CTH | These three video segments are a case-study in deconstructing
and confronting the fallacies of the illogical leftist mind. Gupta went
from having a high opinion of his own intellectual self, to being a
puddle of moonbat mush under the microphone. ENJOY.
♦ First segment. Joe Rogan points out the fallacy of fear behind COVID {Direct Rumble Link}.
Statistics and research show unvaccinated children are not at risk of
death from COVID. In fact, they are far less at risk than vaccinated
adults. So why all the focus on jabbing a population that is not at
risk?
♦ Second segment. Joe Rogan confronts Gupta about his own network CNN lying about Ivermectin and calling it a “horse dewormer”. {Direct Rumble Link}
♦ Third Segment. Joe Rogan confronts Sanjay Gupta over
the Wuhan Lab as the epicenter of the SARS-CoV-2 breakout. Rogan
challenges Gupta to explain why gain of function research was taking
place and why the National Institute of Health has lied about it. {Direct Rumble Link}
CNN | In
today's highly segmented media world, most of the people who watch and
listen to me every day on CNN have already received and accepted the
message about the utility of vaccines, the importance of masks and how
we can all work together to put an end to this pandemic. So I realized
that if I was serious about trying to communicate public health, I
needed to go to a less comfortable place. I needed to go into the lion's
den and accept an invitation to sit down with Joe Rogan for more than three hours.
I
don't think I have ever had a conversation that long with anyone.
Seriously -- think about that. We sat in a windowless podcast booth with
two sets of headphones and microphones, and a few feet between us. Not a
single interruption. No cellphones. No distractions. No bathroom
breaks.
At
a time when there is a desire for shorter, crisper content --
responding to abbreviated human attention spans -- one of the most
popular podcasts in the country features conversations that last
exceptionally long and go particularly deep.
Many
friends cautioned me against accepting Joe's invitation. "There is
little room for reasonable conversations anymore," one person told me.
"He is a brawler and doesn't play fair," another warned. In fact, when I
told Joe early in the podcast that I didn't agree with his apparent views on vaccines against Covid,
ivermectin and many things in between, part of me thought the MMA,
former Taekwondo champion might hurtle himself across the table and
throttle my neck. But, instead he smiled, and off we went.
OK, I am embellishing here, but Joe Rogan is the one guy in the country I
wanted to exchange views with in a real dialogue -- one that could
potentially be among the most important conversations of this entire
pandemic. After listening to his podcasts for a while now, I wanted to
know: Was Joe simply a sower of doubt, a creator of chaos? Or was there
something more? Was he asking questions that begged to be asked, fueled
by necessary suspicion and skepticism?
It wasn't what Joe Rogan thinks that most interested me, it was how he thinks. That is what I really wanted to understand.
Truth
is, I have always been a naturally skeptical person myself. One of my
personal heroes, the physicist Edwin Hubble, said a scientist has a
"healthy skepticism, suspended judgment and disciplined imagination, not
only about other people's ideas but also about their own."
holy fucking shit, vaccine mandates are causing teachers who don't believe in science to quit, nurses who don't believe in medicine to quit, and cops who don't believe in public safety to quit. I'm failing to see the downside to this...,
folks: I hate tweet thieves and I hate it even more when the tweet thief turns out to be me. I have no memory of seeing @mbeisen's tweet but clearly I must have, and then regurgitated it as my own. UGH. folks, please retweet the hell out of the original: https://t.co/CBTmfH9JDe
marketwatch | “Typically, an employee who is terminated for failing to comply with
company policies is not eligible for unemployment benefits, which would
include refusing to comply with a company’s COVID-19 prevention
policies, masking requirements or vaccine requirements,” Ackels told
MarketWatch.
But an employee who has proof of a medical
exemption or religious objection to receiving a COVID-19 vaccine may
still be eligible to collect unemployment benefits if fired, said
Rebecca Dixon, executive director at the National Employment Law
Project, a nonprofit that advocates for worker’s rights.
Otherwise,
refusing to get a COVID-19 vaccine, if your employer requires one, “is
akin to an employee’s refusal to submit to permissible drug tests or
participate in safety trainings,” said Ronald Zambrano, employment law
chair at West Coast Trial Lawyers, a Los Angeles–based law firm. That
is, such an employee, when terminated, would not qualify for
unemployment benefits, Zambrano said.
Ultimately, “this could
lead to tens of thousands of people across the United States without
work or access to unemployment benefits because they refuse to get
vaccinated,” Zambrano said.
What if employees quit because they don’t want to get vaccinated?
Quitting
over refusal to get vaccinated when an employer requires it appears
unlikely to improve one’s chances of securing unemployment payments.
“If
you quit because of the mandate then you’d have to have good cause
attributable to the employer in order to collect unemployment benefits,”
Dixon said. “Good cause is usually viewed from that of a reasonable
person. Given the overwhelming evidence of the safety of the vaccine,
it’s likely that good cause would not be found” in the case of a person
who quits a job because of a vaccine mandate.
That said, state
workforce departments can update “eligibility requirements such that,
depending on the circumstances, employees fired for refusing to get the
COVID-19 vaccine could be eligible for unemployment benefits,” Ackels
said.
The Department of Labor didn’t respond to MarketWatch’s request for comment.
The
Texas Workforce Commission, noting that “[e]very unemployment insurance
claim is reviewed on a case by case basis” and that “what happens in an
unemployment claim is dependent upon the individual facts,” saidthat an employee “may be eligible for benefits if you were fired for reasons other than misconduct.”
The
commission, while noting that most people who quit jobs are deemed
ineligible for unemployment compensation, observed that it is possible
to qualify if it is demonstrated that they quit “for good cause
connected with the work.”
Officials at the commission did not
indicate whether any individuals fired from a job for refusing to be
vaccinated had qualified for unemployment benefits or whether any
employer have been charged, as the commission suggested was possible.
MIT | By some lights, it seems curious how authoritarian leaders can
sustain their public support while limiting liberties for citizens. Yes,
it can be hard to overthrow an entrenched leader; that does not mean
people have to like their ruling autocrats. And yet, many do.
After all, authoritarian China consistently polls better on measures
of trust and confidence in government than many democratic countries,
including the U.S. And elected leaders from Africa to East Asia and
Europe have seen their popularity rise after rolling back civil rights
recently. What explains this phenomenon?
“Successful authoritarians do not take public support and the
durability of their systems for granted,” says MIT political scientist
Lily Tsai, who has spent years studying autocratic regimes. “They know
they have to constantly work hard to make sure there is support and
voluntary cooperation.”
The specific way many autocrats achieve this, Tsai believes, is by
investing heavily in “retributive justice,” the high-profile use of
punishment against people who have run afoul of values shared by leaders
and their supporters. Such punishments, it seems, signal to the public
that its leaders are maintaining a social order based upon core moral
values, even as they restrict certain liberties.
“It’s an important strategy for mobilizing public support that
unfortunately we don’t always acknowledge,” Tsai says. “Successful
authoritarians understand that people need to feel there is a stable
social and moral order, arguably before anything else, and they have to
consciously and continuously produce it.”
Now Tsai, the Ford Professor of Political Science and chair of the
MIT faculty, has examined this idea at length a new book, “When People
Want Punishment,” published by Cambridge University Press. In it, she
explores how retributive justice functions, and seeks to shift our
understanding of how authoritarians prosper — an especially urgent
question while many have gained traction around the globe. Fist tap Dale.
theweek | President Biden is in trouble. As my colleague Damon Linker writes,
his approval numbers have been steadily declining for months, now
hovering in the low 40s in some surveys. Without some upward movement,
that will spell disaster for the Democrats in the upcoming midterms.
There
is one straightforward policy Biden can undertake, completely on his
own initiative, to turn this around: vaccine mandates. Strict policies
to force vaccine-resistant populations to get their shots would do more
than anything else under Biden's direct control to improve the condition
of the country — and his own polling numbers.
Now, there are no
doubt many reasons Biden's approval is down. The shrieking tantrum from
the mainstream media over the American empire being humiliated in Afghanistan
plays a part, as does the general tendency for presidential approval to
decline following inauguration. The relentless drumbeat of conservative
propaganda takes its toll as well.
But
the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is surely the largest part. Political
science has shown for years that the incumbent party in the White House tends to be blamed for bad things that happen on its watch — even if that assignment of blame makes little sense. That's what's happening here.
As
long as the pandemic continues, it will play hell with the economic
recovery. Unemployment is relatively low, but recent jobs numbers have been weak, and supply chains are badly snarled up
across the globe. That, coupled with the worst mass casualty event in a
century — more people have died of COVID-19 this year than in 2020 — is
surely sandbagging presidential popularity.
What's more, Biden did
promise to end the pandemic. "I'll immediately put in place a national
strategy that will position our country to finally get ahead of this
virus and get back our lives," he said
in a campaign speech last year. So even if it's not exactly his fault
things are still bad, he still appears to be breaking his word. Early
this summer, it appeared life was finally going back to normal after an
absolutely horrible year — as it finally is in Western Europe, thanks to super-high vaccination rates. Instead, we got sucked right back down into the pandemic sandpit.
NYTimes |Southwest Airlines
canceled more than 1,000 flights on Sunday and just over 800 on
Saturday, wreaking havoc on weekend travel plans for thousands of
passengers.
The airline had canceled
24 percent of all scheduled flights on Saturday, according to
FlightAware, a tracking service. By noon on Sunday, Southwest had already canceled 28 percent of flights scheduled for the day, with hundreds more flights delayed.
“We
experienced weather challenges in our Florida airports at the beginning
of the weekend, challenges that were compounded by unexpected air
traffic control issues in the same region, triggering delays and
prompting significant cancellations,”
the airline said in a statement on Sunday. “We’ve continued diligent
work throughout the weekend to reset our operation with a focus on
getting aircraft and crews repositioned to take care of our customers.”
Southwest
added that recovering from the disruption was more difficult than usual
because it is operating fewer flights than before the pandemic,
complicating efforts to reschedule passengers.
“We know the frustration flight cancellations
are creating for our customers and employees and we apologize, and we
again thank everyone for patience as we work first to be safe, and
second to be as quick as possible in solving disrupted plans.”
The
Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement on Sunday that it
had briefly suffered an air traffic control staffing shortage, but that
the issue had long since been resolved.
“Flight
delays and cancellations occurred for a few hours Friday afternoon due
to widespread severe weather, military training and limited staffing in
one area of the Jacksonville Air Route Traffic Control Center,” the
agency said. “Some airlines continue to experience scheduling challenges due to aircraft and crews being out of place.”
Indeed, the weekend disruption appeared to be limited to Southwest.
American Airlines had the second highest number of cancellations among
U.S. carriers on Sunday, with fewer than 70 flights — about 2 percent of
those scheduled for the day — affected.
Southwest suffered similar widespread disruptions over several days in June,
which it attributed to technological problems, both internally and with
a third-party weather data supplier. The delays prevented crews from
reaching flights they were scheduled to work, exacerbating the problem.
WaPo | Hundreds of thousands of U.S. service members remain unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated against the coronavirus
as the Pentagon’s first compliance deadlines near, with lopsided rates
across the individual services and a spike in deaths among military
reservists illustrating how political division over the shots has seeped
into a nonpartisan force with unambiguous orders.
Overall, the military’s vaccination rate has climbed since August, when Defense Department leaders, acting on a directive from President Biden, informed the nation’s 2.1 million troops that immunization would become mandatory,
exemptions would be rare and those who refuse would be punished. Yet
troops’ response has been scattershot, according to data assessed by The
Washington Post.
For
instance, 90 percent of the active-duty Navy is fully vaccinated,
whereas just 72 percent of the Marine Corps is, the data shows,even
though both services share a Nov. 28 deadline. In the Air Force, more
than 60,000 personnel have just three weeks to meet the Defense
Department’s most ambitious deadline.
Deaths attributedto
covid-19 have soared in parts of the force as some services struggle to
inoculate their troops. In September, more military personnel died of
coronavirus infections than in all of 2020. None of those who died were
fully vaccinated, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Charlie Dietz said.
Military
officials explain the variance in vaccination rates, in part, by
pointing to the staggered deadlines each of the services set for
personnel to comply while expressing optimism that, as those dates
approach, numbers will quickly rise and a vast majority of troops will
carry out their orders.Thousands of troops already have begun
their two-shot regimens, like in the Navy, where 98 percent of
active-duty sailors have received at least one dose, officials said.
But other services are not on such a steady path, and critics say the large gaps between vaccination deadlines jeopardizehow
ready the military can be in a moment of crisis. They point
specifically to the reserves and National Guard, which over the past two
years have been called upon in numerous emergencies — at home and
overseas — and yet large numbers of their personnel have so far refused
to get vaccinated.
“The Army’s policy is incentivizing inaction until the latest possible
date,” said Katherine L. Kuzminski, a military policy expert at the
Washington think tank Center for a New American Security, citing plans
that require Army Reserve and National Guard personnel to be fully
vaccinated more than eight months from now. Coronavirus vaccines have
been widely available since the spring.
NYTimes | Vaccine
hesitancy among police officers in the United States has been one of
the themes of pandemic news this year, but in some places, firefighters
are joining the resistance.
This week, hundreds of firefighters in Los Angeles filed a notice of intent to sue the city over its vaccine mandate, saying an Oct. 20 deadline to get vaccinated is “extreme and outrageous.”
The
notice, filed on Thursday, said each of the 871 firefighters would seek
$2.5 million each if the lawsuit is filed — for a projected total of
over $2.1 billion. A lawyer representing the group said that the city
would have 45 days to evaluate the notice and that he expected to file
the suit immediately after that period.
Firefighters in Spokane, Wash., joined state workers in a lawsuit over statewide vaccine mandates, according to KXLY-TV. In Orange County, Fla., a group of firefighters upset by a vaccine mandate sued the county, WFTV reported.
The International Association of Fire Fighters’
statement on vaccines offers no support for rejecting vaccine mandates.
Instead, it notes the extreme importance of vaccination for “fire
fighters and medical emergency personnel who work in confined and
uncontrolled environments while treating or transporting patients or
interacting with the public.” The statement lists the few options
available for exemptions, and lists some of the financial penalties and
job losses that defying mandates could incur.
Kevin
McBride, the lawyer representing the Los Angeles firefighters, said in
an interview that his clients did not trust the available vaccines and
could be fired for defying the city’s vaccine mandate.
All three vaccines used in the United States are highly effective
at preventing serious illness, hospitalization and death from Covid-19,
and serious side effects, like a strong allergic reaction, are
extremely rare.
Mr. McBride said the
Los Angeles authorities had rejected his offer of a “middle ground” in
which weekly testing would substitute for getting the shot. The mandate
passed by the Los Angeles City Council in August did not include an
option for regular testing.
As of
Thursday, about 64 percent of members of the Los Angeles Fire Department
were fully vaccinated, according to a spokeswoman, Cheryl Getuiza, and
about 1,200 members had not had a single shot. Since the pandemic began,
two members have died, and 1,070 have been infected, she said.
Los
Angeles is also experiencing vaccine hesitancy among its
law-enforcement agents. The firefighters’ notice of intent to sue was
filed on the same day that the Los Angeles County sheriff, Alex
Villanueva, said he would not enforce the vaccine mandate at his department, which employs some 18,000 people.
covertactionmagazine | Obama and his handlers effectively covered up the truth about Obama’s family history.
They marketed Obama as a multi-racial candidate whose sensitivity to
divergent cultures around the world would help restore America’s
international reputation following the Bush years.
In his 2020 memoir, A Promised Land, Obama presents his
mother as a 1960s rebel and beatnik who partook in civil rights
protests, opposed the Vietnam War, married outside her race twice, and
decided to devote her career to setting up micro-lending projects for
poor women in Indonesia and later Pakistan whose language and culture
she absorbed.[16]
Obama claimed that his mother did not know about the countless
atrocities that were committed by the Suharto government, which is
implausible given her background and the fact that they were reported on
by mainstream newspapers at the time—favorably.
Of further significance, Obama underplayed his stepfather Lolo’s army rank in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope.[17]
Regarding his own story, Obama has promoted falsehoods at every step.
In A Promised Land, he neglects to mention that, after graduating Columbia University in 1983, he worked for about a year for Business International Corporation (BIC),
a Manhattan-based consulting house to multinational corporations, where
his job was to edit newsletters on business conditions in countries
around the world.
Headed by a close friend of former Vice President Hubert Humphrey,
Orville Freeman, Jr., the former Governor of Minnesota who was involved
with Humphrey in the purge of suspected communists in the Farmer-Labor
Party, BIC had functioned as a CIA front.
Its sub-specialty was in recruiting left-wing organizers to use as
assets, and in infiltrating foreign labor unions with the goal of
promoting disruptions in targeted economies.
An activist with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
described BIC as the guys who wrote the Alliance for Progress (Marshall
Plan for Latin America): “They’re the left-wing of the ruling class.”[18]
Besides underplaying his employment with BIC, Obama in his writings
omits the fact that his work as a community organizer was for the
Gamaliel Foundation, a satellite of his mother’s old employer the Ford
Foundation, whose underlying aim was to prevent class solidarity and the
revival of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inter-racial poor people’s
movement.[19]
Obama’s timeline for his life story, meanwhile, is often wrong. In A Promised Land,
for example, he claims to have spent three years in New York after
transferring from Occidental College to Columbia after his sophomore
year; however, it is believed that Obama spent the 1981-1982 school year
in Pakistan and only studied at Columbia for one year.[20]
FAIR | It would seem that covert plans for the state-sanctioned murder on
British soil of an award-winning journalist should attract sustained,
wall-to-wall media coverage.
The news, however, has been met by Western establishment media with
ghoulish indifference—a damning indictment of an industry that
feverishly condemns attacks on press freedom in Official Enemy states.
BBC News, one of the most-read news outlets in the world, appears to have covered the story just once—in the Somali-language section of the BBC website (Media Lens on Twitter, 9/30/21).
Neither the New York Times or Washington Post, two of the world’s leading corporate news organizations, have published any articles about Assange since July 2021.
To its credit, since the story first broke on September 26, the Guardian has reported
twice on the CIA-led conspiracy to kill or kidnap Assange. But to offer
perspective, during the week after Russian opposition figure Alexei
Navalny was reported to have been poisoned by the Russian government, the Guardian published 16 separate pieces on the issue, including video reports and opinion pieces.
Similarly, a Nexis search of British newspapers for the word
“Navalny” brings up 288 results from August 20–25, 2020. The same search
for “Assange” between September 26–October 1, 2021, brings up a meager
29 results—one of which, a notable exception, was a Patrick Cockburn
piece in the Independent (10/1/21).
Indeed, the Grayzone (5/14/20)
was the first outlet to provide evidence of a CIA-linked proposal to
“kidnap or poison Assange” in May 2020. The story, however, was almost
universally ignored, suggesting that, as Joe Lauria wrote in Consortium News (10/2/21), “until something appears in the mainstream media, it didn’t happen.”
One thing the corporate media cannot be accused of with regards to
Assange, however, is inconsistency. After a key witness in the
Department of Justice’s case against the publisher admitted
to providing the US prosecution with false testimony, a detail that
should ordinarily turn a case to dust, the corporate media responded by
ignoring the story almost entirely. As Alan MacLeod wrote for FAIR.org (7/2/21):
The complete uniformity with which corporate media have
treated this latest bombshell news raises even more concerns about how
fundamentally intertwined and aligned they are with the interests of the
US government.
Even after it was revealed that the UC Global security firm that targeted Assange had also spied on journalists at the Washington Post and New York Times, neither outlet mounted any protest (Grayzone, 9/18/20).
Perhaps most remarkably, UK judge Vanessa Baraitser relied on a falsified CNN report (7/15/19) to justify the CIA’s spying operation against Assange (Grayzone, 5/1/21). Now, CNN’s website contains no reports on the agency’s plans to kill or kidnap Assange.
The prevailing silence has extended into the NGO industry. Amnesty International, which refused in 2019 to consider Assange a prisoner of conscience, has said nothing about the latest revelations. Likewise, Index on Censorship, which describes itself as “The Global Voice of Free Expression,” hasn’t responded to the story.
The establishment media’s dismissal of Assange supports Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s framework of “worthy” and “unworthy” political dissidents, with Assange situated firmly in the latter camp.
CTH | According to Dr Pierre Kory, MD, MPA, and verified by the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance
(FLCCC), 100 to 200 congressional reps and/or staff and families who
contracted COVID-19 were treated with the Front Line Ivermectin
protocol.
Fun fact: Between 100-200 United States Congress Members (plus many of their staffers & family members) with COVID.. were treated by a colleague over the past 15 months with ivermectin & the I-MASK+ protocol at https://t.co/OvU8SLfLJq. None have gone to hospital. Just sayin'
This successful treatment is happening at the same time many
congressional representatives are playing politics in favor of the
vaccine; downplaying the effective anti-viral treatment and therapeutic approach with Ivermectin; and taking action to block regular American citizens from seeking similar treatment with Ivermectin.
Congress can seek treatment with a medication they simultaneously
deny to others? This is well beyond a “scandal”, and needs to be
investigated quickly.
Friends, we would not have tweeted something of this magnitude and importance without knowing for certain that it was true, and that the source was unassailable. https://t.co/V7XUZkqLOt
— Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care (@Covid19Critical) October 8, 2021
Additionally, as Merck has announced a new and similar anti-viral
drug called Molnupiravir, two trial studies in India have requested to
exit the trials. Apparently the issue surrounds the new drug providing
no benefit once a patient is moderately ill and hospitalized (READ MORE, Reuters Link).
Guardian |On a recent afternoon, Steven Pinker,
the cognitive psychologist and bestselling author of upbeat books about
human progress, was sitting in his summer home on Cape Cod, thinking
about Bill Gates. Pinker was gearing up to record a radio series on
critical thinking for the BBC, and he wanted the world’s fourth richest
man to join him for an episode on the climate emergency. “People tend to
approach challenges in one of two ways – as problem-solving or as
conflict,” Pinker, who appreciates the force of a tidy dichotomy, said.
“You can think of it as Bill versus Greta. And I’m very much in Bill’s
camp.”
A few weeks earlier, Gates had
been photographed in Manhattan carrying a copy of Pinker’s soon to be
published 12th book, Rationality, which inspired the BBC series.
“We sent it to his people,” Pinker said. Pinker is an avid promoter of
his own work, and for the past 25 years he has had a great deal to
promote. Since the 1990s, he has written a string of popular books on
language, the mind and human behaviour, but in the past decade, he has
become best known for his counterintuitive take on the state of the
world. In the shadow of the financial crisis, while other authors were
writing books about how society was profoundly broken, Pinker took the
opposite tack, arguing that things were, in fact, better than ever.
In
The Better Angels of Our Nature, published in 2011, he gathered copious
amounts of data to show that violence had declined across human
history, in large part because of the emergence of markets and states.
Understandably, the book struck a chord with people who move markets and
run states. Gates called it “the most inspiring book I’ve ever read”,
and Mark Zuckerberg included it on a list of what to read at Davos.
Then, in 2018, at the height of Donald Trump’s presidency and amid the
accelerating climate crisis, Pinker published a follow-up, Enlightenment
Now, which expanded his argument. It wasn’t just that life had become
less violent; thanks to the application of science and reason since the
18th century, the human condition had dramatically improved in health,
wealth and liberty, too. Bill Clinton had Enlightenment Now on his
bedside table, and Gates declared it his “new favourite book of all
time”.
“Bill’s got a pretty nimble mind, so I
think he can riff on anything,” Pinker said, imagining how Gates would
fare on the radio show. He was looking out over Cape Cod Bay from the
upper deck of his house, which he shares with his wife, the philosopher
and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. From the bottom deck, a
staircase of more than 100 steps runs down to a beach, like one of
Pinker’s trademark graphs depicting the decline in some measure of human
misery. Pinker sees the world in broadly utilitarian terms. “A
quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally
enlightened one,” he writes in Enlightenment Now. On this basis, he has
ranked Gates, who has spent roughly $50bn on philanthropy, near the top
of a moral hierarchy crowned by people such as Norman Borlaug, a Nobel
Peace prize-winning agronomist credited with saving more than a billion
lives through his innovations in agriculture.
Pinker’s positive spin on the world has brought him into the orbit of
many powerful people. On his phone, under the heading Politicians, he
keeps a list of the two dozen or so heads of state, royalty and other
leaders who have asked him for an audience. They include the prime
minister of his native Canada, Justin Trudeau (“That was the greatest
thrill for a Canadian boy”) and Mauricio Macri, then the president of
Argentina (“I got to stand on the Evita balcony”). In 2016, Pinker
co-authored an article
for the New York Times with Colombia’s then-president, Juan Manuel
Santos, two months before Santos won the Nobel Peace prize for helping
to end the country’s 50-year-long guerrilla war.
He has twice been a guest at Bohemian Grove, which has been described
as an off-the-record summer camp for male members of the American
establishment. He told me he had met some amazing people there, like
Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, the former secretaries of state to
Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, respectively. He seemed to enjoy both
the absurdity of the experience and its purpose – to bring powerful
people into contact with one another.
GodsSpies |“The news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin
board and public relations firm for the ruling class—the people who run
things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid
by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power.
If the parent corporation doesn’t want you to know something, it won’t
be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to
suit them, and then rarely followed up.” — George Carlin, quoted here
It's going to be interesting to see, in the next five to fifteen
years, the methods the rich must use to keep their power when the
climate crisis hits with full and majestic force. The coming chaos and
revolutionary fervor that suffering millions and billions will bring to
the table will each be world-historical in scope. What under those
conditions will the powerful do, the very very few, to keep the very
many from taking control? Whatever the result, none of our governments
will survive in their current form.
Keep in mind, revolutions are
not orderly, and this one almost certainly won't be well led. Yes, from
time to time, the world kicks out a George Washington, fit for the
challenge of his time, a man who willing to fortify the republic he
helped to build rather than just profit from it.
And yes, from
time to time the world kicks out a Napoleon or Vespasian, a man fit to
rule his time well, at least for the most part, even if that rule is
decidedly autocratic.
But most of the time the world kicks out
masters of chaos, egomaniacal destroyers and opportunists, people like
Alcibiades of Athens, or Ronald Reagan, people who gain power in
disgruntled times, and through their actions make the world worse for
everyone. Reagan took a struggling country, the proto-neoliberal nation
of the Carter years, a nation steeped in stagflation, and set in fatal
motion the wealth machine that will soon destroy us all, including the
machine itself.
If we don't get off of fossil fuel in time, the
rich will suffer with the rest of us the destruction they will cause.
Our leaders won't contemplate any measure that reduces their power, and
we won't contemplate forcing them to leave. Under those constraints, the
problem has no solution.
The rich won't stand down. Will the people stand up? On that one question hangs all of the rest of this tale.
tabletmag | The
unavoidable problems with censoring disinformation have predictably
plagued recent laws, including those touted as restricting
pandemic-related disinformation in order to protect public health. As
the Economist reported
in February 2021, “Censorious governments are abusing ‘fake news’
laws,” invoking the pandemic as “an excuse to gag reporters” and to
silence critics of pandemic-era policies. In February 2020, Amnesty
International noted
that Singapore’s 2019 law against “online falsehoods and manipulation”
was “repeatedly used to target critics and political opponents.” The
Singaporean government could not deny this, but instead claimed that the
law’s consistent enforcement against opposition party members was a
“coincidence.” To the contrary, these patterns necessarily result from restrictions on such a vague, broad category of speech, even in democratic regimes.
That is why the American Civil Liberties Union brought a 2020 lawsuit
challenging disinformation laws that the government of Puerto Rico had
recently passed for the asserted purpose of protecting public health and
safety. One such law makes it a crime to share “false information”
about the government’s post-pandemic emergency and curfew orders with
the intent to cause “confusion, panic, or public hysteria.” Shortly
after the law went into effect, the Puerto Rican government charged a
prominent clergyman with allegedly disseminating false information on
WhatsApp about a rumored executive order to close all businesses. In
fact, only a short time later, the governor did issue such an order.
Even
beyond the speech that disinformation laws directly stifle, these laws
also suppress incalculable amounts of important expression, including
information about the pandemic that could literally be a matter of life
or death. That’s because the laws deter scientists and other experts
from providing information to journalists, and journalists are in turn
deterred from conveying information to the public, for fear of
transgressing—or being charged with transgressing—the laws’ blurry
boundaries. The ACLU’s complaint in the Puerto Rico case was filed on
behalf of two prominent investigative journalists, who explained
that “developing stories on matters of immense public concern are often
complex, contentious, and murky,” and thus “inadvertent inaccuracies
are inevitable even in the most thoroughly vetted reporting.”
Throughout
the pandemic, we have witnessed constantly evolving and shifting views
among expert individuals and agencies, as they steadily gather and
analyze additional data. Yesterday’s life-endangering “disinformation”
can and has become today’s life-protecting gospel. Recall, to cite only
the most obvious example, the CDC’s changing edicts about mask-wearing.
Inherently
subjective disinformation restrictions can easily be wielded for
ulterior purposes, including to promote partisan interests. Consider,
for instance, recent evidence that the Biden administration has been
pressuring social media companies to restrict content that purportedly
purveys disinformation about COVID, in light of allegations that the
actual concerns may well involve politics at least as much as public
health. Republican members of Congress have claimed that platforms have
restricted “conservative” posts on issues related to the pandemic in
response to pressure from administration officials, even though the
posts contained no factual misrepresentations and simply conveyed
perspectives with which the administration disagreed. Whether or not
these claims are factually correct, it is true that the concept of
disinformation is so open-ended that it could be deployed against
particular communications for partisan reasons.
The
inevitable manipulability of restrictions on disinformation is well
illustrated by YouTube’s recent removal of a video for violating its
“medical misinformation policy.” The video, which had been posted by New
York Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, was of an August 2021 news conference in
which she announced a lawsuit challenging New York City Mayor Bill de
Blasio’s “vaccine passport” as an invasion of privacy and an
unreasonable mandate on small businesses. Although Malliotakis supports
vaccination, she believes that the mandate constitutes government
overreach—a position that the Supreme Court might well end up sharing.
After Malliotakis appealed YouTube’s removal, the company said that it
was “taking another look” and ultimately reinstated the video, thus
underscoring the inherent elasticity of the misinformation concept.
Whether or not YouTube actually had a good-faith health reason for its
initial removal of the video, the fact remains that the vague policy can
easily be invoked as a pretext, masking other motives.
All
the more reason, then, to be suspicious of even sincere attempts by
public and private authorities to prevent the harm that disinformation
can cause. Recall that Southern officials based their libel lawsuits
against activists and journalists during the civil rights movement on
the dissemination of inaccurate information. What we learned in that era
is that disinformation is unavoidable in any vigorous discussion of
fast-breaking public issues, and that making it punishable by law can
only inhibit democratic debate. It’s time we relearn that lesson.
ladailypost |WWII was the most devastating and
destructive wars of all time. It began when Adolph Hitler took power at a
time when Germany was economically and politically unstable. He invaded
Poland, and made treaties with Italy and Japan to enhance his ability
to dominate the entire world and proceeded to murder 6 million Jews in
what he called the “final solution”.
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)
was established when the world’s leading scientists wanted to create a
weapon that would put an end to Hitler’s plan and the unspeakable
devastation of the war.
By bringing together scientists who
could put their unique and different minds together in a rigorous way to
think and debate and create, LANL was able to win WWII and the cold war
afterwards.
Decades later, LANL seems to have lost
sight of the value of intellectual freedom and dissent. The latest
example is that LANL has asked it’s employees who choose not to take
vaccines due to their faith to either quit their job or take leave
without pay on Oct. 15.
First of all, this measure seems
medically unnecessary, since the vaccination rate at LANL is over 90
percent, which is well above the minimum rate to stop runaway
circulation of COVID-19 at the lab. On top of that, I’m amazed that in a
society of free will, more than 90 percent of people would ever choose
to do the exact same thing no matter what it is. But what’s mind
boggling is that the lab is demanding 100 percent alignment or you’re
fired!
This kind of extreme and unbending
policy is not unfamiliar to me. Growing up in a communist country, I
witnessed and experienced long brain-washing and knew people were
getting their heads cut off when 100 percent consensus wasn’t achieved.
While an individual’s utopian wishful
thinking of saving every life may make him a hero some of the time, it’s
dangerous when an organization has an utopian policy of saving every
life because the results come at the cost of other people’s lives. In
this case, life of hundreds families will put upside down in such a
short time.
Personally, I am not even anti-vaccine; I am fully vaccinated.
As a biologist and a Christian, I
understand why people choose not to vaccinate for medical or religious
reasons. Their choice came with some risks, mostly (>99%) to
themselves. Taking a risky path is usually a rare behavior in any group
and can lead to valuable contributions to society.
As an organization based on science, LANL should take the lead to protect religious freedom
Why?
Because religion, specifically
Christianity, is the father of modern science. Modern science could not
exist if there was no Christianity.
Let me explain. I was an atheist before
I became a Christian. I experienced two stages of conversion, first
emotional conversion and then rational conversion. The rational
conversion happened when I studied the history of modern science,
Christianity, and other religions. My conclusion from that study is that
modern science could only occur in a society that practices faith. In
this short writing, I will tell you briefly about my main reasonings.
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:
slate | On
Thursday, President Joe Biden went to Chicago to make his case for
COVID-19 vaccination mandates. He warned that unvaccinated Americans
were “overrunning”
hospitals—thereby crowding out patients who needed care for heart
attacks or cancer—and he accused them of jeopardizing the economy by
scaring people away from shops and restaurants. Getting vaccinated, said
the president, was a simple matter of “being patriotic, doing the right
thing.”
Biden
has been using this kind of language—moralizing the COVID debate and
vilifying noncompliant Americans—for the past month. It’s a formula that
Republicans have often exploited in other contexts. Here’s how it
works: First, you identify a politically vulnerable minority. Then you
accuse that minority of deviant behavior. You depict these people as a
threat to everyone else, and you blame them for the country’s troubles.
Over the years, conservatives have cynically applied this algorithm to
many topics, such as homosexuality, welfare, immigration, Islam, and
kneeling for the national anthem. But now it’s being turned against
Republicans, because they’ve chained their party to a genuinely deviant
minority: vaccine refusers.
For
months, Biden was patient with people who resisted vaccination. He
offered them retail discounts and paid time off from work to get a shot.
He appealed to their altruism, arguing
that most would “be convinced by the fact that their failure to get the
vaccine may cause other people to get sick and maybe die.” After four
years of Donald Trump’s divisiveness, Biden wanted unity. “We’ve had too
much conflict, too much bitterness, too much anger, too much
polarization,” he lamented in May, referring to the debate over masks. “Let’s remember that we are all in this together.”
Vaccination requirements work. They drive up vaccination rates, which makes our communities and schools safer, along with strengthening our economic recovery. Vaccine requirements are widely supported, proven successful, and quickly becoming the standard across the country. pic.twitter.com/qo1swxjbYg
Barrons |Merck
‘s announcement that its antiviral molnupiravir had halved hospitalizations
in a trial of high-risk Covid-19 patients was met with enthusiasm on
Friday, inspiring a vision of a world in which treating a Covid-19
infection could be as trivial as swallowing a few pills.
Some
scientists who have studied the drug warn, however, that the method it
uses to kill the virus that causes Covid-19 carries potential dangers
that could limit the drug’s usefulness.
Molnupiravir works by incorporating itself into the genetic material
of the virus, and then causing a huge number of mutations as the virus
replicates, effectively killing it. In some lab tests, the drug has also
shown the ability to integrate into the genetic material of mammalian
cells, causing mutations as those cells replicate.
If that were
to happen in the cells of a patient being treated with molnupiravir, it
could theoretically lead to cancer or birth defects.
Merck
(ticker: MRK) says it has run extensive tests in animals that show that
this isn’t an issue. “The totality of the data from these studies
indicates that molnupiravir is not mutagenic or genotoxic in in-vivo
mammalian systems,” a Merck spokesperson said.
Scientists who have studied NHC, the compound that molnupiravir
creates in the body after it is ingested, however, say that Merck needs
to be careful.
“Proceed with caution and at your own peril,”
wrote Raymond Schinazi, a professor of pediatrics and the director of
the division of biochemical pharmacology at the Emory University School
of Medicine, who has studied NHC for decades, in an email to Barron’s.
Scientists
are split on how serious a risk this is, and in the absence of detailed
data on Merck’s animal tests, and long-term human safety data, it’s
difficult to know for sure.
The safety concerns suggest that the
stock market’s reaction to the positive molnupiravir data on Friday
might have been overblown. Shares of Merck jumped 8.4% Friday, while
shares of Covid-19 vaccine maker
Moderna
(MNRA) fell 11.4%, and shares of
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals
(REGN), which developed one of the leading monoclonal antibodies for Covid-19, fell 5.7%.
Vir Biotechnology
(VIR), which developed another of the monoclonal antibodies in partnership with
GlaxoSmithKline
(GSK), was down 21.1%.
“It was sort of, in effect, wishful thinking,” says SVB Leerink analyst Dr. Geoffrey Porges of investors’ reactions on Friday.
CBS-4 | A Colorado woman with stage 5 renal failure was months away from
getting a new kidney. Now, she and her donor are looking for another
hospital after learning UCHealth’s new policy.
According to
UCHealth, the majority of transplant recipients and living donors are
now required to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Neither woman has
received their shots.
Leilani Lutali met her donor, Jaimee Fougner, in Bible study just 10 months ago.
“It’s your choice on what treatment you have. In Leilani’s case, the
choice has been taken from her. Her life has now been held hostage
because of this mandate,” said Fougner.
Fougner says she hasn’t
received the vaccine for religious reasons. Lutali hasn’t gotten the
shot because she says there are too many unknowns. Until last week,
neither woman thought they needed to be vaccinated for the transplant.
“At
the end of August, they confirmed that there was no COVID shot needed
at that time,” said Lutali. “Fast forward to Sept. 28. That’s when I
found out. Jamie learned they have this policy around the COVID shot for
both for the donor and the recipient.”
apnews | Scandinavian
authorities on Wednesday suspended or discouraged the use of Moderna’s
COVID-19 vaccine in young people because of an increased risk of heart
inflammation, a very rare side effect associated with the shot.
Sweden
suspended the use of Moderna for those recipients under 30, Denmark
said those under 18 won’t be offered the Swiss-made vaccine, and Norway
urged those under 30 to get the Pfizer vaccine instead.
The
countries have adequate supplies of both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines
and will be able to continue their vaccination campaigns.
In
neighboring Finland, authorities are expected to announce their
decision Thursday, according to Dr. Hanna Nohynek, chief physician at
the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, told local broadcaster
YLE.
reuters | Finland on Thursday paused the use of Moderna's (MRNA.O)
COVID-19 vaccine for younger males due to reports of a rare
cardiovascular side effect, joining Sweden and Denmark in limiting its
use.
Mika
Salminen, director of the Finnish health institute, said Finland would
instead give Pfizer's vaccine to men born in 1991 and later. Finland
offers shots to people aged 12 and over.
"A
Nordic study involving Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark found that
men under the age of 30 who received Moderna Spikevax had a slightly
higher risk than others of developing myocarditis," he said.
Swedish and Danish health officials had announced on Wednesday they would pause the use of the Moderna vaccine for all young adults and children, citing the same unpublished study.
Norwegian health officials reiterated on Wednesday that they recommended men under the age of 30 opt for Pfizer's vaccine.
The
Finnish institute said the Nordic study would be published within a
couple of weeks and preliminary data had been sent to the European
Medicines Agency (EMA) for further assessment.
npr | In the quest to get more Americans vaccinated, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: Vaccine mandates work.
Nowhere is that more apparent than at United Airlines.
On Aug. 6, United became the first U.S. airline to tell its workers to
get vaccinated against COVID-19 if they wanted to keep their jobs.
The
company says 99.5% of United employees have been vaccinated, not
counting the roughly 2,000 who have applied for religious or medical
exemptions. Elsewhere, other employers also report success with
mandates. Tyson Foods, New York City schools, major hospital systems in
Maine and the NBA are among those with vaccination rates topping 90%.
Taking
the shot isn't an easy decision for many people. One of them was
Margaret Applegate, a San Francisco-based customer service agent with
United for 29 years. She was proud of how United had handled the
pandemic up until then — the lengths the airline had gone to for keeping
workers and customers safe, even partnering with Clorox on cleaning and
disinfecting.
Now she no longer felt so proud.
Applegate, who is 57, had
not gotten vaccinated. Like many people, she was scared. She'd heard
from friends in the U.S. and abroad about bad reactions to the shots,
and she worried that the vaccine could exacerbate her heart condition.
She was also uneasy about how quickly the COVID-19 vaccines had been developed and authorized for use.
"I thought that was a little bit too rushed. It just felt too rushed," she says.
Still,
she wrestled with what to do. She was troubled by the death of a
co-worker from COVID-19 and the diminished health of another co-worker
who had been hospitalized with the virus and survived. She recognized
the vaccine mandate as her company's final push to keep employees safe.
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