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barid-bel-medar · 3 years ago

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More of a real life ramble than anything else but...

This year has been weird. At the start of the year it did not look like it would be a good one. I’m not going to touch on shit like the Capital Riots, but more in light of the fact I had a goddamn seizure through my medication. That was theorized to be a result of me just being so stressed out over things like the pandemic, and the fact that at that point I’d been out of work since June 2020. Pandemic paranoia to some extent started to drop once both me and my grandma got vaccinated (I qualified pretty early due to the epilepsy; I actually got a weird look when I arrived for my appointment due to how young I am and then mentioned the epilepsy and got an understanding nod). The only good thing was with the Pandemic Unemployment Act for once I qualified for unemployment insurance (since my previous jobs had been contractor positions I didn’t which is BS), since it had been changed so that contractors/temps could qualify. None of my job applications seemed to be working, I was barely getting interviews, and it was just frustrating.

Then one day in March I get an email from an employment agency I’d sent my resume to in the past but never heard from. It was an email to ask me about if I would be interested in a two month temp contract to work at a small bank helping process PPP loans. I said yes, curious and frankly bored if nothing else. To be honest I wasn’t even entirely sure it was legitimate, since that does happen at times. That discussion went well, and I was then set up to do an actual interview with the bank the next morning.

I was given a verbal offer by the bank within five minutes of my interview. Two thirds of my interview was the HR person going over what my specific duties would be. I had the official offer letter in my email the following morning, did all sorts of paperwork, and by Friday of that week I was working at the bank (remotely). Did my one day training, and then started to process loans.

So initially I was on one team, that dealt directly with applicants, and being supervised by someone from the credit division. It seems however, that I was not supposed to be on that team. To some extent it had been a matter of me getting some degree of experience (I assume), but I’d actually been supposed to be on the team run by the head of risk management that dealt with brokers rather than direct clients. My previous supervisor tried to convince HR not to move me in terms of teams (she was very satisfied with my work), even offering up another team member. HR said ‘no’ and the following week (my third week at the bank), I was now on the brokerage team.

Now for that first week my boss actually wasn’t there (he’d been on vacation), and I was under the supervision of the CFO. Lovely man, did enjoy working with him and I get along well with him. Made a few errors, but I picked up quickly what I was doing wrong and fixed it. Actually lead to the semi-irritating aspect of realizing some of the temps/interns who’d been there months still hadn’t picked up some of that shit...But next week my actual boss came back.

First thing Monday morning was a meeting with him. He’d gotten progress reports on me from both the prior supervisors and HR and had been pleased. I’d demonstrated that I could pick things up quickly and fix errors. I was also willing to reach out if I felt I was missing something or needed help. So I chat with him and make the off handed reference to how I was looking for full time, permanent employment. Didn’t really think much of saying it, more was as a forewarning that if I found something I’d take it and likely be leaving very quickly. He got a very interested look at his face, but at that moment didn’t say anything else. It made me wonder, and there had been a part of me already wondering that if I did good enough job with the loans if they’d keep me on long term. I figured though if that did happen, I wouldn’t be asked anything until basically the end of my two month contract.

So here’s what I didn’t realize. My boss had recently convince the bank president to let him hire on an assistant/team member. Previously the bank president didn’t really believe him on just how overworked he was, but PPP (where everyone at the bank basically had to do it on top of their regular duties) made the president realize just how bad it was. So boss now has approval, but hadn’t yet been allowed to post the job.

And that’s apparently where I came in.

Again, I’d been getting praise, demonstrated interest in what my boss’s regular job was, and also had a skill set that could easily be transitioned to doing risk management (my background is in libraries/archives/information governance). I also proved over the course of that week I could easily handle the PPP workload and that again, I picked up new skills easily. I got along well with my boss, and did things also like give him heads up when I thought something was going weird.

So Friday of that week comes, and my boss, maybe a half an hour before my work day was over asks me the question I was not expecting. “What would your expected salary be for a full time position?” Again, I’m figuring even if heard something, I’d be hearing it closer to the end of my contract. Not barely a month into it. I spent the weekend figuring out the salary range I should ask for, asking my sister’s partner what he thought I should ask (he works risk management at a much larger bank but still had an idea on what I should ask for). Monday comes, I give the range, and from there my boss spends like the next two weeks practically chasing down the president to set things up.

Did have to do an ‘interview’ for the job with the CFO and my boss, but honestly the interview with my boss was mostly us chatting about random shit, and the meeting with CFO was more just verifying certain things (also he was nice and took the generous look at my previous work history as ‘they may just like doing short term jobs’ [I in fact very much do not]). A few days later I got my verbal job offer, and a few days after that my official letter. Part of why it took a bit was due to the temp contract and there were some things there apparently. But I now had a full time, perm job that gave me a salary I was very happy with and basically all the benefits I wanted (the only one I didn’t get is tuition reimbursement and I know HR is trying to convince the President and bank owner they should do it too; also I admittedly already have a Masters degree, but depending on how much I like this job [which I am] I may try to do either a Masters of Legal Studies or an MBA).

Part of also why was apparently due to PPP. They didn’t exactly want to transition me over to the permanent job until it was closer to over, which they expected to happen by late month. Then, as some of my may know, PPP ran out of funds faster than expected. My boss and I had chatted about it, but both of us were still expecting at least a week longer than what ended up happening. Which then lead to a different issue at that point; HR wasn’t quite ready for me to do all my paperwork stuff, but since they’d done my offer and the like what ended up happening was I was kept on the temp contract, but started my new duties. Also there was apparently a certain ‘we get hit by a fee’ thing there, if they took a temp ‘too soon’.

In a very technically sense there was still PPP stuff going on. They were starting to set up things like the forgiveness program, and dealing with applicants complaining over rejections or that they had applied and gotten nothing since the funds had run out (and there wasn’t much we could do there). However my boss didn’t want me doing that. He wanted me to focus on figuring out how to do my new job, which meant reading up on a bunch of stuff. Which was nice since I didn’t have to deal with applicant complaints, of which there were a lot.

So I started to transition over to doing risk stuff, learning, training and like experimenting with writing policies and procedural stuff (though looking back at that I still don’t really get why he was having me do that but whatever). He started me doing the real reason he’d hired me in June, doing IT due diligence reviews. The reviews on average take me at least a day and a half (there’s generally a lot of information and I have to read all of it and write up a report). First time I did one he assured me ‘don’t worry if you mess up, this is your first time’. Did it, spent a day or so paranoid, and then we had a meeting to discuss it. Apparently I did it perfectly which delighted him since it meant I could start doing it seriously.

And it’s just been nice. I’m working something I find interesting. I have a boss who has the view of ‘work to live, not live to work’ which he views as an incredibly unhealthy mindset. Meaning if something comes up like say, visiting my parents and I’ve been able to do half days so I can get to their house, including this past Friday (thought that was also partially a result of how messed up public transit due to Ida but that’s a different matter); he actually said I could head out Thursday but since public transit was such a mess it wasn’t viable (my train line was down). Back during PPP the one broker kept annoying him by emailing/calling him at fuck o’clock and not respecting that it was after work hours. My boss also trusts me to attend things like meetings that are with senior management, and I suspect he’s starting to groom me to take over his position (especially based on a comment from last week).

It’s just very weird to realize this year started so shitty, showed no signs it would really get better and yet now all this. And it’s just really nice.

#real life ramblings

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sciencespies · 4 years ago

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Despite the dumpster fire of 2020, here are 11 huge achievements we made in science

https://sciencespies.com/humans/despite-the-dumpster-fire-of-2020-here-are-11-huge-achievements-we-made-in-science/

Despite the dumpster fire of 2020, here are 11 huge achievements we made in science

With just a handful of days left in this strange beast of a year that will most certainly go down in history books, we thought it would be nice to reflect on the marvellous things scientists still delivered, despite everything.

Of course, scientific achievements are usually years in the making. Nevertheless, here’s a round-up of some of the exciting science news we reported in 2020. Just to remember that it wasn’t all terrible.

1. We found the first known extraterrestrial protein in a meteorite

Could life emerge elsewhere in the Solar System? As curious and intelligent beings, humans are naturally interested in finding out if living creatures thrive beyond the confines of our little blue space rock. One way to discover this requires turning to meteorites.

Earlier this year, scientists revealed they had found the first-ever extraterrestrial protein, tucked inside a meteorite that fell to Earth 30 years ago.

“We’re pretty sure that proteins are likely to exist in space,” astronomer Chenoa Tremblay told ScienceAlert in March. “But if we can actually start finding evidence of their existence, and what some of the structures and the common structures might be, I think that’s really interesting and exciting.”

2. We avoided some troubling changes in the atmosphere

A new study revealed that the famed Montreal Protocol – the 1987 agreement to stop producing ozone-depleting substances – could be responsible for pausing, or even reversing, some troubling changes in air currents around our planet’s Southern Hemisphere.

Healing the protective ozone layer surrounding Earth seems to have paused the migration of an air current known as the southern jet stream, a phenomenon that ended up pushing parts of Australia into prolonged drought.

“If the ozone layer is recovering, and the circulation is moving north, that’s good news on two fronts,” explained chemist Ian Rae from the University of Melbourne.

3. An AI solved a 50-year-old biology challenge, decades before anyone expected

Earlier this month, scientists at the UK-based artificial intelligence company DeepMind announced that a new AI system had effectively solved a long-standing and incredibly complex scientific problem concerning the structure and behaviour of proteins.

For about 50 years, researchers have strived to predict how proteins achieve their three-dimensional structure. The astronomical number of potential configurations has made this task – known as the protein-folding problem – incredibly difficult.

DeepMind’s success means a huge step forward in a range of research endeavours, from disease modelling and drug discovery, to applications far beyond health research.

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4. Scientists used fast radio bursts to find the Universe’s missing matter

In a mesmerising tale of mystery within a mystery, earlier this year a really clever application of fast radio burst (FRB) tracing gave astronomers an answer to a perplexing question – just where is the missing matter in the Universe?

We’re not talking about dark matter here, but the baryonic (normal) matter that should be there on account of all our calculations, but simply couldn’t be detected until now. The Universe is vast, and the stretches between galaxies enormous. Yet in that seemingly empty space, lone atoms are still kicking around.

While looking for the source of the powerful interstellar signals known as FRBs, researchers figured out that extremely diffuse gas can account for all the missing ‘normal’ matter in the Universe. Phew.

5. We also confirmed the first-ever detection of an FRB in our own galaxy

That’s right. On 28 April 2020, a Milky Way magnetar called SGR 1935+2154 flared up in a single, millisecond-long burst so incredibly bright, it would have been detectable from another galaxy.

This landmark detection made a huge and immediate impact on the study of mysterious FRBs, that until now had only been detected coming from outside our galaxy, making their precise source difficult to pin down.

“This sort of, in most people’s minds, settles the origin of FRBs as coming from magnetars,” astronomer Shrinivas Kulkarni of Caltech told ScienceAlert.

Astronomers had a whale of a time doing follow-up work on this detection, and by November we also had confirmation that this intra-galactic FRB is a repeater. We can expect even more excitement around this next year, for sure.

6. SpaceX and NASA made history with the first crewed launch

Space enthusiasts truly had lots of cause for excitement this year, as various launches and space missions soldiered on despite the global pandemic. On 30 May 2020, SpaceX became the first private space company to deliver NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).

We have liftoff. History is made as @NASA_Astronauts launch from @NASAKennedy for the first time in nine years on the @SpaceX Crew Dragon: pic.twitter.com/alX1t1JBAt

— NASA (@NASA) May 30, 2020

Not only did they safely bring them home several months later, another crewed launch went off without a hitch in November, delivering four astronauts to the space station – the first in what will likely be many routine missions in 2021 and beyond.

7. NASA touched an asteroid, and JAXA brought back a sample

After a long trip of more than 320 million kilometres (200 million miles), NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft finally touched down on asteroid Bennu in October, collecting a sample of its surface rubble, its efforts captured for posterity in magnificent footage delivered by the space agency. We can expect the probe to return with its precious cargo in 2023.

Last year, the Japanese space agency JAXA achieved a similar feat with the Hayabusa2 probe, collecting a sample from asteroid Ryugu. In December this year, we witnessed the safe return of that sample, and have already been treated to a first glimpse of some of the black dust the team retrieved. We can’t wait to learn more about what these asteroid missions will discover.

Ryugu dust on the outside chamber of the retrieval capsule. (JAXA)

8. Scientists found the first animal that doesn’t need oxygen to survive

Back here on our own world, biologists were in for a surprise when they found the first multicellular organism without a mitochondrial genome – which means an organism that doesn’t breathe. In fact, it lives without any need for oxygen at all.

While some single-celled organisms are known to thrive perfectly well in anaerobic conditions, the fact this common salmon parasite, a jellyfish-like creature Henneguya salminicola, doesn’t need oxygen to survive is quite remarkable, and has left researchers with many new questions to answer.

H. salminicola under the microscope. (Stephen Douglas Atkinson)

9. We got spectacular footage of a “long stringy stingy thingy” off the coast of Australia

Back in April, a trailing ribbon of conjoined tentacled clones caused quite a stir amongst a bunch of biologists exploring a little-studied part of the ocean off the coast of Western Australia. This strange entity was a particularly long siphonophore, a floating string of thousands of individual zooids. In fact, it could be one of the longest such strings ever observed.

Check out this beautiful *giant* siphonophore Apolemia recorded on #NingalooCanyons expedition. It seems likely that this specimen is the largest ever recorded, and in strange UFO-like feeding posture. Thanks @Caseywdunn for info @wamuseum @GeoscienceAus @CurtinUni @Scripps_Ocean pic.twitter.com/QirkIWDu6S

— Schmidt Ocean (@SchmidtOcean) April 6, 2020

“Everyone was blown away when it came into view,” biologists Nerida Wilson and Lisa Kirkendale from the Western Australian Museum told ScienceAlert.

“There was a lot of excitement. People came pouring into the control room from all over the ship. Siphonophores are commonly seen but this one was both large and unusual-looking.”

10. A physicist came up with the mathematics that makes ‘paradox-free’ time travel plausible

Wouldn’t it be great to pop into a time-machine and fix up some mishap you’ve done in your past, all without accidentally killing your grandfather in the process?

Well, 2020 also became the year when we learned of a mathematically sound solution to time travel that doesn’t muck everything up. Physics student Germain Tobar from the University of Queensland in Australia worked out how to “square the numbers” to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.

While it hasn’t gotten us immediately closer to having a working time machine, his calculations show that space-time can potentially adapt itself to avoid paradoxes. And, according to Tobar’s supervisor, the mathematics checks out. Fabulous.

11. The first COVID-19 vaccines are already being administered outside of clinical trials

The single biggest challenge the world faced this year was the global COVID-19 pandemic. Healthcare professionals and essential workers have carried much of the burden of keeping society afloat, and we can never thank them enough. Meanwhile, researchers from myriad relevant fields – from immunology to genetics – have also worked tirelessly all year long to better understand the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.

That work will continue into the new year, but in late November we finally got the first taste of what it means to accelerate scientific research and funding beyond its typical pace. The very first vaccines intended to protect people from COVID-19 have already completed all the necessary phases of clinical trials, and are being rolled out in the UK, US, and parts or Europe.

Lots more will need to be done before we can put this devastating pandemic behind us and protect the most vulnerable communities worldwide, but already having effective vaccines is a truly fantastic achievement, and without a doubt the biggest cause for celebration of science this year. One to carry us into 2021 full of hope.

#Humans

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ettawritesnstudies · 5 years ago

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August Monthly Goal Update

Hello! By the time this goes up, the other post I wrote detailing my monthly goal process should have been published so I’m not going to explain much farther here. Future updates will have the link. This month was *wild* guys. I went of vacation the 1st - 5th, my boss scheduled me to work the 6th - 17th, and I moved into college and had orientation the 22nd - 25th, which meant I had a lot of things to accomplish.

I completed 25/30 goals this month, winning by a 10-point margin! In retrospect, some of these goals were easier than I expected and so I could have combined them and added more. A lot of them are also recurring goals that just didn’t happen because of my wacky schedule. With such a big adjustment with college, I expected this month to be an outlier, and I’m sure my September list will reflect my new schedule. Let me know what you’re up to and how your months are going by tagging me or using the hashtag #monthlygoalsupdate!

If you want to read more, the list is below the cut!

Donate Hair - I got my hair cut in late July and donated 10 inches to charity! Children With Hair Loss is a great organization that gives hairpieces to kids dealing with medical issues (cancer, of course, as well as burns, Alopecia, and Trichotillomania, and others) for FREE. 10/10 recommend checking them out.

Clean my room before I leave for college - no small feat

Buy and pack all college supplies

Go through clothes and pack those

Make #1month1language post a week - whoops. I’m trying again in September! I did turn my phone’s langage to Italian tho

Make an Italian learning schedule

Make a Spanish learning schedule - I’m counting these two as half-done since I made viable schedules for both but only stuck to it about half the time.

Buy new glasses - yep, I bit that bullet

Send out more graduation cards - they never ever end

Finish alcohol safety training for college

Deposit money into school laundry/debit account

Read student handbook

Complete academic integrity training

Find syllabi for each class and add all dates to the planner - I have 3 of my classes done as of writing this, and I’ll get the rest of the syllabi this week, so this will definitely be done by the end of the month

Send thank-you notes to advisors - I met with advisors before school started to figure out my wacky schedule and thought a thanks would be in order given that they did it over the summer

Get a work-study job as a lifeguard

Write 20,000 words - I haven’t touched my book at all since camp nano ended :(

Publish Worrywart parts 1, 2, and 3 - I write Newsies fanfic too! You can find me on ff.net with the username “mgsglacier”

Get 2nd meningitis shot for school and update health info - vaccines are important y’all

Send vaccination history to uni

Put away diploma - funny story: at graduation, we got our diplomas in envelopes with a bunch of other stuff after the ceremony, and I kind of threw it on my dresser to deal with later. I didn’t realize until I did this goal that I graduated 4th in my class. I thought I was 12th before. :0

Do 1 devotion outside Mass once a week - I did like 3 one week and none the other week, so this technically doesn’t count.

Update check register - adulting is hard guys

Keep up with other Uni obligations - this is vague, but they gave us a list a mile long to do and most of them are things that can be done in ~10 minutes so this is my way of bundling them into one goal

Exercise twice a week - I have no excuses

Have 1 me-day - I’m really bad at taking a break and end up working myself to burnout if I don’t put this on a to-do list. :P

Get together with two specific friends - I have no excuse besides a busy schedule but I’m still sad this didn’t happen

Meet with my mentor once and report conversation - my university has a really cool mentorship program for women engineers! I’m going for coffee with her on Thursday!

Play piano/guitar once a week - unfortunately not this month, but I’m in an Arts themed dorm and it’s so nice because there’s ALWAYS someone singing or playing, so this will definitely get done in September!

#monthlygoalsupdate #August 2019 #productivity #studyblr #writeblr #university #first year #let's support each other!#I want to cheer you guys on!

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wineanddinosaur · 4 years ago

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Next Round: Master Sommelier Jill Zimorski on the Future of Sommeliers in America

Airing between regular episodes of the VinePair Podcast, “Next Round” explores the ideas and innovations that are helping drinks businesses adapt in a time of unprecedented change. As the coronavirus crisis continues and new challenges arise, VP Pro is in your corner, supporting the drinks community for all the rounds to come. If you have a story or perspective to share, email us at [email protected].

In this “Next Round” episode, host Zach Geballe sits down with Master Sommelier Jill Zimorski to discuss the future of the sommelier in America. Of course, the two weigh in on the recent string of scandals in the Court of Master Sommeliers and Zimorski discusses what she learned by testing through the Master examinations. Both touch on what Geballe deems an “unnecessary” level of secrecy, which has come into question since the release of the “SOMM” movies, as well as the cheating scandal of 2018. Zimorski affirms this level of “supreme secrecy” creates a testing landscape that is unreasonably broad, and suggests aspects of testing that the CMS-A could adopt from other institutions including WSET and Wine Scholar Guild exams.

With a Covid-19 vaccine approved in the U.S., Geballe and Zimorski also share their hopes for sommeliers returning to work. While wine professionals have often had a range of responsibilities when working in restaurants, the two hope that 2021 could be the year somms are allowed to focus on sharing their wine expertise instead of being tasked with an additional title like floor or general manager.

Zimorski emphasizes that so many underemployed or unemployed sommeliers have gotten creative this year, and has herself been podcasting. This series, called “Reading and Drinking,” is produced by SOMM TV. There, Zimmorski reviews important wine texts and educates viewers on the best wine books to look out for. She hopes that somms and other wine professionals will continue to find creative outlets or specialized ways to share their wine knowledge.

Listen Online

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Or Check Out the Conversation Here

Zach: From Seattle, Washington, I’m Zach Geballe. And this is “Next Round,” a VinePair Podcast Conversation. We’re bringing you these conversations in between our regular podcast episodes in order to focus on the stories and issues in the drinks world. Today, I’m speaking with Chicago-based wine educator and Master Sommelier, Jill Zimorski. Jill, thanks so much for your time today.

Jill: Thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

Z: Wonderful to have you. I will say that off the jump, I am an avid listener of your podcast, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. And as I was mentioning before, it is interesting to do a podcast with someone who you listen to do a podcast. I don’t know if it’s like “Inception” or what but it’s messing with me a little bit. So if I get thrown off during this conversation, that’s the only reason why. So let’s start on a slightly more — pardon the pun — sober topic, but 2020 has been a year for all of us. And it’s been a year for everyone who is involved in the restaurant industry, I think, in one form or another. We’ve discussed that in many forms on both the regular VinePair Podcast and through these “Next Round” conversations, but we haven’t talked a whole lot about the sommeliers in particular and wine professionals in restaurants, and both you and I pre-Covid have worked in that capacity. And I’m just wondering, what do you see going forward? Now that we are in this period of time when people are getting vaccinated, “the end” isn’t exactly clear when it will come, but seems like it is closer than the beginning. And what do you see for sommeliers and wine professionals going forward?

J: Well, I’m very hopeful. It’s been obviously a horrible year in a horrible situation. And in some ways specifically, wine professionals in the hospitality industry have a unique situation where it’s a specialized niche position. I’ve always likened sommeliers to pastry chefs.

You can have a successful restaurant without either one of those positions, but having people in those positions will really enhance your ability to be profitable and your guest experience. But it’s been said many times that they’re the last ones to be hired back and the first ones to be let go, because you can get by without them. That said, this has been such an interesting time because around the country laws have thankfully been changed very quickly to allow on-premise restaurants and hotels to allow for takeout and delivery, not just of wine, but also of cocktails and cocktail kits. And so it’s been very interesting watching the adaptation process and I hope that when things return to a little bit more of a state of normalcy in terms of safe dining and restaurants and working the floor again and that whole environment, I hope that the positions will come back. Because I know far too many sommeliers who are unemployed or underemployed. So I hope that one, people will be re-employed in those positions, but I think and I wonder and hope that some of the skills that I think that people have developed over this year, over these 10 months, will enhance and further develop them professionally, but further enhance their job skills and their job abilities.

Z: Yeah, interesting. I guess to me, one thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot, and I certainly have heard from peers, colleagues, friends, et cetera throughout the industry who have themselves been displaced, laid off, furloughed, given a new set of responsibilities, et cetera in this period of time, I do wonder, we were kind of at this period into 2019, where the sommelier was kind of riding high. I mean between the positive associations that the title had from the “SOMM” films and just general cultural cache, I think it was a period of time when there was this sense that maybe it could be this piece of the restaurant industry that really was a thing for people to strive for. And I still think it can be that my question and concern is that, what I’ve heard from a lot of people that I’ve talked to is their fear is that we’re going to go back to a period of time where “Yeah, OK, you can be the wine director, but you also need to be the general manager. You also need to be the floor manager.” That the idea of wine specialists in restaurants — and maybe to come back to that pastry chef analogy — it’s kind of like yeah, you can be the pastry chef, but I also need you to work a station on the line. That might not be a viable thing for a pastry chef, frankly, but for sommeliers I’m just concerned and I don’t know if you have any thoughts on this, about the subsuming of wine responsibilities in a restaurant into a larger set of job descriptions, as opposed to breaking it out as was maybe starting to happen in the latter part of this past decade.

J: That combined position, we sarcastically call it a “som-manager” a sommelier and a manager combined into one. I know that’s a necessary evil. But I also hate that position because those are two full-time jobs that are then squished into one person and one lower salary as a result.

And I do hate that, but I understand why it’s necessary. And I think that there have been some examples around the country of wine professionals who’ve really —and please, I’m going to try so hard not to use the word “pivot.” It’s the most overused word of 2020. I never want to hear it again, unless it’s in relation to basketball, but I’ve seen some examples of people adapting.

And really taking what the sommelier does, which is providing hospitable wine service and really taking it next- level. And sometimes in small restaurants, I’ve seen that in developing a wine club, and I know wine clubs can be a dime a dozen, but restaurants can be very theme-specific. And so to operate that, I think it’s an interesting idea to do a wine club or to do a little bit more of a guest service, “in-depth information sharing” situation, where there might be interviews with featured producers or winemakers or distillers whose products are heavily featured or partnered with the restaurant.

And so I would hate to see all sommeliers pushed into a job where they’re only doing the wine aspect of things 25 percent of the time. But I think there’s ways to make the case that it’s not just ordering, receiving, inventorying wine. That there are other things that a sommelier can do that will add value and add revenue.

And I think that’ll be critical, honestly. You have to make that case for yourself, you can’t expect it’ll just be OK. You’ve got to fight for that.

Z: I also think that there’s something to be said about one piece that none of us really know at this point, because we’re still in the pandemic, even if it feels we might be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Is that I think a lot of people’s relationships with restaurants will have changed to some extent in this period of time, that people will have either, at least for a while, maybe a greater appreciation of what they missed when restaurants were not an option, or at least were complicated for people to go to as opposed to a thoughtless thing.

And also I think that we’ve gotten so used to engaging with not just friends and coworkers and family virtually, but also with businesses and entities that we care about, at least in a more abstracted attenuated way than we had pre-Covid. And I think that point you make is a really valid one, which is that the good wine professionals, sommeliers, et cetera, will find ways to continue to connect with guests even when they’re not in the restaurant. And I think that’s going to be a huge piece for a lot of businesses, because I think everyone has been reminded that you can’t take that customer connection, that outreach, for granted because it’s your lifeline if things go sideways. And I think all of us know now that they can go sideways and then go sideways quickly, in ways that no one anticipated.

J: 100 percent, and look it’s going to be hard. But I think that’s one thing that hospitality industry workers generally, and sommeliers for certain specifically, have in common is there’s some hustle there.

And so I think it’s just going to be one of those things where we’re going to have to dig a little bit deeper and find the emotional energy to wax creative and come up with some new ideas, but it’s going to take some hard work for sure. But that’s how you get the good things to happen is hard work.

Z: Yeah, and speaking of hard work, you know a hell of a lot about it, probably in some sense more than you care to. And I think it’s important in this conversation — it would be remiss of us not to talk a little bit about the other piece of 2020 for sommeliers, which has been, the incredible storm of scandals surrounding the Court of Master Sommeliers.

And obviously we’re a part of, unfortunately, this initial crack in the ice, but it was certainly a seismic thing. I mean, much more so for you being one of the people directly involved in the cheating scandal, as an innocent bystander, I should point out, not anything other than that.

Whenever those words get thrown out, that gets really messy. I apologize. But yeah, you just happened to be taking your exam at the same time as other people who were perhaps cheating. And then obviously this year, the really horrific, if perhaps not completely surprising, allegations and reports of widespread sexual abuse throughout the court at the highest levels.

And maybe even more than that, the very willing blind eye that many of the Master Sommeliers within the court turned to the predatory actions of their fellow Master Sommeliers. So we can talk about this in whatever dimension you want, or multiple dimensions, obviously. But I’m just curious first and foremost, how has this been sitting with you?

J: It’s been very frustrating because of what’s happened over the past couple of years in my experience with the Court of Master Sommeliers, I certainly have had every reason to just wash my hands clean of this organization. But I haven’t. And I do feel that I’ve had to explain that to some people who do want to see it completely dismantled. And I will say this: I won’t make any excuses or any apologies. What those men did is horrible. And there needs to be consequences, pretty severe ones. I’m going to take out the pretty severe consequences.

I’m not going to modify that at all, but I gained a lot through the process of going through certifications with the Court of Master Sommeliers. I didn’t chase a pin. It led me to develop professionally and it provided a roadmap for me. And I didn’t experience what so many of these women did. So I believe the women and we always have to believe the women, but I do believe that since some people didn’t experience that, that means that there are some people who are in the organization that are good and decent and honorable. And for an organization that’s primarily male. It’s not like all the men are being accused. It’s a subset, it’s a subset of bad actors. And so I think that this organization has not evolved the way the wine industry has evolved. And it started off 44 years ago as a certification body, but it’s become so much more than that. And now it’s something that people really identify with and not just Master Sommeliers.

I mean, there are definitely Master Sommeliers where it’s part and parcel to who they are and how they work. But for people all over the world, it’s been a really important, impactful thing. And I still think there’s a place in the wine diaspora for what it does. The “WSET,” which I am also a part of, that organization is not the equivalent.

It has a different testing process and it also tests different skills. And so I believe there’s a place for it, but I think it needs to evolve and we need to recognize and understand that it’s not just an examination body anymore. And as something that people so strongly identify with with any level of participation, it needs to understand that not acknowledging what’s happening in the world around us with regard to racial and social unrest — that’s not acceptable because that hurts people. And the court is officially organized as a not-for-profit and I don’t represent the court. I can’t speak for the court. But I have this conversation frequently these days.

What is this organization? Is it just a nonprofit? Is it a club? Is it an academic credential? What is it? Because sometimes I feel that the people who are in charge of it for a long time really believe it to be so much more important than I think it actually is in the wine world. That if it is just a credentialing organization and there are some people who have demonstrably behaved so horrifically, boot them out! That shouldn’t be hard. And I struggled to find what’s so complicated and difficult about this. It’s not impeaching a president. It should be a little bit easier. And I also think that one of the biggest disconnects is the speed at which things happen internally, and the speed at which the external wine industry wants to see things happen. Because if we look at the court as a business, which people pay to take the exams, and we look at candidates for exams as customers, the customer base is not happy right now. And so we need to — we as a company — need to figure out how to reach our customer and how to not lose them and how to make them feel that there’s a return on their investment.

And I think that there’s just been a real disconnect with who our customer is now and what the wine industry really looks and how this organization operates. And I’m hopeful. I am hopeful that with this new elected leadership — I’m not trying to be ageist here, but it is a much younger group of individuals because some qualifications for leadership were changed.

And I think that some of these people are a little bit more in touch with the methods of communication and the speed of communication and the expectations of the industry. So I’m hopeful that things will improve, but yeah it’s been a hot mess.

Z: I have a couple of questions I wanted to ask to follow up to that. The first one is that, I wonder, and I think a thought that struck me for a while, honestly, since the issues with the master examinations in 2018. And maybe even before that, is one issue that I think has plagued the court maybe in public perception over the last couple of years, certainly within the sommelier community is a general level of secrecy that seems unnecessary. And I understand that to some extent you need there to be a certain amount of secrecy surrounding an examination because obviously you can’t tell people everything. There has to be some level of uncertainty. Otherwise, if you tell people exactly what’s going to be on the test, it becomes then an examination of something other than the skill they’re trying to test for.

But I do think that that level of secrecy as we’ve seen has really been exploited on multiple fronts. It’s part of what gave these predatory men power over women who were aspiring to achieve higher levels. There was a sense, I think, that these Masters Sommeliers had this secret knowledge that could improve or hurt your chances of advancement both specifically on exams and also, of course, getting placement in exams and things like that. But also, more broadly, even for people who weren’t necessarily going to be victimized in that specific way, there is a lot of confusion and I think unnecessary confusion about the exam, the format, the kinds of things that one was expected to know, and really more than anything else the fairness of the adjudication of those exams.

And again, a lot of that was brought to the surface in 2018 when it became very clear to most everyone that it wasn’t particularly fair. Either how the exams were handled and certainly the aftermath of the cheating scandal, but also I think that that always has been an issue. Do you feel it’s possible to conduct the exams throughout the levels that the court does with significantly less secrecy?

J: Oh my gosh, yes. This is a thing that has been incredibly frustrating for me because I feel that again, if this is purely an examining body, there is no need for this “supreme secrecy” and redacted minutes and all this garbage. We’re just a bunch of sommeliers. We don’t have nuclear codes. So I think a little bit is just self-important and extreme. And I am not convinced, nor has anyone been able to convince me that the levels of secrecy that those who have claimed are necessary are actually necessary. That said, I’ve never actually seen an exam.

But I teach, and I teach classes of all levels with the Wine and spirit Education Trust. And it’s a very different organization, but the exams are graded by Masters of Wine and I am not a Master of Wine, but I’ve certainly proctored exams and I teach classes, and that organization provides a pathway, a syllabus, study materials, and yet still people still don’t pass all those exams. So there is a way to provide more direction, more guidance, more clarity, and more exam expectations and it won’t necessarily mean that there’ll be a hundred percent pass rate because I see that. When you’re preparing for an exam, people go down wormholes.

And if you don’t give them a roadmap of what is expected or reasonable, people can really take it to absurd levels of “I need to know this” and that’s not necessarily helpful, but they have no one telling them, “Stay the course. You’re really veering off into minutiae here” and the WSET is better about that. I also think that throughout this whole pandemic I’ve been searching for what I call “little silver linings,” little things to grasp at. And while the pandemic and the subsequent unemployment of many Masters Sommeliers has proved that a credential does not guarantee employment, one thing I’ve seen is that a lot of people at various levels of education are pursuing certification.

Just one, they have the time or just trying to keep engaged in what they’re doing. And I’ve taken actually a couple of exams. One to just experience them for classes I was going to teach. I’ve taken online exams and the level of security is really quite impressive, for both the WSET or The Wine Scholar Guild. And so I know that these things are possible. But I also feel that transparency is paramount because if you’re not doing anything wrong, then what do you have to hide? And I agree, there are things in an exam like if you think back to high school or college, we had tests of varying styles there and teachers perhaps, or professors may have prepared students for general expectations, but they didn’t reveal the questions that they were going to be asking prior to the exam. So no one’s expecting that, but, blind tasting is part of both the WSET and the Court of Master Sommeliers and there’s never been a reveal of what the wines are. I’m not even talking about producer, but vintage or variety or, region of production. That would be helpful because if you don’t know what you should be focusing on, there are too many places for candidates to spiral off.

And so I think more specific guidelines, more transparency, and more secure testing methods, I think, are really, really important. I mean, tests are administered by humans in our case, and humans are fallible. And so there needs to be a backup. I mean, if it’s just a candidate and two or three master sommeliers in a room, there needs to be something else.

I mean, one of the best examples I can give for blind tasting because I’ve done so many blind-tasting exams, you walk into a room, you sit across the table from two or three Master Sommeliers. In more recent years, there’s been another person in the back of the room observing, but that’s still people listening to you. They can see who you are. They can see if you’re visibly nervous, there’s possibility for innate bias. But I think back to middle school when I played the clarinet, and I was not some gifted musician, but I remember auditioning for like municipal concert or something, and there would be blind sight reading and you would walk into a room. There would be a curtain. And behind the curtain was someone who would purely listen. And you would sit down at a chair. You couldn’t see who was behind there — man, woman, what color, how old? And there’d be a piece of sheet music on the stand, and you would hear the beep of a timer and you would just have to sight read.

You didn’t even talk. And so there are ways where you can isolate the product of someone’s work product or what their exam product is, and it can eliminate, or at least drastically reduce, any implicit bias. ‘Cause that’s one thing I think that we’ve realized this year, upon some introspection and examination is how important it is to pay attention to all of the implicit bias and micro-aggressions that probably a lot of people in this organization and the organization writ large around us is not even aware of, but that exist.

Z: I think one last thing I wanted to ask about and to come back to this issue of fairness and secrecy, a question that I have, ’cause you’re a person who has not only achieved a level of a Master Sommelier but who’s been heavily involved in WSET, but also is currently involved in education. One thing that I always wondered about with the court in particular is it has not often seemed to me — especially as I got a little further in — that really truly the goal was for me to succeed. And by what I mean by that is that it felt that in some sense, especially maybe in the period of time after the movie “SOMM” was released, which I think was fairly viewed as something of a watershed moment for the organization, because it really fundamentally changed the publicity, the level of a claim and just attention paid to Master Sommeliers and the Court of Master Sommeliers is that protecting the pass rate such as it is, or the low pass rate became a point of pride, or even maybe a focal point, and maybe it’s in those redacted minutes that none of us will ever see. But the exams were set up, or even perhaps administered in such a way where the goal was here’s what we want the pass rate to be. How do we design the test? How do we administer the test to protect that? And I will say this, this is me speculating wildly — this is not Jill. She can tell me I’m wrong. She can come back to me. It’s always been my belief that part of the reason the entire set of results for 2018 were invalidated is because frankly, too many people passed. And that is to me, a load of horses*** and really unfair. And is that a little conspiratorial thinking? Maybe. But I am pretty confident in saying that this isn’t the first time that there have been questions about whether someone had had access to information beforehand but it is the first time when 20-odd people passed. And I think, yeah, I think that was taken as an invitation to keep that pass rate down.

J: Well, I don’t necessarily agree with that and I’ll explain why. I could be wrong, by the way. And if that was the case, that would be horrible, but I don’t necessarily agree. For a couple of reasons.

One, I have seen — because I’ve been around for a bit — and I’ve seen the numbers of people passing increase. So when I passed the advanced exam in 2012, there were only 10 people in my group who passed. And in subsequent years, over the past decade, I’ve seen that number be in the teens and 20s and more, the MS has been historically low.

And that’s part of the fact of the matter is there’s just a lot fewer candidates. There’s just a lot fewer people at the MS exam. Now that said, at the 2018 exam that was a watershed moment because four years prior, in 2014, the format of the exam changed. There were so many people who had reached that level, because with the MS exam, you have to pass all three parts in three years, or you have to restart.

But from my understanding, there were more and more people who had reached that level, who were masters candidates and there were so many people who — frankly, there needed to be a way to allow these folks to test, but also keep it manageable. And so they separated theory from the other two parts of the exam.

So theory became a gateway, you had to pass the theory exam first. Once passed, you could then take service and tasting. So for example, I passed in 2018 on my fifth try. So I took the theory exam in 2014 for the first time and I passed it. That’s not terribly common, but I did.

And other people have, too. And then later that year, I took service and tasting and I passed service, but not tasting. I didn’t pass tasting the next year or the next year in 2016. So I reset, which sucks, but it happens to a lot of people. So 2017 rolls around and the same rule applies. I have to take theory and I pass theory, later that year I take service and tasting.

I pass service. I don’t pass tasting. I come back the next year, I pass tasting. That was true for a lot of people. So by the time you get to the service and the tasting exam portion, everyone in the room, all 50, 60, 70 people has already got at least one part down. And a lot of those people only needed one more part to pass and it’s not correct to assume that if you just keep taking the exam, you’ll pass it. There’s enough people who have never passed it, who would attest to that. But there were a lot of people at that exam who I’ve known most of my adult professional career, and we’d come up through the ranks together.

So I wasn’t the least bit, I was a little surprised, but I wasn’t shocked that so many people passed because so many people were so ready to pass that only had one part left who had taken the exam multiple times and were really seasoned, highly skilled sommelier professionals. Now here’s the problem, because it was so record-setting, that so many people passed, the lack of communication and explanation about the statistics of the candidate pool and those who passed has never been clearly articulated by the court. And I think that’s a huge failure. And I think that led to so many people thinking that the reason that exam was invalidated had to do with the large pass rate, because again all the people in the room had already passed one third of the exam, and I don’t know what proportion, but a large proportion of us only had to pass one more part. And so if we looked at it from a statistical standpoint, we weren’t starting at the start line at that point. And so I think that that’s part of it. But if the court had ever revealed data on “here’s the number of people who applied,” “here’s the number of people who tested,” “here’s the breakdown by gender and by sector of the industry that they work in,” that kind of data sharing where you can still protect identities would be incredibly helpful.

And if you look at the total candidate pool for the Masters exam in 2018, you have to include all the people who sat for the theory exam in 2018 and didn’t pass. And that’s the larger number. And if you look at the number of people who passed the whole exam, based on the total number of not just those of us who are in St. Louis but those of us who also took the theory exam that year, the percentage is actually fairly consistent with what it’s been through the years, but there’s a larger number of people in the shoot, and people who are testing through this organization. So of course the past numbers are going to go up, but I don’t know if that means the pass rate changes, but that’s never been clearly explained or articulated.

And when you don’t provide the information, people can draw whatever conclusion they want. So I don’t a hundred percent agree with you on that one.

Z: Fair enough. Fair enough. I’m over here, I’m down here in my basement with the photos and the red string. I want to shift gears and ask about one last thing before we wrap it up here, Jill, which is what you’re doing now for SOMM TV and in particular, your podcast. Do you want to say a little more about it?

J: Yeah, so this is peak 2020. I, like many others, started a podcast this year and it’s really funny. I’m a perpetual student. I just like the process. It gives me a sense of direction with my wine focus, and I like being informed. And so throughout the years in all of the different tests and things, I’ve become an avid collector of wine books and books are challenging because they go out of date really quickly when the world of wine moves fast.

But I like books for reference. I like books for aesthetics. I don’t know. I’m an avid reader. My grandmother was a librarian. Maybe that’s part of it. And the thing that I’ve noticed and it’s over the past few years, and I think it coincides with me reaching a level of — I know a lot about wine. I don’t know everything about wine, no one ever can, but I know a lot. And I’d be reading books and I was like “Oh, that’s just wrong. Wow.” And I started to develop this theory that one, I have no idea how one gets a publishing deal. I’ve never written a book. I’ve never tried to write a book, but from what I understand, and I have friends in the publishing industry, from what I understand there are editors, and I have friends who have published books and their editors work with them to make sure that their writing and the facts and things are correct. And I started reading these wine books and they were just full of errors. And sometimes the writing was awful and I thought maybe there’s a gap in the industry that I’m not aware of, where there’s just not enough editors who know enough about wine to edit a wine book. And it’s not a widespread problem. I mean, there are wonderful, wonderful books out there, but I was reading a few books and I was like this is just hot garbage.

And so I had done a few small feature pieces, videos and stuff with the team from Somm TV. And I was joking with Jason Wise, who’s the producer of the Somm films and Somm TV. And I was like, does Somm TV need a book reviewer? Like a wine book reviewer? And he was like ha ha call me. And so we hatched out this idea and so it just started on a lark.

And so I was furloughed for five months this summer. And so I had a lot of time on my hands, like many people, and I had never done anything like this. And so I had a very steep learning curve and some very kind and patient people shout-outs to Jason and Nadine. But it was very interesting and the whole premise is that I would just review wine books and try to offer some informed opinion and guidance on whether it was something that I felt people should certainly buy.

Maybe if they found it used to just give it a read and borrow it, or avoid this flashing red lights, this is garbage. And so it was really fun. And we recorded all these during the summer while I was furloughed. And then I had this moment before they launched and I was like “Oh my God,” have I been in this weird protected, isolated area where I think we’ve put up something that’s really clever and the population at large is going to think this is ridiculous and absolutely far too niche? And have no merit in the world of wine. And thankfully that’s not been the case. I mean, I don’t know what the stats are in terms of subscribers and downloads and things, but we’ve gotten some really positive feedback and it helps me in my goal to become well read and it’s been a passion project and it’s really funny when I talk to people and they’re like, “Wow, what’d you do this year? You weren’t working for a long time,” and I’m like, “I started a podcast.” It was my 2020 story, but it’s been so awesome. And, we took a little break, for the six weeks at the end of the year. ‘Cause I got to read some more books and then we’ll start back up again in January. So I’m excited.

Z: Well, I’m a regular listener. I enjoy it. It’s fun because I also think an important thing to note about what Joel does with the podcast is you really jump around, it’s a lot of different kinds of wine books. So there’s a mix of some of the most famous books in the genre that are a little more academic, although I assume you will never do “Wine Grapes” by Jancis Robinson. I can’t even imagine how you would review a book like that. It’s just information.

J: Well, if you’ve heard me fangirl about Jancis. You can probably imagine a little bit that it would be a glowing review.

Z: Since I’ve listened to at least one episode, Yes. I have heard you fangirl about Jancis,

J: But I don’t know that that would be very good listening.

Z: Probably not, but I wanted to say that what’s fun is that there’s also some interesting wine-adjacent books, or at least it’s not all textbooks. It’s not all academic books. There’s a lot of fun books and you even reviewed “Sideways.” I encourage people if they have any free podcast time that is not devoted to this podcast, give Reading and Drinking a listen, it’s a lot of fun. And Jill, thank you so much for your time I really appreciate it.

J: Oh my goodness. Thank you so much for having me. It’s just been a real joy to talk with you and I appreciate the support and shout-out for my podcast, too. That’s awesome, thank you.

Thanks so much for listening to the VinePair Podcast. If you enjoy listening to us every week, please leave us a review or rating on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. It really helps everyone else discover the show. Now, for the credits. VinePair is produced and hosted by Zach Geballe and me, Adam Teeter. Our engineer is Nick Patri and Keith Beavers. I’d also like to give a special shout-out to my VinePair co-founder Josh Malin and the rest of the VinePair team for their support. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you again right here next week.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity

The article Next Round: Master Sommelier Jill Zimorski on the Future of Sommeliers in America appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/next-round-master-sommelier-jill-zimorski/

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johnboothus · 4 years ago

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Next Round: Master Sommelier Jill Zimorski on the Future of Sommeliers in America

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Jill: Thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

And I think that’ll be critical, honestly. You have to make that case for yourself, you can’t expect it’ll just be OK. You’ve got to fight for that.

And when you don’t provide the information, people can draw whatever conclusion they want. So I don’t a hundred percent agree with you on that one.

J: Well, if you’ve heard me fangirl about Jancis. You can probably imagine a little bit that it would be a glowing review.

Z: Since I’ve listened to at least one episode, Yes. I have heard you fangirl about Jancis,

J: But I don’t know that that would be very good listening.

J: Oh my goodness. Thank you so much for having me. It’s just been a real joy to talk with you and I appreciate the support and shout-out for my podcast, too. That’s awesome, thank you.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity

The article Next Round: Master Sommelier Jill Zimorski on the Future of Sommeliers in America appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/next-round-master-sommelier-jill-zimorski/

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thesevillereport · 4 years ago

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In Focus: Supreme and Uber

When the Carlyle Group dropped an estimated $500 million to acquire a piece of streetwear brand Supreme there was a big question that followed the investment. Could Wall Street and Hypebeast co-exist? Would the Carlyle Group's need to grow their investment as fast as possible disrupt what Supreme had cultivated over several long years? The answer was yes, the two could co-exist.

Last week VF Corp. (VFC), home to North Face, Timberland, and other fashion apparel brands purchased Supreme for $2 billion. In the time between Carlyle's investment in Supreme and the VF Corp.'s purchase of Supreme, the Supreme brand hasn't lost much of its cache with its audience. But now, a new owner of the brand brings new concerns. Hypebeast and VF Corp. investors now have to consider how VF Corp will handle this fragile brand.

To start 2020 VF Corp.'s stock price was trending down, even before COVID-19 became an issue in the United States. The company's quarterly earnings for the quarter ending December 2019 was greeted with mixed emotions by Wall Street. Although the company reported increases in gross margin, operating margin, and revenue for the quarter, it didn't quite meet Wall Street's expectations, and big investors started to move away from the stock. Add the coronavirus pandemic to a so-so quarterly report and what we got was VFC's stock dropping from $100 per share to $56 per share in a few short months.

Fashion is Fickle

I earlier described Supreme as a fragile brand, and that was done on purpose. When it comes to streetwear or urban wear I have seen brands come and go. My pre-smartphone photo albums are filled with me in shirts made by companies that are no longer in business or aren't what they were when the photo was taken. We all have a box of stuff that we purchased when it was "in style" that we wouldn't dare wear today. Can Supreme with the help of VF Corp elevate from the space of fickle fashion and become a standard like Louis Vuitton or Burberry, but for streetwear, so it doesn't end up in that box of stuff we wouldn't dare wear?

We have to keep in mind that Supreme is a baby compared to other well known fashion labels. Hermes was founded in 1837, Louis Vuitton was founded in 1854, Burberry was founded in 1856, Gucci was founded in 1921, and Supreme was founded in 1994. For this investment to work for VF Corp. and its investors, VF Corp. needs to help Supreme maintain and grow its standing in the universe of fashion and all things related?

Let's Collab

The collaboration has been a huge deal for Supreme in transferring money from consumer to company, very few companies have done it better. Supreme has collaborated with different companies inside and outside of its industry. There are Supreme boxing gloves thanks to a collaboration between Supreme and boxing equipment company Everlast, Supreme and Fender gave us the Supreme guitar, Clarks, Nike, Bathing Ape, and Louis Vuitton have also collaborated with Supreme in the past.

If you aren't sure about the type of clout the Supreme brand holds, here are two examples. The Hanes-Supreme collaboration produced a 3-pack of Hanes t-shirts that retailed for $28 and hit resale prices upward of $40. A regular 3-pack of Hanes t-shirts goes for $9.99 on Amazon, the Supreme logo on a Hanes t-shirt drove the price up by 180%. A pair of six inch wheat colored Timberland boots retails for $198 on the Timberland website. The Supreme and Timberland collaboration resulted in the same six inch wheat colored boots but with the Supreme logo retailing for $248, with a resale value upward of $300 a pair. S-U-P-R-E-M-E has the ability to turn a regular item into a must-have item.

VF Corp. has said it plans to leave Supreme as is and let it operate as it has been, which Hypebeast all over the world were hoping for after the news of the acquisition was made public. If that plan were to change and VF Corp. were to limit the number of Supreme collaborations and collaborators, or favor VF Corp. brands over others, this could really hurt the Supreme brand and how its fans interact with it.

Now You Can Invest in Supreme

For any investor who ins't a Carlyle Group client but who has wanted to align their money with that red box with the white lettering, then this is your chance, but buyer beware. I've said before that I believe COVID-19 will have a major financial impact on the U.S. and the rest of the world for some time. As this pandemic rolls on, it will get harder to justify the purchase of a $200 sweatshirt with a Supreme logo if your employment isn't as secure as it once was.

With that said, I believe VF Corp. is a good parent to help Supreme navigate the pandemic and come out stronger on the other side. Supreme can use VF Corp's access to capital and public markets to continue its rapid growth, and VF Corp can use Supreme's name and momentum to help boost its stock price.

Uber Selling ATG

Last week we got news that Uber (UBER) is exploring a sale of it's self driving unit, Advanced Technologies Group. Wall Street took this news better than I had expected, the stock closed up 6% on the week. Maybe Wall Street sees what I see.

Since before it's initial public offering, Uber bulls have pointed to the day when Uber vehicles would go driverless, allowing the company to keep more of the revenue it brings in. With the advances that companies like Tesla (TSLA) and Waymo were making in autonomous vehicle development, the driverless taxi investment thesis seemed like a very plausible one, and one that could likely happen by 2030, but now what?

Focus

Earlier in the year we talked about focus and how it would allow Tesla to gain an even bigger lead on its competitors in the EV space, because their competitors would be forced to focus on their money makers, gas powered vehicles in order to survive the economic slowdown caused by the pandemic; and Tesla would be able to focus on it's money maker, the electric vehicle. We also saw Amazon earlier in the year scale back on it's logistics business to focus on its primary business.

Now, the pandemic has also forced Uber to focus on its primary business, which is currently delivering food, followed by delivering people. This news of Uber exploring a sale of ATG comes out as Uber's stock price is pushing above all time highs. There's been good upward momentum in the stock following the Postmates deal, but now what?

Business Switch Up

The delivery of people, using the Uber business model was a losing business prior to the pandemic and it's gotten tougher since the pandemic. But the need for food delivery has helped offset some of the lost taxi business revenue. The shift from people delivery to food delivery was a good strategic move on Uber's part. The move to sell off AGT hints to me that the company is positioning themselves as a food delivery company first, everything else second, and I think this is an interesting move by Uber

The pandemic will not last forever, it could last for a few years, but not forever. The longer this pandemic lasts the more people will be ready to travel freely and eat freely away from home when it's over. When we get a viable vaccine for COVID-19 there will be a lot less food delivery and a lot more people traveling to restaurants, movie theaters, concerts, sporting events, and airports.

I thought this was the time for Uber to really focus on their autonomous vehicle development, to hopefully get a lot closer to making driverless transport a reality.

The autonomous taxi market will go to someone, maybe Waymo, maybe Tesla, but already having the taxi infrastructure was a big advantage for Uber, which they're in the process of losing, or are they?

Uber could leverage it's digital taxi network to an autonomous vehicle taxi company and essentially make revenue from its collected customer data without paying drivers. This may seem out there, but it's not as crazy as it seems.

Investors often forget how much data Uber has been collecting since its inception, and that's because we as investors haven't figured out what they could possibly do with the data, but licensing that data could be an option.

Aurora Innovation is rumored to be the interested party seeking to purchase Uber's autonomous vehicle assets. Aurora is led by an executive team that hails from Tesla, Google (GOOGL), and Uber. If Aurora Innovation is able to get a safe, working, approved autonomous vehicle capable of picking up and delivering people, Uber could eventually acquire Aurora or just lease all the data they've collected to Aurora.

We could see a situation where the autonomous vehicle becomes the computer, and the operating system is provided by Uber.

I remain high on Uber for the long run, this move of selling their ATG unit is about focus and survival. Uber is attempting to focus on what makes money so they can survive and reach the other side of the pandemic.

0 notes

ameliorator · 5 years ago

Text

May Covid-19 be one of the greatest PSYOP ever? Additional evidence from the Italian experience.

Dear friends,

here I am with another open letter: its aim is to contribute with some reflections on what is going on in Italy, while also trying to analyze the available information on the drug treatments currently tested against Covid-19.

Once again, I choose to focus on official sources and mainstream news (with marginal exceptions), a technique which allows me to show clearly that everything we have to know in order to question the official narrative is in plain sight: as I keep on repeating, there is really no need nor time to be wasted in the swamp of those who only indulge in attacking each other in the dichotomy “conspiracy theorist - debunker”.

Divide et impera is one of the main strategies used by rulers for millennia, so we should make an effort in order to escape the trapping effect of such mindset.

Before it’s too late, I would like to thank you all for the conversations we had in the last weeks: they helped me a lot and continued to do so even when the flow of critically constructive comments from you on my previous text was over.

When all the arguments were discussed with you, I kept on questioning the solidity of my interpretation.

I realized that the anger I was feeling for what I perceive as a great injustice was obfuscating my view while writing, so I was not as precise as I should have been.

As a partial justification, the previous text was published as a rough draft. I was tired of postponing, I thought I had no time to keep on re-writing it. I might resort to the same justification here, but I do hope to make less mistakes.

I am aware I was not clear enough in some parts: for instance, when I mentioned the process of using the “backdoor” to move sequentially from an administrative act to an ordinary law I did not stress that the lack of constitutional legitimacy of the adopted measures could eventually lead to their overturn by the Constitutional Court (but all those who know Italy at least a bit could easily forecast that there would be some gray area for abuse during the period before the final ruling of the court).

Alas! This should have been expressed with more precision: I humbly admit my fault.

There might have been some misinterpretations in other parts of the text, but time will tell.

Up to now and to a large extent, I haven’t found any strong proof against the validity of what previously written1.

1. To those who are (still) scared: a case for drug treatments

In my previous letter I asked you to stop for a moment concentrating exclusively on the virus and to pay attention to everything that was going on around it after its outbreak: in other words, to use a holistic approach in order to focus on the big picture and all the potential repercussions of this state of emergency on what we used to consider as “normal”.

When temporarily taking the virus out of the equation, I went a tad too far in the process of distancing from it and I made a big mistake, by means of underestimating some crucial pieces of widely available information which might prove to be fundamental to “solve the enigma”.

I am no expert and I have no presumption to have become one overnight: I just want to keep on following the method of questioning everything which is contradictory in the official narrative, using mere logic and common sense as the main tools.

When I pointed my finger at the risks and side effects of experimenting those treatments with pharmaceutical drugs for malaria and Ebola on patients diagnosed with Covid-19, I was only highlighting the potentially adverse outcomes.

Well, how partial was that limited attitude of stressing only the negative sides, what a tricky effect was generated by the tension of being under house arrest (paired with my mostly “automated” attitude in advocating for the age-old solution of boosting the immune system in natural ways rather than becoming addicted to pharmaceutical drugs)!

With this in mind, the perspective that I should have chosen on this matter was supposed to be the contrary.

For those who prefer not to trust the natural paths of healing and preventing diseases, and/or for those who are still in the “fear & psychosis” loop of this Covid-19, there is a strong case for drug treatments as a viable alternative to the compulsory vaccination, which is a core argument of the official narrative.

It might be needless to remark that ad-hoc treatments for whatever disease, with specific drugs according to the specific preconditions of any specific individual represent the safest way to get the situation under control.

On the other end, a widespread and indiscriminate vaccination is based simply on inoculating the virus in everyone, without any differentiation based on individual risks and with plenty of side effects on the immune system (especially if it’s already debilitated): a potential disaster in the making.

Knowing that all the viruses mutate (and coronaviruses are not an exception), there might be endless vaccination campaigns for booster shots and not simply one: might this be a reason why among the ubiquitous funding activities of the main backer of vaccines globally you can find conspicuous grants awarded to develop nanotechnologies like the “microneedle array patch” – for use in “house-to-house campaigns via administration by minimally-trained personnel”?

You can follow all the links to that foundation’s website included in this article and check by yourself the awarded grants.

Later in this text we will see the main drug treatments which are being tested at the moment, but let’s start with a first consideration on the most promising of the lot and surely the most debated recently (due to this, it will also get the lion’s share here).

As it appears, one of the best available drugs used in treatments for Covid-19 (let’s not forget that this “disease” is caused by what is said to be an isolated novel coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2) is chloroquine2, a drug with antiviral effects whose effectiveness on treating coronaviruses was supposed to be known by the health authorities and the medical community at least since 2006, especially due to the fact that in 2005 it was successfully demonstrated in vitro that “chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus [a.k.a. SARS-CoV-1] infection and spread”.

We are talking about an inexpensive generic drug with antiviral effects, defined as a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread 15 YEARS AGO!

If this and other drug treatments were confirmed to be safe and the already positive trend of their successful use was corroborated by additional evidence, the magnitude of lies and deception to push forward the insane and nonsensical measures adopted up to now would really be unprecedented.

You already know that I strongly refuse getting stuck in partisan views while dealing with such complex phenomena, so I don’t want to take sides on the topic in an infantile way, like they are doing in the U.S.A..

In that country, a combination of hydroxychloroquine (a derivative of chloroquine, which has antiviral effects) + azythromicin (an antibiotic) + zinc sulfate (a dietary supplement) was campaigned by their president like a promisingly effective treatment (he went to the point of defining it a “game-changer”), igniting the foreseeable smear campaign of the US mainstream media against him by means of discrediting the drug treatment he is sponsoring3.

In other words: it’s about the typical partisan game of blaming the adversary, not about a thorough investigation to be started with an impartial view on the effectiveness of the treatment (which should be the basics of journalism).

Putting aside any political affiliation, I would like you to do your own objective reflections on what is stated in this article and in the included video interview.

For those who are still skeptical, let’s be clear as usual: I don’t need to convince anyone to refuse vaccines.

If you believe that they are effective and you know all the risks and side effects, you could get 10 shots of the most exotic vaccines every day and I wouldn’t care at all.

The issue here is that you can’t force everyone to get vaccinated with compulsory mass programs, because this is an unlawful prevarication on those who refuse vaccines on solid grounds of widely available natural or pharmaceutical alternatives and clear trends on the characteristics of the deceased: in the worst-case scenario, conscientious exemptions should be granted.

Let’s not get caught in the rigid dichotomy Pro-vaccine VS Anti-vaccine: it’s futile and counterproductive.

Once again, remember divide et impera.

Instead of wasting time in the swamp of opposed factions obsessed by dogmatic assertions, let’s try to achieve to a transparent and objectively informed freedom of choice4.

2. Is it really only about drugs with antiviral, antibiotic, anti-inflammatory and anticoagulant effects?

Up to now, besides the 2005 study and the 2006 article on The Lancet, there are many noteworthy elements on the efficacy of the drug with antiviral effects chloroquine and its derivative hydroxychloroquine5 (as we have already seen, especially in combination with an antibiotic called azythromycin and zinc sulfate) while treating patients diagnosed with Covid-19: you can read the recommendations in an article from Chinese researchers published on Nature or the results of a controlled clinical study conducted by IHU-Méditerranée Infection in Marseille, France.

A clinical trial comparing hydroxycloroquine with another antiviral (used against HIV) is being conducted in the Asan Medical Center in Seoul, South Korea6.

Another well known trial is ORCHID: a multicenter, blinded, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trial in the scope of the National Institutes of Health in the US.

2 clinical trials are also ongoing in Italy.

In the database ClinicalTrials.gov you can currently find 52 clinical trials and 150 clinical trials which involve the use of cloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, respectively. It is worth noticing that 48 clinical trials include both hydroxychloroquine and the already mentioned antibiotic azythromycin.

After an emergency use authorization was issued by the FDA, chloroquine phosphate and hydroxychloroquine sulfate are currently being stockpiled by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Please note that tens of millions of doses have been and will be donated by pharmaceutical companies, so neither big money nor profiteering are involved in this solution.

In India, one of its major producers, hydroxychloroquine has been recommended by the National Task force for COVID-19, constituted by Indian Council of Medical Research as a preventive treatment for all the healthcare workers and people who are in contact with confirmed laboratory cases. After the spike in the orders for chloroquine and hydroxichloroquine, India banned its export.

Greece is also stockpiling chloroquine phosphate and there is a plan of producing this inexpensive generic drug in Greek facilities.

South Africa has also received a donation from a major local pharmaceutical company of chloroquine phosphate imported from India.

In the Italian mainstream news, a recent article shows the first positive results of being treated with hydroxycloroquine at home. The roughly translated title of the article is: “Coronavirus - From North to South 1039 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine at home. The point on the experimentation: "Slump of hospitalizations"”.

The anti-Ebola drug remdesivir (sponsored as well by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the U.S.A.) is an antiviral being tested and considered as having potential in treating patients infected with the virus SARS-CoV-2, due to the fact that it was found to be working against SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV (other viruses of the same Coronoviridae family).

It is being tested in 2 clinical trials in Italy, run by the same company which produces that drug.

In the database ClinicalTrials.gov you can currently find 19 clinical trials which involve the use of remdesivir.

Other kinds of drugs are being tested as treatments, especially against the severe pulmonary complications which are induced by the virus (let’s keep in mind that its given full name is Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome - Coronavirus - 2).

One complication which caused a series of serious problems among the patients, namely pulmonary embolism (also referred to as pulmonary thrombosis) is presumably to be cured in a “traditional” way: the Agenzia Italiana del Farmaco approved the use of heparin, commonly prescribed for the treatment of blood clotting in humans.

No big surprise here: we are talking about an anticoagulant to be used against thrombi (known colloquially as a blood clots), an inexpensive solution that can prevent this complication from escalating .

The most harmful and deadly complication is pneumonia, almost always resulting in ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome): therefore, some drugs are tested to address a complication which was observed in the majority of patients (97.1% of cases) in Italy, according to the latest report by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (April 29).

One of the most efficient is an anti-arthritis drug called tocilizumab, in Italy firstly used in an ongoing clinical trial in 27 Italian study locations, led by an expert from the Istituto nazionale per lo studio e la cura dei tumori - fondazione Giovanni Pascale in Napoli, which is known internationally as National Cancer Institute of Naples.

This anti-inflammatory drug blocks some proteins called cytokines, whose increased levels cause inflammation and may lead to organ failures and a spike of mortality.

Since there is plenty of cases involving the so-called cytokine storm syndrome among the patients diagnosed as infected with SARS-CoV-2, it makes complete sense to use such an anti-inflammatory drug in their pharmacological treatments (as clearly explained in this publication on The Lancet).

The treatment with tocilizumab proved to be effective against pneumonia and ARDS in 77 % of the cases in a study conducted in Brescia (one of the main hotbeds in Italy7), moreover in a hospital which is not even one of the 27 study locations of the already mentioned main clinical trial in Italy (out of 3 in place at the moment).

In the database ClinicalTrials.gov you can currently find 32 clinical trials which involve the use of tocilizumab.

Another anti-inflammatory drug which is very similar to tocilizumab is sarilumab (the main difference appears to be that they are produced by different corporations), also tested against pneumonia and ARDS: like the former, it is based on human monoclonal antibodies against IL-6 receptor and it is used as an anti-arthritis drug.

This drug is being tested now in 2 clinical trials in Italy.

In the database ClinicalTrials.gov you can currently find 12 clinical trials which involve the use of sarilumab.

Again for what concerns pulmonary complications, also colchicine (another anti-inflammatory drug, usually used against gout and Behçet's disease) is being used in 2 clinical trials in Italy at the moment.

An important clinical trial testing colchicine on 6000 participants in an international setting of study locations is led by the Montreal Heart Institute in Canada.

In the database ClinicalTrials.gov you can currently find 9 clinical trials which involve the use of colchicine.

In China they are also testing with apparently great results several natural formulas of the Chinese Traditional Medicine and one of them is considered particularly promising: Lianhuaqingwen, whose anti-inflammatory and antiviral effects against this virus are confirmed in this study (in vitro).

You can also read a very insightful analysis on the response to the current epidemic at an international level, which also highlights the results achieved by medical practitioners with drug treatments up to now.

In the methodology section you can read that “6,227 physicians across all specialties were sampled. The 30 countries included in the sample are United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, Italy, UK, France, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, Turkey, Poland, Russia, Finland, Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Australia, China, India and Hong Kong”.

The awareness on the positive results of some of those drug treatments sheds an even more sinister light on all the other considerations on the HUGE contradictions in the official narrative which were analyzed in my previous open letter.

Unconstitutional measures to lock the population down and cause “controlled” economic crashes?

Useless face masks and gloves8 to be mandatory on an everyday basis?

Social distancing to become a rule?

Prohibition of mass gatherings9?

A mixture of old-fashioned police abuse and highly technological devices deployed in order to “discipline and punish” the entire population with the pretext of a virus which was reported to be the cause of death of a tiny fraction of it, composed mostly by elderly and sick people?

On top of them all, the constant lobbying to convince the population to wait for a vaccine to be released in order to start a compulsory vaccination (possibly with nanotechnologies which may lead to very disturbing scenarios, as indicated in my previous letter) that could be worse than the disease it is supposed to fight?

When we get the final confirmation of the effectiveness of some of the aforementioned drugs and when the necessary guidelines of approved treatments are in place, do you think we can stop all this nonsense?

3. Patents, or a Coronaviridae family affair

Very interestingly, a few patents on the ways to replicate viruses of the Coronaviridae family are in place: for instance, SARS-CoV-1 was patented in 2007 by the Center for Disease Control in the U.S.A.

No surprise, right? Also the unrelated10 but very well known Zika and Ebola are patented.

Some implications of patenting a disease can be found on an article published by Canada’s public broadcaster CBC which dates back to 2013, related to an application filed by a Dutch research group to get a patent for MERS-CoV, of the Coronaviridae family, which was eventually granted on 15.01.2020.

Strangely enough, one organization which has past ties with the foundation of our “philanthropist” friend11who wants us (but not himself12) to be widely vaccinated holds a patent on what is described as an “attenuated coronavirus comprising a variant replicase gene, which causes the virus to have reduced pathogenicity. The present invention also relates to the use of such a coronavirus in a vaccine to prevent and/or treat a disease”. The patent is related to avian infectious bronchitis virus (IBV), which is in the Coronaviridae family.

There is no direct link here, of course: SARS-Cov-2 is not patented (yet?) and some of the previously mentioned patents relate to other viruses of the Coronaviridae family.

None the less, suspicions start to grow when considering this scenario. As usual, we are just trying to join the dots and we should ask ourselves some questions.

Mine are very simple:

1) What is the rationale behind patenting viruses as a common practice, not only by public institutions but also private companies?

2) What are we supposed to understand when we analyze this trend in patenting several viruses of the Coronaviridae family and then to see the newcomer SARS-CoV-2 becoming such a global treat, to the point of causing prolonged lockdowns and economic crashes at an international scale, pushing forward the agenda for a totalitarian state of surveillance & control and compulsory vaccinations13?

3) If I had to patent (let’s assume for profit and not for the “advancement of knowledge above all nonsense”14) a virus in a group of several viruses which are all related, could I be more interested to make people aware of how to cure that virus and potentially the other members of the same family with some easily available pharmaceutical drugs (maybe with an inexpensive generic drug which is considered to be a potent inhibitor of infection and spread of that virus) or to lobby for a very lucrative15 vaccine which I could produce from the patented virus?

Let’s think about it again, if there is a part of us which still wants to give credit to the nonsensical official narrative or if we are dealing with someone who is still prey of its web of lies: there are other options rather than being locked down or hyper-controlled and/or subject to a series of unconstitutional personal limitations imposed for months while waiting for a worthless vaccine (all viruses mutate and SARS-CoV-2 is not different at all: for instance, there are apparently already 8 strains of this novel coronavirus).

To those who are still panicking and forecasting months or years to be lived in such a nightmare, regardless of the incredible amount of proofs in plain sight against this nonsense: are you scared of getting diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 and escalate to a severe condition?

According to the currently available evidence, you could get a prescription for whatever treatment based on drugs with antiviral, anti-inflammatory, antibiotic, anticoagulant effects is proven to be safe and effective in your case, so you could have an extremely high chance of surviving a disease which is so deadly that in millions of cases it manifests itself (?) in an asymptomatic way and that is proven to kill only a minuscule percentage of the overall population (mostly immunocompromised, i.e. sick and old people).

4. A quick reminder on the reliability of data

It would be of extreme help to get hold of the data of all the people reported as dead with pneumonia, other respiratory diseases, heart attacks, tumors and some other major causes of death since the outbreak of this novel SARS coronavirus: we could compare them with historical charts of the same indicators in the previous years.

My safe bet is that they would show some surprising trends.

As of now, there is a very gripping insight from the president of the Istituto Nazionale di Statistica, whom affirmed in an interview with a catholic newspaper that “ it is worth remembering the data on the death certificates for respiratory diseases. In March 2019 there were 15.189 and the year before there were 16.220. Incidentally, it is noted that they are more than the corresponding number of deaths for Covid (12,352) reported in March 2020.”

What do you think about that?

As remembered several times, every new official report from the Istituto Superiore di Sanità gives us additional confirmations that 96% of the deaths attributed to Covid-19 (SARS-Cov2) in Italy are those of patients having 1 to 3 comorbidities (i.e. severe pre-existing conditions which cause immunodeficiency). The mean age of the overall number of deceased is 79.

This trend is being kept constant for weeks, with minimal variations regardless of the increasing amount of medical records examined.

The latest report is from yesterday (April 29) and takes into consideration 2,351 medical records out of 25,452 deceased.

This information is coming from the main producer of official statistics in Italy and from the leading technical-scientific body of the Italian Health Service.

From a totally different perspective (actually the opposite), the best additional proof to understand how the creepy predictions of millions of deaths don’t make any sense and why the virus is only a pretext in this PSYOP is coming from the US mainstream media.

Let me ask you this: if you were the Center for Disease Control, why the hell would you issue guidelines to add to the Covid-19 death toll even those people who are only PRESUMED to have died because of it, even tough you had no proof because they were NOT TESTED?

The New York Times reported the addition of 3,700 deaths in only one day to the Covid-19 death toll in NY without even questioning it!

Those incomprehensible guidelines from the CDC were slammed elsewhere on the US mainstream media, for instance here.

On top of what was already discussed, here we go with an enormous falsification of data in plain sight (no, better: recommended by the top authorities in that field): is there anything else we need to know?

5. People at high risk

Whenever discussing the detailed statistics of deaths in Italy, both in the previous text and this one, I also wish to clarify that in my interpretation of the current situation I never considered the elderly and the sick as “expendables”.

I am strongly advocating for keeping the most detailed attention to people at high risk, in order for them to be cared about and safe to the highest achievable degree during any outbreak of any viral disease or any other life-threatening situation.

That’s the reason why I feel repulsion for the twisted logic that used the elderly and the sick as a “bait on the hook” when starting the roll-out of the official narrative on this virus: the “authorities” convinced the whole population of the necessity to make a sacrifice and stay home in order to avoid hospitals from being overwhelmed with patients and to prevent the sick and elderly people from dying in that chaos.

That was the starting point, let’s never forget that.

Eventually, when the shortage of beds or equipment (most importantly - they told us - the ventilators) in the hospitals put the medical personnel in the position of taking drastic choices, they always chose the young over the old and/or sick.

Wait, everything was started as a sacrifice to be done by everyone in order to keep the elderly and/or sick safe, and then we let them die due to the lack of “staff and stuff”?

As explained in my previous letter, the lack of beds and personnel could have been surely eased or even eliminated by means of requisitioning all the private clinics from DAY ONE, using the same rationale of the emergency powers which put the entire country under lockdown.

It is crucial to understand that if the already mentioned drug treatments are confirmed to be safe and effective, being intubated can be reverted or even prevented.

Concernedly, in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (in German), a member of the German Respiratory Society pushed forward a case against the unrestrained use of ventilators when dealing with respiratory diseases, because the excessive artificial pressure of the oxygen or the amount of the oxygen itself pumped in the lungs of a sedated patient might worsen the situation.

Another case against ventilators while facing the current epidemic is debated among US doctors and explained here.

Let’s be always clear to avoid misinterpretations: there might never be a shortage of ventilators for those who are in real need of them and, in case there is any, the appropriate authorities need to take care of eliminating that lack of medical equipment.

Going back to the epidemic: the main point is to understand whether you can blame this chaos in the healthcare system of some Italian northern regions only on the decades-long process of dismantling, downsizing and privatizing it underwent, or whether the chaos could have been mitigated (or even avoided, as explained above), also by means of testing from the very beginning16 an inexpensive generic drug with antiviral effects which was already available since the 1930s and whose efficacy against the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) was internationally known since at least 2005/2006 or its direct derivative, or any other drug with antiviral, anti-inflammatory, antibiotic, anticoagulant effects for any specific condition or complication described before: where are all the health authorities and experts when they are really needed?

Do they want us to understand that they did not know about the 2005 study on that potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread and they did not read that crystalline article on The Lancet?

I am not supposed to consult The Lancet and other similar publications because I am not a professional in this field, but the upper echelons both at national and international level should surely have such habit.

Or am I being too naive here?

Is it so revolutionary to start treating a virus with an antiviral?

Moreover, why didn’t they think from the very beginning about the standard procedures they use when they treat cases of pulmonary embolism (with anticoagulant drugs) or pneumonia and ARDS (with anti-inflammatory drugs)?

Was it only because of the (largely induced) chaos in the hospitals which put the majority of the medical personnel under stress and tension, making them prone to misjudge while being physically overworked and psychically defenseless?

Had we all obtained this clear information from the start, the pretext used to convince people of the necessity of giving emergency powers to the prime minister and being put under lockdown could have been dismantled with ease.

But guess what?

Two months passed at the mercy of “professional conformists” (who are constantly pushing forward the official narrative and silencing all the doubts) of all sorts in the media and “passive conformists” among common people brought the majority of Italians to keep on believing without questioning what seems more and more to have little or no rational ground.

This situation has tragic consequences, but it does not add up when you use mere logic and common sense.

6. “Hey, what is really happening in Italy now”?

A vivid impression is that up to now the key players in this PSYOP created a mass psychosis in the country, then they moved forward and used what they had tested in Italy as a blueprint for other countries.

Through media propagation of alarming disinformation or partial information on the situation in Italy, they lobbied several countries to follow the same path of unconstitutional restrictions imposed to the general population, like a domino effect.

Meanwhile, they keep on conducting an experiment aimed at re-programming people’s minds both individually and socially through an irrational and panic-driven psychosis, generated with the typical method of creating tension and fear by means of exaggerated and contradictory pieces of information which don’t stand the test of a rational analysis (even a superficial one like this).

Of course, I am not inferring here that conditions are the same everywhere, but the patterns up to now have striking resemblances in some major countries.

Luckily, though, not all countries in that lot went as far as Italy in the process of inverting all the basic elements of logic, while violating constitutional laws.

To make it clearer, what do you think about the following? Do you witness something similar in your country?

A few days ago, the Italian prime minister (who seems to act and be perceived like an emperor or a king by the sheeple) used one of his endless press conferences to disseminate the “new word” (i.e. yet another one of the useless administrative acts presumably justifying these unconstitutional measures) for a big announcement: the introduction of a task force (which does not exist in the Italian constitution as a legitimate means, but the rules can be changed/not followed “temporarily” when there is a crisis or a state of emergency, right?) that will take care of the so-called Phase 2 in the process of gradually lifting the lockdown.

Now, bearing in mind the fact that the Parliament counts like nothing these times (not only in Italy, of course), having been blatantly deprived of its legislative power, at least they could have played the card of the inter-ministerial committee, keeping the responsibility inside the same Government which usurped17 the Parliament and violated a few articles of the Italian Constitution, as mentioned several times before.

But it would have been too plain, no?

They want the Italians to be constantly entertained with new and amazing special effects, so they chose 17 UNELECTED individuals to compose the task force.

The prime minister said he would take the “political” responsibility of this choice.

It goes like this: consultants which are not legitimated by nor representing anyone, apparently chosen by the prime minister and his staff (not even the government itself, let alone a parliament deprived of any of its functions), are supposed to decide on behalf of 60 million people!

And do you know who is the chief of this task force?

The former CEO of Vodafone18! Can you believe it?

Q: There is an unprecedented crisis affecting healthcare, economics and politics, so what do you do?

A: The Italian government (no, the prime minister with an administrative act!) outsources the decision-making process related to lifting the lockdown of 60 million citizens to a bunch of consultants led by the former CEO of a telecommunications company.

Is it a bad joke?

To add insult to injury, those aforementioned individuals asked for immunity, as testified by one Italian MP in a parliamentary session in which they were discussing an essential theme like the procrastination of the Olympic games (what?).

Why did they do so? What are the powers being transferred to them? What is their ultimate goal?

This sounds like a putsch: not a violent one and possibly not a permanent one (?), but who needs violence when everyone is already under house arrest?

Of course, like everywhere there is a minority which strongly dissents and reacts: besides the thought-provoking articles which you can get from Italian “antagonist” sources, I was both surprised and relieved when another Italian MP expressed some days ago the same views I shared with you in my open letter published 4 weeks ago (and also in this one).

With this in mind, I hope that we will find the strength to put aside all the divergences which divided us before this huge PSYOP and start organizing ourselves to act collectively in order to get out of this trap.

Sincerely,

Raffaele Amelio

1 Actually, some “fortuitous” coincidences with the current situation found in this publication dating back to 10 years ago and curated by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Global Business Network (please see especially pages 18-25) generate additional suspicions of potential dystopian scenarios, as outlined in the previous letter.

2 Please read on Wikipedia: “Chloroquine was discovered in 1934 by Hans Andersag.[5][6] It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines, the safest and most effective medicines needed in a health system.[7] It is available as a generic medication.[1] The wholesale cost in the developing world is about US$ 0.04.[8] In the United States, it costs about US$ 5.30 per dose.[1]”

3 What would you do if you had the choice? Would you give a try to a treatment based on an antiviral which is “a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus [a.k.a. SARS-CoV-1] infection and spread”?

4 On the other hand, to use some irony and breaking it down to the most basic example: I respect your freedom in believing that the vaccine will get you immunized but, if this is the rationale behind your choice, what is your risk in letting me be free to choose whether I want to get immunized or not? You are safe anyway, as you are immunized after your shots of vaccine, right?

5 An article on Nature underlines how the use of chloroquine and its derivative hydroxychloroquine is a part of current treatment guidelines for rheumatoid arthritis (RA), systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) and primary Sjögren syndrome.

6 South Korea has 236 deaths attributed to Covid-19 out of 51,276,700 inhabitants (0,000004602 % of the population) after reaching an advanced state of containing the contagion without a lockdown, as clarified by the country’s Foreign Minister in an article published by the World Economic Forum (by the way, do you remember that organization? It was among the organizers of the notorious “Event 201”). I heard some criticism because I used China (deemed “untrustworthy”) as the main reference of a country which was in an advanced state of “containing the contagion”, the latter being the fundamental axiom in the official narrative to justify all the draconian measures adopted. Do you see South Korea as more trustworthy? Most people do. Like China it is in an advanced state of containment and shows an overall mortality (beware, not the case fatality rate!) which is exactly the same as China’s. These results were achieved with a widespread use of technology, but no lockdown.

7 Everything was explained in “Why Lombardy?” in my previous letter, but the connection between mandatory flu vaccination and the INCREASE in the risk of getting infected with a Coronavirus was also confirmed by a study of the US Department of Defense available here.

8 Card taken from a very nice card game released in 1994 to a worldwide success. It’s a funny coincidence, Covid-19 was declared a pandemic on 3/11 in 2020, while after the notorious 9/11 in 2001 everybody was talking about this and this card.

9 Watch the whole video, but pay attention to what he says starting at 17 minutes and 7 seconds and especially when at around 18 minutes he says “mass gatherings may be in a certain sense more optional, so until YOU [please notice, not “we”] are widely vaccinated those might not come back at all”. What kind of authority was granted to that guy so that he can express such views?

10 Zika is in the Flaviviridae family and Ebola in the Filoviridae family.

11 Do you really want to be a friend of this mass murderer who also visited the infamous Epstein’s paedophile island? Is this being philanthropic? This guy should be jailed!

12 See note 9.

13 One striking evidence on people’s great awakening on the compulsory vaccination agenda is that a petition to the US White House on change.org is calling for Investigations Into The "Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation" For Medical Malpractice & Crimes Against Humanity: it has already reached more than 465,000 signatures in 20 days (the goal was 100,000 in a month).

14 If I wanted to achieve that goal, I would rather choose open access and open source as the most suited for advancing knowledge in the most transparent and equitable way.

15 All the major pharmaceutical companies which promised to develop a vaccine saw their market value rise. They are described as being in a race at the moment. Also a series of companies having past or present ties with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, like Inovio (which is also testing a proprietary smart device for intradermal delivery of a vaccine), Moderna, Novavax are already working on a vaccine. If the puppeteers succeed with imposing a compulsory vaccination, those companies’ profits will skyrocket: if you just want to “follow the money” and focus your attention on who is going to benefit from the virus, this is a very easy case to understand.

16 They did so at a later stage, as previously reported. The complete list is here.

17 By means of adding the legislative to its executive power and thereby breaking the trias politica, or separation of powers.

18 Isn’t it a strange coincidence to witness the current solidification of the initiatives against the installation of antennas for the fifth generation of digital cellular networks (there is a national alliance against it, Alleanza Italiana Stop 5G, part of a larger European alliance) which will create serious issues to people’s immune systems due to the increase of electrosmog, one one hand, and the choice of someone who worked as a CEO for a telecommunications company (and was constantly cheerleading for 5G) as the chief of the illegitimate and unelected task force, on the other?

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scenes-in-between · 8 years ago

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En Ami

CGB

Months of planning. Layers upon layers of subterfuge. Dominoes meticulously arrayed, men placed just so on a chessboard, whatever metaphor you please. A different story for each participant, painstakingly crafted to ensure his or her cooperation. After all, without all of the players working in concert, the whole thing unravels.

How unexpected, then, when I learn of Scully’s visit to Doctor Parenti. Of her unwitting inclusion in a program under my direct purview. So she wants a child, does she?

“Of course none of the samples she brought in are viable, but it’s no matter. We can proceed with something from the next test batch. I’m sure we are getting closer.”

The program is on its last legs, and Parenti knows it. A less experienced man might be fooled, but I am no stranger to sycophants; these are merely the words of a man desperate not to lose his funding. Another failure, and it will surely be another failure, wouldn’t matter in the case of some random test subject, but a failure with Scully? She will not be deceived so easily, and after she exposes every last person involved, Mulder will come riding in on his steed of self-righteousness and burn the place to the ground.

Could we recover from it? Of course. But it’s an expense and a complication I don’t need. I already have enough knives in the air.

“No, use what she gave you. Let it fail, and let her go. I have another use for her, later.”

What I don’t tell him is that her failed conception will serve my purposes quite nicely. An unplanned gift of leverage.

And, ultimately, a means by which I can not only repay her for her cooperation in the larger plan, but potentially drive Parenti’s program into obsolescence.

***

Mulder

“I don’t understand. You said I was getting better.”

“I said the medication seemed to be helping slow the progression, as we’d hoped it would. Unfortunately, it hasn’t stopped the progression entirely, and the differences I’m seeing between your scan from two months ago and the one from today are significant.”

“But how is that possible? I feel fine! I’ve had no symptoms, no headaches, nothing. How can there be something progressively rotting my brain without there being any outward sign?”

“I confess it is puzzling. Given the areas of encroachment, I would expect you to be having all manner of difficulty with your auditory processing. It is possible, I suppose, that you have been experiencing low-level auditory hallucinations and simply haven’t recognized them as such.”

The walk-ins. Samantha, Amber Lynn, the boy who led me to Samantha’s diary… Scully didn’t see them. What if…? But no, he said auditory, not visual. No, they were real, I’m sure of it.

“So what do we do next? Where do we go from here?”

“I’m, uh… I’m afraid, Mr. Mulder, that I am at a loss. I’ve conferred with several colleagues about your case, and none of us has ever encountered a pathology quite like this before. We’ve exhausted all of the conventional avenues of treatment.”

“Okay, well what about the unconventional ones?”

“There are a handful of experimental therapies being explored, primarily overseas. Monoclonal antibody therapy, various stem cell treatments. But they’re all unproven, still very early in development. You would also have to be selected for the clinical trials, of course, and I’m afraid there’s no guarantee you’ll meet the criteria.”

“So… so, what, I’m just supposed to do nothing and wait around for this to kill me? I refuse to accept that. There has to be something else to try.”

There has to be. Damn it, I was getting better! I can’t leave her alone, not like this. And how in the hell can I tell her now, when she’s still so sad about the IVF? Oh my god, the IVF. I only agreed to it because I thought I was getting better…

“I wish I had something more to offer at this point. I’m sorry, I truly am. It’s worth bearing in mind that we don’t know the timeline on this. It’s… unlikely, but not impossible, that you could carry on as you have been for quite some time before you become drastically symptomatic. I know it’s hard to think about things like putting your affairs in order, and while I want to stress that it’s a good idea for you to start considering that, I’m also not suggesting that you give up hope altogether.”

“Oh, believe me, I’m not. You may not be able to help me, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t someone who can.”

***

Scully

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit…”

*sound of fabric scraping across the microphone*

“Mulder, I don’t know how this happened. I don’t know where I am, but I think he’s found me out. He has to have found… He changed my damned clothes. He drugged me and moved me from the car, and I’m in a room in… I don’t know, a house or a hotel or something. My, uh… my bag is here. My things are all here.”

*more rustling*

“But he put me in pajamas, which means he has to have seen the wire. I don’t know why he didn’t take it. I don’t know if he’s even still here. Maybe he saw the wire and decided the deal’s off. I’m so angry, I’m so… I’m furious with myself for letting my guard down.”

*unintelligible*

“--orry this turned out to be nothing but a waste of time. I thought… I really thought I could get this cure, could give other cancer patients the same chance I got. The same chance Jason McPeck got. But I’m done making deals with CGB Spender. Once I figure out where in the hell I am, I’m coming home.”

***

CGB

Of course I drugged her.

Oh, she fell asleep on her own, that much was true. But even as tired as she was, she never would have slept through being carried to the house. Couldn’t have her waking up before I had a chance to give her my gift, could I?

It's miraculous technology, the chip in her neck. And it's not even the latest model. Of course, that's of little matter in light of advancements such as software patches and wireless data transfer. The human body is a complex machine, but once you hold the key to reprogram it at will, well… anything is possible.

Once-depleted ovaries, for example, could easily be stimulated to produce anew.

And given her previous exposure to both the alien virus and vaccine, given Mulder's exposure to the same, if the two of them were to conceive a child naturally, they just might be able to accomplish that which we’ve spent decades trying and failing to do artificially.

My lies to her in the car were by design, of course. I know full well the degree to which the two of them have become entangled. But a claim to believe otherwise was carefully calculated to let her believe she still had secrets. To let her believe, in a sense, that she had the upper hand, just as I let her believe, for a time, that I didn't know about the wire.

It’s admirable, if unfortunate, that she is capable of such deceit. Having her complete trust would make things easier, but I suppose I have more respect for her, knowing she is smart enough to protect herself, to not stroll willingly into danger without taking precautionary measures.

Still, it was time to let her know she’s not fooled me. I could have put her into bed fully clothed, preserved the illusion of ignorance. Instead, I chose to send a message: I know what she’s up to, and I’m not threatened by it in the least.

Well, that and I truly did want her to be comfortable. Not every word out of my mouth is a lie.

It was a calculated risk -- she nearly decided to walk away this morning -- but I gambled on her fundamentally altruistic nature. For the moment, at least, it remains a bet of the safest sort.

***

Mulder

“It’s not her.”

“Mulder--”

“I’m telling you, it’s not her! It’s impossible. Look at the date and time stamp on this. There’s no way she could have sent this email because we were in California then, and she didn’t even have her laptop on that trip.”

“Are you sure?”

“Damn it, Frohike, of course I’m sure! And this one. This is from a week ago. At 11:35pm, we were sitting together at her kitchen table. She never even left the room. It’s. Not. Her.”

“Okay, well if you’re a hundred percent certain she didn’t write these, then who did?”

“You guys tell me. I thought you were the hacking experts. Can you figure out who gained access to her account?”

“Depends on how much they covered their tracks. This could take some time.”

“She may not have much time. Someone has gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to set her up, and if it’s the son of a bitch she’s with right now, he won’t think twice about using her as bait. We’ve got to figure out if this is related to wherever she’s gone or if it’s a whole separate operation.”

“Look, man, you know I’m the last guy on Earth who wants to see her get hurt. I promise you, we’ll try to get some answers for you as soon as we can.”

“I guess we’re having a slumber party at my place, then. You want me to put coffee on?”

***

Scully

“Mulder, it’s me.”

“Scully! Where are you, are you okay?”

“I’m okay. I’m southbound on Highway 209, on my way home. I should be there in about four and a half hours.”

“What the hell were you thinking?”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you have any idea how much danger you were in?”

More than you even know. “Look, I took the necessary precautions. I’m unharmed, and once I get back, I will be happy to walk you through exactly why I did what I did. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to discuss it any further over the phone.”

“Call me every hour. If I don’t hear from you, I’m sending out the highway patrol.”

“Mulder--”

“He could have had you killed!”

“But he didn’t! So you can stop acting like you’ve never put yourself in danger for the greater good.”

“...”

“I’ll call you in an hour.” *click*

***

CGB

It might seem like a long way to go, just to kill a man. On the face of it, certainly, there could have been simpler methods. But they would have been messier, and far less comprehensive.

It wasn’t just the killing of the man, after all. It wasn’t even that we needed the research. Everything on that disc he handed Scully, I already have.

I am not actually dying. That was another necessary lie.

Cobra worked for the project, once. He was one of the brighter ones, making connections others couldn’t, spinning gold from the virtual straw we gave him. Bits of translated hieroglyphs from the Ivory Coast craft. Biological and genetic data from an exterminated EBE. Nanoprocessor technology from another recovered ship. The advancements he made in a few short years were astounding.

Unfortunately, his genius ultimately became a liability. He developed a conscience, which is, shall we say, problematic in this line of work. We could tell he was getting ready to bolt, that he’d already smuggled data out of the office, data we absolutely couldn’t risk falling into the wrong hands. In the end, it was merely a matter of making sure he bolted in the right direction.

Enter Dana Scully.

Even the most brilliant of men can be led around by the nose by a smart and beautiful woman. Impersonating her via email was child’s play, and though it may have taken months of careful grooming, “Scully” eventually convinced Cobra to destroy all but one copy of the research with which he’d absconded, to turn that final copy over to “her” for safekeeping. Luring him out into the open took some skill, I’m not afraid to boast, but it would require Scully’s actual physical presence in the end. And there were those who wanted to see her eliminated as well, once she had completed what we needed of her.

Perhaps I am growing soft and sentimental in my old age. Or perhaps I am just as susceptible to her charms as Cobra was. I can couch my decision to countermand her kill order in any number of justifications, all of them valid, but it remains possible that I am simply losing my stomach for it.

Why, then, didn’t I let her keep the data? I confess I was tempted. If there were ever a person to trust with it, someone who would truly only use it with the best of intentions, it would be her. But maybe that’s sentimental of me as well. The sad truth is that the world itself cannot support the possibility of so many cured. Six billion people on this Earth, and how many suffer already from starvation? How many overcrowded, over-polluted cities could handle a population that never got sick and died?

This is why there have to be men like me, men holding all the cards, who make the difficult decisions for the greater good. It is a lonely existence; if I had my life to do over again, I… well, I don’t know if all this power truly is worth the sacrifice. Some days I really don’t know.

***

Mulder

I had hoped to never have to write in this journal again, Dana. I foolishly believed I had won, or dodged a bullet at least. I guess I only heard what I wanted to hear.

Turns out that “not worse” is not the same thing as “better.”

I know I made a lot of promises. I hope one day you will understand why I’m continuing to break them now.

If I had never told you about the ova I kept, if you had simply carried on exploring other options, you would have been spared all that needless heartache. You might have conceived on the first try with a donor egg and the sperm of a man not slowly dying of some unprecedented brain disease. Now I fear you might be unwilling to try again, after how badly this went.

The doctors say they can’t help me. I’ve got a whole drawer of cases that say doctors aren’t the only option. Once I have exhausted those avenues too, or once the progression of my condition is such that I can no longer hide it from you, that is when I will tell you.

I know that you already feel bad about the empty disc, about being promised this miracle cure only to have it yanked away like the football in a Peanuts comic strip. I remember what it was like, finding the chip that cured your cancer. I remember what it felt like when I thought I’d been deceived too, finding a vial filled with water instead of some miracle elixir I thought I was after. To tell you now that you maybe could have had something that would cure me… I won’t compound your frustration and guilt. I won’t do it.

I was angry when you went off alone with him, but if I'm honest, I was really just afraid. Afraid you wouldn't see him for the snake he is, afraid he would dangle promises in front of you all while leading you to slaughter like a sacrificial lamb.

I should have given you more credit. I'm sorry I let my fear turn me into an asshole.

I’m embarking out on my own now for the same reasons you did these past few days. I want to try to fix this without you getting hurt. I don’t know if I will succeed, but I have to try.

***

Scully

Initially, I thought the worst part of this whole thing was seeing the disappointment and anger on Mulder’s face. At first I felt indignant (Who was he to talk, given the number of times he’s run off on his own?), but after the blank disc and the empty office, I started thinking maybe he was right to be disappointed in me.

And then it seemed the worst part was having been so thoroughly played for a fool. I thought I was so clever. I thought I could play him, that I could pretend to go along with his demands but still maintain the upper hand in the end. How incredibly naive. There wasn’t a moment after we left my apartment that I was in control.

Finding out I had been used so comprehensively threw me for a loop. Mulder and the Gunmen explained how my email had been hacked and cloned, showed me the messages that had been sent in my name. Well, the Gunmen did most of the explaining. Mulder mostly glowered. Seeing it there on the screen, evidence of months of correspondence between Cobra and someone pretending to be me, made me sick to my stomach. That this could have all been going on, for as long as it did, while I was none the wiser, is nearly impossible to believe.

It is only now, days later, that I finally realize even this wasn’t the worst part.

Because I can’t seem to stop thinking about those last few moments before Cobra’s death. Because I have woken up in a cold sweat four times in the past three nights, haunted by the look on his face when he realized he’d been set up. When he thought I’d set him up. Because my stomach still turns at the memory of watching the bullet hit him, watching him fall over the side of his boat, struggling and failing to grab hold of him as shots were fired at me, too.

Because I know, now, that if I had just walked away after I woke up in the lake house, he might still be alive. If I’d failed to turn up at our rendezvous, he probably never would have come out of hiding. And all his work, all that science, never would have fallen into the hands of that double-crossing, cigarette-smoking son of a bitch.

In trying to do the “right” thing, I only messed everything up. An innocent and arguably brilliant man is dead, and life-saving, world-changing information has been stolen by someone who will only use it for personal gain.

My instincts in this case were so utterly, disastrously wrong, and because of that, I became an instrument of the very group of men responsible for some of the greatest evil I have ever encountered. That is the thing I am not likely to get over for a very long time.

#x-files fanfic #txf: en ami #cigarette smoking man #mulderfic #scullyfic #mulder's stupid brain disease thing #a/n: i hope you'll indulge my experimentation here #i wanted to play a bit with alternating first person povs #don't worry #this isn't a format i'm going to stick with long-term or anything #;)

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ladystylestores · 4 years ago

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Antiviral Fabrics Gain Momentum in COVID-19 Era – WWD

https://pmcwwd.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/mrz_orditura_valdagno.jpg?w=640&h=415&crop=1

MILAN — The wave of innovation that has marked the evolution of the textile sector in Europe and elsewhere in the past decade has increased the number of performances the garments we wear now boast — think antibacterial, natural stretch and wrinkle-free qualities.

But unusual times call for unusual projects and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic bringing customers’ safety and health concerns to the forefront, textile firms in Europe have been banking on a new performance-driven innovation: antiviral fabrics.

As reported, apparel and accessories inspired by personal protective equipment could be a $10 billion to $20 billion opportunity for the fashion industry. But what about antiviral fabrics that luxury players can source from their usual suppliers and craft into suits, shirts and cocktail dresses?

Textile firms developing this category have made clear these fabrics do not substitute for PPE, nor do they prevent the risk of contagion. Rather, they are seen as an additional layer of performance that is likely to become the new norm in manufacturing.

The latest brainchild of cotton specialist Albini Group’s Albini Next think tank for smart innovations is a family of antiviral fabrics dubbed ViroFormula, developed in partnership with Swiss company HeiQ, which provided the chemical treatment called Viroblock. This destroys the virus within five minutes, the company claims.

Treated with liposomes combined with a silver compound that enhances the antiviral property, the ViroFormula’s range of fabrics — intended for shirts, jackets, trousers and to be applied soon to knitwear yarns, too — marks an evolution from existing textiles that were adjusted to become suitable for the treatment, maximizing their performance without any impact on quality.

The Albini Group’s finishing machinery inside the Brebbia, Italy-based facility. Giovanni Marchesi/Courtesy of Albini Group.

“When we realized the violent impact that COVID-19 could have on the world, strong enough to freeze the economy and change social behaviors, we prompted HeiQ to apply the treatments they were already developing for PPEs to regular apparel,” explained Fabio Tamburini, chief executive officer of Cotonificio Albini, the group’s production arm.

Despite the shutdown of all nonessential manufacturing businesses that Italy enforced on March 23, the group powered ahead to bring the family of fabrics to the market in less than two months, instead of the six to nine months that are typically required, conducting about 1,200 tests.

Similarly, the Marzotto Wool Manufacturing company partnered with Polygiene, a spin-off of Sweden-based chemical company Perstorp Group, to adapt the ViralOff finish to fabrics crafted from natural yarns, including wool, linen and cotton, which required the fabrics’ manufacturing process to be revised.

The compound, which is made of titanium dioxide and silver chlorine ions, underwent lab tests showing it can eliminate 99 percent of viruses within two hours, or 93 percent in 30 minutes.

Before taking it to the market, the company wants to assess that the treatment can persist on fabrics such as wool, stretch wool and washable wool after at least three to six dry cleanings. Marzotto already evaluated that cotton significantly retains the coating compound after 15 water washes, with a 4 percent reduction in efficacy.

A Marzotto ViralOff fabric. Courtesy of Marzotto Wool Manufacturing.

“At the beginning of the lockdown in Italy, the idea started taking shape, even though wool itself boasts antimicrobiotic features,” commented ceo Giorgio Todesco. “We had never thought about antiviral treatments, despite the fact that Polygiene had already developed a few solutions during the 2002-03 SARS outbreak, but customers easily forgot about that epidemic because the impact was limited to a few regions of the world.”

In the U.K., Promethean Particles has cooperated with local textile businesses to explore the antiviral effect of its copper nanoparticles technology when embedded via melt extrusion into nonwoven polymer fibers.

Initial results showed that the antimicrobial effect can last longer than in surface-coated textiles, but the company is assessing the efficacy in collaboration with Mexican research institute CIQA and textile trade association NWTexNet through independent laboratories in the U.S. and the U.K. “If we can show evidence of antiviral properties from the testing being carried out, then it’s particularly relevant to the current COVID-19 outbreak, and we may see a lot more urgency in its development,” noted Selina Ambrose, technical manager at Promethean Particles.

Also, Germany-based chemical company Rudolf Group has conducted lab tests on its RUCO-BAC AGP technology introduced in 2005 to assess whether it could boast antiviral properties on the family of coronaviruses. Made of microstructures, or vehicles, that carry and release an appropriate quantity of silver ions on the treated textile, the solution enhances the durability of the chemical’s antibacterial qualities, up to 100 water washes.

As an evolution of antimicrobial or odor-control treatments already widespread and common among textile suppliers, the antiviral fabrics seem to be generating buzz and interest.

“The market has responded very well, especially for those areas, such as Japan, South Korea and China, that have been traditionally more sensitive to the topic,” said Marzotto’s ceo, adding that demand in Europe is also strong, especially in Germany, France and Spain.

“Like for any innovation, the request has been spotty, with companies at the forefront of the conversation and others which will probably follow suit,” he noted. “I cannot really tell what’s the future of these fabrics…but talking to scientists I got the impression that COVID-19 is not going to be an isolated incident and that vaccines typically require a long amount of time, so having the chance to be ready with these fabrics in the future is meaningful.”

“I hope it will become a market standard, as I believe people deserve to return to a normal life, which cannot rely only on the progresses made by the pharmaceutical industry,” echoed Tamburini while stressing that Albini’s ViroFormula fabrics cannot alone help prevent contagion.

The executive said the innovation resonates with the psychological impact the coronavirus has had on consumers and on more exposed workers such as frequent travelers, health-care professionals and retail employees.

The range has been welcomed by Albini’s clients, but Tamburini sounded cautious. “Like for any fabric category, ViroFormula will perform as a learning curve, with its demand spiking in the next six months triggered by curiosity and the psychological needs of the moment. Then the interest will probably decline until it becomes a market standard, growing consistently.”

He believes that in the next two to three years, the market share of antiviral fabrics will be comparable to wrinkle-free textiles as a performance-based feature.

Although the business of antiviral textiles seems to be thriving in the wake of the pandemic, these technologies pose a number of questions in terms of marketability, safety, sustainability and compliance with countries’ regulations.

“The coronaviruses are not particularly viable in external environments compared to other viruses that are more robust. COVID-19 tends to be inactivated in a relatively short amount of time, its viability does not last more than a few hours or less,” said Carlo Federico Perno, professor of microbiology and virology at the University of Milano and director of Niguarda Hospital’s department of laboratory medicine.

“The airborne, respiratory contamination is the dominant route for the spread of this virus in the environment…the example of shirts is particularly fitting as if an infected person wearing a shirt sneezes on it, the shirt becomes a vehicle of transmission only if another person touches it shortly after and then with the hands [dirty of secretions] touches their mouth, nose or eyes. As you can understand, this way of transmission is unlikely and limited,” he said.

“I’m saying that I’m not sure about the real need for excessive efforts to make antiviral clothes that in reality do not represent a vehicle of transmission,” Perno underscored, noting other pathogens can definitely transmit via garments. Despite this, he underscored the positive psychological impact these textiles can have on consumers, who want to feel safe.

Research conducted by scientists at the National Institutes of Health and published in the New England Journal of Medicine assesses the life of the virus on different surfaces, but no real evidence was provided by this study and by the scientific community on COVID-19’s ability to persist on fabrics.

Italy’s health-care authority, the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, issued guidelines to sanitize garments and fabrics. Compiled with the support of Tessile e Salute, an eco-toxicology association that evaluates the safety and sustainability of chemicals employed by the textile and fashion industries, the guidelines are vocal about the indiscriminate use of chemicals, suggesting instead dry-steaming as the technique of choice, the only one avoiding potentially harmful compounds and preventing damage to the quality of the fabrics.

The antiviral fabrics are “a new category for every stakeholder and we never had in the past the necessity to evaluate the toxicology of such treatments,” noted Marco Piu, scientific and organizational coordinator at Tessile e Salute, raising health and environmental concerns.

Among the compounds available, Perno said ions of silver chlorine are the more effective antiseptics and probably among the few that can easily be applied to textiles with no harm, while stressing the need to make sure these chemicals persist after several cleaning cycles.

“The eco-toxicology problems might surface as these production processes potentially encompass additional treatments other than the antiviral coating, such as additives, coadjuvants and vehicles, that guarantee that the compounds stick to the fibers…also after several cleanings. It represents a downside because those could be harmful chemicals entering the textile process,” Piu said.

To this end, companies marketing antiviral fabrics have been stressing their compliance with safety regulations. “The treatment is environmentally respectful, this is extremely important because it sits in our broader green initiatives,” said Todesco about Marzotto’s antiviral fabrics. The ViralOff chemical has already obtained the Eco Passport by Oeko-Tex and the seal of approval by the American Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA. The company also claims the compound is hypoallergenic and in no way harmful to the skin.

As a company stressing its commitment to sustainability and having recently developed an organic range of fabrics that forgo chemical compounds, Todesco acknowledged this project seems “counterintuitive compared to our values, but health care is very much top-of-mind.”

“Innovating in the field of chemistry means adding new performance features to existing fabrics but at the same time it challenges us to do so while respecting the environment,” noted Tamburini, who added that Albini’s ViroFormula fabrics boast all the certifications the company has gained for regular textiles. They include the AATCC 100 test method, the most commonly chosen test and the industry’s standard for antimicrobial fabric performances in the U.S.

The Albini Group ViroFormula fabrics. Courtesy of Albini Group.

Tackling diverse international laws and regulations can also represent a challenge.

In Europe any textile product claiming antiviral features is required to get the ISO 18184:2019 certification, which attests the substances — chemical or otherwise — employed produce a modification of one of the elements of the virion structure that induce an inability to replicate. Albini’s and Marzotto’s technologies have been tested according to that standard, although in compliance with the regulation lab tests could not be conducted on the COVID-19 virus causing SARS-CoV-2. ViralOff has been tested on the family of coronaviruses, instead, while the Albini’s ViroFormula fabrics are being assessed by independent laboratories to make sure the antiviral property can be applied to the fabrics.

In the U.S., to distribute or use an antimicrobial product, it must be registered with the EPA, which has stringent rules regarding what language can be used to state or imply its antimicrobial capabilities. For instance, marketing claims must be limited to the protection of the “treated article,” and cannot refer to protection beyond it, such as for personal protection.

The antimicrobial claims must be limited to protection or prevention from microorganisms that are not considered “public-health-related microorganisms.” That means companies cannot market products with references to specific organisms infectious to humans, like COVID-19, unless the antimicrobial product has been approved by the EPA to make these claims.

“Fashion and apparel companies must beware: If they buy such input products to use in finished goods, they are not allowed to make any similar kinds of claims about the end products’ ability to fight COVID-19. U.S. laws prevent companies from making ‘public health claims’ about viruses and consumer textiles,” noted Terry Walmsley, director of regulatory affairs and sustainability at Noble Biomaterials.

Todesco said Polygiene’s ViralOff compound is EPA-approved, securing a competitive advantage for Marzotto’s antimicrobic textiles in the U.S.

The Viroblock biocide developed by HeiQ for the Albini Group’s ViroFormula fabrics is under scrutiny by the American authority to be labeled as an “active agent,” according to the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, or FIFRA, the U.S. federal law setting up the basic system of pesticide regulation to protect applicators, consumers and the environment. Such approval would extend the chemical’s antimicrobial features to any finished good treated with it. Meanwhile, HeiQ has obtained the registration of the formula in Europe, as well as locally in Germany and Switzerland, and it has applied for it in Italy and Belgium.

“The regulations that prevent companies from using antiviral labels or claims make sense to avoid speculations, also because demonstrating the antiviral properties is no easy task,” commented Piu.

“I’m very happy about the innovation, I believe it represents the future of our industry. But despite our results, keep washing your hands,” Tamburini concluded.

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The climate change battle dividing Trumps America

Climate change denial and energy conspiracy are high on the presidents agenda, but US scientists are fighting back

Ever since Donald Trump became US president, certain sectors of American society have felt particularly embattled. His statements on Mexicans and Muslims are notorious, but there is another community, less heard about, that has also been sent reeling: scientists.

If politics has never been a world that is overly respectful to empirical research, Trumps victory exploited a growing popular suspicion of expertise, and a tendency to seek out alternative narratives to fact-based analysis. Conspiracy theories, anti-vaccination campaigns and climate change deniers have all traded on this rejection of science, and their voices have all been heard, to differing degrees, in the new administration. But for the science community perhaps the most provocative act so far of Trumps short time in office was the appointment of Scott Pruitt, a Republican lawyer and climate change sceptic, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Id say a lot of Trumps cabinet picks are not ideal, says Shaughnessy Naughton, of the science activist group 314 Action. But Pruitt is really an offence to the organisation. Hes spent his career suing the EPA. Hes for state rights when its for polluters and against state rights when its for conservation or protecting the environment.

Naughton is the founder of 314 Action, which seeks to promote Stem science, technology, engineering and maths education and help scientists become politicians. The name refers to the first three digits of the mathematical ratio pi, a scientific imprint that occurs everywhere in life. But too often, Naughton believes, science has remained aloof from politics, while politics has grown less troubled about getting involved in science.

Pruitt is perhaps the most conspicuous example of this development. As attorney general for Oklahoma, he frequently sued the EPA in alliance with oil and gas lobbyists. Since taking over at the EPA, he has promised to weaken regulation of carbon emissions from cars and power plants, and has withdrawn requests for information on industrial production of methane.

A leading EPA official called Mustafa Ali, who is involved in environmental justice, recently resigned from the agency, complaining that there has been a concerted effort to roll back the positive steps that many, many people have worked on through all the previous administrations.

Science is under attack, says Naughton, and this administration is an example of that. If you look at the science committee in the House [of Representatives], its clearly hostile to empirical evidence. We are not going to win this battle by signing polite letters. We are going to win by getting a seat at the table. That means getting people that have pro-science agendas and scientific backgrounds elected at all level of government.

A former chemist who has worked in cancer research, Naughton has twice run for Congress, both times losing out in the Democratic primaries. She knows from experience a lot about the pitfalls and demands of American politics, particularly the vital role played by donors.

Though it has only existed since the end of last year, 314 Action has already had more than 3,000 scientists and people from scientific backgrounds sign up for training. One of them is Brian Johnson, a 32-year-old nuclear engineer. Johnson doesnt have much of a political history. He was an active supporter of the independent Ron Paul in the 2012 presidential elections, but thats about it. Now hes aiming to run for Congress in the 2018 elections. The more I look into it, he says, the more I realise it really is a huge commitment. I will probably have to resign from my job in order to campaign.

He will run as a Democrat. Isnt that a long way, politically speaking, from the libertarian Ron Paul? Johnson insists that, on all the critical issues, he supports the party line. But it is striking that his political stance is largely about what he is against rather than what he is for. And first and foremost hes against Trump.

Johnson says he waited to see if Trump would honour his campaign commitment to appoint the best people. When that didnt happen, Johnson got angry.

He appointed Rick Perry to be in charge of the Department of Energy, he says. Hes not exactly a nuclear engineer. Hes been looking to defund data collection on global warming. Hes just protecting his interest in fossil fuels, not serving the American people.

Perry, a former governor of Texas, is an enthusiast for extracting fossil fuels, does not believe that the human effect on climate change is a proven case, and is on record as wanting to scrap the Department of Energy, which is largely devoted to nuclear energy and its applications.

You know Donald Trumps views are not founded in evidence, says Johnson. They are founded in whatever feelings hes got. He doesnt really care if theres evidence for what hes doing.

Not all scientists agree with Johnson and Naughton. For instance, William Happer, the distinguished professor of physics at Princeton University, argues that global warming is not a problem, that climate science is a so-called science, that climate scientists are a glassy-eyed cult, and that increased C02 emissions are beneficial, because they are a boon to plant life.

Naughton laughs when I mention Happers name. Thats like talking about Andrew Wakefield, she says, referring to the British medical researcher, now based in America, who maintains, despite a wealth of contrary evidence, that the MMR vaccination is a cause of autism.

It would be wrong to compare Happer to the thoroughly discredited Wakefield, but its no coincidence that he has been touted as Trumps chief science adviser. Its as if the president is not interested in mainstream scientists who are proponents of widely accepted theories.

Climate change sceptic and now head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP

Enraged by the administrations appointments and Trumps immigration policy, Brian Johnson turned to 314 Action. But if he thought that his scientific background and opposition to Trump was enough, he soon began to realise what running for office in America involves. He discovered that a deep knowledge of nuclear fusion came a poor second to the ability to fundraise.

314 Action told me the steps I would have to take, how I would fundraise, who I would talk to, and the networks I needed to tap into, he says. Ive learned how to make myself a viable candidate that can run a serious campaign.

Some of what Trump and his cohort say can make the scientific establishment sound like a bastion of political correctness. But science is not only under threat from the right. For many years now the postmodern strand of leftwing thought has tended to view science as a social construct.

This outlook, exposed by Alan Sokals notorious 1996 hoax (in which a spoof scholarly article was published by an academic journal) has often dismissed emphases on empirical research as scientism, in other words as just another belief system.

Indeed, in some cases science has been accused of being simply a cultural pillar of western ideological hegemony. Perhaps the most notorious example of this kind of thinking saw the South African leader Thabo Mbeki reject the orthodox scientific thesis on HIV-Aids as a product of centuries-old white racist beliefs.

In such cases science is understood not as a neutral, or unbiased means of analytical observation and prediction, but instead as a deeply ideological interpretation of events. Both political extremes, for different reasons, have a history of questioning the science establishments political underpinning.

And both have employed the same method to discredit mainstream science: promoting the dissenting voice. Trump seeks out climate change deniers to support his agenda, just as Mbeke made use of the molecular biologist Peter Duesbergs controversial, and now discredited, theory that HIV did not cause Aids. Mbekes stance is estimated to have cost more than 300,000 South African lives.

That took place in a pre-internet age. Now the wonders of technology have made it even easier to disseminate an anti-science message through a medium the web that serves to flatten out hierarchies of empirical truth.

Naughton is familiar with the tactic of digging out heterodox opinions to justify bad policies. What I find completely remarkable, she says, are the people who reject all the experts and find an outlier with a PhD who says something that confirms their belief. It doesnt make any sense. There is a place for questioning everything. Thats important. But we do need experts, we do need to accept facts. Gravity is not something we debate. At a certain point, your opinion is not as relevant as the facts.

But of course its not always easy to distinguish opinion from fact, especially when accusations and counter-accusations of fake news dominate the debate. Scientists are used to a long process of peer review. Thats not how it works in politics.

Politics is much more emotional and volatile than science, says Molly Sheehan, a bioengineer, who is considering whether to enter the congressional race in the Philadelphia area. It moves a lot faster.

She too is using the know-how provided by 314 Action to inform her preparation. Although she is a longstanding political activist, she says it was Trumps election that galvanised her to look at becoming a politician. It went from a hobby to the feeling of I need to do everything in my power to ensure our country comes back to paying attention to reality and paying attention to fact.

Sheehan says the kind of scientific belief and optimism that America experienced under JFK in the 1960s has been replaced by apathy and cynicism. She believes that the US has been growing more anti-science for many years. Its just that Trump has made the drift definitive.

People dont remember how bad diseases were, she says They dont remember polio, or measles or mumps. They dont realise that medical science has had a huge impact on child mortality and morbidity. People dont have the emotional connection to science that they had in the 1960s.

But can scientists create that connection by becoming politicians? President Kennedy, after all, was not a scientist, but the space race he launched captured the public imagination. What can scientists bring to the political scene?

First of all, says Johnson, I think a scientist can really understand technical issues, whether its climate change or cyber security. Politicians like Trump make a decision and then go out and find the science to support it. If I were in Congress I would want to seek out the science first, and then have that inform my policies.

Its an admirable ambition, but is it one that will inspire the public? One of the criticisms that has been launched at politicians, not just in America but in the UK and Europe too, is that they have become too technocratic. Which is to say that instead of viewing issues from a personalised emotive basis, they are more likely to be dry utilitarians, allowing research to show the sensible policy.

The triumph of Trump was to portray that kind of politics as divorced from peoples reality and therefore insular, and most likely corrupt. It worked. But how long will it last? On the whole people tend to prefer trained pilots flying planes and experienced surgeons carrying out serious operations. In other words, when it really matters, we want expertise.

The question is whether the experts are the best people to argue for expertise. Scientists are good at winning the argument, but that doesnt necessarily mean they are good at winning over the people.

Sheehan sees the Trump election as an opportunity for scientists to reassert themselves. For while his presidency may at first be a backward step, Sheehan believes it will provide the impetus to force science back on to the national agenda. It might be the wake-up call thats needed for the pendulum to swing back the other way, she says.

The European temptation to look down on America and its more garish habits has proven particularly irresistible in recent months, but there remains an energy and optimism in the country that should not be underestimated. 314 Action is a fine example of a spirit that doesnt dwell in defeat but instead looks at practical ways of putting things right.

Trump should beware. The scientific revolution starts here.