Cornpop Officially Supresses Coerced Vaccination Adverse Reaction Reports

 

OSHA  |  Are adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine recordable on the OSHA recordkeeping log?

DOL and OSHA, as well as other federal agencies, are working diligently to encourage COVID-19 vaccinations. OSHA does not wish to have any appearance of discouraging workers from receiving COVID-19 vaccination, and also does not wish to disincentivize employers' vaccination efforts. As a result, OSHA will not enforce 29 CFR 1904's recording requirements to require any employers to record worker side effects from COVID-19 vaccination at least through May 2022. We will reevaluate the agency’s position at that time to determine the best course of action moving forward.

In Addition To Asset Forfeiture - Police Have Corporate-Funded Foundations

nakedcapitalism |  One thing I learned from studying with Tom Ferguson: follow the money. That’s the Golden Rule for understanding American politics and other money-driven political systems.

Alas, political scientists and other students of politics often don’t do this, for a variety of reasons, not least that they don’t want to admit – let alone document – how our entire political system is awash with money, let alone completely dominated by it.

I was therefore pleased when this report crossed my desk earlier this month, Police Foundations: A Corporate-Sponsored Threat to Democracy and Black Lives, produced by Color Of Change and Public Accountability Initiative/ LittleSis. I’d intended to write this up last week, but will instead substitute it today for a post I’d planned on vaccine mandate litigation. That’ll have to wait until I can check in again with a lawyer friend who’s in the thick of many of these lawsuits. Rest assured, these  aren’t going away and there will be ample opportunity for me discuss them soon.

The police foundation report is chock-full with good data and information and I encourage interested readers to look at it in full, especially as some graphic design considerations prevented me from reproducing data and information I’d otherwise wanted to include. In addition, the report’s organization is somewhat repetitive. One can grasp its gist by looking at the foreward and executive summary.

Any serious attempt at policy reform must come to grips with how it’s at present undermined by police foundations, which are funded by corporations who publicly proclaim support for reform and protest movements and at the same time privately funnel money that ensures nothing fundamental will change.

Corporate Funding of Police Foundations: The Problem

From the report:

On June 12, 2020, with the nation and world still reeling from the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, Atlanta police murdered Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man. Days later, after the city’s police chief resigned in shame and Brooks’ murderer was charged, Atlanta police officers staged a “blue flu” protest and called in sick.

But this isn’t the end of the story. On June 18, as Brooks’ family made funeral arrangements for their loved one, the Atlanta Police Foundation announced it would give each Atlanta police officer a $500 bonus. Again: One day after officers walked out on the job because charges were filed against their colleagues for the murder of Rayshard Brooks, the Atlanta Police Foundation rewarded police with a bonus (report, p. 3).

So, where did the money come from? Again, per the report:

Police foundations are private organizations that funnel corporate money into policing, protecting corporate interests and enabling state-sanctioned violence against Black communities and communities of color. You might be more familiar with the Atlanta Police Foundation’s sponsors: Amazon, Bank of America, Chick-fil-A, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Home Depot, Waffle House, Wells Fargo, Uber and UPS, to name a few. These are the donors we know about. As calls for accountability increased in recent years, police foundations have taken additional steps to scrub their websites and hide donor information.

There is a police foundation in nearly every major American city, behind almost every police department, backed by wealthy donors and giant multinational corporations. In 2020, many police foundations’ top corporate sponsors made public statements in support of Black Lives Matter, while providing a corporate slush fund for police (citations omitted, report, p.  3).

Lori Lightfoot Actually Started Putting Non-Compliant Chicago Police Into Unpaid Status

thehill |  The Chicago Police Department (CPD) has begun placing officers on no-pay status for not reporting their coronavirus vaccination status, Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) said Monday.

In a news conference on Monday, Lightfoot said that CPD has been reaching out to officers who are not in compliance with the vaccine mandate to ensure that they are in compliance.

Lightfoot said that a “very small number” of officers have been put on no-pay status, even after having multiple opportunities to comply with the mandate. 

The Hill has reached out to CPD for further comment.

The update comes amid a back-and-forth between the city and the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police regarding the vaccine mandate.

The deadline for officers and all other city employees to come into compliance was Friday. The police department warned in a memo that officers who choose to disobey the mandate would “become the subject of a disciplinary investigation that could result in a penalty up to and including separation from the Chicago Police Department.”

John Catanzara, president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, has repeatedly encouraged members to violate the mandate, to the point where the city sued Catanzara over his encouragement. A judge ruled Friday that he could no longer publicly discourage people from complying with the mandate.  

Under the city’s vaccine mandate, employees must report whether they are vaccinated, have an exemption, or will be undergoing weekly testing. The testing option is only available through Dec. 31, after which all employees will need to be vaccinated or have an exemption.  

As of Monday, 13 out of the city’s 35 departments are at 100 percent compliance, and another 29 departments are at 95 percent compliance, Lightfoot said.

Overall, 79 percent of city employees have reported their vaccination status, of which 84 percent are fully vaccinated. When not accounting for police and fire department employees, 96 percent of city employees are in compliance, of which 80 percent are fully vaccinated. 

If You Take Out Police And Fire Departments....,

nbcchicago |  While more than 8,000 Chicago police members have complied with the city's COVID-19 vaccine mandate, thousands still haven't done so, city officials revealed Monday, two days after the vaccination requirement for city workers went into effect.

A showdown over the requirement has enveloped the city for days, with the head of Chicago's Fraternal Order Police asking his members to defy the city’s COVID vaccine policies. A restraining order was issued against FOP President John Catanzara Friday, barring him from making public comments urging members to not comply.

On Monday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot spoke at a news conference where she revealed a total 79% of city employees have confirmed their vaccination status, and of those, 84% have been fully vaccinated. 

City officials also released compliance data, revealing the Chicago Police Department had the lowest response rate among the more than 30 city departments.

Approximately 64.42% or 8,226 of the department's 12,770 members, complied with the mandate, submitting their vaccination status through an online portal before the Friday deadline.

More than 35% of employees, approximately 4,500 people, haven't submitted their vaccination status.

It's unclear how many officers haven't complied as the numbers provided include both sworn Chicago police officers and civilian employees.

Of the more than 8,200 CPD employees who responded, 1,333 said they haven't been vaccinated against COVID-19.

Under the city's rules, employees who weren't vaccinated by Oct. 15 need to get tested twice a week on their own time and expense until the end of the year, when they will be required to be vaccinated. Any employee not complying with those requirements could face disciplinary action, including and up to termination.

City officials have said there is no requirement to enter detailed medical information — only vaccination status and proof of vaccination.

"There is information online saying that people are being requested to upload private medical records, lots of medical history, DNA sample - none of that is true," Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady previously said.

The city has a similar COVID-19 vaccine requirement for employees of city schools, which the Chicago Teachers Union supported.

 

The UnVaccinated Are Not Who You've Been Instructed To Believe They Are

NYTimes |  Then there is the health system’s long-documented mistreatment of Black people (and other minorities) in this country. Black people are less likely to be given pain medication or even treatment for life-threatening emergencies, for instance. I thought of those statistics while reading the poignant story of a Black physician who could not persuade her mother to get vaccinated because her mother’s previous interactions with the medical system included passing out after screaming in agony when a broken arm got manipulated and X-rayed without sufficient care for her pain.

While the racial gap in vaccination has improved over the last year — nonwhite people were more likely to express caution and a desire to wait and see rather than to be committed anti-vaxxers — it’s still there.

In New York, for example, only 42 percent of African Americans of all ages (and 49 percent among adults) are fully vaccinated — the lowest rate among all demographic groups tracked by the city.

This is another area in which the dominant image of the white, QAnon-spouting, Tucker Carlson-watching conspiracist anti-vaxxer dying to own the libs is so damaging. It can lead us to ignore the problem of racialized health inequities with deep historic roots but also ongoing repercussions, and prevent us from understanding that there are different kinds of vaccine hesitancy, which require different approaches.

Just ask Nicki Minaj.

About a month ago, the rap artist made headlines after tweeting that she was worried about vaccines because she had heard from her cousin that a friend of his had swollen testicles after being vaccinated. (Experts pointed out that, even if this had happened, it was most likely caused by a sexually transmitted disease.) She was justifiably denounced for spreading misinformation.

But something else that Minaj said caught my eye. She wrote that she hadn’t done “enough research” yet, but that people should keep safe “in the meantime” by wearing “the mask with 2 strings that grips your head & face. Not that loose one.”

“Wear a good mask while researching vaccines” is not the sentiment of a denier. She seemed genuinely concerned about Covid, even to the point that she seemed to understand that N95s, the high-quality masks that medical professionals wear, which have the “2 strings that grips your head & face,” were much safer.

Lazer said that the Covid States Project’s research showed that unvaccinated people who nonetheless wore masks were, indeed, more likely to be Black women. In contrast, those who were neither vaccinated nor masked were more likely to be Republicans, and more likely to be rural, less educated and white. (Among the vaccinated, Asian Americans were most likely to be still wearing masks.)

 

Unvaccinated Looking Smarter Every Week

americanthinker |  There is a massive propaganda push against those choosing not to vaccinate against COVID-19 with the experimental mRNA vaccines. Mainstream media, the big tech corporations, and our government have combined efforts to reward compliance and to shame and marginalize non-compliance. Their mantra says that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Persons who choose not to vaccinate are characterized as unintelligent, selfish, paranoid people who don’t read much and live in a trailer park in Florida (or Alabama, or Texas, or name your state). Never has there been such an effort to cajole, manipulate through fear, and penalize people to take an experimental medical treatment.

However, as time has passed with this pandemic and more data accumulates about the virus and the vaccine, the unvaccinated are looking smarter and smarter with each passing week. It has been shown now that the vaccinated equally catch and spread the virus. Vaccine side effect data continues to accumulate that make the risk of taking the vaccine prohibitive as the pandemic wanes. Oral and IV medications (flccc.net) that work early in the treatment of COVID-19 are much more attractive to take now as the vaccine risks are becoming known, especially because the vaccinated will need endless boosters every six months.

First, let’s address the intelligence of the unvaccinated. Vaccine hesitancy is multi-factorial and has little to do with level of education or intelligence. Carnegie Mellon University did a study assessing vaccine hesitancy across educational levels. According to the study, what’s the educational level with the most vaccine hesitancy? Ph.D. level! Those can't all have been awarded to liberal arts majors. Clearly, scientists who can read the data and assess risk are among the least likely to take the mRNA vaccines.

The claim that there’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated is, therefore, patently untrue. As a retired nurse from California recently asked, “Why do the protected need to be protected from the unprotected by forcing the unprotected to use the protection that did not protect the protected in the first place?” If the vaccine works to prevent infection, then the vaccinated have nothing to worry about. If the vaccine does not prevent infection, then the vaccinated remain at some risk, and the unvaccinated would be less likely to choose a vaccine that does not work well.

The mRNA vaccine efficacy is very narrow and focused on the original alpha strain of COVID-19. By targeting one antigen group on the spike protein, it does help for the original alpha strain, but it is clear now it does not protect against Delta strain and is likely not protective against any future strains that might circulate. It also appears that the efficacy wanes in 4-6 months, leading to discussions about boosters.

Several authors have pointed out that vaccinating with a “leaky” vaccine during a pandemic is driving the virus to escape by creating variants. If the booster is just another iteration of the same vaccine, it likely won’t help against the new strain but will, instead, produce evolutionary pressure on the virus to produce even more variants and expose us to more side effects. Why, then, is this booster strategy for everyone being pursued?

This vast Phase 3 clinical trial of mRNA vaccines in which Americans are participating mostly out of fear is not going well. It is abundantly clear for anyone advocating for public health that the vaccination program should be stopped. Iceland has just stopped giving the Moderna vaccine to anyone which is a good step in the right direction. Sweden, Denmark, and Finland have banned the Moderna vaccine for anyone under the age of 30.

VAERS, our vaccine adverse effect reporting system, showed at the beginning of this week 16,000 deaths, 23,000 disabilities, 10,000 MI/myocarditis, 87,000 urgent care visits, 75,000 hospital stays, and 775,000 total adverse events. The VAERS system is widely known to under-report events, with an estimated 90 to 99% of events going unreported there.

Lil'Fauci Can't Think Of A Single Thing He's Done To Piss People Off...,

BI  |  Dr. Anthony Fauci said he's become a polarizing figure during the pandemic because he stands with "science, data, and hard facts" instead of conspiracy theories.

"I have stood for always making science, data, and evidence, be what we guide ourselves by," Fauci said in an interview with "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace. "And I think people who feel differently, who have conspiracy theories, who deny reality, that's looking them straight in the eye."

Wallace told Fauci that at the start of the pandemic he was seen as an "authority on infectious disease" but that he became a "polarizing figure" over time, with critics accusing him of  "sending mixed messages."

Fauci said he stood by the truth and that that's "inconvenient" for people who believe in conspiracy theories. 

"Those are people that don't particularly care for me, and that's understandable because what I do, and I try very hard, is to be guided by the truth," he said. "And sometimes the truth becomes inconvenient for some people, so they react against me."

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is considered the nation's top infectious disease expert. He has been a central part of the country's COVID-19 response, serving on former President Donald Trump's task force and now as the Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden.

When asked by Wallace if anything he has done has contributed to him becoming a polarizing figure, Fauci said he couldn't answer because he couldn't think of anything.

MIT Davos Weasel Dick Misleadership Strikes Again....,

 

MIT | To the members of the MIT community,

 

You may have heard about a situation centered on our Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) regarding an invited speaker, Professor Dorian Abbot.

 

In a recent letter to the faculty, Provost Marty Schmidt lays out the facts, some of which have not come through clearly in the media and on social media. I encourage you to read his letter. You will also find thorough coverage in The Tech.

 

The controversy around this situation has caused great distress for many members of our community, in many quarters. It has also uncovered significant differences within the Institute on several issues.

 

I would like to reflect on what happened and set us on a path forward. But let me address the human questions first.

 

To the members of the EAPS community: I am deeply disturbed that as a direct result of this situation, many of you – students, postdocs, faculty and young alumni – have suffered a tide of online targeting and hate mail from outside MIT. This conduct is reprehensible and utterly unacceptable. For members of the MIT community, where we value treating one another with decency and respect, this feels especially jarring.

 

I encourage anyone who is subjected to harassing or threatening behavior or language to reach out for support and guidance to the Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response (IDHR) office.

 

I also want to express my tremendous respect for Professor Rob van der Hilst, department head in EAPS, who faced a difficult situation. I know Rob as a person of the highest integrity and character. We are fortunate to have his leadership in EAPS. In this case, when Rob concluded, after consulting broadly, that EAPS could not host an effective public outreach event centered around Professor Abbot, he chose to extend instead an invitation for an on-campus lecture; Rob took this step deliberately to preserve the opportunity for free dialogue and open scientific exchange.

 

Professor Abbot is a distinguished scientist who remains welcome to speak on the MIT campus, and he has been working with EAPS to confirm the event details.

 

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that this matter has caused many people inside and outside our community to question the Institute’s commitment to free expression. Some report feeling that certain topics are now off limits at MIT. I have heard these concerns directly from faculty colleagues, alumni and others who care deeply about the Institute.

 

Let me say clearly what I have observed through more than 40 years at MIT:

 

Freedom of expression is a fundamental value of the Institute.

 

I believe that, as an institution of higher learning, we must ensure that different points of view – even views that some or all of us may reject – are allowed to be heard and debated at MIT. Open dialogue is how we make each other wiser and smarter.

 

This commitment to free expression can carry a human cost. The speech of those we strongly disagree with can anger us. It can disgust us. It can even make members of our own community feel unwelcome and illegitimate on our campus or in their field of study.

 

I am convinced that, as an institution, we must be prepared to endure such painful outcomes as the price of protecting free expression – the principle is that important.

 

I am equally certain, however, that when members of our community must bear the cost of other people’s free expression, they deserve our understanding and support. We need to ensure that they, too, have the opportunity to express their own views.

Elite Capture Moral Cowardice And Epistemic Deference

thephilosopher |  A fuller and fairer assessment of what is going on with deference and standpoint epistemology would go beyond technical argument, and contend with the emotional appeals of this strategy of deference. Those in powerful rooms may be “elites” relative to the larger group they represent, but this guarantees nothing about how they are treated in the rooms they are in. After all, a person privileged in an absolute sense (a person belonging to, say, the half of the world that has secure access to “basic needs”) may nevertheless feel themselves to be consistently on the low end of the power dynamics they actually experience. Deference epistemology responds to real, morally weighty experiences of being put down, ignored, sidelined, or silenced. It thus has an important non-epistemic appeal to members of stigmatized or marginalized groups: it intervenes directly in morally consequential practices of giving attention and respect. 

The social dynamics we experience have an outsize role in developing and refining our political subjectivity, and our sense of ourselves. But this very strength of standpoint epistemology – its recognition of the importance of perspective – becomes its weakness when combined with deferential practical norms. Emphasis on the ways we are marginalized often matches the world as we have experienced it. But, from a structural perspective, the rooms we never needed to enter (and the explanations of why we can avoid these rooms) might have more to teach us about the world and our place in it. If so, the deferential approach to standpoint epistemology actually prevents “centring” or even hearing from the most marginalized; it focuses us on the interaction of the rooms we occupy, rather than calling us to account for the interactions we don’t experience. This fact about who is in the room, combined with the fact that speaking for others generates its own set of important problems (particularly when they are not there to advocate for themselves), eliminates pressures that might otherwise trouble the centrality of our own suffering – and of the suffering of the marginalized people that do happen to make it into rooms with us.

The dangers with this feature of deference politics are grave, as are the risks for those outside of the most powerful rooms. For those who are deferred to, it can supercharge group-undermining norms. In Conflict is Not Abuse, Sarah Schulman makes a provocative observation about the psychological effects of both trauma and felt superiority: while these often come about for different reasons and have very different moral statuses, they result in similar behavioural patterns. Chief among these are misrepresenting the stakes of conflict (often by overstating harm) or representing others’ independence as a hostile threat (such as failures to “centre” the right topics or people). These behaviours, whatever their causal history, have corrosive effects on individuals who perform them as well as the groups around them, especially when a community’s norms magnify or multiply these behaviours rather than constraining or metabolizing them.

For those who defer, the habit can supercharge moral cowardice. The norms provide social cover for the abdication of responsibility: it displaces onto individual heroes, a hero class, or a mythicized past the work that is ours to do now in the present. Their perspective may be clearer on this or that specific matter, but their overall point of view isn’t any less particular or constrained by history than ours. More importantly, deference places the accountability that is all of ours to bear onto select people – and, more often than not, a hyper-sanitized and thoroughly fictional caricature of them.

The same tactics of deference that insulate us from criticism also insulate us from connection and transformation. They prevent us from engaging empathetically and authentically with the struggles of other people – prerequisites of coalitional politics. As identities become more and more fine-grained and disagreements sharper, we come to realize that “coalitional politics” (understood as struggle across difference) is, simply, politics. Thus, the deferential orientation, like that fragmentation of political collectivity it enables, is ultimately anti-political.

Deference rather than interdependence may soothe short-term psychological wounds. But it does so at a steep cost: it can undermine the epistemic goals that motivate the project, and it entrenches a politics unbefitting of anyone fighting for freedom rather than for privilege, for collective liberation rather than mere parochial advantage.

The Origin Of All Political Power Is In The Barrel Of A Gun

thesenecaeffect | The Monastic order of the Templars (Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici), was founded in 1119 as a military force to defend the Christian holdings in the Holy Land. In time, the order evolved into a financial structure: the Templars became bankers and they developed a sophisticated money transfer system that helped pilgrims and warriors to move to and from the Holy Land and to transfer money from Europe to Palestine and back. They have been termed "the first multinational corporation" in history. 

As you may imagine, the Templars were rich, despite the term "pauperes" (poor fellows) in their name. They had land, castles, palaces, and, of course, plenty of gold and silver. The problem was that, with the loss of the last lands controlled by the Christian crusaders in the Holy Land, at the end of the 13th century, they had become useless: no more crusades, no need of a banking system to finance them. 

At that point, the Templars attracted the attention of the king of France, Phillip IV, in dire need of money, as kings normally are. In 1307, he ordered the arrest of all Templars and the confiscation of their properties.  Most of the leaders were burned at the stake after that they had confessed under torture all sorts of evil misbehaviors: spit on the cross, deny Christ, engage in indecent kissing, worship the devil, and other niceties. 

As exterminations go, this one didn't involve large numbers: we read of 54 executions in France in 1310. Probably there were more in other countries, but the total cannot be higher than a few hundred. Nevertheless, it had a big impact: it is said that the fame of Friday the 13th as an unlucky day originates from the date of the arrest of the Templars: Friday, October 13, 1307.

The question is, of course, can it happen again? How about our class of hyper-rich, the "100 billion dollar club," that includes well-known names such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and a few more? They are clearly going to become trillionaires in the near future. But a house full of gold is hard to defend, as we read in the Tao Te Ching. Could our Internet barons follow the destiny that long ago befell another class of financial tycoons, the Templars?

As usual, the key to the future is in the past. Examining the destiny of the Templars, we may understand the factors that may lead to the extermination of a powerful (but not enough) financial guild. 

First of all, why were the Templars exterminated? I argued in previous posts (one, two, and three) that certain categories of people can be exterminated and their possessions confiscated when they are 1) wealthy, 2) clearly identifiable, and 3) militarily weak, The Templars clearly satisfied the first two rules but not necessarily the third: after all, they were a military order. Yet, when the King of France descended on them, they didn't even try a military reaction. It may be that the prowess of the Templar Knights was much overrated: they were more like a private police force for a financial organization, not a real military force. But it may also be that it was exactly the presence of this force that hastened their downfall. Sometimes, a little military power may be worse than none at all, since it invites a decapitation strike. This is probably what happened to the Templars, exterminated just to make sure that they would not become a threat. 

The story of the Templars is just an example of a power struggle that has very ancient origins. One of the earliest written texts we have was written by the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna who complained with the Goddess that her temple had been desecrated by a local warlord. Enheduanna does not say if the warlord was after the temple's money, but we know that, at that time, temples were also banks, a tradition that remained unchanged for millennia. For instance, as late as during the first century AD, we have the record of a local leader who raided the temple of Jerusalem and attacked the resident bankers, most likely in order to finance an armed insurrection against the Roman governor. 

Temples and warlords remained in an uneasy relationship with each other during the Roman Empire, but a few centuries later, raiding Pagan temples became the normal way to finance the Roman armies, a tradition started by Emperor Constantine 1st ("The Great") during the early 4th century AD. Less than a century later, Emperor Theodosius 1st ("The Great") was the last emperor who still could find Pagan temples to raid for their gold and silver. Then, no more temples, and no more Roman Empire.

Elite Capture: If You Believe Marc Benioff Is A Good Guy - Why Is San Francisco So Squalid?

NPR  |  Benioff's outspokenness is part of his brand. He frequently and forcefully weighs in on controversial issues, including gun policy, human rights, climate change, and politics more broadly.

He is an evangelist for changing the way companies do business, a defender of what's called "stakeholder capitalism," or the belief that corporations should look beyond just the interests of its employees or shareholders and customers.

"We need a new capitalism that is more fair, more equitable, more sustainable," he told CNBC. "Capitalism that values not just all shareholders, but all stakeholders."

Benioff defines "stakeholder" more broadly than most of his contemporaries.

In a recent interview with NPR, Benioff said the planet is a Salesforce stakeholder, and so is the homeless community in San Francisco, where his company has its headquarters, and where his family has lived for four generations.

It's a kind of advocacy few other CEOs have engaged in, according to Benioff.

"When I first started, I don't think there were a lot of CEOs who were willing to speak out and really take positions outside of, maybe, their product," he told NPR.

But that's starting to change — slowly.

In 2015, when Indiana passed a law that would have made it easier for business owners to deny services to same-sex couples because of religious beliefs, Benioff was joined by other CEOs, including Apple's Tim Cook and organizations like NCAA in denouncing the law.

That forced then-Governor Mike Pence to amend the law.

Last year, in a moment that seemed to represent a turning point for corporate America, executives widely condemned the killing of George Floyd, and many pledged to address racial inequality both within their companies and in society at large.

However, many company executives continue to stay away from hot-button issues.

 

 

Is Fuck You Money A Prerequisite For Freedom Of Speech, Freedom Of Choice, and Moral Bravery?

Chappelle IS The GOAT - AND - The GOAT Is Unapologetically Black! Accept No Substitutes...,

slate |  Dave Chappelle is getting plenty of heat for his latest Netflix special, The Closer. Chappelle’s 72-minute bit is squarely aimed at setting the record straight after being widely criticized for his previous specials in which he belittles trans people, gay people, and survivors of sexual violence. He says this is his intention right at the start. We should take him at his word. His routine—controversial as it is—accomplished exactly what he set out to do.

What that accomplishment reveals is not that he isn’t funny (he is). It’s not just that he is punching down (he is) or that his jokes haven’t aged well (they haven’t). His latest special confirms once and for all Chappelle was never the progressive darling many thought him to be. In 2019, when Chappelle won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, Jon Stewart called him the “Black Bourdain,” a nod to the widely loved chef and documentarian whose work explored the intricacies of the human condition.

That characterization is somewhat understandable. The beauty, and ultimate demise, of Chappelle’s Show was that he deftly and publicly explored the trials and tribulations of Black life. At the time, his comedy was provocative, novel, even revelatory. It makes sense we expected the same nuance with respect to other oppressed groups. But ultimately we were just projecting onto him something that wasn’t actually reflected in his work. We expected an intersectional analysis where none existed.

The line that runs through all of Chappelle’s comedy is that anti-Blackness is the Final Boss of all oppressions. Everyone else’s pain and suffering isn’t as bad by comparison, and therefore doesn’t deserve the level of outrage and attention it currently gets in progressive circles. Consider one of his opening jokes in The Closer. “I’d like to start by addressing the LGBTQ community directly,” he says with a smirk. “I want every member in that community to know that I come in peace, and I hope to negotiate the release of DaBaby.” Chappelle acknowledges that DaBaby made “a very egregious mistake” when he made disparaging comments about people living with HIV/AIDS while onstage at a concert in Miami in July. But then the joke takes a turn.

 

White People Can Joke About Things Black People Can't...,

zora |  Dave Chapelle addressed the primarily white attempts to cancel Black celebrities for offending the LGBTQ community, even as White pockets in those communities "punch down" at Black people. That being said, Dave Chapelle made some pretty shocking statements about sex and gender politics. For example, "Sex is assigned at birth" and "Gender refers to how someone self-identifies." So, in that respect, I think it's wrong for the trans community to insist that he is inherently transphobic in identifying these distinctions (which we use in the medical community). It’s not our differences that are problematic — it’s the way people treat us for them that is problematic. These accusations only close the door to a conversation we need to have.

All I ask of your community, with all humility: Will you please stop punching down on my people? (Dave Chapelle)

White people often refer to Black people as racist for talking about race, and it seems that now White people are calling Dave Chapelle transphobic for discussing the trans community. Yet, he never made a statement diminishing their lives, their worth in the community, or their plight. People need to wake up and realize we can't live in a race-neutral society just because folks don't want to talk about race, and we can't live in a gender-neutral society because folks feel uneasy about the conversation. Instead, we need to embrace our differences and fight against the ignorant messaging out there.

I can’t help but see the irony here because as a Millenial, I’m old enough to remember when White people made a movie called “Team America” in which the characters sang the song “Everybody Has Aids.” At the time, no one accused them of being homophobic which is why I raised an eye-brow when DaBaby’s statements about HIV/AIDS were automatically assumed homophobic.

Society is shifting and I believe it’s doing so for the better. But, I’m seeing a lot of ignorance being labeled as cruelty and that actually serves to diminish the point that marginalized folks are making. In other words, “don’t cry wolf because when the real hateful person comes along, everyone will tune out.” They will be effectively desensitized to the violence that we experience for being Black, gay, disabled, or just different.

America is an odd show to watch. Somehow, White people can joke about things Black people can't. When we do it, we're homophobic, and when they do it, everyone laughs. I think that there is a double standard here, and that's what Dave Chapelle was trying to bring to the forefront. Too bad the loudest voices on this issue want us to believe that Dave Chapelle hates gay people.

Chapelle can joke about Whiteness, Blackness, conservativism, progressivism, poverty, crime, but not the gay community. That makes no sense to me. So, while many people are jumping on the bandwagon to cancel or punish Dave Chapelle, I'm not on board because he never said anything hateful about the community. He only exposed his bias towards heteronormativity, which could provide an opportunity for his continued education and growth. Sadly, White folks are just out to cancel him.

Roxanne Gay Isn't Relevant To Any Black Person I've Ever Met (Or Would Care To Meet)

NYTimes |  Mr. Chappelle spends much of “The Closer,” his latest comedy special for Netflix, cleverly deflecting criticism. The set is a 72-minute display of the comedian’s own brittleness. The self-proclaimed “GOAT” (greatest of all time) of stand-up delivers five or six lucid moments of brilliance, surrounded by a joyless tirade of incoherent and seething rage, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia.

If there is brilliance in “The Closer,” it’s that Mr. Chappelle makes obvious but elegant rhetorical moves that frame any objections to his work as unreasonable. He’s just being “brutally honest.” He’s just saying the quiet part out loud. He’s just stating “facts.” He’s just making us think. But when an entire comedy set is designed as a series of strategic moves to say whatever you want and insulate yourself from valid criticism, I’m not sure you’re really making comedy.

Throughout the special, Mr. Chappelle is singularly fixated on the L.G.B.T.Q. community, as he has been in recent years. He reaches for every low-hanging piece of fruit and munches on it gratuitously. Many of Mr. Chappelle’s rants are extraordinarily dated, the kind of comedy you might expect from a conservative boomer, agog at the idea of homosexuality. At times, his voice lowers to a hoarse whisper, preparing us for a grand stroke of wisdom — but it never comes. Every once in a while, he remarks that, oh, boy, he’s in trouble now, like a mischievous little boy who just can’t help himself.

Somewhere, buried in the nonsense, is an interesting and accurate observation about the white gay community conveniently being able to claim whiteness at will. There’s a compelling observation about the relatively significant progress the L.G.B.T.Q. community has made, while progress toward racial equity has been much slower. But in these formulations, there are no gay Black people. Mr. Chappelle pits people from different marginalized groups against one another, callously suggesting that trans people are performing the gender equivalent of blackface.

In the next breath, Mr. Chappelle says something about how a Black gay person would never exhibit the behaviors to which he objects, an assertion many would dispute. The poet Saeed Jones, for example, wrote in GQ that watching “The Closer” felt like a betrayal: “I felt like I’d just been stabbed by someone I once admired and now he was demanding that I stop bleeding.”

Later in the show, Mr. Chappelle offers rambling thoughts on feminism using a Webster’s Dictionary definition, further exemplifying how limited his reading is. He makes a tired, tired joke about how he thought “feminist” meant “frumpy dyke” — and hey, I get it. If I were on his radar, he would consider me a frumpy dyke, or worse. (Some may consider that estimation accurate. Fortunately my wife doesn’t.) Then in another of those rare moments of lucidity, Mr. Chappelle talks about mainstream feminism’s historical racism. Just when you’re thinking he is going to right the ship, he starts ranting incoherently about #MeToo. I couldn’t tell you what his point was there.

This is a faded simulacrum of the once-great comedian, who now uses his significant platform to air grievances against the great many people he holds in contempt, while deftly avoiding any accountability. If we don’t like his routine, the message is, we are the problem, not him.

"In Our Country, You Can Shoot And Kill A N-gga But You Better Not Hurt A Gay Person’s Feelings."

GQ  |  In the show’s opening minutes, under the auspices of updating the audience on his pandemic experience — he got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine: “Give me the third best option! I’ll have what the homeless people are having!” — Chappelle makes it clear that, in addition to being entertaining, he’s out to test our limits because, it becomes increasingly clear, he believes we need to have our limits tested. A few breaths after likening his immune system fighting coronavirus to Black people violently beating up Asian-Americans, Chappelle surveys the gasping audience and says “It’s gonna get worse than that. Hang in there; it’s gonna get way worse.”

And then it does. Discussing DaBaby, for example, Chappelle opines “In our country, you can shoot and kill a n-gga but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings." Never mind that DaBaby’s onstage comments about AIDS at the Rolling Loud festival were truly out of pocket, or that the apology that followed was late and lackluster, or that DaBaby eventually took the apology back.

By the time Chappelle declares that “gender is a fact” and that he’s “Team TERF” in solidarity with J.K. Rowling, I turned my television off because I wasn’t having fun anymore. And part of freedom as I experience it is that I don’t owe Dave Chappelle any of my time.

Maybe you watch comedy specials to endure them, but I watch them to have a good time, and I stop watching them when that’s no longer the case. Chappelle argues this makes me "too sensitive, too brittle"; I just think I have better things to do than watch a standup set that could just as well have been a Fox News special. As a gay Black man, even when I’m watching a comedy special, my identity is inconveniently present. It’s so annoying; I asked my queerness to chill in the other room so I could watch "The Closer" in peace, but no such luck.

 

My Trust In Biden And My Trust In Goo - I Loves Both Like A Rock In My Shoe....,

WaPo |  For generations we’ve had vaccine mandates, particularly for childhood diseases, in every state plus D.C. Few thought to call this tyranny because communities have a duty to maintain public health, and individuals have a duty to reasonably accommodate the common good — even if this means allowing your child to be injected with a substance carrying a minuscule risk of harm.

So there can be no objection rooted in principle to vaccine mandates, unless you want to question them all the way down to measles, mumps and rubella. The problem must be covid-19 in particular.

If the coronavirus vaccines are risky, experimental concoctions with frequent side effects, then government and business mandates are social coercion run amok. We might as well mandate vaping.

But if these vaccines are carefully tested and encourage greater immunity to a deadly disease, with minimal risk of side effects, then the “heroism” of vaccine resisters takes on a different connotation: It means resisters are less courageous and more selfish than your average 6-year-old getting a second MMR dose. Perhaps vaccine mandates should be modified to include lollipops for whingeing malcontents.

So which view is correct? If only there were empirical means, some scientific method, to test the matter. If only there had been three phases of clinical trials, involving tens of thousands of volunteers, demonstrating the drugs to be safe and effective. If only the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration were constantly monitoring safety concerns about the vaccines. If only we could estimate the number of covid deaths that might have been prevented if vaccine uptake were higher.

To break the suspense — we do live in such a world. “From June through September 2021,” concluded a recent Peterson-KFF report, “approximately 90,000 covid-19 deaths among adults likely would have been prevented with vaccination.” So the matter is simple: Who is making vaccination more likely to take place, and who is not?

In this light, it’s hard to blame the small group of workers who have been misled into believing that liberty is the right to infect your neighbors with a deadly pathogen. The main fault lies with the media outlets that spotlight and elevate such people, and with political figures who seek their political dreams by encouraging lethal ignorance.

Eugene Robinson Makes A Responsible Negroe Attack On Kyrie Irving

WaPo  |  Kyrie Irving is a thrillingly talented basketball player, a former Rookie of the Year, a seven-time All-Star and a gold medalist for Team USA. But I look forward to not watching him work his magic this season — as long as he refuses to do the right thing and get vaccinated against the coronavirus.

This isn’t the first time Irving has courted controversy. But the skepticism he and other holdouts have propagated and the wishy-washy stances even some of their vaccinated colleagues have taken, are worth addressing seriously — and not just for what they say about the fight against the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The best way to show respect for athletes as political actors and philanthropists is to push back when they’re wrong — especially when the stakes are this high.

Irving plays for the Brooklyn Nets, and the city of New York mandates that Nets players be vaccinated before they can play in their home arenas. Irving is the only stubbornly unvaccinated Net. Since he would have to sit out roughly half the team’s schedule, Nets management has wisely decided it’s best he not play at all.

A performative iconoclast, Irving posted an I’m-the-victim justification on Instagram Live. “It’s bigger than the game,” he said. “I came into the season thinking I was just going to be able to play ball. . . . Why are you putting it on me?”

Cue the violins.

I don’t respect his “choice” at all. As for why we’re “putting it on” him, we are battling together to defeat a highly infectious virus that has killed more than 720,000 Americans. We have a trio of safe and effective vaccines that slow the spread of the virus and confer miraculous protection against serious illness and death. Irving’s choice threatens not just his own health but also, should he be infected, that of his fellow players, his coaches and trainers, the referees who call the games, and the fans who come to see the Nets play.

Irving clearly understands the privileges that come with his stardom, including the ability to get millions of people to listen to whatever he has to say. A few years ago, he drew worldwide attention by claiming, with a straight face, that he believed the world is flat. “I do research on both sides,” he said in 2017. “I’m not against anyone that thinks the Earth is round. I’m not against anyone that thinks it’s flat. I just love hearing the debate.”

He later apologized. “At the time, I was, like, huge into conspiracies,” he said. “And everybody’s been there.”

That’s precisely the problem. Far too many Americans are “huge into conspiracies,” and it is deeply irresponsible for famous athletes to encourage them to go down the anti-vaccine rabbit hole.