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Category Archives: Transhuman News

Do we want social media firms censoring critiques of US role in world events? – The Boston Globe

Posted: March 31, 2022 at 2:32 am

Marcela Garca argues that social media platforms like Facebook should censor misinformation that may give [Spanish-language users] a misguided idea about what caused the war in Ukraine (Social media platforms must address Russias Spanish-language misinformation, Opinion, March 26). Such misinformation supposedly includes propaganda and conspiracy theories that blame the United States for the armed conflict.

Do we want censors employed by corporations like Facebook to determine the cause of the Russian invasion, and protect readers from any analyses that argue, as one researcher puts it, that the United States was the reason for possible escalation? Should we be allowed only to hear voices that claim that the United States has played no role?

Every war has tangled roots and causes, including this one. Academic and political debate about these causes should not be censored by tech companies. Latino readers, just like non-Latino readers, have a right to read different perspectives, even perspectives critical of US government policy.

If Latin Americans who may have very good reasons, based on their own history, to be critical of US foreign policy are seeking alternative sources of information, maybe its because the mainstream media have often failed to report inconvenient truths about US interventions abroad.

Aviva Chomsky

Salem

The writer is a professor of history and the coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University.

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Do we want social media firms censoring critiques of US role in world events? - The Boston Globe

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The steamy films Egypt never wanted its people to watch – Haaretz

Posted: at 2:32 am

The outrage created by one scene inNetflixsnew Arabic film Perfect Strangers (Ashab Wala Aaz), in which Egyptian actress Mona Zaki removes her underpants, seems rather ridiculous when compared tosome Egyptian films of the 1970s.

Take for example 1973's Wolves Dont Eat Meat.Not only did it include Nahed Sharif appearing fully naked, but the Egyptian actress even kissed another woman on the big screen. And yet, in the wake of Netflix's film, Zaki has been subjected to cruel, extensive, artistic and public criticism.

Perfect Strangers, a remake of the eponymous Italian movie, follows an encounter between several friends and the dark secrets that come to the surface. The remake was made specifically with Arab audiences in mind by director Wissam Smayra. Yet despite his efforts, the discourse in the Arab world has noted that the new filmis a pale replica of its Western counterpart, which fails to take into account the uniqueness of Arab society and its religious-cultural characteristics.

One Egyptian lawmaker, Mustafa Bakri, was especially angered by the movie and demanded that Netflix be banned in Egypt. He went on to accuse the streaming giant of assailing Egyptian values by encouraging homosexuality and flagrant displays of sexuality even though there is not a single full sex scene in Perfect Strangers.

At the same time, others have claimed that the film faithfully reflects the social, cultural and sexual profiles of Arab society without embellishment. Zaki said she strongly connected with her character, Maryam. I really identified with her, Ive met many women in my close circles who have sex lives similar to Maryams. It was important for me to make space for them, she said.

The emperor has no clothes

But Perfect Strangers is just the latest victim of censorship and public vitriol in the Egyptian film industry. This persecution goes back to the 1930s. Egypts film industry, which was in its infancy, saw the birth of new historical, comic and imaginative genres. There was even room for female directors, such as Fatima Rushdi, Aziza Amir and Bahiga Hafez.

In 1938, King Farouk prohibited the screening of Lachine, the Peoples Hope, which tells the story of a courageous and moral Egyptian military commander who speaks out against a corrupt prime minister. Censors working for the Interior Ministry claimed that the film was indirectly accusing the king of corruption and tarnishing his image. Even though Studio Misr, which produced the film, changed the ending to portray the ruler as victorious and decent, the movie was banned by royal decree and consigned to the Egyptian archives.

The persistent and systematic censorship of Egyptian films began in the early 60s, under President Gamal Abdel Nasser. It continued through the 70s under Anwar Sadat, and then into the 90s under Hosni Mubarak and his successors.

While the list of banned Egyptian films is very long, the reason for their censorship varied over the years. In this millennium, the establishment has objected to films that it claims threaten the social order. Examples include Roukhs Beauty (2014) and Perfect Strangers, due to their sexual subject matter. The establishment claims that such movies offend religious sensibilities and corrupt family values.

In contrast, censors in the 60s and 70s primarily censored movies for political content. Nasser prohibited the screening of The Iron Door (1958); Sadat banned A Dawn Visitor (1973), Al-Karnak (1975) and The Guys on the Bus (1979); Mubarak banned The Innocent (1986). These movies all dealt with arrests and the political persecution of Egyptian students in the 60s, sharply criticizing the Egyptian regime at the time.

This censorship was the side effect of a social and political process that began in the early 50s, with the 1952 Free Officers Movement led by Nasser. This process is still at work today. Nasser outlawed all political parties, except his National Union party. Despite the rich cinematic creativity, a nationalist film industry arose, which lauded the 1952 revolution and even the Egyptian rout in 1967sSix-Day War.

Sadat entered this complex social-political scene in 1971, following Nassers death. Established parties were allowed to resume activity at the end of 1976, but Sadat adopted a wily policy: On the one hand, he took harsh action against fundamentalist, Islamist underground organizations; and, on the other, he glorifiied Islam within civil society. He embraced certain Islamist factions in order to block the growing power of the communists, who were in the opposition. This political strategy, along with abundant funding from Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf states, allowed the leaders of the factions to support religious institutions that preached against secularism and the left in Egypt a pillar of the cultural scene.

This drive toward religion and censorship peaked in the 80s and 90s, with the growing power of Wahabi Islamic movements. Under their influence, a clean film industry took shape one that avoided dealing with sexuality in any form. According to Egyptian journalist Hani Mohammed, this gave way to a very conservative generation of actors. Mohammed claims that, in contrast to the 60s and 70s, the censorship, silencing and even persecution of topics related to sexuality now arose from within the art world.

He says there is now an entire generation of actors and actresses in Egypt who adamantly refuse to act when there is physical contact with the opposite sex. The phenomenon, often referred to by the name of actor-comedian Mohamed Henedi, goes so far that some actors condition their participation in a project on dropping all scenes that include kissing or other contact. These actors, most of whom come from a religious rural background, have brought traditional, conservative values to Egypts art scene, pushing out the more liberal actors of the earlier generation.

Censorship is also common in other Arab countries, including some that outwardly present a liberal and democratic face, such as Lebanon and Morocco. For example, Lebanese films such as Terra Incognita (2002) and Hotel Beirut (2011) faced harsh criticism from state institutions. In Morocco, the government banned Much Loved (2015), claiming it featured too many sex scenes. The rules are clear in the Arab world: religion, sex and politics are red lines that must never be crossed.

Both bold and conservative

So what are the dos and donts when it comes to sex in Egyptian cinema? A look at five major banned films from various periods may shed some light on the issue.

My Father Up on the Tree (1969) is still considered one of the most beautiful Egyptianmusical-romantic films ever. Starring Abdel Halim Hafez, the film is based on a story by the legendary Egyptian author Ihsan Abdel Quddous.

The film tells the story of a young engineering student, Adel, who leaves his conservative sweetheart when she rejects his advances. In a bar in Alexandria, he meets a beautiful belly dancer, falls in love and the two move in together. His father travels from Cairo to Alexandria in the hope of bringing his son home. The father also falls in love with a belly dancer and abandons his family. In contrast to his father, Adel eventually comes to his senses and returns to the straight and narrow, and to his virgin sweetheart.

The film was one of the most widely viewed in the history of Egyptian cinema. It screened in movie theaters for 58 consecutive weeks, breaking box office records. Despite its success, Egyptian censors later banned the film and it could no longer be shown mainly because the film included about 50 kisses and what the censors described as immoral scenes.

Alcohol flowed like water throughout the movie, and the male and female actors appear in their bathing suits. However, there is almost no significant sexual content in a film that deals with the characters sexual desires and fantasies. In effect, the films ultimate moral is that sex and sexuality outside of marriage are unacceptable and disgusting. There is one interesting exception, in a scene where Adel tells his friend that men dont take anything from women during sexual relations, rejecting that common equation.

Malatily Bathhouse (1973), on the other hand, greatly expanded the boundaries of Egyptian sexual discourse. Directed by Salah Abu Seif, the film recounts the story of Ahmed Abdel Salam, a young man who leaves his hometown of Port Said to get married.

Like Adel from the previous film, he loses his way in the big city. He cannot find work or a decent place to live, and is forced to live and work in a hammam. There he meets a young prostitute called Naeema, and falls in love with her. He also encounters a man named Raouf, who falls in love with him.

Abu Seif presents a tightly-knit story and a well-constructed plot. There are sex scenes between Ahmed and Naeema that depict kisses, half-naked bodies and signs of sexual relations (such as clothing tossed aside), without ever showing the act itself. But the movie really broke boundaries by depicting non-mainstream sexuality.

In one scene, Raouf, who is sitting half-naked in the Turkish bath, wearing only a towel around his waist, stretches out his hand and sensually wipes beads of perspiration from Ahmeds forehead. In another scene, he trails his fingers across Ahmeds back and says, Do you want to change into something comfortable? That scene ends with Raouf dancing sensually, half-naked, before Ahmeds eyes the type of scene that has disappeared from recent Egyptian cinema entirely.

And still, in the end, Raoufs character is never able to fully embrace his sexual identity. Toward the end of the film, he conforms to social and religious dictates, and blames his mother for his sexuality, claiming that she didnt set clear moral boundaries when he was a teenager.

The film was only shown once and was immediately censored, with claims that it encouraged homosexuality. Although the producers acceded to the censors request and cut most of the scenes that were said to be too sexual, the film is still banned in Egypt to this day.

That same year, 1973, also saw the premiere of Wolves Dont Eat Meat, which made a priceless contribution to the conversationon sexuality in Egyptian culture. Directed by Samir Khouri, the film follows an Egyptian journalist, Anwar. After years of exposure to injustice the war with Israel, the occupation of Sinai and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict Anwar becomes a money-hungry hit man. After he is seriously wounded in an operation, he arrives at the home of a former lover, Soraya. She nurses him back to health and the two renew their love.

To this day, the film is considered revolutionary. It was the first Egyptian film to show an Egyptian actress naked, getting into bed with a fully naked actor and even kissing another woman. If that werent enough, it was the also the first film to show a female character demanding ownership of her sexuality without fear, regret or self-victimization.

In one scene, Sorayas husband rips her panties, takes her into the bedroom, stands her in front of the bed where Anwar lay wounded and asks her: Do you like him? Without hesitation, Soraya answers, while removing her clothes: Yes, I like him. In another scene, Lutfiya, Sorayas sister-in-law, says to her: Thank you for pleasuring me with your body. Soraya replies: You deserved to be loved like anyone else. The Egyptian censor immediately issued a blanket ban on the film ever being screened.

But the cinematic boldness, which peaked in the mid-70s, began to wane in the 80s, giving way to the clean Egyptian cinema of today. Both Alley of Love (1983), about prostitution in Egypt, and Roukhs Beauty (2014), about a woman whose husband abandons her, present a God-fearing, conservative, tortured sexuality that can only be restrained by institutionalizing it in marriage. One of the prostitutes is murdered by her brother and the main character in Roukhs Beauty pays a high price for her sensuality and is brutally raped.

The message is clear: sexuality outside of the ordained institutions comes to a bitter end. Yet Alley of Love still presented one fascinating scene that is still quoted to this day: An important politician (played by Hassan Abdin) comes to the brothel in secret and tells the main character: I pay so youll humiliate me a sexual discussion that was not at all routine, then or now. The film was banned because it ostensibly legitimized prostitution by discussing it. Similar claims were made against Roukhs Beauty regarding its portrayal of sexual scenes involving a minor.

Having the cake and eating it too

In contrast to the films produced in Egypt, its interesting to examine how Muslim-Egyptian sexuality is portrayed in the West. The Hulu series Ramy, for example, offers a fresh approach. The show is the brainchild of Rami Youssef, a 29-year-oldAmerican actor and comedian with Egyptian roots, who tired of the Western portrayal of Arabs and Muslims only as terrorists or rebels against their own religion, tradition and society.

Hence his decision to write Ramy. The show has been highly successful and is about to air its third season. The series follows a young Egyptian-American living with his parents and sister in New Jersey. As a Muslim growing up in the shadow of 9/11, he deals with crises of identity, values, religion and morality.

Unlike the conservative discourse in Egyptian cinema, Ramy introduces an honest, direct and complex view of sexuality. The Muslim protagonist masturbates, has sexual relationships with women outside of marriage and even sleeps with a married woman. Youssef presents a split, unstable sexuality that is fully aware of its conflicting stance to the values of Islam.

At the same time, like many of the characters in Egyptian film, he has no desire to fully sever himself from religion, tradition and social dictates. Unlike Egyptian characters who ultimately express regret for fulfilling their sexual desires and return to the straight and narrow Youssefs characters want to have both worlds. In other words, they seek both full sexual fulfillment and belonging to the Muslim nation, despite the inherent conflict that presents.

The series manages to do all this without picking a side. In an interview with British online newspaper The Independent, Youssef said he is interested in a genuine emotional representation of the type of confusion that many Arab-Americans, especially Arab-American men, experience.

The series has been roundly condemned in the Arab community, which claims that it shames Islam and its values. Youssef, for his part, told the Emirati newspaper Al Khaleej that he was not surprised by the negative response and doesnt blame the community. He stressed that Ramys character does not represent either Muslims or Islam.

Ramy really is a breath of fresh air to both the American and Arab scene. It dares to present sexual content without fear or censorship. It describes a burgeoning Muslim-Western sexuality without criticism or a deep questioning of the mechanisms that restrain, silence and reject it.

Moreover, as in the Egyptian films surveyed here, the series does not address the notion that there is no place for sexuality, particularly female sexuality, in religious Muslim spaces. In doing so, it essentially avoids any critical debate about sex that could challenge the dominant Islamic discourse or the superficial sexuality of clean cinema.

Returning to Perfect Strangers, the film is a failure: Not because of Mona Zakis underpants, but because it once again presents a passive, victimized sexuality that does not have the strength to oppose the social trap it is embroiled in. It reflects the trend in Egyptian films of recent decades, which sabotage the courageous and complex cinematic sexual discourse that developed in the 70s.

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Psoriasis: More than skin deep – Harvard Health

Posted: at 2:27 am

The first accurate medical discussion of psoriasis dates back to 1801, but the disease itself is much older. In fact, its very name is borrowed from an ancient Greek word meaning an itchy or scaly condition. About 7 million Americans are plagued by this itching and scaling, and many of them have serious complications involving other organs. Although psoriasis is classified as a dermatologic disease, it doesn't start in the skin, and its damage may be more than skin deep.

At a basic level, psoriasis is a disorder of the immune system. White blood cells called T-helper lymphocytes become overactive, producing excess amounts of cytokines, such as tumor necrosis factor, interleukin-2, and interferon-gamma. In turn, these chemicals trigger inflammation in the skin and other organs. In the skin, the inflammation produces three characteristic findings: widened blood vessels, accumulation of white blood cells, and abnormally rapid multiplication of keratinocytes, the main cells in the outer layer of the skin. In healthy skin, keratinocytes take about a month to divide, mature, migrate to the skin surface, and slough off to make way for younger cells. But in psoriasis, the entire process is speeded up to as little as three to five days. The result is thickened, red skin that sheds silvery scales of keratinocytes that have matured before their time (see Figure 1).

As a service to our readers, Harvard Health Publishing provides access to our library of archived content. Please note the date of last review or update on all articles. No content on this site, regardless of date, should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.

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20 Proposals on Methotrexate Dosing in Patients with Psoriasis Discussed – MD Magazine

Posted: at 2:27 am

A consensus was reach on 20 of the 21 proposals regarding dosing of methotrexate in patients with psoriasis, which investigators of the eDelphi study believed could be use to harmonize the treatment of the drug in affected patients.

As one of the 4 available systemic treatments, methotrexate has been prescribed for psoriasis for over 6 decades, and is also used prominently in the rheumatology field.

However, methotrexate was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration before the introduction of dose ranging studies. As such, a clear dosing regimen for the treatment is lacking.

As such, investigators led by Astrid van Huizen, MD, Department of Dermatology at the University of Amsterdam, conducted the eDelphi study to reach international consensus on the dosing of methotrexate for treating patients with psoriatic disease.

The study consisted of 3 sequential survey rounds that were conducted in September 2020, November 2020, and February 2021. An online consensus meeting occurred following the last survey round in June 2021.

A total of 4500 members of the Skin Inflammation and Psoriasis International Network (SPIN) were invited to participate. Additional emails were sent to 108 national representatives and 35 scientific committee members of the network.

From September 2020 to March 2021, a total of 180 participants worldwide- 30.6% of whom resided in non-Western countries- completed the 3 survey rounds.

Participants voted on 21 individuals proposals on a 9-point scale, 1-3 indicated disagree, 4-6 neither agree nor disagree, and 7-9 being agree.

A majority of participants worked at a university hospital (53.9%) and were experienced in treating patients with psoriasis with methotrexate (91.6%), with more than 10 years of experience.

Among the 251 participants included in the study, 180 (71.7%) completed all 3 survey rounds, and 58 participants (23.1%) joined the conference meeting.

No consensus was achieved regarding increased dosage of folic acid when increasing the dosage of methotrexate, with members of the study citing a lack of conclusive evidence.

However, a consensus was met regarding children and methotrexate dosing, though most proposals were based on studies from rheumatology due to a lack of evidence in dermatology.

The most widely discussed proposals involved patients with frailty. Elderly individuals, individuals with kidney renal dysfunction, liver disorders (eg, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis), ulcerative colitis, history of hepatitis, lack of compliance, gastritis, diabetes, previous cancer, and congestive heart failure were included in the added definition of patients with frailty.

Furthermore, the term patients with frailty was replaced with vulnerable patient, which excluded elderly patients and patients with impaired kidney function.

While a consensus was achieved in the study, investigators believed that additional high-quality studies were needed to support the proposals offered by the group.

Other consensus projects can focus on the screening and monitoring of this drug, how often and which tests should be performed, and whether special precautions are needed in children, elderly individuals, and other subpopulations, the team wrote.

The statement, "International eDelphi Study to Reach Consensus on the Methotrexate Dosing Regimen in Patients With Psoriasis," was published online in JAMA Dermatology.

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Dr Pimple Popper changed 9-year-old Yaelles life forever with genius treatment – Reality Titbit – Celebrity TV News

Posted: at 2:27 am

Who remembers the sweet 9-year-old girl, Yaelle from Dr Pimple Popper? Yaelle was featured on Season 5 during the episode entitled, Cyster Cyster and quickly captivated fans attention with her bubbly and charismatic personality. Unfortunately, she suffered from a serious case of psoriasis that covered her entire body and she went on the show in hope that Sandra Lee could help her.

The epic episode contained many bizarre situations including the twin sisters that both had cysts, however, Yaelle was the stand out star of the show and fans want to know what happened to her and if she managed to get her psoriasis sorted. Keep reading to find out!

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Lucy and Desi | Official Trailer | Amazon Prime Video

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Yaelle is from a town called Hotchkiss in Colorado and at just nine years old she had suffered from extreme psoriasis all the way from her arms, neck, legs and head from a very young age and her condition was so bad that she said the skin often clogged up her ears.

The little girl had suffered from the condition since she was a baby, however, it started off only around her eyes and belly button but when she was nine it quickly flared up across her entire body.

Heartbreakingly, Yaelle opened up about how embarrassed she was by her condition and how she would style her hair specifically to try and cover it on her face. Her mom had tried to get her medications and steroids but none of them worked and only seemed to make it worse, so they finally decided to see Dr Lee in hopes of a miracle.

They drove all the way from Colorado to California to see the pimple popper and its safe to say it was worth the trip.

During the consultation, Lee described the many treatment options that were available for Yaelles condition but explained how most are too intense and dangerous.

However, we all know how amazing Dr Lee is and she obviously had a plan. The family had only been used to more old-fashioned treatment methods but Lee was here to introduce them to some new ones.

Dr Lee explained an amazing new medication that was only required to be taken once every three months by injection and said the results are usually spectacular. Yaelle was quick to jump at the opportunity and was very brave while receiving the injection.

At the end of the episode, we got to see Yaelle a few months later and fans were gobsmacked. The transformation was incredible and her psoriasis was almost cleared. Yaelle was over the moon and said she finally felt like me again.

During the episode we heard the pain Yaelles mother was going through from having to see her daughter suffer so much, she opened up about the familys Jewish religion and how they strive to live a self-sustaining, off-grid lifestyle.

The only issue with this was that the mom said it affected her daughter due to them being so far away from most towns it was hard for them to get doctors out and treat her psoriasis.

The family grow their own food and products and Yaelle was clear about how much she loves the outdoors so we are over the moon that she can finally enjoy it to its fullest!

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Niamh is a multi-faceted journalist with speciality interests in entertainment, lifestyle and culture. She recently graduated from the University of South Wales with a degree in Journalism and enjoys writing features, reviews and trending news stories.

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Global Psoriatic Arthritis Treatment Market to be Driven by Rising Incidence of Psoriatic Arthritis and Extreme Symptoms in the Forecast Period of…

Posted: at 2:27 am

The new report by Expert Market Research titled, GlobalPsoriatic Arthritis Treatment MarketReport and Forecast 2021-2026, gives an in-depth analysis global psoriatic arthritis treatment market, assessing the market based on drug class, product type, route of administration, and major regions. The report tracks the latest trends in the industry and studies their impact on the overall market. It also assesses the market dynamics, covering the key demand and price indicators, along with analysing the market based on the SWOT and Porters Five Forces models.

Request a free sample copy in PDF or view the report summary@https://www.expertmarketresearch.com/reports/psoriatic-arthritis-treatment-market/requestsample

The key highlights of the report include:

Market Overview (2016-2026)

In addition to the rise in biological and biosimilar therapies, there is an increase in the prevalence of psoriatic arthritis and an increase in R&D activities to develop novel drugs for the treatment of psoriatic arthritis. There is also an increase in demand for psoriatic arthritis treatment goods, along with an increase in the elderly population. High treatment costs and a lack of standardised diagnostic technologies, on the other hand, are projected to restrain market expansion.

Industry Definition and Major Segments

Psoriatic arthritis is a spondylarthritis-related inflammatory joint disease caused by psoriasis. Skin and musculoskeletal systems are both affected. Genetics and the environment both play a role in its development. Psoriatic arthritis symptoms include swollen toes, fingers, and joints, and pitted nails and discomfort.

Explore the full report with the table of contents@https://www.expertmarketresearch.com/reports/psoriatic-arthritis-treatment-market

On the basis of its drug class, the market can be widely categorised as:

Based on its product type, the market can be bifurcated as:

The different administration route available for psoriatic arthritis treatment are:

The regional markets for the product include North America, Europe, the Asia Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa.

Market Trends

More than half of the revenue share was captured by biologics in the Psoriatic Arthritis (PsA) Treatment market. The drug class is likely to increase at the fastest rate during the forecast period and maintain its dominance. The segments growth is expected to be bolstered by the good commercial performances of existing products and the upcoming releases of potential pipeline prospects.

North America and Europe accounted for over half of total revenue. North America led the regional markets, mostly due to product sales in the United States. There is also a substantial patient pool and significant manufacturers supporting the PsA treatment market expansion. Asia Pacific is predicted to be one of the fastest expanding areas. Biosimilars are a crucial growth driver in emerging economies including China, India, and South Korea. Regional expansion is also likely to be influenced by overall economic development, healthcare infrastructure improvements, rising disposable income, and consumer awareness.

Key Market Players

The major players in the market are AbbVie Inc., Amgen, Inc., Johnson & Johnson Services, Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Celgene Corporation, Novartis International AG, Eli Lilly and Company, Pfizer, Inc., UCB S.A, and AstraZeneca plc, among others. The report covers the market shares, capacities, expansions, investments and mergers and acquisitions, among other latest developments of these market players.

About Us:

Expert Market Research is a leading business intelligence firm, providing custom and syndicated market reports along with consultancy services for our clients. We serve a wide client base ranging from Fortune 1000 companies to small and medium enterprises. Our reports cover over 100 industries across established and emerging markets researched by our skilled analysts who track the latest economic, demographic, trade and market data globally.

At Expert Market Research, we tailor our approach according to our clients needs and preferences, providing them with valuable, actionable and up-to-date insights into the market, thus, helping them realize their optimum growth potential. We offer market intelligence across a range of industry verticals which include Pharmaceuticals, Food and Beverage, Technology, Retail, Chemical and Materials, Energy and Mining, Packaging and Agriculture.

Media Contact

Company Name: EMR Inc.Contact Person: Steven Luke, Corporate Sales Specialist U.S.A.Email:sales@expertmarketresearch.comToll Free Number: +1-415-325-5166 | +44-702-402-5790Address: 30 North Gould Street, Sheridan, WY 82801, USACity: SheridanState: WyomingCountry: United StatesWebsite:https://www.expertmarketresearch.com

Upadacitinib Improves Pain Associated with Ankylosing Spondylitis, PsA – MD Magazine

Posted: at 2:27 am

Upadacitinib has already been found to be safe and effective in the phase 3 SELECT-PsA 1 and 2 studies on patients with active psoriatic arthritis (PsA), as well as among patients with active ankylosing spondylitis (AS) in the phase 2/3 SELECT-ASXIS 1 study.

However, a new investigation compiled the data from all 3 randomized trials which brought more insight on upadacitinib's effect. Patients with active psoriatic arthritis or ankylosing spondylitis displayed rapid and sustained improvements in pain outcomes with upadacitinib for over a year.

The population included patients who have experienced either inadequate responses to non-biologic or biologic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs), or were biologic-naive with inadequate response to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Improvements were consistent and observed across several endpoints.

In all 3 studies, patients were randomized to receive either upadacitinib 15 mg once daily, or placebo. In SELECT-PsA 1, an additional group was administered adalimumab 40 mg every other week. Investigators, led by Iain B McInnes, MD, PhD, University of Glasgow, College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences, evaluated pain outcomes based on increments.

In post hoc analyses, when compared with baseline, outcomes were measured by the proportion of patients who achieved 30%, 50% and 70% reduction using a patient global assessment of pain.

Also, changes from baseline were assessed at specific time points, as were particular questions from Bath Ankylosing Spondylitis Disease Activity Index (BASDAI). Additional end points that were unique to each study were looked at.

The research showed that a higher proportion of patients who received upadacitinib acheived 30%, 50% and 70% reduction in pain end points compared with placebo.

The improvements were observed as early as week 2 and were sustained or further increased through the first year (PsA 1/2 studies: 64%/48%, 58%/42% and 38%/22%, respectively; SELECT-AXIS 1 study: 76%, 72% and 54%). The data regarding adalimumab from the SELECT-PsA 1 study produced similar results (59%, 49% and 32%).

Patients who switched from placebo to upadacitinib 15 mg were able to improve to similar levels of the continuous upadacitinib group by the end of year 1 (PsA 1/2 studies: 46%60%, 35%49% and 15%34%; AS study: 83%, 72% and 46%).

Investigators pointed to the importance of pain management in these populations a key component to the treatment of psoriatic arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis. Pain has an incredible impact on an individual's quality of life, fatigue, and functional work impairment.

The study "Effect of upadacitinib on reducing pain in patients with active psoriatic arthritis or ankylosing spondylitis: post hoc analysis of three randomised clinical trials" was published in RMD Open Rheumatic & Musculoskeletal Diseases.

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Extra, extra! News and tidings, March 30, 2022 Catholic World Report – Catholic World Report

Posted: at 2:24 am

Detail from "Reading the Newspaper. War News" (1905) byNikolay Bogdanov-Belsky (WikArt.org)

The trans agenda Thetriumph of male swimmer Lia Thomas (formerly Will Thomas) is national news because it shows there are no limits to the charade of trans ideology. The Trans Lobby Doesnt Just Want To Erase Womens Sports. It Wants To Erase Women (The Federalist)

Putin and the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine By far the largest of the 23 Eastern churches in full communion with Rome, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has around 6 million members Does Greek Catholic Church help explain Putins obsession with Ukraine? (Crux)

No Open Society the composition of professoriate and students at elite universities skews massively to the political left. Against Academic Freedom (Post Liberal Order)

This is a punishment! so many people in both Europe and the United States have recently convinced themselves that the End is nigh. Apocalyptic Daze: Secular elites prophesy a doomsday without redemption.(City Journal)

Adolescent confusion As the number of transgender teenagers has exploded across the country, with it comes a wealth of readily available medical procedures unthinkable a decade ago. Top Pediatrician: Teenage transgender medicine a deadly path (Washington Examiner)

An end to globalization The values-based international order has long since ceased to exist, yet Western leaders remain reluctant to readjust. After the end of Globalization (Post Liberal Order)

Incompatible religions Transhumanism perceives immortality as something that can be achieved by men. Christianity identifies eternal salvation as the mercy of a loving God. The impossibility of Christian transhumanism (First Things)

Vigan s error Vigan is being swept away by trends in modern politics. His (legitimate!) anger at the West is blinding him to the evils of the Russian government. Is Archbishop Vigan Looking East? (Crisis Magazine)

Army fitness reduced standards The Army has scrapped plans to use the same physical fitness test for all soldiers, choosing instead to have some reduced standards to allow women and older soldiers to pass. Army approves reduced physical fitness standards for women and older soldiers (The Hill)

Gods mysterious providence When Pope Francis and the worlds bishops entrust entire countries to Marys intercession, the greatest fruits will be unseen by most people. Russian consecration will ice ecumenism (Pillar Catholic)

Episcopal confusion Bishops of the Episcopal Church on Friday adopted a pastoral statement critical of U.S. states that have enacted policies opposed by transgender activists. Episcopal Church Bishops Pledge Transgender and Non-Binary Support (Juicy Ecumenism)

Continental shifts While ordinations to the diocesan priesthood are on the rise in some parts of the world, theyre also falling fast in some traditionally Catholic countries. Is there a global vocations crisis? (Pillar Catholic)

Our Lady of Aparecida So Paulo States Court of Appeals has reversed a 2019 decision that stopped the building of a giant steel statue of the Virgin Mary in Aparecida, the city where Brazils major Catholic shrine is located. Court allows giant statue of Virgin Mary to be built in Brazil (Crux Now)

Disneys Queer Agenda Disney has been trying to queer children for a long time. A senior Disney executive brags about that to her colleagues! Disney Queers Children, Says Disney Exec (The American Conservative)

(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of said news item or essay.)

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Extra, extra! News and tidings, March 30, 2022 Catholic World Report - Catholic World Report

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Anno: Mutationem: The Kotaku Review – Kotaku

Posted: at 2:24 am

Anno: Mutationem is an overly ambitious love letter with one too many recipients. While the game has an interesting gumbo of ideas, its story buckles under the weight of living up to the very properties it attempts to pay tribute to. Ultimately, Mutationems ending fails to deliver a satisfying or cohesive pursuit of this monumental undertaking.

The game is a pixel art side-scrolling action game with RPG elements, developed by ThinkingStars. You play as Ann Flores, a highly skilled combat-trained lone wolf as she hunts down the cyberpunk gangs and corrupt mega-corporations that kidnapped her brother. Anno: Mutationem, not to be confused with the long-running Anno real-time strategy series, is ThinkingStars first video game. While Mutationem does a serviceable job of constructing an intriguing world, its preoccupation with paying homage to the media that inspired it distracts from the story its trying to tell.

Mutationem makes overt references to popular sci-fi anime and video games, including Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner, NieR:Automata, a smidge of Drakengard 3, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. In the game, this feels more spread out over 18 hours, but in its two-hour demo, it felt like rapid-fire callbacks. While on paper, drawing from these iconic properties is a no-brainer for a developers first video game, Mutationem boldly goes beyond just mirroring aesthetics and injects their varying high-concept ideas on what it means to be human into its plot as well.

Id liken this phenomenon to using all your favorite seasonings into a dish youve never made for the first time. Although those spices pleased your palate in their own dishes, if combined haphazardly, theyll only clash and overwhelm. The same circumstance comes about when Mutationem transforms its aesthetic references into plot points.

Ghost in the Shell, NieR:Automata, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and the other media Mutationem draws from have heavy, esoteric lore of their own. Mutationem ties itself down by ceaselessly drawing comparisons to these other media. Plot points like GitS introspective meditation on the human condition, Blade Runners commentary on transhumanism through cybernetics, and NGEseverything (most notably End of Evangelions third impact) take root within Mutationems story as well. While the argument that every piece of media is a remix of elements a creator liked isnt lost on me, Mutationem becomes a poorly adapted cover to its inspirations rather than rocking to the rhythm of its own story beats.

Youre telling me. Screenshot: ThinkingStars / Kotaku

This is a shame, because buried under all these references is Mutationems own unique premise. Interesting story elementslike the games poverty-stricken populace suffering from the Mechanika Virus, a disease that slowly turns people into robo-zombiesend up jettisoned to give the game more time to retread ideas from other media. Because Mutationem seems afraid to veer far from its inspirations, which are imperfect themselves, ThinkingStars fails at telling its own story.

Just when you expect the game to pay off your detective work and hard-fought battles against mecha and hordes of cybernetically enhanced militia with some attempt to connect its disparate ideas, it shortchanges you with a lackluster ending. Similarly to NGE, Mutationem builds up to armageddon, but its final boss comes out of left field. Basically, the government organization in Mutationem is SEELE from NGEwith all the convoluted reasoning and imagery that impliesand theyre using alternate-dimension tech to do something and must harness Anns power to pull it off. While the games been hyping you to fight Anns alt. dimension self, Amok, you merely fight a dragon. I felt robbed of an epic battle with the rival character I assumed the game was preparing me for, and insulted by the blatant sequel bait.

The gameplay ultimately disappoints, too. Being the unapologetic Devil May Cry devotee I am, games rewarding skill-based combat with gratifying feedback is a must. While Mutationems combat hints at being DMCs pixel-art equivalent, it proves to be a mixed bag of hype visuals and underwhelming grind. The games combat systems promise a depth that never plays out in gameplay. While Mutationem allows you to customize, deconstruct, and forge more powerful weapons with elemental mods and unlockable weapon skills, many of these cool bits only materialize near the games finale. While you can access some of these abilities earlier through side-quests, the game doesnt do a good job of letting you know, seemingly railroading you into its convoluted main plot.

Never go full-End of Evangelion. Screenshot: ThinkingStars / Kotaku

After a couple hours, fights dont really feel rewarding. Simply put, enemies are damage sponges. Once you finally break an enemys shield, which works as their second health bar, you have a matter of seconds to wail on them to do some actual damage before their shields recover. The rest is wash and repeat.

One simple answer to this conundrum would be to parry enemies more frequently, resulting in big damage boosts. But the rewards for doing so are negligible, and your foes have confusing hitboxes; if you miss a parry, thats a chunk of your health gone for the attempt. I had to go out of my way to parry bosses by lining up with their hits instead of letting them come organically. Instead of trusting the game to make my parries count, I developed the instinct to dodge roll constantly because it was the only safe and assured method for maintaining Anns health and dealing damage.

While early boss fights are unique, Mutationems latter half pulls a Halo 5 by throwing multiple versions of the same boss at you, sometimes fielding two more directly after you prime the first for a finishing blow. Boss fights increasingly felt like wars of attrition, rather than the fast-paced battles of skill the game advertises.

"Have neko car, will travel"

Side-Scrolling Action-RPG

PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC

Gorgeous pixel art, wacky NPCs, and the endearing dynamic between the games main character and sidekick

March 16, 2022

Convoluted story, underdeveloped villains, lore dumping and lackluster finale

18-ish hours, many of which were fighting frustrating boss battles

Outside of combat, Mutationem suffers from the same cognitive dissonance as the Yakuza series, with its side-quests and main missions feeling like two separate games. While Mutationems main quest comes off like an AI-generated anime sci-fi plot, its side-quests unabashedly tell wacky and heartfelt stories that characterize the people who inhabit its world. Much of my enjoyment with Mutationem came from straying from its main quest. Avoiding paths or hallways that looked like progress led me to discover bizarre NPCs who all had written dialogue and receive snippets of their experiences in Mutationems dystopian cyberpunk society.

My favorite interactions came from running into a sewer-dwelling man with a manhole cover for a face, discovering the secret identity of a virtual pop idol, and witnessing the final moments of a robot reaching enlightenment in the sewers. These brief encounters left long-lasting impressions, making its underutilization of these fresher concepts within its larger story all the more frustrating. Instead of reveling in rich storytelling, I was collecting a tally of how many plot elements from other media with which Mutationem garnished its story.

To make matters worse, the game introduces cookie-cutter villains who suffer from the annoying trope of being vague about their intentions. Instead of simply telling you just what the fuck is happening and what they want out of Ann, they simply say theyll see her again in the worst archetypical anime villain style. These guys even look identical aesthetically, sometimes even mirroring allies. While the games latter half attempts to curb this by introducing villains with bizarre new looks, these intricately designed double-crossers writing is just as flat as that of their predecessors. Aside from the two leads, the main cast is boring and unimaginative, leaving the incidental environmental NPCs to breathe life into Mutationems world.

Corn-Man rules. Screenshot: ThinkingStars / Kotaku

Storytelling and combat aside, two high points come in the games impressive art direction and the winning dynamic between its main characters. The stunning visuals of Mutationems setpieces almost supersede the imagery of the media its homaging. Ann and Ayane are also really cute. Their banter in between main quest and side-quest content was worth the many brutal deaths and consequent eruptions of Cmon man! I yelled when barely photo-finishing enemies.

As ThinkingStars first game, Anno: Mutationem boldly swings for the fences by throwing every cool concept it has at players. Mutationems unbalanced focus in its story is its critical failure. At one moment, its an anime-infused cyberpunk open-world RPG, in the next its a rigid story-driven metroidvania. But when it tries to meet in the middle, its pacing screeches to a halt, depriving its latter half of the charm of its wacky, worldbuilding NPCs and replacing it with long stretches of exposition conveyed through dry codexes and vague anime archetypes sporting unclear motivations.

With the games ending hinting at a possible sequel, Mutationem stands as a messy first draft. If a follow-up does come, I hope ThinkingStars will have the confidence to boldly stand and tell its own unique story rather than remain so shackled to its inspirations.

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Anno: Mutationem: The Kotaku Review - Kotaku

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The Red-Pill Prince – Tablet Magazine

Posted: at 2:24 am

In his first public appearance after five years of semiofficial banishment, Curtis Yarvin began to cry. It was late February 2020 and Yarvin was the special guest at a live podcast in Los Angeles. A graphic promoting the event shows the computer engineer turned political philosopher, then 46 years old, wearing his black leather motorcycle jacket and wire-framed glasses and staring out with practiced intensity. Over Yarvins left shoulder floats a bust of the deceased rapper Lil Peep.

The moody digital aesthetic is called vaporwave. Ma, Pa, have you heard of vaporwave? It is a very of-the-moment style that uses retro computer graphics to evoke the feeling of haunting nostalgia for a vanishing human presence.

The metaphor was apt. In 2014, Yarvinwho had spent seven years blogging about politics and society under the name Mencius Moldbugwent silent, shifting his attention back to his grand project of building a functional software stack called Urbit that promised to revolutionize computing. But his political pronouncements soon caught up to him. In 2016, after the second planned talk at a computer programming conference was canceled on account of his political views, Yarvin found himself writing lines like: I am not an outspoken advocate for slavery, a racist, a sexist or a fascist. As anyone whos been on the internet lately can tell you, a person who must publicly deny that they are a fascist has already lost. When the invitations stopped coming, Yarvin didnt protest.

When I invited him to be a guest at that event, he was truly radioactive, the podcasts organizer, a young intellectual entrepreneur named Justin Murphy, told me recently. The scene brought out LA art hipsters, connoisseurs of civilizational decline, and PayPal founder Peter Thiel. The billionaire, who was one of the first investors in Facebook and has been a longtime patron of Yarvins, drank Pabst Blue Ribbon and ate pizza. Thiels car idled outside the club, engine on, driver behind the wheel, ready in case the need arose for a sudden exit. Rumor has it that Thiel takes this precaution wherever he goes, but it was not out of place that evening. Murphy, who spent several years in his 20s participating in militant black bloc anarchist protests, was worried antifa might show up to protest the event.

The night went off without a hitch. Yarvin had chosen an ideal venue to reemerge, with podcasts providing one of the only channels left to reach the public now that the glossy magazines, publishing houses, and other arteries for circulating new ideas had been choked off by the narrowing band of acceptable opinions.

Depending on what circles you run in, it can seem like everyone now has an opinion about Curtis Yarvin, including me. We were introduced in 2017 when I received a short, unsolicited email from him calling me a fake writer working in a fake century. The email arrived after Id published an essay that mentioned Yarvin a handful of times and referred to him as an architect of antidemocratic, Neoreactionary politics. The brashness, it turned out, was just Yarvins way of getting my attention. Thus began an occasional correspondence that has included a handful of interactions over the last five years. And so, without giving it a great deal of thought, I added myself to the extended network of people being courted, outraged, and shaped by the man and his work.

Like Niccol Machiavelli, to whom he is sometimes compared, Yarvin defines himself as an amoral realist who invented a new theory of government that upends established doctrines of political morality. Starting in the late 2000s, his namenot his real name, he was still known then by his blogging pseudonymbegan to be whispered among some of the most powerful people in the country, a secret society made up of disaffected members of the American elite.

Shortly after Donald Trump entered the White House, reports started to circulate that Yarvin was secretly advising Trump strategist Steve Bannon. His writing, according to one article, had established the theoretical groundwork for Trumpism.

Yarvin denied the rumors, sometimes playfully and at other times strenuously. But he was consistent in his criticisms of the Trumpian approach to politics. Mass populist rallies and red MAGA hats struck him as merely a weak imitation of democratic energies that had already died out. Trump is a throwback from the past, not an omen of the future, he wrote in 2016. The future is grey anonymous bureaucrats, more Brezhnev every year.

What Yarvin is, if one wants to be accurate, is the founder of neoreaction, an ideological school that emerged on the internet in the late 2000s marrying the classic anti-modern, anti-democratic worldview of 18th-century reactionaries to a post-libertarian ethos that embraced technological capitalism as the proper means for administering society. Against democracy. Against equality. Against the liberal faith in an arc of history that bends toward justice.

Instead, neoreactionaries subscribe to the classical idea that history moves in cycles. In an era when the iconic Shepard Fairey portrait of Barack Obama captured the HOPE of the nation, Yarvin and his followers were busy explaining why liberal democracy was already doomed.

Unlike some of the other neoreactionary writers that emerged in the last 20 years, Yarvin possessed a style that, even when discoursing at great length on the gold standard or obscure historical matters, never suggested powdered wigs. He wrote like what he was: a hyperintellectual Ivy League autodidact and wiseass tech geek masking his childhood insecurities with an aura of infallibility, who shared the same set of subcultural and sitcom references found in anyone else his age. At its best, this approach made difficult ideas accessiblenot to mention viral. In one of his earliest blog posts, Yarvin birthed the now-ubiquitous meme of the red pill, a metaphor he borrowed from The Matrix movies and turned into a worldwide catchphrase describing the revelation of a suppressed truth that shatters progressive illusions and exposes a harsh underlying reality.

In Yarvins worldview, what keeps American democracy running today is not elections but illusions projected by a set of institutions, including the press and universities, that work in tandem with the federal bureaucracy in a complex he calls the Cathedral. The mystery of the Cathedral, Yarvin writes, is that all the modern worlds legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.

Living Americans might be able to glean a sense of the phenomenon Yarvin describes in the current public discourse. It has often seemed in recent years that every few weeks has brought a new instance in which journalists and experts instantaneously, almost magically converged on shared talking points related to the hysteria du jourcycling through moral crusades to free children from cages at the U.S. border, save the post office from a fascist coup, label the filibuster a tool of white supremacy, and so on.The power of the Cathedral is that it cannot be seen because it is located everywhere and nowhere, baked into the architecture of how we live, communicate, and think.

The night that Yarvin reemerged onto the sceneat the LA event, the story that moved him to tears concerned the life of the English writer Freda Utley, who became a communist in 1928an era, he observed archly, when anyone who was smart or cool was a communist. Utley moved to the Soviet Union and a few years later her husband was arrested and shipped to the gulag never to be seen again. She fled to the United States with her infant son and tried to warn her friends that their imagined utopia was really a police state. Of course, her friends are like, Do I know you? Who is this anti-Soviet person knocking at the door? Theyre like, Fuck you. Yarvin arrived at the moral of his story: You really shouldnt expect the material rewards of success to come along with the spiritual rewards of telling the truth. He swallowed a sob. You really shouldnt, he said, and wiped a tear from his eye.

In Yarvins parable, he is both the betrayed figure of Utley, martyred for telling the truth, and the above-it-all narrator explaining how the world really works. To his readers, his immense, fortresslike body of work offers one of the only redoubts where they can glimpse the realities of power behind the political circus. To his skeptics, he is a minor fraud whose claims to be a truth-telling iconoclast belie a fundamental affinity with the status quo. Yarvins calls to do away with democracy and turn, say, Elon Musk into Americas new CEO kingthats just the liberal technocratic system we already have on speed, an acceleration into the most dystopian aspects of the endless neoliberal present. To his critics, he is, as noted, a fascist. They point to a handful of his statements from a decade ago, including one in which he argued that certain races were better suited to slavery than others, and to the fact that the central pillar of his outlook is an avid opposition to the principles of democracy and equality. Yarvin, they say, is not a victim but the sender-off to the gulags; behind his tears, he plots to oppress minorities and tear down whatever remains of liberal democracy.

The essence of Yarvin as a historical figure begins not with his politics but his talents as a computer engineer, or programmer, the latter of which is his preferred label since he sees himself as a builder of things that work, not simply a manipulator of symbols. To separate his roots in technology from the politics he developed is to miss what is most powerful about himhis understanding of the hidden designs behind the systems of knowledge and power that keep both computers and societies running. The universal rule that he deduced is almost mystical in its simplicity: Order is good, not merely in an instrumental sense because it leads to virtuous outcomes; it is good in itself. Whatever leads to more of it is also good, while anything that produces disorder is bad.

While conservatives who have come to embrace Yarvin speak of restoring natural rights and using state power to direct the common good, for him, it is impossible to go directly from hypocrisy to morality. A cleansing bath of amoral realism must intervene. Yarvin is not a nationalist or a populist, nor even a conservative. Rather, he is the signature example of a political theorist born after the death of 20th-century mass political movements, on the unsettled terrain of the internet. Whether you like it or not, Yarvin is the philosopher of, at the very least, our near future.

The father of neoreaction was raised in the bosom of the American state. His paternal grandparents were Jewish American communists. Yarvins father worked for the U.S. government as a foreign service officer, which took his family overseas to Portugal, Cyprus, and the Dominican Republic. His mother was a Protestant from Westchester County who eventually also joined the civil service, as did Yarvins stepfather. The progeny of this Jewish-WASP-Stalinist, civil service, Cold War liberal American heritage was a child math prodigy and computer whiz who liked to write poetry. It didnt make social life easy, especially when his family returned to the United States just as he began high school.

I had already skipped one grade back in Fairfax County and they did an admission test, so I skipped two more and then Im 11 in ninth grade, he told me. Then we come back to the States and I go to an American public high school in Columbia, Maryland, and Im a 12-year-old sophomore, which is definitely wack.

At 15, Yarvin entered college as part of Johns Hopkins longitudinal Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. A year later, he transferred to Brown University in Rhode Island as a legacy admission to the Ivy League liberal arts college, where his parents had met in the mid-60s. After graduating, it was on to a computer science Ph.D. program at Berkeley. He dropped out after a year and a half to take a tech job at the height of the go-go 90s dot-com era.

In late adolescence, Yarvin had a formative experience on an early internet message board called Usenet. It was a decentralized system, and more importantly it had this amazing form of admission control because everyone on it was an engineering student or worked at a tech company or something, Yarvin told me. He participated on forums like talk.bizarre, absorbing the inside jokes and new iterative patterns of thinking that were being developed on the outpost of a still-innovative and experimental digital culture. Occasionally he posted a poem or short piece of fiction to the board.

The end came in 1993 when America Online, the first mass internet provider, offered Usenet access to its subscribersresulting in a flood of uninitiated, unwashed provincials overrunning the community. You had this sort of de facto aristocracy that didnt know it was an aristocracy, and then it fell apart.

After the dot-com crash, I was left with a newly acquired girlfriend (who would become my wife), a few hundred thousand dollars, and a place in San Francisco, Yarvin told me of his early career. The buyout came from his job at a mobile software company that was founded in 1996 as Libris before changing its name to Unwired Planet, and then Phone.com. The settlement was considerably less than fuck you money, Yarvin said, but enough to finance an extended self-education in history and political theory that was attained by searching through Googles library of everything, ever, which was brand new at the time.

My ideas really came from reading the Austrian SchoolMises and Rothbardand then Hoppe. Hoppe opened a kind of door to the pre-revolutionary world for me, Yarvin has said. A German-born political theorist and leading proponent of Austrian School economics, Hans-Hermann Hoppe has called himself an anarcho-capitalist, a title borrowed from his mentor Murray Rothbard. Hoppe theorized a distinction between monarchy, which he defined as privately owned government, and democracy, classified as publicly owned government. In the introduction to his 2001 book, Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe called the transition from monarchy to democracy a source of civilizational decline.

From Hoppe, Yarvin took the idea that all organizations, big or small, public or private, military or civilian, are managed best when managed by a single executive.

If democracy is so decrepit and ineffective, one might ask how it is that America became the worlds great superpower and maintained that position for the last century. Yarvins answer contains two parts: first, that nothing lasts forever. Second, while American supremacy may once have rested on innovation and growth, the country, now a bloated empire, has been surviving for decades on the power of myth-making and mass illusions.

Whether or not he can be compared to Machiavelli the man, it is correct to describe Yarvin as a Machiavellian, in the meaning given to that term by the American political writer James Burnham, a one-time follower of Leon Trotsky who later became a committed anti-communist. Like the historical figures chronicled in Burnhams book The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, Yarvin believes that one of the worst aspects of democracy is the fact that it rarely exists. Because democracy is the rule of the many, and the rule of the many is inherently unstable, democracies rarely last long.

Burnham argues that all complex societies are in effect oligarchies ruled by a small number of elites. To hide this fact and legitimize their rule in the eyes of the masses, oligarchies employ the powers of mystification and propaganda. Indeed, Yarvin believes that America stopped being a democracy sometime after the end of World War II and became instead a bureaucratic oligarchymeaning that political power is concentrated within a small group of people who are selected not on the basis of hereditary title or pure merit but through their entry into the bureaucratic organs of the state. What remains of American democracy is pageantry and symbolism, which has about as much connection to the real thing as the city of Orlando has to Disney World.

In place of a functional democratic system, Yarvin came to believe, there now exists an industrial-scale symbolic apparatus that generates the illusion of political agency necessary for societys real rulers to carry out their business undisturbed. American voters still go to the polls to pick their leader, but the president is a ceremonial figure beholden to the permanent bureaucracy.

The structure of democratic societies creates two tiers of power, observed the French sociologist and eminent defender of liberalism, Raymond Aron, in his appraisal of Burnhams book. While one tier of power is made up of industrialists, military generals, and other decision-makers operating in the shadows, in public their interests are represented by the second tier made up of those who know how to talk. The problem identified by the Machiavellians, says Aron, is that while the talkers are not necessarily competent leaders, they nevertheless gain power because debating regimes oil the wheels for those who know how to use words. There you have the two paths to power in a democracy: secrecy for the plutocratic persons of action, or, for those in the public political class, skill at deceit.

While Yarvins vision has as much or more in common with left critiques of the state dating back to the 1960s, his solutions are openly reactionarylooking back to the 17th century rather than forward to a promised socialist-utopian future.

In 2007, Yarvin, writing as Mencius Moldbug, started his blog Unqualified Reservations. His themes, now clearly established, were reflected in his earliest published work: Democracy as an Adaptive Fiction, Why, When, and How to Abolish the United States, and Against Political Freedom. At the time, Yarvins paid work was still with the San Francisco-based Urbit where, with funding from Thiel, he was immersed in a yearslong project to write a new programming language from scratch and decentralize the ownership of data. Even in the Olympian culture of Silicon Valley, where the microdosing transhumanists all had startups promising to engineer a brave new humanity, Urbits project was considered wildly ambitious, if not a bit mad.

The initial Moldbug audience was made up of fellow Silicon Valley misfits and disaffected amateur intellectuals with high-speed internet connections, the kind of people interested in his sardonic style and unconventional approach to history and political thought.

Everywhere one looked in the Moldbuggian scheme, things were not what they seemed. Beneath the surface of modern progressivism, for instance, Yarvin found that the sacraments and dogmas of Americas founding Protestant religion had been preserved. The now common criticism that the liberal activist culture of wokeness is a kind of secular religion picks up on arguments Yarvin was making in 2007 about mainstream liberal universalism, which he dubbed CryptoCalvinism.

This new techno-monarchist ideology of neoreaction developed in connection with other post-millennial intellectual movements in Silicon Valley like post-rationalism. By the late-2000s, while the U.S. culture and economy appeared stagnant, if not in outright decline, the technology sector was expanding its power and reach as apparently the only industry left in America still capable of innovation. The ideas coming out of the valley reflected that disparity and a growing feeling there that American liberal democracy was an obsolete operating system, impeding the tech sectors growth and with it the march of progress.

Other key figures to emerge in neoreaction included the writer Michael Anissimov, and the British philosopher Nick Land, a former Marxist and devotee of French critical theory who gave the title Dark Enlightenment to his extended study of Yarvins oeuvre. Adjacent to neoreaction was the digital fascism of the alternative right, which emerged a few years later. The alt-right, as it was also known, was another internet-based ideological movement but one that emphasized anarchic nihilism, rabid racism, and demonization of Jews. Neoreactionaries, by contrast, while comfortable expressing their own racial and ethnic bigotries, tended to downplay their political importance and eschewed the online Nazi role-playing of the alt-right as dim-witted and self-destructive. In a series of early essays, Why I am not a White Nationalist and Why I am not an Anti-Semite, Yarvin offered an analysis of those ideologies that was not entirely unsympathetic before ultimately rejecting them.

How could he be a fascist, Yarvin protested, when he so clearly detested the masses and the peopletwo of fascisms most celebrated subjects?

Perhaps the best known of the Silicon Valley democracy skeptics was Thiel. I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible, Thiel wrote in 2009. The great task for libertarians, he declared, is to find an escape from politics in all its formsfrom the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called social democracy.

Yet for Yarvin, even though libertarianism may be right about the best way to organize society, it fails because it is unserious about power. An all-powerful state is necessary, a sovereign Leviathan of the kind envisioned by Thomas Hobbes, to impose order by force on a level of such absolute authority that it can then disappear from day-to-day life.

Having concluded that democracy is a failed and dying form of governance, one that increasingly produces more disorder than order, Yarvin provided a vision for what could come next: an enlightened corporate monarchy that would only arrive after a hard reboot of the political system. It was a vision of total regime change, but one achieved without any violence or even activism since those efforts were doomed to fail and would therefore only strengthen the system they sought to overthrow. For those who believed in it, the next step was to generate the ideas that a future elite would use to run the country once it seized power.

And who should the rulers be, exactly? Rather than a hereditary dynasty, Yarvin proposed the Elizabethan structure of the joint-stock company used by the British East India Company as the best means for selecting and overseeing the monarch. The state, rather than tyrannizing its subjects or being controlled by citizens who endowed its authority, should be operated as a profitable corporation governed proportionally by its beneficiaries. Elsewhere, he puts it differently: I favor absolute monarchy in the abstract sense: unconditional personal authority, subject to some responsibility mechanism.

Some readers may dwell on how the weight that the rather vague some responsibility mechanism bears in this program for the enlightened monarchies of the future. For Yarvin, the answer is always more power.

While Peter Thiel has since disavowed his rejection of democracyin public at leastand is now financing the U.S. Senate campaigns of a new breed of MAGA 2.0 populists like J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, Yarvin has not wavered.

Power, according to Yarvin, is like computer code, binary. It is either on or off; final and absolute, or merely a glorified form of servitude. Even the tech giants, which he considers the only efficient organizations left in the United States, are powerless. Facebook may be able to ban anyone it wants while controlling the flow of critical information to billions of people across the globe, but Mark Zuckerberg still has to answer to midlevel government functionariesa relationship demonstrated by the Facebook CEOs reluctant embrace of a Democratic Party approved fact-checking apparatus. Even if Zuckerberg wanted to raise an army to stage a coup, its not clear what target he could strike. [F]or all practical revolutionary purposes, Yarvin wrote in May of 2020. the deep state is as decentralized as Bitcoin, and as invulnerableto ballots and bullets alike.

Because the goal for Yarvin is to force power out of the bureaucratic shadows and make it visible, he sees the brute force approach of Chinas government as a positive example. After all, what is the opposite of the U.S. deep state with its esoteric CryptoCalvinist dogmas, if not the overtly state-worshiping ideology of the Chinese Communist Party where the governments capacity for violence is never far from the surface? Its an analysis that for Yarvin and others of his ilk approaches its own dogma. As recently as last December, Yarvin maintained that Chinas zero-COVID surveillance state approach to the pandemic, in which millions of people have been confined to their homes in citywide quarantines, entails fewer covid restrictions than citizens of the reddest American red state.

What is bizarre about the reaction to the neoreactionaries is not the perfectly understandable revulsion at this adoration of China, or at their racial and ethnic bigotries, but the outrage over their attack on democracy. Philosophers and politicians like Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, to name only three among countless figures, including many on the left, have been outspoken in their warnings about democracys perils. That is to say nothing of the current American ruling class, which treats ordinary people with aristocratic contempt, openly conspires to suppress reporting that might get the wrong candidate elected, and conspires to undermine popular electionsall in the name of democracy. If Yarvins political musings are a danger to the future of American democracy, as they may well be, one can only ask what that means for the actions and statements of the people who are currently in power.

The temptation to squeeze Yarvin into the premade villain costume of a contemporary morality play may be temporarily satisfying, but if its aim was to shut him down or curb his influence, it has failed. Hes back in the public sphere now with more time than ever after departing Urbit in 2019, and he has a busy schedule of podcast appearances. It seems likely, in fact, that ignoring Yarvins incisive diagnosis of the American political system, or reducing it to cartoonish villainy, will only benefit him and other opponents of democracy who are more than happy to see the American system continue its slow collapse.

It also misses the fatal weakness of Yarvins ideology: For all of its power as a systemic analysis, it contains no place for human beings. The classic question in philosophywhat is the good life?never intrudes on Yarvins pursuit of designing beautiful machines.

I once asked Yarvin whether he saw his computer programming and writing as drawing on different parts of his brain. My love of computer science has always been in systems because its essentially architecture, youre building something that has to have a very large component of aesthetics in it, he told me. Youre in a situation where maybe even more than in architecture, you know this works because its beautiful.

Later in the conversation, he expanded on this point. When youre building system software, youre in this position of this demiurge, he said using the term from gnostic theology for a minor, and typically false, god. The matter of the individual, not as a political subject but as a sentient, feeling agent possessing intrinsic needs and desires, seems not so much a matter Yarvin avoids as one that almost never occurs to him in his political writing. Even where his designs are most immaculate, they are somehow bereftlike a beautiful but empty city.

Even where Yarvins designs are most immaculate, they are somehow bereftlike a beautiful but empty city.

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On Feb. 1, 2020, before any COVID cases were reported in the United States and a few weeks before his comeback podcast appearance, Yarvin published an essay warning that the novel coronavirus could become a devastating global pandemic. He also predicted that it wouldnt matter. He pronounced America a failed state, unable to envision, let alone muster the capacity to take the kind of decisive action that, according to Yarvin, was being modeled by Chinas zero-COVID approach to the virus. The hard truth, he wrote a few months later, is that the virus is not just a test of our government. It is a test of our form of government.

The following summer, the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan while barely firing a shot. Americas trillion-dollar investment in the Afghan Security Forces was exposed as a Ponzi scheme and collapsed overnight. In the final chaotic days of the war, U.S. forces struck a deal with the Taliban, their sworn enemy of the past two decades, to provide security at the airfield where final evacuations were taking place. Shortly after that, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the airport killing 13 American service members and some 170 Afghan civilians.

No general or political leader was blamed for Americas longest war ending in humiliating defeat. No one was fired or resigned. Moreover, the total lack of accountability for a catastrophic systemwide failure is, according to Yarvin, not a problem that could be solved by electing better leaders or applying more political will, because it is an essential feature of the systems design. Why did this happen? Yarvin asked. Very simply: because no one is in charge of the government.

Not the wrong people; no one.

Is that possible? If things were really that bad, wouldnt we be able to tell?

Maybe not. Without losing your balance, try to work back through the many sharp reversals of public policy and elite opinion since the beginning of the pandemic. In February 2020, when Yarvin first issued his warning, it was considered a sign of right-wing racial paranoia to be worried at all about the virus in China. The actual danger of coronavirus: fear may fuel racism and xenophobia that threaten human rights, intoned The Washington Post. A few months later, the Great and Good changed their minds and declared the pandemic an unprecedented emergency demanding a nationwide shutdown. Schools and playgrounds were locked. Children were masked. The police were called out to break up weddings and prayer services held by religious communities that insisted on endangering the rest of the country by carrying on with their primitive rituals. Then the Black Lives Matter protests began that summer, and the switch was flipped again. Now, national leaders and public health officials donned the kente cloths of their own religious rituals and joined the throngs. A dazzling new form of Jesuitical argumentation was invented in which the crowding of tens of thousands of people together in the streets was not merely justified in spite of the risks, but redefined as a public health measure to combat the chronic threat of white supremacy and thus not in conflict with the science.

Witnessing this spectacle, I have found it easy to picture myself as the member of a captive audience watching a parade of soldiers march by in crisp uniforms, executing their synchronized movements to form images of hammers, surface-to-air missiles, and other icons of the glorious peoples republic. Only here it was not North Korean conscripts marching but the best fed and most thoroughly educated Americansuniversity professors, journalists, scientists, surgeons generalwho clicked their heels and pivoted in unison. How, one had to wonder in amazement, did they always stay on message even as the messaging changed so often and abruptly?

Yarvins answer, of course, is the Cathedralthe invisible structure of belief and messaging by which all the modern worlds legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure. At one and the same time, the Cathedral is simply a name for the uncanny degree of agreement between the media, universities, and other organs of elite culture, and a theory explaining how the aggregate effect of that agreement is a system of Orwellian mind-control projecting an illusion of freedom so powerful it blinds people to reality.

The question many people have, of course, is whether such a structure actually exists. After two years of COVID, following the disintegration of the liberal state, and the emergence of evermore eccentric ideological impositions, coordinated on what seems like an hourly basis by an invisible yet apparently all-powerful hand, which has no need to account for its nakedly visible contradictions and failures, the answer seems obvious: Either you see it, or you dont.

Originally posted here:
The Red-Pill Prince - Tablet Magazine

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