Bojo Catching A Djoko For Not "Playing By The Rules"

businessinsider |  As Conservative MPs returned to their constituencies after another week of fresh allegations of lockdown-busting parties at Downing Street, they were left wondering what reaction they would find back home. 

Boris Johnson, the man once seen as electoral dynamite, is now increasingly seen as politically toxic. The question his backbenchers will have to answer this weekend is whether his toxicity is terminal. 

The prime minister's apology to the House of Commons – in which he acknowledged the public "rage" caused by ITV's revelation of a "bring your own booze" garden party held in May 2020 — did little to quell the anger on Tory benches. But it did initially appear to buy him some time.

Then came another set of revelations. This time, two leaving parties, for which a No. 10 staffer was dispatched to buy a suitcase's worth of wine, were held in Downing Street on April 16, 2021, the night before Prince Philip's funeral.

NYTimes |

• Australia’s immigration minister revokes Djokovic’s visa on ‘health and good order’ grounds.

• Djokovic could be detained again on Saturday while he challenges the decision.

• What would Djokovic’s departure mean for the Australian Open bracket?

• Andy Murray: ‘I’m not going to sit here and start kicking Novak whilst he’s down.’

• In Serbia, Djokovic’s friends and family have fumed and waited.

• Just catching up with the Djokovic story? Here’s what you need to know.

• The Australian government took a stand for the public good, our correspondent writes.

Authorities Across The Board Suffering Irreversible Self-Inflicted Damage To Public Trust

swisspolicyresearch |  In the end, the truth will always be revealed, and the truth about the coronavirus policy is beginning to be revealed. When the destructive concepts collapse one by one, there is nothing left but to tell the experts who led the management of the pandemic – we told you so.

Two years late, you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail. You do not admit it, because you have admitted almost no mistake in the last two years, but in retrospect it is clear that you have failed miserably in almost all of your actions, and even the media is already having a hard time covering your shame.

You refused to admit that the infection comes in waves that fade by themselves, despite years of observations and scientific knowledge. You insisted on attributing every decline of a wave solely to your actions, and so through false propaganda “you overcame the plague.” And again you defeated it, and again and again and again.

You refused to admit that mass testing is ineffective, despite your own contingency plans explicitly stating so (“Pandemic Influenza Health System Preparedness Plan, 2007”, p. 26).

You refused to admit that recovery is more protective than a vaccine, despite previous knowledge and observations showing that non-recovered vaccinated people are more likely to be infected than recovered people. You refused to admit that the vaccinated are contagious despite the observations. Based on this, you hoped to achieve herd immunity by vaccination — and you failed in that as well.

You insisted on ignoring the fact that the disease is dozens of times more dangerous for risk groups and older adults, than for young people who are not in risk groups, despite the knowledge that came from China as early as 2020.

You refused to adopt the “Barrington Declaration”, signed by more than 60,000 scientists and medical professionals, or other common sense programs. You chose to ridicule, slander, distort and discredit them. Instead of the right programs and people, you have chosen professionals who lack relevant training for pandemic management (physicists as chief government advisers, veterinarians, security officers, media personnel, and so on).

You have not set up an effective system for reporting side effects from the vaccines, and reports on side effects have even been deleted from your Facebook page. Doctors avoid linking side effects to the vaccine, lest you persecute them as you did with some of their colleagues. You have ignored many reports of changes in menstrual intensity and menstrual cycle times. You hid data that allows for objective and proper research (for example, you removed the data on passengers at Ben Gurion Airport). Instead, you chose to publish non-objective articles together with senior Pfizer executives on the effectiveness and safety of vaccines.

Scientists Believed In Wuhan Lab Leak But Got Shut Down By Lil'Fauci

yahoo  |  Leading British and US scientists thought it was likely that Covid accidentally leaked from a laboratory but were concerned that further debate would harm science in China, emails show.

An email from Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, on February 2 2020 said that “a likely explanation” was that Covid had rapidly evolved from a Sars-like virus inside human tissue in a low-security lab.

The email, to Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins of the US National Institutes of Health, went on to say that such evolution may have “accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans”.

But a leading scientist told Sir Jeremy that “further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular”. Dr Collins, the former director of the US National Institutes of Health, warned it could damage “international harmony”.

Viscount Ridley, co-author of Viral: the search for the origin of Covid, said: “These emails show a lamentable lack of openness and transparency among Western scientists who appear to have been more interested in shutting down a hypothesis they thought was very plausible, for political reasons.”

In the emails, Sir Jeremy said that other scientists also believed the virus could not have evolved naturally. One such scientist was Professor Mike Farzan, of Scripps Research, the expert who discovered how the original Sars virus binds to human cells.

Scientists were particularly concerned by a part of Covid-19 called the furin cleavage site, a section of the spike protein which helps it enter cells and makes it so infectious to humans.

Summarising Professor Farzan’s concerns in an email, Sir Jeremy said: “He is bothered by the furin site and has a hard time (to) explain that as an event outside the lab, though there are possible ways in nature but highly unlikely.

“I think this becomes a question of how do you put all this together, whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature - accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40.”

Danish Ekstra Bladet Apologizes For Being An Uncritical Covid Sock Puppet...,

ekstrabladet  |  For ALMOST  two years, we - the press and the population - have been almost hypnotically preoccupied with the authorities' daily coronatal.

WE HAVE STARED  at the oscillations of the number pendulum when it came to infected, hospitalized and died with corona. And we've got the meaning of the pendulum's smallest movements laid out by experts, politicians and authorities, who have constantly warned us about the dormant corona monster under our beds. A monster just waiting for us to fall asleep so it can strike in the gloom and darkness of the night.

THE CONSTANT  mental alertness has worn off tremendously on all of us. That is why we - the press - must also take stock of our own efforts. And we have failed.

WE HAVE NOT  been wax enough at the garden gate when the authorities were required to answer what it actually meant that people are hospitalized with corona and not because of corona. Because it makes a difference. A big difference. Exactly, the official hospitalization numbers have been shown to be 27 percent higher than the actual figure for how many there are in the hospital, simply because they have corona. We only know that now.

IT IS OF COURSE  first and foremost the authorities who are responsible for informing the population correctly, accurately and honestly. The figures for how many are sick and died of corona should, for obvious reasons, have been published long ago, so we got the clearest picture of the monster under the bed.

IN ALL  , the messages of the authorities and politicians to the people in this historic crisis leave much to be desired. And therefore they lie as they have ridden when parts of the population lose confidence in them.

ANOTHER  example: The vaccines are consistently referred to as our 'superweapon'. And our hospitals are called 'superhospitals'. Nevertheless, these super-hospitals are apparently maximally pressured, even though almost the entire population is armed with a super-weapon. Even children have been vaccinated on a huge scale, which has not been done in our neighboring countries.

IN OTHER  WORDS, there is something here that does not deserve the term 'super'. Whether it's the vaccines, the hospitals, or a mixture of it all, is every man's bid. But at least the authorities' communication to the population in no way deserves the term 'super'. On the contrary.

Mainstream Media's Ludicrous Joe Rogan Fear Factor Continues....,

mediaite |  Two hundred and seventy “scientists, medical professionals, professors, and science communicators” are requesting Spotify add a misinformation policy for its platform due to Joe Rogan’s massively popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE).

The “Open Letter to Spotify” calling for action against Rogan came as a result of Rogan’s interview with Dr. Robert Malone. The Malone episode has been called out for promoting conspiracy theories regarding the Covid-19 pandemic.

The letter states, “By allowing the propagation of false and societally harmful assertions, Spotify is enabling its hosted media to damage public trust in scientific research and sow doubt in the credibility of data-driven guidance offered by medical professionals.”

The letter continues to slam Rogan for his stance on Covid-19 treatments. “Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Joe Rogan has repeatedly spread misleading and false claims on his podcast, provoking distrust in science and medicine. He has discouraged vaccination in young people and children, incorrectly claimed that mRNA vaccines are ‘gene therapy,’ promoted off-label use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19 (contrary to FDA warnings), and spread a number of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.”

“Notably, Dr. Malone is one of two recent JRE guests who has compared pandemic policies to the Holocaust,” the letter charged.

YouTube has removed Rogan’s interview with Malone, and Twitter suspended Malone’s account earlier this month for breaking the platform’s guidelines around the posting Covid-19 misinformation.

You can read the full Open Letter to Spotify here.

Gregory Bateson: Schismogenesis

downwithtyranny  |  Wokeness, “a term referring to awareness of issues that concern social justice and racial equality,” is everywhere these days. What is going on? The CIA going woke? The Pinkertons, long-time nemesis of labor unions, flying the Rainbow Pride flag? Raytheon pushing critical race theory? Has the U.S. Left finally triumphed over their foes? No, in fact, progressives are circling the drain (Medicare for All is going nowhere, the minimum wage remains $7.25/hr, unions are on the verge of extinction, impotent Twitter protestations by Bernie notwithstanding) but so are their woke-boosting corporate foes. Why and how is this so? The explanation has its roots in 1) the state-sponsored battle against civil unrest U.S that began in the 1960s. and 2) intellectual concepts discovered by polymath thinker Gregory Bateson.

The U.S. during the 1960’s suffered an eruption of domestic rebellion, ranging from the civil rights movement and the feminist revolution to organized labor and the anti-war movement. Strangely enough, most of the leaders in these movements were assassinated (RFK, MLK, Malcolm X) or died under mysterious circumstances (Walter Reuther). Was it enough for the ruling elite that the leaders of these movements were dead (neutralized)? I contend that it was not and that the elites embarked on an additional strategy: capture of the movements to 1) prevent a resurgence of rebellion against the ruling elites and 2) prevent cross alliances between the various rebel factions, a reason theorized by some to explain the death of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, who was trying to unite the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the organized labor movement at the time of his death. From feminism, where a movement leader (Gloria Steinem) has been revealed to have worked for the CIA, to civil rights, where Black Lives Matters is subsidized by the Ford Foundation to the tune of $100 million, to organized labor, where the AFL-CIO provided assistance to various U.S. government regime change efforts, these movements are infested with corporate and state actors. Meanwhile, concrete measures of material progress, such as increased wages for the working class, universal healthcare, and support for organized labor remain curiously out of reach.

 

There is a name for this highly effective signal jamming by government and corporate elites: maintaining the schismogenesis.

 

Schismogenesis means the beginning of the breakdown of a relationship or a system. Gregory Bateson, a scientific polymath, actively conducting research from the 1930s throughout the 1970s, in a wide array of fields including anthropology, semiotics, cybernetics, linguistics, and biology, first developed it while observing the social interactions of a New Guinean tribe called the Iatmul. Interestingly enough, Bateson later weaponized the idea of schismogenesis and deliberately sowed divisions while working for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. This perpetuation of division, schismogenesis, is what I contend all of these woke corporations and government agencies are actively engaged in.

 

The explosion in wokeness launched in the years immediately following the Occupy rebellion of the Left and the Tea Party rebellion of the Right. Very curious timing indeed. Absent in all of these modern woke campaigns, of course, are the aforementioned measures that actually represent material improvements for the working class nor any mention of the menace of war and imperialism Even now, divisive and unpopular concepts like Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality, launched from academia by upper class elites, are being touted by woke corporations and labor unions. Against this goliath force, it looks like progressives are doomed. Ironically, it looks like the woke propagators may have created a tool that will also insure their own demise. Why? This explanation relies on another of Gregory Bateson’s concepts: the double bind.

Brandon's Karenwaffen NeoVaccinoidal Schismogenesis

theatlantic |  To understand how ideologically scrambling the Omicron wave has been, consider this: Some 2022 Democrats are sounding like 2020 Republicans. In spring 2020, many Republicans, including President Donald Trump, insisted that COVID was hardly worse than the flu; that its fatality risk was comparable to an everyday activity, like driving in a car; and that an obsessive focus on cases wouldn’t give an accurate picture of what was going on in the pandemic.

In the current Omicron wave, these Republican talking points seem to have mostly come true—for most vaccinated non-senior adults, who are disproportionately Democrats.

But Democratic talking points about the severity of COVID and the need for commensurate caution remain valid and not only for the sick and elderly. Ironically, they are especially true for the unvaccinated—a disproportionately Republican group that has seen their hospitalization rates soar this winter to all-time highs. About 9,000 Americans are dying of COVID every week. Preliminary state data suggest that more than 90 percent of today’s deaths are still among unvaccinated people. This year, COVID is on pace to kill more than 300,000 unvaccinated people who would, quite likely, avoid death by getting two or three shots.

Read: Should I just get Omicron over with?

The messiness of Omicron data—record-high cases! but much milder illness!—has deepened our COVID Rashomon, in which different communities are telling themselves different stories about what’s going on, and coming to different conclusions about how to lead their lives. That’s true even within populations that, a year ago, were united in their desire to take the pandemic seriously and were outraged by those who refused to do so.

A virus that seems both pervasive and mild offers an opening to people who are, let’s call them, “vaxxed and done.” The attitude of the VADs is this:

For more than a year, I did everything that public-health authorities told me to do. I wore masks. I canceled vacations. I made sacrifices. I got vaccinated. I got boosted. I’m happy to get boosted again. But this virus doesn’t stop. Year over year, the infections don’t decrease. Instead, virulence for people like me is decreasing, either because the virus is changing, or because of growing population immunity, or both. Americans should stop pointlessly guilting themselves about all these cases. In the past week, daily confirmed COVID cases per capita were higher than the U.S. in Ireland, Greece, Iceland, Denmark, France, the U.K., Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, and even Australia, one of the most COVID-cautious countries in the world. As the coronavirus continues its unstoppable march toward endemicity, our attitude toward the virus should follow a similar path toward stoicism. COVID is becoming something like the seasonal flu for most people who keep up with their shots, so I’m prepared to treat this like I’ve treated the flu: by basically not worrying about it and living my life normally.

It’s hard to put a number on how many people are in this group, but we have some hard data to prove that their ranks are growing. This past December, airports processed twice as many travelers compared with the same period in 2020, despite many flights being canceled. On several days, TSA-checkpoint numbers exceeded their totals from pre-pandemic 2019. This is not the picture of a country that is hunkering down for Omicron. It is the limited snapshot of a mostly vaccinated population with millions of people who are eager to move on.

I have a lot of sympathy for this group’s case, especially as it relates to schools. The risk of COVID to vaccinated teachers and even unvaccinated students seems lower than we initially thought. Meanwhile, the costs of remote schooling seem higher than we feared. The White House and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona have come out strongly in support of keeping schools open. Other Democratic leaders, like Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, are fighting reluctant teachers to keep school in person. Even among pro-vaccine Americans, a growing number of people seem to be saying they are done with remote school as a baseline COVID policy.

Will SCOTUS Act In Time To Stop Brandon's Train Wreck?

Heritage |   The Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal workers went into effect Nov. 22, despite vocal opposition from some members of Congress. This mandate could result in more than a hundred thousand people being disciplined or fired for refusing to comply, even if those workers are otherwise excellent employees or if their loss will severely disrupt the government’s ability to function.

The White House reports that 92% of 3.5 million total federal workers have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Another 4.5% are considered “in compliance” by way of having requested an exemption, with some but not all of those exemptions having been approved thus far. Federal employees who had already resigned or found new employment due to the vaccine mandate are not included in these figures.

If all those exemptions granted for the 4.5% and 96.5% are “in compliance,” that’s still a likely loss of 3.5%, or 122,500 federal workers who are not willing to get vaccinated.  

Under ordinary circumstances, firing even a single federal worker is extremely difficult. Federal managers attempting to fire an employee must prove “a preponderance of evidence” and prove that dismissing the employee will improve the performance of the agency.

At a minimum, firing a federal worker takes 170 days, but often it takes well over a year—and sometimes even two years. The nearly impossible process of firing a federal worker even with just cause means that federal managers almost never even attempt to dismiss or discipline workers.

According to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, federal agencies dismissed 0.18% of their career permanent workforce in 2013.

In a complete disregard for what ordinarily constitute an excessive amount of protections for federal workers, the president’s vaccine mandate could allow federal employees—including the best, the brightest, the longest-serving, and even those crucial to federal missions—to be disciplined or dismissed exclusively because they make a personal health decision to not get a COVID-19 vaccine.

No, For Real Brandon? How Many Votes Can The DNC Afford To Lose?

cbs |  The State Police Association of Massachusetts says roughly 300 of its members still have not complied with Governor Charlie Baker’s vaccine mandate for state employees.

About 200 of them have sought exemptions. Union president Sgt. Michael Cherven said the state hasn’t responded yet to the exemptions.

At a news conference Monday in Boston, the union said the lack of communication between the state and those who applied for exemptions is causing anxiety.

“Let me be clear, our concern is not one of anti-vaccination, in fact, the vast majority, almost 85% of our membership is vaccinated. Our concern is based in the lack of fundamental fairness in the Administration’s consistent efforts to undermine the processes by which organized labor secures the rights of its members. On August 19, Governor Baker announced that there would be 60 days to bargain and implement a policy for mandated vaccinations. Well, 60 days has passed. Though we are beyond the deadline, we have not received even one reply to the several hundred medical and religious exemption requests that were submitted,” said Cherven.

The mandate could also draw down on an already understaffed force, the union argued.

“We’ll make sure that we do what we need to do to make sure that they continue to perform the duties that they’re expected to perform, I’m not concerned about that,” Baker said.

According to the Baker administration, 40,462 active state employees submitted the required proof of vaccination or submitted an exemption waiver by Sunday’s deadline, about 1,571 have not responded. That’s roughly 4 percent.

“That is a much bigger number than we had two weeks ago,” Baker said.

That means managers in state departments will now have to seek out those employees to ask their status, and after that, they could face progressive discipline and ultimately termination.

Really? How Many Votes Can The DNC Afford To Lose?

foxnews |  Two hundred and fifty people who worked for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and its affiliates are out of a job because they didn't comply with its vaccine mandate.

Now, some of those employees are gearing up to take the matter to federal court.

Attorney Noah Hurwitz is representing over 100 of the terminated employees and says this case is a clear violation of Title VII employment laws allowing for religious accommodation.

“The courts for a long time have been upholding an employee’s right to religious accommodation from the flu vaccine. So we expect that same precedent of law to apply here,” Hurwitz said.

One former employee we spoke with, who requested anonymity, said he asked Blue Cross Blue Shield of MIchigan for a religious accommodation and was denied. He says at a time when there is lots of talk about diversity and inclusion, this policy seems out of touch.

“It didn’t turn into diversity. It turned into something else entirely. It seems like its more like conformity and exclusion is what it turned into and its been sad to see,” he said.

Amy Castinon of the UAW Amalgamated Local 2256, says seven union members in the Lansing branch of Blue Cross Blue Shield and the Blue Care Network were part of the terminations this week.

She said the union is taking grievances for anyone impacted by the mandate and plans to head to the bargaining table to get back pay and reinstatement for anyone who lost their job.

A statement from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan says in part, “Since announcing our policy on Oct. 29, over 1,900 unvaccinated employees have made the choice to receive their vaccines, or have been approved for a medical or religious accommodation. Out of more than 10,000 employees at Blue Cross and our subsidiaries, more than 96 percent are vaccinated. Regrettably, 250 employees chose not to comply with the company’s vaccine mandate and were therefore terminated Jan. 5.”

The statement goes on to say that the vaccine policy is meant to “safeguard the collective health and well-being of employees.”

Hurwitz says it will be at least six months before a suit can be filed because a complaint has to be filed and investigated by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission first.

How Many Votes Can The DNC Afford To Lose?

nbcnews |  The Mayo Clinic fired roughly 700 employees who failed to comply with the nonprofit medical center's mandatory Covid-19 vaccination policy. 

Workers at the Mayo Clinic had been given until Monday to get their first dose of a vaccine or obtain a medical or religious exemption to the rule. They were also expected not to delay on receiving a second dose if they had already gotten the first jab.

Hundreds of employees failed to meet those requirements and were let go, the Mayo Clinic said in a statement shared with NBC News on Wednesday.

"Nearly 99 percent of employees across all Mayo Clinic locations complied with Mayo’s required Covid-19 vaccination program by the Jan. 3 deadline," the clinic said of its staff, which consists of around 73,000 workers.

The Mayo Clinic said approximately 1 percent of its staff, or around 700 people, would be "released from employment."

Jabbed Bish-Made Presstitutes Straight Hating On Djokovic...,

WaPo  |  Novak Djokovic, the top-ranked men’s tennis player in the world, does not deserve to play in the Australian Open. His flouting of the country’s coronavirus vaccination regime has nothing to do with “freedom” — and everything to do with the persecution complex he cultivates as a source of motivation.

The Open is arguably the most important international sporting event on the calendar in Oz. But if I were an Australian citizen, I’d be livid at the idea that Djokovic could waltz into the country — defiantly unvaccinated — and blithely go about staking his claim as tennis’s greatest of all time. I’d remember the early phase of the pandemic, when thousands of Aussies were stranded abroad for weeks or even months, barred from coming home. I’d remember the repeated lockdowns that were among the strictest and most punishing in the world.

Despite a judge’s ruling on Monday allowing Djokovic to remain in the country and compete, I’d want the government to use all its power to bar him anyway. And if all else failed and he ended up taking the court in Melbourne next week, I’d refuse to watch him play despite his undeniable, exquisite talent.

Djokovic, who is from Serbia, has won 20 singles titles in the four major tournaments — Wimbledon and the Australian, French and U.S. Opens — which leaves him tied with Roger Federer of Switzerland and Rafael Nadal of Spain as the greatest male tennis player of the Open era. Federer and Nadal, both of whom ooze charisma and glamour, have long been widely beloved. Djokovic, not so much.

Federer, who is fully vaccinated, is not playing in Melbourne this year. Nadal, who will compete, is also fully vaccinated — as Australian Open, Victoria state government and Australian national government rules require. According to the Economist magazine, 95 percent of top professional men’s tennis players are fully vaccinated.

Djokovic, however, is well-known as anti-vaccine. Contrarianism seems central to his persona.

He was given a sweetheart “medical exemption” to play in Australia by the tournament and the state, based on the fact that he recently had a covid-19 infection and thus should enjoy some immunity. In the days after testing positive in December, Djokovic did not isolate himself to protect others. Quite the contrary: He was photographed posing and mingling with groups of people, not even bothering to wear a mask.

That may not have been much of a concern in Belgrade, where Djokovic attended an event for young tennis players after testing positive. He is a national hero in Serbia, after all; and the Economist reports that only 45 percent of that nation’s adults are fully vaccinated. But Serbia has “suffered the second-highest number of excess deaths in the world per head of population” during the pandemic, according to the magazine’s tracker.

 

Supreme Court: VaxNation Mandate Is "Major Questions Land"

jonathanturley  |  The defenders of the mandates worked mightily to avoid the fact that it’s the first-ever national vaccine mandate and was decided without the approval of Congress.  Chief Justice John Roberts, a vital vote needed by the administration, noted that this administration was relying on language passed roughly 50 years ago — closer to the Spanish Flu than the novel coronavirus — and stated ominously, “This is something the federal government has never done before.” That sounds not just like a question but a major one.

The major-questions doctrine maintains that courts should not defer to agency statutory interpretations when the underlying questions concern “vast economic or political significance.”

The controversy over the mandates shows the wisdom of the doctrine demanding that Congress not only take action but responsibility, too, for such major decisions.

With increasing confusion over changing CDC guidelines and the risk profile associated with the Omicron variant, congressional action could bring both greater legitimacy and clarity to questions swirling around mandates.

Instead, the Supreme Court is grappling with an executive move that was openly discussed not only as an avoidance of Congress but a circumvention of constitutional limitations.

It was not a good sign for the administration that the most referenced individual during oral argument was Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, who tweeted that the mandates were “workarounds” of the Constitution. Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Neil Gorsuch, and others referred to Klain’s admission as the administration’s lawyers tried to argue that the executive had the constitutional authority to implement a national mandate.

Public Opinion Has Zero-Impact On U.S. Law

upworthy |  Their study took data from nearly 2,000 public-opinion surveys and compared what the people wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America has essentially no impact at all.

Put another way, and I'll just quote the Princeton study directly here:

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

Really think about that for a second.

If you've ever felt like your opinion doesn't matter and that the government doesn't really care what you think, well … you're right.

But, of course, there's a catch.

...unless you're an "economic elite."

If there's one thing that still reliably gets politicians' attention, it's money. While the opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America have a "statistically non-significant impact," Gilens and Page found that economic elites, business interests, and people who can afford lobbyists still carry major influence.

How could it be that our government, designed to function as a representative democracy, is only good at representing such a small fraction of the population? Just follow the money.

Why? Because purchasing political influence is 100% legal.

For example: Let's say a big bank wants a law that would force taxpayers to bail them out again if they repeat the exact same reckless behavior that crashed the global economy in 2008.

It's perfectly legal for our bank to hire a team of lobbyists whose entire job is to make sure the government gives the bank what it wants. Then, those lobbyists can track down members of Congress who regulate banks and help raise a ton of money for their re-election campaigns. Its also perfectly legal for those lobbyists to offer those same politicians million-dollar jobs at their lobbying firms.

Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kansas), shown speaking at an event in 2012, recently attached language originally drafted by lobbyists for CitiGroup to a financial services appropriations bill. Members of Congress who voted "yes" on the bill received, on average, 2.8 times more money from the PACs of CitiGroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase than members who voted "no." Image by Information Technology Innovation Foundation/Flickr.

They can also literally write the language of this new bailout law themselves, then hand it off to the politicians they just buttered up with campaign money and lucrative job offers. And it's perfectly legal for those politicians to sneak the lobbyist-written language through Congress at the last second.

If that example sounds oddly specific, that's because it happened in December 2014. And it happens all the time, on almost every single issue, with politicians of both parties.

Today's Must Read: Physicians Amicus Briefing To The U.S. Supreme Court

supremecourt.gov | 31 pages, 25 pages are very plain language, concise, and cover succinctly what many hear have read, heard, and seen over the past 2 plus years.

“It is the consensus of the medical community that the currently available Covid-19 vaccine injections do not prevent the spread of SARS- CoV-2. Relevant federal agencies have repeatedly acknowledged this consensus. Therefore, there is no scientific or legal justification for OSHA to segregate injected and un-injected people. Indeed, since the Covid-19 injections do not confer immunity upon the recipients, but are claimed to merely reduce the symptoms of the disease, they do not fall within the long-established definition of a vaccine at all. ”

Fat Diabetic Sotomayor Clowns Herself With Vaxnation Mandate Behavior And Remarks..,

reuters | The 63-year-old Sotomayor, one of the nine-member court’s four liberal justices, was diagnosed as a child with type 1 diabetes and has openly discussed her experience with the chronic illness in the past. She was named to the court in 2009 by Democratic former President Barack Obama.

 

“Justice Sotomayor experienced symptoms of low blood sugar at her home this morning. She was treated by D.C. Emergency Medical Services and is doing fine,” spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said in a statement. “She came to work, resumed her usual schedule, and will be participating in planned activities over the weekend.”

 

When she was appointed, Sotomayor became the first Hispanic justice and the third woman to serve on the nation’s highest court.

 

She manages her diabetes through insulin injections, glucose tablets and regular testing of her blood sugar. Sotomayor has been candid about her previous struggles and scares that led her to be more open about the disease. 

***********************************************************************************

Justice Sotomayor, fully vaccinated and boostered according to news reports, decided to hear the case in her own office over Zoom. This is an appropriate medical decision based on what we know about the inability of these vaccines to prevent COVID transmission. And again, regardless of her vaccination status, she should do all she can to protect herself from COVID. Because of her obesity status, on an individual level, vaxnation will absolutely decrease her chance of ending up in the ICU. 

 

It will do absolutely nothing to decrease her risk of catching or transmitting the virus. Nor will it decrease the outpatient illness that people seem to get. There is ZERO difference in the outpatient illness between those vaxxed or not. It is about the same. A mild illness for many, a severe “knock you out for a few days” illness for many. Vaxnation status seems to not make a difference in the outpatient illness.

 

That said, Sonia Sotomayor stated in her remarks and questions, that the vaccines are essential for protecting workers from spreading the virus. And by inference, this vaccine efficacy is worth firing millions of hard-working Americans from their jobs. Fully vaccinated and boostered, sitting in her office so she did not come into contact with the other justices – all of whom are at least fully vaccinated - this fat diabetic paid-for-life supreme asked these questions pretending one thing, while her own fearful behavior betrayed the truth of what even she knows about these pathetic neovaccinoids. 

 

Sotomayor is admitting something wrong with the narrative, betrayed by her own behavior while simultaneously contemplating millions of Americans losing their livelihood - to protect the vanated co-workers from what exactly?

 

Is this how vaxnations are supposed to work?

 

Am I missing something?

CDC Finally Tells The Eugenic Truth 78% Of Covid Fatalities Had Four Co-Morbidities...,

Today, @CDCDirector said:
"The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least 4 comorbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with and yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron."

This is eugenicist. pic.twitter.com/zd3iBQTH0J

— Matthew Cortland, JD (@mattbc) January 8, 2022

CDC  |  Among 1,228,664 persons who completed primary vaccination during December 2020–October 2021, severe COVID-19–associated outcomes (0.015%) or death (0.0033%) were rare. Risk factors for severe outcomes included age ≥65 years, immunosuppressed, and six other underlying conditions. All persons with severe outcomes had at least one risk factor; 78% of persons who died had at least four.

What are the implications for public health practice?

Vaccinated persons who are older, immunosuppressed, or have other underlying conditions should receive targeted interventions including chronic disease management, precautions to reduce exposure, additional primary and booster vaccine doses, and effective pharmaceutical therapy to mitigate risk for severe outcomes. Increasing vaccination coverage is a critical public health priority.

David Bohm Did Not Propose A Holographic Universe

futurism |  David Bohm’s influence extends beyond physics to embrace philosophy, psychology, religion, art, and linguistics. Interestingly, his ideas have been received more enthusiastically by the arts community than by the scientific establishment. The Tibetan Master Sogyal Rinpoche once remarked that there are striking parallels between Bohm’s model of the universe and the Buddhist *bardo* teachings, as they both “spring from a vision of wholeness.”

Bohm had doubts about the theory of quantum mechanics and its ability to fully explain the workings of the universe. Despite having written a classic textbook on quantum mechanics, Bohm, agreed with Albert Einstein that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” While working on plasmas at the Lawrence Radiation laboratory in California in the 1940s, Bohm noticed that once electrons were in a plasma (which has a high density of electrons and positive ions), they stopped behaving like individual particles and started behaving like a unit. It seemed as if the sea of electrons was somehow alive. He thought then that there was a deeper cause behind the random nature of the subatomic world.

Bohm came up with an idea of the quantum potential to suggest that subatomic particles are highly complex, dynamic entities that follow a precise path which is determined by subtle forces. In his view the quantum potential pervades all space and guides the motion of particles by providing information about the whole environment.

For Bohm, all of reality was a dynamic process in which all manifest objects are in a state of constant flux. By introducing the concepts of “implicate order” and “explicate order”, Bohm argued that the empty space in the universe contained the whole of everything. It is the source of explicate order, the order of the physical world, and is a realm of pure information. From it, the physical, observable phenomena unfold, and again, return to it. This unfolding of the explicit order from the subtle realm of the implicate order, and the movement of all matter in terms of enfolding and unfolding, is what Bohm called the Holomovement.

Bohm believed that although the universe appears to be solid, it is, in essence, a magnificent hologram. He believed in the “whole in every part” idea, and just like a hologram, each part of physical reality contained information about the whole.

Bohm was not the only scientist who arrived at this conclusion. In neuroscience, Karl Pribram, who was working on the functioning of the brain, concluded that memories are encoded not in specific regions of the brain, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the area containing a holographic image. Together, Bohm and Pribram worked on developing the so called “Holonomic Model” of the functioning of the brain.

Bohm believed that his body was a microcosm of the macrocosm, and that the universe was a mystical place where past, present, and future coexisted. He postulated the existence of a realm of pure information (the implicate order) from which the physical, observable phenomena unfold. Unlike classical physics where reality is viewed as particles of separate, independent elements, Bohm proposed that the fundamental reality is the continuous enfoldment (into the implicate order) and unfoldment (of the explicate order) from the subtle realms. In this flow, matter and space are each part of the whole.

In stark contrast to Western ways of thinking about the nature of reality as external and mechanistic, Bohm considers our separateness an illusion and argues that at a deeper level of reality, we, as well as all the particles that make up all matter, are one and indivisible. For Bohm, the “empty space” is full of energy and information. It’s a hidden world of the implicate order, also known as the “Zero Point Field” or the “Akasha”.

What If Holonomic Theory Informs Clandestine And Military Doctrine At The Highest Level?

archive |  MISHLOVE: You're very well known in psychology and in neuropsychology as the developer of the holographic or holonomic model of the brain. Can you talk about that a little bit, and how it relates to the mind -- or rather, to the mind-body process? I have to be on my toes with you today.
PRIBRAM: Yes. The holonomic brain theory is based on some insights that Dennis Gabor had. He was the inventor of the hologram, and he obtained the Nobel Prize for his many contributions. He was a mathematician, and what he was trying to do was develop a better way of making electron micrographs, improve the resolution of the micrographs. And so for electron microscopy he suggested that instead of making a photograph -- essentially, with electron microscopes we make photographs using electrons instead of photons. He thought maybe instead of making ordinary photographs, that what he would do is get the interference patterns. Now what is an interference pattern? When light strikes, or when electrons strike any object, they scatter. But the scatter is a funny kind of scatter. It's a very well regulated scatter. For instance, if you defocus the lens on a camera so that you don't get the image falling on the image plane and you have a blur, that blur essentially is a hologram, because all you have to do is refocus it.

MISHLOVE: Contained in the blur is the actual image.

PRIBRAM: That's right. But you don't see it as such. So one of the main principles of holonomic brain theory, which gets us into quantum mechanics also, is that there is a relationship here between what we ordinarily experience, and some other process or some other order, which David Bohm calls the implicate, or enfolded, order, in which things are all distributed or spread -- in fact the mathematical formulations are often called spread functions -- that spread this out.

MISHLOVE: Now what you're talking about here is the deep structure of the universe, in a way. Beneath the subatomic level of matter itself are these quantum wave functions, so to speak, and they form interference patterns. Would I be wrong in saying it would be like dropping two stones in a pond, the way the ripples overlap? Is that like an interference pattern?

PRIBRAM: That's certainly the way interference patterns work, yes.

MISHLOVE: And you're suggesting that at that very deep level of reality, something is operating in the brain itself.

PRIBRAM: Well, no. In a way, that's possible, but that's not where the situation is at the moment. All we know is that the mathematical descriptions that we make of, let's say, single-cell processes, and the branches from the single cells, and how they interact with each other -- not only anatomically, but actually functional interactions -- that when we map those, we get a description that is very similar to the description of quantum events.

MISHLOVE: When you take into account that there are billions of these single cells operating in the brain.

PRIBRAM: That's right. And the connections between them, so there are even more; there are trillions of connections between them. They operate on the basic principles that have been found to also operate at the quantum level. Actually, it was the other way around. The mathematics that Gabor used, he borrowed from Heisenberg and Hilbert. Hilbert developed them first in mathematics, and then Heisenberg used them in quantum mechanics, and Gabor used them in psychophysics, and we've used it in modeling how brain networks work.

MISHLOVE: So in other words, in the brain,when we look at the electrical impulses traveling through the neurons, and the patterns as these billions of neurons interact, you would say that that is analogous, I suppose, or isomorphic to the processes that are going on at the deeper quantum level.

PRIBRAM: Yes. But we don't know that it's a deeper quantum level in the brain.

MISHLOVE: That may or may not be the case.

PRIBRAM: Analogous isn't quite the right word; they obey the same rules. It's not just an analogy, because the work that described these came independently. An analogy would be that you take the quantum ideas, and see how they fit to the data we have on the brain. That's not the way it happened. We got the brain data first, and then we see, look, it fits the same mathematics. So the people who were gathering these data, including myself, weren't out to look for an analogous process. I think it's a very important point, because otherwise you could be biased, and there are lots of different models that fit how the brain works. But this is more based on how the brain was found to work, independent of these conceptions.

MISHLOVE: Independent of any model.

PRIBRAM: Yes, essentially independent of any model.

MISHLOVE: So you've got a mathematical structure that parallels the mathematical structures of quantum physics. Now what does that tell us about the mind?

PRIBRAM: What it tells me is that the problems that have been faced in quantum mechanics for the whole century -- well, since the twenties --

MISHLOVE: Many paradoxes.

PRIBRAM: And very many paradoxes -- that those paradoxes also apply at the psychophysical level and at the neuronal level, and therefore we have to face the same sets of problems. At the same time, I think what David Bohm is doing is showing that some of the classical conceptions which were thought not to apply at the quantum level, really do apply at the quantum level. Now, I'm interpreting Bohm; I'm not sure he would want to agree to my interpretation of what he's doing. But to me that seems to be what is going on. So that the schism between levels -- between the quantum level, the submicroscopic almost, subatomic level and what goes on there, and the classical, so-called uncertainty principle and all of that -- that all applies all the way along; but you've got to be very careful in -- how should I put it? You've got to apply it to the actual data, and not just sort of run it over.

MISHLOVE: To the average layman, why would they be interested in this? Is there some significance to people in their everyday lives, or in their workaday worlds, in the business of life?

PRIBRAM: Sure, and this is the critical thing -- that if indeed we're right that these quantum-like phenomena, or the rules of quantum mechanics, apply all the way through to our psychological processes, to what's going on in the nervous system -- then we have an explanation perhaps, certainly we have a parallel, to the kind of experiences that people have called spiritual experiences. Because the descriptions you get with spiritual experiences seem to parallel the descriptions of quantum physics. That's why Fritjof Capra wrote The Tao of Physics, why we have The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and all of this sort of thing that's come along. And in fact Bohr and Heisenberg already knew; Schroedinger talked about the Upanishads, and Bohr used the yin and yang as his symbol. Because the conceptions that grew out of watching the quantum level -- and therefore now the neurological and psychophysical level, now that it's a psychological level as well -- seem to have a great deal in common with our spiritual experience. Now what do I mean by spiritual experience? You talked about mental activity, calling it the mind. That aspect of mental activity, which is very human -- it may be true of other species as well, but we don't know -- but in human endeavor many of us at least seem to need to get in contact with larger issues, whether they're cosmology, or some kind of biological larger issue, or a social one, or it's formalized in some kind of religious activity. But we want to belong. And that is what I define as the spiritual aspects of man's nature.

We Need Multidimensional Portraits Of Ancient Peoples...,

ineteconomics  |   Napoleon Bonaparte asked, “What is history but a fable agreed upon?” Graeber and Wengrow come in to shake off the spell of prevailing fables — not as armchair theorists snatching ideas from thin air but as reviewers and synthesizers of a plethora of tantalizing recent discoveries, along with the work of neglected thinkers who (hello, feminist scholars) who drew ire for their attention to glaring inconsistencies in the established narratives. In doing so, they recover frameworks for the way ancient peoples experienced their world that help us to see that we could be organizing ourselves – socially, economically, politically — on principles much different from those that seem inevitable today. This is heartening.

Among the propositions of Graeber and Wengrow are these:

• We barely have the language to express what our remote ancestors were up to 95% of the time.
• The Agricultural Revolution wasn’t a revolution at all. The real story is much more complex – and interesting.
• Ancient peoples lived with a rich variety of social and political structures, even varying according to the season. (Very flexible, those folks).
• Humans aren’t just pawns on a chessboard of material conditions. We’ve been actively experimenting from the get-go.
• Inequality in large-scale human communities isn’t inevitable, nor is it a product of farming. Ditto, patriarchy.
• Past societies that valued women were happier places to live. (Duh).
• We can do better. We have done better.

The authors begin by pointing out that eighteenth-century theories of human history were partly a reaction to critiques of European society offered by indigenous observers. Consider Kandiaronk, a Wendat chief so skilled in debate he could easily shut down a Jesuit, who blew the minds of listeners with penetrating insights on authority, decency, social responsibility, and above all, freedom. Kandiaronk’s critiques, presented in a dialogue form by the Baron de Lahontan in 1703, sparked a whole genre of books voicing criticisms from a “primitive” outsider. Graeber and Wengrow illuminate how profoundly these products influenced Enlightenment thought and helped give rise to social and political experiments (including the U.S. Constitution), as well as defensive strategies to discount such perspectives (also including the U.S. Constitution).

Madame de Graffigny’s epistolary novel of 1747, “Letters from a Peruvian Woman” (1747) tells the story of an Incan princess who rails against the inequality she observes in French society – particularly the ill-treatment of women. This volume, in turn, helped shape the thinking of the economist A.R.J. Turgot, who responded by insisting that inequality was inevitable. He outlined a theory of social evolution posited as progress from hunters to pastoralism to farming to urban commercial civilization that placed anybody not at the final stage as a vestigial life form that had better get with the program. Turgot’s scheme of social evolution started popping up in lectures of his buddy Adam Smith over in Glasgow, and eventually worked its way into general theories of human history proposed by several of Smith’s influential colleagues such as Adam Ferguson.

The new default paradigm formed the lens through which Europeans viewed indigenous peoples the world over; namely as childish innocents or brutal savages living in deplorable static conditions. Everybody was to be sorted according to how they acquired food, with egalitarian foraging societies banished to the bottom of the ladder. The Kandiaronks causing anxiety by pointing out the grotesque conditions of so-called civilization — from the large numbers of starving people to the need for two hours for a Frenchman to dress himself — could now be dismissed. This mindset became prevalent in the emerging field of archaeology, where practitioners churned out biased interpretations of ancient societies that rendered them non-threatening to the modern, capitalist way of life.

Teleological history was the name of the game, and scholars played it endlessly.