2022 will be the year of the Drug Lords — Pfizer, Merck, Moderna, et al, paid for by you and me. How’s that new pill regimen, of three-a-day, twice daily (6) for five days (30) at $500 a dose from Pfizer, and you and I, taxpayer, are footing that bill.

Pfizer currently has 180,000 treatment courses available worldwide, with roughly 60,000 to 70,000 allocated to the U.S. Federal health officials are expected to ration early shipments to the hardest hit parts of the country. Pfizer said the small supply is due to the manufacturing time — currently about nine months. The company says it can halve production time next year.

The U.S. government has agreed to purchase enough Paxlovid to treat 10 million people. Pfizer says it’s on track to produce 80 million courses globally next year, under contracts with the U.K., Australia and other nations.

No question marks about this pill’s background, the technology, how close it is to anti-viral Ivermectin, etc.? Pfizer’s “drug” is part of a decades-old family of antiviral drugs known as protease inhibitors, which revolutionized the treatment of HIV and hepatitis C. The drugs block a key enzyme which viruses need to multiply in the human body. Again, where is the robust discussion about this drug? Price? And, here, feeding the Medical-Pharma-Insurance Complex:

Patients will need a positive COVID-19 test to get a prescription. And Paxlovid has only proven effective if given within five days of symptoms appearing. With testing supplies stretched, experts worry it may be unrealistic for patients to self-diagnose, get tested, see a physician and pick up a prescription within that narrow window. “If you go outside that window of time I fully expect the effectiveness of this drug is going to fall,” said Andrew Pekosz, a Johns Hopkins University virologist.

May we militate against the military — that complex tied to DARPA, NASA, CDC, ATF, FBI, CIA, ICE, NSA, SS, BP, FUSION, et al.

This film is a riveting saga of the creation of the Panthers in Oakland. Armed with guns and a law book, in 1966 Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale boldly patrolled Oakland’s mean streets, confronting the police over their (mis)treatment of Blacks. Insisting on their Second Amendment right to bear arms and that the so-called “pigs” must obey the letter of the law when interacting with African Americans, their brazen, in-your-snout defiance set Huey, Bobby, and their followers on a collision course with the Oakland PD, soon the Nixon administration, the FBI, and COINTELPRO (as harrowingly recounted in Judas and the Black Messiah).

The Black Power organization spread to Southern California, with the formation by former prisoner Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins of what was arguably the party’s most militant chapter in Los Angeles. The doc recounts the socialist-oriented Panthers’ clash with the so-called “porkchop” cultural nationalists of Ron Karenga’s US Organization, which apparently led to the 1968 shootings of Carter and Huggins at UCLA.

However, the film’s title refers to the climactic shoot-out between the LAPD and the Panthers at the BPP’s L.A. HQ located at 41st and Central in the “’hood.” One of the survivors of that tense confrontation declares onscreen that during this violent five-hour standoff he never felt freer, as he was a Black man deciding who would and would not enter the Panther office, which was even aerial bombed during the armed clash.

Kwanzaa, don’t believe it! —

Kwanzaa celebrates what its founder called the seven principles of Kwanzaa, or Nguzo Saba (originally Nguzu Saba – the seven principles of African Heritage). They were developed in 1965, a year before Kwanzaa itself. These seven principles comprise Kawaida, a Swahili word meaning “common”.

Each of the seven days of Kwanzaa is dedicated to one of the principles, as follows:

1. Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
2. Kujichagulia (Self-determination): To define and name ourselves, as well as to create and speak for ourselves.
3. Ujima (Collective work and responsibilitt): To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers’ and sisters’ problems our problems and to solve them together.
4. Ujamaa (Cooperative economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.
5. Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
6. Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
7. Imani (Faith): To believe with all our hearts in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

However, who started this odd thing, Kwanzaa? Bruce Dixon discusses, Black Agenda Report —

I don’t do Kwaanza, I just don’t. I never have, and the very thought of it evokes some difficult memories and feelings for me. It’s not the holiday’s religious trappings or its Afro-syncretic fusion of Jewish menorahs, Swahili words, Kemetic, Christian and other rituals. I understand people do have a perfect human right to adopt or make up the cultural and religious practices that suit them. Rastafarianism , Voudon , Santería  and Candomblé all borrow from multiple traditions, as does Islam from Judaism and Christianity, and Christianity from Judaism, Greek and Roman sources, and so on. So I have no quarrel whatsoever with those who celebrate and find value in Kwaanza.

But for many of us who took part in or were simply aware of the Black Panther Party in the late 60s and early 70s, the Kwaanza holiday is inseparable from the career and persona of its inventor, Ron Karenga, now a tenured professor in California. Back in the day, Karenga headed up an organization called US. As a tool of COINTELPRO , the federal counterintelligence program directed at movement organizations, Karenga’s US organization murdered 2 leading members of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins, and 2 more in San Diego, Sylvester Bell and John Savage. To my knowledge, Mr. Karenga has never expressed the faintest remorse or regret for these murders, or for his part in furthering the nefarious aims of federal and local police agencies in their assault upon the movement of those times. Karenga was later convicted along with his wife, of kidnapping and torturing two women in his own organization , a crime for which he served 4 years in prison, and one of which he still claims to be innocent. Some of Karenga’s close and credible associates however, like former US chair Wesley Kabaila , maintain Karenga was not only responsible for those women’s torture, but that it was part of an ongoing pattern over the years.

“I’m a feminist,” Kiilu Nyasha, a former Black Panther in New Haven CT told Black Agenda Report. “How can I honor a holiday made up by a man who tortures women in his own organization?”

She’s got a point. Just now, Spelman College is suspending its Bill and Camille Cosby endowed professorship , folks are hiding or throwing away their old Bill Cosby albums and places are covering up the Bill Cosby plaques inside the very buildings built with Cosby money. It’s their very imperfect way, if not of sympathizing with Bill’s long hidden victims, of at least disassociating themselves and their works from Cosby’s apparent crimes. It’s a reasonable precaution. After all, what would we think of charities and institutions who’d taken Cos’s money and loudly celebrated his generosity but couldn’t be bothered with the slightest acknowledgement of his victims?

The way many of us see it, people who celebrate Kwaanza and are getting something out of it should hold that high. We’re happy for them. It’s true enough that Kwaanza is now bigger than the crimes of its founder, and will outlive him. But that doesn’t mean Karenga’s crimes never happened or that they should be forgotten. Someone has to hold high the legacies and the work of John Huggins and Sylvester Bell, of John Savage and of Bunchy Carter. Somebody has to remember who they were, what they lived and served for. Somebody has to recall why they died and at whose hands. While you’re celebrating Kwaanza some of us will be doing that.

This is an archival interview from the upcoming film, 41st & Central: The Untold Story of the L.A. Black Panthers, a documentary series about the Southern California Chapter of The Black Panther Party For Self-Defense. Directed by Gregory Everett son of former L.A. chapter member Jeffrey Everettt. Co-produced by former L.A. chapter member Roland Freeman.

SYNOPSIS: 41st & Central, a two-part documentary series, follows the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party from its glorious Black Power beginnings through to its tragic demise. Despite the Party’s formation of free medical clinics and a successful breakfast program for children, the L.A. chapter was also known as the most violent Black political group in the United States. 41st & Central explores The Black Panther ethos, its conflict with the L.A.P.D. and the US Organization as well as the events that shaped the complicated and often contradictory legacy of the L.A. Panthers.

41st & Central contains interviews with former Black Panther Party members along with archival footage detailing the history of racism in Los Angeles, including the Watts uprising from the perspective of the participants who engaged with the L.A.P.D. 41st & Central is the most in-depth study ever of L.A. Chapter founder Alprentice Bunchy Carter, with the Party’s formation told by the original surviving members and an eyewitness account of Bunchy and John Huggins murder at U.C.L.A. in 1969. The film includes exclusive interviews with Black Panther Party leaders Geronimo Ji Jagga and Elaine Brown about their membership in the L.A. Chapter and the U.C.L.A. murders. Also featured are L.A. Panthers members Ericka Huggins, Roland & Ronald Freeman, Wayne Pharr, Jeffrey Everett, Long John Washington, Muhammad Mubarak, former L.A.P.D. Chief Bernard Parks, US Organization member Wesley Kabaila, U.C.L.A. Professor Scot Brown, and many others.

Why Black Panthers Don’t Celebrate Kwanzaa –Episode 1001

January 1, 2019 – David Feldman Radio Show, 

Framing the sophisticated ways of today in terms of harvesting our youth’s souls, Alison McDowell does a decent job, but her voice is a cry in the wilderness.

Elizabeth Hinton’s From The War On Poverty To The War On Crime for further insights into the ways in which the social safety net of Johnson’s Great Society was used to extend police presence in communities of color through public housing and afterschool programs. In this ten-minute clip, Jason Bosch of Argusfest and I discuss the topic on the grounds of the UT Austin campus on a shady hill overlooking the LBJ presidential library and graduate school of public affairs.

And, what would the BPP say about all this nefarious COINTELPRO of the AI-Digital-Social Impact Investing kind? Blockchains! This is a machine, and the intent is to help, but you get caught up in the soul mashing gearwork of these machines, now computing controlling machines.

There are many parallels to what is being set up for the children in Rio and what has happened to the children of Philadelphia over the past decade. Despite the geographic distance, the playbook and many of the organizations are the same. What Silicon Valley needs next is digital ID, programmable money, and real-time geo-fencing to begin to enforce their planned cybernetic remaking of society. This will be systems engineering at scale from individual neurons tweaked with targeted dopamine hits and nanotechnology to entire populations groomed through ubiquitous computing embedded in smart-city mixed reality to offer up their data, interoperable on blockchain, to the hivemind. There will be gaming, lots of gaming, paid in digital scrip and aligned with performative identity scripted by the Global North in a misguided attempt to erase indigeneity and optimize soul harvest. It’s all framed in terms of saving the planet and solving poverty, of course. They’ve set up the framework so that any attempt to resist appears unseemly, selfish, and even racist.

It is vital that more people start to understand how social entrepreneurs and impact investors intend to corral today’s youth into mixed reality; take away their economic independence; condition them to a surveillance panopticon; farm them for compliance data; and package their futures as commodities to be traded as asset backed securities rated based on how they utilize privatized welfare or blockchain Universal Basic Income.