Freedom Is Dangerous - (Ironically Under The Guardian's Old Comment Is Free Banner)

theguardian |  “Freedom” protests similar in form and simultaneously nebulous in broadly anti-vax/anti-mandate political goals have materialised in Britain, France and New Zealand. A convoy claiming to originate from across Europe is making its way towards Brussels. An ongoing gathering that locals alternately describe as “Spring Break for QAnon” or “Camp Covid” is encamped outside Australian Parliament House in Canberra.

Across these countries, protestors appear as a wild herd of “sovcit”, anti-vaxxer, QAnonner and more nefarious fellow travellers, alongside some more ordinary people. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether social media content about these events has been gathered by extremism monitors, or comedians.

Participants unwilling to be injected with a free vaccine safely used on hundreds of millions of people further advise each other that drinking one’s own wee is curative and somehow “camel urine deals with cancer”. Monitors observe attendees costumed as paramedics, pilots and deceased Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Someone really wears a tinfoil hat.

In New Zealand, the monitors themselves hijacked the Telegram and Zello channels the protestors use to organise. They’ve sown chaos and crammed the convoy’s Spotify playlist with songs like Redneck Piece of White Trash, Why Don’t You Get a Job and Dumb Fuck.

In Canada, protestors have used their vehicles to blockade entire Ottawa neighbourhoods, erecting jumping castles and even saunas. Participants stiffly stage ceremonies to anoint one another faux powers of police. Amid the carnival of crank it all reads like character-based black comedy … but this investment in a parallel reality is not satire. It’s not performance. It’s complete. It’s terrifying.

Wherever this “freedom movement” manifests, a similar cast of characters emerges. Light-in-the-eyes zealots holler conspiracy theories. Grifters solicit to camera like a roll of tabloid clickbait. Burly, closed-mouth types appear to be handling secretive logistics. Around them are impassioned, often inarticulate – and poorly-costumed – clowns.

Don’t let the ridiculousness distract from the threat.

I spent a year undercover in the broadly QAnon movement researching a book; I understand well why democratic citizens may struggle to take seriously the crossed streams of alien lizard aficionados, drink-your-own-wee health enthusiasts and those people who believe democrats eat children’s faces. Even while besieged in his capital and struggling to contain the protests, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau hasn’t yet called in the army; he’s made the point that in more than 80%-vaxxed Canada, those protesting vaccine mandates are indeed a “fringe” – the truckers aren’t backed by their unions, more than 90% of their industry is vaccinated. The tomfoolery in Canberra could not be considered a representative movement of Australians either. Like New Zealanders and the Europeans, we’re a country with a high vaccination rate too.

 

Cain't B'lee Ayesha Rascoe Kwestined Jen Psaki Like This...,

realclearpolitics  |  According to President Biden this morning, the latest leader of the "Islamic State" group detonated a bomb killing his wife and family during a U.S. special forces raid near the Syria-Turkey border last night that resulted in his death. At least 13 other people died according to local sources and members of an apparently unrelated Syrian family on the lower floor of the building were injured.

NPR White House correspondent Ayesha Rascoe asked during an Air Force One press gaggle on Thursday if we were going to see any evidence of that claim. 

OTHER QUESTION: With regard to the civilian casualties in Syria, is the administration saying that they were caused entirely by the bomb detonating, or by crossfire from the one lieutenant engaging with U.S. forces? Give us some clarity on that.

JEN PSAKI: Obviously these events just happened overnight. So I'm going to let the Department of Defense do a final assessment, which I'm certain they will provide additional detail on once it is finalized.

AYESHA RASCOE, NPR: Jen, will there be any, like evidence or, like, release to support the idea -- I know the U.S. has put out a statement that they [ISIS leader or his associates] detonated the bomb themselves. But will the U.S. provide any evidence? Because there may be people who are skeptical of the events that took place and what happened to the civilians.

JEN PSAKI: Skeptical of the U.S. military's assessment when they went and took out an ISIS terror-- a leader of ISIS, that they are not providing accurate information? And ISIS is providing accurate information?

AYESHA ROSCOE: Well, not ISIS, but I mean. The U.S. has not always been straightforward about what happens with civilians, I mean that is a fact.

JEN PSAKI: Well, as you know, there is an extensive process that the Department of Defense undergoes. The president made clear from the beginning at every point in this process that doing everything possible to avoid civilian casualties was his priority and his preference.

I just reconfirmed and I think our national security colleague who did a briefing this morning also reiterated that the individual who was the target detonated himself, killing his entire family. Given, these events just happened less than 24 hours ago, we're going to give them time to make a final assessment and they will provide every detail they can. 

Reality Is Holographic Associative Memory - Perception Is A Simulation

medium |  In the late 1940’s and early 50’s, Karl Pribram, a neuroscientist, performed defining neuro-behavioural experiments that established the underlying structure of the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system.

In essence, the neural architectures of thought and feeling.

Additionally, he discovered that the sensory-specific association cortex of the parietal and temporal lobes, where associations are made between the body’s senses in real-time, “operate to organize the choices we make among sensory stimuli, and not the sensing of the stimuli themselves.”

But what Pribram is best known for is holonomic brain theory, which describes human cognition by modeling the brain as a holographic storage network, with consciousness being shaped by the quantum effects occurring within and between brain cells.

In 1975, Pribram was inspired by the work of Bohm who had noted that the universe would look like a hologram to us if we did not have the use of lenses.

Building on this insight, Pribram concluded that our view of the world would be a hologram — a diffuse scattering of the interference patterns of electromagnetic waves — if not for the lenses of our eyes.

And that the neural processes of perception are formed by several stages of transformation, each stage having its roots in quantum mechanics.

In a famous collaboration with Bohm that followed, Pribram laid the foundation for a quantum theory of consciousness, connecting Bohm’s theory of holomovment with the mathematics of holography and neuroscience.

Pribram hypothesized that memory takes the form of interference patterns similar to those of holograms produced by a laser.

Pribram suggested that cognition involved electrical oscillations in the delicate fibers of the dendritic web, which are different from the more commonly known action potentials of axons and synapses.

In other words, the space between the neurons — and not the neurons themselves —was responsible for consciousness.

Pribram hypothesized that the fluctuations of brainwaves riding on gray matter, glial cells, and the synapto-dendritic web “create interference patterns in which memory is encoded naturally, and the waves may be analyzed by a Fourier transform.”

And remember, with a hologram, any part of it with sufficient size contains the whole of the stored information.

In this theory, a piece of a long-term memory is similarly distributed over a dendritic arbor so that each part of the dendritic network contains all the information stored over the entire network.

This structuring of the brain provides the capability of responding to stimuli without specialized and constrained paths of nerve conduction.

Instead, the brain operates as a general purpose computer with built-in redundancy, each part receiving information about the whole and performing a specific computation on it — at all scales.

Like many structures found in nature, the brain’s architecture is fractal. And perhaps it follows that the algorithm is as well. Consciousness itself.

In this model, consciousness is expressed by a Fourier transform between the frequency and space-time domains of reality. It’s what reveals the available degrees of freedom with respect to the past and the future —in essence, it’s a function to decide what to pay attention to.

But ultimately, consciousness is really the platform for making a choice. A multi-dimensional awareness of and response to the environment. The basis for an informed decision, at any scale.

Perception, then, is the re-construction of the hologram, a momentary collapse of the wave-function into an explicate order. The filtering and focusing of attention predicated on the past and future.

Perception is the simulation.

The electrical signals of the nervous system are the read-write interface to the hologram. And consciousness is what illuminates the choices available now, in the present — focusing our attention — distorted and myopic as it may be.

Holographic Associative Memory

In the typical operation of holograms, we shine a reference beam on a holographic film to re-construct the visual image of the object beam, thereby observing a virtual image in the reflected light.

And in theory, we can also reverse the procedure, using the object beam to illuminate the hologram, re-creating the original reference beam.

The light itself.

In this dual mode of operation, a holographic associative memory —HAM, for short— is a form of data storage where information from the object beam and reference beam can be saved and retrieved by associating them with one another in interference patterns. Each part of the pattern contains them both, and each can be used to retrieve the other.

Experimental setup for a 3D holographic storage network

In other words, a hologram with a read-write interface.

HAM is part of the family of analog, correlation-based, associative, stimulus-response memories, where information is mapped onto the phase orientation of complex numbers operating on a Riemann surface.

It can be considered as a complex valued artificial neural network.

The HAM also exhibits some remarkable characteristics, as it has been shown to be effective for associative memory tasks, generalization, and pattern recognition with changeable attention.

And the ability of dynamic search localization is central to natural memory. For example, in visual perception, humans always tend to focus on some specific objects in a pattern. Humans can effortlessly change the focus from object to object without requiring relearning.

HAM provides a computational model which can mimic this ability by creating a representation for focus

Principles of Operation

Link

1. Stimulus-response associations are both learned and expressed in one non-iterative transformation. No backpropagation of error terms or iterative processing required.
2. The method forms a non-connectionist model in which the ability to superimpose a very large number of stimulus-response patterns or complex associations may be superimposed or “enfolded” on a single neural element.
3. The generated phase angle communicates response information, and magnitude communicates a measure of recognition (or confidence in the result).
4. The process permits a capability with neural system to establish dominance profile of stored information, thus exhibiting a memory profile of any range — from short-term to long-term memory.
5. The process follows the non-disturbance rule, that is prior stimulus-response associations are minimally influenced by subsequent learning.
6. The information is presented in abstract form by a complex vector which may be expressed directly by a waveform possessing frequency and magnitude. This waveform is analogous to electro-chemical impulses believed to transmit information between biological neuron cells.

To the point, the universe is a HAM and the brain is it’s tuner.

The Gateway Experience

Use of these audio files requires good quality headphones or ear buds. The files are in .flac format for highest possible audio fidelity. Two .flac files per CD and 3 CD's per zip file except for the Experience Discovery zip file which also contains a detailed usage manual as well as most of the books referenced in the DoD Analysis and Assessment document. These .flac files should play with sufficiently high fidelity using any contemporary smartphone or PC audio player. They're zipped and average 900 MB per zip file except for Experience Discovery which is 2GB. They were created using 7zip.

Gateway Overview Manual

Gateway Experience Discovery (Audio Files + Manuals And Supporting Books)

Gateway Experience Threshold

Gateway Experience Freedom

Gateway Experience Adventure

Gateway Experience Exploring

Gateway Experience Voyager

Gateway Experience Odyssey

 

 

Archeoacoustics: Megaliths, Music And The Mind

academia |  There is no question that something happened 11,000-12,000 years ago in Anatolia. By
putting Archaeoacoustics into the mix, we may have an answer.

Researching a subject about prehistory that cannot be photographed or handled requires input from a wide range of disciplines combined with informed observation. Those of us working with Archaeoacoustics: the archaeology of sound in ancient ritual and ceremonial spaces, have always thought that the next step was a collection of on-site biofeedback. Happily, Neuroscience is now filling in the gap of knowledge about the psycho-physiological impact of certain resonant sound which is present in the world’s oldest monuments. Add that to new discoveries in Anatolia, and a solution for the “Sapient Paradox” practically leaps right out of the stone.
 

A paper published in 2008[iii] is recognized as the first official source indicating an effect on brain activity of sound in a specific frequency that has been measured in various megalithic enclosures. While a range of 90 to 130 Hz is the target area, this report cites abrupt changes at 110 Hz in a small group of volunteers. Thanks to the internet, this number has taken on a cultish following and prompted wild speculation about all the ways and places that 110 might be significant. This is the sort of stuff television shows are made of, but it is not grounded in science.

What has been scientifically detected is a “megalithic range” for highest resonance between 90 and 130 Hz in stone chambers, which has also been confirmed in Malta’s incomparable Hal Saflieni Hypogeum. An estimated 2000 tons of stone were removed to create this place, by the same people who built the megalithic temples above ground on the Mediterranean islands of Malta and Gozo. By virtue of being undetected underground until 1902, Hal Saflieni is still acoustically intact. We hear sound in there today exactly as it was heard by the folks who were using it 5000 years ago, and it can be hair-raising.[iv] Since its discovery, a sort of mythology has been built up about the way sound behaves in Hal Saflieni. Echoes that last as long as 13 seconds and sound waves that circle around the walls create a sonic
atmosphere that is difficult to describe.

One chamber called the Oracle Room, functions as a giant resonator. There is a high carved out shelf curving around the dead end of the chamber that seems to serve no purpose but to channel sound waves. The remains of red ochre on the ceiling in this chamber are an intricate pattern of disks and curls that begin above a side compartment and spin out like some kind of prehistoric musical notation, stopping at the entrance portal that frames more finely carved halls beyond.

The side compartment was cut into the wall of the eggplant-shaped Oracle Room at face height. It has been said that a male voice speaking into this niche is heard throughout the three stories of the underground complex in a way that is far different from a female voice. There is a scientific explanation for it. Like Newgrange passage tomb and every other tested megalithic site, the range for standing wave resonance in Hal Saflieni is within the range of a bass baritone. Basically, it means that in Hal Saflieni, the echo of a deep voice is occurring at maximum strength in those pitches.

Actually the acoustics of Hal Saflieni are even more complex, with a second peak and loads of low frequency vibration that is beyond human hearing, although one might be able to feel it.[v][vi] Try to imagine standing in that space in the presence of sound in the range of that standing wave. It’s like being inside a giant bell. The air is vibrating; the walls and floors and ceilings are vibrating; the sound is swimming all around and can be felt in the tissues of the body. There can be a sort of buzzing in the ears that one sometimes gets when singing along with the radio in the car, when a pitch has been exactly matched. It’s mesmerizing. When it stops, this writer always wants to say “do it again.”

5,000 years ago, visitors to this site shared it with the bones of their ancestors which were kept here, treated with red ochre and placed into communal beds, as if they were planted in some sort of rebirth ritual. That would fit the ideology of the time. Workers in the space, even talking to each other, would have been exposed to the acoustic effects. Quite a bit of the architecture in Hal-Saflieni suggests features of our performance spaces today. Considered with artifacts recovered from this site, it is clear that something more than interment of the dead was going on in here.

It is difficult to imagine that human beings would let the potential a sound phenomenon such as that in Hal Saflieni go unexploited. If it’s impressive today, for people who have answers for everything. the thought of what they might have created in here thousands of years ago is extraordinary. Were they listening for the voices of the dead, or perhaps spirits of the earth? There would have been an aroma, as well as an echo, creating a very sensory and emotional experience. We now know that while the goosebumps were rising, dopamine was being released in their brains.

Lil'Mike Bloomberg Buying Black And Brown Former Felon Votes For Biden In Florida

NYPost |  Rep. Matt Gaetz warned billionaire Michael Bloomberg that he may be facing a criminal probe for paying the outstanding fines and fees of 32,000 convicted felons in Florida so they could regain their right to vote ahead of the November election.

Speaking to Fox News’ “Hannity” Tuesday evening, Gaetz (R-Fla.) said he had spoken to Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody prior to his appearance on the show about Bloomberg’s voter effort in the Sunshine State.

On Tuesday, it was reported that the former NYC mayor had raised over $16 million for, and donated $5 million to, the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition.

Bloomberg’s push would benefit ex-cons as part of a 2018 state constitutional amendment allowing felons who have served their time to regain their right to vote.

Before they can regain that right, however, they need to pay any fines, fees or restitution.

In a statement to Axios, a representative for Bloomberg said, “The right to vote is fundamental to our democracy and no American should be denied that right. Working together with the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, we are determined to end disenfranchisement and the discrimination that has always driven it.”

To Gaetz and Moody, however, there are legal concerns regarding Bloomberg’s political spending in this specific case.

“I believe there may be a criminal investigation already underway of the Bloomberg-connected activities in Florida,” Gaetz told Sean Hannity.

“[Under Florida law] it’s a third-degree felony for someone to either directly or indirectly provide something of value to impact whether or not someone votes. So the question is whether or not paying off someone’s fines and legal obligations counts as something of value, and it clearly does. If Michael Bloomberg was offering to pay off people’s credit card debts, you would obviously see the value in that.

“When you improve someone’s net worth by eliminating their financial liabilities, that’s something of value. Normally, it would be very difficult to prove that that was directly linked to impacting whether or not someone was going to vote. But they literally wrote their own admission,” the Florida Republican argued, referencing a Washington Post report.

As Goes Blackness: There Is No Fixing The Past To Escape The Present

Counterpunch  |  It is September 2020. Americans are focused on an election between an Orange Fascist criminal and an old-school right-wing Democrat war criminal. Where Donald Trump projects chaos and disorder, Biden projects stability, order, and a return to normalcy. If Trump is the virus, then surely Biden is the cure.

It is September 2020. Libya prepares to enter its eighth year of civil war. Slave markets like the one in Bani Walid are as common as youth literacy centers were in Gaddafi’s Libya. Armed gangs and militias wield power even in areas nominally under government control. A warlord regroups in the East as he looks to Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates for support.

It is September 2020 and the US-NATO war on Libya has faded to a distant memory as other issues like Black Lives Matter and police murder of Black youth have captured the public imagination and discourse.

But these issues are, in fact, united by the bond of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. The Libya once known as the “Jewel of Africa,” a country that provided refuge for many sub-Saharan African migrant workers while maintaining independence from the US and the former colonial powers of Europe, is no more. In its place is a failed state that now reflects the kind of vicious anti-Black racism forcefully suppressed by the Gaddafi government.

Libya as the global exemplar of the exploitation and disposability of the black body.

Squint a little and you can see President Joe Biden getting the old band back together. Hillary Clinton welcomed into the Oval Office as an influential voice, someone to give words to the demented thoughts of the living corpse serving as Commander-in-Chief. Derek Chollet and Ben Rhodes laughing together as they buy another round at their favorite DC hangout, toasting to the re-establishment of order in Washington. Barack Obama as the éminence grise behind the political resurgence of the liberal-conservative dominant structure.

But in Libya, there is no going back, no fixing the past to escape the present.

Perhaps the same might be true of the United States.

The Fraternal Order Of Police: America's Killer-Ape Alternate Reality/Legality

vanityfair |  This is a brotherhood. It abides no law but its own. It scorns the personhood of all but its own brethren. It derides all creatures outside its own clan. And for that reason, the brotherhood is not only a hurdle impeding reform. It is the architecture of an alternate reality, one that seethes and bubbles just beneath the surface of our own. And it’s a reality in which none of us are human.

In May, the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police elected John Catanzara as president. According to a 2017 report by the United States Department of Justice, the police department in Chicago “engages in a pattern or practice of using force that is in violation of the Constitution,” where “officers’ force practices unnecessarily endanger themselves,” “a pattern...[which] results from systemic deficiencies in training and accountability.”

And yet, even given the city’s abysmal standard of police conduct, in his 25 years on the force Catanzara has managed to distinguish himself from his peers by being especially awful. According to the Citizens Police Data Project (a database of police misconduct records made public after a lawsuit and Freedom of Information Act requests), Catanzara has been the subject of 50 complaints, putting him in the 96th percentile for allegations. At the time he was elected to lead the FOP, Catanzara was assigned to administrative duty; according to the Chicago Sun-Times, he is the first president to take on the role while stripped of his official police powers.

In June, when asked about the killing of George Floyd, Catanzara referred to Officer Derek Chauvin’s actions as an “improper police tactic.” “Explain to me how race had anything to do with it,” he went on. “There’s no proof or evidence that race had anything to do with it.” Catanzara has said that any lodge members showing support for protesters could face disciplinary action from the FOP, and perhaps expulsion.

Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police is a local chapter of the larger national organization of the same name. The national FOP boasts more than 2,100 such lodges, representing more than 330,000 members, which makes it, according to its website, “the world’s largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers.”

When Chicago police officer Robert Rialmo killed Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones—a young man having a mental health episode and his neighbor, who answered the door—Rialmo was fired. The vice president of the Chicago FOP called the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, which recommended the firing, “a political witch hunt on police officers. The investigations are unfair and politically motivated.”

When Jason Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder for the death of Laquan McDonald, the FOP defended him. When four of the officers accused of aiding in the cover-up were fired, a different FOP vice president used the decision as an occasion to impress upon police board members that they should not “fall to the pressure of the media or the radical police haters.”

These men were sworn officers of the law. But they did not look at Van Dyke as a convicted murderer who had broken that law. They did not look at him and see police—a social category, a profession, a uniform one puts on and can take off. They looked at him and saw their brother. They saw a different type of being, bound by an oath that transcends civilian understanding. And by virtue of Van Dyke’s being, in their eyes, he could do no wrong.

The same logic underlies the phrase “blue lives matter,” which semantically equates the color of a uniform with the nonnegotiable, unshakable fact of Blackness. It’s a phenomenon not unlike the transfiguration that took place behind the eyes of Darren Wilson. “It looks like a demon,” he told the grand jury in describing Michael Brown. Michael Brown: not man, but beast. Jason Van Dyke: not man, but kin. A brother in the pantheon. A demigod among demigods, his actions deemed necessary and virtuous because they were wrought by his hand, and his hand was necessary and virtuous.

Of course, as Catanzara’s comment about support for protesters demonstrates, it’s not that it’s impossible to be cast out from the brotherhood. The unforgivable sin within the brotherhood is to cast aspersions against the only people whom the brotherhood recognizes as human—its own kind. Shoot a boy in the back, and you can still be in the brotherhood. Side with the people who are asking questions, or raise a fist with them, or kneel before them, or talk to them, and you are out.

Maya Angelou had a thing she used to say—When people show you who they are, believe them the first time. Perhaps it’s time for America to heed Angelou’s advice. The Fraternal Order of Police has told us candidly what they are—that they are not a union, but a fraternity. A brotherhood. We ought to believe them.

Deplorables Equal Expendables In The 9% American Political Economic Calculus

NYTimes |  Here is the basic argument of mainstream political opinion, especially among Democrats, that dominated in the decades leading up to Mr. Trump and the populist revolt he came to represent: A global economy that outsources jobs to low-wage countries has somehow come upon us and is here to stay. The central political question is not to how to change it but how to adapt to it, to alleviate its devastating effect on the wages and job prospects of workers outside the charmed circle of elite professionals.

The answer: Improve the educational credentials of workers so that they, too, can “compete and win in the global economy.” Thus, the way to contend with inequality is to encourage upward mobility through higher education.

The rhetoric of rising through educational achievement has echoed across the political spectrum — from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton. But the politicians espousing it have missed the insult implicit in the meritocratic society they are offering: If you did not go to college, and if you are not flourishing in the new economy, your failure must be your own fault.

It is important to remember that most Americans — nearly two-thirds — do not have a four-year college degree. By telling workers that their inadequate education is the reason for their troubles, meritocrats moralize success and failure and unwittingly promote credentialism — an insidious prejudice against those who do not have college degrees.

The credentialist prejudice is a symptom of meritocratic hubris. By 2016, many working people chafed at the sense that well-schooled elites looked down on them with condescension. This complaint was not without warrant. Survey research bears out what many working-class voters intuit: At a time when racism and sexism are out of favor (discredited though not eliminated), credentialism is the last acceptable prejudice.

In the United States and Europe, disdain for the less educated is more pronounced, or at least more readily acknowledged, than prejudice against other disfavored groups. In a series of surveys conducted in the United States, Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium, a team of social psychologists led by Toon Kuppens found that college-educated respondents had more bias against less-educated people than they did against other disfavored groups. The researchers surveyed attitudes toward a range of people who are typically victims of discrimination. In Europe, this list included Muslims and people who are poor, obese, blind and less educated; in the United States, the list also included African-Americans and the working class. Of all these groups, the poorly educated were disliked most of all.

Beyond revealing the disparaging views that college-educated elites have of less-educated people, the study also found that elites are unembarrassed by this prejudice. They may denounce racism and sexism, but they are unapologetic about their negative attitudes toward the less educated.

By the 2000s, citizens without a college degree were not only looked down upon; in the United States and Western Europe, they were also virtually absent from elective office. In the U.S. Congress, 95 percent of House members and 100 percent of senators are college graduates. The credentialed few govern the uncredentialed many.

It has not always been this way. Although the well-educated have always been disproportionately represented in Congress, as recently as the early 1960s, about one-fourth of our elected representatives lacked a college degree. Over the past half-decade, Congress has become more diverse with regard to race, ethnicity and gender, but less diverse with regard to educational credentials and class.

One consequence of the diploma divide is that very few members of the working class ever make it to elective office. In the United States, about half of the labor force is employed in working-class jobs, defined as manual labor, service industry and clerical jobs. But fewer than 2 percent of members of Congress worked in such jobs before their election.