Category: Reprints from others.

Reprint: How Masking Did Us Wrong

Post author By Phoenix
Post date June 21, 2022
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Mandatory Face mask law and by-law for wearing masks and facial coverings as a regulation for public safety as a medical or hospital legal issues with 3D illustration elements.

This article was first published on Instagram on April 2, twelve days after Ontario lifted its mask mandate.

The Dark Side of an Easy Ask

Even though masking is no longer mandated in Ontario, some businesses choose still to enforce it, believing that the smallest safety benefit is worth the smaller ask to mask.

Their unwavering dedication to public wellbeing, even while hospitalizations vanish and variants weaken, illuminates a troubling fact: we have constantly minimized the social and psychological costs of masking.

Now that we’ve passed through the miasma of daily case counts, it’s time to be honest about how face-coverings made us an uglier society.

Throughout pandemic, we heard nothing except how easy and costless it is to mask — even though it’s flatly dehumanizing to be forced to do it, and it keeps everyone under the thumb of a ballooning health authority.

Thoughts like these were unbecoming while cases were rising, so we made no allowances for such privileged worries. Before long, we couldn’t fathom any good reason for someone not to wear a mask.

We convinced ourselves that masking was such a free act of kindness and empathy that a bare face became an insult to anyone within sight.

So we waged war on each other instead of the virus, and what could’ve been uncontroversial guidance — allowing for some principled opposition — instead turned into an ideological bloodbath.

Our willingness to dehumanize a lone unmasked shopper stunk of an Orwellian evacuation of critical thinking that stains mask wearing to this day. Those imperfect, soiled cloths — we knew — did only marginal good, yet we fancied a bare face as being tantamount to murder. The real murder was logic, as we grossly overstated the stakes of masking just to have an enemy.

Something deeply authoritarian happened to the symbol of the mask as it gradually transmuted from a medical device into a tribal flag. Its ability to signal correct thinking and a willingness to “play for the team” fast eclipsed its safety benefit.

In practical terms, the mask functioned like a visible record of one’s goodwill, which became eerily compulsory to demonstrate in order to be left unmolested in public.

The urge to “get along” displaced any individual doubts about the growing nonsensicality of mask rules. It was a game of follow the leader, and it was “unkind” not to play.

The mask experiment showed us just how well we would take to a Lord-of-the-Flies level rewrite of social norms overnight.

And so the mask experiment showed us just how well we would take to a Lord-of-the-Flies level rewrite of social norms overnight. We proved that there’s no amount of change we won’t accept as long as it’s positioned the right way.

The mask mandate, in essence, had us piloting a rudimentary behavioural credit system, a way to score and police our kindness with (ironic) cruelty. Not only did we embrace it, but some of us deputized ourselves to defend it.

Truly it is remarkable how masking became such a recipe for social engineering and that so many failed to see the complexity in something so simple.

As an example of this, I was volunteering at a St. Vincent De Paul thrift store. While bringing in a bag of donated clothing, and not wearing a mask since I had been eating a snack, I was confronted by a retired nurse (who should have known better) who — among other things — said “Don’t you respect us?!?”

Fortunately for her, I didn’t reply. But after a couple more incidents with other people (although I’m sure she instigated a confrontation with another person,too). I told one of the supervisors that I was going home and wouldn’t be volunteering there anymore because of the harassment. He sadly agreed about the atmosphere. That was the summer of 2021 –18 MONTHS after the CCP virus has shown up in the states.

Back Door Power Grab Biden Pandemic COVID Politics Polls Progressive Racism Reprints from others. Science

Moral Blinding: How the COVID-Prevention Fetish Killed Critical Thinking

Post author By MC
Post date June 21, 2022
No Comments on Moral Blinding: How the COVID-Prevention Fetish Killed Critical Thinking

Time to stand up. Get rid of the unnecessary masks.

This article was written by Susan Dunham.

Feeling the fuzzies

Our first lockdown was like a great war effort. It was the closest we’ve come to the home-front experience of the World Wars, when people set aside every selfish thought in favor of the collective wellbeing. We ground our lives to a halt in a powerful rebuke against an emerging threat. Heroes emerged, along with new rituals to honor them as we banged pots for frontline workers and decorated our neighborhoods with messages of thanks. Meanwhile, the rest of us did our part: we stayed home. And it all felt good.

Months later, rising COVID cases have plunged us into another lockdown, which in short order has become a practiced routine. After a lax summer and fall season, we slip back into the usual stay-at-home restrictions. We triple our vigilance: we keep our distance, follow the masking rules, and sanitize compulsively. “Be safe,” we wish each other in lieu of the customary farewells. Even the fearless pitch in, because staying safe means preventing yourself from becoming a threat to others.

All of the prescribed safety practices have become part of a new social ritual. Participation demonstrates one’s commitment to the collective wellbeing, which the pandemic has taught us is not an individual game but a group effort. Masking, sanitizing, distancing, and isolating are not only safety measures in the traditional sense but they have also become the new signs of caring. And they are fast becoming a prerequisite for societal participation. No mask, no service says many signs in store windows, big and small.

As Canadians, long-renowned for politeness, compliance under these terms is practically built into the national DNA. Save for some pockets of protests in our larger cities, we have demonstrated a willingness to give up a little bit of our personal freedom for the greater good, and we embrace whatever is asked of us if it can save a life.

But is that really such a good thing? Could it be that our impassioned acceptance of drastic new norms makes us a little too willing to compromise on everything if we can be convinced it’s the righteous thing to do? And has our conscience been hijacked so that we consent to new norms that actually dismantle the progress we’ve made towards a free and open society?

I argue that the COVID crisis has turned a once liberal society into a cult of compliance and that we have sold off an open marketplace of ideas in a bid to secure our safety. In its place we have built a new social operating system that coerces consent and could one day render us incapable of seeing the true effects of policies that masquerade as public good..

Creating tunnel vision

While we were placing “Stay at Home” badges on top of our Instagram selfies, congratulating ourselves for staying inside, The World Food Program — an agency of the UN — was reporting that 130 million more people in developing nations would face starvation by the end of the year as a direct result of the global economy which we ground to a halt. That means tens of millions of additional deaths in developing countries because of lockdown.

At home we knew that suicide numbers must have skyrocketed and that countless unstable home lives turned dramatically worse, while food bank lines extended longer than we had ever seen them.

But rather than these realities sobering us out of our moral stupor, they instead inspired us to double-down on the categorical importance of lockdown, even as we were learning that most people are not at serious risk of severe illness. No cost was too high to prevent one more COVID case.

Months later, with better perspective on the costs of lockdown, we find ourselves in yet another one. Although we entered it with reduced appetite for the same kind of stringency we saw last spring, we have dutifully complied with everything that the case numbers have demanded. We’ve thrown out every skeptic thought, because the unquantified concerns of mental health, childhood developmental delay, economic collapse, and mass death by starvation the world over do not hold an audience more powerfully than the running tally of COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.

The constant beat of daily broadcast COVID briefings and the bombardment of public health messaging play no small part in constructing our perception of the coronavirus threat. Reshaping our lives to avoid a virus seems logical and inevitable when the only metric we’re allowed to hear is the COVID numbers. How naturally all other facets of life seem to fall away when we are properly obsessed over a single problem to the exclusion of all others.

This curation of concern single-handedly drives our collective reaction to the emergent coronavirus. Our laser focus on all things COVID creates a kind of team spirit in the wellness effort, encouraging our embrace of the pain-loving self sacrifice of lockdown — and blinding us to both its costs and its alternatives.

Affirming the course

By now we should have heard from our public health policy-makers that instead of blanket lockdown, we might opt for a model that is business-as-usual with the exception of a full marshaling of resources aimed at those who self-identify as vulnerable and full support for only their isolation. We don’t question the absence of this suggestion because we have been so locked onto the altruistic idea of self-sacrifice for the greater good that any kind of debate would seem selfishly motivated.

Instead we indulge in the joy of pitching-in and doing good, while remaining guiltlessly ignorant of the fact that history might look back upon lockdown as a devastating mistake. Meanwhile, we collect our CERB cheques and boast about the moral virtues of remaining indefinitely couch-bound. Thus we are placated by a public health policy that we should be debating at the very least.

The great opiate of public health stewardship makes us feel so assured of our righteousness that questioning health regulations is morally suspect. We look unkindly at the oppositional thinker, the lockdown skeptic who threatens to upend the whole care-making experience of the COVID era. Whereas normally we would give skeptical voices vital consideration, especially before embracing the drastic new normal we’ve been handed, we instead condemn them out of hand because we are pre-conditioned to despise their very premise.

Much analysis is given to the pandemic response on the government level, but it is our pandemic response on the social level which will prove the most significant to history, because that is where the true forces of lasting change carve out their legacies.

The on-the-ground tensions between the majority of us who embrace policy and those who don’t is the effect of a social phenomenon which has demonstrated an enormous capacity to reshape our world. What we are gripped by is a peculiar kind of collective blindness disguised as goodwill and righteousness that turns us against all forms of debate on public policy so long as it is positioned correctly.

Dehumanizing the rebel

Toronto’s first lockdown protest in April drew the ire of a vocal majority who denounced participants as selfish, small-minded, ignorant, and reckless. These were anti-science bigots whose ideas literally endangered lives. They thumbed their noses at the new rituals which were meanwhile bringing the city together. The protests grew in number and in frequency into the summer months. Demonstrators were spared no ill will by the court of public opinion. Many commentators openly wished they see their comeuppance in the form of a hospital bed, and such tidings were met with all round applause.

There is no moral standing, as we see it, from which to question the edicts of the health experts. Our enthusiastic focus on the wellness effort has morphed into a complete intolerance for debate on the issue. We are so emboldened by our collective struggle that we feel morally justified in throwing all opposition into the fire.

Thus we’ve become locked into a radical, all-in moral defense of new and unprecedented rules. Such a rabid mode of categorical compliance establishes a dangerous low in our capacity for critically, rather than emotionally, perceiving the issues we face. We now despise rebellious thinking, even if those deviant ideas might be our life raft out of dangerous waters.

While the Coronavirus is often said to have brought out the best in us — with our pot-banging and our well-wishing — all of this team-building has produced, almost by necessity, a dark response to doubting voices.

Silencing doubt

SARS-COV-2 has changed our reaction to voices that oppose the crowd. Whereas in the past, outlier thinking, skepticism of mainstream messaging and policy makers, nonconformity in the face of social pressure were all tolerated if not welcomed, now we deem these things dangerous, not stimulating.

The pain of the pandemic, which has shown us what can happen when people adopt the wrong kinds of opinions, has made us hypersensitive to regressive views on other global issues like climate change, vaccination, social justice, even politics, in which the actions of the individual can affect the group. We have seen the consequence of too much freedom of thought in the form of lockdowns and packed ICUs, and we bristle to think what future crises might unfold if the wrong opinions gain traction again.

So we put extra effort into vilifying harmful views. If we have to contend with freedom of speech and freedom of thought, then we get around that obstacle by making unsafe views so socially toxic that they’re more dangerous for the speaker than they are for society. Be caught courting an unsanctioned idea and get branded an enemy of the public good. Suddenly yesterday’s eccentric thinker is today’s ignorant, selfish, uneducated bigot.

The ideological cooling effect of such a social mechanism is an effective tool for steering opinion and, as the pandemic has demonstrated, behavior too.

Saving face

Universal masking and protocol compliance has been so effectively adopted precisely because it has become socially untenable to do otherwise. To be caught without a mask, that brilliant piece of cloth that shows you care, is to forfeit your status as a well-meaning member of society.

And so we have it that much of the moral fetishization of COVID protocols — the excessive displays of complying well beyond the public guidelines — has become a way of signifying ideological affinity. So repellent is the image of the COVID skeptic that COVID compliance has become as much about self-image as it is about public safety — if not more.

We find ourselves trapped within a new social formula in which conformity is social currency. The more one over-performs the prescribed duties and rituals of the good citizen, the more approval is bestowed, and the more distance the performer creates between themselves and the looming image of the social monster.

In this paradigm, independent thinking — synthesizing available data into more nuanced or perhaps contradictory conclusions — is taboo. The social rewards of conformity far outweigh the immoral stink of rebellious thought. It simply becomes no longer worth the shame, stigma, self-doubt, and the bother of holding and sharing a competing idea.

There is no end in sight to this new model now that we have set it into motion. It has been embraced during pandemic and the gears are already turning to point this machinery towards other global efforts. It is our new social operating system — and it has already proven its capacity to reshape society without limitation. Consider how absurd the notion would have been just over a year ago that it would be reprehensible to be caught barefaced in a grocery store. What absurdities today will we reconstruct as the moral obligations of tomorrow?

We now have a framework for coercing total compliance to new and changing rules and rituals, which need no backing by logic or sense. How many truly contradictory public protocols do we now follow for the sake of optics alone? We jump into the street to give space to fellow pedestrians even though there is no realistic concern for transmission in this way. Proof and reason become redundancies — at most, formalities. If the Coronavirus ever ceases to be a concern, how many people will truly abandon masking when it has become so ingrained as a symbol of prudence and altruism? Compliance becomes its own end when its made synonymous with moral good.

And thus a moral blinding has stricken society. COVID-19 has gathered us so tightly around the bonfire of cooperation, either by conversion or coercion, that we have found no better place to be, and we have lost our tolerance for anyone refusing to join. We’ve completely annexed our capacity to judge what is being asked of us dispassionately, leaving open an unguarded pathway to our consent through both our heartstrings and our self-image.

Losing Control

The foundation is laid for future incursions into our daily normal, which have no hope of encountering resistance. The next radical social change need only be positioned as the next good thing, and even in the mind of the conflicted individual, doubt will be set aside in favor of appearance. Woe to anyone with the misfortune of disagreeing, because an intense, scapegoating hatred for those who do not comply will justify any manner of policy, punishment, and correction against them. And social spoils will await the loudest and most zealous followers and enforcers of whatever new normal the future cooks up.

We have burned our safety net against tyranny. Rather than doing the hard thing, respecting an individual’s right to self-direction even at a marginal expense of safety, we wage war on thought, between right-think and wrong-think, good action versus bad action so that we may burn every deviant in our path.

Sealing our fate

Through a system of self-adulating social rituals, single-minded public messaging, and stigmatization of the uncooperative, we have lost our capacity to see the shades of gray between extremes and to recognize the fundamental merits of debate and the freedom to dissent. We now prefer that every last skeptic be shamed into compliance, as if the benefit of that is worth the cost of forcing a free society into a hive mind.

We have so easily forgotten that it is in the dialectic of competing views — some for this side, others for that side — that we prevent any one extreme from over-dominating. And it is precisely by the moral exclusion of oppositional views that a population finds itself one day in a world it doesn’t recognize.

So while the world stampedes in lockstep towards new extremes of safety protocols, we are in danger of a well-intentioned agenda breaking away from itself and running ahead of its own mandate if there is no one left to one day challenge it.

And yet the average person shakes their head to learn of the latest citizen to defy protocol.

In just a few short months, the old liberal mindset that would have called for a balance between safety and liberty, that would have rejected the idea that science offers only one way through a crisis, that would have accepted the foundational need for some dissent, has eroded into a culture of compliance. To obey is to care. That is the equation that has reprogrammed our social order. And if it might benefit us today, it could more easily hurt us tomorrow, the next time something to which we wouldn’t normally consent finds that tested appeal to our hearts.

Tags Covid, Lies

Biden Pandemic COVID Drugs Reprints from others.

Take that Karen: ‘Natural Immunity Wins Again’: Study Demonstrates Infection-Derived Immunity Likely Superior to COVID Vaccines

We're from the government, we're here to protect you.

Fireman Jason Wendell protesting against NYC vaccine mandates in Manhattan, New York, on Oct. 26, 2021. (Sarah Lu/The Epoch Times)

By Enrico Trigoso for Epoch Times

Natural immunity wins again

A new study published by the New England Journal of Medicine on June 9 found that protection from COVID-19 via natural immunity was superior to that of two doses of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine after the same amount of time elapsed among uninfected people.

“Natural immunity wins again,” Martin Adel Makary, M.D., M.P.H., a public policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Twitter, referring to the new study.

Natural immunity “protection was higher than that conferred after the same time had elapsed since receipt of a second dose of vaccine among previously uninfected persons,” concludes the study.

Pfizer vaccine protection ‘wanes.’

“Infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) provides natural immunity against reinfection,” the study states at the outset, adding that recent studies have shown “waning of the immunity provided by” the Pfizer shot.

The article uses the database of the Israeli Ministry of Health from 2021 at a time when the Delta variant was predominant, among people who were previously infected with the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus or who had taken the 2019 vaccine.

For those with immunity from natural infection, the risk of hospitalization and death upon reinfection is exceedingly low

“CDC seroprevalence data shows that 58 percent of the public has already been infected across all age groups (75 percent of pediatric population). For those with immunity from natural infection, the risk of hospitalization and death upon reinfection is exceedingly low,” Dr. Sanjay Verma, a cardiologist who has seen a big increase in heart problems since the vaccines were rolled out, told The Epoch Times.

“Therefore, continued disregard for immunity from natural infection is not only contrary to all the published science, it’s an egregious affront to medical ethics,” he added.

“Throughout the pandemic, public health experts have ignored and even disparaged immunity after natural infection, exclusively emphasizing immunity from COVID vaccines. Many people have been unethically forced into unemployment from vaccine mandates that did not accommodate immunity from natural infection. Repeated studies have shown that immunity after COVID infection is comparable or even better than immunity after COVID vaccination,” Verma said.

Epoch Times Photo — Estimated Covariate-Adjusted Rates of Confirmed Infections per 100,000 Person-Days at Risk. (Screenshot of Fig 3 “Protection and Waning of Natural and Hybrid Immunity to SARS-CoV-2,” From The New England Journal of Medicine)

A chart showing the different levels of protection and waning efficacy against infection shows that those in the 4 to <8 months “1 dose + recovered” group didn’t experience significantly fewer infections than the “recovered, unvaccinated” group in the same time frame.

In addition, the data doesn’t show the 4-8 month result for people who took 3 doses.

Education Leftist Virtue(!) Reprints from others.

Move over ACLU, FIRE is the New Champion of Free Speech.

Post author By MC
Post date June 11, 2022
No Comments on Move over ACLU, FIRE is the New Champion of Free Speech.

The new Freedom of Speech Champion. FIRE CEO and President Greg Lukianoff- Photo TK News.

Article is from TK News by Matt Taibbi.

The expansion of the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education marks the end of an era, when free speech issues were the sole province of American liberalism

After years of planning, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, better known as FIRE, announced a major expansion Monday, moving “beyond college campuses to protect free speech — for all Americans.”

FIRE was the brainchild of University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors and Boston civil liberties lawyer Harvey A. Silverglate, who co-authored the 1999 book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses. To the modern reader the book reads like a collection of eccentric cases of students and teachers caught up in speech code issues, most (but not all) being conservative.

To take just one of countless nut-bar examples, Kors and Silverglate told the story of a professor in San Bernardino reprimanded for violating sexual harassment policies because, among other things, “he assigns provocative essays such as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal,” as the court case later put it. This was apparently the “cannibalism” portion of the accusation that he delved into such subjects as “obscenity, cannibalism, and consensual sex with children.”

The book triggered such an overwhelming number of responses from other faculty members and students that the pair decided to set up an organization to defend people who found themselves in tricky speech controversies on campuses. They soon found they had plenty of work and, by 2022, enough of a mandate to expand beyond colleges and universities into America at large. According to FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff, as quoted in a Politico story, the group has already raised over $28 million toward a $75 million “litigation, opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free-speech values.”

As noted in another story I put out today, FIRE will be doing a lot of stepping into a role semi-vacated by the American Civil Liberties Union. I spoke with Nico Perrino of FIRE, producer and co-director of the excellent documentary about former ACLU chief Ira Glasser (see review here), to ask what the expansion would entail:

Matt: What was the genesis of FIRE and how has it evolved?

Nico: FIRE was founded in 1999 by two Princeton classmates Harvey Silverglate, a left-leaning, civil liberties attorney out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a conservative-leaning professor, Alan Charles Kors, who teaches the Enlightenment, or taught the Enlightenment, at the University of Pennsylvania. They enjoyed their college experience, but were dismayed by the rise of speech codes in the 1980s and ‘90s, so they wrote a book called The Shadow University.

After they published that book, they were flooded with requests from students and faculty members for help to help defend their free speech, due process, and free assembly rights.

The first case was at the University of Pennsylvania. This was even before FIRE was founded, but it’s the case that inspired The Shadow University and therefore inspired FIRE. There was a student, named Eden Jacobowitz, who was studying in his dorm room at the University of Pennsylvania. There was a group of students outside making loud noises, it was dark out, and he screamed out his window, “Shut up, you Water Buffalo!” It became known as the Water Buffalo case. The students outside ended up being black students, and the accusation against Eden was that he was shouting a racial slur. It turns out that he was Israeli, or devoutly Jewish, and “water buffalo” was a translation of a word, behayma, which in Hebrew means a loud or unruly person. Kors, our co-founder, came to his defense and became a cause célèbre across the United States and vindicating the rights. That set the stage for what we were going to do at FIRE more generally.

Over the years, we’ve defended all sorts of speakers. As you can imagine, popular speakers don’t need free speech protections, so we often defended speakers at the margins. People like Ward Churchill, for example. [Editor’s Note: Churchill wrote a book, Some People Push Back, that described the 9/11 hijackings as “counterattacks” to “genocide,” the victims being “little Eichmanns.”]

We defended a student at Valdosta State University, for example, who criticized his University president’s effort to build a parking garage on campus. A Buddhist environmentalist student who thought the president shouldn’t be encouraging more parking on campus, or more driving on campus, and should invest rather in public transportation. He created a collage that described a “Ronald Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage.” Well, Zaccari was the name of the president, who thought it was a threat, the idea being that the “Memorial” in the collage meant that he was going to die.

Matt: He thought “Memorial” was referencing his future non-existence?

Nico: Yes.

Matt: Amazing.

Nico: He placed an expulsion note under Hayden Barnes’ dorm room door, and told him he needed to be out of the dorms. If you think someone’s actually a threat, you probably don’t slip a note under their door. We ended up defending Hayden Barnes, this is 2007, and taking his case to court and winning a $900,000 judgment in that case.

Matt: Didn’t you also do that crazy case in Indiana, about the janitor reading the book about Notre Dame and the Klan?

Nico: Yes. We defended the case of Keith John Sampson, a janitor at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, who was reading a book called Notre Dame vs. the Klan during his lunch break. He was working his way through school as a janitor. Someone saw, on the cover of the book, burning crosses and reported him to the University administration who found him guilty of racial harassment. The book, of course, was about how Notre Dame defeated the Klan when they marched on the campus. The Klan, people often forget, also hated Catholics, in addition to hating blacks. Someone literally judged the book by its cover. The University found him guilty of racial harassment for reading it. Funny thing is — well, the maybe not so funny thing is — the book was found in the University’s own library.

Matt: Functionally, what is this change going to mean?

Nico: Functionally, we’re getting a lot bigger. This is a $75 million expansion into off campus programming. We’ve already raised $28.5 million of that through a three year fundraising effort. We will be litigating and finding cases off campus. Some of those first cases should be coming down the pipe here shortly. Right now, as of this morning, people will start seeing ads defending a culture of free expression on television. You watch CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, you’ll see our ads start running with a high degree of regularity. We’re requesting $10 million in ads through the remainder of the year. Also, there will be billboards across the country in major cities. You’ll see free speech messaging out there. The big thing that we haven’t seen is people out there advocating for a culture of free expression in a visible way. We want to create an organization that people can rally around when threats to free speech exists.

That’s what this effort is about and we want to do so in an unapologetic way. Too often, there’s a lot of throat-clearing before for the defense of free speech. A lot of apologies, it almost comes off as apology for free expression. We’re genuflecting before other values before we can say anything about what we believe is a fundamental human right. FIRE doesn’t take a position on the content of speech. You won’t see us condemn speakers, even the most vile, racist, or offensive of them. For us, it’s enough that the speech is protected or should be protected. We’ll defend it. We’ll argue on first principles. That’s what’s necessary to win.

Matt: This question may be a little uncomfortable: isn’t that what the ACLU is for? Don’t we already have an ACLU?

Nico: The ACLU has 19 different issues in values and defense. It’s necessarily going to be a little bit more difficult for them to determine how they prioritize their work and where it directs its limited resources. Ben Wizner, who runs the ACLU’s Free Speech Project, acknowledged as much in Michael Powell’s New York Times article last year. He said, “FIRE does not have the same tensions.” He said that for the ACLU, free speech is one of 12 or 15 different values.

We don’t have a racial justice program. We don’t have a reproductive rights program. We don’t have a trans rights program. We have a free speech program. We’re not having to deal with the tensions that may or may not exist with free speech and other values. FIRE believes fundamentally that free speech is supportive of all those values, so we’ll make those arguments where necessary, but no, there’s no other values that we have to defend, which makes our work a little bit easier and more focused.

Matt: Last question. Thirty or forty years ago, when George H. W. Bush pointed at Mike Dukakis and called him a card-carrying member of the ACLU, it was pretty firmly understood that speech was primarily a left liberal concern. Is that still true? And if not, is there a perception now that this has become a conservative fixation?

Nico: My sense is that freedom of expression should be core to every political belief. Our ability to express our political beliefs, whole stop, is the thing that makes debate and discussion about all these other issues possible.

I was in a debate with a professor at George Washington University recently, and he was arguing essentially that free speech, all the conversations that you’re seeing in the media about free speech: that speech doesn’t rate when you have, as he was putting it, abortion rights being restricted all over the country, crackdowns on immigration, things of that nature. I said to him, “The only reason those other issues can rate is because we have our free speech right to discuss them.” So freedom of speech is the first right. It’s the matrix. It’s the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom.

As far as whether liberals have retreated from the idea? To a certain extent, yes. I think that’s apparent. All you need to do is look at who’s going after Dave Chappelle. Look at the response to Elon Musk’s decision to purchase Twitter. Netflix CEO, Ted Sarandos, I think, told the New York Times recently, that it’s an interesting time that we live in because free speech used to be a very liberal value, but that was when the censorship was coming from conservatives against Black Panthers, against Lenny Bruce, against anti-war protestors, against civil rights marchers, against —

Nico: Ruth Bader Ginsburg said America is nothing if not a pendulum. When it swings one direction, it always has a tendency to swing back. For a lot of America’s history in the 20th century, it was liberals who were being censored, so they care deeply about free speech. Now conservatives see that they’re being censored or at least feel like they can’t speak. So they are more vocal in support of free expression.

Now, whether they’re consistently supportive of the principle is another discussion, as we’ve seen with what’s happened in Republican legislatures across the country. I think the suggestion is they’re supportive of the principle when it’s convenient for them, but that’s why we need a nonpartisan free speech advocate in this country. An organization that is going to, as Norman Siegel, who was featured in my documentary Mighty Ira, once said, “If I’m going to have anything tattooed on my chest, it’s going to be ‘neutral principles.’” That’s really what we’re advocating for here, that freedom of speech is an insurance policy for us. If we don’t defend the rights of speakers with whom we disagree with, how can we expect our rights to be protected?

Matt: Excellent. Congratulations and good luck.

Nico: Thank you.

Life Reprints from others. Uncategorized

Vestiges of Americana fading before our eyes.

Post author By MC
Post date June 9, 2022
No Comments on Vestiges of Americana fading before our eyes.

Days gone by. Photoi Washington Examiner.

Article first published by Salena Zito, National Political Reporter

HOLLIDAYSBURG, Pennsylvania — In truth, the last Howard Johnson’s restaurant closed long before the one in Lake George, New York, did last week. The only thing that particular location had in common with the fried clams and 28 flavors of ice cream the restaurant was famous for was maintaining the iconic orange roof that signaled to families for generations you were pulling up to a place you could trust for known comfort food at reasonable prices.

What began as Howard Deering Johnson taking over his father’s struggling medicine store and soda fountain in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1925 grew because of his keen understanding of what people were looking for. The 27-year-old had vision and understood people. He improved the quality of the ice cream, added well-prepared food for customers to eat, and soon, he went from deeply in debt to flourishing.

Four years later, Johnson opened a second restaurant and was selling his popular ice cream at stands along the beach.

Unofficial official Howard Johnson’s restaurant historian Walter Mann details on his HoJoLand website that Johnson was a bit of a visionary who saw the love Americans had for the open roads and their cars and understood that as the U.S. road system expanded, families would be packing up their vehicles.

And he was eager to expand. “He conceived a new idea: franchising. Johnson talked another businessman into using the ‘Howard Johnson’s’ name on a Cape Cod restaurant, in return for a fee and an agreement to buy food and supplies from Johnson. The idea worked well for both men, and Johnson made similar agreements with others. That was the beginning of restaurant franchising, a system that has since been replicated by countless others,” Mann wrote.

Food rationing dragged the business down during World War II, but Johnson kept the company alive by providing food for military installations, defense plants, and schools.

By the 1950s, there were more than 400 Howard Johnson’s operating across the country and at the end of that decade, and Howard D. Johnson passed the business on to his son Howard B. Johnson. By the mid-60s, its sales exceeded those of McDonald’s, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, making it the second-largest food provider in the U.S., second only to the U.S. Army.

So, what went wrong? Why are we not getting ready to celebrate HoJo’s 100 years of existence in 2025? Howard D. had done everything right despite inheriting a deeply-in-debt business, a stock market crash, a Great Depression, food shortages, and a war throwing land mines in his direction every few years. And he had developed a brand that was trustworthy, visually recognizable from a mile away, and located on just about every road in America, along with all the turnpikes and highways.

Sort of reminds you of another American company — Sears and Roebucks — which by all accounts should have been the Amazon of today and is instead languishing in bankruptcy and a shell of what it once was.

Sears was the quintessential American company the catalogs of which defined what we wore, what appliances and tools we used, and what we wanted for Christmas. It also fixed our cars, sold us tires, and would send us plans and all the supplies needed to build our homes.

It knew everyone’s address because of the Wish Book, and its stores, large and small, were located on everyone’s Main Street business district or in suburban malls.

There is no reason at all why Sears could not be the Amazon of today. It had the footprint in the public’s hearts and in their backyards to make that happen, beginning with customer trust, information, and access.

In the same thinking, there is no reason why Howard Johnson’s could not still be delighting parents with crispy fried oysters while their children decided which of the over two dozen ice cream flavors they would soon be devouring. It didn’t have to be this way, and yet here we are.

What made Sears great were the innovators who created it. Sears began as a mail-order watch company, then morphed into a mail-order operation that sold a variety of household essentials at a discounted price to rural areas — think farmers, small towns, and villages — who had little access to retail stores.

Richard W. Sears understood customers’ needs because he understood and experienced their challenges, which is easy when you come from Stewartville, Minnesota, the population at the turn of the 20th century which was under 800. You are in touch with the customer when you are the customer. In short, he was able to put himself in their shoes.

Howard D. Johnson, a World War I veteran who inherited his father’s soda shop in Quincy, Massachusetts, knew people. Despite failing a lot more times than succeeding in his early days, he never stopped trying, innovating, and learning what his customers wanted.

The beginning of the end for both companies began as they kept getting sold and resold and sold again to venture capital groups the operators of which never once ate at a HoJo’s or bought Sears auto parts to fix their car or had their children circle what they wanted for Christmas in the Wish Book. When you share little in common with your customers, then how do you innovate to keep them and their children?

The public loves nostalgia. It would have loved to bring its children or grandchildren to the same place their parents took them on their way to the shore. They also love consistency. You knew what you got and where to go to get it every time you walked into a Sears.

Last week was more than just the end of Howard Johnson’s. It marked one more place in our culture that lost touch with its customers because the owners had little in common with them. In short, they lived in the super ZIP codes of this country and ate and shopped in a universe far different than their customers. They still made money whether anyone came to shop or eat.

And unlike many of us did not mourn when someone turned the lights off for the last time in Lake George.

Tags End of days gone by, HoJo’s

Economy Leftist Virtue(!) Opinion Politics Reprints from others.

Biden Backer Cardi B Asks: When They Going to Announce We Going Into a Recession

Post author By MC
Post date June 7, 2022
No Comments on Biden Backer Cardi B Asks: When They Going to Announce We Going Into a Recession

A loon asking for more pain. Youtube Photo.

This article first appeared on Breitbart.

The left’s stupidity never ceases to amaze me. See below.

Rapper and Joe Biden supporter Cardi B took to Twitter on Sunday to ask when “they going to announce” that the United States is “going into a recession.”

“When y’all think they going to announce that we going into a recession?” Cardi B wrote Sunday in a tweet, which has since garnered more than 120,000 likes, and over 16,000 retweets.

Cardi B’s tweet also received thousands of replies, including many Twitter users who reminded the rapper that she had encouraged her fans to vote for President Joe Biden.

Weren’t you encouraging people to vote for Joe Biden?
— Adam Kuhn (@IamAdamKuhn) June 5, 2022

Indeed, Joe Biden sat down for an Elle magazine interview with rap star Cardi B jut months before the 2020 presidential election.

Watch below:

“Thanks for helping elect Joe Biden,” another quipped.

Another Twitter user responded to those retorting, “But didn’t you vote for Biden?” saying, “Y’all realize literally MILLIONS of people regret voting for Biden right?”

“You don’t need ‘them’ to tell you anything you can see for yourself,” another tweeted.

A host of other Twitter users took to the comment section to claim that the U.S. is not in a recession.

“Inflation doesn’t mean recession,” one wrote.

“A recession is defined as 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, so we’d only know we are in a recession after it’s already started, and after the economic data comes in for those 2 quarters,” another tweeted.

A strong majority of Americans, however, believe that the U.S. economy is experiencing a recession, according to a recent poll from the Economist and YouGov.

This is bad news for Biden, who just last week declared that a record high number of Americans were comfortable. Moreover, the president’s approval ratings have tanked, as citizens have overwhelming rejected the Biden administration’s handling of gas prices, inflation, and the economy.

Tags Biden, Cardi B, Stupidity

Daily Hits. MSM Opinion Politics Reprints from others.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

Post author By MC
Post date June 6, 2022
No Comments on Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

Where am I? What day is it? Who's the President?

Article originally appeared on The Morning Dispatch.

The baby formula plant whose February shutdown exacerbated a nationwide formula shortage resumed production over the weekend. “We will ramp production as quickly as we can while meeting all requirements,” Abbott Nutrition said in a Saturday statement.
Dr. Mehmet Oz secured his victory in Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate primary Friday after former hedge fund CEO David McCormick, who trailed Oz by less than 1,000 votes in the initial vote count, conceded that an in-progress recount would not eliminate that margin.
John Fetterman—Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor and Oz’s November opponent—is facing new questions about his health going into the general election, following a stroke last month that required hospitalization and the installation of a pacemaker. In a Friday statement, Fetterman, a Democrat, revealed he suffered from a heart condition and had “avoided going to the doctor,” and as a result he “almost died.”
Republicans and Democrats in the Senate say they’re making progress on gun legislation following a rash of mass shootings in recent weeks, although Sen. Pat Toomey said on Face the Nation Sunday that the discussions do not “guarantee any outcome.” The Washington Post reports that such legislation would potentially include encouraging states to implement red-flag laws that would allow courts to bar people thought to be a threat to themselves or others from accessing firearms.
Three people were killed and 11 more injured in a shooting in Philadelphia’s South Street nightlife corridor Saturday night. Police said two men got into a fight, then both produced guns and began firing at each other on the crowded street. One of the two shooters was killed in the initial confrontation; the other was wounded and fled the scene.
Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro was arrested on two misdemeanor charges of contempt of Congress Friday after Navarro refused to testify before or supply documents to the committee investigating the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Another former Trump associate, Steve Bannon, is scheduled to go on trial for comparable charges next month.
An attack on a Catholic church in southwest Nigeria has left more than 50 people feared dead, including many children, authorities said Sunday. It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack, which involved both firearms and explosives.

A Jobs Report from the Goldilocks Zone

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Goldilocks who really should’ve been booked for home invasion. Instead, she wound up granting her name to anything that’s “just right”—such as May’s job report.

We know that joke’s a stretch, but we’re running out of new ways to introduce solid jobs reports like the one the Labor Department released Friday. After nearly a year of the pandemic rebound with at least 400,000 new jobs per month, in May employers added 390,000 jobs—hardly cold, but not quite white-hot. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had predicted a slower uptick of 318,000 new jobs.

We’re still about 822,000 jobs short of pre-pandemic levels, but the gap could close by the end of summer. Meanwhile, labor force participation edged up 0.1 percent to 62.3 percent in May, still 1.1 percent below February 2020.

Unemployment stayed at its near fifty-year low of 3.6 percent, and there are still nearly two open jobs for every one job-seeker. Coupled with high inflation, that ridiculously tight labor market has driven strong wage growth in recent months, causing economists to fret rising wages would in turn force businesses to increase prices, creating a wage-price spiral.

But average hourly wages for private, non-farm employees rose 0.3 percent in May from the previous month, a smidge shy of the 0.4 percent economists expected. And the three-month average of year-over-year wage growth hit 4.6 percent—about 1.7 percent above the pre-pandemic average but well below the peak of 7 percent in mid-2021, according to the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics.

That’s a lot of numbers just to say: Employers are still raising pay to attract workers, but they’ve chilled out a bit. “Firms seem to be less willing to raise wages sharply in order to fill openings than they were last winter,” as Peterson analysts put it. That’s not pleasant for the individual worker looking for a boost to the old paycheck, but it’s a good sign that the economy overall remains robust but not berserk. Meanwhile, as we’ve written previously, inflation seems to have peaked, at least for now.

All in all, a solid jobs report—but the markets reacted like they’d been served a bowl of chilly, lumpy porridge. The S&P 500 dropped 1.7 percent Friday after the report’s release, while the Dow Jones Industrial average fell 1 percent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite outdid them both by losing 2.6 percent. Meanwhile, Tesla owner and maybe someday Twitter owner Elon Musk declared he has a “super bad feeling” about the economy and needs to cut 10 percent of Tesla’s staff, Reuters reported.

We’re not sure what to tell you about Musk’s super bad feeling, but the market’s overall reaction is a perverse sign of the job report’s strength. “The economy’s doing quite well,” Brendan Walsh, co-founder of Markets Policy Partners, told The Dispatch. “The worry is that because the economy is doing well, the [Federal Reserve] will over-tighten and drive us into recession.”

In a bid to bring down inflation by taking its foot off the economy’s gas pedal, the central bank has already hiked interest rates twice this year, making loans to buy homes or expand businesses more expensive, discouraging demand. It’s signaling it plans a couple more hikes before September, and Fed vice chair Lael Brainard said Thursday the central bank would check its plan against the jobs report (among other markers). “We’ll be looking closely to the data to see that kind of cooling in demand, and moderation—better balance—in the labor market,” Brainard told CNBC. “With our number one challenge being the need to get inflation down, we do expect to see some cooling of a very, very strong economy over time.” The solid jobs report is another indicator that the economy can handle the Fed’s cooling measures.

In remarks trumpeting the report, President Joe Biden said it was an indicator that the economy can handle the Fed’s cooling measures. “As we move to a new period of stable, steady growth, we should expect to see more moderation,” Biden told reporters Friday. “We aren’t likely to see the kind of blockbuster job reports month after month like we had over this past year, but that’s a good thing. … That stability puts us in a strong position to tackle what is clearly a problem: inflation.”

Which returns us to the market worry that after letting inflation shoot up the Fed will overcorrect and strangle U.S. economic growth into a recession. “Right now, it’s kind of sunny, things are doing fine,” JPMorgan Chase head Jamie Dimon warned Tuesday at an investors’ conference, arguing that the combination of pandemic stimulus, Fed policy, and the war in Ukraine are bearing down on the economy. “Everyone thinks the Fed can handle this. That hurricane is right out there, down the road, coming our way. We just don’t know if it’s a minor one or superstorm Sandy.”

But at least for the next few months, Walsh is sanguine. “The economy is too strong,” he said. “The risk is much more [for] 2023, that the Fed does over-tighten, we come off of this COVID rebound.” But, he predicted, “It’s a bit of a lull. It’s not like a crisis.”

So… a lukewarm economic porridge? We’ll see ourselves out.

Worth Your Time

So-called red-flag laws have emerged as a rare point of possible bipartisan agreement on gun issues in recent years, particularly following the crush of shootings this Spring. But they’ve also been criticized as a potentially spotty countermeasure, with several prominent mass shooters in states with red-flag laws having been able to obtain firearms despite making public threats of violence ahead of time. A New York Times feature over the weekend examines one county that has taken its red-flag ordinance seriously: Suffolk County in New York, where more than 160 guns have been removed by court order since 2019. “The filings are filled with people threatening to shoot up courthouses or schoolhouses, amped-up men in cars with weapons and ammunition, people behaving erratically at a gun shop or military-base checkpoint or firing randomly into a neighbor’s yard,” the reporters write. “People who text friends and loved ones ‘Goodbye forever’ or ‘I have a gun next to my bed bro’ or post, ‘When I kill everyone know it’s my dad’s fault.’”
Speaking of the Times, Maggie Haberman’s latest contains remarkable new reporting about former Vice President Mike Pence’s experience of the January 6 riot: “The day before a mob of President Donald J. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol … Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff called Mr. Pence’s lead Secret Service agent to his West Wing office. The chief of staff, Marc Short, had a message for the agent, Tim Giebels: The president was going to turn publicly against the vice president, and there could be a security risk to Mr. Pence because of it.” Haberman goes on to detail the remarkable pressure Pence was put under by a rogue’s gallery of Trump supporters in the days leading up to his Jan. 6 decision not to obey Trump’s command to interfere with the counting of the electoral vote: “At the end of December, Mr. Pence traveled to Vail, Colo., for a family vacation. While he was there, his aides received a request for him to meet with Sidney Powell, a lawyer who promoted some of the more far-fetched conspiracy theories about flaws in voting machines, and whom Mr. Trump wanted to bring into the White House, ostensibly to investigate his false claims of widespread voter fraud.”

Presented Without Comment

Jason Campbell @JasonSCampbell

Rep Louie Gohmert on Navarro indictment: “If you’re a Republican, you can’t even lie to Congress or lie to an FBI agent or they’re coming after you”

Also Presented Without Comment

Mo Brooks @MoBrooks

MAGA Nation, here is my story. Join me in asking President Trump to #ReEndorseMo so that we can send a message to Mitch McConnell by sending a real America First conservative to the Senate on June 21.

Toeing the Company Line

In his Sunday French Press, David draws a distinction between the healthy safety- and rights-focused gun culture that America has long enjoyed and the reactionary gun fetishism that has grown more ubiquitous in recent years. “The gun fetish rears its head when politicians pose with AR-15s in their campaign posters, or when a powerful senator makes ‘machine-gun bacon’ to demonstrate just how much he loves the Second Amendment,” he writes. “Spend much time at gun shows or at gun shops, and you’ll quickly become familiar with something called the ‘tactical’ or ‘black gun’ lifestyle, where civilians intentionally equip themselves in gear designed for the ‘daily gunfight.’ It’s often a form of elaborate special forces cosplay, except the weapons (and sometimes the body armor) are very real.”
In his Friday G-File, Jonah took aim at “the most fatal flaw of Democrats”: “that they take it as a given that government can do the normal stuff well.” “If progressives really wanted to restore faith in government, they’d concentrate all of their energies on tackling the stuff already on the government’s plate,” he writes. “Execute the job you’ve been given well, and then we’ll talk about giving you more responsibility. Walk, then run, and then we’ll get into a fun argument about whether it’s stupid you think you can fly.”
Don’t forget the podcasts: In Friday’s Remnant, Jonah dove solo into topics ranging from the somber to the downright bizarre: television, republicanism, superstition, and the like. In this week’s Good Faith, David and Curtis discuss the tensions between gun rights and gun control and the hyper-polarization that engulfs the issue. And on the Dispatch Podcast, the gang discusses the first 100 days of war in Ukraine, the gun question, and next week’s January 6 hearings on Capitol Hill.

Let Us Know

When you read the sentence “Republicans and Democrats in the Senate say they’re making progress on gun legislation following a rash of mass shootings in recent weeks,” what color did your mood ring turn?

Tags Daily News

Biden Pandemic COVID Politics Reprints from others. Science Uncategorized

Pfizer quietly admits it will never manufacture original FDA approved COVID vaccines Company claims it is manufacturing Comirnaty product with new formula.

Not giving the rest of the story. Getty Pictures

This article is from The Dossier.

The August 23, 2021 FDA approval of Pfizer’s Comirnaty vaccine was a cause for celebration. Marked as a turning point in the battle against COVID19, the announcement was highly publicized by the Biden Administration with the clear intention to extinguish “vaccine hesitancy” and boost uptake.

CNN Breaking News @cnnbrk

President Biden says anyone who was waiting for an FDA-approved Covid vaccine should “go get your vaccination and get it today” cnn.it/3D3Q7ci

Bridget Naso @BridgetNaso

Dr. Anthony Fauci said surveys show 30% of unvaccinated Americans said if the vaccine was FDA approved they would get the shot. It was approved today and Fauci said “The time has come.”

It was celebrated as a cause for national relief, and many Americans arrived at their local pharmacies under the impression, via government and pharmaceutical propaganda, that they were receiving an FDA-approved COVID vaccine. Yet that legally distinct product, as we know it, never existed. And now we know, via Pfizer, that it will never exist.

For the uninitiated:

Comirnaty is a legally distinct product from the emergency use authorization (EUA) shots, and It has never made its way to market. For months on end, no such vaccine has ever become available. Those who received the “Pfizer shot(s)” have been injected with the emergency use authorization (EUA) version of the shots. See my piece in The Dossier for more info:

Shell Game? There remains no FDA approved COVID vaccine in the United States

I fact checked the fact checkers and couldn’t believe what I found. Despite the corporate press, Big Pharma, and the federal government telling us otherwise, it is absolutely true that there is no FDA approved COVID-19 vaccine available in the United States today. And there are no plans to make one available any time soon…

5 months ago · 241 likes · 79 comments · Jordan Schachtel

The information operation succeeded. There was indeed an FDA approved vaccine, at least on paper, but you couldn’t get it.

When originally confronted with this ordeal, Pfizer labeled this issue an inventory question that had nothing to do with the legal distinction between an experimental EUA product and an FDA-approved vaccine. Up until just weeks ago, this was the statement up on the CDC website via Pfizer:

“Pfizer received FDA BLA license on 8/23/2021 for its COVID-19 vaccine for use in individuals 16 and older (COMIRNATY). At that time, the FDA published a BLA package insert that included the approved new COVID-19 vaccine tradename COMIRNATY and listed 2 new NDCs (0069-1000-03, 0069-1000-02) and images of labels with the new tradename.
At present, Pfizer does not plan to produce any product with these new NDCs and labels over the next few months while EUA authorized product is still available and being made available for U.S. distribution. As such, the CDC, AMA, and drug compendia may not publish these new codes until Pfizer has determined when the product will be produced with the BLA labels.”

In May, Pfizer updated its statement to mention a December 2021 licensed Comirnaty product, which was granted a license four months after the highly-publicized August FDA press release.

And just last week, Pfizer finally acknowledged that its original licensed product will never be distributed. In an unreported update on the CDC website, Pfizer told the agency:

“Pfizer received initial FDA BLA license on 8/23/2021 for its COVID-19 vaccine for use in individuals 16 and older (COMIRNATY). At that time, the FDA published a BLA package insert that included the approved new COVID-19 vaccine tradename COMIRNATY and listed 2 new NDCs (0069-1000-03, 0069-1000-02) and images of labels with the new tradename. These NDCs will not be manufactured. Only NDCs for the subsequently BLA approved tris-sucrose formulation will be produced.”

The key distinction between the originally approved formulation and the tris-sucrose formulation is that — according to manufacturers — the latter can be held for a much longer period of time outside of an ultra cold freezer. These freezers cost over $10,000 a piece and each unit uses as much energy per day as an average American household. Improper storage can render the mRNA unstable.

Notably, the clinical trials for the Pfizer shot were conducted without the modified tris-sucrose ingredient. Given the partisan nature of Pfizer, the corporate media, government health bureaucracies, and your correspondent’s lack of expertise in this area, it is unclear whether this is significant.

Another notable thing to look out for in the coming days and weeks is the possibility that the subsequently FDA approved product finally becomes available in the United States. In recent days, the CDC removed the language of “not orderable at this time” above the description of both Comirnaty and Moderna’s Spikevax.

Additionally, as reported by Uncover DC, the Defense Department appears to be in the early stages of ordering what it has interpreted as a legally required minimum of Comirnaty in order to continue its mRNA mandate of American service members.

Tags Lies, Pfizer

Reprints from others. Uncategorized

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

Post author By MC
Post date June 1, 2022
No Comments on Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

Yes you did. Government overreach. FOX Photo.

Article is from the Dispatch.

In a New York Times op-ed published Tuesday night, President Joe Biden announced the United States will provide Ukraine with “more advanced rocket systems and munitions” so it can “fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.” Biden had said Monday his administration would not send Ukraine any rocket systems that could strike across the border into Russia and wrote yesterday his administration is “not encouraging or enabling” Ukraine to do so. Biden also claimed in his op-ed the United States “will not try to bring about” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ouster, despite him saying a few weeks ago Putin “cannot remain in power.”
The United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency said Monday Iran has almost enough near-weapons-grade enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb and hasn’t provided credible answers to the agency’s questions about the material’s existence. Negotiations between Iran, the Biden administration, and a handful of other nations have largely stalled over the United States’ refusal to remove the Foreign Terrorist Organization designation from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Taiwan’s defense ministry reported Monday that China sent 30 warplanes through its air defense identification zone in an incursion that coincided with a previously unannounced visit to Taipei by U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth. A Taiwanese military pilot died during a training exercise this week—the third such military plane crash since January—underscoring concerns the island’s military isn’t prepared for a potential Chinese invasion.
The Supreme Court sided with social media platforms on Tuesday, blocking a Texas law that prohibits companies with more than 50 million monthly active users from moderating content based on “viewpoint.” The 5-4 decision—with Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor in the majority—will prohibit enforcement of the law while tech companies’ challenges work through the lower courts.
U.S. home prices were a record 20.6 percent higher in March 2022 than March 2021, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index. The measure represents a slight increase from February’s 20 percent year-over-year growth, but operates on a two-month lag. Home prices have begun to level off or fall in recent months as heightened mortgage interest rates put a damper on consumer demand.
Eurozone inflation reached 8.1 percent year-over-year in May, up from a 7.4 percent annual rate in April and March. In a move likely to drive energy prices even higher, European Union lawmakers have agreed to cut oil purchases from Russia in phases, embargoing about 90 percent of Russian oil imports by the end of the year. They’ll meet to officially pass the plan—which includes an exemption for oil sent via pipeline to overcome Hungary’s veto threat—on Wednesday.
Canadian lawmakers introduced legislation on Monday that, if passed, would prohibit Canadians from buying, selling, importing, or transferring handguns. The sweeping changes—which are expected to become law—would also require owners of “military-style assault weapons” to participate in a mandatory government buyback program and implement red-flag laws allowing judges to temporarily take firearms from a person deemed to be a danger to himself or others. “As a government, as a society, we have a responsibility to act to prevent more tragedies,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said. “We need only look south of the border to know that if we do not take action, firmly and rapidly, it gets worse and worse and more difficult to counter.”
A federal jury on Tuesday acquitted Michael Sussmann—an attorney with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign—on a charge of lying to the FBI about whether he was working on the campaign’s behalf when he passed information to the Bureau alleging ties between Donald Trump’s campaign and a Russian bank. The jury deliberated for a few hours Friday afternoon and Tuesday morning before reaching its verdict in the case, which was brought by Special Counsel John Durham.
Sihle Zikalala—premier of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province—said over the weekend that the death toll attributed to recent flooding in the eastern and coastal parts of the country has risen to at least 459 people. The region has had several severe storms in recent weeks.

John Durham Swings and Misses in Sussmann Investigation

Michael Sussmann (Screenshot via C-SPAN)

It’s bizarre now—like looking back into another life—to remember the days of the investigation into possible connections between the campaign of then-President Donald Trump and Russia, during which a remarkable number of liberals in both media and pop culture convinced themselves that the day was coming when Special Counsel Robert Mueller would reveal his shocking findings, indict everyone within a mile of the Trump campaign, and rid America for good of this turbulent president.

They never ascended to the heights of Muellermania, but for the last couple of years, Trump’s allies have carried a torch for a special counsel of their own: John Durham, who was appointed in 2019 to examine the origins of the Russia probe and, specifically, the question, long belabored by those sympathetic to Trump’s assertion that the whole thing was a “witch hunt,” of whether it was launched as part of a partisan effort to hobble his presidency before it could begin.

As we’ve written in the past, Durham’s investigation has allegedly uncovered some embarrassing and unethical behavior on the part of some of Trump’s adversaries—particularly the Clinton campaign’s role in planting an early (and highly dubious) Trump-Russia story in the press about a week before the 2016 election. But the probe has so far made few moves as far as actual criminal prosecutions are concerned—extracting a guilty plea from former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith (who got probation and community service) and indicting a Democratic lawyer, Michael Sussmann, both on charges of felony false statements.

Yesterday, in federal court, a jury found Sussmann not guilty.

Durham’s case had been relatively straightforward. In late 2016, Sussmann was an attorney at Perkins Coie, a firm known for its work with prominent national Democrats; he himself was performing billable work for the Clinton campaign. In September of that year, Sussmann had sought a meeting with his friend James Baker, general counsel at the FBI, to bring to his attention information that supposedly showed a concerning connection between the Trump organization and a server registered to a Russian company, Alfa Bank.

The information, it turned out, was bad. When the Clinton campaign planted it in the press, it fell apart within a day. But Durham’s indictment was less interested in the bad intelligence than in the fact that Sussmann, in bringing the information to Baker, hid his own relationship with the campaign and its bearing on the matter.

“During the meeting,” Durham wrote in the indictment, “Sussmann stated falsely that he was not doing his work on the aforementioned allegations ‘for any client,’ which led the FBI General Counsel to understand that Sussmann was acting as a good citizen merely passing along information, not as a paid advocate or political operative.”

That Sussmann in fact lied about this is in little doubt. Initially, Durham’s case was more or less solely reliant on the testimony of Baker himself, who testified that Sussmann had made these statements. After charges were filed, a text message from Sussmann to Baker came to light that bolstered that testimony: “Jim—it’s Michael Sussmann. I have something time-sensitive (and sensitive) I need to discuss. Do you have availability for a short meeting tomorrow? I’m coming on my own—not on behalf of a client or company—want to help the Bureau. Thanks.”

Nevertheless, Sussmann was found not guilty. There are a couple of possible reasons for this.