DailyCaller | Jean-Pierre announced her new book “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines” set to publish in October 2025 on Wednesday. The book, according to her publisher Legacy Lit, encourages Americans to “vote their values and maintain individuality within party lines.”
“Jean-Pierre didn’t come to her decision to be an Independent
lightly. She has served two American presidents, Obama and Biden,” the
book description from Legacy Lit reads.
“In 2020, she joined
Biden’s campaign as a senior adviser, becoming Harris’s chief of staff
and then, two years later, White House press secretary. She takes us
through the three weeks that led to Biden’s abandoning his bid for a
second term and the betrayal by the Democratic Party that led to his
decision,” the statement continues.
“In an era of misinformation, disinformation, the regressiveness of
social policy, what we’re seeing currently, right now, what I have
decided to do, and I really have thought long and hard about this, is to
follow my own compass. And that’s what I’ve done, and that’s what this
book does,” Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
“And here’s the
truth, and here’s how I will lay it out to you. I think we need to stop
thinking in boxes and think outside of our boxes, and not be so
partisan. And the way that I see moving forward in this space that we’re
in right now is if you are willing to stand side by side with me,
regardless of your political — how you identify politically, and as long
as you respect the community that I belong to and vulnerable
communities that I respect, I will be there with you. I will be, I will
move forward with you,” she continues.
During the Biden administration, Jean-Pierre
defended the former president’s fitness as concerns about his declining
state grew. Just weeks before Biden dropped out of the race, she decried
videos of the former president looking lost and wandering off as “cheap fakes,” claiming they were edited to make the 82-year-old look bad.
err.ee | "Whataboutism" is not just a feature of Russian rhetoric. The U.S.
invasion of Iraq universally undercut U.S. credibility and continues to
do so. For many critics of the United States, Iraq was the most recent
in a series of American sins stretching back to Vietnam and the
precursor of current events. Even though a tiny handful of states have
sided with Russia in successive UN resolutions in the General Assembly,
significant abstentions, including by China and India, signal
displeasure with the United States. As a result, the vital twin tasks of
restoring the prohibition against war and the use of force as the
critical cornerstone of the United Nations and international system, and
of defending Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, get lost
in a morass of skepticism and suspicions about the United States.
In
the so-called "Global South," and what I am loosely referring to as the
"Rest" (of the world), there is no sense of the U.S. as a virtuous
state. Perceptions of American hubris and hypocrisy are
widespread. Trust in the international system(s) that the U.S. helped
invent and has presided over since World War II is long gone. Elites
and populations in many of these countries believe that the system was
imposed on them at a time of weakness when they were only just securing
their independence. Even if elites and populations have generally
benefitted from pax Americana, they believe the United States and its
bloc of countries in the collective West have benefitted far more. For
them, this war is about protecting the West's benefits and hegemony, not
defending Ukraine.
Russian
false narratives about its invasion of Ukraine and about the U.S.
resonate and take root globally because they fall on this fertile soil.
Russia's disinformation seems more like information—it comports with
"the facts" as others seem them. Non-Western elites share the same
belief as some Western analysts that Russia was provoked or pushed into
war by the United States and NATO expansion. They resent the power of
the U.S. dollar and Washington's frequent punitive use of financial
sanctions. They were not consulted by the U.S. on this round of
sanctions against Russia. They see Western sanctions constraining their
energy and food supplies and pushing up prices. They blame Russia's
Black Sea blockade and deliberate disruption of global grain exports on
the United States—not on the actual perpetrator, Vladimir Putin. They
point out that no-one pushed to sanction the United States when it
invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, even though they were opposed to U.S.
intervention, so why should they step up now?
Countries in the
Global South's resistance to U.S. and European appeals for solidarity on
Ukraine are an open rebellion. This is a mutiny against what they see
as the collective West dominating the international discourse and
foisting its problems on everyone else, while brushing aside their
priorities on climate change compensation, economic development, and
debt relief. The Rest feel constantly marginalized in world affairs. Why
in fact are they labeled (as I am reflecting here in this speech) the
"Global South," having previously been called the Third World or the
Developing World? Why are they even the "Rest" of the world? They are
the world, representing 6.5 billion people. Our terminology reeks of
colonialism.
The
Cold War era non-aligned movement has reemerged if it ever went away.
At present, this is less a cohesive movement than a desire for distance,
to be left out of the European mess around Ukraine. But it is also a
very clear negative reaction to the American propensity for defining the
global order and forcing countries to take sides. As one Indian
interlocutor recently exclaimed about Ukraine: "this is your conflict! …
We have other pressing matters, our own issues … We are in our own
lands on our own sides … Where are you when things go wrong for us?"
Most
countries—including many in Europe—reject the current U.S. framing of a
new "Great Power Competition"—a geopolitical tug-of-war between the
United States and China. States and elites bristle at the U.S. idea that
"you are either with us or against us," or you are "on the right or
wrong side of history" in an epic struggle of democracies versus
autocracies. Few outside Europe accept this definition of the war in
Ukraine or the geopolitical stakes. They don't want to be assigned to
new blocs that are artificially imposed, and no-one wants to be caught
in a titanic clash between the United States and China. In contrast to
the U.S., as well as others like Japan, South Korea and India, most
countries do not see China as a direct military or security threat. They
may have serious qualms about China's rough economic and political
behavior and its blatant abuse of human rights, but they still see
China's value as a trading and investment partner for their future
development. The United States and the European Union don't offer
sufficient alternatives for countries to turn away from China, including
in the security realm—and even within Europe the sense of how much is
at stake for individual countries in the larger international system and
in relations with China varies.
Outside Europe, the interest in
new regional orders is more pronounced. In this context, the
BRICS—which, for its members offers an alternative to the G7 and the
G20—is now attractive to others. Nineteen countries, including Saudi
Arabia and Iran, purportedly showed interested in joining the
organization ahead of its recent April 2023 summit. Countries see the
BRICS (and other similar entities like the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization or SCO) as offering flexible diplomatic arrangements and
possible new strategic alliances as well as different trade
opportunities beyond the United States and Europe. BRICS members and
aspirants, however, have very disparate interests. We need to consider
these as we look ahead to finding a resolution to the war in Ukraine and
as we consider the kinds of structures and networks we will have to
deal with in the future.
I am going to run through some of the factors that are most relevant to thinking about Ukraine in the BRICS context.
pbs | Judy Woodruff: Ultimately, what was your assessment of Donald Trump as a person and as a president?
Fiona Hill: Well, as a person, he was extremely vulnerable to manipulation. And that became a problem for him as a president.
And what I mean by that is, he had a very fragile ego, and he was very susceptible to flattery, as well as taking massive offense, as we all saw, to any kind of criticism. So, on a personal level, that was also a pretty dangerous flaw.
When you're the president of the United States, it becomes a fatal flaw, because President Trump couldn't disassociate or disentangle himself from many of the issues that were the critical ones to address. So, when people were concerned about Russian influence in the United States election, he only thought about how that affected him, for example.
When people talked about the changes in the U.S. economic structure, he would always think, first of all, about how that might affect him and about how that might affect how people would vote for him. So, as a president, he was uniquely preoccupied with himself, not with the country.
And that, of course, made all of the problems of intelligence risks even higher, because the Russians or others from the outside could also manipulate those tendencies.
Judy Woodruff: So, if you can answer this, is the world safer or is it more dangerous because of his presidency?
Fiona Hill: Well, I think it's become more dangerous, because he was also extremely divisive, because President Trump was very focused on getting reelected, and he wasn't going to do that by appealing to all Americans.
He wanted to appeal to a particular base of people who were attracted by his personality or attracted by the things that he said he was going to do for them. And, of course, that's on different parts of the economic scale and the socioeconomic lower levels. It's the people — he said he was going to find them a job. He was going to fix the economy, so they would have jobs.
At the top end, among millionaires and billionaires, it was that he was going to protect their fortunes, from — being from those circles himself.
Judy Woodruff: What I find so striking is that you weren't so concerned about Donald Trump being controlled by Vladimir Putin, being influenced by Vladimir Putin, as you were concerned about the United States following on the same political path that you see Russia follow under Vladimir Putin.
Fiona Hill: That's absolutely right, because Russia went through a similar wrenching economic period and political periods in the 1990s.
So, Russia had its equivalent of a kind of the Great Recession, and, at the end of that decade, President Putin comes in and says, I'm going to fix everything. I'm going to make America great again, which, of course, is what President Trump said in 2016. And what Putin did was basically tie himself up into all of these politics.
He, of course, has extended his terms in office through amending the Constitution. He can essentially be president until 2036. And Donald Trump has also said that he wants to be president in perpetuity. He wouldn't accept that he had lost the 2020 election. He's saying he's going to come back, that he has a right to come back because he was never kicked out of office in the first place.
And he's been spreading lies about essentially his own role in all the events that we have seen over the last years, January 6, for example, and the storming of the Capitol.
Judy Woodruff: Do you believe our democracy is in danger as a result of this?
Fiona Hill: I do.
And I think that danger is increasing by the day, because we're constantly seeing other political figures trying to emulate Trump. We're now in a situation where lies and deceit have become the coin of governance.
Judy Woodruff: It's a disturbing conclusion in this book.
townhall |Left-wing Mexican
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador recently praised a visiting
President Joe Biden: "Just imagine: There are 40 million Mexicans in the
United States - 40 million who were born here in Mexico, (or) who are
the children of people who were born in Mexico!"
Why wouldn't Obrador be delighted? Since Biden took office in January
2021, America has allowed some 5-6 million illegal entries across its
southern border.
Obrador further congratulated the malleable Biden
whom he sees as a kindred but complacent left-wing spirit: "You are the
first president of the United States in a very long time that has not
built even one meter of wall."
Translated that means Mexico is
delighted the United States now cares little about the security of its
border, the disappearance of which is wonderful news for Mexico.
Note
that Mexico itself facilitates illegal transits across its southern
border - as long as such Central American and other global migrants keep
heading northward into the United States.
But when or if they
pause, try to stay in Mexico, commit crimes, or expect Mexican social
services, then almost immediately Mexico City sends thousands of troops
to close its border with Guatemala, deports the illegal crossers, and
revives talk of building a border wall of its own.
Biden has demolished America's southern border. His illegal nullification of U.S. immigration law is music to Obrador's ears.
But
it is a nightmare to Americans who poll overwhelming disapproval of the
subversion of their border security. They are exhausted by the influx
of death-dealing drugs. And they are furious over the hundreds of
billions of dollars diverted from their strapped social services to
attend to the needs of foreign nationals who have broken their laws.
propublica | Two years ago, the DEA arrested a Mexican general, hoping to lay bare the high-level corruption at the heart of organized crime. Then the case fell apart — and took down U.S.-Mexican cooperation on drug policy with it.
When the Cienfuegos family
landed at Los Angeles International Airport on Oct. 15, 2020, they
looked excited and maybe a bit relieved. With the pandemic still
ravaging Mexico, they had come to vacation in Southern California.
Arranging such a visit wasn’t a problem, even on short notice: The
patriarch, retired Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, had made powerful
American friends during his six years as Mexico’s defense minister. When
he needed a favor — like visas for his wife, daughters and
granddaughters — he could still call someone at the Pentagon or the CIA.
But as the family
approached the passport line, an immigration officer waved them to one
side. A trim, middle-aged man — dressed, like the general, in a blue
blazer and jeans — stepped forward and introduced himself in Spanish as a
special agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Could he speak
with the general privately? he asked.
The two men crowded into a
small office with several other law-enforcement officers. “There is a
warrant for your arrest, sir,” the agent said. “This is a copy of the indictment against you.”
Cienfuegos wore a face mask with a clear plastic shield over it, but
there was no hiding his confusion and anger. There must be some mistake,
he insisted. “Do you know who I am?”
The agents did. For years,
U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence agencies had been watching
Cienfuegos as he rose through the Mexican army to become defense
minister in 2012. Since late 2015, the DEA had been investigating what
it believed were Cienfuegos’ corrupt dealings with a second-tier drug
gang based in the small Pacific Coast state Nayarit. In 2019, he had
been secretly indicted on drug-conspiracy charges by a federal grand
jury in Brooklyn.
“I have worked with your CIA,” Cienfuegos protested. “I have been honored by your Department of Defense!”
“I understand,” the DEA agent said. “But you have still been charged.”
In the tumultuous days
before the 2020 election — with COVID-19 cases surging, President Donald
Trump barnstorming and Senate Republicans rushing to confirm a Supreme
Court justice — the jailing of a retired Mexican general didn’t make the
front pages, even in Los Angeles. It did make headlines in Mexico City.
But President Andr茅s Manuel L贸pez Obrador of Mexico, who had long
promised to vanquish the country’s deeply rooted corruption, seemed to
take the news in stride. “It is a very regrettable fact that a former
defense secretary should be arrested on charges of having ties to drug
trafficking,” he said the next morning. “We must continue to insist —
and hopefully this helps us understand — that the main problem of Mexico
is corruption.”
abcnews | Mexican President Andr茅s Manuel L贸pez Obrador started a five-day tour to four Central American countries and Cuba on Thursday by lashing out at the U.S. government.
L贸pez
Obrador criticized American officials sharply for being quick to
send billions to Ukraine, while dragging their feet on development aid
to Central America.
On his first stop in neighboring Guatemala, L贸pez Obrador demanded
U.S. aid to stem the poverty and joblessness that sends tens of
thousands of Guatemalans north to the U.S. border. The Mexican leader
had been angered that the United States rebuffed his calls to
help expand his tree-planting program to Central America.
“They
are different things and they shouldn't be compared categorically, but
they have already approved $30 billion for the war in Ukraine, while we
have been waiting since President Donald Trump, asking they donate $4 billion, and as of today, nothing, absolutely nothing,” L贸pez Obrador said.
“Honestly,
it seems inexplicable,” he added. “For our part, we are going to
continue to respectfully insist on the need for the United States to
collaborate.”
L贸pez Obrador's pet program, known as “Planting
Life,” pays farmers a monthly wage to plant and care for fruit and
lumber trees on their farms.
Mexico has asked the U.S. government to help fund the program, something that so far hasn’t happened. Mexico is also touting another program that apprentices young people to companies. Critics say both programs lack accountability.
Mexican
Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard wrote in his social media
accounts that meetings with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei
and other officials focused on development, migration and strengthening
bilateral ties.
Ebrard said Mexico was starting the tree program in the Guatemalan province of Chimaltenango.
It
is only be the third overseas trip in more than three years for L贸pez
Obrador, who is fond of saying that the best foreign policy is good
domestic policy. The tour is an opportunity for Mexico to reassert
itself as a leader in Latin America and will be welcomed by some leaders
under pressure from the U.S. government and others for their alleged
anti-democratic tendencies.
thepostil | It was during this time that a distinct Ukrainian “identity” was also
fashioned, one which stated that the “real” Ukrainians were supposed
descendants of Vikings who set up Kievan Rus. There is no real
historical or genetic basis
for this designation, but it was a convenient merging with Nazi
ideology. In other words, in the “true Ukraine,” there were the superior
humans and the sub-humans. This “Germanic identity” of Ukraine would
have tragic consequences down to today.
The inevitable result of all this was mass slaughter of those that
were “undesirable,” the bloodiest of which occurred in June and July of
1941, all coordinated by Bandera, and in which some 9,000 people were
murdered (Jews, Poles, and “Muscovites”).
Given the success of this violence and thinking that he had the upper
hand, Bandera blundered and declared the Ukraine as independent, and so
was promptly arrested by his friends, the Nazis, who sent him off to
Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he stayed until 1944, when he
was released to coordinate resistance against the Red Army, a task he
took up with renewed fervor.
After the war, the Banderites were reorganized by the British (MI6)
and the CIA, as a way to fight the Soviets. During this time, Bandera
moved about, often in disguise and in secret, and always protected by
the many members of the former SS, who had found convenient shelter in
Ukraine and who formed an extensive underground network.
During this time, Bandera and his organizations killed thousands;
some say hundreds of thousands; and all the while he worked closely with
the BND, the Federal Intelligence Service of what was then West
Germany.
Finally, Bandera was assassinated by the Soviets in Munich, in 1959.
But this did not end the deep influence of Hitler and the Nazis in the
aspirations of Ukraine nationalists—so much so that it is now difficult
to say where Nazism ends and Ukrainian nationalism begins.
In the new Ukraine, statues of Bandera are everywhere. He is the official, national hero.
Which Ukrainians?
In view of the above, it is important to note that theme of the
“Ukrainian people” is again at the center of the current Ukraine-Russia
conflict. In the West, this has come to mean an alliance with the
“Ukrainians” in order to defeat the Russians who are regarded as aliens
and who do not belong to “us.” Such is the legacy of Nazism in Ukraine,
in that people repeat its core tenet of the inferior Other, in their
“defense” of Ukraine. Russians are not “Western” and so must be fought
and defeated. That is the gist of the hysterical Russophobia that now
grips the West, where “innocent Ukraine” and the “bully Russia” has
become “settled science.”
Few in the grip of this hysteria seem to want to understand the
complexity involved, let alone the near-impossibility of separating
Ukrainian nationalism from Nazism—for the Banderites never went
away—meaning that the Ukraine was never de-Nazified. Rather, the
Banderites became inseparable from the country’s power-structures and
institutions. This relationship only intensified with the dissolution of
the Soviet Union when Ukraine became independent in 1991, and when
Ukrainian nationalism gained full legitimacy.
And the myth of a “superior, Germanic Ukrainian” was central to the
“new Ukraine,” which in turn was central to Euromaidan and what came
later—the relentless slaughter of the “sub-humans” in the Donbas
regions, as many have meticulously catalogued from 2014 to today.
And according to current Ukrainian law, there are two kinds of
“Ukrainians”—the “Germanic Ukrainians,” along with allied people, the
Tatars and Karaites (neither of whom actually live in Ukraine).
Then, there are the undesirable people, who are not legally
“Ukrainians.” These are the Slavs, and a few others like the Magyars and
the Romani who are denied the use of their own language in public. They
have to use the official “Ukrainian” language which officially has
nothing to do with Russian (!!).
This is the “Law of the Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine” which states
that only Germanic Ukrainians, Tatars and Karaites have “the right to
fully enjoy all human rights and all fundamental freedoms.” It was
signed into law by the current BFF of the West, President Volodymyr
Zelensky, on July 21, 2021. In other words, racial segregation of
society into the Uebermenschen and the Untermenschen.
This law is not an aberration; rather it reflects the widespread view of where Ukraine “belongs.” For example, in 2018, a book appeared
(which became a bestseller and won the Stepan Bandera Prize) in which
wide-ranging claims were made about ancient Aryan Ukrainians who
invented all kinds of things, including civilization itself. The book
was happily “reviewed” by three professors of history and philology at
Lviv University (Iryna Kochan, Viktor Golubko and Iosif Los).
WaPo | Vance has taken a ton of heat recently for claiming,
“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.” In
that appearance, Vance added that “Mexican fentanyl” is a much bigger
problem, describing the southern border as a “total war zone.”
What's happening in Ukraine has nothing to do with our national security, but it is distracting our idiot "leaders" from focusing on the things that actually do matter to our national security, like securing the border & stopping the flow of Fentanyl that's killing American kids. https://t.co/a6bAaRxSH7
Buried underneath this smarmy formulation is a real argument, and it’s a repulsive one. There’s a reason Vance and others
keep linking our border to that of Ukraine: Drawing this connection
treats immigration to the United States as a species of invasion on a
par with what Russia is threatening.
Russia has just declared that two separatist regions in Ukraine are independent and sent in troops to them, a move that the United Nations has condemned as a violation of international law and Ukrainian sovereignty.
Yet
Vance’s ugly suggestion is that immigration to the United States and
this Russian invasion are somehow vaguely comparable threats to national
sovereignty, and that only the former one should occupy our attention.
Of
course, what Vance really objects to is that Biden has undone a few of
Trump’s immigration policies. We’re now letting in migrant kids whereas
Trump tried to keep them out, and Biden is trying to end Trump’s “Remain
in Mexico” policy.
That
has created serious logistical challenges with no easy answers, to be
sure. But it’s hardly a severe blow to our national sovereignty, and at
any rate, it’s better than Trump’s alternative, which produced a humanitarian catastrophe. Vance views that catastrophe as successful policy.
But
the deeper point of Vance’s formulation connecting the U.S. and
Ukrainian borders is this: In that version of populist nationalism, the
United States should dramatically retreat on any and all international
obligations, both in maintaining the liberal international order and in letting in legal immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees.
These are two sides of the same coin. David Rothkopf, a foreign policy expert, author and commentator, notes that both represent similar retreats on the very idea of having an international order at all.
“A
central tenet of Trumpism was to seek the end of the international
order,” Rothkopf told me. “But this isn’t just Trumpism. It’s also
Putinism.”
TIME | It’s hard to imagine another profession where people don’t get paid
for hours they spend at work—unless it’s gig economy jobs where Uber
drivers don’t get paid for the time they spend waiting for a passenger
to order a car. Some of the problems in trucking arose because the job
essentially went from a steady, well-paid job to gig work after the
deregulation of the trucking industry in the 1980s, says Steve Viscelli,
a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the
book The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream.
Deregulation
essentially changed trucking from a system where a few companies had
licenses to take freight on certain routes for certain rates into a
system where just about anyone with a motor-carrier authority could move
anything anywhere, for whatever the market would pay. As more carriers
got into trucking post-deregulation, union rates fell, as did wages.
Total employee compensation fell 44% in over-the-road trucking between
1977 and 1987, he says. Today, drivers get paid about 40% less than they
did in the late 1970s, Viscelli says, but are twice as productive as
they were then.
Now that truck drivers are gig workers, the inefficiencies of the
supply chain are making the jobs worse and worse, as Grewal has
discovered. “So much of this is about the inefficient use of time. Is
there a shortage of truck drivers? Probably not. But they are certainly
being used less and less efficiently,” Viscelli says. “That’s the long
term consequence of not pricing their time.”
Ironically,
the louder the narrative becomes about the “shortage” of truck drivers,
the more resources pop up to funnel people into driving. In 1990, the
trucking industry figured it needed about 450,000 new drivers and warned of a shortage; in 2018, before the pandemic, the industry said it was short 60,800 drivers.
history | At 10:00 p.m. on December 3, 1973, a 37-year old trucker from
Overland Park, Kansas named J.W. Edwards stopped his rig suddenly in the
middle of Interstate I-80 near Blakeslee, Pennsylvania and picked up
his CB radio microphone. The insurrection he was about to start, using
his now-famous handle “River Rat,” would give America’s independent
truckers their first national voice and, along the way, elevate them to
folk-hero status.
Edwards was beyond frustrated and scared for his
livelihood. His job hauling meat from the Midwest to New York had
become an agonizing slog because an oil embargo—levied by the Middle
Eastern petroleum-producing cartel OPEC against the United States for
its support of Israel—had dramatically jacked up diesel fuel prices.
With rationing imposed, he was stopping at every virtually filling
station along his route. Worse still, the federal government was
considering a national maximum speed limit of 55 m.p.h. For long-haul
drivers, time lost meant money lost, and oil geopolitics had made
Edwards’s $12,000-a-year job even more precarious. Near Blakeslee, his
tank reached empty. Out of fuel, but full of frustration that truckers
were the forgotten little guys in the global fossil-fuel wars, Edwards
decided, on the spot, to take to his CB and make some noise.
In the 1970s, truck drivers commonly used Citizens Band (CB) radio
to alert their fellow big-rig drivers to traffic conditions, choice
fueling spots and lurking police traps. Without proper FCC radio
licenses and reluctant to announce their real names over the airwaves,
truckers assumed fanciful “handles” and developed colorful slang. They
called diesel fuel motion lotion. They dubbed toll booths cash registers. Police became bears: Smokey bears for state troopers who wore campaign hats like Smokey the Bear, bears in the air for police helicopters. Feeding the bears meant
paying for a ticket—something more truckers were doing due to new speed
restrictions. The OPEC embargo accelerated the CB’s popularity, mostly
because it allowed drivers to share places to find motion lotion.
The protest goes national
As
other truckers stopped to help Edwards, he broadcast via CB that he was
blocking the interstate to protest high gas prices, limited fuel supply
and the proposed speed limit. Instantly, he found sympathy. One trucker
stated, “If a man is going to be broke, he might as well go broke
sitting still.” Others, with handles like Flying Dutchman and Captain
Zag, soon joined in. Within an hour, hundreds of rigs came to a halt on
I-80. The action paralyzed more than 1,000 vehicles in a jam that
extended 12 miles in both directions.
News of River Rat’s protest spread, and within hours, trucker
demonstrations peppered the nation’s highways, with thousands slowing or
stopping their vehicles, snarling travel for miles. By December 4, more
than 10 states saw demonstrations by angry drivers who demanded to be
heard by the federal government—and weren’t afraid to hold up their
deliveries to do so. One quipped that he didn’t think Congress would act
“until those people run out of toilet paper.”
The vast majority
of dissenting truckers were independents who owned and operated their
vehicles, unlike unionized Teamsters who typically hauled for large
shipping companies. Independents hauled about 70% of the country’s
freight, according to Interstate Commerce Commission estimates. Most had
their entire lives mortgaged into their expensive rigs and had the most
to lose from the embargo. Ironically, River Rat Edwards was not an
owner-operator himself.
hollywoodreporter | Nils Lofgren, a longtime guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, is among the musicians to pull music from Spotify in the wake of the streaming platform spreading COVID-19 misinformation.
He follows Neil Young, who announced Wednesday that he would remove his catalogue in protest of COVID vaccine misinformation being spread on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and Joni Mitchell, who followed in solidarity soon after.
Both musicians referred to an open letter sent to Spotify from 270
professionals in the scientific and medical communities, calling on the
streaming service to address misinformation distributed on the platform.
In a statement shared to the Neil Young Archives
on Saturday, Lofgren shared: “A few days ago, my wife and I became
aware of Neil and Daryl [Hannah] standing with hundreds of health care
professionals, scientists, doctors and nurses in calling out Spotify for
promoting lies and misinformation that are hurting and killing people.”
Lofgren noted that 27 years of his music has been taken off the
service and that he is also reaching out to labels that own his earlier
music to have that removed as well. The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to Spotify for comment.
“Neil and I go back 53 years,” Lofgren’s statement continued. “Amy
and I are honored and blessed to call Neil and Daryl friends, and knew
standing with them was the right choice.”
IJR | The Biden administration is urging companies to get their employees
vaccinated against COVID-19 despite pending court cases challenging the
rule.
During a Monday press briefing, White House principal deputy press
secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters, “We think people should not
wait.”
She continued, “We say do not wait to take actions that will keep
your workplace safe. It is important and critical to do, and waiting to
get more people vaccinated will lead to more outbreaks and sickness.”
Jean-Pierre argued the way to get past the pandemic is “to get people vaccinated.”
She also explained the administration believes “there is precedent
here,” adding, “The Department of Labor has a responsibility to keep
workers safe and the legal authority to do so.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit temporarily halted the mandate over the weekend, as IJR reported.
“Because the petitions give cause to believe there are grave
statutory and constitutional issues with the Mandate, the Mandate is
hereby STAYED pending further action by this court,” the ruling states.
The Biden administration has until Monday at 5 p.m. to respond to the petitioners’ motion for a permanent injunction.
A group of plaintiffs, including Republican Louisiana Attorney
General Jeff Landry, filed a lawsuit challenging the rule Friday.
“In a major win for the liberty of job creators and their employees,
the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit just halted the
Biden Administration’s attempt to force vaccines on businesses with 100
or more workers,” Landry said in a response to the ruling.
NYTimes | Mr. Chappelle spends much of “The Closer,”
his latest comedy special for Netflix, cleverly deflecting criticism.
The set is a 72-minute display of the comedian’s own brittleness. The
self-proclaimed “GOAT” (greatest of all time) of stand-up delivers five
or six lucid moments of brilliance, surrounded by a joyless tirade of
incoherent and seething rage, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia.
If
there is brilliance in “The Closer,” it’s that Mr. Chappelle makes
obvious but elegant rhetorical moves that frame any objections to his
work as unreasonable. He’s just being “brutally honest.” He’s just
saying the quiet part out loud. He’s just stating “facts.” He’s just
making us think. But when an entire comedy set is designed as a series
of strategic moves to say whatever you want and insulate yourself from
valid criticism, I’m not sure you’re really making comedy.
Throughout
the special, Mr. Chappelle is singularly fixated on the L.G.B.T.Q.
community, as he has been in recent years. He reaches for every
low-hanging piece of fruit and munches on it gratuitously. Many of Mr.
Chappelle’s rants are extraordinarily dated, the kind of comedy you
might expect from a conservative boomer, agog at the idea of
homosexuality. At times, his voice lowers to a hoarse whisper, preparing
us for a grand stroke of wisdom — but it never comes. Every once in a
while, he remarks that, oh, boy, he’s in trouble now, like a mischievous
little boy who just can’t help himself.
Somewhere,
buried in the nonsense, is an interesting and accurate observation
about the white gay community conveniently being able to claim whiteness
at will. There’s a compelling observation about the relatively
significant progress the L.G.B.T.Q. community has made, while progress
toward racial equity has been much slower. But in these formulations,
there are no gay Black people. Mr. Chappelle pits people from different
marginalized groups against one another, callously suggesting that trans
people are performing the gender equivalent of blackface.
In
the next breath, Mr. Chappelle says something about how a Black gay
person would never exhibit the behaviors to which he objects, an
assertion many would dispute. The poet Saeed Jones, for example, wrote in GQ
that watching “The Closer” felt like a betrayal: “I felt like I’d just
been stabbed by someone I once admired and now he was demanding that I
stop bleeding.”
Later in the show, Mr.
Chappelle offers rambling thoughts on feminism using a Webster’s
Dictionary definition, further exemplifying how limited his reading is.
He makes a tired, tired joke about how he thought “feminist” meant
“frumpy dyke” — and hey, I get it. If I were on his radar, he would
consider me a frumpy dyke, or worse. (Some may consider that estimation
accurate. Fortunately my wife doesn’t.) Then in another of those rare
moments of lucidity, Mr. Chappelle talks about mainstream feminism’s
historical racism. Just when you’re thinking he is going to right the
ship, he starts ranting incoherently about #MeToo. I couldn’t tell you
what his point was there.
This
is a faded simulacrum of the once-great comedian, who now uses his
significant platform to air grievances against the great many people he
holds in contempt, while deftly avoiding any accountability. If we don’t
like his routine, the message is, we are the problem, not him.
GQ | In the show’s opening minutes, under the auspices of updating the
audience on his pandemic experience — he got the Johnson & Johnson
vaccine: “Give me the third best option! I’ll have what the homeless
people are having!” — Chappelle makes it clear that, in addition to
being entertaining, he’s out to test our limits because, it becomes
increasingly clear, he believes we need to have our limits tested. A few
breaths after likening his immune system fighting coronavirus to Black
people violently beating up Asian-Americans, Chappelle surveys the
gasping audience and says “It’s gonna get worse than that. Hang in
there; it’s gonna get way worse.”
And
then it does. Discussing DaBaby, for example, Chappelle opines “In our
country, you can shoot and kill a n-gga but you better not hurt a gay
person’s feelings." Never mind that DaBaby’s onstage comments about AIDS at the Rolling Loud festival were truly out of pocket, or that the apology that followed was late and lackluster, or that DaBaby eventually took the apology back.
By the time Chappelle declares that “gender is a fact” and that he’s
“Team TERF” in solidarity with J.K. Rowling, I turned my television off
because I wasn’t having fun anymore. And part of freedom as I experience
it is that I don’t owe Dave Chappelle any of my time.
Maybe you
watch comedy specials to endure them, but I watch them to have a good
time, and I stop watching them when that’s no longer the case. Chappelle
argues this makes me "too sensitive, too brittle"; I just think I have
better things to do than watch a standup set that could just as well
have been a Fox News special. As a gay Black man, even when I’m watching
a comedy special, my identity is inconveniently present. It’s so
annoying; I asked my queerness to chill in the other room so I could
watch "The Closer" in peace, but no such luck.
projectveritas | Project Veritas released the second video of its COVID vaccine
investigative series today exposing U.S. Food and Drug Administration
[FDA] economist, Taylor Lee, who was recorded calling for forced COVID
vaccinations and a registry for all unvaccinated Americans.
Lee said that U.S. Government policy could emulate Nazi Germany when it comes to the COVID vaccine.
“Census
goes door-to-door if you don’t respond. So, we have the infrastructure
to do it [forced COVID vaccinations]. I mean, it’ll cost a ton of money.
But I think, at that point, I think there needs to be a registry of
people who aren’t vaccinated. Although that’s sounding very [much like
Nazi] Germany,” Lee said.
“Nazi Germany…I mean, think about it like the Jewish Star [for unvaccinated Americans],” he said.
“So,
if you put every anti-vaxxer, like sheep, into like Texas and you
closed off Texas from the rest of the world, and you go, ‘Okay, you be
you in Texas until we deal with this [pandemic].’”
Lee said that
due to a large portion of the African American community being hesitant
to take the COVID vaccine, the solution would be to “blow dart” on them:
Taylor Lee, FDA Economist: “I
think that a lot of the time -- so there's also this issue of -- I
remember reading about how with COVID [vaccine] trials, they were having
an issue recruiting African American people. It was because of a
different medication the government tried to do that was specifically
designed to kill African Americans.”
Veritas Journalist: “Oh, so like a mistrust thing.”
Lee: “Yeah.”
Veritas Journalist: “But this thing [COVID vaccine] is safe, though.”
Lee: “We know that now, but like again, I think there is still this big mistrust and like it's deep-rooted.”
Veritas Journalist: “Yeah. Can’t blame them [African Americans].”
Lee: “I can’t. But at the same time, like, blow dart. That’s where we’re going.”
Lee
affirmed that “wealthy white people” are more likely to get the COVID
vaccine because they are “educated,” and added that he would be willing
to force COVID vaccines upon Americans himself if needed.
“I’m gonna go door-to-door and stab everyone [with the COVID vaccine], ‘Oh, it’s just your booster shot! There you go!’”
Lee also said that FDA officials can often be political appointees rather than actual scientific experts.
“There
are political appointees [at the FDA] that are generally scientific
advisors or are appointed by the president or the commission…They're
being paid based on if the other people are staying in power,” he said.
stltoday | St. Louis County’s acting
health director says the rumor is true: He gave someone the middle
finger on his way out of the council meeting on the mask mandate Tuesday
night.
But in a letter to
County Councilwoman Rita Heard Days sent Wednesday, Dr. Faisal Khan said
he did it after a string of racist provocations from Republican
politicians like Councilman Tim Fitch and a boisterously anti-mask
audience pushed him past his limit.
“I
have never been subjected to the racist, xenophobic and threatening
behavior that greeted me in the County Council meeting last night,” he
wrote, after noting he’s been in public health for 25 years.
Fitch
and others blamed for stoking racism and xenophobia dismissed Khan’s
allegations as baseless. Fitch also said Khan was trying to provide
political cover for County Executive Sam Page, who called for the mask
mandate.
“The entire letter is
another desperate attempt at deflection and diversion by Sam Page,”
Fitch said in an interview. “Dr. Khan knew he was in trouble for (giving
the middle finger) and this was an opportunity to put that on someone
else.”
Khan
appeared at the meeting as the council was considering a move to
terminate the mask mandate as unlawful and unnecessary, which it would
do despite the rising threat of the delta variant. During the debate,
dozens of people, some of whom held signs with anti-mask messages,
filled the council chambers to cheer on the action and jeer the
mandate’s defenders.
Khan
said the trouble began as soon as he took the podium with a
“dog-whistle” question from Fitch, looking to emphasize Khan’s foreign
background.
As he spoke, Khan
said he also endured harassment from Republican politicians Paul Berry
and Mark McCloskey, who sat close behind him in the audience.
Berry
was an unsuccessful candidate for county executive in 2020; McCloskey,
who is running for U.S. Senate, gained notoriety with his wife,
Patricia, for brandishing firearms at protesters last year. Both McCloskeys attended the council meeting.
harvard | ADOS leverages legitimate moral and legal arguments for reparations and grievances about the failure of the Democratic party to adequately support one of its most loyal and critical voting blocs but brings in immigration. Including immigration as a distinguishing factor is justified by legitimate statistics around how Black immigrants have much higher levels of wealth and educational achievement, as well as better health outcomes (Brown etal., 2017) versus native-born Black Americans, differences that can indeed be directly attributed to racial stress and intergenerational trauma that started in slavery and persists today (Doamekpor & Dinwiddle, 2015), despite evidence that this divergenceis the fault of treatment by the dominant white culture (Iheduru, 2013), and not of the immigrants. Animating ADOS grievances are the negative attitudes that Black immigrants can hold about native-born Black Americans (Nsangou & Dundes, 2018; Telusma, 2019), as well as perceptions of dominant cultural narratives favoring those who are apart from the direct legacy of the trauma of slavery and the indictment that legacy presents for the moral foundations of the United States.
ADOS also resents what it sees as justice claims of other groups being prioritized over those of native-born Black Americans. However, it sees the solution as narrowly advocating for the interests of native-born Black Americans alone, and rejecting any solidarity or larger coalitions (N’COBRA, 2020), including trans-national movements for reparations or coalitions that address how systematic racism also lethally affects Black immigrants and other groups. Significantly, Carnell previously sat on the board of Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR), a subsidiary of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which has been identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (Boehlert, 2019) because of its violent opposition to foreign nationals living in the United States.
The ultimate impact that ADOS may have had on the 2020 election will be hard to ascertain; however, it did have a notable media moment when rapper Ice Cube talked with the Trump campaign about his “Contract WithBlack America” in October, which was heavily based on ADOS ideas (Watts, 2020). The Trump campaign used this moment to claim approval from Ice Cube, an example of disinformation creep in trying to distract from Trump’s often outright racism and deep hostility and opposition to the far broader Movement for Black Lives coalition.
We scraped a set of 534 thousand tweets using “#ADOS” or two related terms (“#LineageMatters,” “AmericanDOS,” which we found were not widely used) and posted between November 1, 2019,and September 30, 2020, running analyses on weekly subsets to first understand the content of the ADOS network and to select tweets on which to carry out descriptive content analysis. The status_ids of the tweets, and scripts for both collection and analysis, are available from the Harvard Dataverse (Nkondeet al., 2021). For having accurate counts of daily frequencies to compare to real-world events, we supplemented this scraped set with access, via a third-party service, to a set of 1.36 million tweets pulled from the Twitter firehose. This includesa total of 1.1 million tweets using the #ADOS hashtag that were publicly visible on Twitter as of the end of 2020.
Fauci knows exactly how much the losers who work in the labs are worth - trust and believe - you can’t make this s*#@ up. Do YOUwant fresh students/technicians living in their cars and working in the BioSafetyLevel 3 BSL-3 labs?
The payscale of NIH funded positions is set by these jokers - after 20 years of schooling and a masters degree, you get to earn minimum wage doing the hands-on part of gain of function research.
The Influenza Research Institute (IRI) is an active and growing
influenza research laboratory supporting cutting-edge research on
negative-strand RNA viruses including influenza, SARS-CoV-2, and
replication-deficient ebolavirus. The research group numbers over 30
including scientists, post-docs, technicians and grad students. We are
looking for a Research Specialist who will characterize influenza and
SARS-CoV-2 viruses and support other laboratory operations.
Diversity is a source of strength, creativity, and innovation for
UW-Madison. We value the contributions of each person and respect the
profound ways their identity, culture, background, experience, status,
abilities, and opinion enrich the university community. We commit
ourselves to the pursuit of excellence in teaching, research, outreach,
and diversity as inextricably linked goals.
The University of
Wisconsin-Madison fulfills its public mission by creating a welcoming
and inclusive community for people from every background - people who as
students, faculty, and staff serve Wisconsin and the world.
For more information on diversity and inclusion on campus, please visit: Diversity and Inclusion
Degree and Area of Specialization:
Bachelors or Masters degree in biological sciences
Minimum Years and Type of Relevant Work Experience:
Minimum two years of laboratory experience. A moderate to strong
knowledge and experience in molecular biology is required. In addition,
animal experience and/or NGS experience is required.
Cell
culture experience is important. Animal experience and biological safety
level-3 (BSL-3) experience is desirable, but not required. Candidates
with Illumina miSeq and ONT sequencing are encouraged to apply. Top
candidates will be trained in biosafety, animal, and infectious disease
research. Excellent verbal and written communication skills are
required.
Additional Information:
The successful candidate must pass a background check and be approved
by the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
under 42 CFR 73.8 and the Criminal Justice Information Security Risk
Assessment. Ability to undergo and maintain a favorable background
investigation and National Select Agent Registration security risk
assessment. In addition, the ability to maintain a driver's license is
required.
Annual seasonal influenza vaccination.
A criminal background check will be conducted prior to hiring.
A period of evaluation will be required.
Department(s):
A873100-SCHOOL OF VET MEDICINE/PATHOBIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
and these workers don't have to stop and pee in a bottle....,
bostondynamics | Robotic navigation of complex subterranean settings is important for
a wide variety of applications ranging from mining and planetary cave
exploration to search and rescue and first response. In many cases,
these domains are too high-risk for personnel to enter, but they
introduce a lot of challenges and hazards for robotic systems, testing
the limits of their mobility, autonomy, perception, and communications.
The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge seeks novel approaches to
rapidly map, navigate, and search fully unknown underground environments
during time-constrained operations and/or disaster response scenarios.
In the most recent competition, called the Urban Circuit,
teams raced against one another in an unfinished power plant in Elma,
Washington. Each team's robots searched for a set of
spatially-distributed objects, earning a point for finding and precisely
localizing each object.
Whether robots are exploring caves on other planets or disaster areas
here on Earth, autonomy enables them to navigate extreme environments
without human guidance or access to GPS.
The Solution
TEAM CoSTAR,
which stands for Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Robots, relies
on a team of heterogeneous autonomous robots that can roll, walk or fly,
depending on what they encounter. Robots autonomously explore and
create a 3D map of the subsurface environment. CoSTAR is a collaboration
between NASA’s JPL, MIT, Caltech, KAIST, LTU, and industry partners.
“CoSTAR develops a holistic autonomy, perception, and communication
framework called NeBula (Networked Belief-aware Perceptual Autonomy),
enabling various rolling and flying robots to autonomously explore
unknown environments. In the second year of the project, we aimed at
extending our autonomy framework to explore underground structures
including multiple levels and mobility stressing-features. We were
looking into expanding the locomotion capabilities of our robotic team
to support this level of autonomy. Spot was the perfect choice for us
due to its size, agility, and capabilities.
We got the Spot robot only about 2 months before the competition.
Thanks to the modularity of the NeBula and great support from Boston
Dynamics, the team was able to integrate our autonomy framework NeBula
on Spot in several weeks. It was a risky and aggressive change in our
plans very close to the competition, but it paid off and the integrated
NeBula-on-Spot framework demonstrated an amazing performance in the
competition.” said CoSTAR's team lead Ali Agha of JPL. "The
NeBula-powered Spots were able to explore 100s of meters autonomously in
less than 60 minutes, negotiate mobility-stressing terrains and
obstacles, and go up and down stairs, exploring multiple levels."
The Results
Performance of the NeBula-enabled Spots alongside CoSTARs roving and
flying robots led to the first place in the urban round of competition
for team CoSTAR. For more information about Team CoSTAR's win, see:
floridapolitics | Florida’s Governor blasted as “unconstitutional” a trial balloon floated from the Joe Biden
administration that would see domestic travel restrictions imposed on
the state, setting up a day of what would be aggressive messaging and
fundraising appeals to his base.
“Any attempt to restrict or lockdown
Florida by the federal government would be an attack on our state, done
purely for political purposes,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said
in Port Charlotte Thursday morning, leading off a news conference with a
warlike speech aimed at some reported considerations from the Biden
administration.
The Governor added that “if anyone tries
to harm Floridians or target us, we will respond very swiftly,”
wrapping up nearly four minutes of remarks alternating between the
defense of the state’s coronavirus record and seeming anticipation of a
confrontation with the Democratic presidential administration.
DeSantis was referring to a Miami Herald
report, in which Biden White House members mulled what DeSantis called
“some type of travel restrictions on Americans and on Floridians.” The
concern is the B.1.1.7 strain of COVID-19, of which Florida has the most
cases of any state.
“I think it’s an absurd report that they
are thinking about doing that. It would be unconstitutional. It would
be unwise. And it would be unjust,” DeSantis decried, before serving up a
slab of red meat for Fox News and the rest of the national conservative
media.
“And if you think about it, restricting
the right of Americans to travel freely throughout our country, while
illegal aliens pour across the southern border unmolested, would be a
ridiculous, but very damaging, farce. So we will oppose it 100%,”
DeSantis added. “It would not be based in science. It would be a
political attack against the people of Florida.”
“It’s unclear why they would even try
talking about that,” DeSantis said, noting Florida is middle of the pack
in caseload and hospitalizations, with “much worse COVID results” in
over half the country.
“Over the winter … we were way less per
capita than a whole lot of lockdown states who are always cited as ‘the
right way to do it,'” the Governor added.
Both of the state’s U.S. Senators, unsurprisingly, sided with Florida over Biden.
China's Century, if it can keep it
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My elder brother called Thanksgiving evening and at one point he asked "Is
China kicking our ass?"
Short answer: yes, since around 2008. Longer answer: "It...
If Free Will Is False, Destiny Is True
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Free will is like God: perhaps dead, its absence having something to say
about morality (what Nietzsche meant by “Gott ist tot” was that the
Christian God ...
The Liberation of Assata Shakur
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*From Daily Black History Facts's*
*On November 2, 1979: **Assata Shakur was "freed" from Clinton Correctional
Center in New Jersey.*
Assata Shakur was co...
FREE BOOK: On Nonviolence
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“Michael Barker’s interrogation of nonviolent protest tactics and regime
change is both timely and important. Drawing on cases ranging from American
democr...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
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(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
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With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
them convicted and jailed is going to do too much better than your run of
the mill ...
