Jabbed Bish-Made Presstitutes Straight Hating On Djokovic...,

WaPo  |  Novak Djokovic, the top-ranked men’s tennis player in the world, does not deserve to play in the Australian Open. His flouting of the country’s coronavirus vaccination regime has nothing to do with “freedom” — and everything to do with the persecution complex he cultivates as a source of motivation.

The Open is arguably the most important international sporting event on the calendar in Oz. But if I were an Australian citizen, I’d be livid at the idea that Djokovic could waltz into the country — defiantly unvaccinated — and blithely go about staking his claim as tennis’s greatest of all time. I’d remember the early phase of the pandemic, when thousands of Aussies were stranded abroad for weeks or even months, barred from coming home. I’d remember the repeated lockdowns that were among the strictest and most punishing in the world.

Despite a judge’s ruling on Monday allowing Djokovic to remain in the country and compete, I’d want the government to use all its power to bar him anyway. And if all else failed and he ended up taking the court in Melbourne next week, I’d refuse to watch him play despite his undeniable, exquisite talent.

Djokovic, who is from Serbia, has won 20 singles titles in the four major tournaments — Wimbledon and the Australian, French and U.S. Opens — which leaves him tied with Roger Federer of Switzerland and Rafael Nadal of Spain as the greatest male tennis player of the Open era. Federer and Nadal, both of whom ooze charisma and glamour, have long been widely beloved. Djokovic, not so much.

Federer, who is fully vaccinated, is not playing in Melbourne this year. Nadal, who will compete, is also fully vaccinated — as Australian Open, Victoria state government and Australian national government rules require. According to the Economist magazine, 95 percent of top professional men’s tennis players are fully vaccinated.

Djokovic, however, is well-known as anti-vaccine. Contrarianism seems central to his persona.

He was given a sweetheart “medical exemption” to play in Australia by the tournament and the state, based on the fact that he recently had a covid-19 infection and thus should enjoy some immunity. In the days after testing positive in December, Djokovic did not isolate himself to protect others. Quite the contrary: He was photographed posing and mingling with groups of people, not even bothering to wear a mask.

That may not have been much of a concern in Belgrade, where Djokovic attended an event for young tennis players after testing positive. He is a national hero in Serbia, after all; and the Economist reports that only 45 percent of that nation’s adults are fully vaccinated. But Serbia has “suffered the second-highest number of excess deaths in the world per head of population” during the pandemic, according to the magazine’s tracker.

 

Supreme Court: VaxNation Mandate Is "Major Questions Land"

jonathanturley  |  The defenders of the mandates worked mightily to avoid the fact that it’s the first-ever national vaccine mandate and was decided without the approval of Congress.  Chief Justice John Roberts, a vital vote needed by the administration, noted that this administration was relying on language passed roughly 50 years ago — closer to the Spanish Flu than the novel coronavirus — and stated ominously, “This is something the federal government has never done before.” That sounds not just like a question but a major one.

The major-questions doctrine maintains that courts should not defer to agency statutory interpretations when the underlying questions concern “vast economic or political significance.”

The controversy over the mandates shows the wisdom of the doctrine demanding that Congress not only take action but responsibility, too, for such major decisions.

With increasing confusion over changing CDC guidelines and the risk profile associated with the Omicron variant, congressional action could bring both greater legitimacy and clarity to questions swirling around mandates.

Instead, the Supreme Court is grappling with an executive move that was openly discussed not only as an avoidance of Congress but a circumvention of constitutional limitations.

It was not a good sign for the administration that the most referenced individual during oral argument was Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, who tweeted that the mandates were “workarounds” of the Constitution. Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Neil Gorsuch, and others referred to Klain’s admission as the administration’s lawyers tried to argue that the executive had the constitutional authority to implement a national mandate.

Public Opinion Has Zero-Impact On U.S. Law

upworthy |  Their study took data from nearly 2,000 public-opinion surveys and compared what the people wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America has essentially no impact at all.

Put another way, and I'll just quote the Princeton study directly here:

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

Really think about that for a second.

If you've ever felt like your opinion doesn't matter and that the government doesn't really care what you think, well … you're right.

But, of course, there's a catch.

...unless you're an "economic elite."

If there's one thing that still reliably gets politicians' attention, it's money. While the opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America have a "statistically non-significant impact," Gilens and Page found that economic elites, business interests, and people who can afford lobbyists still carry major influence.

How could it be that our government, designed to function as a representative democracy, is only good at representing such a small fraction of the population? Just follow the money.

Why? Because purchasing political influence is 100% legal.

For example: Let's say a big bank wants a law that would force taxpayers to bail them out again if they repeat the exact same reckless behavior that crashed the global economy in 2008.

It's perfectly legal for our bank to hire a team of lobbyists whose entire job is to make sure the government gives the bank what it wants. Then, those lobbyists can track down members of Congress who regulate banks and help raise a ton of money for their re-election campaigns. Its also perfectly legal for those lobbyists to offer those same politicians million-dollar jobs at their lobbying firms.

Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kansas), shown speaking at an event in 2012, recently attached language originally drafted by lobbyists for CitiGroup to a financial services appropriations bill. Members of Congress who voted "yes" on the bill received, on average, 2.8 times more money from the PACs of CitiGroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase than members who voted "no." Image by Information Technology Innovation Foundation/Flickr.

They can also literally write the language of this new bailout law themselves, then hand it off to the politicians they just buttered up with campaign money and lucrative job offers. And it's perfectly legal for those politicians to sneak the lobbyist-written language through Congress at the last second.

If that example sounds oddly specific, that's because it happened in December 2014. And it happens all the time, on almost every single issue, with politicians of both parties.

Today's Must Read: Physicians Amicus Briefing To The U.S. Supreme Court

supremecourt.gov | 31 pages, 25 pages are very plain language, concise, and cover succinctly what many hear have read, heard, and seen over the past 2 plus years.

“It is the consensus of the medical community that the currently available Covid-19 vaccine injections do not prevent the spread of SARS- CoV-2. Relevant federal agencies have repeatedly acknowledged this consensus. Therefore, there is no scientific or legal justification for OSHA to segregate injected and un-injected people. Indeed, since the Covid-19 injections do not confer immunity upon the recipients, but are claimed to merely reduce the symptoms of the disease, they do not fall within the long-established definition of a vaccine at all. ”

Fat Diabetic Sotomayor Clowns Herself With Vaxnation Mandate Behavior And Remarks..,

reuters | The 63-year-old Sotomayor, one of the nine-member court’s four liberal justices, was diagnosed as a child with type 1 diabetes and has openly discussed her experience with the chronic illness in the past. She was named to the court in 2009 by Democratic former President Barack Obama.

 

“Justice Sotomayor experienced symptoms of low blood sugar at her home this morning. She was treated by D.C. Emergency Medical Services and is doing fine,” spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said in a statement. “She came to work, resumed her usual schedule, and will be participating in planned activities over the weekend.”

 

When she was appointed, Sotomayor became the first Hispanic justice and the third woman to serve on the nation’s highest court.

 

She manages her diabetes through insulin injections, glucose tablets and regular testing of her blood sugar. Sotomayor has been candid about her previous struggles and scares that led her to be more open about the disease. 

***********************************************************************************

Justice Sotomayor, fully vaccinated and boostered according to news reports, decided to hear the case in her own office over Zoom. This is an appropriate medical decision based on what we know about the inability of these vaccines to prevent COVID transmission. And again, regardless of her vaccination status, she should do all she can to protect herself from COVID. Because of her obesity status, on an individual level, vaxnation will absolutely decrease her chance of ending up in the ICU. 

 

It will do absolutely nothing to decrease her risk of catching or transmitting the virus. Nor will it decrease the outpatient illness that people seem to get. There is ZERO difference in the outpatient illness between those vaxxed or not. It is about the same. A mild illness for many, a severe “knock you out for a few days” illness for many. Vaxnation status seems to not make a difference in the outpatient illness.

 

That said, Sonia Sotomayor stated in her remarks and questions, that the vaccines are essential for protecting workers from spreading the virus. And by inference, this vaccine efficacy is worth firing millions of hard-working Americans from their jobs. Fully vaccinated and boostered, sitting in her office so she did not come into contact with the other justices – all of whom are at least fully vaccinated - this fat diabetic paid-for-life supreme asked these questions pretending one thing, while her own fearful behavior betrayed the truth of what even she knows about these pathetic neovaccinoids. 

 

Sotomayor is admitting something wrong with the narrative, betrayed by her own behavior while simultaneously contemplating millions of Americans losing their livelihood - to protect the vanated co-workers from what exactly?

 

Is this how vaxnations are supposed to work?

 

Am I missing something?

CDC Finally Tells The Eugenic Truth 78% Of Covid Fatalities Had Four Co-Morbidities...,

Today, @CDCDirector said:
"The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least 4 comorbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with and yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron."

This is eugenicist. pic.twitter.com/zd3iBQTH0J

— Matthew Cortland, JD (@mattbc) January 8, 2022

CDC  |  Among 1,228,664 persons who completed primary vaccination during December 2020–October 2021, severe COVID-19–associated outcomes (0.015%) or death (0.0033%) were rare. Risk factors for severe outcomes included age ≥65 years, immunosuppressed, and six other underlying conditions. All persons with severe outcomes had at least one risk factor; 78% of persons who died had at least four.

What are the implications for public health practice?

Vaccinated persons who are older, immunosuppressed, or have other underlying conditions should receive targeted interventions including chronic disease management, precautions to reduce exposure, additional primary and booster vaccine doses, and effective pharmaceutical therapy to mitigate risk for severe outcomes. Increasing vaccination coverage is a critical public health priority.

David Bohm Did Not Propose A Holographic Universe

futurism |  David Bohm’s influence extends beyond physics to embrace philosophy, psychology, religion, art, and linguistics. Interestingly, his ideas have been received more enthusiastically by the arts community than by the scientific establishment. The Tibetan Master Sogyal Rinpoche once remarked that there are striking parallels between Bohm’s model of the universe and the Buddhist *bardo* teachings, as they both “spring from a vision of wholeness.”

Bohm had doubts about the theory of quantum mechanics and its ability to fully explain the workings of the universe. Despite having written a classic textbook on quantum mechanics, Bohm, agreed with Albert Einstein that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” While working on plasmas at the Lawrence Radiation laboratory in California in the 1940s, Bohm noticed that once electrons were in a plasma (which has a high density of electrons and positive ions), they stopped behaving like individual particles and started behaving like a unit. It seemed as if the sea of electrons was somehow alive. He thought then that there was a deeper cause behind the random nature of the subatomic world.

Bohm came up with an idea of the quantum potential to suggest that subatomic particles are highly complex, dynamic entities that follow a precise path which is determined by subtle forces. In his view the quantum potential pervades all space and guides the motion of particles by providing information about the whole environment.

For Bohm, all of reality was a dynamic process in which all manifest objects are in a state of constant flux. By introducing the concepts of “implicate order” and “explicate order”, Bohm argued that the empty space in the universe contained the whole of everything. It is the source of explicate order, the order of the physical world, and is a realm of pure information. From it, the physical, observable phenomena unfold, and again, return to it. This unfolding of the explicit order from the subtle realm of the implicate order, and the movement of all matter in terms of enfolding and unfolding, is what Bohm called the Holomovement.

Bohm believed that although the universe appears to be solid, it is, in essence, a magnificent hologram. He believed in the “whole in every part” idea, and just like a hologram, each part of physical reality contained information about the whole.

Bohm was not the only scientist who arrived at this conclusion. In neuroscience, Karl Pribram, who was working on the functioning of the brain, concluded that memories are encoded not in specific regions of the brain, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the area containing a holographic image. Together, Bohm and Pribram worked on developing the so called “Holonomic Model” of the functioning of the brain.

Bohm believed that his body was a microcosm of the macrocosm, and that the universe was a mystical place where past, present, and future coexisted. He postulated the existence of a realm of pure information (the implicate order) from which the physical, observable phenomena unfold. Unlike classical physics where reality is viewed as particles of separate, independent elements, Bohm proposed that the fundamental reality is the continuous enfoldment (into the implicate order) and unfoldment (of the explicate order) from the subtle realms. In this flow, matter and space are each part of the whole.

In stark contrast to Western ways of thinking about the nature of reality as external and mechanistic, Bohm considers our separateness an illusion and argues that at a deeper level of reality, we, as well as all the particles that make up all matter, are one and indivisible. For Bohm, the “empty space” is full of energy and information. It’s a hidden world of the implicate order, also known as the “Zero Point Field” or the “Akasha”.

What If Holonomic Theory Informs Clandestine And Military Doctrine At The Highest Level?

archive |  MISHLOVE: You're very well known in psychology and in neuropsychology as the developer of the holographic or holonomic model of the brain. Can you talk about that a little bit, and how it relates to the mind -- or rather, to the mind-body process? I have to be on my toes with you today.
PRIBRAM: Yes. The holonomic brain theory is based on some insights that Dennis Gabor had. He was the inventor of the hologram, and he obtained the Nobel Prize for his many contributions. He was a mathematician, and what he was trying to do was develop a better way of making electron micrographs, improve the resolution of the micrographs. And so for electron microscopy he suggested that instead of making a photograph -- essentially, with electron microscopes we make photographs using electrons instead of photons. He thought maybe instead of making ordinary photographs, that what he would do is get the interference patterns. Now what is an interference pattern? When light strikes, or when electrons strike any object, they scatter. But the scatter is a funny kind of scatter. It's a very well regulated scatter. For instance, if you defocus the lens on a camera so that you don't get the image falling on the image plane and you have a blur, that blur essentially is a hologram, because all you have to do is refocus it.

MISHLOVE: Contained in the blur is the actual image.

PRIBRAM: That's right. But you don't see it as such. So one of the main principles of holonomic brain theory, which gets us into quantum mechanics also, is that there is a relationship here between what we ordinarily experience, and some other process or some other order, which David Bohm calls the implicate, or enfolded, order, in which things are all distributed or spread -- in fact the mathematical formulations are often called spread functions -- that spread this out.

MISHLOVE: Now what you're talking about here is the deep structure of the universe, in a way. Beneath the subatomic level of matter itself are these quantum wave functions, so to speak, and they form interference patterns. Would I be wrong in saying it would be like dropping two stones in a pond, the way the ripples overlap? Is that like an interference pattern?

PRIBRAM: That's certainly the way interference patterns work, yes.

MISHLOVE: And you're suggesting that at that very deep level of reality, something is operating in the brain itself.

PRIBRAM: Well, no. In a way, that's possible, but that's not where the situation is at the moment. All we know is that the mathematical descriptions that we make of, let's say, single-cell processes, and the branches from the single cells, and how they interact with each other -- not only anatomically, but actually functional interactions -- that when we map those, we get a description that is very similar to the description of quantum events.

MISHLOVE: When you take into account that there are billions of these single cells operating in the brain.

PRIBRAM: That's right. And the connections between them, so there are even more; there are trillions of connections between them. They operate on the basic principles that have been found to also operate at the quantum level. Actually, it was the other way around. The mathematics that Gabor used, he borrowed from Heisenberg and Hilbert. Hilbert developed them first in mathematics, and then Heisenberg used them in quantum mechanics, and Gabor used them in psychophysics, and we've used it in modeling how brain networks work.

MISHLOVE: So in other words, in the brain,when we look at the electrical impulses traveling through the neurons, and the patterns as these billions of neurons interact, you would say that that is analogous, I suppose, or isomorphic to the processes that are going on at the deeper quantum level.

PRIBRAM: Yes. But we don't know that it's a deeper quantum level in the brain.

MISHLOVE: That may or may not be the case.

PRIBRAM: Analogous isn't quite the right word; they obey the same rules. It's not just an analogy, because the work that described these came independently. An analogy would be that you take the quantum ideas, and see how they fit to the data we have on the brain. That's not the way it happened. We got the brain data first, and then we see, look, it fits the same mathematics. So the people who were gathering these data, including myself, weren't out to look for an analogous process. I think it's a very important point, because otherwise you could be biased, and there are lots of different models that fit how the brain works. But this is more based on how the brain was found to work, independent of these conceptions.

MISHLOVE: Independent of any model.

PRIBRAM: Yes, essentially independent of any model.

MISHLOVE: So you've got a mathematical structure that parallels the mathematical structures of quantum physics. Now what does that tell us about the mind?

PRIBRAM: What it tells me is that the problems that have been faced in quantum mechanics for the whole century -- well, since the twenties --

MISHLOVE: Many paradoxes.

PRIBRAM: And very many paradoxes -- that those paradoxes also apply at the psychophysical level and at the neuronal level, and therefore we have to face the same sets of problems. At the same time, I think what David Bohm is doing is showing that some of the classical conceptions which were thought not to apply at the quantum level, really do apply at the quantum level. Now, I'm interpreting Bohm; I'm not sure he would want to agree to my interpretation of what he's doing. But to me that seems to be what is going on. So that the schism between levels -- between the quantum level, the submicroscopic almost, subatomic level and what goes on there, and the classical, so-called uncertainty principle and all of that -- that all applies all the way along; but you've got to be very careful in -- how should I put it? You've got to apply it to the actual data, and not just sort of run it over.

MISHLOVE: To the average layman, why would they be interested in this? Is there some significance to people in their everyday lives, or in their workaday worlds, in the business of life?

PRIBRAM: Sure, and this is the critical thing -- that if indeed we're right that these quantum-like phenomena, or the rules of quantum mechanics, apply all the way through to our psychological processes, to what's going on in the nervous system -- then we have an explanation perhaps, certainly we have a parallel, to the kind of experiences that people have called spiritual experiences. Because the descriptions you get with spiritual experiences seem to parallel the descriptions of quantum physics. That's why Fritjof Capra wrote The Tao of Physics, why we have The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and all of this sort of thing that's come along. And in fact Bohr and Heisenberg already knew; Schroedinger talked about the Upanishads, and Bohr used the yin and yang as his symbol. Because the conceptions that grew out of watching the quantum level -- and therefore now the neurological and psychophysical level, now that it's a psychological level as well -- seem to have a great deal in common with our spiritual experience. Now what do I mean by spiritual experience? You talked about mental activity, calling it the mind. That aspect of mental activity, which is very human -- it may be true of other species as well, but we don't know -- but in human endeavor many of us at least seem to need to get in contact with larger issues, whether they're cosmology, or some kind of biological larger issue, or a social one, or it's formalized in some kind of religious activity. But we want to belong. And that is what I define as the spiritual aspects of man's nature.

We Need Multidimensional Portraits Of Ancient Peoples...,

ineteconomics  |   Napoleon Bonaparte asked, “What is history but a fable agreed upon?” Graeber and Wengrow come in to shake off the spell of prevailing fables — not as armchair theorists snatching ideas from thin air but as reviewers and synthesizers of a plethora of tantalizing recent discoveries, along with the work of neglected thinkers who (hello, feminist scholars) who drew ire for their attention to glaring inconsistencies in the established narratives. In doing so, they recover frameworks for the way ancient peoples experienced their world that help us to see that we could be organizing ourselves – socially, economically, politically — on principles much different from those that seem inevitable today. This is heartening.

Among the propositions of Graeber and Wengrow are these:

• We barely have the language to express what our remote ancestors were up to 95% of the time.
• The Agricultural Revolution wasn’t a revolution at all. The real story is much more complex – and interesting.
• Ancient peoples lived with a rich variety of social and political structures, even varying according to the season. (Very flexible, those folks).
• Humans aren’t just pawns on a chessboard of material conditions. We’ve been actively experimenting from the get-go.
• Inequality in large-scale human communities isn’t inevitable, nor is it a product of farming. Ditto, patriarchy.
• Past societies that valued women were happier places to live. (Duh).
• We can do better. We have done better.

The authors begin by pointing out that eighteenth-century theories of human history were partly a reaction to critiques of European society offered by indigenous observers. Consider Kandiaronk, a Wendat chief so skilled in debate he could easily shut down a Jesuit, who blew the minds of listeners with penetrating insights on authority, decency, social responsibility, and above all, freedom. Kandiaronk’s critiques, presented in a dialogue form by the Baron de Lahontan in 1703, sparked a whole genre of books voicing criticisms from a “primitive” outsider. Graeber and Wengrow illuminate how profoundly these products influenced Enlightenment thought and helped give rise to social and political experiments (including the U.S. Constitution), as well as defensive strategies to discount such perspectives (also including the U.S. Constitution).

Madame de Graffigny’s epistolary novel of 1747, “Letters from a Peruvian Woman” (1747) tells the story of an Incan princess who rails against the inequality she observes in French society – particularly the ill-treatment of women. This volume, in turn, helped shape the thinking of the economist A.R.J. Turgot, who responded by insisting that inequality was inevitable. He outlined a theory of social evolution posited as progress from hunters to pastoralism to farming to urban commercial civilization that placed anybody not at the final stage as a vestigial life form that had better get with the program. Turgot’s scheme of social evolution started popping up in lectures of his buddy Adam Smith over in Glasgow, and eventually worked its way into general theories of human history proposed by several of Smith’s influential colleagues such as Adam Ferguson.

The new default paradigm formed the lens through which Europeans viewed indigenous peoples the world over; namely as childish innocents or brutal savages living in deplorable static conditions. Everybody was to be sorted according to how they acquired food, with egalitarian foraging societies banished to the bottom of the ladder. The Kandiaronks causing anxiety by pointing out the grotesque conditions of so-called civilization — from the large numbers of starving people to the need for two hours for a Frenchman to dress himself — could now be dismissed. This mindset became prevalent in the emerging field of archaeology, where practitioners churned out biased interpretations of ancient societies that rendered them non-threatening to the modern, capitalist way of life.

Teleological history was the name of the game, and scholars played it endlessly.

When Will The Undisputed Facts Of Gobekli Tepe Breakthrough The Myths Of Antiquity?

Quora |  Göbekli Tepe is a phenomenal time capsule of discovery and insight. We are faced with an untouched, and relatively intact window into a culture that has refused to be forgotten. Göbekli Tepe stands as a reminder that there is grand folly in making any final determinations about who we are, how we lived and where we came from. Göbekli Tepe also shows that there is profound arrogance to call any prior culture, a primitive culture, by any measure or standard. History books will need a complete rewrite as well as Wikipedia's various citations on ancient history. Sadly some of this data is 20 years old and is still not cited nor put in the proper context.

I have posted on this subject before: What are the most fascinating known unknowns?. I hope to give more details on this amazing discovery with Some information that is not yet easily available (on the internet) or otherwise Peer Reviewed published (Eg: Beer/Bread production, Written Language/Symbols, Plant domestication). However none of this data is unannounced or otherwise proprietary unreleased data. Please see notes at the end of the paragraphs for more detail.

Most of this data is still being uncovered and thus will be published in Peer Review publications when appropriate. Some of this data comes directly from Professor Klaus Schmidt, the chief Researcher and Archeologist on site, in updates to academics that are following his work. Professor Schmidt came to Turkey in 1978, but it wasn't until 1994 that he felt sure enough of the data he collected to begin to publish. Professor Schmidt is academically quite conservative and faced the undesirable task of putting archaeology on notice that general assumptions held very tightly were, just wrong. It took him many years of checking and then rechecking before he would publish his discoveries as he knew they were highly controversial. Thus it may be a few years before we see some of what I mention here fully published and accepted. This is an early view and have no doubts is very, very controversial.

Warning: I have a clear bias here that I must warn the reader about. I feel very, very strongly that academia has not given proper encomium, citation, commendation and tribute for Professor Schmidt and his 30 years of work at Göbekli Tepe. I feel rather strongly that this position of academia has caused many discoveries of similar magnitude to be stunted by little to no funding. Please forgive a bit of cheerleading for what I believe is one of the most important discoveries in human history.

All Too Human

I must point out that one of the most difficult things about Göbekli Tepe has been the Historians and Archaeologists that have invested so much into a paradigm of human development, that they found it nearly impossible to accept the realities that Göbekli Tepe presented. This has hampered progress, funding and peer review of Göbekli Tepe. This shows how even the most empirical Researchers and Scientists are all too human and fall prey to the fear of a rewriting of history to a more accurate context. It is my profound hope that Göbekli Tepe helps to change this point of view in some material way.

Here are just some of the new insights Göbekli Tepe has produced:

Yes Virginia, Animals Laugh Just Like You Humans...,

openculture |  Every pet owner knows that animals love to play, but laughter seems reserved for humans, a few apes, and maybe a few birds good at mimicking humans and apes. As it turns out, according to a new article published in the journal Bioacoustics, laughter has been “documented in at least 65 species,” Jessica Wolf writes at UCLA Newsroom. “That list includes a variety of primates, domestic cows and dogs, foxes, seals, and mongooses, as well as three bird species, including parakeets and Australian magpies.” This is a far cry from just a few years ago when apes and rats were the “only known animals to get the giggles,” as Liz Langley wrote at National Geographic in 2015.

Yes, rats laugh. How do scientists know this? They tickle them, of course, as you can see in the video just above. (Rat tickling, it turns out, is good for the animals’ well being.) The purpose of this experiment was to better understand human touch — and tickling, says study author Michael Brecht, “is one of the most poorly understood forms of touch.”

Laughter, on the other hand, seems somewhat better understood, even among species separated from us by tens of millions of years of evolution. In their recent article, UCLA primatologist Sasha Winkler and UCLA professor of communication Greg Bryant describe how “play vocalizations” signal non-aggression during roughhousing. As Winkler puts it:

When we laugh, we are often providing information to others that we are having fun and also inviting others to join. Some scholars have suggested that this kind of vocal behavior is shared across many animals who play, and as such, laughter is our human version of an evolutionarily old vocal play signal.

Generally, humans are unlikely to recognize animal laughter as such or even perceive it at all. “Our review indicates that vocal play signals are usually inconspicuous,” the authors write. Rats, for example, make “ultrasonic vocalizations” beyond the range of human hearing. The play vocalizations of chimpanzees, on the other hand, are much more similar to human laughter, “although there are some differences,” Winkler notes in an interview. “Like, they vocalize in both the in-breath and out breath.”

Why study animal laughter? Beyond the inherent interest of the topic — an especially joyful one for scientific researchers — there’s the serious business of understanding how “human social complexity allowed laughter to evolve from a play-specific vocalization into a sophisticated pragmatic signal,” as Winkler and Bryant write. We use laughter to signal all kinds of intentions, not all of them playful. But no matter how many uses humans find for the vocal signal, we can see in this new review article how deeply non-aggressive play is embedded throughout the animal world and in our evolutionary history. Read “Play vocalisations and human laughter: a comparative review” here.

 

Clout Chasing Fat Rascal Tries And Fails To Bite Joe Rogan's Ankle...,

nbcnews  |   Simmering tensions over Covid vaccines are boiling over in online communities.

Joe Rogan's fans are responding to criticism of the podcast host's fringe medical stances with fatphobic and antisemitic remarks, which have only intensified after YouTube personality Ethan Klein criticized him for spreading Covid vaccine misinformation.

The dispute between Rogan, who has been embraced by conservative figures for questioning Covid vaccine safety, and Klein, whose fanbase is largely progressive, highlights how growing agitation over the pandemic in online circles is quickly turning into all-out internet warfare.

Known for his contrarian and often unfounded opinions on medicine, Rogan has pushed vaccine hesitancy on his show "The Joe Rogan Experience," which reaches an estimated 11 million listeners per episode. The widely criticized talk show was the most popular podcast on Spotify in 2021.

YouTube took down a recent episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience" on Monday for violating the platform's community guidelines, which forbids misinformation related to elections, Covid-19 and vaccines. The episode is still available on Spotify, which struck a multiyear deal to license the show in 2020.

Rogan's audience is now lashing out online, claiming unfair censorship.

When Klein, who helms multiple podcasts under the YouTube channel H3H3 Productions, criticized Rogan’s fringe medical stances on Tuesday, he was met with intense backlash from Rogan’s fans. His channel, which he shares with his wife Hila Klein, has 6.3 million subscribers on YouTube. Its sister channel H3 Podcast has 3 million subscribers.

"Joe Rogan, who lives on elk meat, egg yolk, and human growth hormone, with lungs full of tar, thinks he's healthier than everyone," Klein tweeted Tuesday, criticizing Rogan's "carnivore diet."

He also criticized Rogan for taking multiple medications when he tested positive for Covid, despite bringing anti-vaxxers on his show.

Rogan Also Testing The Limits Of Google's Power To Control Discourse

thefreethoughtproject |  Those paying attention to the current situation regarding the establishment’s control on the narrative around Covid-19, have watched as anyone — including esteemed experts in the field — are censored into oblivion for attempting to put forth information that challenges the status quo. For the first time in recent American history, merely talking about alternative treatments for a disease is met with mass censorship by big tech. This is diametrically opposed to actual “science” and the opposite direction in which a free society should be moving.

One of the people who has been censored the most is Robert W Malone MD, MS who is one of the inventors of mRNA & DNA vaccines. Dr. Malone has been outspoken about the way the establishment system is handling, or rather mishandling, the covid crisis.

His Twitter account had grown to over a half million followers last week before the platform decided that his alternative views on the pandemic were a danger to the narrative. So they banned him.

Instead of standing up for the free exchange of ideas by experts — which is how science works  — the left cheered for Malone’s censorship, calling him a kook while celebrating the tools of tyrants.

Before Donald Trump came into office and caused mass hysteria over Russia, the left used to stand for freedom of speech. However, the flamboyant tyrant in the White House quickly eroded their respect for rights. Then, in 2020, Covid-19 arrived and the censorship campaign switched into overdrive.

The left — armed with their militant “fact checkers” whose opinions are wielded like swords against anyone who challenges the official narrative — became the regime of authoritarian information controllers. After all, if you challenge their messiahs like Dr. Fauci, you challenge science itself — facts be damned.

So what happened? Why did the left go from championing free speech for years — even supporting the speech of neo-nazis — to rabidly demanding the silencing of those who attempt to challenge team doom? Dr. Malone and others have a theory, and it’s called mass formation psychosis.

“When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere,” explained Malone on a recent interview with Joe Rogan.

Malone then described how “leaders” can exploit this situation: “And one of the aspects of that phenomenon is that the people that they identify as their leaders, the ones typically that come in and say you have this pain and I can solve it for you. I and I alone. Then they will follow that person. It doesn’t matter whether they lied to them or whatever. The data is irrelevant.”

MSM Getting Handed Its Ass By Joe Rogan...,

The more employees of large media corporations attack Joe Rogan, the more his audience grows. The two individuals with the largest audiences happen to be the two people most hated by corporate media because they can't be controlled or ordered around:https://t.co/kjgUQRwWIs

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 4, 2022

zerohedge |  When the last hour of the podcast was coming to its conclusion as I was finishing an 8 mile run, a thought dawned on me: this interview with Malone is now officially out there and, no matter how much anyone tries to censor it, it can’t be taken back.

As we all know, nowadays when you make it on JRE, you’ve officially “made it”.

Putting aside the obvious irony of Twitter attempting to ban somebody and the person in question going viral as a result, I also thought about how, despite the fact that Malone’s opinions put him at odds with the mainstream media (who would never dare to have him on), Joe Rogan launched him past the usual media suspects and into the real “mainstream”.

I then thought to myself that in 2022, the mainstream media as we know it today (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, etc.) is going to be forced to change its narrative on Covid.

“It’ll never happen,” you’re thinking to yourself, right? Let me explain.

*  *  *

The idea of the media being forced to change its tune on Covid is something I touched upon a couple of days ago when I wrote about the Omicron variant and how the media is creating a mass hysteria mountain out of a mole hill.

But after listening to Dr. Robert Malone‘s well reasoned arguments, delivered for three straight hours, concisely and calmly, it became clear to me that the entire mainstream media machine could wind up falling at the hands of content creators like Joe Rogan.

It’s an interesting little piece of game theory, when you think about it.

Rogan generates so many views and has grown so quickly - strictly because he allows open dialogue, civil discourse and approaches things with honest intent – that there is no financial incentive to de-platform him. Ever notice how YouTube apparently had no problem taking down Rogan’s interview with Malone, but hasn’t banned Rogan’s channel from the site yet?

The Truth Is Becoming Extremely Difficult To Contain

rwmalonemd  |  It is starting to look to me like the largest experiment on human beings in recorded history has failed.  And, if this rather dry report from a senior Indiana life insurance executive holds true, then Reiner Fuellmich’s “Crimes against Humanity” push for convening new Nuremberg trials starts to look a lot less quixotic and a lot more prophetic.

Here is what lit me up in this report from The Center Square contributor Margaret Menge.

“The head of Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica said the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people.

“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”

OneAmerica is a $100 billion insurance company that has had its headquarters in Indianapolis since 1877. The company has approximately 2,400 employees and sells life insurance, including group life insurance to employers in the state.

Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.

“And what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic,” he said.

“Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.””

So, what is driving this unprecedented surge in all-cause mortality?

“Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths,

Davison said.“What the data is showing to us is that the deaths that are being reported as COVID deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age people from the pandemic. It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.””

Take a moment to read the entire article.  Now.  Then let’s continue on, assuming that you have.

AT A MINIMUM, based on my reading, one has to conclude that if this report holds and is confirmed by others in the dry world of life insurance actuaries, we have both a huge human tragedy and a profound public policy failure of the US Government and US HHS system to serve and protect the citizens that pay for this “service”. 

IF this holds true, then the genetic vaccines so aggressively promoted have failed, and the clear federal campaign to prevent early treatment with lifesaving drugs has contributed to a massive, avoidable loss of life. 

AT WORST, this report implies that the federal workplace vaccine mandates have driven what appear to be a true crime against humanity.  Massive loss of life in (presumably) workers that have been forced to accept a toxic vaccine at higher frequency relative to the general population of Indiana.

FURTHERMORE, we have also been living through the most massive, globally coordinated propaganda and censorship campaign in the history of the human race.  All major mass media and the social media technology companies have coordinated to stifle and suppress any discussion of the risks of the genetic vaccines AND/OR alternative early treatments. 

Full Trancript Of Joe Rogan Interview Of Dr. Robert Malone

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Both Dystopian And Utopian Visions Of The Metaverse Are A LOOONG Way From Realization...,

technologyreview |  The first person to write about the “metaverse” was Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, but the concept of alternative electronic realms, including the “cyberspace” of William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, was already well established.

In contrast to what we typically think of as the internet, a metaverse is a 3D immersive environment shared by multiple users, in which you can interact with others via avatars. A metaverse can, with the support of the right technology, feel like real life, with all the usual elements of work, play, trade, friendship, love—a world of its own.

Perhaps the best-known prototype metaverse is the online virtual world Second Life, whose very name implies an alternate existence. Other games might also be said to be metaverses in their own right: World of Warcraft, Everquest, Fortnite, Animal Crossing. Each of these offers its own version of an immersive world, although they don’t quite have the ability to completely take over your senses. Most users experience these games from the outside looking in: screens front and center, with speakers on the sides. Actions are mediated by a keyboard, mouse, trackpad, or game controller instead of players’ hands and feet.

Technology is starting to change that. High-density screens, virtual-­reality goggles and glasses, surround sound, and spatial audio are putting more genuinely immersive experiences within reach. Cameras are gaining 3D capabilities, and single microphones are giving way to microphone arrays that capture sound with better depth and position. Augmented reality, which overlays virtual objects onto a video feed of the real world, provides a bridge between purely virtual and analog or real experiences. There is progress toward adding a sense of touch, too, in the form of multi­touch screens, haptic technologies, control gloves, and other wearables. Wraparound environments like Industrial Light and Magic’s Stagecraft are within reach only to certain industries for now but may see wider use as technology follows the typical curve of adoption and commoditization.

A Metaverse Presupposes Ubiquitous Cinematographic Pixelation....,

technologyreview | The computer scientist Alvy Ray Smith cofounded both Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division and Pixar Animation Studios. For those achievements alone, he is one of the most important technological innovators in cinema since at least the end of the Second World War. But Smith is not a Hollywood guy, and his intriguing, foundational new book A Biography of the Pixel is not a Tinseltown book. There are only the slightest morsels of gossip (Steve Jobs was a difficult man to work with—confirmed!), and the only marquee celebrity who appears in Smith’s story with any frequency is George Lucas. Smith isn’t interested in fame. He’s chasing more profound themes, arguing in effect that the great project he was part of—the invention and development of computer graphics—is far more important than anything that ever happened in Hollywood.

Smith is what used to be called a “graybeard” in computer programming circles. He’s from that generation of engineers and coders who watched the digital age rise from the swamps of secret military projects and the space program to conquer the world. He has spoken machine language. He marveled at the first crude graphics to exhibit motion on green-and-black screens. And he was among the first to demonstrate the newfound ability of a stylus to trace a smooth curve of digital “paint.”

In A Biography of the Pixel, Smith’s aim is to set down clearly the trajectory of two important, intertwined stories. The first story is the development of computer images, from origin to digital ubiquity. There are, in Smith’s telling, many names, places, and breakthroughs missing from the record, and he has taken on the job of adding them back in with an engineer’s eye for precision. The second story, unfolding in parallel, is about the impact of those images—a transformative force Smith calls “Digital Light.” It encompasses basically everything we experience through screens, and he argues convincingly that it is among the most important innovations in human communication since the first simple depictions of daily life were etched on the walls of caves.

The humble pixel

As Smith demonstrates repeatedly, far too much credit has been allowed to slide to the supposed wizardry of individual geniuses. The reality is a muddy, overlapping history of groups of inventors, working by turns in competition and in collaboration, often ad hoc and under considerable commercial or political pressure. 

Thomas Edison and France’s Lumière brothers, for example, were great promoters and exploiters of early film technology. Both exhibited full systems circa 1895 and were happy to claim full credit, but neither built the first complete system of camera, film, and projector all (or even mostly) on their own. The real answer to the question of who invented movies, Smith writes, is a “briar patch” of competing lineages, with parts of the system developed by erstwhile partners of Edison’s and similar parts by a handful of French inventors who worked with the Lumières. 

Among the crucial figures relegated to history’s dustbin were William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (an odd European aristocrat who designed and built the first movie camera for Edison) and Georges Demenÿ (whose design was copied without credit by the Lumières). Smith shows perhaps too much of his exhaustive work in rescuing these convoluted origin stories—there are similarly tangled muddles at every major stage in the development of computers and graphics—but his effort to set the historical record straight is admirable. 

The main drawback of all this wrangling with the egos and avarice of several generations of forceful men (they are, alas, virtually all men) is that it sometimes distracts Smith’s focus from his larger theme, which is that the dawn of Digital Light represents such a rare shift in how people live that it deserves to be described as epochal. 

Digital Light, in Smith’s simplest definition, is “any picture composed of pixels.” But that technical phrase understates the full import of the “vast new realm of imagination” that has been created by its rise. That realm encompasses Pixar movies, yes, but also video games, smartphone apps, laptop operating systems, goofy GIFs traded via social media, deadly serious MRI images reviewed by oncologists, the touch screens at the local grocery store, and the digital models used to plan Mars missions that then send back yet more Digital Light in the form of jaw-dropping images of the Red Planet’s surface. 

The Role Of Mutually Transgressive Abjection In The American Apocalypse

notesfromdisgraceland |  The abject hovers at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable, but is itself unassimilable which means that we have to contemplate its otherness in its proximity to us but without it being able to be incorporated. It is the other that comes from within (so it is part of ourselves) that we have to reject and expel in order to protect our boundaries[3].

The abject is a great mobilizing mechanism. While the state of being abject is threatening to the self and others, the operation of abjecting involves rituals of purity that bring about social stability. Abjection seeks to stabilize, while the abject inherently disrupts[4].

When the mass of the excluded increases to a size impossible to ignore, they trigger rituals of abjection, which work themselves into identity politics.The repulsion and efforts to distance from the excluded — the abjection – which reinforces the self-awareness of the social standing of regular folks, are in conflict with the attraction by the powers the abject population enjoys and exudes. They are the power bottoms in this relationship as they define the location, robustness and porousness of the boundaries of the enclosure. Fascination with the abject’s power pulls the viewers in, while they remain at arm’s length because of the threats the abject exert.

This makes the excluded a tool that drives the wedge between different social groups and prepares the population for political usage of the abject as leverage.

Objectifying minorities has been institutionalized in America since its inception — from slavery and Jim Crow to ghetto and hyperghetto, prisons, wars, opioids, and other tools of soft and hard marginalization. However, with the rise of the white underclass in the second half of the 20^th century, American ideology has become highly nuanced around the questions of exclusion.

To a large extent, the Right wing has stuck to its white supremacists roots of yesteryear (either in a closeted form or explicitly) while centrists, both Left and Right, have shown greater initiative in modernizing the process. However, when it came to exclusion of the white underclass, the problem proved to be more difficult. Complicated by globalization, technology, the decline of American manufacturing, weaning off conventional energy sources and the general decay of demand for labor, low-skill jobs have been disappearing irreversibly, and the ranks of white underclass grew unstoppably together with their discontent.

Social outcasts and minorities are relatively easy to objectivize. Permanently excluded – criminals, drug addicts, homeless – they have already been cast out. The residual, white precariat, which has always been perceived as a building block of this country’s social fiber, remains still on the inside, but unable to get reintegrated within the context of modern developments.

In a white dominated/ruled society the marginalization of the excluded white subproletariat has been a political hard sell. They grew in size and have acquired a sense of entitlement minorities never could. Their sudden political awareness, no matter how fragile, has become an expression of pleasurable transgressive desires. As a new center of social subjectivity, they draw their power from this position, which serves as an inspiration for their own identity politics.

The emergence of 21^st century Right-wing populism represents the biggest innovation on that terrain. Right-wingers now recognize the abject as a source of political leverage and, instead of exclusion, their program revolves around subjectivizing them. Voluntarily casting oneself as abject — identification with the white subproletariat – has become a quest for authenticity, aimed at acquiring a stigma in order to become a credible voice of the marginalized. This is the core of the modern populist abject gambit.

Covid Crowd Psychosis

rwmalonemd  |  As many of you know, I have spent time researching and speaking about mass psychosis theory. Most of what I have learned has come from Dr. Mattias Desmet, who realized that this form of mass hypnosis, of the madness of crowds, can account for the strange phenomenon of about 20-30% of the population in the western world becoming entranced with the Noble Lies and dominant narrative concerning the safety and effectiveness of the genetic vaccines, and both propagated and enforced by politicians, science bureaucrats, pharmaceutical companies and legacy media.

What one observes with the mass hypnosis is that a large fraction of the population is completely unable to process new scientific data and facts demonstrating that they have been misled about the effectiveness and adverse impacts of mandatory mask use, lockdowns, and genetic vaccines that cause people’s bodies to make large amounts of biologically active coronavirus Spike protein.

These hypnotized by this process are unable to recognize the lies and misrepresentations they are being bombarded with on a daily basis, and actively attack anyone who has the temerity to share information with them which contradicts the propaganda that they have come to embrace. And for those whose families and social networks have been torn apart by this process, and who find that close relatives and friends have ghosted them because they question the officially endorsed “truth” and are actually following the scientific literature, this can be a source of deep anguish, sorrow and psychological pain.

It is with those souls in mind that I included a discussion of the mass formation theory of Dr. Mattias Desmet during a recent talk I gave in Tampa, Florida to an audience of about 2,000.  As I looked out into the audience and spoke, I could see relief on many faces, and even tears running from the eyes of stoic men.

Unknown to me, someone recorded the speech and appended the vocal track to a series of calming images of natural landscapes, producing a video that has gone viral throughout the world.  A link to the video, as well as some notes to clarify and supplement the talk are appended below. Many have told me that they find it very healing.  I hope it may help you also.