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.
technofog | The CDC caused an uproar in early September 2021, after it changed
its definitions of “vaccination” and “vaccine.” For years, the CDC had
set definitions for vaccination/vaccine that discussed immunity. This
all changed on September 1, 2021.
The prior CDC Definitions of Vaccine and Vaccination (August 26, 2021):
Vaccine:
A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity
to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease. Vaccines
are usually administered through needle injections, but can also be
administered by mouth or sprayed into the nose.
Vaccination: The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.
The CDC Definitions of Vaccine and Vaccination since September 1, 2021:
Vaccine:
A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response
against diseases. Vaccines are usually administered through needle
injections, but some can be administered by mouth or sprayed into the
nose.
Vaccination: The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce protection from a specific disease.
People
noticed. Representative Thomas Massie was among the first to discuss
the change, noting the definition went from “immunity” to “protection”.
To many observers, it appeared the CDC changed the definitions
because of the waning effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines. For
example, the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine falls over time, with
an Israeli study
reported in August 2021 as showing the vaccine being “only 16%
effective against symptomatic infection for those individuals who had
two doses of the shot back in January.” The CDC recognizes the waning
effectiveness, thus explaining their promotion of booster shots.
Of course, the usual suspects defended the CDC. The Washington Post, for example, cast doubt that the CDC changed the definition because of issues with the COVID-19 vaccines. The CDC tried to downplay the change, stating “slight changes in wording over time … haven’t impacted the overall definition.”
Internal CDC E-Mails
CDC emails we obtained
via the Freedom of Information Act reveal CDC worries with how the
performance of the COVID-19 vaccines didn’t match the CDC’s own
definition of “vaccine”/“vaccination”. The CDC’s Ministry of Truth went
hard at work in the face of legitimate public questions on this issue.
In one August 2021 e-mail, a CDC employee cited to complaints that “Right-wing covid-19 deniers are using your ‘vaccine’ definition to argue that mRNA vaccines are not vaccines…”
Greenwald | What is going on here is almost too self-evident to require elaboration. For years, The Post
favorably covered the animal welfare work of this group without even
remotely suggesting it had some nefarious ideological agenda, let alone
investigating its finances. Only one thing has changed: their work in
highlighting gruesome dog experimentations now has the possibility of
undermining Dr. Fauci or harming his reputation, and thus The Post
— acting like the pro-DNC liberal advocacy group that it is — set out
to smear White Coat as right-wing MAGA activists in order to
delegitimize and discredit their investigative work and, more
importantly, give liberals a quick-and-easy way to dismiss their work as
nothing more than an anti-science MAGA operation even though they are
nothing of the sort.
Even more disturbing was the telephone call which Goodman had on Monday with Reinhard and another Post reporter, Yasmeen Abutaleb,
assigned to the health and COVID beat. During that call, Abutaleb in
particular repeatedly demanded to know whether White Coat was concerned
that the activism they were doing on these dog experimentation programs
could end up harming Dr. Fauci's reputation and thus make him less able
to manage the COVID crisis. They even suggested that by encouraging
people to call the NIH telephone lines to protest this experimentation,
they might be making it difficult for people with questions about COVID
to get through. The obvious premise of the entire conversation was one
completely antithetical to the journalistic ethos: it is immoral to
do anything that reflects negatively on Dr. Fauci now, no matter how
true or warranted it might be, because his importance is too great to
risk undermining him. (Request for comment from Reinhard was not responded to as of publication of this article, but will be added if supplied).
In
general, as this controversy has unfolded, media outlets have expressed
almost no interest in the immorality and atrocities of these
taxpayer-funded dog experimentations, and instead have acted as
political activists with only one goal: protect Dr. Fauci. PolitiFact, for instance, purported to fact-check
White Coat's campaign (laughably calling them “a conservative watchdog
group”) by implying they were lying. Aside from citing (but not
verifying) NIAID’s denial that they funded one of the experiments, they
acknowledged that they did indeed fund others, but then pointed out that
nobody could prove that Fauci personally approved the funding
for these experiments. Yet that is a claim White Coat has never made and
which, in any event, is as unlikely as it is irrelevant given that, for
thirty years, Fauci has been the head of the agencies conducting these
experiments which have long been the target of activist protest. It is
simply impossible that he was unaware of these controversies.
After speaking with the two Post reporters,
Goodman told me that “it’s clear based on my conversations with them
that rather than investigating the horrific puppy experimentation being
funded with our tax dollars by Anthony Fauci — about which they have
asked virtually nothing — they are instead interested in attempting to
discredit our organization and #BeagleGate campaign in order to run
defense for Fauci.” He also described the sudden change in The Post's
behavior in reporting on them: “in just five 5 years, the paper went
from featuring our group as a model of bipartisanship in the animal
protection movement and highlighting our winning campaigns to end
taxpayer-funded animal testing to now trying to smear us a conservative
front group that doesn’t really care about animals, all because we dared
to criticize St. Fauci.”
Bellotti described The Post's sudden turnaround this way:
Having
personally witnessed the horrors of animal testing, I founded [White
Coat] to unite liberty-lovers and animal-lovers, Republicans and
Democrats, Libertarians and vegetarians to fight against wasteful
taxpayer-funded animal experiments. Widening the tent is how you win
campaigns, and we’ve done this more effectively than any other
organization, resulting in historic wins for animals, from shutting down
the government’s largest cat experimentation lab to freeing monkeys
from federal nicotine addiction experiments to bringing dog testing at
the VA to record lows. This has all been done on a shoestring budget
with overwhelming support from grassroots advocates and donors.
Apparently for some though, disparaging Anthony Fauci for funding the
abuse of puppies is a bridge too far. But, to suggest that we’re out to
accomplish anything other the save animals from wasteful government
spending and abuse is simply not true nor supported by any actual
evidence.
Newspapers like The Post vehemently
deny that they have any political agenda, insisting that they are
devoted to non-partisan and apolitical reporting. Very few people
believe this fraud any longer, which is why trust in journalism has collapsed so precipitously, but rarely do we see a test case that so vividly illustrates how they really function.
For years, The Washington Post
reported fairly and truthfully on this group, because none of its
activities threatened any government officials whom the paper wishes to
protect. Suddenly, when the work they have been doing for years began to
reflect poorly on a government official vital to American liberalism, The Post
launched a campaign that is not even thinly disguised but nakedly clear
in its goal: to smear this group by impugning its motives and
distorting its agenda so that its work is immediately and uncritically
disregarded by the paper's overwhelmingly liberal audience.
consentfactory | Still, as mass hysterical as things are, count on GloboCap to go
balls out on the mass hysteria for the next five months. The coming
Winter is crunch time, folks. They need to cement the New Normal in
place, so they can dial down the “apocalyptic pandemic.” If they’re
forced to extend it another year … well, not even the most brainwashed
New Normals would buy that.
Or … all right, sure, the most brainwashed would, but they
represent a small minority. Most New Normals are not fanatical
totalitarians. They’re just people looking out for themselves, people
who will go along with almost anything to avoid being ostracized and
punished. But, believe it or not, there is a limit to the level
of absurdity they’re prepared to accept, and the level and duration of
relentless stress and cognitive dissonance they are prepared to accept.
Most of them have reached that limit. They have done their part,
followed orders, worn the masks, got the “vaccinations,” and are happy
to present their “obedience papers” to anyone who demands to see them.
Now, they want to go back to “normal.” But they can’t, because … well,
because of us.
See, GloboCap can’t let them return to “normal” (i.e., the new
totalitarian version of “normal”) until everyone (i.e., everyone who
matters) has submitted to being “vaccinated” and is walking around with a
scanable certificate of ideological conformity in their smartphones.
They would probably even waive the “vaccination” requirement if we would
just bend the knee and pledge our allegiance to the WEF, or BlackRock,
or Vanguard, or whoever, and carry around a QR code confirming that we
believe in “Science,” the “Covidian Creed,” and whatever other
ecumenical corporatist dogma.
Seriously, the point of this entire exercise (or at least this phase
of this entire exercise) is to radically, irrevocably, transform society
into a monolithic corporate campus where everyone has to scan their IDs
at every turn of an endless maze of perpetually monitored,
eco-friendly, gender-fluid, ideologically uniform, non-smoking, totally
meat-free “safe spaces” owned and operated by GloboCap, or one of its
agents, subsidiaries, and assigns.
The global-capitalist ruling classes are determined to transform the
planet into this fascistic Woke Utopia and enforce unwavering conformity
to its valueless values, no matter the cost, and we, “the
Unvaccinated,” are standing in their way.
They can’t just round us up and shoot us — this is global capitalism,
not Nazism or Stalinism. They need to break us, to break our spirits,
to coerce, gaslight, harass, and persecute us until we surrender our
autonomy willingly. And they need to do this during the next five
months.
thegrayzone |Described by Forbes as a “cloak and
dagger [research and development] shop” that is “the most important
organization you’ve never heard of,” MITRE has developed some of the
most invasive surveillance technology in use by US spy agencies today.
Among its most novel products is a system built for the FBI which
captures individuals’ fingerprints from images posted on social media
sites.
MITRE’s own COVID-19 umbrella
coalition includes In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central
Intelligence Agency, and Palantir, a scandal-stained private spying
firm.
Elizabeth Renieris,
the founding director of Notre Dame and IBM’s technology ethics lab,
has warned that “as dominant technology and surveillance companies” like
MITRE “pursue new revenue streams in healthcare and financial
services…privately owned and operated ID systems with profit-maximizing
business models threaten the privacy, security, and other fundamental
rights of individuals and communities.”
Indeed, the involvement of the
military-intelligence apparatus in the development of a digital vaccine
passport system is yet another indication that behind the guise of
public health concerns, the US surveillance state could be due to
enhance its control over an increasingly restive population.
The Vaccine Credential Initiative, a neoliberal vehicle advised by military-intelligence professionals
As detailed in the first installment of this series,
tech oligarchs like Bill Gates and global capitalist policy hubs such
as the World Economic Forum have advanced digital ID and electronic
currency systems across the Global South in order to harvest data and
profits from populations that were previously out of reach.
The advent of vaccine passports
providing access to employment and public life has become the key vector
for accelerating their agenda in the West. As the financial consulting firm, Aite-Novarica, declared this September,
digital COVID-19 vaccine passports “expand the case for digital IDs
beyond COVID-19 vaccination only, and potentially serve as a digital ID
as a more comprehensive, universal source of identity information…”
As vaccine passports exclude millions across the West, sparking furious protests and wildcat strikes, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is working with its partners to implement them in digital form.
thehill | The Chicago Police Department (CPD) has begun placing officers on
no-pay status for not reporting their coronavirus vaccination status,
Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) said Monday.
In a news conference on Monday,
Lightfoot said that CPD has been reaching out to officers who are not
in compliance with the vaccine mandate to ensure that they are in
compliance.
Lightfoot said that a “very small number” of officers
have been put on no-pay status, even after having multiple opportunities
to comply with the mandate.
The Hill has reached out to CPD for further comment.
The update comes amid a back-and-forth between the city and the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police regarding the vaccine mandate.
The deadline for officers and all other city employees to come into compliance was Friday. The police department warned in a memo
that officers who choose to disobey the mandate would “become the
subject of a disciplinary investigation that could result in a penalty
up to and including separation from the Chicago Police Department.”
John
Catanzara, president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, has
repeatedly encouraged members to violate the mandate, to the point where
the city sued Catanzara over
his encouragement. A judge ruled Friday that he could no longer
publicly discourage people from complying with the mandate.
Under the city’s vaccine mandate, employees must report whether they
are vaccinated, have an exemption, or will be undergoing weekly testing.
The testing option is only available through Dec. 31, after which all
employees will need to be vaccinated or have an exemption.
As of
Monday, 13 out of the city’s 35 departments are at 100 percent
compliance, and another 29 departments are at 95 percent compliance,
Lightfoot said.
Overall, 79 percent of city employees have
reported their vaccination status, of which 84 percent are fully
vaccinated. When not accounting for police and fire department
employees, 96 percent of city employees are in compliance, of which 80
percent are fully vaccinated.
WaPo | Kyrie Irving is a thrillingly talented basketball player, a former Rookie of the Year, a seven-time All-Star and a gold medalist for Team USA. But I look forward to not watching him work his magic this season — as long as he refuses to do the right thing and get vaccinated against the coronavirus.
This
isn’t the first time Irving has courted controversy. But the skepticism
he and other holdouts have propagated and the wishy-washy stances even
some of their vaccinated colleagues have taken, are worth addressing
seriously — and not just for what they say about the fight against the
ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
The best way to show respect for athletes as political actors and
philanthropists is to push back when they’re wrong — especially when the
stakes are this high.
Irving plays for the Brooklyn Nets, and the city of New York mandates that Nets players be vaccinated before they can play in their home arenas. Irving is the only stubbornly unvaccinated Net.
Since he would have to sit out roughly half the team’s schedule, Nets
management has wisely decided it’s best he not play at all.
A performative iconoclast, Irving posted an I’m-the-victim justification on Instagram Live.
“It’s bigger than the game,” he said. “I came into the season thinking I
was just going to be able to play ball. . . . Why are you putting it on
me?”
Cue the violins.
I
don’t respect his “choice” at all. As for why we’re “putting it on”
him, we are battling together to defeat a highly infectious virus that
has killed more than 720,000 Americans. We have a trio of safe and
effective vaccines that slow the spread of the virus and confer
miraculous protection against serious illness and death. Irving’s choice
threatens not just his own health but also, should he be infected, that
of his fellow players, his coaches and trainers, the referees who call
the games, and the fans who come to see the Nets play.
Irving
clearly understands the privileges that come with his stardom,
including the ability to get millions of people to listen to whatever he
has to say. A few years ago, he drew worldwide attention by claiming,
with a straight face, that he believed the world is flat. “I do research
on both sides,” he said in 2017.
“I’m not against anyone that thinks the Earth is round. I’m not against
anyone that thinks it’s flat. I just love hearing the debate.”
He later apologized. “At the time, I was, like, huge into conspiracies,” he said. “And everybody’s been there.”
That’s
precisely the problem. Far too many Americans are “huge into
conspiracies,” and it is deeply irresponsible for famous athletes to
encourage them to go down the anti-vaccine rabbit hole.
WaPo | Even as the coronavirus
has ravaged the rank and file of law enforcement agencies across the
country, police labor leaders have threatened to go to court and called
for defiance from union members. The response to the coronavirus has
tragically been politicized — starting with the absurd demonization of
masks — but the refusal of these police unions to abide by vaccine
mandates, recognized by other unions including those representing
teachers as a vital tool to safeguard public health, represents a new
low.
Covid-19 has been the No. 1 killer of law enforcement officers in 2020 and 2021. According to the Officer Down Memorial Page,
which tracks the on-duty deaths of police officers in the United
States, more than 470 have died as a result of contracting the virus in
the line of duty since the start of the pandemic. That is more than four
times as many officers who have died from gunfire. Among the covid-19
fatalities: Louisiana Police Lt. DeMarcus Dunn, 36, who died the day
before his wedding; Edgardo Acosta-Feliciano, 48, a U.S. Customs and
Border Protection officer who leaves behind a wife, a daughter and two
sons; Michael Weiskopf,
52, a traffic homicide investigator for the St. Petersburg police
remembered for his kindness in dealing with people involved in serious
crashes. None had been vaccinated.
“If
this was cops getting shot on the streets of America today at this
number, there would be outrage,” Chuck Wexler, executive director of the
Police Executive Research Forum, told the New York Times. “This
is an issue that begs for leadership and putting politics aside. And
that’s exactly the opposite of what’s happening right now.” So on the
same day that the former head of Chicago’s police union died
from covid-19, Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara — who
once compared the city’s vaccine requirements to Nazi Germany — urged
his members not to comply with the mayor’s order to submit proof of
vaccination. Brandon Judd, president of the union that represents border patrol agents
said he is saddened by the rise in deaths — five agents died of
covid-19 in September alone — but he insists vaccines are a personal
choice.
It
should be expected that organizations whose purpose is the protection
of the health, safety and welfare of its members would actually try to
live up to those ideals. And that a profession whose motto is to protect
and serve would recognize the danger that is posed to the public by
officers who refuse to get vaccinated against a deadly virus.
rutherford | It’s no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.
This is what we know: the government has the means,
the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its
orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons,
detention centers, and FEMA concentration camps paid for with taxpayer
dollars.
It’s just a matter of time.
It no longer matters what the hot-button issue might be (vaccine
mandates, immigration, gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage,
healthcare, criticizing the government, protesting election results,
etc.) or which party is wielding its power like a hammer.
The groundwork has already been laid.
Under the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense
Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military can detain and
imprison American citizens with no access to friends, family or the
courts if the government believes them to be a terrorist.
So it should come as no surprise that merely criticizing the government or objecting to a COVID-19 vaccine could get you labeled as a terrorist.
After all, it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore,
especially given that the government likes to use the words
“anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.
For instance, the Department of Homeland Security broadly defines
extremists as individuals, military veterans and groups “that are
mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or
local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”
Indeed, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the
Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely,
associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views,
criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being
questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially
anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.
The government also has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and
law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and
other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result
in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.
This is what happens when you not only put the power to determine who is a potential
danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police
but also give those agencies liberal authority to lock individuals up
for perceived wrongs.
It’s a system just begging to be abused by power-hungry bureaucrats desperate to retain their power at all costs.
caitlinjohnstone | Use of force by Victorian police is officially required to be "reasonable, necessary and proportionate to the threat posed by an incident." When you see a video clip of Melbourne protesters just standing around the Remembrance Shrine begin fleeing to escape harm and being fired upon with less-lethal weapons
as they retreat, for example, does that seem "reasonable, necessary and
proportionate to the threat posed by an incident" to you?
"But Caitlin!" you may object. "Those people they're firing on are
Bad People! They're right-wingers and anti-vaxxers! And they're
protesting without permission!"
Okay, if you don't want to oppose police brutality on principle without making it about the supposed
ideological positions of its victims then that's your right. But surely
you don't think the normalization of this kind of violence is something
that's only going to affect people you disagree with politically going
forward, do you? Surely you're not naive and narcissistic enough to
believe the many dramatic deviations
from normal policing protocol we've been experiencing during these
protests will be rolled back when you personally no longer deem them
necessary?
Because that would be a very silly thing to believe.
The way police are dealing with protesters today is the way they're
going to deal with them from now on, unless we do something. And in
order for that something to be done we're going to first have to
collectively ask ourselves, is this the kind of country we want to live
in from now on?
Do we want to live in a country where protesters
are fired upon by dangerous projectile weapons if the police decide it's
time for them to leave? Where protests are violently quashed if the
government (the only so-called democracy in the world without any kind of statute or bill of rights,
mind you) decides they don't have permission to protest? Where armored
stormtroopers patrol the streets? Where people are apprehended simply for filming police? Where police show up at your doorstep to interrogate you on whether you're planning to attend any protests or know of anyone who is?
I
understand that lockdowns and vaccine passports are still fairly
popular ideas here, but at what point do we say no? At what point do we
say enough is enough? If those policies have literal soldiers patrolling Australian streets and enforcing state borders,
if they have sectors of the populace so upset that heavily armed riot
police are exercising abuses that will certainly be used on racial and
environmental justice demonstrators in the future the moment their
demonstrations are deemed unauthorised, is it really worth holding that
hard line? How much of our soul is Australia willing to trade in order
to enforce strict Covid regulations?
dailymail | Police have fired rubber bullets, stinger grenades and pepper balls at anti-vaxx protesters stationed at Melbourne's war memorial on a third day of violent demonstrations.
Around 400 people, who have been rallying to demand an end to mandatory vaccinations for construction workers, swarmed Victoria's Shrine of Remembrance which was built to honour the state's men and women who served in the First World War.
Throughout Wednesday the mob chanted 'lest we forget' as they stood in front of the monument, some decked out in body armour and helmets in anticipation of a police attack while others urged officers not to arrest them out of 'respect for the Anzacs'.
After an hours-long standoff where police offered to let protesters leave, officers opened fire to clear demonstrators who had started pelting them with bottles.
Victoria Police arrested 215 protesters throughout the day while two officers suffered head injuries, and one was taken to hospital with chest pains. Tap handles, golf balls, batteries and bottles were thrown at them from the shrine.
Deputy Commissioner Ross Guenther said: 'It was completely disrespectful that the crowd ended up at the shrine, which is such hallowed ground in this great city.'
The ugly scenes came after police ordered news channels to stop broadcasting aerial images of the protests, claiming organisers were using the live feed to evade police.
CTH | An inflection point has been reached in Australia with the government
COVID-19 lockdowns, forced vaccinations and now, vaccine passports.
What is happening today in the state of Victoria, specifically the
Melbourne metropolitan area, is an outcome of more than a year of
heavy-handed government rules and regulations deaf to the voices of the
average man, woman or family. There is a middle class & blue-collar
backlash taking place, and Americans would be wise to pay attention.
Things recently came to a head when the Premier of Victoria, Daniel
Andrews, began outlining the rules and regulations for opening society
back up after almost a year of total lockdown. The always futile attempt
to block the COVID-19 virus through a policy known as “COVID-ZERO” was
abandoned. The new approach is to open up society and the economy by
forcing everyone to take the vaccine, and then allowing only the vaccinated
to participate in the economy as varying percentages of the population
are double-vaxxed, and admittedly, later, booster-vaxxed.
Vaccination passports will be required to work, shop, attend events and essentially live in the New World Order
Premier Andrews has created for the citizens of Victoria. The day after
Andrews outlined the new rules – the working class, who have been
locked down and compliant to this point, finally had enough.
Do not be naive to the fact that U.S. and Canadian government
officials; those in direct ideological alignment with the leftist
perspectives of government in Australia; are not paying close attention
to what is happening there in preparation for when both the U.S. and
Canada move to block the unvaccinated from participating in society.
The vaccination passport methods, processes and procedures being
tested right now in Australia are soon to arrive in the United States.
Electronic check-ins and QR codes deployed to track the movements of
vaxxed and unvaxxed are being tested right now in almost all states in
Australia. We The People in America are only a few weeks or
months away from having to make the same decisions that middle-class
Victorian workers are faced with right now. This is why you should pay
attention to what is happening there.
The population of Australia (26 million) is small by comparison to the U.S. (350+ million), and as a result, the dynamic will be exponentially more explosive when it arrives here.
Socially, Americans are more geographically spread out than
Australia, as most of their major population centers circle the
coastline. Factually, the population of Florida or Texas is essentially
equivalent to the entire population of Australia. The economy of the
U.S. is also substantially larger and more diverse than down-under.
However, those points only emphasize how significantly more explosive
the same scenarios may become when the Biden regime attempts to follow
the oppressive process now being witnessed in the Melbourne region.
Do not anticipate any support from CONservative Republican
politicians. As we have witnessed in the past two decades, there is
only one overarching ideology in the Washington DC UniParty. They too
are more than comfortable with a class society where the elites are
disconnected from the laws, rules and regulations they force upon the
underclass.
The rust-belt of America was created by both Democrat and Republican
administrations. The globalist worldview favorable to the multinational
corporations and Wall Street run through both political parties in the
United States.
abcnews | Washington County's sheriff confirmed Tuesday night that jail inmates
had been prescribed ivermectin, but did not say how many. It wasn't
clear if all the inmates who were prescribed the medication had tested
positive for COVID-19.
“There is an open investigation and we can’t comment on it right now," Embry told The Associated Press.
Dr. Rob Karas, the jail's physician, has said no inmates were forced to take the drug.
The
U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved ivermectin for
use by people and animals for some parasitic worms, head lice and skin
conditions. The FDA has not approved its use in treating or preventing
COVID-19 in humans. According to the FDA, side effects for the drug
include skin rash, nausea and vomiting.
“Using any treatment for
COVID-19 that’s not approved or authorized by the FDA, unless part of a
clinical trial, can cause serious harm,” the FDA said in a
warning about the drug.
Embry declined to say who was the target
of the board's investigation. The board has authority over physicians,
but not jail facilities.
Sheriff
Tim Helder did not return a message Thursday, and a spokesperson for
the sheriff's office did not immediately respond to questions about the
drug's use.
In a lengthy statement released to the AP Thursday,
Karas defended the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19. Karas said he
has prescribed it to inmates and patients at his clinics who are
significantly sick with COVID-19 since late 2020. He did not respond to
questions about the investigation and the number of inmates who have
have been prescribed the drug.
“I do not have the luxury of
conducting my own clinical trial or study and am not attempting to do
so," Karas wrote. “I am on the front line of trying to prevent death and
serious illness."
The Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
reported that the sheriff's office said Helder had learned of the drug's
use at the jail on Tuesday. In a July 20 email to Helder, Karas
recommended the sheriff's staff take it as a preventive measure against
COVID-19 but did not mention its use on inmates. Karas has said he's
taken the drug, as have members of his family.
dailymail | A jail doctor in Washington County, Arkansas, has been using an animal deworming drug to treat inmates with Covid-19 even though the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has specifically warned against it.
Ivermectin
is often used as a dewormer in animals including cows and horses, and
is not recommended for treating the virus. The FDA said it 'can cause
serious harm'.
During a finance and
budget committee meeting for Washington County on Tuesday night the
jail's physician Dr Rob Karas asked for a 10 per cent increase in the
medical services contract, even after the county sheriff confirmed that
the jail health provider had been prescribing the drug.
Dr Karas has faced calls to resign over the revelation.
County-elected Justice of the Peace Eva Madison brought the issue back
up towards the end of the meeting after jail officials presented their
2022 budget. 'I learned today that Dr Karas is giving ivermectin - cow
dewormer - to the inmates at the jail,' she said.
Madison told members of the Washington
County quorum court - the county's governing body - that a jail official
and county employee, who asked to stay anonymous, told her they had
been sent to the jail's clinic to get tested for Covid-19.
When
the unidentified person tested negative they told Madison they were
given a $76 prescription for ivermectin, as reported by CBS News.
'They
were concerned about the prescription, asked their primary care
physician about it and the doctor told him to 'throw that in the trash,'
she said.
'(The person) tested
negative, was given a prescription for ivermectin, was told to go to Dr
Karas's pharmacy just off campus to have it filled,' Madison told the
committee.
She added: 'He's out $76
because of Dr Karas prescribing dewormer to a county employee for
treatment of a condition that he didn't have.
'The
employee had the good fortune to have a physician that he could go to
and ask for a second opinion. Our inmates do not have that choice.'
Washington
County Sheriff Tim Helder did not say how many inmates at the 710-bed
facility had been given ivermectin and defended Dr Karas, who has been
prescribing the medication.
Chron | A federal judge threw out a lawsuit filed by employees of a Houston
hospital system over its requirement that all of its staff be vaccinated
against COVID-19.
The Houston Methodist Hospital system suspended 178
employees without pay last week over their refusal to get vaccinated. Of
them, 117 sued seeking to overturn the requirement and over their
suspension and threatened termination.
In a scathing ruling Saturday, U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes of
Houston deemed lead plaintiff Jennifer Bridges’ contention that the
vaccines are “experimental and dangerous” to be false and otherwise
irrelevant. He also found that her likening the vaccination requirement
to the Nazis' forced medical experimentation on concentration camp
captives during the Holocaust to be “reprehensible.”
Hughes also ruled that making vaccinations a condition of employment was not coercion, as Bridges contended.
“Bridges can freely choose to accept or refuse a COVID-19 vaccine;
however, if she refuses, she will simply need to work somewhere else. If
a worker refuses an assignment, changed office, earlier start time, or
other directive, he may be properly fired. Every employment includes
limits on the worker’s behavior in exchange for remuneration. That is
all part of the bargain,” Hughes concluded.
FAIR |EP: Absolutely, yeah. A common thread throughout these bills
is that they use vague, sweeping language to define new criminal
offenses, or redefine existing ones, related to conduct that may occur
during a protest.
So we’ve seen bills targeting “taunting” police in Ohio and Kentucky. The new law in Florida that contains this new criminal offense around mob intimidation,
which is sweepingly defined—you only need three people who are trying
to get another person to do something, or to have a particular
viewpoint, which sounds a lot like any kind of protest, where you’re
trying to convince someone to do or think differently. Broad
prohibitions on inciting or encouraging or aiding unlawful assemblies;
obviously those cast a wide net.
And in many cases, these new bills and laws are relying on states’
existing definitions of “rioting,” which, in almost all states, are
already very broadly defined in ways that can capture a completely
peaceful protest. In many cases, you only need a small number of people,
whereas most of us conceive of a “riot” as kind of a large group. In
most instances, you don’t actually have to cause any damage or injure
anyone for it to be a riot; you only need to pose a threat or a danger
of something, property being damaged or someone being injured. This is
one of the many ways that these sweeping definitions can cover, again,
completely peaceful, nonviolent protest activity.
JJ: The problem that I think a lot of folks could see is the
broad sweep of it. And yet at the same time—it’s not a “but,” it’s an
“and”—and at the same time, we see that they’re actually specifically targeted. Florida’s law is about Black Lives Matter; it’s not about January 6, you know? We know that there are particular targets, and we shouldn’t pretend we don’t know.
EP: Right. And that’s something that we’ve seen, time and time
again in this tracking project, that lawmakers are really introducing
these anti-protest initiatives in the aftermath of distinct protest
movements. And it’s often clear from the text of the bills themselves,
as well as from what lawmakers say, what they’re targeting. And that’s
true of, certainly, this wave of legislation.
outsidevoices |Last May, several months into a global pandemic that
had capsized the economy, hog farmers had a problem on their hands.
With restaurants closed, demand for their product had evaporated. With
outbreaks shuttering meat processing plants all over the country, they
had nowhere to send their animals to be slaughtered. If kept alive, the
pigs would quickly outgrow facilities designed to hold them only for
highly abbreviated lives, and the costs of feeding and watering them
would become astronomical.
So some major pork producers, among
them Iowa’s largest, Iowa Select Farms, made a horrifying decision. They
would mass exterminate their animals in one fell swoop, using a
technique that promised efficiency for themselves but guaranteed
incomprehensible suffering for the pigs.
The method was called “ventilation shutdown,”
and it entailed, basically, roasting the pigs alive. Workers would
close all of the vents into the barns, shut down the air conditioning,
and pipe steam into the buildings until the animals died by asphyxiation
or hyperthermia, a process that took several hours. Then a worker would
walk through the piles of corpses with a captive bolt gun, shooting
whatever stragglers had survived.
The company, however, was
unaware that there was a whistleblower within their ranks. An ISF truck
driver named Lucas Walker, who had long been appalled by the company’s
treatment of its pigs, had informed an activist named Matt Johnson of
the company’s plans. Johnson snuck into the barns, placed hidden
cameras, and recorded video and audio of the massacre to later release
to the news media.
Neither Johnson nor Walker is what most people of conscience would
consider a dangerous political extremist. They had no desire to bring
any physical harm to anyone; on the contrary, they were moved by the
cause of putting a halt to needless suffering. But both a new state law
in Iowa and a bill currently being considered in Congress could render
them such in the eyes of the criminal justice system. It is just one
example of the moral hazard posed by the ongoing effort in Congress and
within the Biden administration to erect a new domestic security state
apparatus in response to the Trump years and the Capitol Riot — an
effort the CIA has joined, while animal rights groups and environmental
campaigners have been explicitly listed among its targets.
lockdownskeptics | Now that we are allowed to meet up in groups of six outside their
homes, Matt Hancock is warning us not to do anything foolish, like hug
one another or breach the two metre rule. “Do it safely,” he tweeted.
“Don’t blow it now”.
But in fact, the people who shouldn’t “blow it” are Boris Johnson,
Sir Patrick Vallance, Chris Whitty and, yes, Matt Hancock. That is the
view of Martin Kulldorff, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical
School, biostatistician and epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women’s
Hospital, Massachusetts, and co-author of the Great Barrington
Declaration.
Professor Kulldorff has told the UK Government and its scientific
advisors exactly who they should be listening to and why if they want to
save lives – and it doesn’t include vaccinating the entire population,
including children. He said this on Twitter on March 15th – “Thinking
that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking
that nobody should. Covid vaccines are important for older high-risk
people and their care-takes. Those with prior natural infection do not
need it. Nor children.” – and Twitter attached a health warning to his
Tweet: “This tweet is misleading. Learn why health officials recommend a
vaccine for most people.” Because, of course, a 22 year-old graduate in
Whiteness Studies sitting in Twitter’s HQ in Silicon Valley knows much
more about infectious diseases than a Harvard professor of medicine.
Speaking to me in an exclusive interview for Lockdown Sceptics, Kulldorff said:
That warning was rather silly.
When making unscientific claims, media often refer to ‘health officials’
or ‘health experts’ without naming those experts. I challenge Twitter
to name vaccine epidemiologists who think that everyone must get the
Covid vaccine, including children and those with immunity from prior
infection.
Equally strange, they even concur with my tweet when
they say “most people” rather than “all people”. Right now, children are
clearly not part of “most people”, since a Covid vaccine has not yet
been approved for them and we know nothing about efficacy or potential
adverse reaction in children. Since most children are asymptomatic or
only mildly symptomatic, it will be hard to show that the vaccine can
reduce symptoms, hospitalisations or mortality in children, requiring a
large sample size in countries that still has considerable disease
spread.
I have worked with vaccines for a couple of decades, but
Twitter clearly thinks that scientific discussions about these things
are dangerous. Maybe social media is dangerous to those in power. I do
hope that social media is dangerous to the lockdowns that have done so
much damage to public health during this past year. The enormous
collateral public health damage, which is being documented by Collateral Global,
is something that we will continue to to live with, and die with, for
many years to come. It truly is a public health tragedy of epic
proportions.
The catastrophic impact of the lockdowns on public health has been
exacerbated by headlines and adverts striking the fear of god into
millions, making them less likely to seek medical help for non-Covid
diseases.
greenwald |A report declassified last Wednesday by the
Department of Homeland Security is raising serious concerns about the
possibly illegal involvement by the intelligence community in U.S.
domestic political affairs.
Entitled “Domestic Violent Extremism Poses Heightened Threat in 2021,” the March 1 Report
from the Director of National Intelligence states that it was prepared
“in consultation with the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland
Security—and was drafted by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC),
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Department of Homeland
Security (DHS), with contributions from the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).”
Its primary point is this: “The IC [intelligence community] assesses
that domestic violent extremists (DVEs) who are motivated by a range of
ideologies and galvanized by recent political and societal events in the
United States pose an elevated threat to the Homeland in 2021.” While
asserting that “the most lethal” of these threats is posed by “racially
or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) and militia violent
extremists (MVEs),” it makes clear that its target encompasses a wide
range of groups from the left (Antifa, animal rights and environmental
activists, pro-choice extremists and anarchists: “those who oppose
capitalism and all forms of globalization”) to the right (sovereign
citizen movements, anti-abortion activists and those deemed motivated by
racial or ethnic hatreds).
The U.S. security state apparatus
regards the agenda of “domestic violent extremists” as “derived from
anti-government or anti-authority sentiment,” which includes “opposition
to perceived economic, racial or social hierarchies.” In sum, to the
Department of Homeland Security, an “extremist” is anyone who opposes
the current prevailing ruling class and system for distributing power.
Anyone they believe is prepared to use violence, intimidation or
coercion in pursuit of these causes then becomes a “domestic violent
extremist,” subject to a vast array of surveillance, monitoring and
other forms of legal restrictions:
It
goes without saying that violence of any kind — including that which is
politically motivated — is a serious crime under U.S. law, and it is
the proper role of the U.S. Government to investigate and prevent it.
But there are real and important legal and institutional limits on the
authority of the intelligence community to involve itself in domestic
law enforcement, or other forms of domestic political activity, that
seem threatened here, if not outright violated.
AIER | One year ago, between March 13 and 16, 2020, began what most of us
would agree were the most difficult days of our lives. We thought our
rights and liberties were more or less secure or could only be hobbled
on the margin. We took certain things for granted, such as that our
governments would not – and could not – order us to stay home, close
most businesses and schools, shut down travel, padlock churches and
concert halls, cancel events, much less lock down society in the name of
virus control.
This not-yet-released HHS report on COVID-19 projects an 18-month-long tsunami of nationwide disease and death. The Trump administration could’ve stemmed the tide but looked the other way until it was too late. If he had an ounce of decency, he’d resign. https://t.co/TA8iorcwW5
All that changed with a federal document issued March 13, 2020,
and declassified three months later. It was the lockdown guidelines.
Over the following days, governors panicked. People panicked.
Bureaucrats were unleashed. All the powers of the state at all levels of
society were deployed not on the virus but on the people, which is all
that governments can really control. The lockdowns were nearly
universal, implemented around the world but for a few holdouts, one of
which was in the US (South Dakota).
A year later, most states are opening up while those still clinging
to lockdowns can no longer control people. Regardless of warnings from
the top that going back to normal life is too dangerous, most people
have decided to be done with the whole dreadful episode.
All year we’ve asked ourselves the question: why did this happen?
Pathogens are part of life now and always have been. For the better part
of a century, social and economic outcomes from new viruses were ever
less disruptive. Public health had a settled consensus that disease is
something to mitigate through doctor-patient relationships. Taking away
people’s rights was out of the question. The last time that was tried in
very limited ways in 1918 demonstrated that coercion only distracts,
divides, and delays. This is why lockdowns were not attempted for
another hundred years. Wisely so.
In the severe pandemic of 1957-58, officials explicitly said:
‘‘[T]here is no practical advantage in the closing of schools or the
curtailment of public gatherings as it relates to the spread of this
disease.’’ It was the same in 1968-69, 2006, 2009, and 2012-13.
Then came 2020 and SARS-CoV-2. The 24-hour news cycle and social
media kicked in. Shocking images from China – people dropping dead in
streets, police dragging people out of their homes or otherwise sealing
whole apartment units – were blasted onto cellphones the world over.
Then a part of Italy seemed to erupt. To many, it felt like a plague,
and a primitive disease panic took over political culture.
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
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...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
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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 ...