PP NewsBrief: 2021-03-31

We need to begin to reclaim control over the institutions which have such oversized roles in our lives. As you read this people work tirelessly to see to it that you are dumb and docile. Let's stop them.

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You Refuse to Get Vaccinated, But Are You Ready to be an Outcast?

"Let’s assume for a minute, that the vaccination campaign is led by people who genuinely want to end the current crisis and restore the country to “normal”. Let’s also assume, that they believe that mass vaccination is the best way to achieve that objective by preventing the spread of the virus and, thus, reducing the death toll. Is that sufficient justification for silencing vaccine critics and conducting a nation-wide brainwashing operation aimed at controlling public opinion?

No, it’s not. People need to hear both sides of the story, in fact, that’s the only way they can make an informed decision about how they wish to proceed. The media has no right to commandeer the airwaves and control whatever people hear and see. And they have no right to deliberately exclude the medical professionals and other experts whose views conflict with the official narrative. The only way that people can offer their informed consent for vaccination, is if they’re able to weigh the risks and benefits for themselves. But that’s only possible if they have access to many diverse sources of information which, at present, they don’t. Increasingly, the only message that most people hear is the one that is provided by the government in collaboration with industry honchos and other elites. Traditionally, this type of state media is called “propaganda” which is a term that certainly applies here.

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...the people that are managing this campaign don’t want anything that veers from the “official narrative”. They don’t want people thinking for themselves, they don’t want people searching alternate websites that challenge the new prevailing doctrine on vaccines, they don’t want people who read the details about the trials or the medical journals or the research papers. They don’t want you to question their motives, or weigh the risks and benefits of getting vaccinated. They don’t want you to notice that their vaccine never completed long-term trials or met the normal standards for product safety. They don’t want you to consider the fact that mRNA is a relatively new technology with a checkered past that includes some very disturbing animal trials in which all the animals died. They don’t want you to think about any of this. They want you to shut up, stand in line, turn off your brain, and roll up your sleeve. And, anyone who disagrees with that sentiment, is being censored.

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And why have behavioral psychologists been employed by the government to promote the vaccination campaign? Why have they concocted a strategy designed “to change people’s beliefs and feelings about vaccination” to inform “people about the prosocial benefits of vaccination”, and to “intervene on behavior directly”, which means that you’re given an appointment, and told that you will be getting your vaccination at the end of the session.” Psychologists call this a “presumptive recommendation” which effectively eliminates the element of personal choice by creating a scenario in which getting vaccinated is a fait accompli. How is this not coercion?

It is coercion, subconscious coercion. The doctor is strong-arming the patient into getting vaccinated by making it look like its standard procedure. That puts pressure on the patient to follow the path of least resistance, which is compliance. It’s a clever tactic, but it is also transparently manipulative.

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Is it really ethical for the APA to be involved in a mass vaccination campaign? Is this the role an organization like this should play in a democratic society? Should the APA use its unique understanding of human behavior to persuade people on behalf of the government and big pharma? And, more importantly, if behavioral psychologists helped to shape the government’s strategy on mass vaccination, then in what other policies were they involved? Were these the “professionals” who conjured up the pandemic restrictions? Were the masks, the social distancing and the lockdowns all promoted by “experts” as a way to undermine normal human relations and inflict the maximum psychological pain on the American people? Was the intention to create a weak and submissive population that would willingly accept the dismantling of democratic institutions, the dramatic restructuring of the economy, and the imposition of a new political order?”"

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A Biden Appointee's Troubling Views On The First Amendment

"...The Cliff’s Notes version of Wu’s thesis:

• The framers wrote the Bill of Rights in an atmosphere where speech was expensive and rare. The Internet made speech cheap, and human attention rare. Speech-hostile societies like Russia and China have already shown how to capitalize on this “cheap speech” era, eschewing censorship and bans in favor of “flooding” the Internet with pro-government propaganda.
• As a result, those who place faith in the First Amendment to solve speech dilemmas should “admit defeat” and imagine new solutions for repelling foreign propaganda, fake news, and other problems. “In some cases,” Wu writes, “this could mean that the First Amendment must broaden its own reach to encompass new techniques of speech control.” What might that look like? He writes, without irony: “I think the elected branches should be allowed, within reasonable limits, to try returning the country to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s.”
• More ominously, Wu suggests that in modern times, the government may be more of a bystander to a problem in which private platforms play the largest roles. Therefore, a potential solution (emphasis mine) “boils down to asking whether these platforms should adopt (or be forced to adopt) norms and policies traditionally associated with twentieth-century journalism.”

That last line is what should make speech advocates worry.

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...there’s a paradox embedded in this new Democratic mainstream thinking about speech in the Internet era. As one activist put it to me last week, the new breed of Democratic-leaning thinkers like Wu wants to be anti-corporate and authoritarian at the same time. Their problem, however, is that in order to effect change through authoritative action, they need to enlist the aid and cooperation of corporate power.

This paradox casts even the “antitrust all-star team” narrative about people like Wu and Khan in a different light. What may begin as a sincere desire by the Biden administration (or, at least, by figures like Wu, who by all accounts is a real antitrust advocate) to break up tech monopolies, may end in negotiation and partnership.

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You can see this mentality in the repeated exchanges between Congress and Silicon Valley executives. An example is the celebrated October 23, 2019 questioning of Mark Zuckerberg by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a House Financial Services Committee hearing. The congresswoman, as staunch a believer in the new approach to speech as there is in modern Democratic Party politics, repeatedly asks Zuckerberg questions like, “So, you won't take down lies or you will take down lies?” and “Why you label the Daily Caller, a publication well-documented with ties to white supremacists, as an official fact-checker for Facebook?”

Grasping that everyone who’s ever thought about speech issues throughout our history has been concerned with the publication of falsehoods, incitement to violence, libel, hate speech, and other problems, the issue here isn’t the what, but the who. The question isn’t whether or not you think the Daily Caller should be fact-checking, but whether you think it’s appropriate to leave Mark Zuckerberg in charge of naming anyone at all a fact-checker. AOC doesn’t seem to be upset that Zuckerberg has so much authority, but rather that he’s not using it to her liking.

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...Every time a Democratic Party-aligned politician or activist says he or she wants the tech companies to take action to prevent, say, the dissemination of fake news, one has to realize that it makes little sense for those same actors to then turn around and advocate for breakups of those same firms. Anyone genuinely interested in clamping down on “harmful” speech would consciously or unconsciously want the landscape as concentrated as possible, because an information bottleneck makes controlling unwanted speech easier.

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Wu’s comment about “returning… to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s” is telling. This was a disastrous period in American media that not only resulted in a historically repressive atmosphere of conformity, but saw all sorts of glaring social problems covered up or de-emphasized with relative ease, from Jim Crow laws to fraudulent propaganda about communist infiltration to overthrows and assassinations in foreign countries.

The wink-wink arrangement that big media companies had with the government persisted through the early sixties, and enabled horribly destructive lies about everything from the Bay of Pigs catastrophe to the Missile Gap to go mostly unchallenged, for a simple reason: if you give someone formal or informal power to choke off lies, they themselves may now lie with impunity. It’s Whac-a-Mole: in an effort to solve one problem, you create a much bigger one elsewhere, incentivizing official deceptions.

That 1950s period is attractive to modern politicians because it was a top-down system. This was the era in which worship of rule by technocratic experts became common, when the wisdom of the “Best and the Brightest” was unchallenged. A yearning to return to those times runs through these new theories about speech, and is prevalent throughout today’s Washington, a city that seems to think everything should be run by people with graduate degrees."

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‘Huge privacy implications’: Florida Gov. DeSantis vows to ban ‘vaccine passports’ as Biden admin joins forces with Big Tech

"The debut of the Excelsior Pass follows reports that the White House is stepping up its involvement in a number of private initiatives for similar passports. Asked about federal participation in those projects on Monday, senior White House Covid-19 adviser Andy Slavitt downplayed the administration’s role, saying it is not the government’s place “to create a passport, nor a place to hold the data of citizens.”

“We view this as something that the private sector is doing and will do,” he said, adding that the administration will merely oversee the initiatives to ensure they follow certain “guidelines,” such as “equitable access” and the “privacy of information.” He predicted the passports will reach “all parts of society.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki echoed Slavitt’s comments later on Monday, saying the passports will be “driven by the private sector” and that the government would focus on “guidelines that can be used as a basis.”

“There are a couple key principles that we are working from. One is that there will be no centralized, universal federal vaccinations database and no federal mandate requiring everyone to obtain a single vaccination credential,” Psaki added.

However, while both officials stressed that the passports will remain fully within the private sector, a recent report in the Washington Post suggested the federal government is more involved than Slavitt or Psaki let on. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for example, is set to not only “help advise” on the passport rollout, but will also “play a role in determining which organizations will credential and issue the certificates,” according to the Post.

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As the private sector presses ahead on a patchwork of coronavirus passport plans – at least 17 of which are already underway in the US, according to the Post – some governments have mulled producing official passes. Israel and Denmark launched their own programs last month, while Japan and China followed suit more recently. The European Union is also developing a vaccine passport, with many member states eager to revive travel and tourism after a year of financially ruinous shutdowns, though bloc officials don’t expect the program to be ready until summer."

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Canada halts AstraZeneca vaccine roll-out for people under 55, citing ‘substantial uncertainty’ amid blood clot concerns

"Canada has suspended its use of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine for those younger than 55, pointing to safety concerns following a number of reports of serious blood clotting among recipients in Europe.

The move comes after a recommendation from Canada’s National Advisory Committee on Immunization on Monday, which called for a pause to buy time to evaluate the safety concerns, namely over a rare blood clotting condition known as vaccine-induced prothrombotic immune thrombocytopenia, or VIPIT.

“There is substantial uncertainty about the benefit of providing AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines to adults under 55 given the potential risks associated with VIPIT,” said Shelley Deeks, who serves as vice-chair of the National Advisory Committee.

The recommendation was prompted by new data out of Europe suggesting the risk of blood clotting in AstraZeneca recipients could be as high as one in 100,000, far above the one in 1 million figure previously estimated by researchers, Deeks said. She added that most of the European patients experiencing clotting were women under the age of 55, and that the fatality rate among those who develop blood clots is as high as 40%."

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Our Dead Money Economy

"M2 is all the money in the financial system which people can spend. It doesn't include the money in individual retirement accounts because that has been set aside for the long-term and is not available (except in cases of early withdrawal) to spend.

Here's the definition of the velocity of money:

"The velocity of money is the frequency at which one unit of currency is used to purchase domestically produced goods and services within a given time period. In other words, it is the number of times one dollar is spent to buy goods and services per unit of time. If the velocity of money is increasing, then more transactions are occurring between individuals in an economy. A decreasing velocity might indicate fewer consumption transactions are taking place."

You might have seen one of the illustrative tales circulating around the web about the one $10 bill that ends up paying a half-dozen debts as it circulates through the town: the grocer pays a debt owed the baker who uses the $10 to pay a debt to the florist and so on. This is an example of a high velocity of money: the $10 bill changes hands many times in the space of a few hours, funding transactions that all lead back to the exchange of a good or service.

There's one part of the definition that is often overlooked: the velocity of money only tracks domestically produced goods and services, so all the transactions that end up in a container of goods from China being unloaded in Long Beach aren't counted.

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So what do we make of this stunning expansion of money and equally stunning collapse of money velocity? Ours is a Dead Money Economy. New money is created in the trillions of dollars, but it is either shipped overseas to exporters selling goods to Americans or it's being stashed somewhere rather than being exchanged for domestically produced goods and services.

In other words, our financial system is pushing on a string: it keeps creating trillions in new money which is either stashed away or sent overseas, having been spent on imported goods. This is the acme of a Dead Money Economy.

Lastly, let's look at the Fed's broadest measure of money, MZM which is inexplicably being discontinued, just as the measure it replaced, M3, was discontinued. (Do we need to keep moving the goalposts on money stock to mask the abject trajectory of our Dead Money Economy?)

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...if we want a summary of America's financial system, we look at the velocity of MZM money. MZM money stock has skyrocketed right along with M2 money stock--no surprise there.

The surprise is that the velocity of MZM money topped out in the inflationary peak of 1981 and has been in a free-fall since the start of the financialization-globalization era began."

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The University Deception: Rankings and Academic Freedom

"Forget the global university rankings of any list.  The global university promotion exercise is filled with snake oil and perfumed refuse, an effort to corrupt the unknowing and steal from the gullible.  The aim here is to convince parents, potential students and academics that their institutions of white collar crime are appealing enough to warrant enrolment and employment at.  

Writing in 2019, Ellen Hazelkorn, who has had an eye on the rankings system for some years, observed that 18,000 university-level institutions could be found across the globe.  “Those ranked within the top 500 would be within the top 3% worldwide. Yet, by a perverse logic, rankings have generated a perception amongst the public, policymakers and stakeholders that only those within the top 20, 50 or 100 are worthy of being called excellent.”

Rankings are complicated by a range of factors: methodological problems in arriving at the figure, what institutions themselves submit, their wealth (endowments, well moneyed donors, grants received) and age (old ties, networks), and, fundamentally, what is being asked of that institution.  Such grading systems have been found, as Nancy Adler and Anne-Wil Harzing describe it, to be “dysfunctional and potentially cause more harm than good”.

One factor that does not find itself into the rankings bonanza is that of academic freedom.  This surely would be one of the primary considerations in what is irritatingly called the “knowledge economy”.  None of the three most consulted registers – the QS rankings, Times Higher Education or the Shanghai Academic Rankings of World Universities – makes mention of it.

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A number of scholars and activists have suggested an institutional corrective to the deceptive picture of rankings.  The Academic Freedom Index is one such proposal, developed by members of the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), the Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), the Scholars at Risk Network and the V-Dem Institute.

In their report Free Universities: Putting the Academic Freedom Index Into Action, Katrin Kinzelbach, Ilyas Saliba, Janika Spannagel and Robert Quinn hope to “bring a rights and freedoms perspective into debates on higher education governance and policy.”  They make the point that academic excellence and reputation are currently considered mere functions of outputs in the current scheme.  “As a result, institutions in repressive environments have climbed the reputation ladder and now occupy the top ranks.”  Confidently, the authors make the claim that featuring an adjusted rank “would lower the chances for institutions constrained by such restrictive environments to improve their international reputations and attract academic talents”.

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As with any index, questions will be asked about what is left out.  There is also something inherently artificial in the exercise of correcting a ranking using the AFi measure.  Even the contributors to the report admit to not knowing “enough about academic freedom and the factors that sustain or threaten it.”..."

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Situational Ethics: Allegations Facing Anti-Trump Figures Dampen Demands For Disbarments

"After the 2020 election, activists launched scorched earth campaigns against conservative figures that included calls for the disbarment or delicensing of Trump lawyers, doctors, and even U.S. senators. Hundreds of righteous lawyers and professionals signed petitions and letters, insisting that they cannot stand idly by in the face of professional misconduct. Those outraged voices however have become muted as Trump critics themselves have faced ethical challenges. In today’s political environment, actions often seem unethical only if they are unpopular. Consider the controversies surrounding anti-Trump figures former Yale Professor Bandy Lee and Clinton lawyer Marc Elias – and how the righteous have become reticent in the face of allegedly unethical practices.

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One of the loudest voices calling for disbarments has been former Clinton lawyer (and Perkins Coie partner) Marc Elias who called for disbarments for “saying and doing so many things to undermine our democracy.” The irony has not been lost on many since, after inauguration, Elias fought to not only undue elections but has created a new group to launch election challenges and litigation. However, the thousands of lawyers called for the disbarment of various Republican lawyers (as well as the disbarment of Republican senators) are conspicuously silent on calling for an ethics review of Elias’ past conduct.

Elias, who was sanctioned last year by a court (with other Perkins lawyers), is accused of playing a key role in false statements made to the media and to Congress about the Steele dossier. It was not until after the election that the media pressed the campaign on clear evidence that Clinton funded the dossier. (It was later disclosed the Obama was briefed on an alleged effort by Clinton to manufacture a Russian collusion conspiracy against Trump). Journalists confronted Elias and others that the Clinton campaign hid the payments to Fusion as a “legal fees” among the $5.6 million paid to the law firm.

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None of the thousands of debarment devotees have called for Elias to be investigated, let alone disbarred, for his alleged role in lying to the public and Congress. While many have cited Trump lawyers for “spreading false information” in public, Elias’ alleged role in the false denials on the Steele dossier has not warranted even a segment on MSNBC or CNN.  Under the same standard applied to Republican counsel, shouldn’t Elias face the same demands for an investigations and explanations? He very well could have an explanation, but few in the media seem inclined to demand one.

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Call it situational ethics.  Lee and Elias are not unethical because they are not unpopular. Their alleged misconduct was needed to fulfill narratives against Trump who remains a type of overriding ethical imperative. There will be no petitions with thousands of signatures for board reviews. No dramatic denunciations of conduct unbefitting a profession. Just silence when the situation demands it."

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The Many Variants of Fauci’s Mutating COVID Advice

"...According to Fauci, previously recovered people who “were exposed to the variant in South Africa” reacted “as if they had never been infected before. They had no protection.”

A Danish study that Fauci later referenced to justify this assertion made no such claim about reinfection being widespread. Quite the contrary, its authors concluded “that protection against repeat SARS-CoV-2 infection is robust and detectable in the majority of individuals, protecting 80% or more of the naturally infected population who are younger than 65 years against reinfections.”

They did further observe “that individuals aged 65 years and older had less than 50% protection against repeat SARS-CoV-2 infection” and recommended targeted vaccinations for this group to bolster immunity. But even this finding came with several acknowledged limitations, as the study was not designed to test for repeat infection among the vast number of mild or asymptomatic cases of the disease, or to directly verify whether suspected reinfection cases were the result of misclassified lingering infections.

The study did not, however, support Fauci’s contention that reinfections are becoming commonplace.

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This sort of overstatement is a familiar theme for the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) lead infectious disease bureaucrat, dating all the way back to his mishandling of the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. Fauci has a bad habit of seizing onto a small kernel of scientific data, drawing sweeping inferences upon it through unfounded speculation, and then presenting his own exaggerated spin to the public as if it is a matter of scientific fact.

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On March 28, 2020 – just shy of a year before his recent tangle with Senator Paul – Fauci aggressively contested the likelihood of reinfection in an interview with the Daily Show’s Trevor Noah. “It’s never 100%,” he explained, “but I’d be willing to bet anything that people who recover are really protected against re-infection.”

The NIH administrator’s many credulous enthusiasts in the news media will likely respond to such contradictory assertions by claiming that Fauci is simply updating his assessment in light of new evidence. Yet his track record over the past year suggests a very different story. Far from incorporating the latest scientific findings, Fauci appears to selectively invoke or downplay the specter of reinfection based on whether or not it serves his political objectives of the moment.

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When medical researchers documented one of the first confirmed cases of reinfection last August, Fauci saw no cause for alarm. During a virtual address to the staff of the Walter Reed Medical Center on August 26, he dismissed the prospect as “purely rare and anecdotal.” Fauci continued: “In every anecdotal case I’ve seen, there could have been another explanation for that. So, I can say that although we have to leave open the possibility, it is likely so, so rare that right now with what we know, it’s not an issue.”

Keep in mind that this description could just as easily apply to the recent studies of the South African strain, which have only confirmed or suggested a tiny number of reinfections. Fauci simply interpreted these earlier studies with greater caution and restraint against exaggerating their implications.

Not long after his August 2020 remarks, Fauci’s messaging on reinfections shifted to an opposite tack. With the looming prospect of another round of lockdowns in the fall, a group of scientists convened for a weekend meeting at AIER. On October 4th they issued the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), challenging the efficacy of Fauci’s lockdown-centered strategy and calling attention to the widespread collateral harms it had inflicted on society. Instead, the GBD argued, we should adopt a strategy of “focused protection” for the most vulnerable until we built up herd immunity in the general population.

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On November 18th Pfizer announced the successful completion of its vaccine trial and intention to seek emergency authorization from the FDA within a matter of days. Fauci, who had been deprecating the herd immunity concept and hinting at reinfection only a week prior, pivoted his messaging yet again.

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Faced with mounting political pressures to relax lockdowns and other NPI measures in the wake of the vaccine, Fauci began casting about for new rationales to extend their duration. In a now-notorious interview with the New York Times’s Donald McNeil on December 24th, Fauci bumped his herd immunity threshold upward toward 90%. The lower targets from the previous month, he now insisted, were part of an elaborate noble lie to coax the public into greater compliance with his own directives: “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”

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With each new strain however, Fauci’s message continued to pivot. By mid-February, as noted above, he was again raising the specter of reinfection from the new South African variant as a pretext for keeping mask mandates and social distancing requirements in place, even after vaccination...."

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Germany says AstraZeneca Covid shot should only be given to people over 60 as country tallies 9 deaths from blood clots

"Germany has restricted the use of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine as a precautionary measure amid reports the jab is being linked to more cases of suspected adverse effects, some resulting in death.

The country’s Standing Vaccination Commission recommended on Tuesday that AstraZeneca’s Vaxzevria only be given to men and women over the age of 60, or in exceptional cases. The decision was made due to “available, albeit limited, evidence” concerning the drug’s safety.

The commission announced its recommendation hours after the city of Berlin introduced an identical policy. Earlier, two state-owned clinics in the city halted AstraZeneca shots for women under 55 years of age. Munich followed suit with its own rule banning the shot for people under 60."

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The Ancient Roots of “Doing Nothing”: Is Idleness a Form Of Resistance — Or Just an Indulgence for the Lucky Few?

"...Concepts like “niksen,” Dutch for “doing nothing,” and “wintering,” resting in response to adversity, have entered the wellness lexicon. Doing nothing is even being called a new productivity hack, aligning the practice with an always-on culture that seeks to optimize every waking minute.

While such prescriptions largely target the privileged who have the resources to curate their schedules, idleness can also be a form of resistance to the capitalist machine. Artist Jenny Odell’s bestselling book “How to Do Nothing” argues for using leisure time to build cohesive communities by engaging with your local environment instead of your smartphone.

In other words, there’s an ethics to idleness. And the debates on its ethics date back thousands of years, to philosophers and theologians who distinguished between civic-minded leisure, or “otium,” and sloth, or “accidia.”

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Many ancient Romans disparaged otium as political disengagement that threatened the stability of the republic. (Its opposite, “negotium,” is the source of the word “negotiation.”)

Yet others sought to recuperate leisure and idleness for positive political ends. Cicero and Seneca both advocated for an otium consisting of personal cultivation that would serve society. They argued that properly studying history, politics and philosophy demanded time away from the business of the city. Citizens who learned from these subjects could help ensure peace and stability in the republic. Both took care to distinguish the otium of study from the idleness of hedonistic indulgences like drinking and sex.

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The division of idleness into beneficial “otium” and reprehensible “accidia” elicited new critiques in the industrial era. The 19th-century economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen acerbically noted that leisure was a status symbol that distinguished the haves from the have-nots. He counted “government, warfare, religious observances and sports” as primary leisure activities enjoyed by capitalist elites. Essentially, Veblen condemned the classical and medieval activities of learning and leisure with the vitriol once reserved for sloth.

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Underlying this divided conception of idleness is the paradox at its heart. By definition, it is nonaction, unlikely to influence the world.

Yet escaping the hamster wheel of productivity can spark the ideas that change the world. Real thought and insight require time away from “negotium.” A Reddit forum celebrates the shower thoughts that happen when the mind wanders, and Silicon Valley companies grant sabbaticals to encourage innovation. But it’s hard to tell from the outside whether idleness is hedonistic or edifying."

It's not always easy from the inside either...

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Google repeatedly hands over user data to law enforcement without a warrant

"Google is turning over user data to US law enforcement, even when requests for that come without a warrant, in the form of requests that are not court-ordered.

That emerges from information shared with the LA Times by an anonymous Google user, who said they were notified about this in an email from the tech giant, who said the request came from the Department of Homeland Security, without including the request itself in the email.

When this Google user asked to see the document, it turned out to be an administrative subpoena issued by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), while the data the agency was requesting from Google included the user’s name, home, email, and IP addresses, as well as sources of payment associated with the account.

And here, the term “account” covers any Google service and app, such as Gmail, Google Pay, YouTube, etc.

In the original email that arrived from the giant’s Legal Investigations Support, the user was advised that this data would indeed be handed to the agency as requested unless they obtained a federal court stamped motion to quash the subpoena within seven days."

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Gov. Kristi Noem signs executive orders to protect girls' sports in South Dakota, banning males from girls' sports

"This is separate from House Bill 1217 that was initially passed through South Dakota legislature earlier this month. This bill reportedly included a requirement that student-athletes would have to sign a document stating their biological sex.

A little over a week since it went to Noem’s desk, she sent it back to lawmakers for “style and form” changes. It was done, according to her, on the grounds of language surrounding drugs being too vague (gender transition vs. performance enhancement), the burden placed on public schools, and how college-level enactment of the bill would work when considering the national stage.

The voting for HB 1217 also took place today. It fell two votes short of the 47 necessary from the state house floor. As it stands, the bill is dead.

While HB 1217 may be dead, the Governor of South Dakota released a pair of executive orders maintaining the spirit of what the bill aimed for."

So she rejects the bill passed by an elected legislature. Then, when the elected legislature rejects her proposals, she takes "executive action". These governors need to learn their place and quit acting like monarchs.

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Supreme Court Judge Expects People Will Be Forced To Wear Masks, Stay Home For TEN YEARS

"British former Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption has warned that “social controls” brought about by the coronavirus pandemic may be kept in place by governments for up to a decade.

“It’s politically unrealistic to expect the Government to backtrack now,” commented Sumption, who has been highly critical of the government’s ‘totalitarian’ lockdown policies.

The judge compared the reaction to rationing after the Second World War, which went on for nine years, adding that this time “I think it may be even longer.”

“An interesting parallel is the continuation of wartime food rationing after the last war. People were in favour of that because they were in favour of social control,” he said during a ‘Sketch notes on’ podcast.

“In the 1951 general election, the Labour party lost its majority entirely because people with five years more experience of social control got fed up with it. Sooner or later that will happen in this country,” he added."

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‘Color of skin… important’? Instagram censors artist’s comic as ‘DANGEROUS’ for VERBATIM quote of woke ‘Sesame Street’ episode

"‘Sesame Street’ is a popular children’s show broadcast on public television in the US. Its most recent episode featured two new characters – a boy named Wes and his father Elijah – explaining to the red-furred muppet Elmo that “the color of our skin is an important part of who we are.”

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Alexopoulos employed the old-fashioned substitution trick to illustrate just how racist that sentiment appears to be, featuring a white boy named Heinrich and putting the words into the mouth of Adolf Hitler, the dictator of Nazi Germany in WWII."

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How Fellowship Could Drive the Next Evolution of Social Media

"An arbitrage of attention is emerging on the horizon. How can we trade low-trust, bad-faith, negative-sum media environments with ones that are high-trust, good-faith, and positive-sum in spirit? It may sound corny, but I’m beginning to believe fellowship could drive the next evolution of social media. By this I mean a move towards more exclusive spaces with stronger ties, greater trust, and shared pursuits.

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Fellowship, from the ancient Greek word koinonia, means joint participation. It exists when people come together to pursue a common interest, activity, or experience. Fellowship is not friendship, though friendships may form within fellowship.

To many of us, the idea of fellowship seems quaint, a relic of Shriners and Rotarians on a Main Street that no longer exists. Fellowship was something our grandparents valued. We “network” and “hang out.” Who needs fellowship when we can spill our guts to the world at a click?

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Over the last year, I’ve shifted my time away from open social media platforms to “fellowship spaces”—both online and in person—where relationships develop over shared pursuits. These include a local parent’s group, a fiction book club, and the men’s group I mentioned. I’ve also witnessed the genius of Alcoholics Anonymous, which uses faith and fellowship to help people through recovery....

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As users migrate to closed spaces, some will view the resulting fragmentation of the information environment as dangerous because it is less subject to control and surveillance. There’s some truth to this, despite the twisted logic. Every change to the information environment brings new risks and implications. The unforeseen consequences of these trends are important to consider.

But as large open platforms become toxic, a move toward more exclusive, fellowship-oriented spaces would be a boon for users, society, and individual liberty. Fellowship is at the heart of civil society. It is the thread that weaves social fabric."

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31 Reasons Why I Won’t Take the Vaccine

"1. It’s not a vaccine. A vaccine by definition provides immunity to a disease. This does not provide immunity to anything. In a best-case scenario, it merely reduces the chance of getting a severe case of a virus if one catches it. Hence, it is a medical treatment, not a vaccine. I do not want to take a medical treatment for an illness I do not have.

...

4. I can reduce my chances of getting a severe case of a virus by strengthening my immune system naturally. In the event I catch a virus, there are vitamins and well-established drugs that have had wonderful results in warding off the illness, without the risks and unknowns of this medical treatment.

...

16. This is the greatest medical experiment in the history of the human race.

...

20. We are being pressured in various ways to get injected, which violates medical ethics and the foundations of democratic society. The best way to get me not to do something is to pressure me to do it.

...

24. I know of many people who got injected, but none of them studied the science in depth, carefully weighed the potential benefits against the risks, compared this option to other alternatives, was truly informed, and decided this medical treatment was the best option for them. On the contrary, they got injected because of the hype, the propaganda, the pressure, the fear, blind trust in what “the majority of experts” supposedly believed (assuming THEY all studied everything in depth and were completely objective, which is highly dubious), blind trust in what certain influential rabbis urged them to do (ditto the above), or hysterical fear that the only option was getting injected or getting seriously ill from the virus. When I see mass hysteria and cult-like behavior surrounding a medical treatment, I will be extremely suspicious and avoid it.

...

31. The Whole thing Stinks."

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“The Chicken Little” Act Isn’t Working – COVID Mania Is Wearing Off. Resistance is Unfolding

"In my view, the mass awakening of those once under the spell of COVID mania is happening for several reasons.

First off, whatever your position is on the COVID vaccines, they are working from at least a psychological standpoint to help rid people of the fear and paranoia they’ve experienced related to pandemic mania. More people are leaving their houses and going out, citing the vaccine as the reason why. Of course, they never should have locked themselves indoors in the first place, but that’s a separate issue.

Second, COVID fatigue is getting real. Not everyone wants to suffer and be miserable forever.

Third, the corporate media and authoritarian politicians and bureaucrats can no longer continue to disregard the fact that states like Florida, South Dakota, and others have had similar to and better results without lockdowns and other strict mandates. “Just wait two weeks” for disaster doesn’t stick when it’s been an entire year.

Fourth, people who can move the needle and shape opinions are finally speaking out against the failed draconian mandates, from scientists to doctors to politicians to other influential individuals, they came to the party a year late, but at least they’re here now.

The repeated Chicken Little act is getting old and tiresome. Eventually, people have come to realize that the sky is not, in fact, falling."

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Congress, in a Five-Hour Hearing, Demands Tech CEOs Censor the Internet Even More Aggressively

"...it is vital not to lose sight of how truly despotic hearings like this are. It is easy to overlook because we have become so accustomed to political leaders successfully demanding that social media companies censor the internet in accordance with their whims. Recall that Parler, at the time it was the most-downloaded app in the country, was removed in January from the Apple and Google Play Stores and then denied internet service by Amazon, only after two very prominent Democratic House members publicly demanded this. At the last pro-censorship hearing convened by Congress, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) explicitly declared that the Democrats’ grievance is not that these companies are censoring too much but rather not enough. One Democrat after the next at Thursday’s hearing described all the content on the internet they want gone: or else. Many of them said this explicitly.

At one point toward the end of the hearing, Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-TX), in the context of the January 6 riot, actually suggested that the government should create a list of groups they unilaterally deem to be “domestic terror organizations” and then provide it to tech companies as guidance for what discussions they should “track and remove”: in other words, treat these groups the same was as ISIS and Al Qaeda.

...

There are genuine problems posed by Silicon Valley monopoly power. Monopolies are a threat to both political freedom and competition, which is why economists of most ideological persuasions have long urged the need to prevent them....

...

But that is hard and difficult work and that is not what these hearings are about. They want the worst of all worlds: to maintain Silicon Valley monopoly power but transfer the immense, menacing power to police our discourse from those companies into the hands of the Democratic-controlled Congress and Executive Branch.

...

We are taught from childhood that a defining hallmark of repressive regimes is that political officials wield power to silence ideas and people they dislike, and that, conversely, what makes the U.S. a “free” society is the guarantee that American leaders are barred from doing so. It is impossible to reconcile that claim with what happened in that House hearing room over the course of five hours on Thursday."

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Judge Rejects Threat of Terrorism Charge for 3 Accused in Whitmer Plot

"A Michigan judge on Monday dismissed charges of threat of terrorism against three of the men accused of plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, though they will still face trial on other felony charges, The Detroit News reports.

Judge Michael Klaeren of the12th District Court on Monday dismissed the charges of false report or threat of terrorism against Munith residents Joseph Morrison and Pete Musico while declining to add it to the charges faced by Milford resident Paul Bellar.

Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a statement that the state plans to "explore all options for reconsideration of the charge moving forward."

The three men will go on to face trial on charges of gang membership, felony firearm and providing material support to terrorism. They are among seven with alleged ties to the militia group Wolverine Watchmen who are accused of plotting to kidnap Whitmer, who face a combined 19 felony charges. The others are Eric Molitor of Cadillac, Shawn Fix of Belleville, William Null of Shelbyville and Michael Null of Plainwell."

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“Man Has Not Recognized Himself”. The Ideology of Power Threatens Humanity. Renouncing the Use of Violence

"The political, economic and social turmoil in the world is causing people great concern. Independent scientists are shedding more and more light on the cabal’s sinister plans with profound analyses, but the guild of psychologists, which could provide people with orientation and support, is failing for the most part.

This is not by design. The young people who turn to the study of psychology are religious and believers in the state: they stand on the old standpoint that this system should be preserved. Therefore, nothing can be expected from them and they cannot be trusted. Yet the findings of scientific psychology would be beneficial for human coexistence. But without deep psychological knowledge of human nature, we cannot join forces with our fellow citizens to stand up against the criminal rulers of this world and their accomplices.

...

Psychology is the queen of the sciences. Its favourites are knowledge of human nature and human welfare, its clothing is truth and verifiability. Its palace is surrounded by thorny bushes of prejudice, medieval superstition and religious-philosophical-ethical heresies. Whoever wants to reach it must fight his way through this thicket. A casual traveller with a firmly established view of man and the world will find nothing attractive in the palace. Its beauty and richness only open up to a person with a healthy, empirically working mind and an open spirit. By overcoming fearfulness, he will become spiritually free and courageous, gain knowledge of human nature and learn to understand his own emotional life and that of his fellow human beings. He is thus a witness to man’s astonishing inclination towards hidden but inexhaustible and sublime spiritual and mental pleasures (1).

With the provocatively intended statement that psychology is the queen of the sciences, Friedrich Liebling wanted to explain the scope and importance of psychology and make students of psychology aware of how important psychology is in our lives.

Psychology is the science about man, about human nature: how man becomes, how he grows up, how he finds his way in life. This comes into being as a result of the experiences he has, which are imparted to him by parents and teachers. Thus he is the product of his experiences, his impressions in childhood. Already in the first years of life, the child collects these experiences. At the age of five or six, when it enters kindergarten, it already has its compass, it already knows how it should behave. The young person then already has an opinion about the other child, about the father, the mother and the siblings. He has his character, his traits and an opinion about his position in the world.

...

Nowadays, psychologists in turn give dubious advice to young and old: They help them to get through their fears, fits of despair and suicidal thoughts due to the illegal state repression. The political system is not questioned. The desperate people are supposed to submit to the repressions and not exercise their individual and collective right to resist. This betrayal of professional ethics pushes people deeper and deeper into misery.

...

Mankind has not yet found an answer to the Cain question from the biblical prehistory “Am I my brother’s keeper?”. It is frightening to see how the lack of sympathy, compassion and fellow humanity today leads to countless people being left alone in their suffering through no fault of their own, because fellow citizens are only interested in their own concerns and take less and less interest in the fate of their fellow human beings, their brothers and sisters. A glance at the Syrian or Yemeni war zones makes any compassionate heart shudder. The scale of the atrocities can hardly be appreciated. “That’s none of my business!” is then an often-heard expression of displeasure – even from professing Christians.

...

Since all human action is prepared in the minds and hearts, and since people will behave tomorrow as they think today, what is needed above all is enlightenment. The purpose of enlightenment efforts is to purify human consciousness of individual and collective prejudices. The future of our culture will essentially depend on whether there will be enough “enlighteners” who will be able to remove from the broad masses of people those prejudices that are the ideological background of the catastrophes of humanity. At the present time, when the destruction of humanity seems possible, we need more than ever the “free spirits” who teach us what is truth and what is a lie. Intellectuals should face up to this responsibility.

Even more important than enlightenment is the problem of education. Deep psychological insight has made it clear to us what a tremendous scope education has. Today we know that the human being is to such an extent the product of his or her upbringing that we may cherish the hope of being able, through psychological methods of education, to train people who will be immune to the entanglements of power madness and develop a sense of community.

...

In today’s violent culture, however, the path of the individual inevitably comes under the influence of the desire for power and domination. All role models and ideals under which the child of our cultural circles grows up are coloured by the will to power. The human urge for self-improvement thus involuntarily takes on the guiding line of the lust for power: being great, being powerful becomes the goal that the weak set for themselves in order to become strong. The dazzling work of violence already takes possession of the soul of the individual at a time when he has neither conscious insight nor a developed sense of justice.

...

Our task for the future is therefore above all the cultivation and strengthening of community feelings. No means must be too small, no effort too arduous for us to better integrate the youth into the social structure, to teach them that violence and greed for power can only lead to disaster.

...

With the insights of depth psychology, a libertarian social order with free people could be realised – a future vision of free citizens. For the author, it would be a counter-model to the present totalitarian form of rule of unfreedom, violence and exploitation. This vision of the future was already held by some mature people like Peter Kropotkin and other free socialists more than 100 years ago.

The Russian anarchist, geographer and writer Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) observed both nature and natural beings and related his findings to human beings. In the book “Mutual Aid in the Animal and Human World”, Kropotkin writes that in nature and society there is by no means only a struggle of all against all (social Darwinism), but that the principle of “mutual aid” also prevails. Those living beings that implement this principle would survive more successfully.

Scientific depth psychology is based on these findings. According to this, man is a naturally social being, oriented towards the community of his fellow human beings. He also has a natural inclination towards good, towards the knowledge of truth and towards community life. We do not have to be afraid of this human being. He wants to live in freedom and peace, without violence and war – just like all of us.

This freedom, which is to be given to man (again) because it is his by nature, is of course not the freedom to exploit the other man and to plunder his hard-earned savings. This is the “freedom” that the ruling clique in capitalism means and that makes man involuntarily corrupt. To give man freedom is to give him the right to a decent life, to justice, security and tranquillity.

...

Karl Marx was right: when man has the security of his life, he thinks differently. He has different thoughts, different feelings and a different relationship to his fellow man. Man becomes different when he has the table laid. He has different feelings than the one who lives in insecurity, is exploited, is poor, is afraid of hail and lightning that God will send him if he does not pray enough. Afraid that the good Lord will set his house on fire or send hail and smash the grain so that he starves. In his whole emotional life and thinking he is taken up by this."