As you should know, Naomi Wolf, former Clinton advisor, is now on the COVID denialism bandwagon. She has gotten worse. Much worse. She has come out with a video denouncing the COVID-19 vaccine as a nanotechnology upload that can be manipulated by developers. Mind control! Tracking! Who knows what nefarious schemes these people are up to.
Note: I have not seen the video. It’s banned everywhere because she’s spreading gross medical misinformation. She has talked about it on Twitter, though, and affirmed that she really wrote this.
You know, I read the Moderna website and the sources in my video about how the mRNA is not actually a vaccine but a software platform. I actually work with developers who create software so I understand how dangerous it is to have a tech in one’s body that can receive ‘uploads’.
Here’s a link directly to it, if you can’t believe she would say something so stupid. Oh, yeah, she works with software developers so she knows this is possible. She’s also the CEO of a data tech company so she has inside info on Apple’s time travel technology.
Untrue. ‘Time Travel’ as noted in my much-banned video, is an Apple product. A self-described Apple employee reported a product unveiled at a secret Apple product demo that used ‘Time Travel’ in a medical nanoparticle delivery technology. I am CEO of a data tech company so…
Oh boy. Time travel. That’ll be one killer app.
As a branding exercise, though, Wolf has some potent kool-aid. She’s got a fog of science denialists cheerleading everything she writes, and she got invited on the Tucker Carlson show. That’s peak internet famous, right? Getting to promote your nonsense on Tucker Carlson?
She’s so full of herself that now she has offered to join the Republican team in South Dakota.
@govkristinoem
I’ve been a lifelong Dem, Clinton/ Gore team advisor. I don’t agree w/many GOP positions. But basic liberty is being destroyed by Biden/Harris. If you run for Pres., restore freedoms, I’ll do all I can to mobilize support. Heck, I’d join your team if asked.
Please, please, please do.
OMNEG. This is why we should all stop referring to “the genetic code”. Because idiots and engineers think they understand “code”.
Just for the record, once the mRNA vaccine is inside your body there is no workable way to alter it or interact with it. But I waste my keystrokes.
Did she misunderstand what Time Machine™ is for? Holy crap, she really has either gone off the deep end, or has realized just how much money she can make fleecing the sheep by joining forces with the professionals.
I try to joke about far-right madness, but there is nothing I can write about Naomi Wolf that would not be upstaged by her own comments.
I look forward to learn how this ties in with the alien reptiles living in Buckingham Palace.
Maybe it’s all part of a nefarious plan to bring Steve Jobs back to life as a zombie (with some kind of nefarious reprogramming of course).
Maybe Hugo Chavez and some election machine company are involved. May as well get bankrupted as a way of showing your sincerity, right?
Sans teh added woo-woo, the loon in the OP’s conspiracy theory is disturbingly similar to one hypothesis I jokingly suggested back in January (in poopyhead’s then-current [Pandemic and] Political Madness All the Time, wit some Tpyos offerrrings silenlty correccted):
How would nanotechnology in my body receive updates? Where is the wi-fi router located? In my appendix?
Your appendix? That little knot of immune system tissue? That would make sense.
I think you’ve gotten too close to the truth. Expect a knock on your door soon.
That is some serious delusionality. Of course the mRNA in the vaccine is destroyed by the cell once it’s done making proteins. The only permanent change is that you now have antibodies to Covid. That’s it. Completely nuts.
Once there is enough vaccine that everyone worldwide who wants it can get it, we may be entering a phase where there is a global pandemic that mostly just kills stupid people. If I was a member of an evil liberal global conspiracy, that would seem like a far better goal than just putting microchips in everybody. It should help us win more elections, for one thing.
QFT.
This woman is completely out of contact with reality. To the point where she is no longer capable of functioning in society.
She didn’t read the Moderna website because it says no such thing.
She doesn’t even know the difference between mRNA, a long biochemical polymer found in every cell, and computer software, human created instructions on computer media that operate digital devices.
The basic point could be understood by an average gradeschooler.
What the hell happens in the brain of someone like this? Weapons-grade crazy.
Has she been huffing mercury fumes or something?
LOL.
The Democratic party would be way ahead if she left for the GOP.
It’s probably not even worth it for them to push her out.
Someone this delusional is insignificant. Unless they are in the GOP, in which case, they are average Republicans.
Naomi Wolf has managed to self-cancel herself. She is done everywhere except the lunatic fringes.
7 Aha, so the appendix isn’t vestigia! God knew we’d need it for this one day. Ken Ham is right.
BTW what is she a doctor of – is it in a Gillian McKeith kind of way, or a real MD in a similar revisionist way to Georgia Purdom being a biochemist?
True.
That is what faith healing and anti-vaxx does.
The mortality rate of children 0 to 18 is 25% in those cults, 50X higher than normal people.
The Covid-19 virus vaccine refusers in the USA are now about 33%, a third.
I’m not overly concerned about them.
Everyone will get vaccinated against Covid-19 virus anyway.
This virus is very easily spread and diffuse, meaning it is everywhere.
All the vaccine refusers will eventually get Covid-19 virus and end up vaccinated whether they like it or not. They just get the disease and the possibility of being dead or a long hauler thrown in as well.
I suspect that a lot of the refusers will eventually get vaccinated.
We all know a lot of people that have gotten the vaccine by now, and nothing much bad has happened to them.
It is a lot better than trying to dodge death for the rest of your life.
The Apple product “Time Travel” is just part of the operating system of the Apple watch.
It has nothing to do with a “medical nanoparticle delivery system”.
Ironically, there is nothing wrong with medical nanoparticle delivery systems.
The 4 lipids in the Moderna and Pfizer mRNA vaccines are part of a medical nanoparticle delivery system. Without them, it doesn’t work.
Wolf is beyond delusional but we don’t have a word for that.
@ajbjasus Wolf received her Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature from Trinity College, Oxford in 2015.
Not so qualified to talk about medicine then.
As an aside I was next door at Balliol, which had a silly feud with Trinity, but this is quite interesting –
“The rivalry was given an extra edge in the early 20th century by the contrast between the radical tendencies of many Balliol students and Trinity’s traditional conservatism and social exclusivity. The president of Trinity between 1907 and 1938 was Herbert Blakiston, who became notorious for his reluctance to admit non-white students”
@raven Someone should warn her that Apple has been calling its backup software Time Machine for the last 13 years. I expect someone has already constructed a deranged conspiracy fantasy about this.
littlelocomotive@7
Too easy! It will come in those little juice boxes that Alex Jones says contain “estrogen mimickers” as part of a secret plot to turn us into girly men.
Wolf has been self-destroying her reputation and life for a while.
Oddly enough, according to the Vox article above, at one time she actually did some respectable academic work and was capable of acting like a normal person.
It’s a huge mystery what happened to her mind.
I got my first vaccine shot a couple of days ago and I feel much calmer now that Bill Gates can control my thoughts with his TV remote.
If there’s a conspiracy by secret and powerful organizations to do anything like that, they must be doing an amazing job keeping it secret. All I have noticed for years is a complete shit show. Yes, there are powerful entities, but when they try to do stuff, it’s usually very obvious, and usually planned very poorly (but often doesn’t matter because they do hold the power at the end of the day). Conspiracy theories seem to be driven by a belief that there are organizations competent enough to carry out the most subtle and nefarious plans. There is a lot of harm going on, but very little of it is difficult to see or read the purpose of. There are evil people in the world and what they do is carried out openly because they know they can get away with it.
If the “router” for the vaccine is in the appendix, I’m safe. Haven’t had one for getting on for 50 years. As for the vaccine itself, got my first shot yesterday and have an appointment on 3/27 for the second shot.
I’m a bit amused by how much mileage she wants to get out of being “CEO of a tech company”. Daily Clout is not a tech company. And even if it were, well, you know all the jokes about CEOs and tech.
“CEO of a tech company” Isn’t that just a LinkedIn euphemism for “unemployed”?
As with many conspiracy theories, one of the annoying things about this is that it’s borrowing a grain of truth from a real issue that it’ll now make harder to discuss. There is an issue with malicious actors manipulating software in your body from afar… but it’s to do with the wireless security of implanted devices like pacemakers or insulin pumps, which (like anything with networking) can be compromised, and which (being as how they’re surgically put inside your body) are difficult to update to patch a vulnerability once one is found (because if you can push updates remotely, that itself is a vulnerability…) That’s a pretty serious concern, but now attempts to address it will have to do extra work to distance themselves from cranks who think Bill Gates can program nanotechnological viruses from the Cloud.
ajbjasus::
With no engineering or computer science degree not qualified to talk about either software or hardware.
Morgan@28 Insulin pumps, I never even thought of that. I have a friend with type 1 adult onset diabetes who injects himself manually (last time I saw anyway, granted some years back; has to every time we meet for lunch). He can do all the calculation he needs in his head and it’s not a big deal to him. But I can imagine those who might benefit greatly from an insulin pump falling prey to a conspiracy theory. That sounds like a catastrophe. I wonder if it happens much or if people come to their senses when they realize there is something that can improve their life.
Well, that’s Vox for you.
Not academic work — popular books for a general audience, as well as some articles in the popular press. Her wiki page. Starting with the first book in 1991, they’ve consistently been criticized for sloppiness and so forth. Her PhD in English Literature was completed just recently in 2015.
“Tech company” seems a largely meaningless buzzphrase. Another example is “cyber”.
A blacksmith’s shop could be called a “tech company” (and should be, if the loon thinks daily clod is also). Various technologies — fire, mechanical manipulation, &tc — are skillfully used to product items, sometimes useful, sometimes decorative, and sometimes quite intricate and clever.
brucegee1962@10, raven@16,
Unfortunately there are people who can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons, and none of the vaccines give 100% protection, particularly if you’ve got a dodgy immune system – because you’re old, for example, or have any one of a variety of illnesses or disabilities. Moreover, the more people remain unvaccinated, the higher the chances of variants that the vaccines do not protect against arising. The anti-vaxxers really do constitute a threat to us all.
blf@32 I would find “proprietor of such and such blacksmith” a lot more impressive than “tech CEO” if I knew the address of the shop and could look in and see someone with a forge and an anvil. I could be “CEO of a tech company” in my dreams and on LinkedIn at the cost of a few keystrokes. I could conceivably be CEO of a profitable “tech company” just by looking up a couple of contacts and seeing if they have any work for me, which they might not, but there’s a good chance of it.
It’s more lucrative for me to stay employed, and when I see people with their own company listed, it’s often a safe bet that there’s nothing behind it. Sometimes there was a business, but the name has a way of persisting long after activity has ceased.
KG@33
I worry about that a lot. We need a much faster rollout.
PaulBC@35,
Indeed. And it needs to be worldwide. At present, I’ve seen estimates that many poor countries won’t be able to vaccinate much of their population until 2024.
@PaulBC, thankfully, there have been no recorded instances of anyone remotely hacking medical implants, save with non-implanted devices being hacked as a proof of concept.
That’s a good thing, as could you picture what could happen if a murderous hacker brought their laptop to a Trump rally?
After all, to stop a bad guy with a laptop, all one needs is a good guy with a laptop.
wzrd1@37 To be clear, I’m a lot more worried about somebody refusing an insulin pump because they have been watching too much Alex Jones or similar. Granted, you don’t need an insulin pump (my other point) but they probably do help a lot of people.
The insanity virus sweeping America is more easily transmissible than covid.
As for blacksmith… For a number of years, a friend of mine made a living making armor (helms, mostly) for SCA combat. One day, looking out his shop window, he saw someone trying to steal a bicycle. After coming outside to confront the would-be thief, said attempted thief dropped into a “wanna be” martial arts stance. My friend just stood there and looked at him and said, “You want to start a fist fight with a blacksmith?” Said thief turned and sprinted away.
Re: KG @ #33…
There are reports in the news that Moderna is working on a third–“booster”–shot to cover at least one of the variants that have cropped up.
There has also been talk of possible annual booster/variant vaccines (like the annual flu shots) being needed. It may turn out to be an interesting decade…or–perhaps–century.
@40, Laughs !
Just in case anyone thinks I was disparaging blacksmiths or blacksmithery, I was not, just using them, their skills & art, tools, and items so-produced an example of “tech”. An ancient and important tech.
This “nanocomputers living in your body” fear got its unfortunate start on September 25, 1989, with the first broadcast of the TV episode “Evolution” on the show Star Trek: The Next Generation. Naomi Wolf was 27 then, so she probably saw the show.
In the episode, Wesley Crusher (a teenager who is such a genius that he can’t even fall asleep over a science experiment without inadventently creating a new life-form), allows the “nannites” (nano-scale robots that are injected into humans to effect medical repairs on the molecular level) get together and become intelligent and sentient, letting hell break loose. And so, a conspiracy theory/societal fear was born. We have to make it revolve around Apple or Bill Gates, since we haven’t a teen-aged genius at hand.
So, once again, we see life imitating art, or, at least, imitating TV.
That’s AMAZING! I have so many questions. Does it support .Net? Is there a VS emulator? What kind of interface does it use? Can I program the vaccine directly, or do I need to send the code out to be updated in the syringe? Would it be easier to code in Assembler? Is it a RISC platform?
Wolf isn’t capable of even simple coherent thought.
This doesn’t make any sense.
We already had Ebola in the USA. It’s a replicating virus and there were already stocks in many freezers in many labs throughout the USA.
Our problem at the time was keeping the Ebola virus out of the USA and even so, we still had a few cases here, two fatal.
Since Ebola can be replicated in cell culture, how much Ebola we have is limited to how much we want to make.
@43 garnetstar
The “nanobots get into your bloodstream, evolve, and achieve sentience” plot goes back even farther than that Star Trek episode — the first published example I know of is Greg Bear’s excellent novel “Blood Music” from 1985. ST may have borrowed from that. There may be earlier examples as well.
Nanocomputers hiding in the body could be programmed to mine bitcoin! Lose weight (due to energy consumption) stay warm in the winter (raised metabolism) and get rich! Win win win!
What is the API for the nanoconputers?
@43, Richard Feynman’s famous 1959 lecture, There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom touches on biological nanotech, albeit as a mechanism rather than putting nanocomputers into the body. (I do not know if his revised 1984 lecture visits the idea.)
brucegee1962 @46, that’s good. It’s always better when life imitates literature instead of TV. It’s usually better-written.
Although, life imitating art, especially conspiracy theories or existential dangers, is not a great idea in general, due to the old canard:
Q: What is the difference between life and art?
A: In art, you have an editor.
@18, @19: Dr. Wolf’s dissertation (presumably; certainly the popular book she wrote based on it, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, 2019) had a serious error in it that really should have been caught by her (Oxford!) thesis advisor, or her committee, or (one would hope) her publishers. Or, of course, the author.
Outrages was, in fact, cancelled by its US publisher. So Dr. Wolf is that rare victim of Cancel Culture who actually has been cancelled. And still she persists.
@46, According to Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge:
Not exactly the “nanobots get into your bloodstream, evolve, and achieve sentience” plotline, and maybe not technically nanoscale (Ye Pffft! is unclear). There are other early examples listed, albeit with caveats.
It occurs to me the 1966 Fantastic Voyage, whilst again not quite nanoscale, etc., might also be considered an early example — perhaps a stretch, as that movie / book was “shrinking” stuff, not building extremely small stuff.
There are.
I remember a short SF story from the 1950’s or 1960’s. Well written and interesting especially for the time.
A human is invaded by UFO aliens when their spaceship explodes.
These aliens are the size of microbes and their spaceship is the size of a bullet.
They make the human into their own country and control its life so their country remains healthy.
He eventually meets a woman who had the same thing happen.
They are going to get married and the two UFO nations have a celebration.
While the aliens are celebrating, the two humans raid the medicine cabinet and take all the pills.
Some of which are antibiotics.
The aliens end up dead. So does one of the humans.
Title? Author? Don’t know, this was decades ago.
Even Google isn’t helping here.
me@50, Oops! Sorry, borked link, should be Ye Pfffft! of All Knowledge.
And of course in me@53 I meant me@51…
Notice to trumpists: the elites have spread the myth it is dangerous to stick a metal fork into an electric outlet, because they do not want you to share the rejuvenating effects of the process.
raven@52, Maybe Hal Clement’s 1950 Needle ? The description doesn’t quite match yours, but there do seem to be multiple similarities.
I kinda understand how a “platform” can be used to describe the mRNA vaccine: you don’t inject the final product, you inject the sequence and use your body to assemble the final product. “Updates” are used in a similar way: when a new (enough) variant emerges, you update the sequence to create a new vaccine. This analogy, albeit not good, can be helpful to people familiar with software development, if it is made clear that 1) it’s just an analogy, nothing from actual software development can and will be involved, now or for the foreseeable future; and therefore 2) the final “deployment” for any “updates” still needs to be done via a jab.
However, for people with no idea how either vaccine or software development works but pretends to know both, this analogy is a disaster and will be used as “proof” of this kind of BS.
raven @52, Inside John Barth, by William W. Stuart
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28608/28608-h/28608-h.htm
blacksmiths and forging steel has not gone away in any sense. besides the artisan/craftsman blacksmith making reproduction hardware, it is a major industrial technology using huge machines and induction furnaces to make all manner of products.we are still being carried and supported by the blacksmiths art. it is an indispensable technology.
uncle frogy
blf@56
No it isn’t that one.
These UFO aliens were the size of bacteria and they referred to their human host as their country.
When they first invaded, they had a huge battle to rid their country of the previous residents, those being our normal microbial flora.
It was also a short story, not a novel.
I get a lot of hits from Google, some of which I’ve also read, but not for this story.
AstrySol@57 It would make sense to me if a vaccine “platform” existed in a sense vaguely analogous to software. Instead of starting a new R&D project every time a disease came along, wouldn’t it be nice if you could just sequence the virus, and then keep the same drug and delivery method but with a different RNA strand based on the specific pathogen? I have no idea how far we are from this. I think maybe we’re at least a little closer now, and that’s good news.
(No idea if that’s what they’re getting at with this use of the word. I am just analogizing from software.)
The immune system itself is a disease fighting “platform.” Instead of having some completely ad hoc way to fight every disease, large classes can be handled by the same overall approaches using antibodies and T-cell receptors specific to the pathogen.
However, I don’t think the vaccine “platform” would exist inside the body. The vaccines would be products of this platform (even the mRNA ones that trick your cells into making copies of antigen).
John Morales @ 58
Bingo!!!
Yes, that is the one.
Galaxy 1960.
One of the few details I remember is that the first human invaded was named Barthland.
Your Google skills are very good.
Thanks for finding that one.
To anyone who wants to, the link of John Morales has the entire short story.
It’s not long and I just reread parts of it. It’s still good and surprising from so long ago, 1960.
John @58: Was that google fu, depth of SF knowledge, or a combo? Any way, I’m impressed.
Apparently, the Time Travel feature was removed from Apple watchOS with version 5. Per reports, this was because of users weren’t using it.
two things about this phenomena that “puzzle” (for want of a better word) how do people believe and come up with ideas so divorced from reality and how is it that they any credence i at all so many people?
uncle frogy
any credence with so many people
robro@64
Are you sure they didn’t use it to keep their own parents from meeting? (No doubt as a side effect of trying to smother baby Hitler with a pillow.)
RG@63 JM@58 Agree it was pretty impressive either as encyclopedic knowledge of SF or finding the right keywords. I only skimmed in a couple of pages but I assume it’s correct.
Paul, I Googled.
—
On-topic, I can instantly tell Naomi is clueless because she writes about receiving uploads; sending data out is uploading, receiving data is downloading.
[sigh]
That’s depressing.
@JM — All downloads are also uploads, as someone had to put the data there for download.
John Morales@69 I have been trying to track down a science fiction story I read as a kid about books flying away by flapping their covers. I had thought it was in a pretty standard collection of old stories from the 50s or 60s, and I must have read it in the 70s. If I recall, the conflict is between people who think it is pretty cool and like watching the books fly and others who are appalled by the idea, but I think it ends with the protagonist (who wants to keep the books) releasing the world’s last book in resignation and watching it fly away.
I have never been able to find this, and today’s googling just found a bunch of other stories that revisited the same idea, so I’m no better off. I didn’t even think it was that great a story. It just bugs me I can’t find it. I think it was in an anthology that also included a story about a discarded rag coming to life.
At one point I connected it in my mind to Philip K. Dick’s The Preserving Machine (about an inventor trying to preserve works of classical music by transforming them into animals that could survive in nature; spoiler: it doesn’t work). Anyway, it was years later that I found out Dick had written that, but he hadn’t written the others.
Anyone know? Google is pretty good, but there are still things I can’t find. There’s also a TV commercial for a tech school from the late 70s or early 80s where a satisfied student says “I feel good when the program I write, runs.” I can’t find that either, though I can find a lot of other ephemera preserved on YouTube.
JM@69
Maybe she considers herself the central server of humanity.
OK, The Rag Thing by Donald A. Wollheim was pretty easy to find. Maybe if I can find an anthology that includes that. I don’t think I have ever tried that approach before.
Pandemic and Genome by A.G.Riddle 2017.
Protagonists start a pandemic that kills billions to force the population to take a vaccine with nano bots. The bots are activated by signal balloons so they can control people and find out……where the universe came from.
How do people beleive concepts like this? Same as religious beleif I’m guessing. They want simple and authoritarian.
Apparently, she specialized in modern fantasy fiction.
The best part is, she confirmed it with a “self-described Apple Eployee”. That’s Investigative Journalism,.. you sheeple!
Interestingly enough, I spoke to the self-described Pope on the street the other day. He was dingy-er than I expected but he sure did have some amazing things to tell me, though not about time travel.
People writing on their smartphones and FaceBook about evil tracking chips is endlessly amusing.
Two good resources for locating and indentifing SF stories….
To find them, post on one of the rec.arts.sf.* groups, starting the subject line with YASID (Yet Another Story ID) and provide as much information about as you can.
To locate anthologies and such, ISFDB (Internet SF Database).
Paul re #69: Had a look for a couple of minutes, did not find.
Presumably, you’re aware of Google’s advanced search operators.
If not:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ydVaJJeL1EYbWtlfj9TPfBTE5IBADkQfZrQaBZxqXGs/edit
[um, re #72, obs]
@80 I sometimes use site: and -. It’s very rare that I fail to find what I need with a simple keyword search. That was the first thing I noticed and liked about google some time in 1999. I had been a committed Alta Vista user before then. If I’m ever feeling motivated I may try harder.
It seems unlikely that I imagined the existence of this story. It may not have been in the same anthology as The Rag Thing after all. That’s in Omnibus of Science Fiction for one thing, which may be where I read it. I have a vague recollection that I was reading a book that was in a public place where I had to wait for a while, like at a hospital (I wasn’t the patient). It’s possible more than one book was involved so it is all kind of jumbled together. I think I once had a chance to skim Omnibus and it is not in there.
PaulBC @61, I think this is the ideal the researchers are aiming at. Theoretically the mRNA vaccine design can be such a “platform” that you just need to replace the sequence with whatever the genetic code for the surface antigen of new virus is, and it should just work most of the time. Everything else, including the delivery method, should only need minimum changes, if any. This is why both providers said they could have very short turnaround time to create vaccines for any SARS-CoV-2 variants.
And yes, this platform is definitely not running in the body, and the actual vaccine is a product of said platform.
So basically there are two things that can be described as platforms: one is the immune system, where mRNA vaccines used to build the final antigen; the other is the mRNA vaccine design, where we just replace genetic sequence to “update” the vaccines. The first one runs in the body but is not controlled in the long term, or “updatable”. The second one gets updates but runs in the lab. This can be a problem if the end products are not tested at all before rolling out, though it’s not very likely to happen. (FDA says those updates don’t need full sets of clinical trials and is deciding how much will be needed, but unlikely to be none especially under this administration.)
PaulBC@61,
Vaccine designers talk about “vaccine platforms”, meaning modified or synthetic viruses that can be used as the basis of multiple vaccines. It may be that Wolf has come across this and in her ignorance, garbled the idea.
@KG, possibly that and “viral programs”, such as the HIV latency program. Or the varicella latency program.
Mother Nature’s bioweapons labs produce horrific computers, or something.
KG@86 Thanks. That explanation makes sense.
Had my first dose today ,can’t say someone is controlling my mind ,but every time i yawn the TV changes channels
@timgueguen Wolf finally dragged that doctorate out of Oxford by making herself an insufferable nuisance; she finished the degree THIRTY YEARS after starting at Oxford and they are still hiding her laughable ‘thesis’ and refusing to allow it to be viewed (illegal according to their own rules.) Wolf was and is a lying laughingstock.