When Will The Undisputed Facts Of Gobekli Tepe Breakthrough The Myths Of Antiquity?

Quora |  Göbekli Tepe is a phenomenal time capsule of discovery and insight. We are faced with an untouched, and relatively intact window into a culture that has refused to be forgotten. Göbekli Tepe stands as a reminder that there is grand folly in making any final determinations about who we are, how we lived and where we came from. Göbekli Tepe also shows that there is profound arrogance to call any prior culture, a primitive culture, by any measure or standard. History books will need a complete rewrite as well as Wikipedia's various citations on ancient history. Sadly some of this data is 20 years old and is still not cited nor put in the proper context.

I have posted on this subject before: What are the most fascinating known unknowns?. I hope to give more details on this amazing discovery with Some information that is not yet easily available (on the internet) or otherwise Peer Reviewed published (Eg: Beer/Bread production, Written Language/Symbols, Plant domestication). However none of this data is unannounced or otherwise proprietary unreleased data. Please see notes at the end of the paragraphs for more detail.

Most of this data is still being uncovered and thus will be published in Peer Review publications when appropriate. Some of this data comes directly from Professor Klaus Schmidt, the chief Researcher and Archeologist on site, in updates to academics that are following his work. Professor Schmidt came to Turkey in 1978, but it wasn't until 1994 that he felt sure enough of the data he collected to begin to publish. Professor Schmidt is academically quite conservative and faced the undesirable task of putting archaeology on notice that general assumptions held very tightly were, just wrong. It took him many years of checking and then rechecking before he would publish his discoveries as he knew they were highly controversial. Thus it may be a few years before we see some of what I mention here fully published and accepted. This is an early view and have no doubts is very, very controversial.

Warning: I have a clear bias here that I must warn the reader about. I feel very, very strongly that academia has not given proper encomium, citation, commendation and tribute for Professor Schmidt and his 30 years of work at Göbekli Tepe. I feel rather strongly that this position of academia has caused many discoveries of similar magnitude to be stunted by little to no funding. Please forgive a bit of cheerleading for what I believe is one of the most important discoveries in human history.

All Too Human

I must point out that one of the most difficult things about Göbekli Tepe has been the Historians and Archaeologists that have invested so much into a paradigm of human development, that they found it nearly impossible to accept the realities that Göbekli Tepe presented. This has hampered progress, funding and peer review of Göbekli Tepe. This shows how even the most empirical Researchers and Scientists are all too human and fall prey to the fear of a rewriting of history to a more accurate context. It is my profound hope that Göbekli Tepe helps to change this point of view in some material way.

Here are just some of the new insights Göbekli Tepe has produced:

Yes Virginia, Animals Laugh Just Like You Humans...,

openculture |  Every pet owner knows that animals love to play, but laughter seems reserved for humans, a few apes, and maybe a few birds good at mimicking humans and apes. As it turns out, according to a new article published in the journal Bioacoustics, laughter has been “documented in at least 65 species,” Jessica Wolf writes at UCLA Newsroom. “That list includes a variety of primates, domestic cows and dogs, foxes, seals, and mongooses, as well as three bird species, including parakeets and Australian magpies.” This is a far cry from just a few years ago when apes and rats were the “only known animals to get the giggles,” as Liz Langley wrote at National Geographic in 2015.

Yes, rats laugh. How do scientists know this? They tickle them, of course, as you can see in the video just above. (Rat tickling, it turns out, is good for the animals’ well being.) The purpose of this experiment was to better understand human touch — and tickling, says study author Michael Brecht, “is one of the most poorly understood forms of touch.”

Laughter, on the other hand, seems somewhat better understood, even among species separated from us by tens of millions of years of evolution. In their recent article, UCLA primatologist Sasha Winkler and UCLA professor of communication Greg Bryant describe how “play vocalizations” signal non-aggression during roughhousing. As Winkler puts it:

When we laugh, we are often providing information to others that we are having fun and also inviting others to join. Some scholars have suggested that this kind of vocal behavior is shared across many animals who play, and as such, laughter is our human version of an evolutionarily old vocal play signal.

Generally, humans are unlikely to recognize animal laughter as such or even perceive it at all. “Our review indicates that vocal play signals are usually inconspicuous,” the authors write. Rats, for example, make “ultrasonic vocalizations” beyond the range of human hearing. The play vocalizations of chimpanzees, on the other hand, are much more similar to human laughter, “although there are some differences,” Winkler notes in an interview. “Like, they vocalize in both the in-breath and out breath.”

Why study animal laughter? Beyond the inherent interest of the topic — an especially joyful one for scientific researchers — there’s the serious business of understanding how “human social complexity allowed laughter to evolve from a play-specific vocalization into a sophisticated pragmatic signal,” as Winkler and Bryant write. We use laughter to signal all kinds of intentions, not all of them playful. But no matter how many uses humans find for the vocal signal, we can see in this new review article how deeply non-aggressive play is embedded throughout the animal world and in our evolutionary history. Read “Play vocalisations and human laughter: a comparative review” here.

 

Clout Chasing Fat Rascal Tries And Fails To Bite Joe Rogan's Ankle...,

nbcnews  |   Simmering tensions over Covid vaccines are boiling over in online communities.

Joe Rogan's fans are responding to criticism of the podcast host's fringe medical stances with fatphobic and antisemitic remarks, which have only intensified after YouTube personality Ethan Klein criticized him for spreading Covid vaccine misinformation.

The dispute between Rogan, who has been embraced by conservative figures for questioning Covid vaccine safety, and Klein, whose fanbase is largely progressive, highlights how growing agitation over the pandemic in online circles is quickly turning into all-out internet warfare.

Known for his contrarian and often unfounded opinions on medicine, Rogan has pushed vaccine hesitancy on his show "The Joe Rogan Experience," which reaches an estimated 11 million listeners per episode. The widely criticized talk show was the most popular podcast on Spotify in 2021.

YouTube took down a recent episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience" on Monday for violating the platform's community guidelines, which forbids misinformation related to elections, Covid-19 and vaccines. The episode is still available on Spotify, which struck a multiyear deal to license the show in 2020.

Rogan's audience is now lashing out online, claiming unfair censorship.

When Klein, who helms multiple podcasts under the YouTube channel H3H3 Productions, criticized Rogan’s fringe medical stances on Tuesday, he was met with intense backlash from Rogan’s fans. His channel, which he shares with his wife Hila Klein, has 6.3 million subscribers on YouTube. Its sister channel H3 Podcast has 3 million subscribers.

"Joe Rogan, who lives on elk meat, egg yolk, and human growth hormone, with lungs full of tar, thinks he's healthier than everyone," Klein tweeted Tuesday, criticizing Rogan's "carnivore diet."

He also criticized Rogan for taking multiple medications when he tested positive for Covid, despite bringing anti-vaxxers on his show.

Rogan Also Testing The Limits Of Google's Power To Control Discourse

thefreethoughtproject |  Those paying attention to the current situation regarding the establishment’s control on the narrative around Covid-19, have watched as anyone — including esteemed experts in the field — are censored into oblivion for attempting to put forth information that challenges the status quo. For the first time in recent American history, merely talking about alternative treatments for a disease is met with mass censorship by big tech. This is diametrically opposed to actual “science” and the opposite direction in which a free society should be moving.

One of the people who has been censored the most is Robert W Malone MD, MS who is one of the inventors of mRNA & DNA vaccines. Dr. Malone has been outspoken about the way the establishment system is handling, or rather mishandling, the covid crisis.

His Twitter account had grown to over a half million followers last week before the platform decided that his alternative views on the pandemic were a danger to the narrative. So they banned him.

Instead of standing up for the free exchange of ideas by experts — which is how science works  — the left cheered for Malone’s censorship, calling him a kook while celebrating the tools of tyrants.

Before Donald Trump came into office and caused mass hysteria over Russia, the left used to stand for freedom of speech. However, the flamboyant tyrant in the White House quickly eroded their respect for rights. Then, in 2020, Covid-19 arrived and the censorship campaign switched into overdrive.

The left — armed with their militant “fact checkers” whose opinions are wielded like swords against anyone who challenges the official narrative — became the regime of authoritarian information controllers. After all, if you challenge their messiahs like Dr. Fauci, you challenge science itself — facts be damned.

So what happened? Why did the left go from championing free speech for years — even supporting the speech of neo-nazis — to rabidly demanding the silencing of those who attempt to challenge team doom? Dr. Malone and others have a theory, and it’s called mass formation psychosis.

“When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere,” explained Malone on a recent interview with Joe Rogan.

Malone then described how “leaders” can exploit this situation: “And one of the aspects of that phenomenon is that the people that they identify as their leaders, the ones typically that come in and say you have this pain and I can solve it for you. I and I alone. Then they will follow that person. It doesn’t matter whether they lied to them or whatever. The data is irrelevant.”

MSM Getting Handed Its Ass By Joe Rogan...,

The more employees of large media corporations attack Joe Rogan, the more his audience grows. The two individuals with the largest audiences happen to be the two people most hated by corporate media because they can't be controlled or ordered around:https://t.co/kjgUQRwWIs

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 4, 2022

zerohedge |  When the last hour of the podcast was coming to its conclusion as I was finishing an 8 mile run, a thought dawned on me: this interview with Malone is now officially out there and, no matter how much anyone tries to censor it, it can’t be taken back.

As we all know, nowadays when you make it on JRE, you’ve officially “made it”.

Putting aside the obvious irony of Twitter attempting to ban somebody and the person in question going viral as a result, I also thought about how, despite the fact that Malone’s opinions put him at odds with the mainstream media (who would never dare to have him on), Joe Rogan launched him past the usual media suspects and into the real “mainstream”.

I then thought to myself that in 2022, the mainstream media as we know it today (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, etc.) is going to be forced to change its narrative on Covid.

“It’ll never happen,” you’re thinking to yourself, right? Let me explain.

*  *  *

The idea of the media being forced to change its tune on Covid is something I touched upon a couple of days ago when I wrote about the Omicron variant and how the media is creating a mass hysteria mountain out of a mole hill.

But after listening to Dr. Robert Malone‘s well reasoned arguments, delivered for three straight hours, concisely and calmly, it became clear to me that the entire mainstream media machine could wind up falling at the hands of content creators like Joe Rogan.

It’s an interesting little piece of game theory, when you think about it.

Rogan generates so many views and has grown so quickly - strictly because he allows open dialogue, civil discourse and approaches things with honest intent – that there is no financial incentive to de-platform him. Ever notice how YouTube apparently had no problem taking down Rogan’s interview with Malone, but hasn’t banned Rogan’s channel from the site yet?

The Truth Is Becoming Extremely Difficult To Contain

rwmalonemd  |  It is starting to look to me like the largest experiment on human beings in recorded history has failed.  And, if this rather dry report from a senior Indiana life insurance executive holds true, then Reiner Fuellmich’s “Crimes against Humanity” push for convening new Nuremberg trials starts to look a lot less quixotic and a lot more prophetic.

Here is what lit me up in this report from The Center Square contributor Margaret Menge.

“The head of Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica said the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people.

“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”

OneAmerica is a $100 billion insurance company that has had its headquarters in Indianapolis since 1877. The company has approximately 2,400 employees and sells life insurance, including group life insurance to employers in the state.

Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.

“And what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic,” he said.

“Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.””

So, what is driving this unprecedented surge in all-cause mortality?

“Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths,

Davison said.“What the data is showing to us is that the deaths that are being reported as COVID deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age people from the pandemic. It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.””

Take a moment to read the entire article.  Now.  Then let’s continue on, assuming that you have.

AT A MINIMUM, based on my reading, one has to conclude that if this report holds and is confirmed by others in the dry world of life insurance actuaries, we have both a huge human tragedy and a profound public policy failure of the US Government and US HHS system to serve and protect the citizens that pay for this “service”. 

IF this holds true, then the genetic vaccines so aggressively promoted have failed, and the clear federal campaign to prevent early treatment with lifesaving drugs has contributed to a massive, avoidable loss of life. 

AT WORST, this report implies that the federal workplace vaccine mandates have driven what appear to be a true crime against humanity.  Massive loss of life in (presumably) workers that have been forced to accept a toxic vaccine at higher frequency relative to the general population of Indiana.

FURTHERMORE, we have also been living through the most massive, globally coordinated propaganda and censorship campaign in the history of the human race.  All major mass media and the social media technology companies have coordinated to stifle and suppress any discussion of the risks of the genetic vaccines AND/OR alternative early treatments. 

Full Trancript Of Joe Rogan Interview Of Dr. Robert Malone

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Both Dystopian And Utopian Visions Of The Metaverse Are A LOOONG Way From Realization...,

technologyreview |  The first person to write about the “metaverse” was Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, but the concept of alternative electronic realms, including the “cyberspace” of William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, was already well established.

In contrast to what we typically think of as the internet, a metaverse is a 3D immersive environment shared by multiple users, in which you can interact with others via avatars. A metaverse can, with the support of the right technology, feel like real life, with all the usual elements of work, play, trade, friendship, love—a world of its own.

Perhaps the best-known prototype metaverse is the online virtual world Second Life, whose very name implies an alternate existence. Other games might also be said to be metaverses in their own right: World of Warcraft, Everquest, Fortnite, Animal Crossing. Each of these offers its own version of an immersive world, although they don’t quite have the ability to completely take over your senses. Most users experience these games from the outside looking in: screens front and center, with speakers on the sides. Actions are mediated by a keyboard, mouse, trackpad, or game controller instead of players’ hands and feet.

Technology is starting to change that. High-density screens, virtual-­reality goggles and glasses, surround sound, and spatial audio are putting more genuinely immersive experiences within reach. Cameras are gaining 3D capabilities, and single microphones are giving way to microphone arrays that capture sound with better depth and position. Augmented reality, which overlays virtual objects onto a video feed of the real world, provides a bridge between purely virtual and analog or real experiences. There is progress toward adding a sense of touch, too, in the form of multi­touch screens, haptic technologies, control gloves, and other wearables. Wraparound environments like Industrial Light and Magic’s Stagecraft are within reach only to certain industries for now but may see wider use as technology follows the typical curve of adoption and commoditization.

A Metaverse Presupposes Ubiquitous Cinematographic Pixelation....,

technologyreview | The computer scientist Alvy Ray Smith cofounded both Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division and Pixar Animation Studios. For those achievements alone, he is one of the most important technological innovators in cinema since at least the end of the Second World War. But Smith is not a Hollywood guy, and his intriguing, foundational new book A Biography of the Pixel is not a Tinseltown book. There are only the slightest morsels of gossip (Steve Jobs was a difficult man to work with—confirmed!), and the only marquee celebrity who appears in Smith’s story with any frequency is George Lucas. Smith isn’t interested in fame. He’s chasing more profound themes, arguing in effect that the great project he was part of—the invention and development of computer graphics—is far more important than anything that ever happened in Hollywood.

Smith is what used to be called a “graybeard” in computer programming circles. He’s from that generation of engineers and coders who watched the digital age rise from the swamps of secret military projects and the space program to conquer the world. He has spoken machine language. He marveled at the first crude graphics to exhibit motion on green-and-black screens. And he was among the first to demonstrate the newfound ability of a stylus to trace a smooth curve of digital “paint.”

In A Biography of the Pixel, Smith’s aim is to set down clearly the trajectory of two important, intertwined stories. The first story is the development of computer images, from origin to digital ubiquity. There are, in Smith’s telling, many names, places, and breakthroughs missing from the record, and he has taken on the job of adding them back in with an engineer’s eye for precision. The second story, unfolding in parallel, is about the impact of those images—a transformative force Smith calls “Digital Light.” It encompasses basically everything we experience through screens, and he argues convincingly that it is among the most important innovations in human communication since the first simple depictions of daily life were etched on the walls of caves.

The humble pixel

As Smith demonstrates repeatedly, far too much credit has been allowed to slide to the supposed wizardry of individual geniuses. The reality is a muddy, overlapping history of groups of inventors, working by turns in competition and in collaboration, often ad hoc and under considerable commercial or political pressure. 

Thomas Edison and France’s Lumière brothers, for example, were great promoters and exploiters of early film technology. Both exhibited full systems circa 1895 and were happy to claim full credit, but neither built the first complete system of camera, film, and projector all (or even mostly) on their own. The real answer to the question of who invented movies, Smith writes, is a “briar patch” of competing lineages, with parts of the system developed by erstwhile partners of Edison’s and similar parts by a handful of French inventors who worked with the Lumières. 

Among the crucial figures relegated to history’s dustbin were William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (an odd European aristocrat who designed and built the first movie camera for Edison) and Georges Demenÿ (whose design was copied without credit by the Lumières). Smith shows perhaps too much of his exhaustive work in rescuing these convoluted origin stories—there are similarly tangled muddles at every major stage in the development of computers and graphics—but his effort to set the historical record straight is admirable. 

The main drawback of all this wrangling with the egos and avarice of several generations of forceful men (they are, alas, virtually all men) is that it sometimes distracts Smith’s focus from his larger theme, which is that the dawn of Digital Light represents such a rare shift in how people live that it deserves to be described as epochal. 

Digital Light, in Smith’s simplest definition, is “any picture composed of pixels.” But that technical phrase understates the full import of the “vast new realm of imagination” that has been created by its rise. That realm encompasses Pixar movies, yes, but also video games, smartphone apps, laptop operating systems, goofy GIFs traded via social media, deadly serious MRI images reviewed by oncologists, the touch screens at the local grocery store, and the digital models used to plan Mars missions that then send back yet more Digital Light in the form of jaw-dropping images of the Red Planet’s surface. 

The Role Of Mutually Transgressive Abjection In The American Apocalypse

notesfromdisgraceland |  The abject hovers at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable, but is itself unassimilable which means that we have to contemplate its otherness in its proximity to us but without it being able to be incorporated. It is the other that comes from within (so it is part of ourselves) that we have to reject and expel in order to protect our boundaries[3].

The abject is a great mobilizing mechanism. While the state of being abject is threatening to the self and others, the operation of abjecting involves rituals of purity that bring about social stability. Abjection seeks to stabilize, while the abject inherently disrupts[4].

When the mass of the excluded increases to a size impossible to ignore, they trigger rituals of abjection, which work themselves into identity politics.The repulsion and efforts to distance from the excluded — the abjection – which reinforces the self-awareness of the social standing of regular folks, are in conflict with the attraction by the powers the abject population enjoys and exudes. They are the power bottoms in this relationship as they define the location, robustness and porousness of the boundaries of the enclosure. Fascination with the abject’s power pulls the viewers in, while they remain at arm’s length because of the threats the abject exert.

This makes the excluded a tool that drives the wedge between different social groups and prepares the population for political usage of the abject as leverage.

Objectifying minorities has been institutionalized in America since its inception — from slavery and Jim Crow to ghetto and hyperghetto, prisons, wars, opioids, and other tools of soft and hard marginalization. However, with the rise of the white underclass in the second half of the 20^th century, American ideology has become highly nuanced around the questions of exclusion.

To a large extent, the Right wing has stuck to its white supremacists roots of yesteryear (either in a closeted form or explicitly) while centrists, both Left and Right, have shown greater initiative in modernizing the process. However, when it came to exclusion of the white underclass, the problem proved to be more difficult. Complicated by globalization, technology, the decline of American manufacturing, weaning off conventional energy sources and the general decay of demand for labor, low-skill jobs have been disappearing irreversibly, and the ranks of white underclass grew unstoppably together with their discontent.

Social outcasts and minorities are relatively easy to objectivize. Permanently excluded – criminals, drug addicts, homeless – they have already been cast out. The residual, white precariat, which has always been perceived as a building block of this country’s social fiber, remains still on the inside, but unable to get reintegrated within the context of modern developments.

In a white dominated/ruled society the marginalization of the excluded white subproletariat has been a political hard sell. They grew in size and have acquired a sense of entitlement minorities never could. Their sudden political awareness, no matter how fragile, has become an expression of pleasurable transgressive desires. As a new center of social subjectivity, they draw their power from this position, which serves as an inspiration for their own identity politics.

The emergence of 21^st century Right-wing populism represents the biggest innovation on that terrain. Right-wingers now recognize the abject as a source of political leverage and, instead of exclusion, their program revolves around subjectivizing them. Voluntarily casting oneself as abject — identification with the white subproletariat – has become a quest for authenticity, aimed at acquiring a stigma in order to become a credible voice of the marginalized. This is the core of the modern populist abject gambit.

Covid Crowd Psychosis

rwmalonemd  |  As many of you know, I have spent time researching and speaking about mass psychosis theory. Most of what I have learned has come from Dr. Mattias Desmet, who realized that this form of mass hypnosis, of the madness of crowds, can account for the strange phenomenon of about 20-30% of the population in the western world becoming entranced with the Noble Lies and dominant narrative concerning the safety and effectiveness of the genetic vaccines, and both propagated and enforced by politicians, science bureaucrats, pharmaceutical companies and legacy media.

What one observes with the mass hypnosis is that a large fraction of the population is completely unable to process new scientific data and facts demonstrating that they have been misled about the effectiveness and adverse impacts of mandatory mask use, lockdowns, and genetic vaccines that cause people’s bodies to make large amounts of biologically active coronavirus Spike protein.

These hypnotized by this process are unable to recognize the lies and misrepresentations they are being bombarded with on a daily basis, and actively attack anyone who has the temerity to share information with them which contradicts the propaganda that they have come to embrace. And for those whose families and social networks have been torn apart by this process, and who find that close relatives and friends have ghosted them because they question the officially endorsed “truth” and are actually following the scientific literature, this can be a source of deep anguish, sorrow and psychological pain.

It is with those souls in mind that I included a discussion of the mass formation theory of Dr. Mattias Desmet during a recent talk I gave in Tampa, Florida to an audience of about 2,000.  As I looked out into the audience and spoke, I could see relief on many faces, and even tears running from the eyes of stoic men.

Unknown to me, someone recorded the speech and appended the vocal track to a series of calming images of natural landscapes, producing a video that has gone viral throughout the world.  A link to the video, as well as some notes to clarify and supplement the talk are appended below. Many have told me that they find it very healing.  I hope it may help you also.

The Abject Gotta Go Because They Will Fight Rather Than Eat Insects...,

NYTimes |  You may remember a 2019 story about how Senator Amy Klobuchar once ate a salad with a comb. According to the article, an aide purchased a salad for Klobuchar at an airport. Later, when the senator wanted to eat her salad on the plane, she discovered that there were no utensils available. After berating the aide, Klobuchar retrieved a comb from her purse and (somehow) ate her salad with it. When finished, she handed the comb to her aide with orders to clean it.

The comb story was part of a larger narrative about the senator’s treatment of her staff, which Klobuchar bravely tried to spin into evidence of her exactitude. You have to admire the effort, but the senator’s defense was useless. Nobody came away thinking that her mistake was in having high expectations. Her mistake was in doing something gross in front of multiple witnesses. That image was indelible. You couldn’t read the story without imagining the comb, a hair perhaps still caught in its teeth, plunging into an oily airport salad. Like all disgusting stories, it had a contaminating effect. Now the anecdote was in you, the voter. The taste of the comb was upon your own tongue, and you had no choice but to resent Klobuchar for putting it there.

The episode belongs to a list of disgust-related political scandals: the pubic hair on the Coke can, the stain on the blue Gap dress. On a recent weekend I passed a truck in Queens with a giant bumper sticker that said, “Any Burning or Disrespecting of the American Flag and the driver of this truck will get out and knock you the [expletive] OUT.” This was a perfect Haidt litmus test. A liberal might walk past the truck and think some version of: This guy — and it’s definitely a guy — has an anger problem. A conservative might walk past the truck and think: This guy — and it’s definitely a guy — must really love our country. As Haidt put it: “There are people for whom a flag is merely a piece of cloth, but for most people, a flag is not a piece of cloth. It has a sacred essence.” If a person views the American flag as a rectangle of fabric, it is unfathomable to be disgusted by its hypothetical desecration. If a person views the flag as a sacred symbol, it is unfathomable to not feel this way.

These two types of human — which broadly map onto “liberal” and “conservative,” or “relatively disgust-insensitive” and “relatively disgust-sensitive” — live in separate moral matrices. If it seems bizarre that disgust sensitivity and politics should be so closely correlated, it’s important to remember that disgust sensitivity is really measuring our feelings about purity and pollution. And these, in turn, contribute to our construction of moral systems, and it is our moral systems that guide our political orientations.

To ward off disgust, we enact purity rites, like rinsing the dirt from our lettuce or “canceling” a semipublic figure who posted a racist tweet when she was a teenager. We monitor the borders of mouth, body and nation. In “Mein Kampf,” Adolf Hitler described Jews as like “a maggot in a rotting body” and “a noxious bacillus.” Another category of humankind consistently deemed repulsive is women; to take one of several zillion illustrations, one reason long skirts were a dominant fashion in Western Europe for centuries, according to the fashion historian Anne Hollander, was to conceal the bottom half of the body and by extension its sexual organs. Mermaids aren’t just a folkloric figure but the expression, Hollander argues, of a horrified disgust at the lower female anatomy, which is seen as amphibiously moist and monstrous.

But purification rites may also be healthful (washing your hands) or ritually significant (baptism). We will never disentangle ourselves from the instinct to purify, even as we name different reasons for doing it: justice, patriotism, progress, tradition, freedom, public health, God, science. Beneath it all will be a confused omnivore, stumbling upon a dewy mushroom in the forest — with no clue what will happen if she eats it.

In 2022 I Resolve To Stop Expecting Negroe "Journalists" To Have Integrity...,

theatlantic |  The Brooklyn Nets have officially ended their tug-of-war with Kyrie Irving over the star point guard’s vaccination status. And Irving, who has refused to get a COVID-19 shot, is unquestionably the winner.

The rapid spread of the coronavirus’s Omicron variant has left gaps on rosters across the NBA. Because positive tests had rendered so many players ineligible, the Nets finally buckled to Irving, who had not played this season because New York City’s vaccine mandate for certain indoor facilities had banished him from home games. To let Irving on the court now, even just for away games, is a drastic turnaround for a team that had sidelined him rather than deploy him part-time. After he cleared the NBA’s COVID-19 protocols on Tuesday, Irving will be eligible to play for the Nets when they travel to Indiana to face the Pacers on January 5.

This resolution of the Nets’ high-profile dispute with Irving is part of a larger problem in professional sports: Confronted with this latest virus surge, both the NBA and the NFL have essentially waved the white flag. They are easing their health rules and sending conciliatory signals to players who have refused to get COVID-19 shots.

Both leagues had adopted a range of health protocols that strongly encouraged vaccination. But now the leagues are choosing instead to cede to the forces of capitalism. Short-term financial concerns are dictating that even as Omicron spreads, games must go on. And if that means holding vaccinated and unvaccinated players to the same standards, the leagues will do it.

After the CDC issued new guidelines Monday that will shorten quarantine times for anyone who tests positive for the coronavirus, the NBA announced that players who test positive will have to isolate for only six days, rather than 10, if they have no symptoms. The NFL and the NFL Players Association quickly announced that players with positive test results can return after five days. Stunningly, the two leagues’ abbreviated new quarantine timelines apply to both vaccinated and unvaccinated players.

Until now, the NFL had rightly made a point of imposing additional burdens on unvaccinated players. For example, unvaccinated players had to undergo daily testing and, when the team traveled, could not fraternize with anyone but team personnel. These rules reflected the greater risk that unvaccinated players pose to others. The rules also created strong incentives: Among NFL players, the policy helped produce a vaccination rate of more than 94 percent—far higher than the rate for all American adults. (The rate for NBA players is even better: at least 97 percent.)

Strangely, I'm At Ease With The Karenwaffen Boosting Itself To Death....,

NYTimes | With Omicron sweeping the world at alarming speed, governments are scrambling to figure out how to contain it in the face of significant public pressure against reimposing harsh restrictions on daily life, curbing holiday celebrations and deepening the economic pain wrought by two years of pandemic.

A new British report shows that booster doses are less effective against Omicron than previous variants, and their effectiveness wears off faster — within 10 weeks. Vaccine makers are trying to adjust their shots to target Omicron.

In addition to concerns that a fourth shot in less than a year could actually weaken immunity, some experts said Israel’s government had still not made the most of other options, such as vaccinating more of the unvaccinated or giving a third shot to about a million eligible citizens who have so far not received one.

Along with the generally sparse knowledge about Omicron, the effect of a fourth dose against the new variant is also unknown. But the country’s medical experts point to waning immunity in those 60 or older, who were the first to receive the third shot starting in August.

Israeli researchers from the Health Ministry and several academic institutions presented data to the advisory team that made the recommendation for the fourth shot on Tuesday. The presentation, obtained by The Times, showed a doubling of the rate of infection from Delta among the 60-plus age group within four or five months of the third shot.

There was no clear indication of reduced efficacy against severe illness.

Israel has confirmed a few hundred cases of Omicron, but officials say the new variant is much more widespread, and could overtake Delta as the dominant variant in the country within two or three weeks.

Denmark Puts The Lie To Official Vaxnated vs. UnVaxnated Infection And Illness Myths

 

statensseruminstitut  |  Denmark is now >80% Omikron with skyhigh case numbers, but public/media is strikingly calm.

From the 3-times weekly Omikron report: (posted Mon Wed Fri at https://covid19.ssi.dk/virusvarianter/omikron in Danish & English)

Table 4: Other variants (=delta) and omikron in over 12y olds vs. vaccination status:

Delta vs. Omikron (n = 90k cases & 41k cases since Nov 22nd = 1st Danish Omikron case)

No Jab (unvaxxed): 24 vs. 9%
1 Jab: 3 vs. 2%
2 Jabs 63 vs. 72%
3 Jabs (boostered) 11 vs. 18%

Unvaxxed to vaccinated cases
– delta : 24% to 76%
– omikron 9% to 91%

Danish vax rate for population >12y is around 81% (i.e. 19% unvaxxed)

= for delta vaxnated are slightly underrepresented (i.e. neo-vaccinoid seems to protect against infection/ being a transmitter by a small amount)

= for omikron the vaxnated are over-represented vs. their population percentage.
– is it the age-skew?
– are the vaxnated more risk-taking?
– does the neovaccinoid make one more susceptible to infection?
– are unvaxxed avoiding getting tested (counter intuative as it would give 7months valid green pass)

Who knows, but any claim to blame the unvaxxed for the transmission numbers has no basis in Danish data (Denmark having highest daily per-capita testing in the world = free PCR tests).

From the same report regarding hospitalizations (Table 5)
– omikron hospitalized number is still rising
– but omikron patients in ICU remains under 5 & has been there the last 2-3 weeks without change)
– table 6: 99.2% of omikron cases have not required hospitalisation (skewing young, but nonetheless, Danish has free health care, so no disincentives to treatment)

Before You VaxNate Your Child....,

rwmalonemd  |   Before you vaccinate your child, which is irreversible and potentially permanently damaging, find out why 16,000 physicians and medical scientists around the world signed a declaration publicly declaring that healthy children should NOT be vaccinated for COVID-19. On behalf of these MDs and PhDs, I have published a clear statement outlining the scientific facts behind this decision.

Full Text of Malone Statement

My name is Robert Malone, and I am speaking to you as a parent, grandparent, physician and scientist. I don’t usually read from a prepared speech, but this is so important that I wanted to make sure that I get every single word and scientific fact correct.

I stand by this statement with a career dedicated to vaccine research and development. I’m vaccinated for COVID and I'm generally pro-vaccination. I have devoted my entire career to developing safe and effective ways to prevent and treat infectious diseases.

After this, I will be posting the text of this statement so you can share it with your friends and family.

Before you inject your child - a decision that is irreversible - I wanted to let you know the scientific facts about this genetic vaccine, which is based on the mRNA vaccine technology I created:

There are three issues parents need to understand:

The first is that a viral gene will be injected into your children's cells. This gene forces your child’s body to make toxic spike proteins. These proteins often cause permanent damage in children’s critical organs, including

•     Their brain and nervous system

•     Their heart and blood vessels, including blood clots

•     Their reproductive system

•     And this vaccine can trigger fundamental changes to their immune system

The most alarming point about this is that once these damages have occurred, they are irreparable

•     You can’t fix the lesions within their brain

•     You can’t repair heart tissue scarring

•     You can’t repair a genetically reset immune system, and

•     This vaccine can cause reproductive damage that could affect future generations of your family

The second thing you need to know about is the fact that this novel technology has not been adequately tested.

•     We need at least 5 years of testing/research before we can really understand the risks

•     Harms and risks from new medicines often become revealed many years later

Ask yourself if you want your own child to be part of the most radical medical experiment in human history

One final point: the reason they’re giving you to vaccinate your child is a lie.

•     Your children represent no danger to their parents or grandparents

•     It’s actually the opposite. Their immunity, after getting COVID, is critical to save your family if not the world from this disease

In summary: there is no benefit for your children or your family to be vaccinating your children against the small risks of the virus, given the known health risks of the vaccine that as a parent, you and your children may have to live with for the rest of their lives.

The risk/benefit analysis isn’t even close.

As a parent and grandparent, my recommendation to you is to resist and fight to protect your children.

Crazy Narratives Make For Crazy PissAnts...,

off-guardian |  Why is the story of Covid irrational and contradictory? Why are we told on the one hand to be afraid, and on the other that there is nothing to be afraid of?

Why is the “pandemic” so completely insane?

You could argue that it’s simple happenstance. The by-product of a multi-focused evolving narrative, a story being told by a thousand authors all at once, each concerned with covering their own little patch of agenda. A car with multiple drivers fighting over a single steering wheel.

There’s probably some truth to that.

But it’s also true that control, true control, can only be achieved with a lie.

In clinical psychology one of the diagnostic signs of the psychopath is that they tell elaborate lies, compulsively. Many times they will tell a lie even if the truth would be more beneficial.

Nobody knows why they do this, but I have a theory, and it applies to the swarming groups of little rat minds running the sewers of power as much as it does any individual monstrosity.

If you want to control people, you need to lie to them, that’s the only way to guarantee you have power.

If you are standing in the road, and I yell “look out, there’s a car a coming”, and you move just as a car whips past, I will never know if you moved because I said so, or because there actually was a car.

If my interest is in making sure you don’t get hurt, this would not matter to me either way.

But, what if my only true aim is the gratification of watching you do what I say, simply because I said it?

…well, then I need to scream out a warning of a car that does not exist, and watch you dodge an imaginary threat. Or, indeed, tell you there is no car, and watch you get run over.

Only by doing this can I see my words mean more to you than perceivable reality, and only then do I know I’m truly in control.

You can never control people with the truth, because the truth has an existence outside yourself that cannot be altered or directed. It may be the truth itself that controls people, not you.

You can never force people to obey rules that make sense, because they may be obeying reason, not your force.

True power lies in making people afraid of something that does not exist, and making them abandon reason in the name of protecting themselves from the invented threat.

A Lot Of Wealthy Powerful Men Hit Epstein's Jailbait And Every Single One Of Them Will Skate...,

Guardian |  Now that the British former socialite Ghislaine Maxwell has been convicted in her sex-trafficking trial, speculation is growing that she may try to cut a deal and become a government witness in any broader investigation into the elite social circle of her ex-boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein.

Maxwell would be aiming for a reduced sentence by naming powerful names when it comes to others who may be involved in Epstein’s crimes.

But defense lawyers and sexual-crimes prosecutors have cast doubt on the government’s appetite to strike a bargain. They question whether Maxwell has any vital information the government does not already have, and whether it represents a strategy Maxwell has previously attempted that has failed.

“It all depends on who she would be cooperating against, and what she has to offer,” said Jeffrey Lichtman, the defense attorney who represented the Mexican drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán at trial two years ago. “I would not be surprised if she had already tried to cooperate and it had failed.”

Maxwell, who is expected to appeal her conviction, was found guilty on five of six charges for her involvement in Epstein’s sexual abuse of teenage girls. Prosecutors said Maxwell “preyed on vulnerable young girls, manipulated them and served them up to be sexually abused”. She is expected to receive a significant prison term.

According to Lichtman, there are defendants who, in the eyes of the government, are so bad that it does not want to strike a deal in exchange for testimony. “They don’t want to take the hand of someone involved a criminal operation and let them cooperate against people who are well below them.”

“That may be the case here – they just feel that she’s so bad they won’t allow her to cooperate,” Lichtman said.

But that does not preclude Maxwell and her lawyers from making an offer. “There’s a tremendous amount of information she has on some very important people. Now that she’s been convicted she may be more eager to discuss. She certainly should, in my mind, because a lot of people skated here, while she bore the brunt of the government’s full wrath,” Lichtman said.

 

Jizzlane's Going To Jail, Now We Posed To Pretend Epstein Fscked All That Jailbait By Himself?

 Business Insider

slate |  “It’s all connected,” one woman would say, repeatedly, to no one in particular. “It’s the cabal.” She at one point told me that she suspected it was a Maxwell lookalike sitting at the defense table, while the actual Maxwell was off freely gallivanting somewhere. The fifth-floor types spoke frequently of links between Jeffrey Epstein, the CIA, and Mossad, expecting anyone in earshot to understand the significance without further explanation.

Among the conspiracists, there seemed to be a belief that this trial would unlock the secrets of the universe—that it would lay bare a web touching every rich person in the world, every celebrity, every government agency, implicating them all in some sort of horrific global plot. In the end, of course, it did nothing of the sort.

The prosecution’s case was narrowly focused on the harm done to four teenage girls. It was built on the testimony of those four accusers, now women, who alleged that Maxwell aided, and sometimes participated in, Epstein’s efforts to sexually abuse them. When Epstein’s “little black book” came into evidence, it wasn’t because it included contact information for prominent politicians and businesspeople—it was because the book had phone numbers for those underage girls.

After testimony came to a close, I didn’t think the question of Maxwell’s guilt was much of a question at all. The accusers were, to my eyes and ears, extremely credible. Corroborating evidence affirmed their stories. The prosecutors were polished and effective in their presentation, while defense attorneys often stumbled and looked overmatched. When the defense team got a chance to put on its case, it turned out to be shockingly flimsy. The defense’s lead character witness—Maxwell’s onetime executive assistant—barely even managed to say anything nice about Maxwell. There was zero doubt, in my mind, that Maxwell committed the crimes she was charged with. But this was a jury trial, and with a jury, you just never, ever know.

Day after day, the deliberations went on without a verdict. The jurors requested transcripts of testimony from about a third of the witnesses—just reams of words—which made it seem like maybe they were attempting to rerun the entire trial in their chambers. As time dragged on, and they kept asking for more transcripts, I wondered if they were simply overwhelmed by the case, lost at sea, unable to make heads or tails of what they’d seen and heard in the courtroom. Some trial watchers had earlier complained that the prosecution’s case was too narrow, and that more accusers should have been called to testify, but the jury’s behavior during deliberations suggested that the case was confusing enough as it was. When the jurors requested a whiteboard, highlighters, and colored Post-it notes, I wondered if one among them was attempting to patiently explain to the rest, in a clear and visual way, what actually happened.

 

Federal Prosecutors Steered Clear Of 3rd Parties In Epstein's Orbit

miamiherald |  Maxwell was once a fixture on the New York social scene who possessed a Rolodex of names and direct phone numbers to former presidents, world leaders, billionaires and celebrities. She was also for years Epstein’s girlfriend and, according to testimony, managed his household in Palm Beach and other locales where the multimillionaire maintained estates. 

At least two women have claimed that they were trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell to powerful and wealthy men, including Prince Andrew, former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell and former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. Federal prosecutors purposefully seemed to steer the case around the potential minefield of identifying figures they referred to as “third parties” who were in Epstein’s orbit. All the men have denied the allegations.

David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor, said the verdict shows that prosecutors were right not to focus on these other figures. “The government’s decision to streamline their case was the right choice,” he said. 

Like Epstein, Maxwell hired a team of defense lawyers who filed a flurry of legal motions focused on undermining the credibility of the accusers and portraying them as prostitutes. “Depending on the age of the accusers during the time frame of the conspiracy, consent may be an appropriate and viable defense,’’ Maxwell’s attorneys said in one motion, noting that in Florida at the time the crimes were allegedly committed, “individuals under the age of 18 could be charged with commission of the crime of prostitution.” 

Michael Reiter, the former Palm Beach police chief who oversaw the earlier 2005-08 case against Epstein, said the verdict should send a message to everyone in the criminal justice system.

“In 2005, early in our investigation, the Palm Beach Police Department recognized the importance of stopping Jeffrey Epstein and bringing him to justice. The department never bent to the power and influence brought to bear against us.,” Reiter said. 

“Now that the courts have spoken, I hope and pray that the professionals in our justice system learn from this case. Law school professors should teach this case in legal ethics courses as an example of how not to treat victims of sex crimes and as a forewarning to prosecutors on how they can be influenced to fail in their duties to both victims and the public.” 

Maxwell’s verdict comes three years after the publication of “Perversion of Justice,” a Miami Herald investigation that told in vivid detail how Epstein and his team of high-profile attorneys manipulated the criminal justice system more than a decade earlier allowing him to escape federal prosecution. It told the stories of the girls, now women, and how they were coping years after their encounters with Epstein. Despite the fact that the FBI had evidence he sexually abused at least 34 girls, Epstein served just 13 months in the Palm Beach county jail on charges that he solicited one minor.