More than half a dozen people from across the US government
have left their jobs in public protest, saying they could no longer work
for the administration, and even more have quietly departed. Many of
the officials who resigned publicly said they would instead seek to have
an impact outside the government.
President Joe Biden has faced pressure both abroad and at home over his support for Israel eight months into the war in Gaza with
Hamas – a conflict that has cost tens of thousands of civilian lives,
displaced millions and brought extreme hunger throughout the enclave.
Although the rhetoric from the administration has become harsher – with
warnings that Israel must do more to protect civilians and allow more
aid in – the policies have remained largely unchanged.
The former officials who resigned publicly – Josh Paul,
Harrison Mann, Tariq Habash, Annelle Sheline, Hala Rharrit, Lily
Greenberg Call, Alex Smith, and Stacy Gilbert – said that they felt
their perspectives, expertise and concerns were not being heeded, and
that the administration was willingly ignoring the humanitarian toll
caused by Israel’s military campaign. They spoke of the damage they felt
US policy on the war is having on the country’s credibility and a sense
that the administration did not fully grasp that impact.
All the officials who have resigned publicly and spoke with
CNN said they have many colleagues who are still within the government
but agree with their decision to leave.
Providing support and advice to those colleagues – whether
they choose to leave or continue to dissent from within – is one of the
key reasons that they have come together collectively. Another key
reason, they said, is to increase the pressure on the administration to
change course.
“We’re thinking about how we can use our shared concern and
to continue to press together for change,” said Paul, a State Department
official who publicly resigned in protest in October, becoming the
first US official to do so.
“When you have numerous career professionals and
presidential appointees … who have resigned over this policy, it’s an
indicator that something is going wrong,” Mann told CNN.
reuters | The State Department submitted the 46-page unclassified report earlier this month to Congress as required under a new National Security Memorandum that Biden issued in early February. Among other conclusions, the report said that in the period after Oct. 7 Israel “did not fully cooperate” with U.S. and other efforts to get humanitarian aid into Gaza.
But it said this did not amount to a breach of a U.S law that blocks the provision of arms to countries that restrict U.S. humanitarian aid.
Gilbert, who worked for the State Department for over 20 years, said she notified her office the day the State Department report was released that she would resign. Her last day was Tuesday.
U.S. State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters on Thursday that he would not comment on personnel issues but that the department welcomes diverse points of view.
He said the administration stood by the report and continued to press the government of Israel to avoid harming civilians and urgently expand humanitarian access to Gaza.
"We are not an administration that twists the facts, and allegations that we have are unfounded," Patel said.
The Israeli embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Gilbert's accusations.
Gilbert’s bureau was one of the four that contributed to a classified initial options memo, reported exclusively
by Reuters in late April, that informed U.S. Secretary of State Antony
Blinken Israel might be violating international humanitarian law.
Gilbert
said the State Department removed subject matter experts from working
on the report to Congress when the document was a rough draft about 10
days before it was due. She said the report was then edited by more
senior officials.
In
contrast to the published version, the last draft she saw stated that
Israel was blocking humanitarian assistance, Gilbert said.
Officials who resigned prior to Gilbert include Arabic language spokesperson Hala Rharrit and Annelle Sheline of the human rights bureau.
More
than 36,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's air and land war
in Gaza. Israel launched its offensive after Hamas fighters crossed from
Gaza into southern Israel on Oct. 7 last year, killed 1,200 people and
abducted more than 250, according to Israeli tallies.
TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Candace is attacked – even when she’s right (4:27) Ben Shapiro’s comments (12:50) The emotional response to news out of Israel (23:05) Nikki Haley vs. free speech (30:34) 2024 predictions pic.twitter.com/VOThqpQQ48
dailycaller | The Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing announced Friday that the outlet has severed ties with Candace Owens. Owens hosted a show on The Daily Wire after becoming a prominent name in the conservative movement. The outlet abruptly made the announcement of her departure for reasons currently unknown. “Daily Wire and Candace Owens have ended their relationship,” Boreing announced without an explanation.
In an essay published Monday in City Journal,
Kulldorff wrote that his anti-mandate position got him fired from the
Mass General Brigham hospital system, where he also worked, and
consequently from his Harvard faculty position.
Kulldorff detailed how his commitment to scientific inquiry put him at odds with a system that he alleged had “lost its way.”
“I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard,” Kulldorff wrote.
“The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered,
truth can get you fired.”
He noted that it was clear from early 2020 that lockdowns would be futile for controlling the pandemic.
“It was also clear that lockdowns would inflict enormous collateral
damage, not only on education but also on public health, including
treatment for cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental health,”
Kulldorff wrote.
“We will be dealing with the harm done for decades. Our children, the
elderly, the middle class, the working class, and the poor around the
world — all will suffer.”
That viewpoint got little debate in the mainstream media until the epidemiologist and his colleagues published the Great Barrington Declaration, signed by nearly 1 million public health professionals from across the world.
The document made clear that no scientific consensus existed for
lockdown measures in a pandemic. It argued instead for a “focused
protection” approach for pandemic management that would protect
high-risk populations, such as elderly or medically compromised people,
and otherwise allow the COVID-19 virus to circulate among the healthy population.
Although the declaration merely summed up what previously had been conventional wisdom in public health, it was subject to tremendous backlash.
Emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request revealed
that Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of
Health called for a “devastating published takedown” of the declaration and of the authors, who were subsequently slandered in mainstream and social media.
kommersant |The
Ministry of Defense reported that at 5:00 Moscow time, the transfer of
Russian troops to the left bank of the Dnieper was completed. As the department clarifies, not a single piece of military equipment and weapons was left on the right bank.
The
official representative of the Ministry of Defense, Igor Konashenkov,
said that the Armed Forces of Ukraine tried at night to disrupt the
transportation of civilians and the transfer of troops to the left bank
of the Dnieper. River crossings were hit five times by HIMARS rockets.
“All
Russian military personnel crossed over, no losses of personnel,
weapons, equipment and materiel of the Russian group were allowed,” Mr.
Konashenkov said (quoted by TASS).
According
to him, the Russian military stopped the enemy at a distance of 30-40
km from the area of crossings across the Dnieper. The
representative of the Ministry of Defense added that the advance of the
Armed Forces of Ukraine over the past two days in certain areas in the
Kherson region amounted to no more than 10 km.
On November 9, the Ministry of Defense decided to withdraw troops from Kherson to the left bank of the Dnieper. On
the same day, the authorities of the Kherson region reported the
beginning of heavy fighting in the Snigirevka area near Kherson. The Kremlin stated that the Kherson region remains a subject of the Russian Federation, and there can be no changes in this status.
About what happens on the 261st day after the entry of Russian troops into Ukraine - in the online broadcast "Kommersant".
What used to be called BDA . . . Bomb Damage
Assessment, is now satellite reconnaissance imagery review. Based on
what is seen, targets are identified as finished or in need of being hit again. This is why last weeks cruise missile attacks
have been followed up with subsequent attacks at regular intervals. It takes only minutes to reload launchers. But it
takes some hours to collect satellite imagery reflecting recent damage - and have those images reviewed for selecting the next targets.
Low Earth Orbit spacecraft have some memory aboard, but not
very much. These are polar orbiting vehicles and the areas over the
poles have higher radiation exposure, with memory being notoriously
vulnerable to radiation. So, frequent and even perpetual downlinks for Russian assets, is the order of the day.
Russian spacecraft traversing Ukraine sky north to south or south to north will
have Russian receive stations line-of-sight for downlinks of imagery.
Ground based jammers aren't heard by dishes
pointed upwards from within Russia.
It is clear that in-orbit assets have determined Russian tactics and strategy. Why Sergei Surovikin, commander of Russian Aerospace forces is now supreme commander of the mobilization to bring about Ukrainian capitulation.
Normal drones have a controller, since they are
either surveillance drones or attack drones hunting particular targets.The so-called kamikaze drones do not have a controller and are subsequently immune to jamming. They are instead like low and slow miniature ballistic missiles. Flight path fixed at time of launch so as
to hit a particular static target.
They evade detection till they can be
seen near the target because they are small, slow, and very low to the ground. They emit very little
infrared so they can’t be detected that way. They don’t talk to the
mother ship so they can’t be seen sending signals nor can they be
signal jammed. They thus also take way less in the
way of chips (simpler and fewer) and so can be made cheaply and quickly
in large quantities.
Kamikaze drones are far cheaper than but just as effective as
high-cost precision missiles Best bit is that they follow one of the
principles of war – economy of force – and they certainly get a
lot of bang for the buck.
The kamikaze drone will bring old fashioned
antiaircraft guns back. The ones Russia is using don’t produce enough
heat for a MANPAD to lock to, small arms aren’t going to bring them down
in most cases, and it sounds like they don’t show
up very well on modern missile anti-air systems which is combined with
the ridiculous cost of bringing down a $20K drone with a $100K+ missile.
The Ukrainian tactic of putting serious air defense
systems inside populated areas is almost as kamikaze as the drones
themselves. Having them on the White House or similar makes some sense,
having them heavily used inside a city does not.
At the moment, the Ukrainian police, soldiers,
militia, etc. are trying to shoot those drones down with rifles, pistols
or anything else that shoots a bullet and the streets of Kiev are
sounding like a firing range. Best to be inside or
you might get hit by a falling bullet-the more real danger is a populated area getting
hit by an exploding shot down drone rather than the drone hitting its
energy infrastructure target. Except it’s not just bullets flying willy
nilly.
Ukraine has S300 and Buk missiles curving
down trying to hit the drones and plowing into apartment blocks. The
S300 packs 150kg of explosive to the Geran-2’s 50kg.
And on top of that, keen troopers with
western-supplied ATGMs are trying to hit drones in the air. Often with
unguided ATGMs. Even with guided ones they’ve got a snowballs
chance. All of those come down too.
Russia has begun flooding* Donbass with
old, reliable S-60 anti-aircraft guns. They shoot 57mm shells with
proximity fuses, and are mgreat against small drones – as per
experience in Syria. They can also penetrate 90mm
of steel, so work well also against an enemy largely down to APCs and
civilian vehicles for mobility.
And being from the old Soviet stock, they can be
easily integrated with the existing air-defense systems, like
battalion/divisional radars for targeting information or even automatic
targeting.
Designed in the late 40s, considered obsolete in
the mid-60s, reinstated after Vietnamese experience in early 70s,
finally removed from service to storage in 1990s only find a niche for
use again today.
Anyway, once you do see the drone, the latest
wisdom is that 57 mm ammo has longer reach (6000 m vs 4000 m), doesn’t
rely on hitting the target directly (proximity fuse) and packs way more
punch (3-4 times heavier shell) than a regular
30 mm (like Pantsir, Tunguska or BMP-2/3).
Which all apparently translate to a higher kill
probability against drone type targets. Come to think of it, S-60 was
designed 80 years ago to protect the troops against relatively low and
slow flying, propeller driven aerial vehicles.
Gen Surovikin: I oversaw the crippling of the Ukrainian electrical distribution and overran three cities.
Mrs Surovikin: that's nice honey.
Why don't you grab a cold one out of the fridge-dinner will be ready in 20 minutes.
The appointment of Commander of Aerospace Forces General Sergei Surovikin (aka
“Severoviy”) as commander of the united group of troops has already
borne serious fruit. Good management requires neither a
‘jack-of-all-trades’ (a military man, who emerged from civilian ranks)
nor a ‘stormtrooper’ in the vanguard of an offensive
– everyone has his tasks, and there is no need to put them in the wrong
places. What is needed is a combat general who knows the specifics
of combined arms combat as well as working with the various branches of troops to establish quality
interaction.
As a result, on the first day of the new commander-in-chief:
Today's targeting depended upon precise latitude/longitude
measurements, from orbit. Much cheaper to take measurements from imagery
at 500 miles altitude than to send covert people with Garmin handhelds,
waiting to be discovered, searched, and arrested.
Spacecraft imaging decides wars.
Over 200 cruise missile hits in Ukraine, which is quite a record. (By the way, the
sorties are the same Kalibres that by all laws of military propaganda Russia should have run out of.)
️Massive power cuts in almost all of Ukraine
️Serious water supply outages
️Damage to critical wartime infrastructure – primarily repair factories where Ukrainian equipment was being repaired
️Fuel and supply disruptions in virtually every region
Transport collapse at Ukrzaliznytsia: trains are stopped, and some
routes are switched to diesel – which naturally leads to the aggravation
of the fuel situation
️Ukrainian Security Service building struck, head of Cyber Police of
Ukraine department Yuriy Zaskoka, who was responsible for coordinated
telegram bot attacks, eliminated
It’s coming down hard. It’s going to continue to rain.
By evening,
Ukraine is once again covered in air-raid alarms.
The city goes to sleep – the Kalibres wake up.
Taken down the Starlink system (so Ukrainians can no
longer communicate at the front lines properly), The vast majority of trains that are
electric won't run, and the remainder will help use up the
diesel supplies and therefore the troop and equipment transportation
abilities, and display to the Ukrainian population how their leaders are
completely useless in the face of serious attack.
This needs to be not just a "retaliatory warning" but a
continuing process for the next days and weeks, grinding down the
Ukrainians as the cold weather and rain set in. Together with the
continued military grinding in Bakhmut etc. to make Ukrainian soldiers lives really awful (plus propaganda wins as Bakhmut etc. taken).
Then major attacks in late November as the ground freezes, the leaves
are gone and the skies clear. The job needs to get finished (the south
and east taken, including Odessa) before the
Spring arrives and while Europe sits freezing with power blackouts.
Then Europe can look forward to the next year of
horrendous energy prices, a following winter with much lower levels of
gas reserves, a deep recession and an extremely unruly population, plus a
hopeless position in Ukraine. Ukraine without
the Black Sea coast and Odessa is a greatly degraded position for the
US and NATO, plus there will be many, many more millions of Ukrainians
flowing across the Polish border into Europe.
P.S. The taking out of the electricity supply to
the manufacturer of the parts required for the French nuclear power
station maintenance was pure genius. So now many of those power stations
won't be running at full tilt to keep French electricity
prices down during the winter.
And the most important thing in this whole story is
that the Ukrainian authorities have warned of the consequences, of not
playing with fire and poking a stick in the den. Back in the summer,
Dmitriy Medvedev promised that in the event
of a strike on Crimea, the Ukrainians would face “Judgment Day”. Well,
10.10.2022 was that day for the Ukrainians.
france24 | An occupation of Canada's capital by
truckers opposed to vaccine mandates gained steam as it entered its
second week on Saturday, with more demonstrators piling onto the clogged
streets of Ottawa, while protests kicked off in several other cities.
In the capital, protesters huddled around campfires in
bone-chilling temperatures and erected bouncy castles for kids outside
Parliament, while waving Canadian flags and shouting anti-government
slogans.
The atmosphere appeared more festive than a week earlier,
when several protesters waved Confederate flags and Nazi symbols and
clashed with locals.
Police, who were out in force and put up
barriers overnight to limit vehicle access to the city center, said they
were bracing for up to 2,000 protesters -- as well as 1,000
counterprotesters -- to join hundreds of truckers already jamming Ottawa
streets.
But organizers of the so-called Freedom Convoy told AFP they expected their numbers to swell into the tens of thousands.
Similar
protests were happening in Toronto, Quebec City and Winnipeg. And in
southern Alberta province, truckers blocked a major border crossing to
the US state of Montana.
"This remains an increasingly volatile
and increasingly dangerous demonstration," Ottawa police chief Peter
Sloly told a news conference Friday.
With public anger rising --
thousands of residents have complained of harassment by protesters, and
an online petition demanding action has drawn 40,000 signatures -- Sloly
vowed to crack down on what he called an "unlawful" occupation of the
city.
brownstone | Dr. Julie Ponesse was a professor of ethics who has taught at Ontario’s
Huron University College for 20 years. She was placed on leave and
banned from accessing her campus due to the vaccine mandate. This is her
speech during the weekend when the Canadian truckers arrived in Ottawa
to protest pandemic restrictions and mandates that have been so harmful
to so many. Dr. Ponesse has now taken on a role with The Democracy Fund,
a registered Canadian charity aimed at advancing civil liberties, where
she serves as the pandemic ethics scholar.
But our true moral failure is that we did this to ourselves. We
allowed it. And some of us embraced it. We forgot for a while that
freedom needs to be lived every day and that, some days, we need to
fight for it. We forgot that, as Premier Brian Peckford said, “Even in
the best of times we are only a heartbeat away from tyranny.”
We took our freedom for granted and now we are in danger of losing it.
But we are waking up and we won’t so easily be seduced or coerced again.
To our governments, the cracks are showing. The dam is breaking. The
facts are not on your side. You can’t keep this up any longer. The
pandemic is over. Enough is enough. You are our servants; we are not
your subjects.
You have tried to mold us into hateful, terrified, demoralized people.
But you underestimated the challenge. We aren’t so easily broken. Our
strength comes from the bonds of family and friendship, of history, of
our home and native land.
You didn’t realize the strength of our doctors and nurses on the
front lines in Alberta, our RCMP and provincial police officers, the
ferocity of a mother fighting for her child, and my goodness the
truckers who rolled courage into Ottawa on 18 wheels. 18 wheels times
tens of thousands of trucks.
To the families of those who have lost children, your tears will be a
stain on our nation forever. But you can rest now. You have done
enough, lost enough. It’s time for us, your fellow citizens, to take up
this battle for you.
To the truckers who drove across Canada, to stand up for all of us,
to defend all our rights, I have never felt so much gratitude or pride
for perfect strangers. You are electrifying this moment in history, and
you are awakening a passion and a love for our country that we thought
we had lost. You are the leaders all of Canada has been waiting for.
Driving from all corners of the country — from Prince Rupert to
Charlottetown, on icy roads, past waving flags and under packed
overpasses, you are taking all the brokenness, all the hate, all the
division, and weaving us back together again. In this one simple,
united, powerful action, you are the leaders we so desperately need.
You are giving grandmothers who have been isolated and abandoned a reason to smile again.
You are giving those who have lost their livelihoods reason to hope;
the families who have lost loved ones a reason to believe in justice.
thephilosopher | A fuller and fairer assessment
of what is going on with deference and standpoint epistemology would go
beyond technical argument, and contend with the emotional appeals of
this strategy of deference. Those in powerful rooms may be “elites”
relative to the larger group they represent, but this guarantees nothing
about how they are treated in the rooms they are in. After all, a
person privileged in an absolute sense (a person belonging to, say, the
half of the world that has secure access to “basic needs”) may
nevertheless feel themselves to be consistently on the low end of the
power dynamics they actually experience. Deference epistemology responds
to real, morally weighty experiences of being put down, ignored,
sidelined, or silenced. It thus has an important non-epistemic appeal to
members of stigmatized or marginalized groups: it intervenes directly
in morally consequential practices of giving attention and respect.
The social dynamics we
experience have an outsize role in developing and refining our political
subjectivity, and our sense of ourselves. But this very strength of
standpoint epistemology – its recognition of the importance of
perspective – becomes its weakness when combined with deferential
practical norms. Emphasis on the ways we are marginalized often matches
the world as we have experienced it.
But, from a structural perspective, the rooms we never needed to enter
(and the explanations of why we can avoid these rooms) might have more
to teach us about the world and our place in it. If so, the deferential
approach to standpoint epistemology actually prevents “centring” or even
hearing from the most marginalized; it focuses us on the interaction of
the rooms we occupy, rather than calling us to account for the
interactions we don’t experience. This fact about who is in the room,
combined with the fact that speaking for others generates its own set of
important problems (particularly when they are not there to advocate
for themselves), eliminates pressures that might otherwise trouble the
centrality of our own suffering – and of the suffering of the
marginalized people that do happen to make it into rooms with us.
The dangers with this feature
of deference politics are grave, as are the risks for those outside of
the most powerful rooms. For those who are deferred to, it can
supercharge group-undermining norms. In Conflict is Not Abuse,
Sarah Schulman makes a provocative observation about the psychological
effects of both trauma and felt superiority: while these often come
about for different reasons and have very different moral statuses, they
result in similar behavioural patterns. Chief among these are
misrepresenting the stakes of conflict (often by overstating harm) or
representing others’ independence as a hostile threat (such as failures
to “centre” the right topics or people). These behaviours, whatever
their causal history, have corrosive effects on individuals who perform
them as well as the groups around them, especially when a community’s
norms magnify or multiply these behaviours rather than constraining or
metabolizing them.
For those who defer, the habit
can supercharge moral cowardice. The norms provide social cover for the
abdication of responsibility: it displaces onto individual heroes, a
hero class, or a mythicized past the work that is ours to do now in the
present. Their perspective may be clearer on this or that specific
matter, but their overall point of view isn’t any less particular or
constrained by history than ours. More importantly, deference places the
accountability that is all of ours to bear onto select people – and,
more often than not, a hyper-sanitized and thoroughly fictional
caricature of them.
The same tactics of deference
that insulate us from criticism also insulate us from connection and
transformation. They prevent us from engaging empathetically and
authentically with the struggles of other people – prerequisites of
coalitional politics. As identities become more and more fine-grained
and disagreements sharper, we come to realize that “coalitional
politics” (understood as struggle across difference) is, simply,
politics. Thus, the deferential orientation, like that fragmentation of
political collectivity it enables, is ultimately anti-political.
Deference rather than
interdependence may soothe short-term psychological wounds. But it does
so at a steep cost: it can undermine the epistemic goals that motivate
the project, and it entrenches a politics unbefitting of anyone fighting
for freedom rather than for privilege, for collective liberation rather
than mere parochial advantage.
theathletic |Kyrie Irving
believes he is fighting for something bigger than basketball — and the
unintended consequences are that his mission is conflicting with his
career and his franchise, the Brooklyn Nets.
Irving remains ineligible to play in NBA
home games at Barclays Center in Brooklyn because he has not fulfilled
New York City’s COVID-19 vaccine requirement, and the Nets announced
Tuesday that Irving will not play or practice with the team until he is eligible to be a full participant. The Athletic
has learned through multiple sources what has been behind his stance
and decision to not take the vaccine, reasoning which has not been made
public to date.
Nets general manager Sean Marks acknowledged Tuesday that Irving is
not vaccinated for COVID-19. The All-NBA star and the Nets had received
some good news on Friday when New York City Hall ruled that the team’s practice facility, HSS Training Center, is a public office building
— clearing Irving to return to practice on Sunday. But as of now,
Irving has no plans to be vaccinated, sources say. Within the franchise
and the players in the locker room, it is understood that Irving’s
decision is what it is.
Coonius McCoonibus Got So Much Things To Say...,
Damn right I said this S&&@ about Kyrie Irving. And I meant every damn word. Nobody’s backing up pic.twitter.com/3gtE2N5tF3
All this has left the Nets to account for how to handle the
unprecedented situation and led to a bevy of questions: Is Irving
anti-vax and what is really behind his choice? Will City Hall change the
vaccine mandate? How will the Nets handle having Irving banished from
the team instead of in and out of the lineup and available for road
games and home practices?
Multiple sources with direct knowledge of Irving’s decision have told The Athletic
that Irving is not anti-vaccine and that his stance is that he is upset
that people are losing their jobs due to vaccine mandates. It’s a
stance that Irving has explained to close teammates. To him, this is
about a grander fight than the one on the court and Irving is
challenging a perceived control of society and people’s livelihood, according
to sources with knowledge of Irving’s mindset. It is a decision that he
believes he is capable to make given his current life dynamics. “Kyrie
wants to be a voice for the voiceless,” one source said.
However, the nation’s top doctors and scientists have cleared the vaccine as safe and effective. The Center for Disease Control
(CDC), American Medical Association (AMA) and Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) state clearly that COVID-19 vaccines are effective
at helping protect against severe disease and death, including from
variants of the virus, while also being safe. In fact, multiple studies
showed that 99 percent of people who are in intensive care units in
hospitals are unvaccinated. Sources say 96 percent of NBA players are
currently vaccinated. More than 3.75 billion people worldwide have
received a vaccine dose. To be clear, Irving’s stance is not believed to
be anti-science, according to sources.
Irving has made more than $160 million over his NBA contracts and has
a massive Nike shoe endorsement deal, so those who know Irving
understand he is not driven right now by money, nor cares for inheriting
more, but rather the stand for larger issues in his mind that need his
support. He’s a seven-time All-Star, two-time All-NBA member and former
Rookie of the Year who now stands to lose over $200 million by deciding
to use his platform to stand up for his stance of each and every person
being able to decide for themselves on whether they should take the
vaccine without impacts on job statuses. However, the fact of the matter
is there are consequences for being unvaccinated in some industries and
municipalities. Just as Irving wants to stick with his principle belief
on the matter, policies and requirements are subject to local and
federal governments.
aaronkheriaty | Here is the latest move by the University of California in response to my lawsuit in Federal court challenging their vaccine mandate on behalf of Covid-recovered individuals with natural immunity.
Last Thursday Sept 30th at 5:03 PM I received this letter from the
University informing me that, as of the following morning, I was being
placed on “Investigatory Leave” for my failure to comply with the
vaccine mandate. I was given no opportunity to contact my patients,
students, residents, or colleagues and let them know I would disappear
for a month. Rather than waiting for the court to make a ruling on my
case, the University has taken preemptive action:
You might be thinking, a month of paid leave doesn’t sound so bad. But the language is misleading here, since
half of my income from the University comes from clinical revenues
generated from seeing my patients, supervising resident clinics, and
engaging in weekend and holiday on-call duties. So while on leave my
salary is significantly cut. Furthermore, my contract stipulates that I
am not able to conduct any patient care outside the University: to see
my current patients, or to recoup my losses by moonlighting as a
physician elsewhere, would violate the terms of my contract.
It
came as no surprise that, since my request for a preliminary injunction
was not granted by the court, the University would immediately begin
procedures to dismiss me. However, in the complicated legal game of
three-dimensional chess I did not anticipate this particular
development: the current administrative designation, where I am neither
able to work at the University nor permitted to pursue work elsewhere,
was not a development I had anticipated. The University may be hoping
this pressure will lead me to resign “voluntarily,” which would remove
grounds for my lawsuit: if I resign prior to being terminated by the
University, I have no legal claim of harm.
I have no
intention at this time of resigning, withdrawing my lawsuit, or having
an unnecessary medical intervention forced on me, in spite of
these challenging circumstances. You may be wondering about the CA
Department of Public Health vaccine mandate mentioned in the
University’s letter above: yes, I am subject to two mandates, the UC mandate as a faculty member and the CA State mandate as a healthcare provider. Regarding the latter mandate, I filed a similar lawsuit in Federal court last Friday against the State Public Health Department. I will post more later on that case as it develops.
Although
this is a challenging time for me and my family, at this time I remain
convinced that this course of action is worthwhile. I am grateful for
your ongoing encouragement, prayers, and support. I want my readers to
know that am taking legal action not primarily for myself, but for all
those who have no voice and whose Constitutional rights are being
steamrolled by these mandates. As I wrote in my first post:
guardian | Naomi Osaka has surprised the tennis world by declaring days before the start of the French Open
that she will not conduct her mandatory media assignments during the
tournament. Osaka, the world No 2, cited the effects of reporters’
questions in press conferences on her mental health.
“I’m writing this to say I’m not going to do any press during Roland Garros,” said Osaka in a statement posted to her social media
accounts. “I’ve often felt that people have no regard for athletes’
mental health and this rings true whenever I see a press conference or
partake in one. We are often sat there and asked questions that we’ve
been asked multiple times before or asked questions that bring doubt
into our minds and I’m just not going to subject myself to people that
doubt me.”
Osaka’s announcement has forced the French Tennis
Federation (FFT) to conduct discussions regarding how to handle her
intended rule breach. The four-time grand slam champion further
explained her reason for foregoing press conferences and she
acknowledged the “considerable fine” she may receive after each match.
“Me
not doing press is nothing personal to the tournament and a couple
journalists have interviewed me since I was young so I have a friendly
relationship with most of them,” she wrote. “However, if the
organisations think that they can just keep saying, ‘do press or you’re
gonna be fined’ and continue to ignore the mental health of the athletes
that are the centerpiece of their cooperation then I just gotta laugh.”
Gilles
Moretton, the president of the FFT responded firmly to Osaka’s
statement on Thursday by saying that she will be fined if she does not
attend her mandatory press conferences.
“It’s a deep regret, for you journalists, for her [Osaka] personally and for tennis in general,” he said, according to
l’Equipe. “I think this is a phenomenal mistake. It shows to what
extent today there is strong governance in tennis. What is happening
there is, in my opinion, not acceptable. There are rules, laws. We will
stick to the laws and rules for penalties and fines.”
Moretton
continued: “It is very detrimental to sport, to tennis, to her
probably. She hits the game, she hurts tennis. This is a real problem.”
patrickwyman | The assumed subject of this culture is a straight, young-ish (18-40)
dude who’s kind of into fitness of some kind, whether that’s lifting
weights, a little jiu-jitsu, or what have you. He probably played sports
and currently enjoys watching them. He’s familiar with but not super
dedicated to video games and likes beer and maybe some weed from time to
time. He may or may not have a college degree, but either way has a
solid but not extremely high-paying job. He probably lives in the
suburbs, exurbs, or a rural area, rather than a dense metro. He’s
probably but not necessarily white. He’s disproportionately likely to
have served in the military, and if he hasn’t, he knows people - family
or friends - who do or did.
These various demographic, and
therefore cultural and social affiliations, don’t exist in isolation
from one another. Put together, they form a relatively stable melange,
an ecosystem with its own influencers and heroes, values and principles,
and connections to other social, cultural, and political phenomena.
It’s
rooted in physicality and the body, self-ownership through activity.
While it doesn’t necessarily eschew the life of the mind - Jocko
Willink, for example, constantly discusses and advocates the reading of
books on his podcast - that’s simply not the main focus for
self-actualization or identity. If you want to talk about intellectual
pursuits, you can do it while pulling 500 pounds or beating the hell out
of a heavy bag.
Some aspects of this are obviously new, like social media and the
role of influencers. But others aren’t. Fitness culture, one of Bro
Culture’s constituent pieces, has been around in various guises for a
long time; weightlifting came to prominence in the 1960s and 70s,
Crossfit in the 2000s, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in the last decade, but other
manifestations - like respectable men’s Muscular Christianity
around the beginning of the 20th century - have been around for much
longer. Bare-knuckle boxing was a manifestation of rough-and-tumble, working-class manhood
in later 19th century America. That working-class manhood revolved
around taverns and drinking, gambling on fights and races, a combination
of activities familiar to any self-respecting Bro today whether he
participates in them or not.
One parallel that’s particularly striking to me, though I wouldn’t take the comparison too far, is with medieval chivalry.
Hear me out.
The
popular conception of chivalry, as a moral code guiding the behavior of
honorable knights, is flat-out, laughably wrong. That’s a creation of
19th-century authors like Walter Scott, and the popular fantasy authors
(basically up until George R.R. Martin) who built on their worldview in
the 20th.
In reality, chivalry was all about one particular version of Guys Being Dudes.
Chivalry could refer to a few different things, but the most common
meaning was simply battlefield deeds, executed with some style. This,
what knights referred to as “prowess,” was at the core of the broader
ideology of chivalry: raw, bloody, physical performance, violence done effectively and to an agreed-upon aesthetic standard.
The second major concern of chivalry, honor, grew directly out of the
first. Honor wasn’t an abstract concept to medieval knights; it was a
possession, a recognition of their particular status and place in the
social hierarchy, which they were well within their rights to violently
defend and assert through their prowess. Piety was the icing on the
cake, but no knight really doubted that God approved of their actions.
al-jazeera | “Kampf der Nibelungen” or “Battle of the Nibelungs,” a reference to old
Germanic and Norse legends, is beloved by white supremacists from across
Europe and beyond – they are both fans and fighters.
With German authorities keeping a close eye on them after banning
their previous event in 2019, organisers are planning to stream their
far-right fight-night of boxing, kickboxing and mixed martial arts (MMA)
online this Saturday.
Observers warn Al Jazeera that Europe’s far-right groups are using
combat sports to recruit young men and train them for literal battle in
the streets.
“They are violent neo-Nazis training for physical violence,” said
Robert Claus, a German journalist and author of a new book on combat
sports and the European far right.
The individuals behind Kampf der Nibelungen are violent and “dangerous”, he added.
There is “a very long list of racist attacks which comes out of the network of Kampf der Nibelungen”.
Moreover, Claus is concerned about the longer-term consequences if Kampf der Nibelungen goes ahead as planned.
“They’re showing a middle finger to German authorities,” he said. “If
they manage to go ahead and broadcast this event in defiance of German
authorities, it undermines the state’s monopoly on violence and the
authority of the state.”
But
that writer, who goes by the pseudonym “streiff,” isn’t just another
political blogger. The Daily Beast has discovered that he actually works
in the public affairs shop of the very agency that Fauci leads.
William
B. Crews is, by day, a public affairs specialist for the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. But for years he has been
writing for RedState under the streiff pseudonym. And in that capacity
he has been contributing to the very same disinformation campaign that his superiors at the NIAID say is a major challenge to widespread efforts to control a pandemic that has claimed roughly 200,000 U.S. lives.
Under
his pseudonym, Crews has derided his own colleagues as part of a
left-wing anti-Trump conspiracy and vehemently criticized the man who
leads his agency, whom he described as the “attention-grubbing and
media-whoring Anthony Fauci.” He has gone after other public health
officials at the state and federal levels, as well—“the public health
Karenwaffen,'' as he’s called them—over measures such as the closures of
businesses and other public establishments and the promotion of social
distancing and mask-wearing. Those policies, Crews insists, have no
basis in science and are simply surreptitious efforts to usurp
Americans’ rights, destroy the U.S. economy, and damage President Donald
Trump’s reelection effort.
“I think we’re at the point where it
is safe to say that the entire Wuhan virus scare was nothing more or
less than a massive fraud perpetrated upon the American people by
‘experts’ who were determined to fundamentally change the way the
country lives and is organized and governed,” Crews wrote in a June post on RedState.
“If
there were justice,” he added, “we’d send and [sic] few dozen of these
fascists to the gallows and gibbet their tarred bodies in chains until
they fall apart.”
After The Daily Beast brought those and other
quotes from Crews to NIAID’s attention, the agency said in an emailed
statement that Crews would “retire”
from his position. “NIAID first learned of this matter this morning,
and Mr. Crews has informed us of his intention to retire,” the
spokesperson, Kathy Stover, wrote. “We have no further comments on this
as it is a personnel matter.”
NPR | In the mid-'80s, just as his career as a writer was reaching its
first ascent, Stanley Crouch presided over an attempted, unexpected, coup d'etat.
Crouch wanted to return to a time when the serious Black practitioners
participated in the gatekeeping. (The title of a 2000 Crouch piece in
the New York Times says it all: "Don't Ask the Critics. Ask Wallace Roney's Peers.")
That was all to the good, but another, more reactionary and perhaps
even more commercial aspect of his proposed revolution proved impossible
to implement: defining jazz as a fixed object made up of conventional
swing, blues, romantic ballads, a Latin tinge... and not too much else.
While executing this maneuver, Crouch rejected — by some lights,
betrayed — his original peer group of Murray, Blythe and Newton, and
instead embraced the latest musicians intrigued by a comparatively
straight-ahead approach. (Newton complained, "A stylistically dominant agenda in jazz is like bringing Coca-Cola to a five-star dinner!")
It
was an artificial conceit to begin with, and Crouch was too contrarian
and combative to lead a movement. However, he did have one important
acolyte: Wynton Marsalis, the man anointed as the biggest new jazz star
of the era. Marsalis studied the texts of Stanley Crouch and Albert
Murray the way he did the music of Jelly Roll Morton and Louis
Armstrong. In what may have been an unprecedented event, a major jazz
artist actually read critics, and let those critics inform his
music. (Crouch also contributed liner notes to the first run of
excellent Marsalis LPs.)
Between them, Marsalis and Crouch
kicked off the jazz wars of the '80s and '90s, an argument about
tradition versus innovation, a tempest in a teacup that played out in
all the major jazz magazines, in many mainstream publications, in bars
and clubs everywhere – and in the end did very little good to anybody.
(The day Keith Jarrett angrily invited Wynton Marsalis to a "blues duel" in the New York Times was a notable low point.) The 2001 Ken Burns documentary Jazz,
which featured Marsalis and Crouch as both off-screen advisors and
on-screen commentators, was the climactic battleground. People who love
post-1959 styles connected to funk, fusion and the avant-garde are still very upset about Ken Burns' Jazz.
Still. When he started assembling the repertory institution Jazz at Lincoln Center
in 1987, Wynton Marsalis was advocating for the primacy of the Black
aesthetic at a time when the white, Stan Kenton-to-Gary Burton lineage
dominated major organizations like the Berklee College of Music and the
International Association of Jazz Educators. The music of Kenton and
Burton has tremendous value, but their vast institutional sway and undue
influence in jazz education is part of this discussion. We needed less
North Texas State (Kenton's first pedagogical initiative) and more Duke
Ellington in the mix, and Marsalis almost single-handedly corrected our
course – although Marsalis himself would give Crouch a lot of the
credit. Indeed, Crouch's long-running internal mandate to get Ellington
seen as "Artist of the Century" had finally paid off on a macro level, and the free high school program "Essentially Ellington" is one of JALC's most noble achievements.
Crouch
and Marsalis also strove to bury the once-prevalent idea that Louis
Armstrong was an Uncle Tom, and encouraged the Black working class to
reclaim the jazz greats as crucial to their heritage. (Those ready to
hate on Ken Burns's Jazz should keep that perspective in mind.)
There was some bad, a lot of good, and plenty to argue about. What can be said for sure: JALC never quite pulled off Crouch's proposed coup. All these years later, JALC
remains merely a part of what makes jazz interesting today. Younger
practitioners and listeners comfortably see the music as a continuum
that can contain anything from the avant-garde harp musings of Alice
Coltrane to the electric fusion of John McLaughlin to hip-hop stylings
of Robert Glasper. Crouch's definition of jazz does not dominate the
conversation the way he intended, perhaps paradoxically proving the
original point that jazz musicians and critics don't really have much to
do with each other.
straightlinelogic | Vladimir Putin is a black belt in judo, the only Russian and one of
the few people in the world to be awarded the rank of eighth dan. He
also practices karate.
A fundamental principle of martial arts is using an opponent’s size
and momentum against him. This is Putin’s strategic approach. Westerners
demonize Putin, but few try to understand him. Trying to understand
someone else is regarded as a pointless in narcissistic America,
selfie-land. Perhaps 90 percent of the populace is incapable of grasping
anything more subtle than a political cartoon.
That’s a pity, because Putin has accomplished a geopolitical triumph
worthy of study. He’s catalyzing the downfall of the American empire,
and it has nothing to do with subverting elections or suborning Trump.
Putin became acting prime minister in 1999, then president in 2000.
The Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse devastated Russia. The economy shrunk
and life expectancies fell. A group of rapacious oligarchs, many with
Western backing, acquired Soviet industrial and commercial assets at
fire sale prices.
Putin coopted the most important oligarchs, letting them hold on to
their loot and power in exchange for their allegiance. This bargain has
been a bulwark of both his continuing political support and his
reportedly immense personal fortune. He quelled a long-running
insurrection in Chechnya and stabilized the situation there, exchanging a
measure of autonomy for a declaration in the Chechen constitution that
it was part of Russia. During his first two terms, from 2000-2008, the
economy began recovering from the 1990s. Projecting a law and order
image while stifling critics, he solidified what has become his
unwavering support, winning 72 percent of the vote in the 2004
presidential election.
A coterie of highly placed idiots in the US and Europe insist that
Putin’s ultimate goal is to reconstitute the former Soviet Union on his
way to global domination. Russia’s GDP, after 18 years of recovery, is
$1.4 trillion, compared to almost $20 trillion for the US and over $17
trillion for the European Union. Russia’s military budget is $61
billion, versus $250 billion for NATO nations (excluding the US) and
over $700 billion for the US. The scaremongering screeds never say where
Russia will get the money to invade and conquer former Soviet
provinces, much less conquer the world. Putin, unlike America’s high and
mighty, realizes from Soviet experience that empires drain rather than
augment an empire’s resources.
Conquering the world is one thing, throwing the American empire to
the mat another. Putin must have smiled when George W. Bush invaded
Afghanistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden, purported mastermind of the
9/11 attacks. The US’s hubristic rage led it into what has been a
quagmire at best, a graveyard at worst, for a string of invaders,
including the Soviet Union.
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