Last week: In Week 46 (ONS Released the Full Provisional Figures Yesterday), Adults Aged 15-44 Saw 35.5% Rise in Deaths (2022 Compared to 2019)

Latest numbers here.

In week 47 of 2019, 283 adults aged 15-44 died in England and Wales.

In week 47 of 2022, 359 adults aged 15-44 died in England and Wales.

359 – 283 = 76 or 27% higher in 2022 than in 2019.

What’s the cause if it’s not COVID-19 and not “Long COVID”? One can guess and Germany studies the matter.

The following figures came out this morning (England and Wales total deaths per week):

England and Wales deaths per week, now with week 47 (it’s higher this year than it was last year)

Source: ONS

Here is how that compared to pre-COVID-19 years:

Deaths above normal in 2022, based on complete statistics, not a random sample. Values above 0 mean deaths higher than pre-COVID-19 for a given week. Counting the deaths since week 22, we have 37,000 more deaths in England and Wales this year than average prior to the pandemic. That’s a LOT of people.

Data: As ODF

Video download link | md5sum 4e251da456416f8e8155bd4f356340d3
Cover-up Culture at Sirius Open Source
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Cover-up and lies became a corporate pattern at the company where I had worked since 2011; it was time to go in order to avoid cooperation in unethical activities

IT has now been 4 days since I officially left Sirius ‘Open Source’ after disputes with the management. As the above video notes (near the start), we’re dealing with thin-skinned people who lie to staff and then get all “victim-like” because someone used the word “liar”. We’ll come back to this much later in this series.

The video mostly deal with the latest part of the report, which examines awful events nearly a decade old. There was an actual lawsuit, but it was hidden away from staff. The lawsuit had been filed after suspension/dismissal of someone alleged to have engaged in wrongdoing, along with his partner, who was of course innocent regardless of the merits of these allegations.

The use of the word “allegations” is key here because what management is alleging has historically not been trustworthy (and usually those allegations aren’t shared with staff or constitute mere smears). There’s a culture of dishonesty or a chronic culture of lying at the management. It’s something I was first made aware of about 4 years before joining the company. Someone credible (whom I first knew online, later met in person) told me that the Sirius founder had lied about his credentials (for media attention) and that litigation was considered over those lies; it was not worth pursuing for financial reasons, but the founder of Sirius was taking credit for things not actually one’s own achievement (misrepresentation or lying about one’s role in a British institution).

The saddest thing is that real people are hurt and even disabled people are harmed. They don’t do anything wrong, but for pseudo-political reasons they get punished regardless.

I never forgot what I learned down at a local pub before I joined the company; but I only saw it firsthand in more recent years. I was conveniently ignoring the lies for years, as they didn’t impact me personally and I didn’t participate in the lying.

Sirius shown to the public as women-friendly a decade ago

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ was taken to court after it had wrongly fired a couple of employees, one of whom was blind; this was accompanied by lies about why the staff’s communication server was shut down

THE year was 2011 or thereabouts. Sirius hired a kind German lady, was also completely blind. Colleagues were happy to help, but clients were not being informed that she was blind and management feared that clients might find out that she was blind. A year or two later she was fired and simply ‘vanished’; nobody was allowed to talk about that.

This, among other incidents, is an example of a ruthless company that does not tolerate staff dialogue and relies on secrecy (or clients being blind to what really goes on). The relevant part of the report is below.

Blindness to Criticism

The foundations of the company need to be protected, not the personal agenda of pertinent, individual workers and/or cliques/factions of workers. Lack of communication blinds us to our weaknesses. Over a decade ago when the company-wide Jabber server was disabled (probably to prevent unity and sympathy among staff) workers’ ability to interact with colleagues was curtailed, leaving everyone in a position where supporting clients was a lot harder. The widespread belief at the time was that the server was intentionally offline (nobody wanted to talk about it, let alone lie) because the company faced a lawsuit from a couple wrongly accused/dismissed (at least one of them). Roy and Rianne have supported blind people’s charities for nearly a decade already, so recalling how the company treated a blind colleague, likely an innocent colleague, is a bit of deja vu in light of later sections of this document. Roy and Rianne poured in a portion of their income (received monthly from Sirius) into blind people’s charities after the company, Sirius, had unfairly dismissed a legally blind — and much-liked among her colleagues — vulnerable lady.

Sirius was not always criticised or fearful of criticism, certainly not as a whole (criticising one particular aspect of Sirius is not the same as just rejecting Sirius as a whole). In fact the company used to boast true transparency (also full access to the wiki, which Roy helped manage/install), like telling workers not only which clients were paying but also how much they were paying (so it was possible to understand the commercial side of things). In some sense, workers felt connected to the company, not left out to hang. Internal presentations in the company, or even the habitual workshop, gave all workers a lot of information. The accountant and other people met staff in person, offering good advice on a number of things. Not much was outsourced or left behind walled gardens.

Things have changed a lot since then.

Video download link | md5sum b1726ae376189bc6db959452e1e46683
Working in the Blind
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: When companies behave like monarchies where staff has no role at all in decision-making and decisions are made in violation of those companies’ tenets (or mission statements) it is inevitable that staff will issue concerns, first internally and — failing that — in other channels

THE company Sirius fancies the word “Open”, but it does not engage in open debate. Staff is left in the dark about the company’s own affairs, never mind clients and the general public. Everything is decided secretly by an inner cabal; it wasn’t always like that!

In the more recent past, bad decisions were made like abandoning Open stuff in favour of proprietary spyware such as Slack, Skype, Google, and Zoom. A decision regarding mobile phones came much later, without any consultations at all with those actually impacted by the decision. They say there were concerns about the staff pushing back, but if staff isn’t being listened to, then key staff will leave the company. This already happened before. Managers, for instance, were making our infrastructure obsolete and driving out people who can maintain it, leaving rotting foundations and massive bills for “Clown Computing” (the same could be hosted for like 10 times less and be controlled directly).

The video above mentions taxes, addresses, and a pattern of misleading clients while taking great risk. This is no way to run a company, except into the ground. Its long-earned reputation (almost 25 years) cannot compensate for recent bad karma.

Summary: Part 3 of a report regarding Sirius Open Source, which is imploding after bad judgement and misuse of power against employees

THE signs of Sirius collapsing were all over the place. In Part I and in Part II (see index) we explained some of the earlier days of the company, which turns 25 next year. It might not even reach this milestone at all. Prognosis is negative.

People can understand that institutions are failing when people improperly qualified are assigned jobs they are incapable of doing. This is where Sirius is today. And now we come to Part 3, looking back a bit:

The Open Source Era

Humble Beginnings

Roy’s loyalty to the company is evident and easily provable considering how long he has served the company. But now it is not the company he entered in early February 2011; nor is this the company Rianne entered in 2013. Much patience and tolerance were needed to justify staying in the company for so long (in 2 months it’ll be full 12 years since Roy joined), especially after unforgettable tirades from management that has since then been (apparently) removed, albeit only after a lot of backlash from a lot of staff. 12 years is a long, long time. Roy worked there from his 20s to his 40s. He had much better job offers elsewhere. 12 years is also the longest any existing worker has served the company. That’s very long by today’s standards, where employment records are a lot shorter than back in the 1960s-1980s. A lot of people hop between jobs only months or a few years apart. But not Roy.

Both Roy and Rianne have consistently and persistently demonstrated loyalty to the company, sticking to it even when times were rough and people elsewhere offered “better” jobs. This, as a matter of very simple fact, is why there’s a benevolent fight for the company and its (original) core mission. It’s why internal issues are escalated internally (not to publicly embarrass the company) and misguided directions get highlighted without admonishing anyone.

It’s important not to derail core tenets of the company. It’s essential for recruitment, which can beget better clients, in turn rewarding the staff, too. People who don’t care about their employer simply keep quiet, blindly follow instructions, and don’t care about long-term consequences. Those are typically employees that just come and go. They don’t offer much value to the company (training takes up a lot of time and it’s an investment which goes astray), so they don’t fully develop familiarity, skills, personal connection etc. (among colleagues and among clients, who learn to trust the company based on names of long-serving people). Many of them cannot develop software, either.

A Fast-Rotting Apple

Companies succeed and perish based on what people they can attract and what people they lose. In the case of Sirius, much was lost and almost nothing gained in the “human capital” or “human resources” sense. It’s becoming a crisis. More on that later.

Over the past decade or longer there has been a change of leadership and severe brain drain. Morale has not been good, to put it politely. The Sirius management figures rely far too much on credibility of a company that existed well over a decade ago — a company that had a physical office (real location), a clearer and more elaborate leadership structure, and a lot of office staff, not just remote workers. The company had assets, certified professionals in fields of operations (not just technical fields), and therefore it functioned a lot more reliably, e.g. in the accountancy. There were cheques and balances. There were actual domain-proficient departments and not self-appointed jacks of all trades.

As we shall see later, there was also a change of address in October: [sic]

This is not the Sirius address, it is the accountancy’s address.

Sadly, what we’re seeing or what ‘low-level’ employees have witnessed so far this year is a growing level and ever-increasing frequency of cover-up (few examples to come later) of what was/is really happening. Those who are portrayed as troublemakers are in fact those who supposedly ‘threaten’ this veil of secrecy or amicably challenge the company to improve (from within, repeatedly if necessary, in order to spare otherwise-avoidable damage and save face). As internal avenues of grievances are exhausted, people start speaking to friends, even without naming any persons, companies etc. This is a well-known high cost of failing to act upon internal suggestions or constructive complaints, leaving little leeway and inevitably causing a sort of spill-over of woes and gripes. This, suffice to say, is another example of managerial failure. Being unable to listen (not just hear but actually listen) to workers is a weakness. It’s not a strength, although it can be rather tempting to simply ignore critics and impulsively alluring to reject criticism as fundamentally “invalid”, “void”, “hostile”, “paranoid”, “ignorant” and so on. Egocentric companies end up with no inflation in business, just inflation of the self. That weakens teamwork. A cohesive working environment boils down to collaboration and deep trust, not a bunch of superhero avatars in Slack channels, which to an outsider may indicate that the company is immature, unprofessional, and child-like.

In the past, the company known as “Sirius” (same name, very different people) had more competent administrators (like a person associated with the Ubuntu community back when Roy joined), i.e. folks who actually understood the products and services that Sirius provided. It helps to have such people onboard because of networking and links; they can bring business (around that time Sirius had clients directly connected to Ubuntu; it was a gateway to a flourishing network of other clients). Likewise, some world-class and well-known PostgreSQL engineers were employed by the company; this is a sign of solid corporate leadership, technical leadership, and also a lead to future clientele. Of course almost all of those people have since then left the company, leaving the company with a “skeleton crew”.

Having an administrator with no background in computing is not a good idea; clients can sense they’re interacting (e.g. over the telephone) with people whose skills are limited to “personal assistant” that soon got promoted to management due to an unfilled vacuum. Potential of career leap may seem nice, but that comes at a collective, company-wide cost. Another aspect of this phenomenon was in recent years dubbed “imposter syndrome”. That can lead to insecurity, which in turn causes backlash, outbursts, and paranoia. It makes any workplace potentially toxic. Any time a company is hiring unskilled people or promoting people in spite of a lack of relevant skills it causes issues on several levels; clients lose respect, workers feel dissatisfied, and job roles cannot be performed (maybe not by intention, but high forms of incompetence are not distinguishable from malice). Due to (corporate) survival instincts, those being scrutinised can turn aggressive very fast.

In the past 4 years staff casually witnessed tantrums (albeit staff was subjected to divide-and-rule tactics, impeding communication between staff or across teams); that typically came from above, not from below, e.g. managers resorting to bullying. General consensus within workers’ circles is that at least some of that stems from some people’s desperate desire to cover up their lack of capabilities. This is very dangerous to any company, including those who do the bullying (after all, without the company they too would be unemployed). Those who stand to lose the most are long-serving staff, whose CV is closely connected and long-connected to that one firm. Those who just come and seed destruction can move on and repeat the same modus operandi. Short-term workers have a different set of personal interests. That’s just how it is.

Description:

Autopsy-based histopathological characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination

link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00392-022-02129…

Likelihood assessment of vaccine-induced
(epi-)myocarditis

Causality or correlation?

Presence of myocarditis with temporal association to vaccination event

AND

Integration of histological phenotype, clinical presentation, and laboratory findings indicate no alternative differential diagnosis

Abstract infographic

Cases of myocarditis

Have been diagnosed clinically,

by laboratory tests,

imaging

(in the context of mRNA-based anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination)

Autopsy-based description

We describe,

Cardiac autopsy findings and common characteristics of myocarditis,

with vaccine-induced myocardial inflammation representing the likely or possible cause of death.

Our findings establish the histological phenotype of lethal vaccination-associated myocarditis.

Standardized autopsies

Performed on 25 persons

25 bodies found unexpectedly dead at home,

within 20 days following SARS-CoV-2 vaccination

Histology

Patchy, focal, interstitial myocardial T-lymphocytic and macrophage
infiltration,

predominantly of the CD4 positive sub- set, (T Helper cells)

associated with mild myocyte damage.

Autopsy findings indicated

Death due to acute arrhythmogenic cardiac failure.

Thus

Myocarditis can be a potentially lethal complication following mRNA-based anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.

Our findings may aid in adequately diagnosing unclear cases after vaccination,

and in establishing a timely diagnosis in vivo, thus,

providing the framework for adequate monitoring and early treatment of severe clinical cases.