You can resume activities that you did prior to the pandemic.
You can resume activities without wearing a mask or staying 6 feet
apart, except where required by federal, state, local, tribal, or
territorial laws, rules, and regulations, including local business and
workplace guidance.
If you travel in the United States, you do not need to get tested before or after travel or self-quarantine after travel.
You do NOT need to get tested before leaving the United States unless your destination requires it.
You still need to show a negative test result or documentation of recovery from COVID-19 before boarding an international flight to the United States.
You should still get tested 3-5 days after international travel.
You do NOT need to self-quarantine after arriving in the United States.
If you’ve been around someone who has COVID-19, you do not need to stay away from others or get tested unless you have symptoms.
However, if you live or work in a correctional or detention facility
or a homeless shelter and are around someone who has COVID-19, you
should still get tested, even if you don’t have symptoms.
WaPo | Delta
Air Lines chief executive Ed Bastian said Friday that new employees who
join the company will be required to be vaccinated for the coronavirus.
The
announcement makes Delta the only major U.S. airline to require
vaccines for at least a portion of its workforce. While most carriers
have taken steps to boost vaccination rates, including setting up
centers at airports to encourage employees to get the shot, others
aren’t requiring they do so.
In an interview on CNN,
Bastian said: “Any person joining Delta in the future, we’re going to
mandate that they be vaccinated before they can sign up with the
company.” The vaccine will continue to be optional for workers already
at the airline.
“I’m
not going to mandate and force people if they have some specific reason
why they don’t want to get vaccinated, but I am going to strongly
encourage them and make sure they understand the risk to not getting
vaccinated,” Bastian said.
Even
so, those who opt not to be vaccinated might encounter limits to the
work they can do, he said. For example, he said unvaccinated employees
may not be able to fly international routes since shots might be
required in other countries.
Bastian
said more than 60 percent of Delta’s 75,000 employees have received at
least one dose of the vaccine, adding that he expected between 75 and 80
percent ultimately would be vaccinated.
realclearpolicy | We hear a lot about “unity” these days. The Biden administration
promises and even demands it. Meanwhile, Republicans (and some
Democrats) charge the administration with hypocrisy because its radical
programs can’t garner a legislative majority — let alone the consensus
support the word “unity” implies. But the charge of hypocrisy misses the
point: The demand for unity is dangerous because it aims to undermine
the genuine diversity that is essential to a free people.
To call for unity is, in effect, to call for obedience. But free
people are not obedient. Free people should obey the law, of course, but
they do so only because they have consented to the law. And before
consent comes debate: Free people air differing opinions that reflect
their differing backgrounds and experiences, rather than bowing to those
who claim they know what’s best. Free and open debate — and the
diversity of viewpoint such debate implies — is therefore essential to
lawmaking in a democratic republic.
This is our constitutional inheritance. Our lawmaking process is
structured by mechanisms — such as the separation of powers, checks and
balances, and lesser rules like the Senate filibuster — that ensure the
views of the minority are not simply brushed aside by a fleeting
political majority. Of course, from time to time, Americans do come
together as one nation, for instance in the face of great tragedies or
crises. Yet, unfortunately, such crises can easily be exploited or
manipulated to stifle dissent and centralize political power.
RT | Merriam-Webster is again redefining language to fit a narrative,
this time framing its definition of “anti-vaxxer” to include not only
people who oppose vaccination, but also those who are against
inoculation mandates.
The definition on Merriam-Webster's website says “anti-vaxxer” means “a person who opposes vaccination or laws that mandate vaccination.”
It’s not clear when it was written to include opposition to forced
jabs, but many observers noticed for the first time on Wednesday.
“Welcome to ‘1984.’ This is the Ministry of Truth,” rapper and podcaster Zuby said on Twitter, referring to George Orwell’s dystopian novel.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary has changed their definition of 'anti-vaxxer' to include
'people who oppose laws that mandate vaccination'.
Other reactions were similar, with many commenters noting that they now fit the dictionary definition of “anti-vaxxer,”
even though they believe in the benefits of vaccinations and choose to
receive the shots themselves. Merriam-Webster's definition appears to
dismiss the concept of favoring a product personally but being opposed,
on principle, to forcing others to use it.
arvix |Controversial understandings of the coronavirus pandemic have turned data visualizations into a battleground. Defying public health officials, coronavirus skeptics on US social media spent much of 2020 creating data visualizations showing that the government’s pandemic response was excessive and that the crisis was over. This paper investigates how pandemic visualizations circulated on social media, and shows that people who mistrust the scientific establishment often deploy the same rhetorics of data-driven decision-making used by experts, but to advocate for radical policy changes.Using a quantitative analysis of how visualizations spread on Twitter and an ethnographic approach to analyzing conversations about COVID data on Facebook, we document an epistemological gap that leads pro- and anti-mask groups to draw drastically different inferences from similar data. Ultimately, we argue that the deployment of COVID data visualizations reflect a deeper sociopolitical rift regarding the place of science in public life.
This paper has investigated anti-mask counter-visualizations on social media in two ways: quantitatively, we identify the main types of visualizations that are present within different networks (e.g., pro-and anti-mask users), and we show that anti-mask users are prolific and skilled purveyors of data visualizations. These visualizations are popular, use orthodox visualization methods, and are promulgated as a way to convince others that public health measures are unnecessary. In our qualitative analysis, we use an ethnographic approach to illustrate how COVID counter-visualizations actually reflect a deeper epistemological rift about the role of data in public life, and that the practice of making counter-visualizations reflects a participatory, heterodox approach to information sharing. Convincing anti-maskers to support public health measures in the age ofCOVID-19 will require more than “better” visualizations, data literacy campaigns, or increased public access to data. Rather, it requiresa sustained engagement with the social world of visualizations andthe people who make or interpret them.While academic science is traditionally a system for producing knowledge within a laboratory, validating it through peer review,and sharing results within subsidiary communities, anti-maskers reject this hierarchical social model. They espouse a vision of science that is radically egalitarian and individualist. This study forces us to see that coronavirus skeptics champion science as a personal practice that prizes rationality and autonomy; for them, it is not a body of knowledge certified by an institution of experts. Calls for data or scientific literacy therefore risk recapitulating narratives that anti-mask views are the product of individual ignorance rather than coordinated information campaigns that rely heavily on networked participation.
Recognizing the systemic dynamics that contribute to this epistemological rift is the first step towards grappling with this phenomenon, and the findings presented in this paper corroborate similar studies about the impact of fake news on American evangelical voters [98] and about the limitations of fact-checking climate change denialism [42].Calls for media literacy—especially as an ethics smokescreen to avoid talking about larger structural problems like white supremacy—are problematic when these approaches are deficit-focused and trained primarily on individual responsibility. Powerful research and media organizations paid for by the tobacco or fossil fuel indus-tries [79,86] have historically capitalized on the skeptical impulse that the “science simply isn’t settled,” prompting people to simply“think for themselves” to horrifying ends. The attempted coup on January 6, 2021 has similarly illustrated that well-calibrated, well-funded systems of coordinated disinformation can be particularly dangerous when they are designed to appeal to skeptical people.While individual insurrectionists are no doubt to blame for their own acts of violence, the coup relied on a collective effort fanned by people questioning, interacting, and sharing these ideas with other people. These skeptical narratives are powerful because they resonate with these these people’s lived experience and—crucially—because they are posted by influential accounts across influential platforms.Broadly, the findings presented in this paper also challenge conventional assumptions in human-computer interaction research about who imagined users might be: visualization experts tradition-ally design systems for scientists, business analysts, or journalists.
Researchers create systems intended to democratize processes of data analysis and inform a broader public about how to use data,often in the clean, sand-boxed environment of an academic lab.However, this literature often focuses narrowly on promoting expressivity (either of current or new visualization techniques), assuming that improving visualization tools will lead to improving public understanding of data. This paper presents a community of users that researchers might not consider in the systems building process (i.e., supposedly “data illiterate” anti-maskers), and we show how the binary opposition of literacy/illiteracy is insufficient for describing how orthodox visualizations can be used to promote unorthodox science. Understanding how these groups skillfully manipulate data to undermine mainstream science requires us to adjust the theoretical assumptions in HCI research about how data can be leveraged in public discourse.What, then, are visualization researchers and social scientists todo? One step might be to grapple with the social and political dimensions of visualizations at the beginning, rather than the end, of projects [31]. This involves in part a shift from positivist to interpretivist frameworks in visualization research, where we recognize that knowledge we produce in visualization systems is fundamentally“multiple, subjective, and socially constructed” [73]. A secondary issue is one of uncertainty: Jessica Hullman and Zeynep Tufekc
Dr. Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of
California, San Francisco called the exchange “very, very troubling.”
“What seems strange to me here is there would be this very intimate
back and forth including phone calls where this political group gets to
help formulate scientific guidance for our major public health
organization in the United States,” Ghandi told The Post. “This is not
how science-based guidelines should work or be put together.”
The New York Times on Tuesday published a report
from David Leonhardt that questioned the CDC’s recent guidance on mask
wearing outdoors. Upon releasing the new guidelines in April, the agency
announced that “less than 10 percent” of COVID-19 transmission was
occurring outdoors.
According to the report, the 10 percent figure is “almost certainly
misleading.” A review of the data by the Times found that certain cases
in the study were misclassified as outdoor transmission and quoted
numerous experts who contend the share of cases linked to the outdoors
is less than 1 percent, and could be as low as 0.1 percent.
“I’m sure it’s possible for transmission to occur outdoors in the
right circumstances,” Dr. Aaron Rictherman of the University of
Pennsylvania told the Times, “but if we had to put a number on it, I
would say much less than 1 percent.”
As noted in the report, the CDC’s newest guidance on summer camps
says these facilities should require mask wearing “at all times” with
few exceptions. Considering the low rate of outdoor transmission and the
fact that many summer camp activities take place outside, it seems
unnecessary to have hordes of children playing outside with masks on.
“Dr. Walensky, I used to have the utmost respect for the guidance
from the CDC. I always considered the CDC to be the gold standard. I
don’t anymore,” Collins said Tuesday during the hearing.
“Here we have unnecessary barriers to reopening schools, exaggerating
the risks of outdoor transmission and unworkable restrictions on summer
camps. Why does it matter? It matters because it undermines public
confidence in your recommendations,” Collins said.
foreignpolicy | “It’s an act of war,” said
Christopher Miller, former President Donald Trump’s last acting
secretary of defense. He was talking about alleged attacks on diplomatic
and intelligence personnel by an unknown microwave directed-energy
weapon. But before the United States declares war on the unknown enemy
wielding that weapon, we should know what it is—and whether it exists at
all.
Every few weeks, another alleged attack on Americans is reported, some recent, some decades ago. The symptoms are neurological, such as dizziness, headaches, and brain damage. The first wave of reports came in 2016,
from the American and Canadian diplomatic missions in Havana, hence the
name “Havana syndrome.” Since then, similar cases have been reported in
other places, including China; Washington, D.C.; and Syria. State
Department and intelligence personnel make up most of those affected.
The State Department and the CIA have investigated Havana syndrome, with much criticism by the victims and their legal counsel. The Jasons, a group of defense advisors, have been reported to be studying the incidents. Most recently, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine also conducted a study
that concluded a microwave attack was the most plausible explanation;
it also considered chemical pollutants, infectious agents, and
psychological and social factors, and found all these explanations
wanting.
Here’s the problem. Aside from the reported syndromes, there’s no
evidence that a microwave weapon exists—and all the available science
suggests that any such weapon would be wildly impractical. It’s possible
that the symptoms of all the sufferers of Havana syndrome share a
single, as yet unknown, cause; it’s also possible that multiple real
health problems have been amalgamated into a single syndrome.
It’s not the first time microwaves and embassies have mixed. From 1953 to 1976,
the U.S. Embassy in Moscow was bathed in high-powered microwaves coming
from a nearby building. The purpose seems to have been related to
espionage—activating listening devices within the embassy or interfering
with American transmissions. But a 1978 study concluded that there were
no adverse health effects.
Back in the United States, microwave ovens came into common use during the 1970s.
Their ability to heat food by imperceptible waves created many myths.
How they actually work is well understood. Some molecules, notably
water, absorb microwaves and turn them into heat. That happens across
the microwave and visible spectrum: Substances absorb energy of a higher
frequency and turn it into heat. It’s why sunlight heats surfaces.
There’s a persistent myth that microwaves heat things from the inside
out. Anyone who has heated a frozen dinner knows that this is not true.
The outer part of the frozen food thaws first, because it absorbs the
microwaves before they can reach the inner part. Back in the day, when I
was working for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, I had to debunk the
idea that microwave heating could produce oil from underground oil
shale. Water and minerals between the shale and the microwave source
above ground would absorb the microwaves. In the same way, if a directed
microwave beam hit people’s brains, we would expect to see visible
effects on the skin and flesh. None of that has accompanied Havana
syndrome.
"It's not a vaccine anyway?" She is admitting having conscious awareness, she never informed him before he took his sample away for analysis ... Is that the first to cry ... "I was just doing my job"
Luke 1-5 Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. 2 For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. 3 Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops. 4 And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. 5 But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him. Fist tap Dale.
jonathanturley | Under a free speech approach, cakeshop owners have a right to refuse
to prepare cakes that offend their deep-felt values, including
religious, political or social values. Thus, a Jewish cakeshop owner
should be able to decline to make a “Mein Kampf” cake for a local
skinhead group, a Black owner to decline to make a white
supremacist-themed cake, or a gay baker to decline to make a cake with
anti-LGBT slogans. While these bakers cannot discriminate in selling
prepared cakes, the act of decorating a cake is a form of expression,
and requiring such preparation is a form of compelled speech.
In the same way, NFL teams have a free speech right to prevent
kneeling or other political or social demonstrations by players during
games, Citizen’s United has a right to support political causes — and,
yes, Facebook has a right to censor speech on its platform.
Free speech also allows the rest of us to oppose these businesses
over their policies. We have a right to refuse to subsidize or support
companies that engage in racial or content discrimination. Thus, with
social media companies, Congress should not afford these companies legal
immunity or other protections when they engage in censorship.
These companies once were viewed as neutral platforms for people to
exchange views — people who affirmatively “friend” or invite the views
of others. If Big Tech wants to be treated like a telephone company, it
must act like a telephone company. We wouldn’t tolerate AT&T
interrupting calls to object to some misleading conversation, or cutting
the line for those who misinform others.
As a neutral platform for communications, telephone companies receive
special legal and economic status under our laws. Yet, it sometimes
seems Facebook wants to be treated like AT&T but act like the DNC.
In defending Big Tech’s right to censor people, University of
California at Irvine law professor Richard Hasen declared that “Twitter
is a private company, and it is entitled to include or exclude people as
it sees fit.” That is clearly true under the First Amendment. It also
should be true of others who seek to speak (or not speak) as
corporations, from bakeries to sports teams.
Yet, when the Supreme Court sent back the Masterpiece Cakeshop case in 2018 for further proceedings, an irate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)
declared: “Masterpiece Cakeshop is a commercial bakery open to the
public, and such services clearly must be made available to the public
on equal terms … No business or organization open to the public should
hide their discriminatory practices behind the guise of religious
liberty.” But Pelosi applauded when social media companies barred some
members of the public based on viewpoint discrimination on subjects
ranging from climate change to vaccines to elections.
The difference, of course, is that Masterpiece Cakeshop was willing
to sell cakes to anyone but refused to express viewpoints that conflict
with the owners’ religious beliefs. Conversely, social media companies
like Twitter and Facebook are barring individuals, including a world
leader like Trump, entirely from their “shop.” And, taking it one step
further, Facebook has declared it will even ban the “voice of Donald Trump.”
Big Tech is allowed to be arbitrary and capricious in corporate
censorship. However, our leaders should follow a principled approach to
corporate speech that does not depend on what views are being silenced.
Because Elizabeth Warren was right. This “never was about a cake” or a
tweet or “likes” for that matter. It was always about free speech.
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.
caitlinjohnstone | It sure is interesting how stuff keeps happening that makes free
speech on the internet something dangerous which must be curtailed.
Covid, the Capitol riot, Russian propaganda, all of which just happen to
require tightening restrictions on our single best tool against the
powerful.
Had online platforms not agreed to curtail speech in
alignment with the US empire, they would with 100 percent certainty have
been broken up by antitrust cases and been replaced by other
monopolistic companies that would censor in alignment with imperial
interests.
You’re not permitted to ascend to power within the
system unless you cooperate with existing power structures. If you
don’t, you’ll be stopped in your tracks and replaced with someone who
will.
A rookie journalist who doesn’t advance narratives favorable
to US imperialism will keep getting called to the editor’s desk until
they get the message. When rookie social media sites first showed up it
was the same thing, except instead of the editor’s desk, it was US
congressional hearings.
NYMag | Take, for instance, this paper
from 1995: “High Recombination and Mutation Rates in Mouse Hepatitis
Viruses Suggest That Coronaviruses May Be Potentially Important Emerging
Viruses.” It was written by Dr. Ralph Baric and his bench scientist,
Boyd Yount, at the University of North Carolina. Baric, a gravelly
voiced former swim champion, described in this early paper how his lab
was able to train a coronavirus, MHV, which causes hepatitis in mice, to
jump species, so that it could reliably infect BHK (baby-hamster
kidney) cell cultures. They did it using serial passaging: repeatedly
dosing a mixed solution of mouse cells and hamster cells with
mouse-hepatitis virus, while each time decreasing the number of mouse
cells and upping the concentration of hamster cells. At first,
predictably, the mouse-hepatitis virus couldn’t do much with the hamster
cells, which were left almost free of infection, floating in their
world of fetal-calf serum. But by the end of the experiment, after
dozens of passages through cell cultures, the virus had mutated: It had
mastered the trick of parasitizing an unfamiliar rodent. A scourge of
mice was transformed into a scourge of hamsters. And there was more: “It
is clear that MHV can rapidly alter its species specificity and infect
rats and primates,” Baric said. “The resulting virus variants are
associated with demyelinating diseases in these alternative species.” (A
demyelinating disease is a disease that damages nerve sheaths.) With
steady prodding from laboratory science, along with some rhetorical
exaggeration, a lowly mouse ailment was morphed into an emergent threat
that might potentially cause nerve damage in primates. That is, nerve
damage in us.
"And we need to stop hunting for new exotic diseases in the wild, shipping them back to laboratories, and hot-wiring their genomes to prove how dangerous to human life they might become." https://t.co/N2Cnhk5Xde
A
few years later, in a further round of “interspecies transfer”
experimentation, Baric’s scientists introduced their mouse coronavirus
into flasks that held a suspension of African-green-monkey cells, human
cells, and pig-testicle cells. Then, in 2002, they announced something
even more impressive: They’d found a way to create a full-length
infectious clone of the entire mouse-hepatitis genome. Their “infectious
construct” replicated itself just like the real thing, they wrote.
Not
only that, but they’d figured out how to perform their assembly
seamlessly, without any signs of human handiwork. Nobody would know if
the virus had been fabricated in a laboratory or grown in nature. Baric
called this the “no-see’m method,” and he asserted that it had “broad
and largely unappreciated molecular biology applications.” The method
was named, he wrote, after a “very small biting insect that is
occasionally found on North Carolina beaches.”
In
2006, Baric, Yount, and two other scientists were granted a patent for
their invisible method of fabricating a full-length infectious clone
using the seamless, no-see’m method. But this time, it wasn’t a clone of
the mouse-hepatitis virus — it was a clone of the entire deadly human
SARS virus, the one that had emerged from Chinese bats, via civets, in
2002. The Baric Lab came to be known by some scientists as “the Wild
Wild West.” In 2007, Baric said that we had entered “the golden age of
coronavirus genetics.”
“I would be afraid to look in their freezers,” one virologist told me.
Baric
and Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the two top experts
on the genetic interplay between bat and human coronaviruses, began
collaborating in 2015.
Over the weekend I watched a very interesting discussion between Dutch virologist, Geest Vanden Bossche and Bret Weinstein. Vanden Bossche made exactly this point about using vaccinations in the middle of an epidemic – he points out that - this is the first time a major vaccination program has taken place while a pandemic is at its peak.
He particularly emphasized that ‘two shot’ vaccinations have a longer immunological ramp up time, giving the virus more time to evolve. The mRNA therapeutic program is nothing other than an active gain of function experiment on the virus at a global scale.
The real worries here are the following:
First, the breakthrough (mRNA therapeutic breach) cases are asymptomatic/mild now, but they will not be mild later in the year, as antibodies for the synthetic spike protein decline in those who received these shots.
Second, and most important, from the evolutionary perspective of the virus, its evolutionary “goal” is not just to survive, but to make as many copies of itself as possible. Milder cases tend to have less of the virus (yes, there are completely asymptomatic superspreaders that generate a huge amount of virus in their upper respiratory tracts, but in general, if Covid-21 can get past the upper respiratory tract and cause real damage, that means a lot more copies of the virus.) Clearly the evolutionary pressure is there for Covid-21 to evolve in that direction.
Whatever can escape the antibodies generated by the mRNA synthetic spike protein and lead to more replication will be selected for. That will mean a much more contagious and virulent virus (Covid-21_ just from that.) So far, immune escape has evolved hand in hand with stronger affinity for the ACE2 receptor, which directly translates into higher contagiousness and also elevated virulence as well. The likely mutations to come next have been identified in vitro (to be noted, in vitro evolution had already correctly identified the ones that characterize the current variants, so it has a good track record so far).
In vitro has also identified ways for it to get deadlier through a different mechanism – that is - shutting down innate immunity by inhibiting the interferon response. This second mutation is a key strategy that these viruses have evolved in their battle with bats’ immune systems. There is some evidence that Covid-19 is actually not all that good at this compared to, for example, the first SARS virus from 2003. I suspect that this was a major reason why SARS-1 was much more lethal.
Can the mRNA therapeutic regimen select for a reversion back to that state, i.e. it goes in the direction of countering the immune system as a whole by becoming better at overcoming the innate arm of the immune system. When the adaptive arm of Covid-19 has been strengthened by mRNA therapeutics, the evolutionary potential for a much more contagious and lethal Covid-21 may become evident?
I don’t have an answer, but I sure hope that it does not.
The mRNA therapeutic approach runs the risk of breeding something much more contagious and deadly Covid-21. And because it may well happen in stages, there is also the risk of it becoming gradually normalized, just as the current level of death has become normalized. I remember learning about gain of function research reading Annie Jacobson's Operation Paperclip. So it's not as if potential outcomes aren't well understood.
So not only do we have lying officials that did everything possible to help the spread of an aerosol pathogen, now those same officials are running a playbook for creating more virulent strains taking us from Covid-19 to Covid-21. Meanwhile, we're drowned in and overwhelmed by dueling narratives Outside of what you read here, there's scant information to be gotten about gain of function mutations and the rate of infection of those whose mRNA therapeutic injections have been breached.
"Trust the science" pretenders like the frightening Dr. Kavita (force the injections) Patel are pretending that shots will get the virus under control - and they won’t. mRNA therapeutic jabs won't even get degenerating public health care systems under control. So, not only does this grand Covid-21 gain of function experiment have the potential to be even more deadly, nary any of the deep seated issues with any of the impacted health care systems have been fixed.
thehill | In the current phase of this ever-changing pandemic, we are
witnessing the emergence of two Americas. One where fully-vaccinated
Americans often remain highly reluctant to remove masks with examples of
“mask shaming.”
At the opposite pole, another country where large unmasked crowds
gather in public, such as at sports events, unclear of who has or has
not been vaccinated. What links both of these Americas? Neither one is
following the CDC’s updated COVID-19 recommendations.
Recommendations
are often complex and confusing. Trust in science and the CDC, damaged
by politicization, has deteriorated. As an example of how acute these
challenges are — four out of every 10 health care workers remain
unvaccinated. Recommendations alone are not enough. New requirements for
vaccinations and reporting are required to move the country forward
that will “open” the country back up in ways that are practical and safe
at the same time.
The country needs to implement vaccine
requirements, especially in high-priority settings including hospitals,
nursing homes and schools. Without vaccine requirements the country will
face significant difficulties and delays in safely opening back up. In
turn, public health will be compromised, and the economy will face
avoidable burdens. These types of vaccination requirements aren’t new
and are done routinely in hospitals and schools. There are several
reasons why these measures are needed.
First and most important is the direct health consequences of
unvaccinated individuals in critical settings. The lack of a vaccine
requirement in health care settings has resulted in superspreader events
and preventable deaths posing a health risk to patients. It is
reasonable for many patients to assume that health care workers are all
immunized. Additional critical settings where requirements should be
considered are institutions of education or childcare, transportation,
law enforcement and hospitality industries -all places where close
contact indoors can pose risks, particularly to infants and children for
whom there is currently no available Covid-19 vaccine. While some
universities are moving ahead with mandates, a disturbing trend
has erupted: Public colleges in red states are less likely to have a
vaccine requirement compared to private universities in blue states. Law
enforcement, including police officers were some of the earliest
eligible essential works for vaccines, but in same large urban areas
such as Columbus, Ohio only 28 percent of the employed police officer have received a vaccine to date.
Vaccination
requirements will need to be augmented through mechanisms to
demonstrate proof of vaccination and reporting requirements. Without
this type of transparency, rebuilding the social trust needed to return
to normalcy will continue to lag. We are in a transitional period where
the number of immunized Americans is increasing but we are not yet at a
level where mitigation measures can easily be lifted, if at all. Federal
officials should work with state and local authorities to consider how
best to establish fair and accurate reporting mechanisms — without
overburdening already stressed businesses — to reflect actual levels of
immunization. Employers, especially large ones, are already embracing
vaccine requirements partly because they know that customers might
choose to seek services elsewhere, which could have significant
financial impact.
level |Like
so many online communities, the Black Manosphere is rife with internal
divisions and disputes, each more ridiculous than the last; what unites
it is its founding principles of anti-feminism. Most of these are
cribbed from the larger “manosphere,” an umbrella term for a collection of subreddits and “men’s rights” forums
claiming that women and a feminist-leaning society have robbed men of
their power, and then tailored to Black women specifically. Black women
lack femininity, says Black Manosphere dogma; they refuse to be
submissive; they are the ones responsible for Black family dysfunction.
As with the manosphere at large, the Black Manosphere traffics in jargon that makes them sound like Matrix superfans whose experience with actual women doesn’t extend beyond fantasy. “Red pill”
ideology casts followers as visionaries who dare to see through the
illusion; they divide other men into “alpha” and “beta” categories to
denote their power and status (“betabux,” for example, is a term used
for weak men whose only value to women is as sugar daddies). Sexually
empowered women are denigrated as riding the “cock carousel” until they
hit “the wall” in their mid-twenties and their “sexual market value”
drops; the 80/20 rule
dictates that women find only one out of every five men attractive
enough to have sex without added incentives like money (at which their
“hypergamy,” or drive to marry up a class, kicks in).
As with the manosphere at large, the Black Manosphere traffics in jargon that makes them sound like “Matrix” superfans whose experience with actual women doesn’t extend beyond fantasy.
Unlike
the larger, ostensibly White manosphere, the Black Manosphere isn’t a
pathway into the alt-right. It reserves its ire solely for its own
community: Black women and men who violate its expectations. Black women in particular are its targets, with men referring to them as “scraggle daggles,” “demons,” and “the most filthy and disease-ridden women on the planet.” It’s a codified system of misogynoir — misogyny toward Black women in particular — that gives stark form to an attitude Black women have been noticing and discussing for well over a decade.
Before the Black Manosphere, there was the men’s rights movement, and lo, it was bad. It was also predominantly White, or at least non-Black. A Philadelphia-based man who calls himself Mumia Obsidian Ali sought
to change that. After coming across men’s rights activists online in
the mid-2010s, he began to contribute pieces to blogs like A Voice for Men and Return of Kings, and eventually launched a radio show
where he holds forth on his favorite topic: Black women. (The seeds of
his own anti-feminism were sown in childhood, he suggested in one article,
when he saw his grandmother and mother being verbally abusive toward
his grandfather and father, respectively.) “Black women [in America], as
a group, suck,” he tells me in an email exchange.
As
the Black Manosphere proliferated, so did a deluge of content. Men —
mostly from North America and Western Europe — write ceaseless articles
referencing other articles, and upload videos as long as 12 hours
blaming Black women for every societal ill plaguing Black communities in
Western societies. Literally, every one: crime rates, single motherhood, STD rates, killing sprees, lagging school performance, out-of-wedlock births; abortions,
incarceration rates. To bypass YouTube’s content moderation policies,
some make their videos age-restricted. Others post their content on BitChute or Free Speech Avenger, both of which can feature profane or even pornographic content, as well as their own websites, blogs, podcasts, private Facebook pages, and Telegram chat groups. Some self-publish books. Revenue builds through donations during livestreams, one-on-one consultation fees, book sales, merchandise, and Patreon subscriptions. A nearly two-hour video can generate more than $200 in donations.
theatlantic | For both yes-vaxxers like me and the no-vaxxers I spoke with,
feelings about the vaccine are intertwined with feelings about the
pandemic.
Although I think I’m right about the vaccines, the truth
is that my thinking on this issue is motivated. I canceled vacations,
canceled my wedding, avoided indoor dining, and mostly stayed home for
15 months. All that sucked. I am rooting for the vaccines to work.
But
the no-vaxxers I spoke with just don’t care. They’ve traveled, eaten in
restaurants, gathered with friends inside, gotten COVID-19 or not
gotten COVID-19, survived, and decided it was no big deal. What’s more,
they’ve survived while flouting the advice of the CDC, the WHO, Anthony
Fauci, Democratic lawmakers, and liberals, whom they don’t trust to give
them straight answers on anything virus-related.
The
no-vaxxers’ reasoning is motivated too. Specifically, they’re motivated
to distrust public-health authorities who they’ve decided are a bunch
of phony neurotics, and they’re motivated to see the vaccines as a risky
pharmaceutical experiment, rather than as a clear breakthrough that
might restore normal life (which, again, they barely stopped living).
This is the no-vaxxer deep story in a nutshell: I trust my own cells more than I trust pharmaceutical goop; I trust my own mind more than I trust liberal elites.
So what will change their minds?
I
cannot imagine that any amount of hectoring or shaming, or
proclamations from the public-health or Democratic communities, will
make much of a difference for this group. “I’ve lost all faith in the
media and public-health officials,”said Myles Pindus, a 24-year-old in
Brooklyn, who told me he is skeptical of the mRNA vaccines and is
interested in the Johnson & Johnson shot. “It might sound crazy, but
I’d rather go to Twitter and check out a few people I trust than take
guidance from the CDC, or WHO, or Fauci,” Baca, the Colorado truck
driver, told me. Other no-vaxxers offered similar appraisals of various
Democrats and liberals, but they were typically less printable.
From
my conversations, I see three ways to persuade no-vaxxers: make it more
convenient to get a shot; make it less convenient to not get a shot; or
encourage them to think more socially.
theatlantic | Nonprofit organizations that provide these training
sessions argued that the order violated their free-speech rights and
hampered their ability to conduct their business. In December, a federal
judge agreed; President Joe Biden rescinded the order the day he took
office. But by then, critical race theory was already a part of the
conservative lexicon. Since Trump’s executive order, Rufo told me, he
has provided his analysis “to a half-dozen state legislatures, the
United States House of Representatives, and the United States Senate.”
One such state legislature was New Hampshire’s; on February 18, the
lower chamber held a hearing to discuss Keith Ammon’s bill. Rufo was
among those who testified in support of it.
Concerned that the
measure might fail on its own, Republicans have now included its
language in a must-pass budget bill. In March, Republican Governor Chris
Sununu signaled that he would object to “divisive concepts” legislation
because he believes it is unconstitutional, but he has since tempered
his stand. “The ideas of critical race theory and all of this stuff—I
personally don’t think there’s any place for that in schools,” he said
in early April. But, he added, “when you start turning down the path of
the government banning things, I think that’s a very slippery slope.”
Almost everyone I spoke with for this article assumed that Sununu would
sign the budget bill, and that the divisive-concepts ban would become
law.
Although free-speech advocates are confident that bills like Ammon’s
will not survive challenges in court, they believe the real point is to
scare off companies, schools, and government agencies from discussing
systemic racism. “What these bills are designed to do is prevent
conversations about how racism exists at a systemic level in that we all
have implicit biases that lead to decisions that, accumulated, lead to
significant racial disparities,” Gilles Bissonnette, the legal director
of the ACLU of New Hampshire, told me. “The proponents of this bill want
none of those discussions to happen. They want to suppress that type of
speech.”
Conservatives are not the only critics of diversity
training. For years, some progressives, including critical race
theorists, have questioned its value: Is it performative? Is it the
most effective way to move toward equity or is it simply an effective
way of restating the obvious and stalling meaningful action? But
that is not the fight that has materialized over the past nine months.
Instead, it is a confrontation with a cartoonish version of critical
race theory.
For
Republicans, the end goal of all these bills is clear: initiating
another battle in the culture wars and holding on to some threadbare
mythology of the nation that has been challenged in recent years. What’s
less clear is whether average voters care much about the debate. In a
recent Atlantic/Leger poll, 52 percent of respondents who
identified as Republicans said that states should pass laws banning
schools from teaching critical race theory, but just 30 percent of
self-identified independents were willing to say the same. Meanwhile, a
strong majority of Americans, 78 percent, either had not heard of
critical race theory or were unsure whether they had.
Last week,
after President Biden’s first joint address to Congress—and as Idaho was
preparing to pass its bill—Senator Tim Scott stood in front of United
States and South Carolina flags to deliver the Republican response.
“From colleges to corporations to our culture, people are making money
and gaining power by pretending we haven’t made any progress,” Scott
said. “You know this stuff is wrong. Hear me clearly: America is not a
racist country.” Rufo immediately knew what he meant. “Senator Tim Scott
denounces critical race theory in his response to Biden’s speech
tonight,” he tweeted. “We have turned critical race theory into a
national issue and conservative political leaders are starting to
fight.”
newyorker | The invention of the sensitivity-training group is often traced to a
specific evening: Lewin was running a workshop for teachers and social
workers in Connecticut, where he had been hired by the state to help
address racial and religious prejudice. After the participants had left,
a few stragglers returned and asked to be permitted to sit in on the
debriefings, and Lewin agreed. Though it was initially awkward to have
the participants present, Lewin realized that the setup led to frank and
open conversations. He saw the transformative possibilities of
uninhibited feedback in the real time of the group session, and
established the idea of the corporate T-group—shorthand for sensitivity
“training group”—at the National Training Laboratory, in Bethel, Maine.
His inroads into social engineering could also be put to less
conciliatory purposes; Lewin was a consultant for the Office of
Strategic Services and developed programs to help recruit potential
spies.
The T-group, which was sometimes called “therapy for
normals”—rather insensitively by today’s standards but with the intent
of destigmatizing the practice—was a therapeutic workshop for strangers
which would take place in a neutral locale and promote candid emotional
exchange. A typical T-group session would begin with the facilitator
declining to assume any active leadership over the session, a move that
would surprise and disconcert the participants, who would collectively
have to work out the problem of how to deal with a lack of hierarchy or
directives.
It sounds simple enough, but the experience could be
deeply unsettling, even life-changing, for some. As one contemporary
witness of the Bethel N.T.L. workshops remarked, “I had never observed
such a buildup of emotional tension in such a short time. I feared it
was more than some leaders and members could bear.” The T-group promised
an antidote to the oppressions of Dale Carnegie-style insincerity that
dominated the business world, and, crucially, the sessions seemed to
provide a glimpse of a reality in which it was finally possible to know
how one was really perceived.
the prize for the “toughest encounter seminar that had been ever
convened at Esalen” went to one run collaboratively by George Leonard
and Price Cobbs. Leonard was a white psychologist from the South, whose
youthful encounter with the terrified eyes of a Black prisoner
surrounded by a white mob instilled in him a lifelong commitment to
fighting racism. He implored Cobbs, an African-American psychiatrist who
was co-authoring the book “Black Rage,”
to come to Esalen to collaborate. They organized a storied,
twenty-four-hour-marathon racial-sensitivity workshop between Black and
white participants that became rancorous: “the anger rolled on and on
without end” and “interracial friendships crumbled on the spot.”
Finally, Anderson relates how, as the sun was beginning to rise, an
African-American woman was moved to spontaneously comfort a crying white
woman, and this shifted the tenor of the entire session. Though the
episode could easily be read less sunnily, as another troubling instance
of the oppressor requiring comfort from the oppressed, the facilitators
purportedly deemed it a success. Cobbs spoke to Leonard and declared,
“George, we’ve got to take this to the world.”
Cobbs’s
career encapsulates the shift of sensitivity training from its literary
roots to corporate argot. He was sparked by early epiphanies about
Black anger and injustice, inspired by reading Richard Wright, James
Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. He admired the plot of “Invisible Man,”
for instance, because “the unnamed main character’s sense of his own
invisibility fans his ultimate rage into flames of
self-expression. . . .” Cobbs credited Lewin’s research as a key
precedent when he went on to found Pacific Management Systems, a
training center for T-group leaders, and he played a role in the spinoff
of diversity training from sensitivity training. His years of advising
African-American businesspeople formed the basis of his guide, from
2000, “Cracking the Corporate Code: The Revealing Success Stories of 32 African-American Executives.”
In her provocative history “Race Experts,”
from 2002, the scholar Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn examines Cobbs’s career as
part of the larger story of how “racial etiquette” and sensitivity
training “hijacked” and banalized civil-rights discourse. Quinn
persuasively maintains that “sensitivity itself is an inadequate and
cynical substitution for civility and democracy—both of which presuppose
some form of equal treatment and universal standard of conduct,” and
neither of which, of course, the U.S. has ever achieved.
archive |Abstract: COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers have been
exempted from legal liability for vaccine-induced harm. It is therefore
in the interests of all those authorising, enforcing and administering
COVID-19 vaccinations to understand the evidence regarding the risks and
benefits of these vaccines, since liability for harm will fall on them.
In short, the available evidence and science indicate that COVID-19 vaccines are unnecessary, ineffective and unsafe.
Necessity: Immunocompetent individuals are
protected against SARS-CoV-2 by cellular immunity. Vaccinating low-risk
groups is therefore unnecessary. For immunocompromised individuals who
do fall ill with COVID-19 there is a range of medical treatments that
have been proven safe and effective. Vaccinating the vulnerable is
therefore equally unnecessary. Both immunocompetent and vulnerable
groups are better protected against variants of SARS-CoV-2 by naturally
acquired immunity and by medication than by vaccination.
Efficacy: Covid-19 vaccines lack a viable mechanism
of action against SARS-CoV-2 infection of the airways. Induction of
antibodies cannot prevent infection by an agent such as SARS-CoV-2 that
invades through the respiratory tract. Moreover, none of the vaccine
trials have provided any evidence that vaccination prevents transmission
of the infection by vaccinated individuals; urging vaccination to
“protect others” therefore has no basis in fact.
Safety: The vaccines are dangerous to both healthy
individuals and those with pre-existing chronic disease, for reasons
such as the following: risk of lethal and non-lethal disruptions of
blood clotting including bleeding disorders, thrombosis in the brain,
stroke and heart attack; autoimmune and allergic reactions;
antibody-dependent enhancement of disease; and vaccine impurities due to
rushed manufacturing and unregulated production standards.
The risk-benefit calculus is therefore clear: the experimental
vaccines are needless, ineffective and dangerous. Actors authorising,
coercing or administering experimental COVID-19 vaccination are exposing
populations and patients to serious, unnecessary, and unjustified
medical risks.
Celebrating 113 years of Mama Rosa McCauley Parks
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*February 4, 1913 -- February 4, 2026*
*Some notes: The life of the courageous activist Mama Rosa McCauley Parks*
Mama Rosa's grandfather Sylvester Ed...
Monsters are people too
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Comet 3I/Atlas is on its way out on a hyberbolic course to, I don't know
where. I do know that 1I/Oumuamua is heading for the constellation Pegasus,
and ...
Remembering the Spanish Civil War
-
This year marks the 90th anniversary of the launch of the Spanish Civil
War, an epoch-defining event for the international working class, whose
close study...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
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(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
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With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
them convicted and jailed is going to do too much better than your run of
the mill ...
