World Economic Forum as covered by the New York Times and the Daily Mail

by philg

Our lab director at MIT went to Davos back in the 1990s and then worked it into every conversation for the next 12 months. If you said “pass the salt please” he would respond “That reminds me of when Bill Gates asked me to pass him the salt at Davos.”

What’s going on this year? The billionaire CEO of Moderna give us his opinion of the peasants who funded his elite lifestyle with their tax dollars:

Let’s see how the World Economic Forum, which concludes today, is covered in the New York Times. Donald Trump, Greta Thunberg, and Climate Change are the stars (Trump featured twice!):

For some reason, all of the articles on this page are from 2020 (SARS-CoV-2 thanked these elites for gathering/dispersing in January 2020, no doubt!). From this week’s Gulfstream-enabled event in Davos, “As Humanitarian Crises Escalate, So Do Demands to End Them”:

David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee, says the global refugee crisis “is manageable, not insoluble.”

The group, whose founding was precipitated in the 1930s by Albert Einstein, a refugee himself, deploys more than 40,000 staff members and volunteers in 40 countries.

[the refugee crisis] is, right now, concentrated in relatively few countries. It’s about a hundred million people. The number has more or less tripled in the last decade. If you listened to some media, you’d think that Western Europe or Britain or America host most refugees. They don’t. Most are in countries like Lebanon or Jordan or Turkey or Bangladesh or Uganda.

But it can be managed. The refugee crisis is one of the global risks, alongside climate and health pandemics, that have been monstrously undermanaged and mismanaged in this phase of globalization these past 20 years.

My message to the people going to Davos is that if they are to continue to reap the benefits of globalization, they have to be willing to bear the burdens of globalization. The “burdens” refer to those who make the rules for how the world deals with the transnational needs that arise in a connected world.

What has caused the number of refugees to triple in the last 20 years?

Well, we know the answer to that. Civil wars. They represent 80 percent of the driver of humanitarian need. Second, the climate crisis, which for many people is a contributor to conflict and the flight of people. But the fundamental reason we have more refugees is that we’ve had more, longer and more virulent civil wars around the world

Once all of the folks who fought civil wars against each other have migrated to Europe and the U.S. they will be content and will stop fighting?

Let’s turn to the Daily Mail… “Prostitutes gather in Davos for annual meeting of global elite – where demand for sexual services rockets during economic summit”:

One sex worker named Liana said she dresses in business attire so she doesn’t stand out among the executives, despite prostitution being legal in Switzerland.

She told Bild she regularly sees an American who visits Switzerland multiple times a year and is among the 2,700 conference attendees.

Liana charges around €700 ($760) for an hour and €2,300 ($2,500) for the whole night, plus travel expenses.

The manager of one escort service in Aargau, 100 miles away from the summit, says she has already received 11 bookings and 25 inquiries – and expects many more to follow this week.

She told 20 Minuten: ‘Some also book escorts for themselves and their employees to party in the hotel suite.’

In 2020, an investigation by The Times found at least 100 prostitutes travel to Davos for the summit according to a Swiss police officer.

(Fact check: Wikipedia says “Prostitution in Switzerland is legal and regulated; it has been legal since 1942.”)

Are these journalists going to the same event?

Readers: What’s been interesting to you regarding the World Economic Forum/Davos 2023? Can you please use the comment section to post your favorite video clips of people talking there? The defrosted Al Gore, for example.

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14 thoughts on “World Economic Forum as covered by the New York Times and the Daily Mail”

  1. In addition to furthering the #MeToo cause as described in the Daily Mail, the WEF also furthers (but denies involvement) the BIPOC cause by looking for blonde hostesses:

    https://switzerlandtimes.ch/business/wef-distances-itself-from-sexist-advertisement-for-blondes/

    A Swiss company is looking for hostesses for the World Economic Forum. However, they must be blond, more than 1.70 meters tall and “aged between 18 and 26 in order to properly represent our company”. The WEF wants nothing to do with the ad.

  2. Sorry, I don’t have any videos of speakers, but I was fascinated to read this tidbit from the Daily Mail article:

    “Salome Balthus, a sex worker and writer, posted on Twitter: ‘Date in Switzerland during #WWF means looking at the gun muzzles of security guards in the hotel corridor at 2 a.m. – and then sharing the giveaway chocolates from the restaurant with them and gossiping about the rich… #Davos #WEF.'”

    So let’s look at this from a security point of view. You have heavily armed guards in the hallways at 2 a.m., but all the menacing firepower and personnel can be distracted and charmed into water cooler gossip by a hooker brandishing chocolates from the hotel restaurant. That’s some awesome security!

    Considering the source, this may just be a heavily embellished anecdote, but what if it’s true?

    • The security threat is crazed “normal” people, not high-class escorts. Think black bloc, Alex Jones, or the like. Nobody that does honey traps is a threat to these people.

  3. This video reveals the purpose of the WEF. Nadella is pitching GitHub Copilot to politicians. There is a huge controversy around that tool, because it is trained on Open Source code and there have been instances of code laundering, i.e., stripping the licenses and the credit while regurgitating the code verbatim. Tellingly, the tool is not trained on Microsoft closed source code.

    So, this is a great opportunity to influence legislation:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOiGU2exv0U

    This video reveals the elevated nature of the participants. John Kerry, who married well, complains about adults not grasping Science, mathematics and physics (3:50) and then contrasts the peasants with the select nature (almost extraterrestrial) of WEF participants (4:30):

    • Thanks for the Kerry video! The guy who majored in poly sci and hasn’t taken a science or math course since high school complains that others aren’t wearing out their brains with science and math? “Half the species of the planet have already been killed,” says Kerry. I’m pretty sure that this is wrong given that most species are insects and insects are difficult to eradicate (though Florida does an awesome job in the war against mosquitoes!).

      The enthusiasm of politicians who’ve been hugely successful (power+money) without ever learning anything scientific or technical beyond high school for sci/tech is fascinating!

  4. Figure the price of prostitutes is a lot higher since the last round of quantitative easing. Only yesterday, it was $300/hour. Even $760 is less than what guys spend on doing it the righteous way.

  5. I’ve never understood why we’re enthusiastic about importing men from places that are so bad that women are granted automatic refugee status because of things like “rape gangs”

    • The healthcare technocrats in government-run systems (“death panels”) don’t look at “lives saved” (as you are attempting to do), but rather life-years. The Swedes estimated that half of their residents tagged as having died from COVID-19 (median age: 82) would have died within the year. So the loss of life-years was perhaps about the same as the number of “lives” lost.

      Humans need to evolve an immune system capable of dealing with SARS-CoV-2. It is much too early to know whether mass vaccination, including injecting people who were never at substantial risk from COVID-19, saved life-years or cost life-years.

      Let’s look at how Science evolves… “Countries where everyone wore masks saw COVID death rates 100 times lower than projected” (June 23, 2020; https://www.fastcompany.com/90519909/countries-where-everyone-wears-masks-saw-covid-death-rates-100-times-lower-than-projected ) highlights forced-masked Slovakia as a big success story. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-mortality-p-scores-projected-baseline?tab=table shows that Slovakia suffered “excess deaths” of about 18 percent since the beginning of coronapanic. Compare to 5 percent for no-mask Sweden.

      If you wanted to use $80 billion plus state and corporate coercion to save life-years, the experimental injections were incredibly inefficient. Instead of firing people for not getting injected, you’d fire them for having a BMI over 25. Instead of excluding the un-injected from public life, such as restaurants, you’d exclude anyone with a BMI over 25. The state would ban the sale of candy. Ice cream would be rationed and heavily taxed. Except for noble asylum-seekers (unlike Djokovic, exempt from any vaccination requirement for travel to the U.S.), residents of the U.S. would have to do morning calisthenics, potentially monitored by low-wage workers in foreign countries via Zoom:

      The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers. … The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes. … ‘Thirty to forty group!’ yapped a piercing female voice. ‘Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to forties!’ Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already appeared. ‘Arms bending and stretching!’ she rapped out. ‘Take your time by me. One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! …’ … ‘Smith!’ screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. ‘6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! That’s better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.’

    • Philip — You seem to be talking around the issue to avoid answering the question.

      It’s fine to think in terms of healthy years instead of lives.

      Sounds like the US spent $30B on the vaccine (https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/how-much-could-covid-19-vaccines-cost-the-u-s-after-commercialization/)

      These other numbers are debatable, but how about

      – 1 million lives saved
      – Average 4 additional years

      Therefore, lived saved at $7500/year.

      Or if you think of it another way, the govt paid $20-$30 per vaccine dose.

      In my case, the risk of death was very low, but the difference between a bad case and a light case is real.

      Before the vaccine (when we had alpha), did you know people who had tough cases? I had coworkers who were out of commission for weeks.

      Is $20-40 a reasonable price for a less severe illness?

      I get to reduce the chance of serious illness and gain another week of productive/enjoyable life for the price of a bottle of wine?

      The best money I spent all year.

    • Yes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year is the standard measure for health care technocrats.

      “did you know people who had tough cases?” I knew people who got sick from COVID in 2020 and people who got sick in 2021 and 2022. All unvaccinated in 2020 and a mixture in 2021/2022. Everyone who got sick in 2020 reported what we today call “mild symptoms thanks to the vaccine”. The most severely ill person whom I knew personally was vaccinated about six months prior the disease. See https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/11/18/maybe-it-is-time-for-that-booster-shot/

      The only person whom I personally knew who may have been seriously harmed by the COVID vaccine was my own father, who died shortly after getting Pfizer #2. He was 91 and therefore no serious attempt was made to determine the cause of death. His gradual decline accelerated sharply about a week after the shot (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/02/25/obituary-of-nathaniel-greenspun-1930-2021/ ). If it had been two days after the shot, I would be more inclined to attribute death to the vaccine. Given the one-week lag, the role of the Pfizer shot remains an unknown.

      In short, based on my personal experience, other than the days of flu symptoms caused by the shots, the attempted COVID vaccines are not provably distinguishable from saline injections.

      I’m glad that you think that your 4 or 5 shots have protected you. But you should recognize that this is a religious belief. You don’t have any way to know whether your long-term risk of death from an attack by SARS-CoV-2 has been reduced or increased. For the 6-month-old babies who were injected, it might be 80 years before we know (since COVID tends to kill people at age 80).

      We can maybe use international comparisons to get some preliminary insight. We proved to ourselves (with Science!) that our school closures and mask orders reduced COVID death rate. But now we have no-mask schools-open Sweden as a reference and both their “excess deaths” and deaths tied to COVID-19 were much lower than places where schools were closed and masks were both ordered and worn. If we try that with vaccines, we can look at the map of where people rejected the Sacrament of Fauci. We’ll stick to countries that are connected to others by reasonably fluid land borders (i.e., no islands). https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html
      shows that only 34% of Ukrainians are fully vaccinated and 30% of Nigerians. Compare to 87% in Spain.

      Then let’s look at https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/

      Spain suffered 2302 COVID deaths per million. Unvaccinated Ukraine suffered 2565. Nigeria clocks in at 15 COVID deaths per million (maybe that’s an undercount, but it would be tough to undercount one’s way down to 15 from Spain’s 2302).

      From the international comparisons, in other words, it is tough to see a significant benefit from a higher vaccination rate. Maybe one can be teased out with sufficient statistical gymnastics. In the meantime, the True Believers in the U.S. can continue to Believe!

    • (Separately, I don’t see how the vaccine shot can have had any effect on your COVID risk. If you follow the Science, you work from home and wear an N95 mask in the rare situations when you are forced to go out. We are informed that the N95 mask will stop transmission (just as we were previously informed that the cloth masks would). Because you are never exposed to SARS-CoV-2, a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 wouldn’t have any value for you.)

  7. step 1: hold a party for “elites”
    step 2: invite young, up-and-coming future politicians
    step 3: set them up with “sex workers”, some slightly underage
    step 4: wait until they are elected, blackmail, profit!

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