driving domestic and foreign policy, to a degree Joseph Goebbels would have been envious of.

At last some inside information concerning the agenda of the news networks is beginning to surface, and this is not good timing for those who have been manipulating the news. There is no longer a fine line between the truth and the lie, and CNN and others in the same stream of media flows have taken one maxim to heart: “If you tell a lie often enough people will come to accept it as truth.”

Some of the born again types, and their media outlets, seem to know what is going on, including the backdating of absentee ballots. They believe that Trump will somehow remain in office.

In the Meantime!

It is becoming clear that until Trump is out of the White House, he will be a problem. It does not matter whether he won or not. People continue to send him money that he can use for his own personal use. I liken these people to “useful idiots” or “real patriots.”

Yet many Republicans say nothing – which is sad, as without this force, which saw them of them riding on Trump’s coattails, many would not be in office now. It is so depressing to see that people can be so ignorant, or arrogant, or both. If Trump refuses to leave office – which I don’t believe – there will be huge protests. But he will leave office – he may not like it – but he will leave and continue to “suck” money from his supporters.

CNN Defect and Manufacturing Dissent

Recent breaking news is that James O’Keefe of Project Veritas caught CNN red handed conniving to influence the election over a period of two months during conference calls. This network made a concerted effort to report in favour of Joe Biden in the run-up to the election, and in its wake, thus adding more layers of conspiracies to an already complicated mess.

In the video he has released, O’Keefe enters into a CNN conference call, unmuting himself, telling the CEO, Jeffrey Zucker,

“We’ve been listening to your CNN calls for basically two months and recording everything. Just wanted to ask you some questions, if you have a minute … do you still feel you are the most trusted name in news? Based on what I’ve been hearing on these phone calls, I don’t know about that. I mean, we’ve got a lot of recordings that indicate you’re not really that independent of a journalist.”

The plot thickens as to how media and politics are joined up, and the playing field is less than level. The Washington Post, another media outlet which has also been accused in recent years of one sided coverage, reported that “while Project Veritas had previously disseminated covert recordings of CNN’s daily meetings, in this video O’Keefe himself could be seen dialing in to a private CNN call — apparently without the knowledge or consent of participants”.

It is clear that these recordings, legal or otherwise, show that CNN took sides in the US election, and even in the coverage of Trump’s bout with COVID, and made a concerted effort not to show him and his party in the best of light. What escapes critical attention, however, is what degree of conspiracy may have taken place with those outside of the media, such as the DNC. Based on the 2016 election, CNN is still referred to by some by the nickname, Clinton’s News Network, and that is not a good position for the network itself to be in.

I Smell a Rat!

I remember the news about the “stopped counting” on the night of the election. When this was first reported a few days after the election, election officials added an excuse that people were tired and needed to sleep. Nowhere else in history, especially on Election Day or before a deadline, and “where does a company send night-shift workers home because they’re afraid their workers are too tired?”

I smell a rat. This clip of vote counting clearly shows the counting votes continuing after hours, when everybody else, such as the election monitors, has left. Due to one sided media coverage, only now is this getting the attention it deserves, with recent Senate Hearings, e.g., Congressional Oversight in the Face of Executive Branch and Media Suppression.

Taken together, the media coverage, election results and all else happening now reminds me of an old film about the nexus of media to politics and American values. This is A Face in the Crowd (1957), directed by the rather controversial Elia Kazan, who has long been vilified for naming names during McCarthyism.

Some recent liberal critics have begun to maintain that the film predicts the Trump era, as it exposes an unhealthy alliance between populism, media and politics, while others claim just the opposite. However it definitely shows how lies and manipulation are part of any election process, and what has apparently transpired shows much more than just how low lying, deceitful politicians, journalists and governmental election oversight watchdogs will go to achieve their ends.

We’re Nowhere Near the Thick of it!

There are several videos of postal contract workers saying they saw suspicious dealings with truckloads and boxes full of ballots. As for the movie, readers should watch this carefully, stop at places and take notes, as it tells it all. Think of your own political history, your country – many countries have had, or still do have, similar vote rigging, media manipulation, playing the same political games. Compare for yourself with what is being alleged in the US, and see how your own people are manipulated into accepting all this as normal by government and media.

Think back to Dr. Goebbels, and how Hitler grabbed and consolidated power, and how it all fell apart in the end. The US is supposed to protect the world from that sort of thing. Whenever it is criticised by doing the opposite, it deflects this by saying that can’t be true because such things don’t happen in the US itself. Once the global community had to accept that argument but will it now?

Nobody is going to be the winner in the US presidential election, and the vote count is a moot issue; only democracy will have been lost. This will only empower those who want a different system – dictators, radicals and extremists of all kinds. These are same people who then dress their deeds up as “democratic”, Soviet-style, to give them legitimacy. They day they don’t will be the day US-hegemony ends, and it make be as soon as the day you read this article.

Vaccine Awareness Week Update 2021

The COVID-19 shots are waking people up to vaccine myths, such as the idea that vaccination always prevents infection and transmission, and is the only way to achieve herd immunity. The truth is that many vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission, and vaccine-acquired immunity is typically temporary. Sometimes you don't get it at all Over the past 18 months, the number of people asking questions about vaccine safety has grown significantly. The subscriber base to the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC)’s The Vaccine Reaction journal newspaper has increased by more than 50% After 9/11, Congress and the pharmaceutical industry got together and passed BioShield legislation that expands liability protection for drug companies marketing pandemic drugs and vaccines in the U.S. The PREP Act’s Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) is so inadequate, if you’re injured by a drug or vaccine used under a public health emergency declaration, it’s nearly impossible to receive compensation Health authorities and government officials have proven their incompetence during this pandemic. From the beginning, they neglected and actually prevented safe and effective treatments from being widely used — a decision that has resulted in unnecessary deaths and needless suffering

This week, we celebrate our 12th anniversary of Vaccine Awareness Week. In this video, Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) — which will celebrate its 40th anniversary as an organization in April 2022 — summarizes some of the high and low points we've experienced over the past year."It's really kind of surreal for me to watch what has unfolded since the winter of 2020," Fisher says. "In the 1990s, I predicted that the day would come when we would not be able to function in society unless we had received every government recommended vaccine.I didn't exactly understand how they would get there. Well, now we know how they got there, and it's like living my worst nightmare, which I thought my children and grandchildren would be grappling with after I was long gone. Instead, I'm here to witness it and it's very disturbing.But within this difficult challenge, we also have opportunity, because I truly think that what they've done has completely changed the public's view of public health officials and of public health policy in general. And I don't think they're going to recover — perhaps ever — but certainly not for a long, long time.The perception is that the public has not been told the whole truth about how this virus came about, and about the way in which they [need to] handle it.Certainly, if you look at it, you see that psychological warfare has been used to create such fear and anxiety in the minds of so many people that they were willing to give up fundamental civil liberties in order to feel safe, [but it's] an illusion of safety … I think they have overreached, because they are zealots in saying that everyone should get all these vaccines in order to keep the public safe."Growing Understanding of Vaccine Dangers According to Fisher, polls show two-thirds of Americans do not want COVID shot mandates.1 They do not want to be required to show a vaccine passport in order to participate in society, enter a restaurant or a store, hold a job or go to college.2 "There is definitely not an appetite in this country for mandatory use of this COVID-19 vaccine," Fisher says.[People are] starting to understand that vaccines do not prevent infection and transmission. The entire mandatory vaccination system has been built on the myth that if you get vaccinated, you cannot get infected and transmit the infection to other people. The truth is that vaccine-acquired immunity is often very temporary and sometimes you don't get it at all. ~ Barbara Loe Fisher, NVICAn estimated 25% to 30% of health care workers and medical doctors are even refusing the COVID shot.3 As noted by Fisher, "That's quite significant, considering they're the ones who have been taking care of these [COVID] patients in hospitals." Importantly, over the past 18 months, the number of people asking questions about vaccine safety has grown significantly."We've been talking about these issues — vaccine ineffectiveness, leaky vaccines, as well as vaccine safety issues — for nearly 40 years," Fisher says. "So, these issues aren't just relevant for COVID. I'm hoping that this conversation is going to widen to taking a critical look at the entire mass vaccination system that is the centerpiece of public health policies around the world."In the early 1980s, when the NVIC first started, there was no information at all for the public about vaccine risks. Doctors never discussed it, so parents knew nothing. Of course, doctors were not educated on vaccine risks either, so the ignorance was spread equally among medical professionals and lay people. Awareness about dangers has increased more or less in tandem with the expansion of the childhood vaccination schedule."When I came into this work, it was seven vaccines we were giving our children," Fisher says. "Tetanus, the DPT shot, measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) and oral polio vaccine. That was it. That's all the children got."Today, children receive 72 doses of 16 different vaccines by the age of 18. The catalyst for the

explosion of added vaccines in the early 1990s was the partial liability protection Congress gave vaccine manufacturers in 1986 under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act The movie, "1986: The Act," released in 2020 explains how the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 (NCVIA) came about, and the ramifications of it. Fisher, who is featured prominently in the film, explains:"That law was passed in November of 1986. I and other parents of DPT vaccine injured children worked on that law with Congress. They basically told us they were going to protect these companies from liability. We could either come to the table and argue for what we thought the children should get, or not come to the table, but they were going to pass the law.We came to the table and did the best we could. We were just a young group of parents against the pharmaceutical industry, the medical industry and the government, that all wanted to take total liability away from these manufacturers and the doctors.We managed to get that law to not protect the doctors. When that law was passed, the doctors were still liable for medical malpractice when it came to vaccines harming a child. The companies were also still liable for design defect. What they got off on was failure to warn.This is what people just don't understand. They [the vaccine manufacturers] were still liable in a civil court of law. And what did [Congress] do? In December 1987, in the dead of the night, an amendment was added to an omnibus budget bill … that completely let all the doctors and vaccine providers off the hook in a civil court of law.In hearings in 1987, companies begged Congress to give them full liability protection and Congress wouldn't do it. They only gave the doctors full liability protection.4Our unique contribution to that law was the safety provisions: informing, recording, reporting safety provisions. VAERS is the result of what we did in insisting that there be a centralized vaccine adverse event reporting system that parents and the public could report to, as well as the doctors.This is a one-of-a-kind vaccine adverse event reporting system [VAERS], and why we know today that more than half a million COVID vaccine reactions have been reported by the public, by doctors around this country and in other countries that use the Pfizer, Moderna and the Johnson & Johnson vaccines.There've been more than [13,600 deaths following COVID vaccination as of August 20, 2021, and more than 55,820 post-COVID shot hospitalizations5] reported to that system."The Destruction of the NCVIA The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 also requires doctors to provide parents with written vaccine information before their children are vaccinated. Originally, these information statements were thick booklets full of information. But after the law was passed, the Department of Health and Human Services gutted the vaccine safety provisions, reducing that vaccine information statement down to a single sheet of paper."They took out a lot of information that should be given to parents," Fisher says. "They gutted the compensation provisions. So, today, almost no child qualifies for compensation under that law. I guess what I'm trying to say is, what the law was when it was passed is not anything like the law we see today."Then, in 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Wyeth in a DTP vaccine injury case (Bruesewitz v Wyeth6) in which the prosecutor argued the vaccine injury was the result of a design defect (failure to make a product safer). Wyeth could have made the DPT vaccine safer, and they didn't do it. The Supreme Court majority claimed the legislative history was clear — that Congress intended that vaccine manufacturers should have no liability for FDA licensed and CDC recommended vaccines.This was in fact the complete opposite of what the legislative history shows. Two of the Supreme Court judges, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sonia Sotomayor, wrote a brilliant dissent, stating

that the legislative history does not show that Congress wanted to give the companies complete liability protection.7The film, "1986: The Act," dispels the myths surrounding this law, clearing up the many confusions about what the law was initially intended to accomplish. Unfortunately, the misinterpretation and gutting of the NCVIA opened the proverbial flood gates to more vaccines being mandated for children."There's not been one vaccine that has been created by the pharmaceutical industry and endorsed by government that has not eventually been mandated," Fisher says."And what they're trying to do during this pandemic is set the stage for every adult to also be required to get every government-endorsed vaccine. It is a public/private partnership between the pharmaceutical industry and government, and it's dangerous.When I came into this work, there was somewhat of a firewall between the pharmaceutical industry and government. They're now one and the same, and Pharma calls the shots at the FDA, the NIH and the CDC. That's just the plain truth of it."The PREP Act While the U.S. Supreme Court granted vaccine makers blanket immunity for childhood vaccine-related injuries by the Supreme Court in 2011, the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act passed by Congress in December 20058 added yet another layer of liability protection for the industry. After 9/11, Congress and the pharmaceutical industry got together and passed BioShield legislation.This federal legislation was based on the idea that weapons of mass destruction could be used against the United States, necessitating protective legislation to respond to "pandemic or bio-terrorism emergencies." Of course, the weapons of mass destruction were never actually found but, still, Congress in partnership with the pharmaceutical industry passed BioShield legislation. The PREP Act is part of that legislation.The PREP Act has to do with declared public health emergencies such as pandemics, and includes a separate mechanism for compensation when the injury occurs from a pandemic-related medication or vaccine. The PREP Act compensation mechanism was reconfirmed by Congress in the spring of 2020, and again in March 2021,9 in regard to COVID-19.While the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Act-related compensation mechanism has been fatally compromised with Congressional amendments and federal agency rule making over the years, the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) under the PREP Act is even worse. It's so bad, if you're injured by a vaccine used under a public health emergency declaration, there's virtually no hope of compensation.Imagine surrendering to all the pressure of losing your job and getting the jab, only to get so sick you generate over $1 million in hospital bills. It sounds outrageous, but this has in fact happened to many. They have zero recourse and in most cases have to declare bankruptcy, while the vaccine companies can continue to ravage the public treasuries without ANY liability or responsibility. It's beyond reprehensibly criminal, but they are getting away with it.Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s book, "The Real Tony Fauci," which comes out in November 2021, goes into far greater detail as to just how this BioShield legislation is really nothing more than a gaming of the system, essentially allowing drug companies to capture hundreds of billions of dollars from the federal government, (really you, the taxpayer). It's all a massive money and power grab.Fauci himself, who is definitely one of the cores of this whole nightmare, is responsible for having allocated probably over $1 trillion in federal funding to researchers, principal investigators that are intimately and ultimately tied to pharma, over the 37 years he's presided as director of the NIAID. His budget for fiscal year 2021 alone is $6.5 billion.10 The patents they created generates royalties to them. It's a nightmare dystopia of raping the public from the federal treasury.'Colossal Mismanagement of a Pandemic' From the beginning,

health authorities have been neglectful when it comes to the treatment of COVID-19. They've even actively prevented safe and effective treatments from being used. In the interview, Fisher describes her own experience with COVID-19:"I had COVID in December of 2019. I had a fairly difficult course with it for 10 weeks into the end of February of 2020. Of course, I didn't know what I had, but it was not a fun experience, and I was left with long-COVID that lasted 16 months until a functional medicine doctor who tested me found that the COVID had reactivated a [latent] Epstein-Barr infection.She prescribed a short course of appropriately dosed ivermectin, and I had an amazing reduction in my symptoms, which included cardiac symptoms that had been diagnosed by a cardiologist. So, I had all the classic symptoms of COVID and I had a classic course of long-COVID, yet I didn't know that I could have used ivermectin months ago to help me get through.My energy shot up after that ivermectin and I stopped having to sleep 12 hours a day. My cardiac symptoms were significantly reduced. It was like I got my life back. Yet the government has gone after doctors who have urged people to get vitamin D, vitamin C, zinc, ivermectin11 and these other licensed drugs that are safe and have been around forever.The government actively discouraged people from doing things that could have helped them recover. This is so wrong on so many levels. It's a colossal mismanagement of an outbreak."Of course, there are indications that it wasn't really inadvertent mismanagement but, rather, a strategic and carefully orchestrated plan to implement the Great Reset."A couple of months ago, I went to the website of the World Economic Forum and what comes up? The Great Reset.12 I could not believe what I was reading. It's completely transparent, how they want to reset the entire world's economy," Fisher says.The ultimate "public health authority" is of course the World Health Organization, and the No. 1 funder of the WHO is Bill Gates, as he provides funding not only through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation but also GAVI.This financial leverage gives Gates a disproportionate amount of power over public health globally and, of course, we know that his primary goal is to expand the use of vaccines. At the same time, Gates is also a major Big Tech player, which is the central enforcer of censorship. By censoring one side of the discussion, Big Tech is responsible for making informed consent impossible.Growing Awareness That Vaccines Don't Prevent Infection The good news is that the COVID situation is waking people up not only to the potential dangers of these novel mRNA injections, but also to the problems and fallacies associated with all the conventional vaccines. They are starting to recognize these injections are not as harmless or as effective as they have been purported to be. That is one of the silver linings of this entire mess."[People are] starting to understand that vaccines do not prevent infection and transmission," Fisher says. "The entire mandatory vaccination system in this country has been built on the myth that if you get vaccinated, you cannot get infected and transmit the infection to other people; that you have vaccine-acquired immunity that is robust and contributes to herd immunity.The truth is that vaccine-acquired immunity is often very temporary and sometimes you don't get it at all. And really, herd immunity is more based on natural immunity … So, the term 'immunization' really should never be used anymore.These COVID 'vaccines,' the government has now acknowledged, cannot reliably prevent infection and transmission.13 This is a game-changer, if people will really get their arms around it. And so, I am glad that has come out. I'm also glad that we're seeing people around the world stand up and fight for their freedom."The Fight for Medical Autonomy and Freedom Since the start of the COVID pandemic, the NVIC has encouraged people to work within the system, to go to your state legislators and

have personal conversations with them. NVIC created model state legislation at the beginning of this pandemic, because they knew the end game would be mandatory COVID vaccination.So far, 21 U.S. states have passed legislation that restrict or prevent COVID vaccine mandates or COVID vaccine passports. Several state governors have also issued executive orders to the same effect. These successes show us that we should not lose complete faith in the system just yet. It's broken, yes, but the answer is not to give up but, rather, to get personally involved. We need freedom-loving, rational people to get involved at every level of government, Fisher says:"That means your school board, your county boards, city councils, your state legislatures. At the local level, you can really make a difference. Talk to your neighbors, talk to your community, give them the information that's produced by NVIC and by mercola.com.Give them factual information backed up with references, and try to change the conversation in your community. Also, we have to change bad laws so that we won't have to feel this oppression that we've felt for almost two years …I'll just point out, there's a page on the CDC website that basically talks about quarantine camps14 and being able to detain citizens should they feel that they need to be protected from the rest of society, or the rest of society protected from them. This is a very serious constitutional issue."As explained by Fisher, the federal government could also invoke its authority over interstate commerce and prohibit unvaccinated people from flying from one state to another that way. There's already legislation introduced in Congress proposing this.15 So, even though 21 states have enacted laws against the requirement of vaccine passports, we're not out of the woods yet. The freedom to travel can still be stripped from us in a variety of ways, and we must fight to block all of them.FDA's Approval of the Pfizer COVID Shot August 23, 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted full approval16 to the COVID-19 mRNA injection developed by Pfizer/BioNTech, sold under the brand name Comirnaty, for use in people aged 16 and older. It's the fastest approval in history,17 and is based on just six months' worth of data from 44,060 people.18,19Half of them got the shots and half initially received a placebo. However, in the second week of December 2020, Pfizer unblinded the control group and 93% of controls opted to get the real injection20 rather than remain in the control group for the remainder of the trial, which is slated to continue for another two years. In other words, there's no control group left against which to compare side effects and effectiveness.The FDA was expected to hold a public meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC)21 and allow for public and expert input before the first COVID-19 vaccine was formally licensed.For transparency and full public disclosure of vital scientific information, this meeting should have taken place before approval because COVID-19 vaccines are the first to ever have been distributed to the US population under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).In response, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Children's Health Defense (CHD) filed a lawsuit22 August 31, 2021, against the FDA and its acting director, Dr. Janet Woodcock, for this mess. On its website, CHD says:"CHD argues that the licensure was a classic 'bait and switch,' allowing Pfizer, the Biden administration, the U.S. military and employers to exhort people to take 'licensed' vaccines when in fact the vaccines available and being administered continued to be the Pfizer-BioNTech Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) vaccines …… the FDA violated federal law when it simultaneously licensed Pfizer's 'Comirnaty' vaccine and extended Pfizer's EUA for its vaccine that has the 'same formulation' and that 'can be used interchangeably …The law (21 U.S. Code § 360bbb-3-(3)) on 'authorization for medical products for use in emergencies'

requires the EUA designation be used only when 'there is no adequate, approved and available alternative to the product for diagnosing, preventing or treating such disease or condition.'The lawsuit alleges once the FDA approved and licensed Pfizer's Comirnaty vaccine, there was no further basis for the FDA to preserve the EUA status for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that Pfizer acknowledges has the 'same formulation' and is 'interchangeable.'"As explained by Fisher, in order to receive Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA, vaccine makers had to show their COVID jabs were more than 50% effective at preventing serious symptoms of COVID-19 disease.23 They were not required to demonstrate that the shots prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection or that it prevents transmission of the virus."So the bar was set very low at the very beginning for the Emergency Use Authorization," she says. "If you look at the rhetoric the CDC uses, you can see they're always talking about prevention of hospitalization and death. This is not what people think happens when you get a vaccine. We have been carefully taught to believe that when we get vaccinated, we will not get infected and we won't transmit that infection to other people."Many Vaccines Don't Prevent Infection or Transmission The problem is, many vaccines don't work the way we've been told. Take the pertussis vaccine, for example. According to Fisher, there's ample evidence that you can be vaccinated against pertussis and still transmit the infection, including asymptomatically.24,25 The same thing has been shown for measles,26 mumps,27 influenza28 and chickenpox29 vaccines."That's why I said that this is an opportunity to educate people about what vaccination really means," Fisher says. "It's also an argument for why [COVID] vaccines should not be mandated.In this case, it's a biological pharmaceutical product that has never been made like this. This is an entirely new technology.30 It is truly an experiment on the human race, because they did not do the kind of science that they should have done to get Emergency Use Authorization."Dr. Peter McCullough, an epidemiologist and cardiologist who is very familiar with medical research protocols, has pointed out that none of the COVID injection trials has data safety monitoring boards. It appears standard safeguards were intentionally eliminated for the rapid rollout of these shots and to eliminate any public outcry because the incriminating data are simply not being collected.How convenient. Actually, it is a clever strategy to achieve their goals and they are getting away with it, because those in authority do not have the courage and boldness of physician scientists like McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone, who invented the mRNA technology.31 We need 10 times more of these types of brave souls to stick their necks out, as they have the credibility to actually make a difference. We just need enough of them to take a stand.Had proper monitoring boards been in place, McCullough believes the vaccination campaign would have been stopped by late January 2021, because of the high number of suspicious deaths that had occurred by then. There's also the possibility of these shots causing antibody dependent enhancement (ADE), which is a big concern for the future.Watch the NVIC Conference for FREE As you might expect, this has been an unusual year, and virtually nothing has been routine. This year, NVIC was removed from three of the four major social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter)32 after NVIC held their groundbreaking online Fifth International Public Conference on Vaccination: Protecting Health and Autonomy in the 2st Century in late 2020.33 Fisher says:"This year, so many people have been contacting us. We have a counseling service and we help people, families, who are going through a vaccine reaction or who are asking for information … Our weekly Vaccine Reaction newsletter has seen an almost 50% increase in subscribers, and this shows you that people are thirsty for this information.One of the

things we're really excited about is we're going to be launching a brand-new website in 2022 that your donations helped us do. It's a very expensive project, but something that I'm very excited about. We're also going to be launching an updated NVIC portal website.We have been putting an awful lot of our efforts into the states, trying to educate people and train them on how to be effective vaccine choice advocates in their state. This takes a lot of organizing, and it takes a lot of collaboration between other groups that are on the front lines in the states.We wouldn't be here if it hadn't been for the support that you [Dr. Mercola] have given us over the years. And I feel positive; I feel that the people in this country are going to remember that freedom is something they have to fight for. It's taken us a little bit of time to come out of our shock, because they punched us around pretty good in 2020, but I think people are waking up now and are going to start to really fight back …Those who are authoritarian — forced vaccinators — have revealed themselves in the last 18 months. And that reveal has caused people to take a step back and look to see what their real goal is."Take Action, Support NVIC Today As in previous years, during Vaccine Awareness Week, I will match your donations to the NVIC, dollar for dollar, so this is a great time to maximize your impact. So, please, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the NVIC today, and be sure to sign up for the NVIC Advocacy Portal to stay abreast of the latest legislative activities in your state.

Oscars 2021: Ignore the Cynics, the Ceremony is Already a Win

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There was a time when folks wondered if there even would be an Oscars in 2021. It’s easy to forget this now. After all, 12 months suddenly feels like several lifetimes, and the anxiety which accompanied theaters going dark in March 2020 was replaced by abject schadenfreude when one studio tried to open a blockbuster six months later. But the state of the industry—from theatrical releases to streaming, to, yes, awards shows—was shrouded in uncertainty for what seemed like an eternity.

Apprehension even seemed to reach the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences when they announced last June that the next Oscars ceremony would be held on April 25, 2021—the latest calendar date ever for the show since they began broadcasting on television in 1953. Yet with theaters still closed and a second wave then imminent, some speculated… would the show really go on?

“There was a time when it looked like no films were being released at all, even on streaming, much less in theaters,” TCM host Dave Karger tells me when we sit down to discuss Oscar history, and the kind of history that’s now being made by the 93rd Annual Academy Awards. “I was worried that they were going to do away with the Oscars or just postpone it for even more months. And then, once I realized there was actually going to be a telecast and be a ceremony, my larger concern was that there weren’t going to be many movies at all that were eligible.”

It was a common concern. It also luckily turned out to be unfounded. In 2021, there were more films eligible for Oscar nominations than ever before, and Karger personally argues the year’s eight Best Picture nominees—including Nomadland, Promising Young Woman, and Mank—are as good or better than any lineup he can recall from the past decade.

All of which is worth keeping in mind ahead of Sunday night’s Oscar ceremony. Steven Soderbergh, the Oscar winning director of Contagion and Ocean’s 11, has even been making the rounds to remind audiences the night is as much a celebration for the movies that did come out and captivate during the COVID era as it is a chance to applaud award winners. “Joyous” is the word the Traffic director used to describe the tone of Sunday night. But then, he may be feeling the need to preempt the cynics who’ve already come out ahead of the Oscars with knives drawn.

Indeed, there’s been a growing wave of cynicism about this year’s nominees, perhaps most loudly articulated by Bill Maher, the iconoclast host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. Recently on that program, Maher criticized the Academy and industry for nominating only “downers,” taking special aim at spoiling Nomadland, Minari, and Promising Young Woman for potential audiences while noting their subject matters are too depressing to be popular with mainstream audiences.

Karger, who notes he’s a fan of Maher and would love to see him appear on TCM again, disagrees with this assessment.

“I think it’s very easy to cherry pick aspects of some of these films,” says Karger. “What’s hard about this year’s Oscars is that—and this happens a lot of the time, but particularly this year—the movies are on the sad side. You could even say somewhat depressing, although I think they’re also uplifting. But if you just hear the subject matter of some of the nominated films—a woman who loses her baby in childbirth; a man suffering with dementia; a young man who loses his hearing suddenly and catastrophically; a woman who loses her job and is forced to live in her van—I can imagine that to a casual moviegoer it would make them want to tear their hair out.”

He continues, “But I think if you actually watch the movies, there’s a lot more to them than just the initial description. The fact of the matter is these films did provide a lot of us with some happiness and some escapism during a time when we largely were sitting at home. So if the Oscars can feel even more celebratory and joyful than they already usually do, I think they’re serving their purpose.”

As for the point of there not being any “popular” movies nominated for Best Picture, Karger is quick to point out that these movies didn’t come out in a vacuum; there were still action movies on Netflix, Kaiju flicks on HBO Max, and Coming 2 America on Amazon. He also reminds us that Hollywood studios were delaying films intended to have populist and prestige crossover appeal—movies like Dune or Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake—out of 2020.

Says Karger, “If there are some people decrying the fact that no blockbusters were nominated at the Oscars this year, I would just say, well, there weren’t that many to choose from. There wasn’t a Black Panther or a Once Upon a Time in Hollywood or Lord of the Rings or an Avatar to anoint.” Not that he necessarily minds. As he’s quick to also say, “I don’t think you can look at a single Best Picture nominee this year and say that it doesn’t deserve to be there.”

Oscars, and the type of movies nominated for them, are things Karger has long been passionate about. A self-described lifelong “Oscar nerd,” Karger was studying the intricacies of the races and changing Academy dynamics well before becoming the Academy’s official red carpet greeter in 2012 and 2013, where he acted as the red carpet’s first welcoming voice (with a microphone) to nominees and presenters. Since then he’s become a Turner Classic Movies host, appearing on the cable network as presenter and historian to recount Hollywood days gone by, including during the network’s annual 31 Days of Oscar.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, 31 Days of Oscar is Karger’s favorite recurring series on TCM, and one that’s allowed him to appreciate parallels between the Oscars during COVID and previous ceremonies held in times of crisis.

“I do think there are some parallels [with the World War II years],” Karger says, “where there were similar discussions had. ‘Should there be a ceremony? And if we have one, what should be different about it? What are the optics of having an Oscar ceremony at all in a time of crisis?’ Of course the difference is that in 1942, the question was more what does it look like and what does it feel like for us to be having this celebratory event? Whereas in 2021, the question is, is it physically safe to have this event?”

Still, the solutions remain strikingly familiar. As Karger adds, “I think the fact that you’re seeing the ceremony be completely reinvented and rethought definitely reminds me of what did happen in 1942 where the Oscar ceremony was scaled down and formal dress was discouraged, and it wasn’t the show it normally was. It was a quieter affair.”

As for the actual awards themselves, Karger is thrilled two of his favorite movies of the year, Sound of Metal and The Father, were able to be the “surprise” nominees for Best Picture. Although, much like everyone else, he thinks it’s improbable anything stops Nomadland from winning Best Picture.

“I think there’s a slight chance that something like Minari or The Trial of the Chicago 7 could win,” Karger says, “but the operative word there is slight. I don’t see Nomadland losing. I think it’s going to do very well with multiple awards, including Best Picture and Director.”

The Best Actress category, however, has never seemed more open in all Karger’s years of Oscar-watching.

“I was trying to think about [a time] where you had four different people who won the Critics Choice, the Golden Globe, the BAFTA, and the SAG Award,” Karger considers, referring to how each of the major proceeding awards have gone, respectively, to Carey Mulligan, Andra Day, Frances McDormand, and Viola Davis. “I don’t know if that’s ever happened before.”

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With that said, Karger suspects the SAG and BAFTA winners are the best indicators for the Oscars, as they’re the only ones with a significant number of voting members also in the Academy.

“A few weeks ago, I was more bullish on Carey Mulligan’s chances for Best Actress,” he says. “Now I feel like it’s more between Viola Davis and Frances McDormand, with Carey Mulligan as a possible Adrian Brody-style spoiler.”

Meanwhile Karger has 31 Days of Oscar at TCM to get him through the anticipation of Sunday night, and well past it. Usually held in the month of February (and part of March), the TCM series is now spread across the whole of April. It’s an exciting time for hosts like Karger, as it’s an opportunity to widen the tent a little with what plays on the network. Their “bread and butter” remains Hollywood’s Golden Age from the 1930s through the 1960s, but 31 Days of Oscar allows them to also show movies from as recently as a few years ago, as seen with Carol (2015) or Nebraska (2013). Yet it still leaves room for Singin’ in the Rain to play on Sunday night at 6pm EST, ahead of the Oscar telecast for those so inclined.

Traditionally, 31 Days of Oscar has also been a time where the network could get highly creative with its programming, such as when each Oscar nominated film TCM aired shared an actor with the film proceeding it on the line-up. “It’s a whole Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game for a month,” Karger laughs. But in 2021? The layout is clean and to the point: the movies are being aired in alphabetical order.

“This year, it’s probably as simple as you can get, alphabetical,” Karger explains. “Because why not? The world is very complex right now. So why shouldn’t there be one thing that’s easy? And that’s 31 Days of Oscar.” Still, he adds with a chuckle, the programmers managed to ensure that Easter Parade played on Easter.

“It was the primetime spot on Easter Sunday at eight o’clock,” Karger points out. “So my hat is off to them, as it always is.”

After a year like 2020, that also is probably worth a standing ovation.

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What Makes a GPU a GPU, and When Did We Start Calling it That?

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

Names change. Perhaps the most jarring element of the recent, widely reported “alien” activity isn’t so much descriptions of sonic boomless sonic flight but that UFOs (unidentified flying objects) are now called UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena).

Companies rebrand; Google became Alphabet and the Washington Football Team decided that was a good idea. With technology, terminology tends to become antiquated as industries progress beyond understanding their own achievements.

With that in mind, let’s consider how changes to the GPU (now the graphics processing unit) acronym and how it harkened a new era of computing applications, while frustrating an obvious customer base.

An ad from Tektronix Interactive Graphics, an alleged forebearer of GPU technology. Or were they?

Most of the history of GPUs doesn’t really count

How mainstream consumers came to expect graphic interfaces to work with computers is a long, fascinating history covered by many books and at least one excellent made-for-TV movie.

While Windows and Apple were gaining acceptance for their point-and-click interface, hardcore computer users, i.e. gamers, needed those points and clicks to register a lot faster. They also wanted the graphics to look more realistic. Then they started asking for features like online multiplayer, instant chat, and a slew of other features we expect nowadays, but seemed like a lot in the early to mid-1990s.

One could contribute the increase in technically demanding games to the 1993 classic Doom, as well as its successor Quake, which drove consumer interest in dedicated graphics cards. However, after talking with an expert that’s watched the field develop from the beginning, the history of GPUs just isn’t that simple.

Dr. Jon Peddie first got involved in the computer graphics industry in the 1960s when he was part of a team that made 3D topographic maps from aerial photography, leading to the creation of his company, Data Graphics. By the early 1980s, he was considering retirement and a career writing sci-fi (sounds nice) when he noticed an explosion in the field that was hard to ignore. Practical applications for high performance graphics were initially driven by CAD (computer-aided design) and GIS (geographic information system)  companies, though the video game explosion of the 80s would change that.

“Gaming was (and still is) the driver because of the volume of the customers,” Peddie said in an email. “The other users of 3D and GPUs were engineering (CAD, and molecular modeling), and the movies. But that market had (in the 80s and 90s) maybe 100,000 users total. Consumer 3D had millions. But, the pro market would pay more—thousands to tens of thousands, whereas the consumer would pay a few hundred. So the trick was to build enough power into a chip that could, in a final product, be sold for a few hundred.”

At this point in computing history, the acronym GPU had been introduced into the tech lexicon. This blast-from-the-past article from a 1983 edition of Computerworld details the Tektronix line of graphics terminals. But if you look a little closer, GPU didn’t yet stand for “graphic processing unit”. Instead, this iteration stood for “graphic processor unit”. Is there even a difference?

“None,” Peddie explains. “Tense at best case. English is not the first language for a lot of people who write for (on) the web.”

Okay, fair enough. But this isn’t actually the problem or even the interesting element of GPU history to consider, Peddie points out. It’s the fact that before 1997, the GPU didn’t actually exist, even if the acronym was being used. A proper GPU, it turns out, requires a transform and lighting (T&L) engine.

“Why shouldn’t, couldn’t, a graphics chip or board developed before 1997 be called a GPU?” Peddie asks. “It does graphics (albeit only in 2D space). Does it process the graphics? Sure, in a manner of speaking. It draws lines and circles—that’s processing. It repositions polygons on the screen—that’s processing. So the big distinction, that is a GPU must do full 3D (and that requires a T&L).”

Ultimately, like much of tech history, the story quickly becomes about competing claims between an industry leader and a forgotten innovator.

The Glint 3D graphics chip by 3Dlabs, arguably the first company to produce a true GPU. Largely used for “high-end 3D CAD applications”, it was released in November 1994 (still not the first “real” GPU but still a cool graphics chip). Though first to market, 3Dlabs would not enjoy the economies of scale available to their competitors, like Nvidia. Image: Jon Peddie

Bragging rights are claimed by the winners

Let’s get this out of the way since it’s a common mistake. The first PlayStation was not the first mass market GPU. That belief comes from the powerful marketing efforts of Sony and Toshiba. As Peddie explains, “The original PlayStation [had] a geometry transformation engine (GTE), which was a co-processor to a 2D chip that was incorrectly labeled (by marketing) as a GPU.”

Marketing is a big element in this era of GPUs, which is just before they actually came out. The breakthrough for a true 3D GPU was on the horizon and plenty of companies wanted to get there first. But the honor would go to a little outfit from the UK imaginitely called 3Dlabs. The specific innovation that gave 3Dlabs the title of first accurately named GPU was their development of a two-chip graphics processor that included a geometry processor known as a transform and lighting (T&L) engine. Compared with their competitors, 3Dlabs focused on the CAD market though it was trying to make inroads with the larger consumer market by partnering with Creative Labs.

The smaller size and professional focus of 3Dlabs meant there were still plenty of “firsts” to be had in the consumer GPU market.

The graphics-card sector was incredibly busy during this period, with one-time big names such as Matrox, S3, and 3Dfx competing for mindshare among Quake players.

But the winners write the history books, and a dominant player emerged during this period. By late 1999, Nvidia was ready to release the first mass consumer GPU with integrated T&L, known as the GeForce 256.

“That, by Nvidia’s mythology, was the introduction of the GPU, and they claim the invention [of it],” Peddie explains. “So you can slice and dice history as you like. Nvidia is at $10 billion on its way to $50 billion, and no one remembers 3Dlabs.”

(Side note: Nvidia is and always will be a noun and not an acronym despite the wide belief it is one.)

Pretty soon, the market would be loaded with competing GPUs each aiming at their own particular market niche. Canadian manufacturer ATI Technologies, which was later purchased by Nvidia’s biggest competitor AMD, attempted to differentiate their entry into the market by calling their GPU a VPU, or video processor unit, even though they were the same thing. This effort didn’t last.

“ATI gave up, they couldn’t stand up to Nvidia’s superior (and I mean that) marketing skills, volume, sexiness, and relentless push,” Peddie says.

By the early 2000s, major players like Nvidia had dominated the consumer market, quickly becoming villains to gamers everywhere. Interestingly enough, this exact market consolidation helps explain exactly why high-end graphics cards are so hard to find nowadays.

Behold! One of the most coveted items in the world. And it’s not even the top of the line.

So who do we blame for that GPU shortage, anyway?

If you’ve gotten this far into an article on GPU history and naming convention, I bet you’re wondering when I’m going to get to the Great GPU Shortage of 2020 (and probably beyond).

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, the gist is this: the price of higher-end GPUs has exploded in recent months, if you can even find them.

For example, the folks over at Nvidia have three models of graphics cards that are generally sought after by gamers:

RTX 3090: MSRP $1,499

RTX 3080: MSRP $699

RTX 3070: MSRP $499

The individual merits of these models can be (and very much are) debated relative to their given price points and performance. However, scarcity has made the resale markets for these GPUs shoot through the roof as supply becomes scarce. Current listings price the middle-tier RTX 3080 at $1,499, while the 3090 and 3070 are nearly impossible to find. One listing for a 3090 on eBay is over $3,000 at time of writing.

The AMD line of graphics cards also deserve a mention here. Though not as highly sought after because, traditionally, they haven’t been as powerful, AMD has nonetheless been affected by the supply chain limitations for GPU manufacturing. Like the Nvidia line, the AMD RX 6700, 6800, and 6900 models have seen similar price spikes in the secondary market with most models fetching more than twice their original values in resale markets.

(One extreme example of this: Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, bought a refurbished AMD RX 570 for slightly more than $100 in mid-2019, which he used in a piece about reusing old workstations. That same card, which is basically a budget model and was already a little old at the time I purchased it, currently sells for $599 on Newegg’s website.)

Clearly there is heavy demand and capitalism is usually pretty good at filling that gap. Like many things wrong with 2020, a good bit of the blame is being placed on COVID-19. Manufacturing hubs in China and Taiwan, along with most of the world, had to shut down. While much of the work in hardware manufacturing can be automated, the delicate nature of GPUs requires some degree of human interaction.

A flow chart describing the current shape of the GPU industry. Image: Jon Peddie

Still, this explanation oversimplifies processes that have been trending in the graphics industry long before COVID-19 hit. Again, I’ll let Peddie explain:

About 15 [plus] years ago, the manufacturing pipeline was established for GPU manufacturing (which includes sourcing the raw silicon ingots), slicing and dicing the wafers, testing, packaging, testing again and finally shipping to a customer. All the companies in the pipeline and downstream (the OEM customers who have a similar pipeline) were seeking ways to respond faster, and at the same time minimize their inventory. So, the JIT (just in time) manufacturing model was developed. This relied on everyone in the chain providing accurate forecasts and therefore orders. If one link in the chain broke everyone downstream would suffer … When governments shut down their countries all production ground to a halt – no parts shipped—the pipeline was broken. And, when and if production could be restarted, it would take months to get everyone in sync again.

At the same time people were being sent home to work, and they didn’t have the tools needed to do that. That created a demand for PCs, notebooks especially. [Thirty to forty percent] of PCs have two GPUs in them, so the demand for GPUs increased even more.

And then [crypto] coins started to inflate … Now the miners (people who use GPUs to monitor and report …) were after every and any GPU they could get their hands on. That caused speculators to buy all the graphics boards and offer them at much higher prices. 

So, the supply line got hit with a 1-2-3 punch and was down for the count.

And that was him keeping a long story short. To put it plainly, companies that make GPUs were operating on a thin margin of error without the ability to predict the future. And this applies more to the general market for GPUs while tangentially addressing the higher-end customers.

Another point of frustration to add here was the unfortunate timing of the latest generation of video game consoles in 2020, which also meant a new generation of video games. The highly anticipated PlayStation 5 along with Cyberpunk 2077 was met with numerous supply and technical issues upon launch. Cyberpunk players reported inconsistent experiences largely dependent on hardware the game was being played on. On the differences between the game on a PS4 and a PS5, one YouTuber commented, “At least it’s playable on PS5.”

While Peddie expects the shortage to self-correct by the first quarter of 2022 (hooray …), he is not optimistic about the industry avoiding such missteps in the future.

“The [next] problem will be double-ordering that is going on now and so we have the prospect of a giant slump in the semi market due to excess inventory,” he concludes. “Yin-yang—repeat.”

There is a lot to learn from history even if it’s fairly recent. While it might be tempting to lean into market failures to meet demand, obviously the story is more complicated. Though GPUs have become required for billions on a daily basis, higher performance is left to a few with niche interests.

Still, the larger market should pay attention to frustrated gamers, at least on this point. Their needs push the industry into innovation that becomes standard in more common devices. With each iteration, devices gain a little more of those advanced graphics as they drip down to people who hadn’t noticed them before but now expect it.

After all, if it doesn’t have painstakingly realistic 3D graphics, can we even call it a phone anymore?

What Makes a GPU a GPU, and When Did We Start Calling it That? syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

Pandemi Covid-19

Worrying has become a routine part of many people's lives these days. And while stress and anxiety are often categorized as irrational or unnecessary, it's easy to understand why worry, in the scary universe of now, is ubiquitous. When it comes to making decisions of any kind, there's always some degree of uncertainty, but under normal circumstances, it's limited. When you eat raw oysters, for example, you'll either get food poisoning or you won't. However, with this pandemic, there's a great deal more uncertainty, and that creates a much more unstable scenario where you have to constantly weigh options that keep changing, notes Sonia Bishop, PhD, an associate professor of psychology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley. Couple that with missing or inaccurate information, and you have a recipe for excessive worry. But, experts like Bishop say that in a time when worry is often warranted - and even protective - there's a way to harness its value without letting it take over your life. https://boxelder.instructure.com/courses/37838/pages/watch-demon-slayer-kimetsu-no-yaiba-the-movie-mugen-train-2020-download-full-version-%7C%7Chd Specific, short-lived worry can be quite useful, especially when it comes to coping with a crisis. https://curio.instructure.com/courses/698/pages/watch-hd-come-play-2020-full-online-movie-free-hd Worrying is part of the brain's response to fear. It gets a bad rap because it's unpleasant, but it's also functional behavior designed to protect us from unfavorable situations, like, say, contracting Covid-19. The response originates in the amygdala, and then the frontal lobe, which is involved in decision-making, considers the information available before designating a reaction. Too much worry can mess with that reaction, sometimes resulting in decision paralysis. "Often we use these [executive processes] to help engage in more thoughtful or rational approaches, and some aspects of those don't seem to be processing information the right way in anxious individuals or people vulnerable to anxiety," says Bishop. https://curio.instructure.com/eportfolios/181/Home/HDWatch_Demon_Slayer_Kimetsu_no_Yaiba__The_Movie_online_Free_HD Long-term, generalized worrying is not great for your mental and physical health. It can lead to depression, addiction, and even digestive, cardiovascular, reproductive, and immunity issues, to name a few. Specific, short-lived worry, however, can be quite useful, especially when it comes to coping with a crisis. "Then it has a function, and then you can use the worry to motivate action," says Kate Sweeny, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside. https://curio.instructure.com/eportfolios/184/Home/_Demon_Slayer__Le_train_de_linfini_2020_Streaming_VF_Complet_en_Film_VOSTFR If given free rein, however, "[worrying] becomes really dysfunctional and disruptive to our lives," Sweeny continues. If you've been having a hard time being productive or just operating normally, your worrying mechanism is likely in overdrive. Even with all the triggers out there right now, there are ways to temper the mechanism so that it helps you make good decisions and doesn't emotionally tax you within an inch of your sanity. https://curio.instructure.com/eportfolios/186/Home/RepelisVER__Demon_SlayerKimetsu_no_Yaiba_Movie_Mugen_Resshahen_pelicula_gratis The benefit in assuming worst-case scenarios Catastrophizing is a common symptom of people with generalized anxiety disorder, but even if you don't have an anxiety disorder, you may be doing your fair share of catastrophizing given the state of, well, everything. While it's not helpful to always assume the worst, when you're dealing with risky scenarios, like eating dinner with friends indoors at a restaurant, Bishop posits that level of concern may be more beneficial than not. https://curio.instructure.com/courses/698/pages/hd-watch-demon-slayer-kimetsu-no-yaiba-online-free-hd "When there's so much uncertainty, the risk of going to a restaurant could be anywhere from maybe 1 in 10 people being positive to 1 and 100 people being positive," says Bishop. "Do you want to take the most probable outcome, or do you want to veer on the side of saying, 'I'm going to [assume] the worst-case scenario because at least then I know I will be engaged in protecting [myself and others].' The cost of underestimating is so much worse than the cost of overestimating." https://curio.instructure.com/courses/698/pages/hd-watch-2067s-online-free-hd Worriers who spent time imagining worst-case scenarios also likely fared better at the beginning of the pandemic, says Bishop, when there were so many unknowns. Those people were taking more precautions and may have stayed safer because of them. That said, since the shutdowns took a lot of the guesswork out of making those decisions, Bishop often heard people say their anxiety levels were lower during more officially restricted times. https://curio.instructure.com/courses/698/pages/hd-watch-freaky-movie-online-free-hd With many neighbors relaxing their safety parameters and dealing with pandemic burnout, the worry intensifies. So now, we have to consciously rebuild and reevaluate our parameters in order to stay safe. And this can trigger unhealthy levels of worry. https://curio.instructure.com/courses/698/pages/hd-watch-wonder-woman-1984-movie-online-free-hd Potential long-term effects Beyond the physical health concerns, Sweeny says there are other potential long-term effects of regular, excessive worry - and they're a mixed bag. "One is that we get better at it; we build up psychological calluses," she says. https://curio.instructure.com/courses/698/pages/watch-hd-demon-slayer-kimetsu-no-yaiba-the-movie-mugen-train-2020-full-online-movie-free-hd"Another is that we numb out and therefore don't prepare appropriately. A third is that the stress just builds and builds until some kind breaking point." https://curio.instructure.com/courses/698/pages/watch-hd-jiu-jitsu-2020-full-online-movie-free-hd Since people are still dealing with the pandemic, in addition to electoral and racial unrest, it's impossible for experts to say how this pervasive worrying will ultimately affect humans. One of the best outcomes would be if our fear response adapts to the point where we more readily prepare and protect ourselves from potential risks without invoking the worry mechanism too much. https://curio.instructure.com/courses/698/pages/watch-hd-hard-kill-2020-full-online-movie-free-hd "The cost of underestimating is so much worse than the cost of overestimating." How you can get better at worrying Try to narrow down your worries on any given day to more specific things and tackle them one at a time. https://curio.instructure.com/courses/698/pages/watch-hd-wonder-woman-1984-2020-full-online-movie-free-hd "Run the mental checklist; see if there is something more you could be doing to prepare yourself to a reasonable degree," says Sweeny. If you've done all that but still feel anxious, it's time to turn to some research-backed worry deflation methods. ★WATCH-HD!! Roald Dahl's The Witches 2020 Full Online Movie Free HD: sanmailum ★WATCH-HD!! Roald Dahl's The Witches 2020 Full Online Movie Free HDcurio.instructure.com This is where, you guessed it, mindfulness comes in. Practicing mindfulness really just means doing anything that keeps you in the present moment rather than dwelling on the past or fretting about the future. There are plenty of ways to do it, but one that Sweeny lauds is getting yourself into a flow state. Flow is a more active form of mindfulness that involves doing something that's enjoyable and moderately challenging and that allows you to track your progress. Playing video games is a perfect example of a flow activity because they're engaging,https://curio.instructure.com/eportfolios/290/Home/REGARDERDemon_Slayer_Le_train_de_linfini_Streaming_vF_2020voir_Demon_Slayer_Kimetsu_no_Yaiba__Mugen_Train_Film_Streaming_vF_Fr_en_Ligne_Complet_et_VOSTFR https://curio.instructure.com/courses/698/pages/full%3Ewatch-demon-slayer-mugen-train-2020-online-full-free-download-hd https://dcds.instructure.com/eportfolios/2830/Home/WATCH_Demon_Slayer_Kimetsu_no_Yaiba__The_Movie_Mugen_Train_2020_Full_Online_Free_HD https://dcds.instructure.com/eportfolios/3604/Home/FREAKY_2020_1080p and you're constantly moving forward to new, harder levels. Learning a new language or engaging in a 30-day exercise challenge are two more great flow state activities. The goal is that you become so immersed in it that your worries fade back, at least for a time. https://curio.instructure.com/courses/698/pages/watch-hd-greenland-2020-full-online-movie-free-hd Even after we make it through these times, worrying will be a part of our lives. The best thing we can do is cultivate a productive relationship with it. Sweeny says it may help to think of worry like that slightly annoying friend who needs to be reassured every so often. Don't ignore it, but don't give it too much attention either. https://curio.instructure.com/courses/698/pages/watch-hd-demon-slayer-kimetsu-no-yaiba-the-movie-mugen-train-2020-full-online-free-hd https://curio.instructure.com/courses/698/pages/regarder-demon-slayer-le-train-de-linfini-streaming-vf-2020-voir~-%60demon-slayer-kimetsu-no-yaiba-mugen-train%60-film-streaming-vf-fr-en-ligne-complet-et-vostfr

Making Gyms Safer: Why the Virus Is Less Likely to Spread There Than in a Bar

After shutting down in the spring, America’s empty gyms are beckoning a cautious public back for a workout. To reassure wary customers, owners have put in place — and now advertise — a variety of coronavirus control measures. At the same time, the fitness industry is trying to rehabilitate itself by pushing back against what it sees as a misleading narrative that gyms have no place during a pandemic.

In the first months of the coronavirus outbreak, most public health leaders advised closing gyms, erring on the side of caution. As infections exploded across the country, states ordered gyms and fitness centers closed, along with restaurants, movie theaters and bars. State and local officials consistently branded gyms as high-risk venues for infection, akin to bars and nightclubs.

In early August, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called gym-going a “dangerous activity,” saying he would keep them shut — only to announce later in the month that most gyms could reopen in September at a third of the capacity and under tight regulations.

New York, New Jersey and North Carolina were among the last state holdouts — only recently allowing fitness facilities to reopen. Many states continue to limit capacity and have instituted new requirements.

The benefits of gyms are clear. Regular exercise staves off depression and improves sleep, and staying fit may be a way to avoid a serious case of COVID-19. But there are clear risks, too: Lots of people moving around indoors, sharing equipment and air, and breathing heavily could be a recipe for easy viral spread. There are scattered reports of coronavirus cases traced back to specific gyms. But gym owners say those are outliers and argue the dominant portrayal overemphasizes potential dangers and ignores their brief but successful track record of safety during the pandemic.

A Seattle gym struggles to comply with new rules and survive

At NW Fitness in Seattle, everything from a set of squats to a run on the treadmill requires a mask. Every other cardio machine is off-limits. The owners have marked up the floor with blue tape to show where each person can work out.

Esmery Corniel, a member, has resumed his workout routine with the punching bag.

“I was honestly just losing my mind,” said Corniel, 27. He said he feels comfortable in the gym with its new safety protocols.

“Everybody wears their mask, everybody socially distances, so it’s no problem here at all,” Corniel said.

There’s no longer the usual morning “rush” of people working out before heading to their jobs.

Under Washington state’s coronavirus rules, only about 10 to 12 people at a time are permitted in this 4,000-square-foot gym.

“It’s drastically reduced our ability to serve our community,” said John Carrico. He and his wife, Jessica, purchased NW Fitness at the end of last year.

Meanwhile, the cost of running the businesses has gone up dramatically. The gym now needs to be staffed round-the-clock to keep up with the frequent cleaning requirements, and to ensure people are wearing masks and following the rules.

Keeping the gym open 24/7 — previously a big selling point for members — is no longer feasible. In the past three months, they’ve lost more than a third of their membership.

“If the trend continues, we won’t be able to stay open,” said Jessica Carrico, who also works as a nurse at a homeless shelter run by Harborview Medical Center.

Given her medical background, Jessica Carrico was initially inclined to trust the public health authorities who ordered all gyms to shut down, but gradually her feelings changed.

“Driving around the city, I’d still see lines outside of pot shops and Baskin-Robbins,” she said. “The arbitrary decision that had been made was very clear, and it became really frustrating.”

Even after gyms in the Seattle area were allowed to reopen, their frustrations continued — especially with the strict cap on operating capacity. The Carricos believe that falls hardest on smaller gyms that don’t have much square footage.

“People want this space to be safe, and will self-regulate,” said John Carrico. He believes he could responsibly operate with twice as many people inside as currently allowed. Public health officials have mischaracterized gyms, he added, and underestimated their potential to operate safely.

“There’s this fear-based propaganda that gyms are a cesspool of coronavirus, which is just super not true,” Carrico said.

Gyms seem less risky than bars. But there’s very little research either way

The fitness industry has begun to push back at the pandemic-driven perceptions and prohibitions. “We should not be lumped with bars and restaurants,” said Helen Durkin, an executive vice president for the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association (IHRSA).

John Carrico called the comparison with bars particularly unfair. “It’s almost laughable. I mean, it’s almost the exact opposite. … People here are investing in their health. They’re coming in, they’re focusing on what they’re trying to do as far as their workout. They’re not socializing, they’re not sitting at a table and laughing and drinking.”

Since the pandemic began, many gyms have overhauled operations and now look very different: Locker rooms are often closed and group classes halted. Many gyms check everyone for symptoms upon arrival. They’ve spaced out equipment and begun intensive cleaning regimes.

Gyms have a big advantage over other retail and entertainment venues, Durkin said, because the membership model means those who may have been exposed in an outbreak can be easily contacted.

A company that sells member databases and software to gyms has been compiling data during the pandemic. (The data, drawn from 2,877 gyms, is by no means comprehensive because it relies on gym owners to self-report incidents in which a positive coronavirus case was detected at the gym, or was somehow connected to the gym.) The resultant report said that the overall “visits to virus” ratio of 0.002% is “statistically irrelevant” because only 1,155 cases of coronavirus were reported among more than 49 million gym visits. Similarly, data collected from gyms in the United Kingdom found only 17 cases out of more than 8 million visits in the weeks after gyms reopened there.

Only a few U.S. states have publicly available information on outbreaks linked to the fitness sector, and those states report very few cases. In Louisiana, for example, the state has identified five clusters originating in “gym/fitness settings,” with a total of 31 cases. None of the people died. By contrast, 15 clusters were traced to “religious services/events,” sickening 78, and killing five of them.

“The whole idea that it’s a risky place to be … around the world, we just aren’t seeing those numbers anywhere,” said IHRSA’s Durkin.

A study from South Korea published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is often cited as evidence of the inherent hazards of group fitness activities.

The study traced 112 coronavirus infections to a Feb. 15 training workshop for fitness dance instructors. Those instructors went on to teach classes at 12 sports facilities in February and March, transmitting the virus to students in the dance classes, but also to co-workers and family members.

But defenders of the fitness industry point out that the outbreak began before South Korea instituted social distancing measures.

The study authors note that the classes were crowded and the pace of the dance workouts was fast, and conclude that “intense physical exercise in densely populated sports facilities could increase the risk for infection” and “should be minimized during outbreaks.” They also found that no transmission occurred in classes with fewer than five people, or when an infected instructor taught “lower-intensity” classes such as yoga and Pilates.

Public health experts continue to urge gym members to be cautious

It’s clear that there are many things gym owners — and gym members — can do to lower the risk of infection at a gym, but that doesn’t mean the risk is gone. Infectious disease doctors and public health experts caution that gyms should not downplay their potential for spreading disease, especially if the coronavirus is widespread in the surrounding community.

“There are very few [gyms] that can actually implement all the infection control measures,” said Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist in Phoenix. “That’s really the challenge with gyms: There is so much variety that it makes it hard to put them into a single box.”

Popescu and two colleagues developed a COVID-19 risk chart for various activities. Gyms were classified as “medium high,” on par with eating indoors at a restaurant or getting a haircut, but less risky than going to a bar or riding public transit.

Popescu acknowledges there’s not much recent evidence that gyms are major sources of infection, but that should not give people a false sense of assurance.

“The mistake would be to assume that there is no risk,” she said. “It’s just that a lot of the prevention strategies have been working, and when we start to loosen those, though, is where you’re more likely to see clusters occur.”

Any location that brings people together indoors increases the risk of contracting the coronavirus, and breathing heavily adds another element of risk. Interventions such as increasing the distance between cardio machines might help, but tiny infectious airborne particles can travel farther than 6 feet, Popescu said.

The mechanics of exercising also make it hard to ensure people comply with crucial preventive measures like wearing a mask.

“How effective are masks in that setting? Can they really be effectively worn?” asked Dr. Deverick Anderson, director of the Duke Center for Antimicrobial Stewardship and Infection Prevention. “The combination of sweat and exertion is one unique thing about the gym setting.”

“I do think that, in the big picture, gyms would be riskier than restaurants because of the type of activity and potential for interaction there,” Anderson said.

The primary way people could catch the virus at a gym would be coming close to someone who is releasing respiratory droplets and smaller airborne particles, called “aerosols,” when they breathe, talk or cough, said Dr. Dean Blumberg, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at UC Davis Health.

He’s less worried about people catching the virus from touching a barbell or riding a stationary bike that someone else used. That’s because scientists now think “surface” transmission isn’t driving infection as much as airborne droplets and particles.

“I’m not really worried about transmission that way,” Blumberg said. “There’s too much attention being paid to disinfecting surfaces and ‘deep cleaning,’ spraying things in the air. I think a lot of that’s just for show.”

Blumberg said he believes gyms can manage the risks better than many social settings like bars or informal gatherings.

“A gym where you can adequately social distance and you can limit the number of people there and force mask-wearing, that’s one of the safer activities,” he said.

Adapting to the pandemic’s prohibitions doesn’t come cheap

In Bellevue, Washington, PRO Club is an enormous, upscale gym with spacious workout rooms — and an array of medical services such as physical therapy, hormone treatments, skin care and counseling. PRO Club has managed to keep the gym experience relatively normal for members since reopening, according to employee Linda Rackner. “There is plenty of space for everyone. We are seeing about 1,000 people a day and have capacity for almost 3,000,” Rackner said. “We’d love to have more people in the club.”

The gym uses the same air-cleaning units as hospital ICUs, deploys ultraviolet robots to sanitize the rooms and requires temperature checks to enter. “I feel like we have good compliance,” said Dean Rogers, one of the personal trainers. “For the most part, people who come to a gym are in it for their own health, fitness and wellness.”

But Rogers knows this isn’t the norm everywhere. In fact, his own mother back in Oklahoma believes she contracted the coronavirus at her gym.

“I was upset to find out that her gym had no guidelines they were following, no safety precautions,” he said. “There are always going to be some bad actors.”

This story is part of a partnership that includes NPR and Kaiser Health News. Carrie Feibel, an editor for the NPR-KHN reporting partnership, contributed to this story.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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Making Gyms Safer: Why the Virus Is Less Likely to Spread There Than in a Bar published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

Making Gyms Safer: Why the Virus Is Less Likely to Spread There Than in a Bar

After shutting down in the spring, America’s empty gyms are beckoning a cautious public back for a workout. To reassure wary customers, owners have put in place — and now advertise — a variety of coronavirus control measures. At the same time, the fitness industry is trying to rehabilitate itself by pushing back against what it sees as a misleading narrative that gyms have no place during a pandemic.

In the first months of the coronavirus outbreak, most public health leaders advised closing gyms, erring on the side of caution. As infections exploded across the country, states ordered gyms and fitness centers closed, along with restaurants, movie theaters and bars. State and local officials consistently branded gyms as high-risk venues for infection, akin to bars and nightclubs.

In early August, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called gym-going a “dangerous activity,” saying he would keep them shut — only to announce later in the month that most gyms could reopen in September at a third of the capacity and under tight regulations.

New York, New Jersey and North Carolina were among the last state holdouts — only recently allowing fitness facilities to reopen. Many states continue to limit capacity and have instituted new requirements.

The benefits of gyms are clear. Regular exercise staves off depression and improves sleep, and staying fit may be a way to avoid a serious case of COVID-19. But there are clear risks, too: Lots of people moving around indoors, sharing equipment and air, and breathing heavily could be a recipe for easy viral spread. There are scattered reports of coronavirus cases traced back to specific gyms. But gym owners say those are outliers and argue the dominant portrayal overemphasizes potential dangers and ignores their brief but successful track record of safety during the pandemic.

A Seattle gym struggles to comply with new rules and survive

At NW Fitness in Seattle, everything from a set of squats to a run on the treadmill requires a mask. Every other cardio machine is off-limits. The owners have marked up the floor with blue tape to show where each person can work out.

Esmery Corniel, a member, has resumed his workout routine with the punching bag.

“I was honestly just losing my mind,” said Corniel, 27. He said he feels comfortable in the gym with its new safety protocols.

“Everybody wears their mask, everybody socially distances, so it’s no problem here at all,” Corniel said.

There’s no longer the usual morning “rush” of people working out before heading to their jobs.

Under Washington state’s coronavirus rules, only about 10 to 12 people at a time are permitted in this 4,000-square-foot gym.

“It’s drastically reduced our ability to serve our community,” said John Carrico. He and his wife, Jessica, purchased NW Fitness at the end of last year.

Meanwhile, the cost of running the businesses has gone up dramatically. The gym now needs to be staffed round-the-clock to keep up with the frequent cleaning requirements, and to ensure people are wearing masks and following the rules.

Keeping the gym open 24/7 — previously a big selling point for members — is no longer feasible. In the past three months, they’ve lost more than a third of their membership.

“If the trend continues, we won’t be able to stay open,” said Jessica Carrico, who also works as a nurse at a homeless shelter run by Harborview Medical Center.

Given her medical background, Jessica Carrico was initially inclined to trust the public health authorities who ordered all gyms to shut down, but gradually her feelings changed.

“Driving around the city, I’d still see lines outside of pot shops and Baskin-Robbins,” she said. “The arbitrary decision that had been made was very clear, and it became really frustrating.”

Even after gyms in the Seattle area were allowed to reopen, their frustrations continued — especially with the strict cap on operating capacity. The Carricos believe that falls hardest on smaller gyms that don’t have much square footage.

“People want this space to be safe, and will self-regulate,” said John Carrico. He believes he could responsibly operate with twice as many people inside as currently allowed. Public health officials have mischaracterized gyms, he added, and underestimated their potential to operate safely.

“There’s this fear-based propaganda that gyms are a cesspool of coronavirus, which is just super not true,” Carrico said.

Gyms seem less risky than bars. But there’s very little research either way

The fitness industry has begun to push back at the pandemic-driven perceptions and prohibitions. “We should not be lumped with bars and restaurants,” said Helen Durkin, an executive vice president for the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association (IHRSA).

John Carrico called the comparison with bars particularly unfair. “It’s almost laughable. I mean, it’s almost the exact opposite. … People here are investing in their health. They’re coming in, they’re focusing on what they’re trying to do as far as their workout. They’re not socializing, they’re not sitting at a table and laughing and drinking.”

Since the pandemic began, many gyms have overhauled operations and now look very different: Locker rooms are often closed and group classes halted. Many gyms check everyone for symptoms upon arrival. They’ve spaced out equipment and begun intensive cleaning regimes.

Gyms have a big advantage over other retail and entertainment venues, Durkin said, because the membership model means those who may have been exposed in an outbreak can be easily contacted.

A company that sells member databases and software to gyms has been compiling data during the pandemic. (The data, drawn from 2,877 gyms, is by no means comprehensive because it relies on gym owners to self-report incidents in which a positive coronavirus case was detected at the gym, or was somehow connected to the gym.) The resultant report said that the overall “visits to virus” ratio of 0.002% is “statistically irrelevant” because only 1,155 cases of coronavirus were reported among more than 49 million gym visits. Similarly, data collected from gyms in the United Kingdom found only 17 cases out of more than 8 million visits in the weeks after gyms reopened there.

Only a few U.S. states have publicly available information on outbreaks linked to the fitness sector, and those states report very few cases. In Louisiana, for example, the state has identified five clusters originating in “gym/fitness settings,” with a total of 31 cases. None of the people died. By contrast, 15 clusters were traced to “religious services/events,” sickening 78, and killing five of them.

“The whole idea that it’s a risky place to be … around the world, we just aren’t seeing those numbers anywhere,” said IHRSA’s Durkin.

A study from South Korea published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is often cited as evidence of the inherent hazards of group fitness activities.

The study traced 112 coronavirus infections to a Feb. 15 training workshop for fitness dance instructors. Those instructors went on to teach classes at 12 sports facilities in February and March, transmitting the virus to students in the dance classes, but also to co-workers and family members.

But defenders of the fitness industry point out that the outbreak began before South Korea instituted social distancing measures.

The study authors note that the classes were crowded and the pace of the dance workouts was fast, and conclude that “intense physical exercise in densely populated sports facilities could increase the risk for infection” and “should be minimized during outbreaks.” They also found that no transmission occurred in classes with fewer than five people, or when an infected instructor taught “lower-intensity” classes such as yoga and Pilates.

Public health experts continue to urge gym members to be cautious

It’s clear that there are many things gym owners — and gym members — can do to lower the risk of infection at a gym, but that doesn’t mean the risk is gone. Infectious disease doctors and public health experts caution that gyms should not downplay their potential for spreading disease, especially if the coronavirus is widespread in the surrounding community.

“There are very few [gyms] that can actually implement all the infection control measures,” said Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist in Phoenix. “That’s really the challenge with gyms: There is so much variety that it makes it hard to put them into a single box.”

Popescu and two colleagues developed a COVID-19 risk chart for various activities. Gyms were classified as “medium high,” on par with eating indoors at a restaurant or getting a haircut, but less risky than going to a bar or riding public transit.

Popescu acknowledges there’s not much recent evidence that gyms are major sources of infection, but that should not give people a false sense of assurance.

“The mistake would be to assume that there is no risk,” she said. “It’s just that a lot of the prevention strategies have been working, and when we start to loosen those, though, is where you’re more likely to see clusters occur.”

Any location that brings people together indoors increases the risk of contracting the coronavirus, and breathing heavily adds another element of risk. Interventions such as increasing the distance between cardio machines might help, but tiny infectious airborne particles can travel farther than 6 feet, Popescu said.

The mechanics of exercising also make it hard to ensure people comply with crucial preventive measures like wearing a mask.

“How effective are masks in that setting? Can they really be effectively worn?” asked Dr. Deverick Anderson, director of the Duke Center for Antimicrobial Stewardship and Infection Prevention. “The combination of sweat and exertion is one unique thing about the gym setting.”

“I do think that, in the big picture, gyms would be riskier than restaurants because of the type of activity and potential for interaction there,” Anderson said.

The primary way people could catch the virus at a gym would be coming close to someone who is releasing respiratory droplets and smaller airborne particles, called “aerosols,” when they breathe, talk or cough, said Dr. Dean Blumberg, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at UC Davis Health.

He’s less worried about people catching the virus from touching a barbell or riding a stationary bike that someone else used. That’s because scientists now think “surface” transmission isn’t driving infection as much as airborne droplets and particles.

“I’m not really worried about transmission that way,” Blumberg said. “There’s too much attention being paid to disinfecting surfaces and ‘deep cleaning,’ spraying things in the air. I think a lot of that’s just for show.”

Blumberg said he believes gyms can manage the risks better than many social settings like bars or informal gatherings.

“A gym where you can adequately social distance and you can limit the number of people there and force mask-wearing, that’s one of the safer activities,” he said.

Adapting to the pandemic’s prohibitions doesn’t come cheap

In Bellevue, Washington, PRO Club is an enormous, upscale gym with spacious workout rooms — and an array of medical services such as physical therapy, hormone treatments, skin care and counseling. PRO Club has managed to keep the gym experience relatively normal for members since reopening, according to employee Linda Rackner. “There is plenty of space for everyone. We are seeing about 1,000 people a day and have capacity for almost 3,000,” Rackner said. “We’d love to have more people in the club.”

The gym uses the same air-cleaning units as hospital ICUs, deploys ultraviolet robots to sanitize the rooms and requires temperature checks to enter. “I feel like we have good compliance,” said Dean Rogers, one of the personal trainers. “For the most part, people who come to a gym are in it for their own health, fitness and wellness.”

But Rogers knows this isn’t the norm everywhere. In fact, his own mother back in Oklahoma believes she contracted the coronavirus at her gym.

“I was upset to find out that her gym had no guidelines they were following, no safety precautions,” he said. “There are always going to be some bad actors.”

This story is part of a partnership that includes NPR and Kaiser Health News. Carrie Feibel, an editor for the NPR-KHN reporting partnership, contributed to this story.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

Making Gyms Safer: Why the Virus Is Less Likely to Spread There Than in a Bar published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

Making Gyms Safer: Why the Virus Is Less Likely to Spread There Than in a Bar

After shutting down in the spring, America’s empty gyms are beckoning a cautious public back for a workout. To reassure wary customers, owners have put in place — and now advertise — a variety of coronavirus control measures. At the same time, the fitness industry is trying to rehabilitate itself by pushing back against what it sees as a misleading narrative that gyms have no place during a pandemic.

In the first months of the coronavirus outbreak, most public health leaders advised closing gyms, erring on the side of caution. As infections exploded across the country, states ordered gyms and fitness centers closed, along with restaurants, movie theaters and bars. State and local officials consistently branded gyms as high-risk venues for infection, akin to bars and nightclubs.

In early August, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called gym-going a “dangerous activity,” saying he would keep them shut — only to announce later in the month that most gyms could reopen in September at a third of the capacity and under tight regulations.

New York, New Jersey and North Carolina were among the last state holdouts — only recently allowing fitness facilities to reopen. Many states continue to limit capacity and have instituted new requirements.

The benefits of gyms are clear. Regular exercise staves off depression and improves sleep, and staying fit may be a way to avoid a serious case of COVID-19. But there are clear risks, too: Lots of people moving around indoors, sharing equipment and air, and breathing heavily could be a recipe for easy viral spread. There are scattered reports of coronavirus cases traced back to specific gyms. But gym owners say those are outliers and argue the dominant portrayal overemphasizes potential dangers and ignores their brief but successful track record of safety during the pandemic.

A Seattle gym struggles to comply with new rules and survive

At NW Fitness in Seattle, everything from a set of squats to a run on the treadmill requires a mask. Every other cardio machine is off-limits. The owners have marked up the floor with blue tape to show where each person can work out.

Esmery Corniel, a member, has resumed his workout routine with the punching bag.

“I was honestly just losing my mind,” said Corniel, 27. He said he feels comfortable in the gym with its new safety protocols.

“Everybody wears their mask, everybody socially distances, so it’s no problem here at all,” Corniel said.

There’s no longer the usual morning “rush” of people working out before heading to their jobs.

Under Washington state’s coronavirus rules, only about 10 to 12 people at a time are permitted in this 4,000-square-foot gym.

“It’s drastically reduced our ability to serve our community,” said John Carrico. He and his wife, Jessica, purchased NW Fitness at the end of last year.

Meanwhile, the cost of running the businesses has gone up dramatically. The gym now needs to be staffed round-the-clock to keep up with the frequent cleaning requirements, and to ensure people are wearing masks and following the rules.

Keeping the gym open 24/7 — previously a big selling point for members — is no longer feasible. In the past three months, they’ve lost more than a third of their membership.

“If the trend continues, we won’t be able to stay open,” said Jessica Carrico, who also works as a nurse at a homeless shelter run by Harborview Medical Center.

Given her medical background, Jessica Carrico was initially inclined to trust the public health authorities who ordered all gyms to shut down, but gradually her feelings changed.

“Driving around the city, I’d still see lines outside of pot shops and Baskin-Robbins,” she said. “The arbitrary decision that had been made was very clear, and it became really frustrating.”

Even after gyms in the Seattle area were allowed to reopen, their frustrations continued — especially with the strict cap on operating capacity. The Carricos believe that falls hardest on smaller gyms that don’t have much square footage.

“People want this space to be safe, and will self-regulate,” said John Carrico. He believes he could responsibly operate with twice as many people inside as currently allowed. Public health officials have mischaracterized gyms, he added, and underestimated their potential to operate safely.

“There’s this fear-based propaganda that gyms are a cesspool of coronavirus, which is just super not true,” Carrico said.

Gyms seem less risky than bars. But there’s very little research either way

The fitness industry has begun to push back at the pandemic-driven perceptions and prohibitions. “We should not be lumped with bars and restaurants,” said Helen Durkin, an executive vice president for the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association (IHRSA).

John Carrico called the comparison with bars particularly unfair. “It’s almost laughable. I mean, it’s almost the exact opposite. … People here are investing in their health. They’re coming in, they’re focusing on what they’re trying to do as far as their workout. They’re not socializing, they’re not sitting at a table and laughing and drinking.”

Since the pandemic began, many gyms have overhauled operations and now look very different: Locker rooms are often closed and group classes halted. Many gyms check everyone for symptoms upon arrival. They’ve spaced out equipment and begun intensive cleaning regimes.

Gyms have a big advantage over other retail and entertainment venues, Durkin said, because the membership model means those who may have been exposed in an outbreak can be easily contacted.

A company that sells member databases and software to gyms has been compiling data during the pandemic. (The data, drawn from 2,877 gyms, is by no means comprehensive because it relies on gym owners to self-report incidents in which a positive coronavirus case was detected at the gym, or was somehow connected to the gym.) The resultant report said that the overall “visits to virus” ratio of 0.002% is “statistically irrelevant” because only 1,155 cases of coronavirus were reported among more than 49 million gym visits. Similarly, data collected from gyms in the United Kingdom found only 17 cases out of more than 8 million visits in the weeks after gyms reopened there.

Only a few U.S. states have publicly available information on outbreaks linked to the fitness sector, and those states report very few cases. In Louisiana, for example, the state has identified five clusters originating in “gym/fitness settings,” with a total of 31 cases. None of the people died. By contrast, 15 clusters were traced to “religious services/events,” sickening 78, and killing five of them.

“The whole idea that it’s a risky place to be … around the world, we just aren’t seeing those numbers anywhere,” said IHRSA’s Durkin.

A study from South Korea published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is often cited as evidence of the inherent hazards of group fitness activities.

The study traced 112 coronavirus infections to a Feb. 15 training workshop for fitness dance instructors. Those instructors went on to teach classes at 12 sports facilities in February and March, transmitting the virus to students in the dance classes, but also to co-workers and family members.

But defenders of the fitness industry point out that the outbreak began before South Korea instituted social distancing measures.

The study authors note that the classes were crowded and the pace of the dance workouts was fast, and conclude that “intense physical exercise in densely populated sports facilities could increase the risk for infection” and “should be minimized during outbreaks.” They also found that no transmission occurred in classes with fewer than five people, or when an infected instructor taught “lower-intensity” classes such as yoga and Pilates.

Public health experts continue to urge gym members to be cautious

It’s clear that there are many things gym owners — and gym members — can do to lower the risk of infection at a gym, but that doesn’t mean the risk is gone. Infectious disease doctors and public health experts caution that gyms should not downplay their potential for spreading disease, especially if the coronavirus is widespread in the surrounding community.

“There are very few [gyms] that can actually implement all the infection control measures,” said Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist in Phoenix. “That’s really the challenge with gyms: There is so much variety that it makes it hard to put them into a single box.”

Popescu and two colleagues developed a COVID-19 risk chart for various activities. Gyms were classified as “medium high,” on par with eating indoors at a restaurant or getting a haircut, but less risky than going to a bar or riding public transit.

Popescu acknowledges there’s not much recent evidence that gyms are major sources of infection, but that should not give people a false sense of assurance.

“The mistake would be to assume that there is no risk,” she said. “It’s just that a lot of the prevention strategies have been working, and when we start to loosen those, though, is where you’re more likely to see clusters occur.”

Any location that brings people together indoors increases the risk of contracting the coronavirus, and breathing heavily adds another element of risk. Interventions such as increasing the distance between cardio machines might help, but tiny infectious airborne particles can travel farther than 6 feet, Popescu said.

The mechanics of exercising also make it hard to ensure people comply with crucial preventive measures like wearing a mask.

“How effective are masks in that setting? Can they really be effectively worn?” asked Dr. Deverick Anderson, director of the Duke Center for Antimicrobial Stewardship and Infection Prevention. “The combination of sweat and exertion is one unique thing about the gym setting.”

“I do think that, in the big picture, gyms would be riskier than restaurants because of the type of activity and potential for interaction there,” Anderson said.

The primary way people could catch the virus at a gym would be coming close to someone who is releasing respiratory droplets and smaller airborne particles, called “aerosols,” when they breathe, talk or cough, said Dr. Dean Blumberg, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at UC Davis Health.

He’s less worried about people catching the virus from touching a barbell or riding a stationary bike that someone else used. That’s because scientists now think “surface” transmission isn’t driving infection as much as airborne droplets and particles.

“I’m not really worried about transmission that way,” Blumberg said. “There’s too much attention being paid to disinfecting surfaces and ‘deep cleaning,’ spraying things in the air. I think a lot of that’s just for show.”

Blumberg said he believes gyms can manage the risks better than many social settings like bars or informal gatherings.

“A gym where you can adequately social distance and you can limit the number of people there and force mask-wearing, that’s one of the safer activities,” he said.

Adapting to the pandemic’s prohibitions doesn’t come cheap

In Bellevue, Washington, PRO Club is an enormous, upscale gym with spacious workout rooms — and an array of medical services such as physical therapy, hormone treatments, skin care and counseling. PRO Club has managed to keep the gym experience relatively normal for members since reopening, according to employee Linda Rackner. “There is plenty of space for everyone. We are seeing about 1,000 people a day and have capacity for almost 3,000,” Rackner said. “We’d love to have more people in the club.”

The gym uses the same air-cleaning units as hospital ICUs, deploys ultraviolet robots to sanitize the rooms and requires temperature checks to enter. “I feel like we have good compliance,” said Dean Rogers, one of the personal trainers. “For the most part, people who come to a gym are in it for their own health, fitness and wellness.”

But Rogers knows this isn’t the norm everywhere. In fact, his own mother back in Oklahoma believes she contracted the coronavirus at her gym.

“I was upset to find out that her gym had no guidelines they were following, no safety precautions,” he said. “There are always going to be some bad actors.”

This story is part of a partnership that includes NPR and Kaiser Health News. Carrie Feibel, an editor for the NPR-KHN reporting partnership, contributed to this story.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/making-gyms-safer-why-the-virus-is-less-likely-to-spread-there-than-in-a-bar/

Baking Structured Data Into The Design Process

About The Author

Frederick O’Brien is a freelance journalist who conforms to most British stereotypes. His interests include American literature, graphic design, sustainable … More about Frederick …

Retrofitting search engine optimization only gets you so far. As metadata gets smarter, it’s more important than ever to build it into the design process from the start.

search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for almost every kind of website, but its finer points remain something of a specialty. Even today SEO Company is often treated as something that can be tacked on after the fact. It can up to a point, but it really shouldn’t be. Search engines get smarter every day and there are ways for websites to be smarter too.

The foundations of SEO Company are the same as they’ve always been: great content clearly labeled will win the day sooner or later — regardless of how many people try to game the system. The thing is, those labels are far more sophisticated than they used to be. Meta titles, image alt text, and backlinks are important, but in 2020, they’re also fairly primitive. There is another tier of metadata that only a fraction of sites are currently using: structured data.

All search engines share the same purpose: to organize the web’s content and deliver the most relevant, useful results possible to search queries. How they achieve this has changed enormously since the days of Lycos and Ask Jeeves. Google alone uses more than 200 ranking factors, and those are just the ones we know about.

SEO Company is a huge field nowadays, and I put it to you that structured data is a really, really important factor to understand and implement in the coming years. It doesn’t just improve your chances of ranking highly for relevant queries. More importantly, it helps make your websites better — opening it up to all sorts of useful web experiences.

Recommended reading: Where Does SEO Belong In Your Web Design Process?

What Is Structured Data?

Structured data is a way of labeling content on web pages. Using vocabulary from Schema.org, it removes much of the ambiguity from SEO Company. Instead of trusting the likes of Google, Bing, Baidu, and DuckDuckGo to work out what your content is about, you tell them. It’s the difference between a search engine guessing what a page is about and knowing for sure.

As Schema.org puts it:

By adding additional tags to the HTML of your web pages — tags that say, “Hey search engine, this information describes this specific movie, or place, or person, or video” — you can help search engines and other applications better understand your content and display it in a useful, relevant way.

Schema.org launched in 2011, a project shared by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex. In other words, it’s a ‘bipartisan’ effort — if you like. The markup transcends any one search engine. In Schema.org’s own words,

“A shared vocabulary makes it easier for webmasters and developers to decide on a schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts.”

It is in many respects a more expansive cousin of microformats (launched around 2005) which embed semantics and structured data in HTML, mainly for the benefit of search engines and aggregators. Although microformats are currently still supported, the ‘official’ nature of the Schema.org library makes it a safer bet for longevity.

JSON for Linked Data (JSON-LD) has emerged as the dominant underlying standard for structured data, although Microdata and RDFa are also supported and serve the same purpose. Schema.org provides examples for each type depending on what you’re most comfortable with.

As an example, let’s say Joe Bloggs writes a review of Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22 and publishes it on his blog. Sadly, Bloggs has poor taste and gives it two out of five stars. For a person looking at the page, this information would be understood unthinkingly, but computer programs would have to connect several dots to reach the same conclusion.

With structured data, the following markup could be added to the page’s <head> code. (This is a JSON-LD approach. Microdata and RDFa can be used to weave the same information into <body> content):

<script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context" : "http://schema.org", "@type" : "Book", "name" : "Catch-22", "author" : { "@type" : "Person", "name" : "Joseph Heller" }, "datePublished" : "1961-11-10", "review" : { "@type" : "Review", "author" : { "@type" : "Person", "name" : "Joe Bloggs" }, "reviewRating" : { "@type" : "Rating", "ratingValue" : "2", "worstRating" : "0", "bestRating" : "5" }, "reviewBody" : "A disaster. The worst book I've ever read, and I've read The Da Vinci Code." } } </script>

This sets in stone that the page is about Catch-22, a novel by Joseph Heller published on November 10th, 1961. The reviewer has been identified, as has the parameters of the scoring system. Different schemas can be combined (or tiered) to describe different things. For example, through tagging of this sort, you could make clear a page is the event listing for an open-air film screening, and the film in question is The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou by Wes Anderson.

Recommended reading: Better Research, Better Design, Better Results

Why Does It Matter?

Ok, wonderful. I can label my website up to its eyeballs and it will look exactly the same, but what are the benefits? To my mind, there are two main benefits to including structured data in websites:

It makes search engine’s jobs much easier. They can index content more accurately, which in turn means they can present it more richly.

It helps web content to be more thorough and useful. Structured data gives you a ‘computer perspective’ on content. Quality content is fabulous. Quality content thoroughly tagged is the stuff of dreams.

You know when you see snazzy search results that include star ratings? That’s structured data. Rich snippets of film reviews? Structured data. When a selection of recipes appear, ingredients, preparation time and all? You guessed it. Dig into the code of any of these pages and you’ll find the markup somewhere. Search engines reward sites using structured data because it tells them exactly what they’re dealing with.

(Large preview)

Examine the code on the websites featured above and sure enough, structured data is there. (Large preview)

It’s not just search either, to be clear. That’s a big part of it but it’s not the whole deal. Structured data is primarily about tagging and organizing content. Rich search results are just one way for said content to be used. Google Dataset Search uses Schema.org/Dataset markup, for example.

Below are a handful of examples of structured data being useful:

There are thousands more. Like, literally. Schema.org even fast-tracked the release of markup for Covid-19 recently. It’s an ever-growing library.

In many respects, structured data is a branch of the Semantic Web, which strives for a fully machine-readable Internet. It gives you a machine-readable perspective on web content that (when properly implemented) feeds back into richer functionality for people.

As such, just about anyone with a website would benefit from knowing what structured data is and how it works. According to W3Techs, only 29.6% of websites use JSON-LD, and 43.2% don’t use any structured data formats at all. There’s no obligation, of course. Not everyone cares about SEO Company or being machine-readable. On the flip side, for those who do there’s currently a big opportunity to one-up rival sites.

In the same way that HTML forces you to think about how content is organized, structured data gets you thinking about the substance. It makes you more thorough. Whatever your website is about, if you comb through the relevant schema documentation you’ll almost certainly spot details that you didn’t think to include beforehand.

As humans, it is easy to take for granted the connections between information. Search engines and computer programs are smart, but they’re not that smart. Not yet. Structured data translates content into terms they can understand. This, in turn, allows them to deliver richer experiences.

Resources And Further Reading

“The Beginner’s Guide To Structured Data For SEO: A Two-Part Series,” Bridget Randolph, Moz

“What Is Schema Markup And Why It’s Important For SEO,” Chuck Price, Search Engine Journal

“What Is Schema? Beginner‘s Guide To Structured Data,” Luke Harsel, SEMrush

“JSON-LD: Building Meaningful Data APIs,” Benjamin Young, Rollout Blog

“Understand How Structured Data Works,” Google Search for Developers

“Marking Up Your Site With Structured Data,” Bing

Incorporating Structured Data Into Website Design

Weaving structured data into a website isn’t as straightforward as, say, changing a meta title. It’s the data DNA of your web content. If you want to implement it properly, then you need to be willing to get into the weeds — at least a little bit. Below are a few simple steps developers can take to weave structured data into the design process.

Note: I personally subscribe to a holistic approach to design, where design and substance go hand in hand. Juggling a bunch of disciplines is nothing new to web design, this is just another one, and if it’s incorporated well it can strengthen other elements around it. Think of it as an enhancement to your site’s engine. The car may not look all that different but it handles a hell of a lot better.

Start With A Concept

I’ll use myself as an example. For five years, two friends and I have been reviewing an album a week as a hobby (with others stepping in from time to time). Our sneering, insufferable prose is currently housed in a WordPress site, which — under my well-meaning but altogether ignorant care — had grown into a Frankenstein’s monster of plugins.

We are in the process of redesigning the site which (among other things) has entailed bringing structured data into the core design. Here, as with any other project, the first thing to do is establish what your content is about. The better you answer this question, the easier everything that follows will be.

In our case, these are the essentials:

We review music albums;

Each review has three reviewers who each write a summary by choosing up to three favorite tracks and assigning a personal score out of ten;

These three scores are combined into a final score out of 30;

From the three summaries, a passage is chosen to serve as an ‘at-a-glance’ roundup of all our thoughts.

Some of this may sound a bit specific or even a bit arbitrary (because it is), but you’d be surprised how much of it can be woven together using structured data.

Below is a mockup of what the revamped review pages will look like, and the information that can be translated into schema markup:

Even the most sprawling content is packed full of information just waiting to be tagged and structured. (Large preview)

There’s no trick to this process. I know what the content is about, so I know where to look in the documentation. In this case, I go to Schema.org/MusicAlbum and am met with all manner of potential properties, including:

albumReleaseType

byArtist

genre

producer

datePublished

recordedAt

There are dozens; some exclusive to MusicAlbum, others falling under the larger umbrella of CreativeWork. Digging deeper into the documentation, I find that the markup can connect to MusicBrainz, a music metadata encyclopedia. The same process unfolds when I go to the Review documentation.

From that one simple page, the following information can be gleaned and organized:

<script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "http://schema.org/", "@type": "Review", "reviewBody": "Whereas My Love is Cool was guilty of trying too hard no such thing can be said of Visions. The riffs roar and the melodies soar, with the band playing beautifully to Ellie Rowsell's strengths.", "datePublished": "October 4, 2017", "author": [{ "@type": "Person", "name": "André Dack" }, { "@type": "Person", "name": "Frederick O'Brien" }, { "@type": "Person", "name": "Marcus Lawrence" }], "itemReviewed": { "@type": "MusicAlbum", "@id": "https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/7f231c61-20b2-49d6-ac66-1cacc4cc775f", "byArtist": { "@type": "MusicGroup", "name": "Wolf Alice", "@id": "https://musicbrainz.org/artist/3547f34a-db02-4ab7-b4a0-380e1ef951a9" }, "image": "https://lesoreillescurieuses.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/a1320370042_10.jpg", "albumProductionType": "http://schema.org/StudioAlbum", "albumReleaseType": "http://schema.org/AlbumRelease", "name": "Visions of a Life", "numTracks": "12", "datePublished": "September 29, 2017" }, "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": 27, "worstRating": 0, "bestRating": 30 } } </script>

And honestly, I may yet add a lot more. Initially, I found the things that are already part of a review page’s structures (i.e. artist, album name, overall score) but then new questions began to present themselves. What could be clearer? What could I add?

This should obviously be counterbalanced by questions of what’s unnecessary. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. There is such a thing as ‘too much information’. Still, sometimes a bit more detail can really take a page up a notch.

Familiarize Yourself With Schema

There’s no way around it; the best way to get the ball rolling is to immerse yourself in the documentation. There are tools that implement it for you (more on those below), but you’ll get more out of the markup if you have a proper sense of how it works.

Trawl through the Schema.org documentation. Whoever you are and whatever your website’s for, the odds are that there are plenty of relevant schemas. The site is very good with examples, so it needn’t remain theoretical.

The step beyond that, of course, is to find rich search results you would like to emulate, visiting the page, and using browser dev tools to look at what they’re doing. They are often excellent examples of websites that know their content inside out. You can also feed code snippets or URLs into Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper, which then generates appropriate schema.

Tools like Google’’s Structured Data Markup Helper are excellent for getting to grips with how structured data works. (Large preview)

The fundamentals are actually very simple. Once you get your head around them, it’s the breadth of options that take time to explore and play around with. You don’t want to be that person who gets to the end of a design process, looks into schema options, and starts second-guessing everything that’s been done.

Ask The Right Questions

Now that you’re armed with your wealth of structured data knowledge, you’re better positioned to lay the foundations for a strong website. Structured data rides a fairly unique line. In the immediate sense, it exists ‘under the hood’ and is there for the benefit of computers. At the same time, it can enable richer experiences for the user.

Therefore, it pays to look at structured data from both a technical and user perspective. How can structured data help my website be better understood? What other resources, online databases, or hardware (e.g. smart speakers) might be interested in what you’re doing? What options appear in the documentation that I hadn’t accounted for? Do I want to add them?

It is especially important to identify recurring types of content. It’s safe to say a blog can expect lots of blog posts over time, so incorporating structured data into post templates will yield the most results. The example I gave above is all well and good on its own, but there’s no reason why the markup process can’t be automated. That’s the plan for us.

Consider also the ways that people might find your content. If there are opportunities to, say, highlight a snippet of copy for use in voice search, do it. It’s that, or leave it to search engines to work it out for themselves. No-one knows your content better than you do, so make use of that understanding with descriptive markup.

You don’t need to guess how content will be understood with structured data. With tools like Google’s Rich Results Tester, you can see exactly how it gives content form and meaning that might otherwise have been overlooked.

Resources And Further Reading

Quality Content Deserves Quality Markup

You’ll find no greater advocate of great content than me. The SEO Company industry loses its collective mind whenever Google rolls out a major search update. The response to the hysteria is always the same: make quality content. To that I add: mark it up properly.

Familiarize yourself with the documentation and be clear on what your site is about. Every piece of information you tag makes it that much easier for it to be indexed and shared with the right people.

Whether you’re a Google devotee or a DuckDuckGo convert, the spirit remains the same. It’s not about ranking so much as it is about making websites as good as possible. Accommodating structured data will make other aspects of your website better.

You don’t need to trust tech to understand what your content is about — you can tell it. From reviews to recipes to audio search, developers can add a whole new level of sophistication to their content.

The heart and soul of optimizing a website for search have never changed: produce great content and make it as clear as possible what it is and why it’s useful. Structured data is another tool for that purpose, so use it.

(ra, yk, il)

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source http://www.scpie.org/baking-structured-data-into-the-design-process/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/614974130235785216