The business of business: The vaccine business, just like the used car business

A baby squid - not  in the 

COVID vaccine

The business of business is business, usually meaning profit above all other concerns. Other concerns include human well-being and pollution. Businesses generally do their business by privatizing and trickling profits up, and socializing or externalizing human, social and environmental costs and damage. And, all this fun and games thing is routinely done in as much secrecy as business can manage it, leaving the public clueless and business free to copiously lie about how it does its standard operations and how much it is concerned about externalities like human, social and environmental damage and costs. 

It's a win-win for business and a lose-lose for the public interest or common good. The radical right loves it. So do businesses, which have bought and paid for this kind of a political-commercial system.

Although most libertarians and other anti-government ideologues vehemently deny it, the business of government is protecting the public interest. As the radical right ideologues see it, the business of government is getting out of the way of business so that unregulated markets can run free and wild, thereby best serving the public interest. That is about a crackpot of a faux reality as arguing against taking the COVID vaccine because there are tiny living creatures with tentacles in it, currently my favorite bit of COVID crackpottery.

In the vaccine, allegedly -- 

by a crackpot radical right politician

Speaking of standard business operations and the COVID vaccine, the New York Times writes:

A report released Tuesday by Public Citizen, a consumer rights advocacy group that gained access to a number of leaked, unredacted Pfizer contracts, sheds light on how the company uses that power to “shift risk and maximize profits,” the organization argues.

The Manhattan-based pharmaceutical giant has maintained tight levels of secrecy about negotiations with governments over contracts that can determine the fate of populations. The “contracts consistently place Pfizer’s interests before public health imperatives,” said Zain Rizvi, the researcher who wrote the report.

Public Citizen found common themes across contracts, including not only secrecy but also language to block donations of Pfizer doses. Disputes are settled in secret arbitration courts, with Pfizer able to change the terms of key decisions, including delivery dates, and demand public assets as collateral.

Sharon Castillo, a spokeswoman for Pfizer, said that confidentiality clauses were “standard in commercial contracts” and “intended to help build trust between the parties, as well as protect the confidential commercial information exchanged during negotiations and included in final contracts.”

Aspects of the contracts are not uncommon, including the reliance on arbitration courts and clauses designed to give companies legal protections. Pfizer’s price for its vaccine, as low as $10 per dose in Brazil, appeared to be lower than some competitors’ prices.

Pfizer has formalized 73 deals for its coronavirus vaccine. According to Transparency International, a London-based advocacy group, only five contracts have been formally published by governments, and these with “significant redactions.”

“Hiding contracts from public view or publishing documents filled with redacted text means we don’t know how or when vaccines will arrive, what happens if things go wrong and the level of financial risk buyers are absorbing,” said Tom Wright, research manager at the Transparency International Health Program.  

The contract reached with Brazil prohibits the government from making “any public announcement concerning the existence, subject matter or terms of [the] Agreement” or commenting on its relationship with Pfizer without the prior written consent of the company.

“This is next-level stuff,” said Tahir Amin, an intellectual property lawyer who co-founded I-Mak, a nonprofit global health organization.

Pfizer exerted control over the supply of vaccine doses after contracts were signed. The Brazilian government was restricted from accepting donations of Pfizer doses or making its own donations. Pfizer also included clauses in contracts with Albania, Brazil and Colombia that it could unilaterally change delivery schedules in the case of shortages.

It is true that confidentiality clauses are “standard in commercial contracts” and “intended to help build trust between the parties, as well as protect the confidential commercial information exchanged during negotiations and included in final contracts.” By that reasoning, the public is not a party to the contract and is told nothing other than what a company chooses to say. No wonder confidentiality is so dominant in commerce. Both parties to a contract can say whatever they want, true, false, crackpot or most anything else and there is no way for the public to know the real truth. 

Arbitration courts operate in secrecy, unless the contract specifies otherwise. Contracts rarely specify otherwise. 

In my opinion, dark free speech (DFS) is the most potent weapon that authoritarians and self-serving people and entities or businesses have to go about their business in secrecy. Secrecy, assuming it is different from DFS and not a subset of it, is probably the next most potent weapon. Secrecy is close to DFS in anti-democratic power, arguably close to tied for first. 

Questions:

1. Which is more powerful and deceptive, (i) public ignorance grounded in a combination of secrecy and the kind of DFS called “public relations”, (ii) public ignorance grounded in DFS (lies, emotional manipulation, crackpot motivated reasoning and the like), or (iii) are they about the same?

2. The contracts the NYT discusses were leaked and Pfizer did not want that information to become public: Did the secret contract terms mostly protect legitimate corporate needs, or did they mostly hide things that Pfizer wanted to keep from the public? What damage did this leak of contract terms cause Pfizer, e.g., loss of legitimate trade secrets, or was it mostly just embarrassing information that caused public relations damage?

3. In moral philosophy, deceit and unwarranted opacity are sometimes argued to be anti-democratic because they deprive people of their right to decide and behave on the basis of facts and truth. Power flows from the deceived to the deceivers. Are contracts like those that Pfizer coerced governments to sign more anti-democratic than pro-authoritarian, or are they something else, e.g., politically or socially neutral?

The tentacles . . . 

the tentacles . . . .

On Free Expression, Free Societies and Laws

We're dealing with so much Dark Free Speech these days that I thought it might be productive to rant on the topic of free speech, and the nature of freedom, and what makes us free.

I'd argue that "free speech" enshrined as a right, the way it is in the US particularly, is pretty problematic.

I have a hard time with the liberal idea of (near absolute) freedom of expression.

It's too easy for bad actors, like fascists to poison the institution with what Germaine has coined "Dark Free Speech" - the kind of vax misinformation, and politically violent brinksmanship we see coming out of the talking heads today.

In The Torah, there are a set of laws which outline a way for someone who is not Jewish to lead a "righteous life" - that is, to play in the street of life and dodge most of the traffic. There are only like 7 of them and they're all pretty easy to follow.

The most difficult might be the most important for social stability: Establish laws, courts and a system of justice.

Absolute free speech is lawlessness. That's what happened to GETTR and Parler. That's what's happening offline as well.

The opposite of the law is not freedom - it is lawlessness - it's own kind of bondage. The rules set us free. That's why we have them. They elevate us.

Humans are self-domesticating, but not automatically so. Right now a great number of us are undomesticating or going "feral" human.

The laws, our social contracts, and belief systems domesticate and civilize us. We aren't born that way.

I like to say everyone's an anarchist at birth, some of us just don't grow out of it. I say that as an anarchist, although not of the infantile variety I just alluded to, at least not since childhood. My anarchism allows for rules, it's simply that the rules flow from the bottom up rather than top down.

Everyone needs rules if they are to live a reasonably satisfying life. It's part of being human.

If we wanted to free our speech, we'd protect it, by explicitly ruling out bad behavior.

People that are concerned about censorship need to understand that we censor every day, all over the place, and that this too is one of the conditions of civility and civilization. 

Online forums are moderated, and nobody loses their shirt. Canada and much of western Europe have laws against many kinds of Dark Free Speech, and if anything, those countries are arguably freer than we are.

Rules are important.

Jordan Klepper chats with T**** supporters in Des Moines

This is a 6 minute video of an interview with some T**** supporters at a recent political rally in Iowa. This arguably constitutes more evidence to support a belief that (1) some or maybe most of the ex-president's supporters are deceived, manipulated and betrayed, and (2) T**** and fascist Republican Party elites intentionally deceive, manipulate and betray them.

Images in the video include a T**** with a blazing machine gun sitting on a velociraptor dispensing righteous justice to Democrats and other evil anti-American miscreants. That's straight from sacred fundamentalist Christian nationalist dogma. That is exactly or close to how many or most of those people see reality.

Questions: 

1. Are some of the ex-president's supporters deceived, manipulated and betrayed, or are they pro-democracy patriots valiantly fighting against the evil socialist tyranny of Biden and the Democrats?

2. Is it morel likely that (a) Democrats who support Biden and the Democratic agenda are evil socialist tyrants, some or most of whom are deep state pedophiles or (b) some significant plurality or an outright majority of the ex-president's supporters are deceived, manipulated and betrayed?

Why I use the Old Testament and The Torah

First of all, I am not Jewish, Christian, nor religious at all. 

I'm not here to convert anyone, but I will endeavor to show you something hopefully amazing, if hard to believe at first.

The Torah is not a religious work! Or rather, religion isn't the primary function of it.

The Torah is a map to "life, the universe, and everything" (with apologies to Douglas Adams)

That seems farfetched, I know. I'm not arguing the text directly contains the answers to all life's questions in encyclopedia-like form. No, it's more like an algebra textbook. It gives you a kind of formulaic way to navigate difficult situations. It gives you new perspectives on existing ideas. It gives you actually, a holistic and articulated model of reality if you know how to use it. It is also predictive of human behavior, and where I draw most of my insight into the human condition and experience.

It's a work of philosophy and sociology, but also a work intended to highlight empirical (and experience based) reality.

It can also be used to validate or reject secular ideas - within it is verificationism. 

The challenge of using it is it is very organic in how it was put together.

The Torah was not engineered/designed like most human works. It was grown, like a tree, or a cat.

How? Generational storytelling. For who knows how long, Jews told themselves folktales, that adapted and changed over time until they became highly reflective of human behavior and our experience of reality.

Finally, those were written down, but the oral tradition continues in tandem (at least for observant Jews, not for a gentile like me)

But even as I am not Jewish and will not experience the full measure of their system, there is incredible utility in the Tanakh.

The first step of using torah ("divine revelations"), is to treat them as the ultimate authority. Placing torah in this position is not an act of hubris. It is an act of wisdom, such that torah can then be used to validate other ideas and models for correctness. The supremacy of torah is not strictly a religious thing. It is simply that you cannot use it the way it operates without it being a singular authority. Just like you'd use the system of math as a singular authority to verify equations, you use the system of torah to validate ideas.

From Converting the Wisdom of Nations, part 1

The Torah is a totality. When a topic is discussed in the Torah it is seen from all possible perspectives. The Torah is described as a perfectly clarified wisdom ( חכמה ברורה ;(everything is present, nothing is missing. In contradistinction, the truths included in the wisdom of the nations are considered point‐like.

... 

Now, let us return to our distinction between Torah as a totality vs. the truth found in the wisdom of the nations inherently being in the point‐like stage. As a totality, the Torah represents not only a way of life, but a complete portrayal of reality. Whatever topic you may learn in the Torah, know that were you to invest yourself in it fully, you would come out with a full, mature, and complete understanding of it and how it relates to every other topic or issue in reality. That is what we mean by Torah being a totality. But, the wisdom of the nations can only portray fragments of reality. For this reason, the wisdom of the nations can never be treated as a complete system. Whatever true knowledge it is able to glean from reality that knowledge will always remain (on its own) incomplete.

I'd like to interject with a personal criticism of this above passage. I don't believe Torah to be perfect, and universally complete. I don't believe any human model is, and I still accept The Torah as a human work. I simply believe it's much closer in terms of a holistic model for a sort of unified "theory of everything" than anything I've ever encountered. So far, it's the best at approaching a ToE, in my experience.

What of science? Torah is compatible with the scientific method. Torah can be used to check a hypothesis and conclusion for consistency. Science can be used to verify your exegesis - or more specifically, your interpretations of the text. As Rambam, a 12th century rabbi said “We Should Accept the Truth From Whatever Source it Proceeds”

But Genesis 1, 2 and 3! Creationism! What of those? Are they not anti-science?

Pro-tip: Don't take your interpretation of this work from Christians. They don't get it.

Ask a rabbi how old the world is. Most of them would say it's ancient, far older than 6000 years, far older than the Jewish calendar, which simply started with the emergence of what I consider to be "modern man"

The other challenge with Genesis, and indeed almost all passages in this work is that it's all conveyed using allegory and metaphor. It's mythos - storytelling. Like the Brothers Grimm. Is "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" a true story? Of course it is! The point of the story is in fact valid - true, correct. The boy never actually existed. That's not the point.

Remember these are folktales.

Genesis is a true account of of the creation of our universe, inasmuch as "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is a true story.

If you want to see the underlying creation process, derived from The Torah, you need to look to Kabbalah, specifically Lurianic Kabbalah. See here, because this is important. You can see in there, if you squint, God contracts his "self" to make room for "Other" and then dramatically, within a very short frame of time creates the universe - this is the contraction that preceded the big bang, and the big bang that followed.

It's difficult to interpret these texts, particularly as a gentile. It helps to try to dovetail your understanding of science (start with some scientific law you're certain of) with an understanding of a related passage in the text, and eventually with enough reflection, and practice with scripture you can see how it fits. This isn't apologetics. It's a crutch someone not raised with Judaism must rely on (and absent the oral tradition which fleshes out the whole system) for want of something better. But with practice, reading the texts, trying to relate them to your understanding of the world, you can get better at understanding the "mind map" of Torah - kind of the underpinning mechanics of it.

For those of you that are still wondering about how mature/complete these stories are - how refined they are, keep in mind Hebrew is a alphanumeric language. Each letter has a numeric value.

The study of gematria is the study of The Torah basically translated to numbers.

In it there are a lot of patterns to be found. You cannot do this with the New Testament. Many have tried (From Converting the Wisdom of Nations linked at the beginning):

Let us end the first part of our topic by noting a beautiful numerical relationship. We have already noted that, quoting the language of the Zohar, “Torah comes from wisdom,” implying that Torah and wisdom are not the same thing. Though the revelation of the Torah is from wisdom, the ultimate source of the Torah is above wisdom in the very essence of God (as explicitly stated in the Zohar: ʺthe Torah and the Holy One blessed be He are oneʺ). The Torah unites all three faculties of the intellect wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, which indeed can only fully develop in the mind through the study of Torah. The numerical value of these four words in Hebrew, דעת בינה חכמה תורה ,is 1225, which is a unique number; it is both a square and a triangular number: 1225 = 352 = U49. We mentioned in passing above that square numbers symbolize completeness, maturity, and inter‐inclusion, the properties of rectification. Whenever the numerical value of a number of words together equals a square number, it tells us that these words go together and complete one another.19 Elsewhere, we have dealt with the significance of numbers that are both triangles and squares. The only 2 numbers before 1225 that share this property are (the trivial) 1, and 36; 36 = 62 = U8. Because 1225 is an odd number, it shares another property with 1 that 36 does not have: it has a midpoint. The midpoint of 1225 is 613, the total number of commandments in the Torah.

I do not use gematria, which I find about as "useful" as numerology (though maybe I just don't understand it)

However, the reason I bring it up is the only way these stories could have so many interdependent and unique numbers is because they were generationally refined.

I posit that the more mature a story is - the more it has been retold, the more regular it will become if you were to translate it to an alphanumeric language like Hebrew and then start relating the numbers together. A mature text will have many interlinked relationships. A text that has not been refined through generation storytelling will not.

Why? Simply because as stories are adapted, patterns/order starts to emerge. That's it. Nothing mystical.

If any of you have ever watched the movie Pi, the premise is basically correct, if a bit overexaggerated for the purpose of the story.

When you plot enough data points of any "grown" system, patterns emerge.

These patterns are the same across different systems. All "grown" systems have common patterns. The golden spiral or golden ratio is one of them. It's even reflected in our relative limb lengths on the human body.

Torah exploits this, because it too was grown, and the patterns in it reflect the patterns in nature.

These patterns are the "wiring in the walls" of our "dollhouse of existence" - they are artifacts of the mechanisms behind the creative force of the universe. There is an order, surrounded by chaos. But there is an order, or these common patterns would not and could not exist.

As much as I'd like to deep dive into some of the texts with you and show you specifically how they relate, each requires a lot of study.

One easy (I think) story to relate is Ezekiel 16 to the arc the US finds itself on. Even the plague is there. Disclaimer: The passage is highly impolitic by modern western standards. 

I'm going to leave you with this for now, and encourage you to read the work "Converting the Wisdom of Nations" - with an open mind - if you want to understand more. I am not a rabbi. I am just a 'lil monster that saw something neat.