Sanjay Gupta Equivocating: Here Is A Headline: Joe Rogan Agreed To Get Vaccinated

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."

 

 

 

 

MatterDaddy KarenWaffen Twitter Celebrates Fallout From The NeoVaccinoid Mandate

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

— Jeff Tiedrich (@itsJeffTiedrich) October 13, 2021

Lesko Brandon Using Your Employers Power To Mandate Jabs And Terminate For Cause If You Refuse

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,” said that 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.

Lesko Brandon Needs To Start Punishing Citizens Who Question Or Disobey His Mandates!

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.

Biden Should Force NeoVaccinoidation On Americans Whether We Want It Or Not!!!

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.

Southwest Airlines Widespread Cancellations Blamed On NeoVaccinoid Mandate

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.

Hundreds Of Thousands Of U.S. Troops Have Not Complied With Cornpop's NeoVaccinoid Mandate

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 attributed to 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 jeopardize how 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. 

L.A. Firefighters File Intent To Sue Over The City's NeoVaccinoid Mandate

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.

Generally POTUS Don't Do Stunts - But The CIA Guy Thinks This Could Be An Exception....,

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 further leaves out that as an Illinois state senator, he partook in pay-to-play schemes granting favors to political donors like slumlord Tony Rezko who helped him purchase his Hyde Park mansion for below market value, and the CEO of a technology firm, Robert Blacwell Jr., who paid Obama $112,000 in legal fees for work that appears impossible for him to have done.

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]

Interesting How The MSM Has Ignored State Sanctioned Plans To Assassinate Julian Assange

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).

As is typical of stories that embarrass the Western intelligence services, independent media provided crucial relief to the backdrop of chilling indifference, with the Grayzone’s Aaron Maté (YouTube, 9/30/21) conducting a rigorous interview with one of the report’s authors, Michael Isikoff.

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.

Congress: Ivermectin For ME - DEATH - FOR THEE!!!

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'

— Pierre Kory, MD MPA (@PierreKory) October 8, 2021

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).

 

Steven Pinker: Few Things More Cynical And Destructive Than A Professional Elite Ass-Kisser

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.

The Real Culture War Is A Battle Between What People Need vs What Money Wants

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.

 

Government Punishment Of Disinformation Is Fundamentally Antithetical To Democracy

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.

Let My Brothers And Sisters Work

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.

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty Puts Everything On The Line In Defense Of Truth And Principles

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:

Is Joe Biden Winning The Culture War Over The Mark Of The Beast mRNA NeoVaccinoids?

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.

Unlike Muslims or gay people, vaccine refusers really do pose an inherent threat to others. Yet Republican politicians proudly embrace them. In Congress, state legislatures, and the courts, conservative governors and lawmakers are fighting to block vaccine requirements—even requirements imposed by private employers—as the virus kills thousands of Americans each week. These politicians accuse progressives of “shaming” vaccine refusers and treating them like “second-class pariahs.” Often, they borrow language from the abortion rights movement, framing vaccination as a matter of “personal choice.” Last week, Sen. Ted Cruz defended NBA players who have declined COVID shots, tweeting “#yourbodyyourchoice.” On Tuesday, another abortion opponent, Sen. Mike Lee, pleaded that unvaccinated Americans “just want to make their own medical decisions.” His fellow pro-lifer, Sen. Ron Johnson, told vaccine proponents to butt out because “it’s not your body.”

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.”

 

 

Cornpop Doesn't Know That The mRNA Therapeutics Don't Prevent Covid Infection Or Transmission...,

 

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

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) October 7, 2021

Uh..., About That $700.00/Dose Merck Anti-Covid Pill Though....,

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.

 

Is There A Tipping-Point Where The Wrong Little Person Get's Crushed By The NeoVaccinoid Mandate?

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.”

The women received this letter from UCHealth: