Realizing He Is Sincerely Hated - Brandon Dials Back The Jab Fascism

WaPo  | President Biden on Tuesday outlined plans to expand coronavirus testing sites across the country, distribute a half-billion free at-home tests and deploy more federal health resources to aid strained hospitals, as the omicron variant drives a fresh wave of infections.

At the White House, Biden acknowledged that Americans are “tired, worried and frustrated” with covid-19, which he described as a “tough adversary.” But he stressed in remarks at the White House that “we’ve shown that we’re tougher; tougher because we have the power of science and vaccines that prevent illness and save lives.”

The president said Americans have an obligation to get vaccinated, calling it a “patriotic duty,” and pointed to former president Donald Trump’s comment that he got his vaccine booster shot.

Biden stressed that while the number of covid cases have soared to levels not seen since 2020, the outlook was far different with vaccines and other treatment.

“This is not March of 2020. Two hundred million people are fully vaccinated. We’re prepared. We know more,” he said.

Speaking directly to parents, Biden said, “We don’t have to shut down schools because of covid-19. We can keep our K-12 schools open. That’s exactly what we should be doing.”

The Biden administration will start delivering a half-billion free rapid tests to homes next month, according to the statement, and health officials will set up a website where Americans can order them. New federal testing sites will also be established across the country, starting with one in New York City this week.

The Biden administration has emphasized increased testing as one of the pillars of its pandemic response, but it has been criticized for failing to provide at-home tests at low cost. Americans are paying $25 for a pack of two tests, if they can find any at a pharmacy.

Health officials say they fear that the emergence of the quickly spreading omicron variant could overwhelm health-care facilities nationwide. The variant accounted for 73 percent of new coronavirus cases in the United States between Dec. 12 and 18, according to modeled projections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Kamala Harris May Be The Least Talented Lawyer And Politician OF ALL TIME!!!!

LATimes |  Vice President Kamala Harris said Friday that the administration failed to anticipate the variants that have prolonged and worsened the COVID-19 pandemic and that she underestimated the role misinformation would play in prolonging the disease that has killed 800,000 Americans.

“We didn’t see Delta coming. I think most scientists did not — upon whose advice and direction we have relied — didn’t see Delta coming,” she said. “We didn’t see Omicron coming. And that’s the nature of what this, this awful virus has been, which as it turns out, has mutations and variants.”

Harris made the comments during a wide-ranging interview with The Times in her ceremonial office, touching on immigration, women’s health, the criticism she has received for her management style and her role as a history-making leader. But the vice president returned repeatedly to the chief challenge of the Biden administration: battling a pandemic that — thanks to a new fast-spreading variant, Omicron — has led many Americans to put travel plans on hold, cancel holiday parties and stock up again on masks.

“I get it. I get it. I totally get it,” she said. “I mean, you know, one of the concerns that I have is the undiagnosed and untreated trauma at various degrees that everyone has experienced.”

I've been thinking a lot about why the latest surge has hit me so hard and I think it's because I have been fooling myself -- to some extent -- for the last 18 months 🧵

— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) December 17, 2021

President Biden celebrated “independence” from the virus in an upbeat July 4 speech, saying, “While the virus hasn’t been vanquished, we know this: It no longer controls our lives. It no longer paralyzes our nation. And it’s within our power to make sure it never does again.”

At the time, some public health experts warned that his optimism was premature, given that the Delta variant was already a significant threat.

Harris denied that the administration declared victory prematurely, or ever.

“We have not been victorious over it,” she said. “I don’t think that in any regard anyone can claim victory when, you know, there are 800,000 people who are dead because of this virus.”

Many Americans, particularly conservatives, resisted Biden’s call to get vaccinated against COVID-19, a measure public health officials say is critical to avoid hospitalization and death from the disease. Harris cited as a singular regret her failure to appreciate the power of misinformation in dissuading people to trust the vaccine.

“I would take that more seriously,” she said of the misinformation. “The biggest threat still to the American people is the threat to the unvaccinated. And most people who believe in the efficacy of the vaccine and the seriousness of the virus have been vaccinated. That troubles me deeply.”

 

 

The Vaccine Mandate Has Taught Elites "In The Future Go Straight To Coercion!"

FT |  Vaccine mandates are not incurring a vicious public backlash, at least not yet. Almost a month has passed since President Joe Biden announced that most US workers would have to be vaccinated or frequently tested. Street protests are real but containable. Resignations from work are at modest levels. The governor of California even feels emboldened to require vaccines for school children….

If it holds, the public’s grudging tolerance of mandates will have eye-opening lessons. For one, people are hopeless predictors of their own future behaviour. Surveys had suggested a rash of job-quitting in the event of employer mandates (just as they had implied that France, whose vaccination rate is pulling ahead of Britain’s, would be a laggard). Public opinion data does not just inform the election predictions of speculative columnists. It is also an important basis of government policy. If the science has a systemic blind spot for the future, for what people think they would do in hypothetical scenarios, it has distorted governance.

Another conclusion is that partisanship has its uses… It is a sign of the most dire civic rot that people base even their approach to personal health on their tribal fealties. But it also means that Biden’s mandate is mostly alienating those who were never going to vote for him anyway. The very bifurcation of America can empower as well as curb a leader.

Of all the inferences to be drawn from the elusive backlash, the last is the most far-reaching. In fact, after five years of anti-elite politics, from Brazil to the Philippines, it feels transgressive to express this thought: in the end, people want to be led.

A truism, possibly? Or something more unpleasant? More:

The public has already supplied an example of what we might call enlightened docility. Imagine being told in 2016 that, in four years, there would be vast support for a lockdown with no peacetime precedent, prescribed by an invisible expert class. Next to coercion of that scale and nature, the mandates are laissez-faire. I say all this with the jitters of a man carrying a vase in a greased hand across a stone floor.

No, not concerning at all! In a way, the whole process resembles the neoliberal playbook: (1) Degrade public health by underfunding and corruption, (2) watch it fail in a very public test, and (3) replace it with coercion. Best of all, in future you can go directly to coercion!

OSHA - Any Adverse Reaction To An Employer Mandated Covid Jab Is Work-Related

ENR  |  New guidance from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration is causing contractors to change their COVID-19 vaccine requirements, and many of them criticize the guidance as diametrically opposed to the Biden administration's stated desire to increase vaccinations.

Update: EEOC Says It Will Create Specialized Return-to-Work Guidelines

On April 20, OSHA released the new guidance in the frequently asked questions section of its website for COVID-19 safety compliance.  

The question asks whether an employer should record adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccination if the employer requires the vaccine. OSHA states that if a vaccine is required, then any adverse reaction is considered work-related and therefore it must be recorded. Under OSHA rules, most employers with more than 10 employees are required to keep a record of serious work-related injuries and illnesses. Recorded injuries and illnesses become part of a contractors safety record.

TAKE OUR POLL: Do you agree with OSHA's guidance on employers requiring vaccines?

This is the actual text of the new question and answer on the OSHA website:

"If I require my employees to take the COVID-19 vaccine as a condition of their employment, are adverse reactions to the vaccine recordable?

"If you require your employees to be vaccinated as a condition of employment (i.e., for work-related reasons), then any adverse reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine is work-related. The adverse reaction is recordable if it is a new case under 29 CFR 1904.6 and meets one or more of the general recording criteria in 29 CFR 1904.7."

In response, several large contractors said they have changed or will change their vaccination policy to only recommend—not require—a vaccine.

"We, sadly, had to back off our (employee vaccination) mandate because OSHA did something I don't understand at all," said Bob Clark, founder and executive chairman of Clayco in a recent ENR Critical Path podcast. "I side with OSHA frequently, we're in its VIP program, but on this they're just wrong. It's a terrible decision they've made and I think it'll be overturned."

Clark said Clayco, which participated in crafting the initial Centers for Disease Control guidance on construction site safety during the pandemic, would be communicating with OSHA through members of congress to seek changes to the guidance. A spokeswoman for OSHA did not immediately return messages asking for clarification of the new guidance. Construction industry groups universally panned the guidance and said it would hurt their efforts to encourage employees to get vaccinated.

"What they put forward could potentially discourage employers from supporting their workers getting the vaccine," said Kevin Cannon, senior director of safety and health services at the Associated General Contractors of America. "AGC is not in support of any mandate, however we participated, April 19th through 23rd, in vaccine awareness week. We had a lot of members who were in chapters that supported the event. We even had some who hosted vaccine clinics on an active job site or in their offices."

Cannon said some member contractors may have changed their approach to those events had they known, at the time, they could potentially "be on the hook for recording these potential adverse reactions."

Degradation Of The Public Health System Wasn't Caused By The Evil Ineptitude Of Fauci And Walensky

authorea |  In most Western countries, and in the majority of Canadian provinces, the COVID response symbiotically produced by political actors and public health institutions caused multiple disconnects: between the scientific evidence on COVID transmission and the public health sanctioned advice; between public health and governmental discourses prioritizing the wellbeing of the population and containment strategies focused mostly on economic indicators; and between inclusive discourses putting forward collective sacrifices for a common good and deeply inequitable interventions. 

At the time of writing this commentary, those disconnects have grown too deep to be hidden. More efforts seem to go in controlling the political spin and rationing the information made available than in trying to correct documented deficiencies (Daflos, 2021; Thomas & Gervais, 2021). This is not to say that there is no push back by some public health officials and it could be that fierce debates are taking place behind closed doors. But, in most jurisdictions there have been little to no place for open dissension (Deep Singh, 2021).

 

Somewhere in the last year public health lost its soul. The goal of fostering individual and collective health and well-being became secondary to disputable economic growth indicators and radical utilitarianism regarding the value of human lives. The focus on equity that was central in all public health discourses fell as one of the first victims of the discipline turn toward political symbiosis and realpolitik. The ambition to be a science-driven evidence-based practice continues to be daily trampled in evidence-free statements (Daflos, 2021; Goldman, 2020).

 

In the following months and years, we should expect the COVID pandemic to be used to support calls for increased budgets by public health state bureaucracies. And many valid arguments can be made in support of stronger public health. However, it would be a huge mistake to ignore what the discipline lost in the pandemic, and the causes explaining the disconnects discussed here. The pandemic caused public health to turn back to its medical roots instead of leveraging the interdisciplinarity it long preached (Greenhalgh et al., 2021). It pushed many public health state bureaucracies to become tools for governments instead of being carriers for evidence-based information. And more generally it caused the discipline to renege most of its principles.

Aussies Gave Up Their Guns 25 Years Ago - Bet They Regret That Now....,

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?

What type of Police is this?@Voice4Victoria pic.twitter.com/BtrECrUYMe

— #FightTheFear (@Mitchyball) September 22, 2021

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?

 

Authoriteh's Restive About What You Peasants Get Up To With Synthetic Biology

FT  |  Paul Dabrowa does not know if it is illegal to genetically modify beer at home in a way that makes it glow. The process involves taking DNA information from jellyfish and applying it to yeast cells, then using traditional fermenting methods to turn it into alcohol. But he is worried that it could be against the law given that it involves manipulating genetic material. “This stuff can be dangerous in the wrong hands, so I did that in an accredited lab,” he says, adding that he himself has only got as far as making yeast cells glow in a Petri dish. For the most part Dabrowa, a 41-year old Melbourne-based Australian who styles himself as a bit of an expert on most things, prefers to conduct his biohacking experiments in his kitchen. He does this mostly to find cures for his own health issues. Other times just for fun.

In recent years the community of hobbyists and amateurs Dabrowa considers his kin has been energised by the falling cost and growing accessibility to gene-editing tools such as Crispr. This has led to an explosion of unchecked experimentation in self-constructed labs or community facilities focused on biological self-improvement.

Despite a lack of formal microbiological training, Dabrowa has successfully used faecal transplants and machine learning to genetically modify his own gut bacteria to lose weight without having to change his daily regime. The positive results he’s seen on himself have encouraged him to try to commercialise the process with the help of an angel investor. He hopes one day to collect as many as 3,000 faecal samples from donors and share the findings publicly.

Much of his knowledge — including the complex bits related to gene-editing — was gleaned straight from the internet or through sheer strength of will by directly lobbying those who have the answers he seeks. “Whenever I was bored, I went on YouTube and watched physics and biology lectures from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology],” he explains. “I tried the experiments at home, then realised I needed help and reached out to professors at MIT and Harvard. They were more than happy to do so.”

At the more radical end of the community are experimentalists such as Josiah Zayner, a former Nasa bioscientist, who became infamous online after performing gene therapy on himself in front of a live audience. Zayner’s start-up, The Odin — to which Crispr pioneer and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School George Church is an adviser — has stubbornly resisted attempts to regulate its capacity to sell gene-editing kits online in the idealistic belief that everyone should be able to manage their own DNA.

These garage scientists might seem like a quirky new subculture but their rogue mindset is starting to generate consternation among those who specialise in managing biological threats in governments and international bodies.

In 2018 the states that are signatories to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) identified gene editing, gene synthesis, gene drives and metabolic pathway engineering as research that qualifies as “dual use”, meaning it is as easy to deploy for harmful purposes as it is for good.
 

mRNA Neo-Vaccinoid Mandate Holds No Political Downside For Cornpop Or The DNC

NYTimes |  In December 2020, as the prospect of imminent mass vaccination against Covid-19 was finally becoming a reality, Mr. Biden leveled with the American people: He said he would not force anyone to get the jab. “No, I don’t think it should be mandatory,” he told reporters. “I wouldn’t demand it be mandatory.”

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, recently reiterated Mr. Biden’s position. “That’s not the role of the federal government,” she declared on July 23, referring to the idea of a government mandate. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the same thing a week later: “There will be no nationwide mandate.”

So much for that. On Thursday, Mr. Biden announced a far-reaching vaccine mandate that applies to most federal workers, hospitals, public schools and 80 million employees of private companies. Under the White House’s presumptuous plan, workplaces that employ more than 100 people must require their employees to either get vaccinated or submit to weekly testing — a burden so onerous that for many businesses, it will not be a choice at all.

The president’s plan is certainly well intentioned. The vaccines are the only tried-and-true strategy for defeating Covid; government officials should both encourage vaccination and make it easier to get vaccinated. Health officials must continue selling people on the vaccines by emphasizing the considerable upside: Vaccination decreases transmission of the virus and turns hospitalization and death into very unlikely outcomes. It provides such robust protection that 99 percent of coronavirus fatalities in the United States now occur in the unvaccinated population. Vaccination works, and it’s the right option for a vast majority of Americans.

But forcing vaccines on a minority contingent of unwilling people is a huge error that risks shredding the social fabric of a country already being pulled apart by political tribalism.

The president should not — and most likely does not — have the power to unilaterally compel millions of private-sector workers to get vaccinated or risk losing their jobs: Mr. Biden is presiding over a vast expansion of federal authority, one that Democrats will certainly come to regret the next time a Republican takes power. Moreover, the mechanism of enforcement — a presidential decree smuggled into law by the Department of Labor and its Occupational Safety and Health Administration — is fundamentally undemocratic. Congress is supposed to make new laws, not an unaccountable bureaucratic agency.

While more than 70 percent of American adults have received a shot, a smaller but sizable group of people, for various reasons, are unvaccinated. Some members of this group have antibodies from a previous Covid case and are reasonably protected from future illness, according to recent data. There is little benefit to forcing vaccination on such people, and Mr. Biden’s decision to not exempt them is a significant misstep.

Unvaccinated individuals who were never infected by Covid would certainly benefit from vaccination. But the coercive approach has major downsides. The most anti-vaccine Americans — those who are adamantly refusing the jab because of a misguided belief that it’s dangerous — will probably not change their minds because the government is strong-arming employers. On the contrary, the federal mandate might actually be taken as confirmation of their paranoid suspicions that the vaccines have less to do with their health and more to do with social control.

As a practical matter, it’s undeniable that the federal mandate will engender a titanic backlash and create a spate of lawsuits. Vaccine holdouts have already taken legal action against employers requiring vaccination: Todd Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason University in Virginia who had recovered from Covid and has antibodies, recently fought his institution’s mandate and prevailed. And Republican governors are certain to battle Mr. Biden over this policy. Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a Republican, tweeted at the president, “See you in court.”

It’s true that courts have upheld vaccine mandates in certain circumstances: In a 1922 case, the Supreme Court famously ruled that a city ordinance could deny admission to students who failed to get the smallpox vaccine. But the assertion that a public official can completely sidestep the legislative process and enact a much farther-reaching vaccine mandate via administrative action should elicit skepticism from even those who vigorously support vaccination.

 

 

Cornpop Declares War On 1/3rd Of Americans "We've Been Patient But Our Patience Is Wearing Thin"

Even if the world were 100% jabbed with these mRNA neo-vaccinoids, the jabbed - who host the virus - would provide ample breeding ground for variants.

It's likely much worse than this. It has been claimed that widespread distribution of a non-sterilizing mRNA goo into a population with high levels of infection and transmission is likely to select for variants that escape the goo induced immune response.

If that’s right, it looks like a colossal blunder to have relied on “symptom reduction for wild type-caused disease” as the primary public health response to the pandemic.
 
If the neo-vaccinoids don’t impact infections or transmission, or barely do so, how will they select for jab evasion? Someone, jabbed or not, gets infected and passes it on – where’s the selection pressure? Masks and distancing, on the other hand, would be expected to select for more transmissible variants.
 
Don’t masks and distancing stop transmission? If the virus doesn’t transmit then it doesn’t seem it can mutate – it would just die out, wouldn’t it? As I understand it, masks and distancing don’t stop transmission, they make it harder – thus favoring virus strains that are more transmissible.
 
It seems as though you’re saying that we are trading a short term benefit by masking and social distancing for a long term consequence of enhanced virulence of the virus. Would you suggest that it might be better (in the long run) not to mask and distance?

My understanding is viruses only survive and replicate in a host cell so it would seem the best way to get rid of this is to deny it host cells by masks and distancing and in some cases lock downs. The jabs as they are now seem like they are more a way to lead some facsimile of normal but they don’t really address the issue that the virus is still here and replicating in both jabbed and unjabbed.

What this will mean over time – who knows? I personally don’t have a whole lot of confidence in the government which seems more made to protect an economy than to save lives.
 
I’ve seen this exact argument applied to the neo-vaccinoids as they are non-sterilizing. It seemed like a sound argument not to rush out these neo-vaccinoids as they may create vaccine resistant strains like we might be seeing with Mu. I’ve not seen this about masking and distancing before. Do you think we are seeing these more virulent strains are occurring because we’ve been masking and distancing and not because we’re using non-sterilizing neo-vaccinoids?

dailymail |  President Joe Biden on Thursday declared war on the 80 million Americans who have yet to get a COVD vaccine and asked them 'what more is there to wait for' as he announced mandates covering two thirds of all workers.

'This is not about freedom or personal choice. It's about protecting yourself and those around you, the people you work with, the people you care about, the people you love. My job as president is to protect all Americans,' he said in remarks in the State Dining Room at the White House.

'We've been patient but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us. So please do the right thing,' he said.

Only NIH Approved Treatments Get The HHS Prep Act Liability Waiver

“Enacted in December 2005, the PREP Act authorizes the Secretary of HHS (Secretary) to issue a declaration (called a PREP Act declaration) that provides immunity from tort liability (except for willful misconduct) for claims of loss caused, arising out of, relating to, or resulting from administration or use of countermeasures to diseases, threats and conditions determined by the Secretary to constitute a present, or credible risk of a future public health emergency to entities and individuals involved in the development, manufacture, testing, distribution, administration, and use of such countermeasures.” (link)

 

A PREP Act declaration is specifically for the purpose of providing immunity from tort liability, and is different from, and not dependent on, other emergency declarations.

 

Under the HHS Notification, the PREP Act has been modified: “The amended Section VII adds that PREP Act liability protections also extend to Covered Persons for Recommended Activities that are related to any Covered Countermeasure that is:

 

1. licensed, approved, cleared, or authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) (or that is permitted to be used under an Investigational New Drug Application or an Investigational Device Exemption) under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic (FD&C) Act or Public Health Service (PHS) Act to treat, diagnose, cure, prevent, mitigate or limit the harm from COVID–19, or the transmission of SARS–CoV–2 or a virus mutating therefrom; (link)

 

The attachment of a liability or tort waiver to only cover FDA approved therapeutics likely explains a shift amid the medical community to stop patients treatment due to coverage restrictions on their malpractice insurance.  Additionally, Big Pharma -the group who controls NIH- wouldn’t make as much money if their mandatory vaccines had a less costly alternative.  So there’s that.

 

The PREP Act offers hospitals blanket financial liability protection in treating C19 patients only if the hospitals follow the approved protocol; if hospitals treat only with CDC, FDA approved countermeasures, i.e. NIH approved measures, they keep the liability shield. Any hospital deviating from the protocol loses the PREP Act C19 liability shield, it seems. Again, follow the money.

 

I can’t see any other reason hospitals would fight so hard to block dying patients last-chance medical requests for an FDA approved drug used off-label but not EUA’d for C19. It might explain the hospital’s use of the term “human guinea pig”.

 

This is from a brief outline of the current PREP Act applied to C19 treatments. Ivermectin is not a "covered countermeasure” by this definition.

 

“Fourth, the medical product at issue must be a covered countermeasure. The PREP Act specifies four types of covered countermeasures: (i) a qualified “pandemic or epidemic product”; (ii) a “security countermeasure”; (iii) a drug, biological product,or device that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)has authorized for emergency use; and (iv) a “respiratory protective device” that is approved by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).”

Biden Is Under Nearly Unprecented Military-Media Assault For Asserting Civilian Control

NYTimes  |   President Biden used his daily national security briefing on the morning of April 6 to deliver the news that his senior military leaders suspected was coming. He wanted all American troops out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

In the Oval Office, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wanted to make certain. “I take what you said as a decision, sir,” General Milley said, according to officials with knowledge of the meeting. “Is that correct, Mr. President?”

It was.

I’ve never seen such a coordinated media-military attack on a President for asserting civilian control of the military. https://t.co/BVPXHUTxed

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) August 21, 2021

Over two decades of war that spanned four presidents, the Pentagon had always managed to fend off the political instincts of elected leaders frustrated with the grind of Afghanistan, as commanders repeatedly requested more time and more troops. Even as the number of American forces in Afghanistan steadily decreased to the 2,500 who still remained, Defense Department leaders still cobbled together a military effort that managed to protect the United States from terrorist attacks even as it failed, spectacularly, to defeat the Taliban in a place that has crushed foreign occupiers for 2,000 years.

The current military leadership hoped it, too, could convince a new president to maintain at least a modest troop presence, trying to talk Mr. Biden into keeping a residual force and setting conditions on any withdrawal. But Mr. Biden refused to be persuaded.

The two Pentagon leaders stood before Mr. Biden near the same Resolute Desk where President George W. Bush reviewed plans in 2001 to send in elite Special Operations troops to hunt for Osama bin Laden only to see him melt over the border into Pakistan. It was the same desk where President Barack Obama decided on a surge of forces in 2009, followed by a rapid drawdown, only to discover that the Afghan military was not able to defend itself despite billions of dollars in training. It was there that President Donald J. Trump declared that all American troops were coming home — but never carried through a plan to do so.

The Root Cause of the Afghanistan Crisis? U.S. Corporate Profit-Seeking...,

diplomaticourier |  With twenty years to prepare for it, there should be plenty of clarity in the post-mortem on “what went wrong in Afghanistan” for American policy. History warned us with everything but flashing red lights that all was not well as the twenty years progressed. History should also tell us that there will be as little clarity as to how America and allies failed in Afghanistan as the lack of clarity that doomed the enterprise.

The comparisons to Vietnam were already numerous. These will only proliferate as photojournalists -- instinctually sensing a fall of Saigon moment -- capture images of the chaotic and poorly planned evacuation of Kabul. Like America’s involvement in Vietnam, this failure did not happen in a vacuum; it happened in a sequence. Policy failures, lacking political will, military issues, and cultural upheaval all contributed to the images of the helicopter leaving the American embassies in both Saigon, with a long line queued up for an escape that was never to come.

That sequence continued after the Vietnam War. In the decades since, that failure has been studied and debated militarily, politically, and policy-wise. The United States military took the lessons of failure and revolutionized itself, moving to an all-volunteer force, integrating National Guard and Reserve components, and focusing on technological superiority and precision. The result was a much smaller overall force that is more capable, lethal, and diverse, while constituting only 1% of the American population.

The government which that military serves, however, failed to carry out a similar soul searching and rebuilding process. Lip service was given, policy papers were written, debates were had, but the power structure largely remained unchanged. The decades of distance meant the personal lessons of Vietnam were operationally lost to the very impersonal machine of American governance. Accountability for decision-making is lacking. The politics of the day has become more about overseeing the system for what could be gained individually and for one’s party than about operating it effectively for the gain of all. The watchdogs of the free press became increasingly reliant on access journalism to the superstars of the political world, and by omission or commission had their investigatory mandate dulled. A vast majority of the American citizenry, most of them lulled into complacency by a level of prosperity unheard of in all of recorded human history, had little interest in changing the systems that weren’t bothering them, even as the number of individuals suffering from it steadily grew.

The answers to "what went wrong in Afghanistan" begin in that grey area of unlearned history lessons from the last failure of American foreign policy leading to desperate evacuations of an embassy in Saigon to the embassy in Kabul. Afghanistan is a political failure, it is a policy failure, it is a military failure, and it is a human failure. Most of all, it is, was, and will forever be known as an avoidable failure as too many of us watched idly while it slowly metastasized into today’s crisis -- a crisis which history and common sense were warning us about.

Any post-mortem on "what went wrong in Afghanistan" that does not include a root cause of dysfunction within the United States government to operate as a competent and accountable governing mechanism is missing the root domestic cause of the foreign policy disaster that the Global War on Terror has become. The failures of the United States government to learn from past mistakes incubated the current dysfunction that inevitably bled through to foreign policy failures like America’s 20 years in Afghanistan. A United States that cannot conduct conflict resolution within its own government can neither project nor maintain a coherent foreign policy to the rest of the world.

The Worst Public Health Fiasco In History

epochtimes |   Dr. Kulldorff: First of all, we expected that we would have good natural immunity from a virus like this. So it’s not a surprise that we do have it. There have been studies showing that we have good immunity from having COVID before. People can be reinfected and test positive, but there’s very few cases where somebody had it and then they get the serious disease afterwards. There are millions of people who have had COVID.

So if this was a common thing, it would have shown up all over the place, but it hasn’t. So it’s very rare. Once you’ve had it, you have good protection from your immune system for a serious disease or for mortality. There has been some direct comparison.

There was some data from Israel that came out recently showing that if you have had a vaccine, you’re 6.7 times more likely to be reinfected than if you have had the COVID disease itself. So we would expect that you get better immunity from the disease than you do from the vaccine. And of course, there’s only that one study.

We don’t know exactly, but we can confidently say that having had the disease at least gives you as good and probably better immunity than the vaccine. Empirically, we know that if you have a disease, you have at least one-and-a-half years of good immunity, because the virus has been with us for that amount of time. So we know that there’s long lasting immunity from having had COVID disease.

From the vaccine, we have less information because it only came in December. So it’s a bit over half-a-year. So we know that there’s good immunity for six months. Hopefully it’s longer, but we don’t have the same amount of data, the same evidence as we do for a natural immunity from actually having the disease naturally.

But for public health scientists, it’s very surprising that this is not recognized. We are forcing people who had the disease, who have good immunity to take a vaccine, even though they have an immunity that’s better than, or at least as good as those who have only had the vaccine.

At the same time, there are a lot of people who need these vaccines who are not getting them. People in India, Nigeria and Brazil, where a lot of older and especially poor people do not get the vaccine because they don’t have enough doses.

So those are the ones we should emphasize being vaccinated. Then we should view this as a global effort to vaccinate the old everywhere in the world, instead of vaccinating people that already have very good immunity against the disease.

Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned that people are being forced to take a vaccine. I don’t know of anyone in the U.S. actually being forced to take it directly. Tell me what you mean when you say that.

Dr. Kulldorff: There’s a push both for vaccine passports and vaccine mandates. If people want to have a job and stay at the job, they are required to take the vaccine or they’ll be fired. If they want to study at the university, many universities are requiring vaccines for all the students.

So there are these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports. In New York City, for example, now they’re requiring restaurants to require vaccinations for people who go to the restaurants.

That is a very coercive way to get people to vaccinate. And that’s very bad for public health. One question is, “Why do you coerce people who are immune or people who are young, who have very small risk, when the vaccines are much more needed in for older people in other places?” So that’s an ethical aspect of it. I think it is very unethical to do so.

The other aspect is that if you force something on people, if you coerce somebody to do something, that can backfire. Public health has to be based on trust. If public health officials want the public to trust them, public health officials also have to trust the public. I’ve been working on vaccines for almost two decades now. One thing that we’ve always tried to do is to maintain good confidence in the vaccines.

For example, measles vaccines are very important, as well as polio vaccines. There is a small group of people who are very vocal, who don’t like vaccines, but they haven’t really been able to put any dent in the confidence in vaccines. It’s very high in the U.S. So we’ve been very successful in maintaining that confidence.

But right now with these vaccine mandates, and vaccine passports, this coercive thing is turning a lot of people away from vaccines, and not trusting them for very understandable reasons. “Why do you have to force somebody to take the vaccine, if it’s so beneficial to you?” That’s one rationale.

Those who are pushing these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports—vaccine fanatics, I would call them—to me they have done much more damage during this one year than the anti-vaxxers have done in two decades. I would even say that these vaccine fanatics, they are the biggest anti-vaxxers that we have right now. They’re doing so much more damage to vaccine confidence than anybody else.

Even if they manage to coerce somebody to get the COVID vaccines, because of people saying, “Okay, I have to take it because I need to go to a university or I have to, because I want that job, or I want to go to restaurants,” even if they manage to get those people to take the COVID vaccine, it will turn them off from public health. It will make them distrust public health and turn them off from other vaccines that are not mandatory.

So it has ripple effects in other aspects of public health that are very unfortunate. I’m a native of Sweden. so I know a little bit about Sweden. Sweden has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, and the highest confidence in vaccines in the world.

But there’s absolutely no mandate. It just doesn’t do it that way. It’s completely voluntary. If you want to have high confidence in vaccines, it has to be voluntary. There shouldn’t be any mandates.

Covidstates Is An NSF Funded Multi-Institutional Network Propaganda Program

covidstates | Researchers from the COVID States Project developed an interactive dashboard to explore public behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic, support for restrictive measures aimed at curbing the spread of the virus, and approval for state governors’ and the president’s handling of the pandemic.

The dashboard presents data from a series of large-scale monthly surveys with approximately 20,000-25,000 participants each. 

 

Users can engage with state and national data in the following ways:

 

Health Behaviors: This tab presents public health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has three separate panels. The first shows core activities such as going to work, church, or the gym. The second shows whether respondents were in close proximity with people living outside their household. Finally, the third panel presents data on public adherence to health recommendations aimed at curtailing the spread of the pandemic. These recommendations include mask wearing, hand washing, avoiding contact with other people, and staying away from crowds and public spaces. Users can select their state of interest and the three panels will automatically update to reflect the selected state. 

Restrictive Measures: Restrictive Measures: The second tab presents data on public support for federal, state and local governments to implement restrictive measures meant to curtail the spread of the virus, such as limiting restaurants to carry-out service only or requiring businesses to close.

Executive Approval: This tab tracks public approval of state governors and the president. A vertical line indicates the transition from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration on January 20, 2021. Prior to that point, presidential approval numbers refer to Donald Trump, while subsequent data points refer to Joe Biden. Users can select the state and the official (Governor/President) they would like to view.

Maps: This tab generates state-level choropleth maps for the data presented in the dashboard. The  tab contains two subpanels: one for health behavior and another for  restrictive measure support. Within each panel, users should also specify  the month that they are interested in viewing. Below these maps, users will find bar charts comparing the data from each state and ranking states in the context of the behavior or measure of interest. 

All graphics in this app can be downloaded in a PDF or PNG format using the “Download” buttons in the respective tab. Users who are interested in downloading the underlying data can find it in a CSV format at the bottom of the Overview tab.

Parseltongue Psaki Pushing Private-Sector Vaccine Mandate And Passport Enforcement

thehill |  Teddy Roosevelt gave a speech in 1902, “The Control of Corporations,” which warned of the danger of corporate power over citizens’ lives. Calling corporations “creatures of the state,” he said they must be controlled by “the representatives of the public.” Roosevelt was a Republican, but his distrust of corporations (and his later faith in big government) would become a touchstone of Democratic politics for generations, from the Great Depression to the Great Society.

Like the reversal of Earth’s magnetic poles, American politics now seems suddenly to have flipped: Democratic leaders increasingly advocate for corporate governance while Republicans voice populist themes. From supporting the largest censorship programs in history to privately mandated vaccine “passports,” liberals are looking to companies like Apple or American Airlines to carry out social programs free from constitutional and political limits imposed on the government.

This new model of governance was evident when White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked about a mandated vaccine passport system. She responded that it is “not currently the role of the federal government" but noted that the administration hopes to see such a mandate from “private-sector entities, universities, institutions that are starting to mandate, and that’s an innovative step that they will take and they should take.”

This use of corporations is born out of political and legal convenience. Despite the rising call for mandatory vaccinations, the Biden administration clearly is not willing to face the political costs of a government mandate. As of July 11, 159,266,536 Americans were fully vaccinated — 48 percent of the country’s population. When you consider the extremely high rate of vaccination for those over 65 (an estimated 85 percent), the percentage of adults under 65 is even smaller. That is a lot of voters who would not take well to a government mandate before the 2022 election. Moreover, the Supreme Court upheld a mandatory state vaccine in 1905, but any federal mandate could face constitutional challenges.

Private companies, however, have great leeway in dictating such conditions. So some, like CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen, have called for coercive measures making it “hard for people to remain unvaccinated.” That coercion would come from private companies which would deny people access to travel, restaurants, movies, schools and other aspects of modern life. Thus, as with Psaki’s statement, the Biden White House is signaling private companies to implement such a national passport system.

And companies are listening.

The Panicdemic Backfired Exposing ALL Of The Ruling Classes Weaknesses

americanthinker |  What happens when a population of introverts, hypochondriacs, and obsessive-compulsives is continuously bombarded with messages to seclude and disinfect themselves, for fear that COVID-19 prickle-balls lurk everywhere, waiting to attack?

What happens is that emotionally damaged people start driving bad politics and bad policy.

"Fifteen days to flatten the curve."  That phrase is surely now banned by corporate media, for it reminds us how the supposedly acute health threat of March 2020 was repeatedly re-packaged to keep populations off-balance and out of business not for 15 days, but for 15 months. 

“Outrageous.” @BillMaher railed against Facebook and Google for banning and suppressing content about lab leak. “You were wrong, Google and Facebook....The CDC’s been wrong about a lot shit, this is outrageous that I can’t look this information up.” #RealTime pic.twitter.com/28dwaQGz9W

— Brent Baker (@BrentHBaker) June 26, 2021

Never in modern times has a health issue been so flagrantly politicized, nor wielded as a club, as the Wuhan virus has been.  Outside a few rational locales, almost every nation drank the COVID Kool-Aid, competing to see who could enforce the stupidest rules.

Naturally, academia would lead the way: 

Among Americans aged 15–24, a total of 587 died of COVID in 2020, according to the CDC, representing about 0.16%, or about 1 in 642, of COVID deaths.  If you are young, you have essentially no chance of dying of COVID.  The low youth mortality impact from COVID was known by April 2020.

Yet many universities now require these low-risk young people to inject the experimental vaccine or be banished from campus.  Did you already catch the WuFlu and have antibodies?  Too bad.  The great pulsating brains of academia cannot differentiate.

Young people who want to serve their country are also targets: the passive-aggressive command at West Point compels the unvaccinated to sacrifice a week's vacation to quarantine and then to wear masks in the most ridiculous circumstances imaginable — to harass them and make them look like fools.  Military leaders do not care whether the experimental vaccines might do more harm than good, especially on a previously COVID-exposed youth.  Take the jab and shut up, cadet; Colonel Suckup needs to PowerPoint his 100% compliance success.

Everything Makes Sense If You Center Megacities As The Focus Of Global Governance

technologyreview |  In 2050, 2.5 billion more people will live in cities than do today. As the world grows more urbanized, many cities are becoming more populous while also trying to reduce carbon emissions and blunt the impacts of climate change.

In the coming decades, cities will be engines of economic growth. But they must also play a key role in confronting climate change; the world’s 100 most populous cities are responsible for roughly one-fifth of global carbon emissions. 

Some of the world’s biggest cities—called megacities—are rising to this challenge. However, these urban areas vary greatly in how efficient they are and how much they will grow. Seeing how they stack up can help us identify where our greatest opportunities are to reduce emissions.

Silly Rabbits, I KNOW You Didn't Think Google Maps Was A Toy - Did You?

technologyreview |  Fourteen-year-old Neha Dashrath was ecstatic when the pizza arrived. It was the first time she’d ever ordered from a food delivery app. “I always felt shy when my friends talked about ordering food from apps,” she says. “Now I, too, can show off.” 

Dashrath lives in Laxmi Nagar, a slum in Pune, Maharashtra, alongside some 5,400 other Indians. Cramped brick and tin structures line crooked lanes wide enough for just one person.

According to the 2011 census, India has 108,000 slums that are home to 65 million residents. It will add more urban residents by 2050 than any other country, according to a 2014 UN estimate, and its slums are growing faster than its cities.

Until recently, Dashrath shared a common address with everyone around her—that of the slum itself. A large banyan tree served as a collection center for mail and other deliveries. With no addresses of their own, residents had a hard time opening bank and postal accounts or accessing electric and water bills. During the pandemic, medical teams struggled to track down infected residents.

Last September, a nonprofit organization called Shelter Associates began a pilot project with Google and UNICEF to provide unique digital addresses to houses in Laxmi Nagar. Now, Dashrath has a special code she can type into delivery apps and share with friends to direct them to her front door. 

“It was the pandemic that really spurred the initiative,” says Pratima Joshi, an architect who cofounded the nonprofit and has worked closely with slums in the cities of Kolhapur and Thane since 1993. 

The digital addresses residents received were “plus codes,” a free feature developed by Google and built with open-source software. A plus code is a simple alphanumeric combination derived from latitudes and longitudes. Each code consists of four characters followed by a plus sign and two to four more characters. The characters after the plus sign define the size of the area.

For example, GRQH+H4 points to a popular temple in Pune, and FRV5+2W56 is the code of a community toilet in Laxmi Nagar. These codes are available on Google Maps and can be used anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

Despite the services that become available to those with a physical address, it took time to convince residents to sign up. Many had never heard of Google Maps and were suspicious of Joshi’s staff, mistaking them for officials from India’s Slum Rehabilitation Authority. So the nonprofit enlisted local students to go door to door and tell people about the program.

 

More Than 2 Billion Of You Humans Live In Informal Urban Developments...,

technologyreview |  Finding your way through Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro is not easy. The buildings are densely and turbulently arranged in a manner that defies traditional identification systems like street names and numbers. Rocinha is a favela, one of the largest among hundreds of unplanned settlements that have sprung up on the outskirts of Brazilian cities since the 19th century. More than 5% of the country’s population now lives in communities like these, with 100,000 people in Rocinha alone. 

The challenge of navigating Rocinha has birthed creative solutions, such as the “friendly mailman” program: companies deliver parcels to a central drop-off point, and a team of Rocinha residents—the only couriers familiar enough with the area to navigate its maze-like streets—take them the rest of the way. 

With little formal aid or administration and scant economic opportunities, favela residents have struggled to contend with unhealthy living conditions and frequent violence. A thick wall of social segregation means that resources from the city—including electricity and clean water—must take twisting, uncertain paths to make it inside. Life expectancy in favelas is just 48, which is 20 years below the national average. 

Much has been made of the dizzying growth of the world’s cities, but few people are aware of what most urban growth actually looks like. Births and migrations are concentrated in the developing world, and with the exception of China, most new urban fabric is informal—more shantytowns than skyscrapers. For all our futuristic reveries, the city of tomorrow probably will not look much different from Rocinha.

In the 20th century, the Brazilian government attempted to eradicate favelas and replace them with more formal public housing, but the bulldozers could not keep up with the massive urban migration that made these settlements swell. 

 

Other governments and urban planners have also tried to prevent such settlements from forming or to dismantle them when they do, but that’s proved a losing strategy. More than 2 billion people worldwide are now estimated to live in them. 

 

The Panicdemic Has Really Rewired Some Nervous Systems

nationalreview  |  The association of danger with permissiveness has warped the “expert class” that is supposed to inform the public. Throughout the pandemic, public-health officials have betrayed their view that they do not trust the public with good news; they seem to fear that an inch given will be a mile taken. And so, even during one of the most successful vaccine rollouts in the world, CDC director Rochelle Walensky warned of “impending doom” just a month ago. But no doom was in the offing.

And the expert class has also corrupted itself. The short circuit of the pandemic has led to a dramatic tightening of groupthink among public-health pundits. One would normally expect that a variety of experts would come up with a variety of recommendations, precisely because, like everyone else, they value the risks differently. But instead, public-health pontificators have tried to guard their authority with an ersatz sheen of unanimity.

When Dr. Martin Kulldorff expressed his view that the pause of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine would do more harm than good, the CDC threw him off its vaccine-safety advisory committee. Four days later, Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was made available again, but the visible dissent was too much to abide. Kulldorff had pioneered many of the processes by which the CDC detects the safety of vaccines. But he had expressed his view that the urge to vaccinate everyone was as superstitious as being anti-vaccine. Twitter, preposterously, put a misinformation tag on this tweet, based on the superstition that there is only one valid “expert” answer — and no valid debates among experts. Kulldorff’s worst crime, apparently, was expressing his views in person in the presence of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.

I used to think that the COVID era would snap to a close once vaccines removed the danger from the most vulnerable — and that the human urge to connect would assert itself dramatically in a new roaring ’20s. Now I’m not so sure. A significant portion of the public and some of our leading institutions have internalized entirely new habits of thought and life. The circuit between truth, science, fear, and caution and virtue needs to be unwired — and reprogrammed.