PP NewsBrief: 2021-04-12

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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At a Major Education Company, Freelancers Must Now Pay a Fee In Order to Get Paid

"Freelance workers everywhere are subjected to a wide variety of indignities and ripoffs. They are the workers who are most at the mercy of their employers’ whims, and least able to fight back. Now, into the pantheon of freelancer exploitation comes a truly jaw-dropping policy: Forcing freelancers to pay money in order to get paid.

McGraw Hill (MH) is a multibillion-dollar educational publishing company, with thousands of employees and offices around the world. Beginning in October of last year, the company instituted a new policy for all of its freelancers and independent contractors — they are now required to pay a fee of 2.2% every time they file an invoice through the company’s invoicing system, called Fieldglass. (There is no other system, meaning the fee is mandatory.) In other words, if a freelancer does $1,000 of work for MH, they will be paid only $978. The other $22 will be taken as an ​“administrative fee.”

In effect, the company has imposed an across-the-board wage cut on all of its freelancers and contractors, without having to come right out and say it. An email sent to all freelancers explaining the new fee offered this explanation: ​“McGraw Hill has chosen to align with market standards and transition to a Supplier funded model. The 2.2% Small Supplier fee included on your invoice supports labor market compliance, administrative tasks, and the Vendor Management System (VMS) associated with payment processes.”

Likewise, the company says that under its new policy, the costs of MH complying with various laws and regulations are now being offloaded onto freelancers themselves. ​“Since October 2020, contractors providing services to McGraw Hill have been charged a fee to cover the cost of third-party vendors that help us ensure that each contractor meets the requirements needed to be classified as an Independent Contractor under various state laws and IRS regulations,” said MH spokesperson Tyler Reed. ​“We need to ensure that those classifying themselves as Independent Contractors are in fact contractors, according to state and IRS guidelines, otherwise there is a legal and financial risk to McGraw Hill and to the contractor.”

...

Though the policy may be unfair, it does not violate any laws, according to the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, and labor law experts. ​“It’s likely that these practices are legal. There is very little regulation of independent contractor relationships, which is precisely why many independent contractors need the rights and protections that come with being an employee,” said Laura Padin, a senior staff attorney with the National Employment Law Project. ​“It’s telling that McGraw Hill unilaterally imposed this fee on its freelancers. A true independent contractor would be setting or negotiating the terms and conditions of their work.”"

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Against the COVID Clingers

"Let’s not kid ourselves. For some, the coronavirus has been a joyride. Topping the list of COVID clingers is Biden. Where would he be without the pandemic? Not in the White House, that’s for certain. Without COVID, Biden would still be tottering around one of his mansions in Delaware.

COVID-19 has also been a blessing to the “expert” class and their media mouthpieces who have been elevated to god-like status, the newly contrived “essential” worker classes, and our ghastly health bureaucracy, praised ad nauseam for its “heroism” while preventing families from seeing loved ones and limiting transparency.

For countless unremarkable people, being a COVID hall monitor has provided a sense of superiority and importance. They will miss scolding their maskless neighbors. They have come to love the fear. Ironically, or perhaps not, those who ostensibly fear coronavirus the most seem most loath to lose it.

The COVID clingers are trying to squeeze everything they can out of this “crisis” before the momentum fades. We are, by a sleight of hand, being nudged to accept a “new normal” that we never asked for under the guise of returning to the normal that we once had.

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The very phrase “new normal” carries an admission that the virus was a pretext for social engineering all along. Now that the crisis is ending, we are being told this more or less openly: COVID was never really about COVID. Rather, its central significance is that it revealed a status quo ante that was rotten, and which needed to be replaced. Since when was that the deal?

The coronavirus is not, as some seem to think, a metaphysical event that divides history into “before” and “after.” It has an expiration date, and another pandemic will someday cause more suffering and death. Does this mean that we should change our civilization? That we should keep wearing masks in perpetuity, waiting for the next disaster to strike? One could just as well say, “I’m going to live in a cave, because my house might catch fire.”

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If this does end eventually, when it’s finally over, it won’t be a victory. What has transpired already is a cause for national shame. The conditions we have allowed ourselves to live with would have, in more virtuous periods of our history, inspired mass resistance.

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...it was a failure to think critically, to perceive and respond to threats to liberty, that got us here, and it is also these things that are keeping us here. They will keep insisting the nonconformists are prolonging this situation, but at this stage, only the mindless conformists can be responsible.

Americans do not have a “patriotic duty” to obey those who have contempt for us: to let frauds, liars, and psychopaths bully our country into submission. By wearing masks, we are showing that we consent to be insulted, to live under the new normal, that we comply with its whole network of magic mandates. We are showing our willingness to believe in nonsense. In short, we are humiliating ourselves.

The American people are facing a test, but it is not a test of whether we are foolish enough to “trust in government,” as Biden implores to do—certainly not after the last year of arbitrary curtailments. We’ve already failed that test. It is whether we, as Americans, have the courage to take our country back, to reclaim life, or if we have finally degenerated into slaves."

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Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine under investigation in EU over potential link to ‘unusual’ blood clots

"The European Union’s drug regulator EMA says it will assess Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 Vaccine Janssen after “four serious cases of unusual blood clots” occurred in people who received the jab in the US.

The statement from EMA’s Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee says one case occurred in a clinical trial and three others during the vaccine rollout in the US. One of the cases was fatal.

Covid-19 vaccine Janssen is currently only used in the USA but the rollout in the EU is expected within the next few weeks. The EMA authorised the jab for use in the EU in March. The agency says the cases are being investigated and currently it’s not clear whether the incidents of blood clots are connected to the vaccinations."

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Gender Equity Bill Threatens Liberty

"The Equality Act of 2021 threatens religious freedom, the freedom of association, and denies biological reality. The authors of the bill claim its purpose is to protect the rights of the LGBTQ community. In reality, the bill uses group identity and government-given rights to violate the God-given individual rights of Americans. The bill amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which had as its purpose reversing generations of segregation laws and their negative consequences.

The bill adds sexual orientation and gender identity as banned forms of discrimination. In the United States, however, there are no laws that treat homosexual or heterosexual Americans differently. All persons have the same God-given rights and those rights are equally protected by the Constitution. The Equality Act is social engineering designed to “perfect” society in the eyes of its authors and to root out cultural beliefs that the authors hold in contempt. Such social engineering is inherently tyrannical, and history shows such uses of governmental power go badly.

The bill begins with unusual “findings” that are, in reality, a set of unsupported grievances.

The bill proclaims that members of the “LGBTQ” community are subject to “widespread discrimination” in “public accommodations” and “employment” and then makes the strange leap of linking these to historical discrimination against women. While women were subject to generations of unequal treatment under the law in areas such as employment, education access, and the right to vote among others, no such unequal treatment is present under the law in regards to sexual orientation.

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...faith-based adoption agencies would no longer be allowed to follow the guidance of beliefs but would be forced to shut down or do things contrary to their faith in violation of their freedom of religion.

The bill bans “conversion therapy” but fails to define conversion therapy, leaving it to executive agencies to define it as they see fit. Thus, the executive branch would have broad authority to use this power in dangerous ways....

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The bill does not contain any religious exemption and sponsors of the bill are proud of the lack of any such exemption. “Every scoundrel in American history has tried to dress up his or her opposition to other people’s civil rights in religious garb,” said Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.). “Their real argument, the only honest argument, is that they believe LGBT people are morally inferior and that firing us should be permitted,” said Representative Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.).

The bill would require employers, institutions of learning, and public accommodations to accept any person’s processed “gender identity” regardless of the biological reality. Therefore, everyone in effect would be forced to accept the lies that gender is mutable and even extends beyond male and female to an open-ended number of fictional possibilities....

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The bill mandates that schools and sports organizations allow persons to compete in sports based on their gender identity rather than the biological reality. Therefore, males claiming to be females would be free to fully invade women’s sports. Martina Navratilova, retired tennis great and gay rights activist, has warned of the danger to female sports from such “absolute transgender equity.” This bill mandates absolute transgender equity and represents the imposing of ideology and rejection of biological reality.

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The Equality Act represents the reality that America has truly become a postmodern society. The bill rejects not just truth and morality but reason and scientific evidence in favor of ideology and group victim identity rights. The bill is designed to use said group identity rights to crush individual liberties and enable the state to reshape mankind as it wills.

Such an agenda shows the bill is rooted in the Hegelian belief that the nature of man is mutable and the state is the institution that can perfect mankind. History has shown over and over again that this idea is false and all attempts by the state to perfect mankind result in tyranny and great suffering.

Americans cannot look to the Supreme Court for protection. The Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton not only rewrote the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include gay rights but recognized a male identifying as female as a female. The Supreme Court has embraced the falsehoods of the current era and done so with self-righteous zeal. The majority was 6-3 including two “conservatives”—Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s dissent praised the triumph of gay rights in the majority and ignored the fact that popular opinion had embraced a complete denial of reality.

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Truth is real and we all must speak the truth.  Only the truth has the real power to drive back the darkness and transform our culture and restore our republic."

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Republicans Are Digging Their Own Graves on Election Reform

"Most of the arguments for the passage of H.R. 1 are based on dogmatic and simplistic claims of racial grievances, summed up in the vacuous and vapid slogan: “If something is a relic of Jim Crow, then we ought to get rid of it.” It would be more accurate to say that if something can be connected, however tenuously, to the apparition of “systemic racism,” Democrats will try to justify killing it. Happily for the Left, the “systemic” definition of the new racism is their wholly-owned subsidiary which they more than willingly lend to their political arm, the Democratic Party.

Naturally, many Republicans are struggling to come up with a response to the racialization of the policy debate around the bill—rather than simply rejecting these terms, as they should, outright. But one aspect of H.R. 1 that has received less attention has some Republican interest groups scared straight.

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H.R. 1 contains elements of campaign finance reform, the letter of the law rendering it ripe for weaponization, but the spirit of which understandably resonates with many of the GOP’s constituents. “Specifically, support for the bill’s measures forcing more disclosures of secret donors was so broad that a senior operative from the Koch network advised just killing it in Congress rather than trying to turn the tide of public opinion,” Kate Riga reported in Talking Points Memo.

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Of course, the bill’s provisions are not intended merely to root out dark money in our elections but would, in reality, serve as a cudgel against the opposition to the Democratic Party—but what matters most now is what the public thinks H.R. 1 will do. And on this point, Republicans have only themselves to blame for their constituents’ confusion about their intentions.

Recall that just recently, South Dakota Republican Governor Kristi Noem caved to corporate interests and the NCAA instead of defending her voters’ interests on an important piece of legislation protecting women and girls in sports.

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...Both populists and “business Republicans” tend to favor the Republican Party, but the “business Republicans, whose preferences Republican politicians promote, on average make $69,711 a year, around $30,000 more than the Republican populists, whose preferences most Republican politicians ignore.”

In other words, the GOP inadvertently has made the strongest case to its own voters that campaign finance reform is needed because it has consistently acted in ways that work against the interests of its own constituents. Indeed, Koch money hijacked the Trump Administration, and Koch operatives and representatives such as Brooke Rollins ended up in the highest seats of power at the White House, turning what began as a populist presidency into a corporate catering service, pushing prison and police reform, and even amnesty.

The fate of H.R. 1 is unclear. What is certain, however, is that no party can dig its own grave like the GOP does, while wondering aloud who is tossing in the dirt."

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H.R. 1’s Massive Mine Contains Some Hidden Gems

"...within those 886 pages are at least a few provisions that can generate some consensus. Most are rolled over from previous failed bills in Congress, and if they were standalone measures, perhaps they could garner supermajority bipartisan support.

American elections can doubtless be improved to bolster public confidence and shore up election integrity. One way to achieve the latter is to clean up voter rolls. A provision of H.R. 1 updates the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (the NVRA, or “Motor Voter” law) to do just that. The NVRA required state departments of motor vehicles to offer voter registration at the place where residents get their driver’s licenses. It has been a major success, and many Americans—including me—don’t remember registering to vote anywhere other than the DMV.

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Some states have participated in interstate programs to notify one another when voters move. Competing programs show varying effectiveness. The NVRA update would improve this. If the new resident intends to register to vote in his new state, the DMV would ask him if he was previously registered elsewhere. The DMV would then notify his former state’s DMV, which, in turn, must notify the former state’s chief election official to avoid duplicated registration there.

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Another part of H.R. 1, an update of the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003, requires paper ballots to be “marked by the voter by hand” or “marked through the use of a non-tabulating ballot marking device or system, so long as the voter shall have the opportunity to mark his or her ballot by hand.” It would require electronic voting systems to leave a paper trail that a voter could review before casting a ballot. That ensures that a voter’s eyes can verify that the machine accurately recorded the vote.

That paper trail also becomes an important record—the definitive record, in fact—if disputes arise. The bill would require that election officials count the paper ballots in the event of demonstrated errors in the electronic tabulation. This will instill confidence that machine errors did not affect the outcome of the election.

Paper ballots must be printed in the United States on paper manufactured in the United States. Another section of the bill also requires the use of voting machines manufactured in the United States. These rules are good, populist “Made in America” provisions, to be sure. They also reduce the likelihood, however remote, of foreign actors attempting to develop forged ballots or embed malware on voting machines.

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H.R. 1 would offer states grants to develop risk-limiting audits, which use statistical analysis to determine how many ballots need to be examined based on the margin of victory. The narrower the margin, the more ballots are reviewed. It also provides increased statistical confidence that the election outcome was accurate. The grant funding is an inducement for states to develop these programs within specified parameters—not a top-down mandate to jump into this developing area of audits. It further instills confidence in election results when officials routinely verify election outcomes with predetermined, objective criteria.

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It’s worth repeating that these proposals have existed in one form or another but were not adopted in previous sessions of Congress. One can look at the earlier bills—the Protecting American Votes and Elections Act, the Secure Elections Act, the Securing America’s Voting Equipment Act, and many more—and wonder why they never became law.

These less controversial—perhaps even uncontroversial—portions of H.R. 1 span a small fraction of the overall bill’s total pages. Perhaps a more effective approach would be to address these bipartisan election-integrity concerns in a separate, much smaller measure."

I don't find the paper ballot requirements to be enough. I don't think there's an argument to be made for marking ballots using anything other than ink pens. Additionally, it is likely that even a "Made in America" voting machine would have some foreign made components in it.

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January 6 Is the New Russiagate Lie

"The manufactured deception about the events of January 6 quickly is approaching Russiagate levels. The formula is familiar: Find a catchy phrase—in this case it’s “insurrection” instead of “collusion”—then fertilize the information ecosystem with the term and watch it grow like a weed.

Get political leaders including former presidents and top lawmakers of both parties to use the description, giving it immediate legitimacy. Issue dire warnings about the “threat to democracy” and “rule of law.” Identify the villain—Donald Trump, of course—and make solemn pledges to hunt down every perpetrator until justice is done.

Sympathy-inducing optics are helpful but not always necessary.

Critical cogs in this sort of performative outrage are government authorities who use their offices to convince the public the whole thing is on the square. This is precisely what happened with the now discredited trope that five people died as a result of the chaos on January 6. A brief report issued Wednesday by the office of the D.C. medical examiner confirmed only one person, Ashli Babbitt, was killed that day.

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...the phony account of what happened to Brian Sicknick and the others wasn’t the result of an honest mistake; it was a vital anecdote intended to stoke fury about the “insurrection” and depict Trump supporters not just as deplorables but cop killers. And the people involved in setting the tone right at the start knew exactly what they were doing.

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It’s impossible to count how many impressions of “five people killed” pollute government documents, news websites, social media, and the brains of tens of millions of Americans. The line is a permanent chapter in the folklore of January 6—and it’s untrue. Just like the notion the protest was an “armed insurrection” and the people involved are guilty of “sedition,” the January 6 body count is one more myth.

There will be no retractions, however, and no apologies. Last weekend, following the killing of a Capitol police officer by a Nation of Islam follower, news and opinion sites reupped the lie about Sicknick, some even laughably sticking to the completely debunked fire extinguisher attack.

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In some ways, the crusade to criminalize January 6 is far worse than Russiagate. Regular Americans exercising their First Amendment rights are being treated as political prisoners, held hostage by their own government, denied due process. Hyperpartisan Biden appointees in charge of the most potent government tools are aiming those weapons at the Right as a whole, threatening to create no-fly lists and warning Americans half their countrymen are wannabe domestic terrorists.

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There’s one more similarity between Russiagate and the “insurrection.” Both act as cover for real scandals, in this case, voter fraud in swing states that helped Joe Biden win the White House, in the case of Russiagate, as cover for the illegal activity of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (possibly even including Obama Administration officials). Anyone who dares still to raise concerns about how the 2020 election was handled is a de facto insurrectionist."

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All eyes on Tokyo, says Beijing, as Japan reportedly plans to sign off on dumping nuclear wastewater into sea on Tuesday

"The Chinese Foreign Ministry has said “the international community is watching Japan” and called on Tokyo to “fulfil [its] international responsibilities” as the government there mulls discharging nuclear wastewater into the sea.

Speaking on Monday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian claimed the disaster at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant has already caused large amount of radioactive material to leak, which has had a profound impact on the marine environment, food safety, and human health.

Responding to a question from a journalist, who cited reports that the Japanese government would hold a meeting on Tuesday to sign off on plans to dump more than one million tons of nuclear wastewater into the ocean, Zhao demanded that they “fulfil their international responsibilities” and listen to the condemnation from other nations."

Apparently Japan really wants that Godzilla mascot for the Olympics...

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YouTube CEO calls for global coalitions to address content that’s “legal but could be harmful”

"During an appearance at the World Economic Forum Global Technology Governance Summit 2021, an event where more than 40 governments and 150 companies meet to ensure “the responsible design and deployment of emerging technologies,” YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki expressed her support for tech platforms moderating content that’s “technically legal but could be harmful” and praised global coalitions that help Big Tech coordinate and automate their censorship efforts.

Wojcicki said that when tech companies comply with the law, there are still “issues around speech” and suggested that these issues should be addressed by private corporations.

“I see a lot of issues around speech and what should or should not be allowed on platforms for example,” Wojcicki said. “And that’s a really tough area. Now, certainly countries pass certain laws and we comply with all the laws that the different countries pass but a lot of times, there’s content that’s legal but could be seen as harmful. And it’s hard for governments to necessarily find the right way to regulate it.”

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“With COVID-19, with a number of different types of misinformation, it would be hard for governments all around the world to all pass different regulations about that and have compliance,” Wojcicki said. “So, there’s this category of content that I would say is content that is technically legal but could be harmful and that’s where we’ve put a lot of time to try to make sure we’ve put the right policies in place.”

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“It is challenging when governments all pass different rules and we have a patchwork of different products,” Wojcicki said. “I think it would be strange if YouTube operated differently in every country depending on the different policies there.”

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She added: “I’m very supportive of coming up with organizations that can be global, that can span industry as well as governments, have experts and come up with the ways for us to better manage some of these tough questions and so I’m looking forward to more collaboration in the future and hopefully setting up more organizations like these that can help us address some of the toughest issues that we face.”"

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Nearly 40% of Marines have rejected coronavirus vaccine as Dems call on Biden admin to make shots mandatory for troops – reports

"Just shy of 40 percent of Marine Corps service members have refused to take the coronavirus jab, new data provided to the media shows. The revelation comes as Democratic lawmakers push to make the vaccine mandatory for soldiers.

Some 75,500 Marines have agreed to be vaccinated as of Thursday, while around 48,000 have declined the inoculation, CNN reported, citing numbers provided by the branch. That puts the rejection rate at 38.9%, slightly higher than the 33% rate for the whole military given by defense officials.

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Another 102,000 or so Marines, including active-duty and reserve troops, are still in line for the immunization and have not had a chance to accept or decline.

The rejection rate was much higher at certain bases, such as Camp Lejeune, a major Marine installation in North Carolina, where 57% of service members have refused to take the shot.

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In a letter sent to the White House last month, a group of Democratic lawmakers led by California Rep. Jimmy Panetta argued that unvaccinated soldiers pose a “critical threat to our national security and public health,” calling on the president to issue a waiver overriding the rules – as well as the “informed consent” of the troops.

“Vaccinating every eligible service member will improve readiness and have an immediate and positive impact on the communities in which they serve,” Panetta wrote in the letter, which was co-signed by six House Democrats."

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Twitter says archivers can’t archive Trump’s tweets on the platform

"The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), collects and maintains Twitter archives of several Trump administration officials and administrators. Their tweets are collected and made available on the platform for archival and historical purposes.

NARA wanted to collect the tweets made by the former American President Donald Trump during his tenure as the president to make them available on their Twitter handle.

The social media network, however, disallowed NARA from doing so and said that the former president’s tweets cannot be made available on the platform. It is worth noting that Twitter has suspended Trump permanently.

Many are now calling Twitter’s decision against having archives of Trump’s tweet on NARA’s account, an apt example of Silicon Valley’s unprecedented control over online information and communication channels used by the US government.

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NARA said that it was going to add the tweets’ archive of Donald Trump to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library website, regardless of whether the archive would be made available on Twitter.

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NARA’s spokesperson, James Pritchett said that they were “exploring the best way” to make the archived content of Trump’s tweets public and that federal archivists are “working to make the exported content available… as a download” on the library website which we mentioned earlier. He also said that NARA’s records will have all tweets that were ever shared or posted by the former president, regardless of whether they were banned or not."

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North Carolina bill would ban medical gender transition for children

"Senate Bill 514, also called An Act To Protect Minors From Administration of Puberty Blockers and Cross-Sex Hormones and Other Related Actions, Procedures, and Treatments, would bar doctors from performing gender reassignment surgeries, and prescribing hormone treatments and puberty blockers to North Carolina youth.

Medical professionals that assist in helping a transgender person present themselves in a way that does not agree with their biological sex would be fined at most $1,000, and potentially stripped of their medical license.

The bill also urges state employees to notify parents if their child is expressing a desire to be treated as a gender other than the one they were born as....

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This law goes much further than other proposed or enacted laws on this type as it equates gender nonconformity with medical gender transition."

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Boston Hospital Will Offer ‘Preferential Care Based on Race’

"According to an article published in the Boston Review, Brigham and Women’s Hospital will offer a program titled “An Antiracist Agenda for Medicine,” later this spring. The program uses a “reparations framework” for allocating medical resources in order to “comprehensively confront structural racism,” according to  Harvard Medical School instructors Bram Wispelwey and Michelle Morse who wrote the report.

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The authors discussed examples of “racial inequity” in hospitals, including a lack of workplace diversity and treatment for sick cell disease, while proposing concrete, albeit discriminatory solutions. These included “cash transfers and discounted or free care” for only blacks and Latinos.

According to the Daily Caller’s report, the program would be discriminatory and would “be illegal under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity,” the law states. Wispelwey and Morse acknowledged that the program would “elicit legal challenges,” but encouraged other institutions to follow their lead.”

“Offering preferential care based on race or ethnicity may elicit legal challenges from our system of colorblind law … We encourage other institutions to proceed confidently on behalf of equity and racial justice, with backing provided by recent White House executive orders,” they wrote, according to the report, they are referencing President Joe Biden’s multiple executive orders addressing racial ‘equity.’"

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Pence Doesn’t Have What It Takes

"Reports are that former Vice President Mike Pence is “laying the groundwork for [a] 2024 Presidential Run.” But the only groundwork Pence should be laying is for his retirement. His surrender to the Democratic Party in the final days of the Trump presidency disqualifies him. Pence may very well be a “good man,” but he’s also a weak man and America’s future depends on men who are both principled and strong.

The contested election of 2020 was not unprecedented. In fact, it bears a striking similarity to the contested election of 1876. The Democratic Party in 1876 was comprised of ex-confederates, who had lost the Civil War, but had not lost their pro-slavery opinions. A Democratic victory foreshadowed a regressive future that Southern blacks feared would return them to slavery and Republicans feared would guarantee a proliferation of white supremacy. The fate of the nation hung in the balance.

The fate of our nation hung in the balance in a similar way in 2020....

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There are two stark differences between the contested election of 1876 and the contested election of 2020. One, unlike Hayes, who went to sleep on election night certain of defeat, Trump went to bed certain of victory. Two, unlike the congressional Republicans in 1876, who refused to concede and fought tooth and nail to prevent the Democrats from installing their illegitimate presidential candidate Samuel Tilden in the Oval Office, the Congressional Republicans in 2020 folded like cheap lawn chairs.

In 1876 Democratic presidential candidate Tilden won the popular vote but three states were contested—Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Nineteen electoral votes were in dispute and both Democrats and Republicans claimed the victory. The Democrats threatened “Tilden or war.” More than 600,000 Americans had died in a bloody Civil War just a decade before. Despite this tragedy, which was very much a living memory for Americans at that time, the Republicans still refused to give in. Republicans in 1876 were guided by principle. Perhaps it was the experience of the Civil War that had strengthened their resolve.

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Had our ancestors taken the Pence approach in 1876, Samuel Tilden, the Democratic presidential nominee, rather than Rutherford B. Hayes, would have been president. But the titanium-spined Republicans of 1876 refused to make such a concession. They didn’t cave to pressure, whether public or political. The upshot of the Republican Party’s absolute devotion to victory was the formation of an unprecedented bipartisan commission—five Senate members, five Supreme Court justices, and five House members, who were appointed to decide on the award of the contested electoral votes.

The commission investigated the election. This bipartisan effort at transparency and due diligence ensured that whichever candidate emerged victorious, the American people could find reason to maintain confidence in the integrity of the election system and also accept the declared president’s legitimacy. In the end, Democratic and Republican representatives hashed out a compromise behind closed doors, which resulted in terms that declared Rutherford B. Hayes the legitimate president of the United States.

No such transparency or due diligence occurred in 2020....

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Again, Pence may very well be a good and decent man. But that isn’t enough. America needs men who are good and decent, but also uncompromising when necessary. Like a great film, it’s the third and final act that matters. Pence may have put on a good show in the first two acts, but in the third act he fell apart. That was the only act that mattered. Pence doesn’t have what it takes."

'Twas January 6th, when all through the House
Not a creature was stirring, not even the hag in the blouse;
The fraudulent votes were placed in the mahogany box with care,
In hopes that the traitor Mike Pence soon would be there;
...

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EU drug regulator reviewing 5 cases of NEW blood condition in AstraZeneca Covid vaccine recipients amid possible link to jab

"Five cases of a very rare blood disorder in people who have received the Covid-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca are being reviewed by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the EU's drug regulator has said.

The cases of "capillary leak syndrome," which can cause leakage of fluid from blood vessels, tissue swelling and a drop in blood pressure, were reported from across the European Economic Area, the EMA said on Friday.

The regulator said it is "not yet clear" if there is a causal association between AstraZeneca's Vaxzevria jab and the condition, which can cause organ failure if it is not treated."

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Stand Up to Tyranny: How to Respond to the Evils of Our Age

"In every age, we find ourselves wrestling with the question of how Jesus Christ—the itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist who died challenging the police state of his time, namely, the Roman Empire—would respond to the moral questions of our day.

For instance, would Jesus advocate, as so many evangelical Christian leaders have done in recent years, for congregants to “submit to your leaders and those in authority,” which in the American police state translates to complying, conforming, submitting, obeying orders, deferring to authority and generally doing whatever a government official tells you to do?

What would Jesus do?

Study the life and teachings of Jesus, and you may be surprised at how relevant he is to our modern age.

A radical nonconformist who challenged authority at every turn, Jesus spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire, and providing a blueprint for standing up to tyranny that would be followed by those, religious and otherwise, who came after him.

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Indeed, the police state in which Jesus lived (and died) and its striking similarities to modern-day America are beyond troubling.

Secrecy, surveillance and rule by the elite. As the chasm between the wealthy and poor grew wider in the Roman Empire, the ruling class and the wealthy class became synonymous, while the lower classes, increasingly deprived of their political freedoms, grew disinterested in the government and easily distracted by “bread and circuses.” Much like America today, with its lack of government transparency, overt domestic surveillance, and rule by the rich, the inner workings of the Roman Empire were shrouded in secrecy, while its leaders were constantly on the watch for any potential threats to its power. The resulting state-wide surveillance was primarily carried out by the military, which acted as investigators, enforcers, torturers, policemen, executioners and jailers. Today that role is fulfilled by the NSA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the increasingly militarized police forces across the country.

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Citizenry with little recourse against the police state. As the Roman Empire expanded, personal freedom and independence nearly vanished, as did any real sense of local governance and national consciousness. Similarly, in America today, citizens largely feel powerless, voiceless and unrepresented in the face of a power-hungry federal government. As states and localities are brought under direct control by federal agencies and regulations, a sense of learned helplessness grips the nation.

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Military-style arrests in the dead of night. Jesus’ arrest account testifies to the fact that the Romans perceived Him as a revolutionary. Eerily similar to today’s SWAT team raids, Jesus was arrested in the middle of the night, in secret, by a large, heavily armed fleet of soldiers.  Rather than merely asking for Jesus when they came to arrest him, his pursuers collaborated beforehand with Judas....

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Jesus—the revolutionary, the political dissident, and the nonviolent activist—lived and died in a police state. Any reflection on Jesus’ life and death within a police state must take into account several factors: Jesus spoke out strongly against such things as empires, controlling people, state violence and power politics. Jesus challenged the political and religious belief systems of his day. And worldly powers feared Jesus, not because he challenged them for control of thrones or government but because he undercut their claims of supremacy, and he dared to speak truth to power in a time when doing so could—and often did—cost a person his life.

Unfortunately, the radical Jesus, the political dissident who took aim at injustice and oppression, has been largely forgotten today, replaced by a congenial, smiling Jesus trotted out for religious holidays but otherwise rendered mute when it comes to matters of war, power and politics."

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A Self-Loathing Ruling Class Cannot Endure

"Not every aspect of the onslaught of self-hate that has broken over America, warped its media, and turned most of the academy—and even apparently, most of its elementary and secondary schools—into centers of reorientation designed to convince Americans their national past is loathsome hypocrisy, is bad. Every country has a national mythos, and the larger, more complicated countries have relatively elaborate, conventionally agreed-upon versions of the raison d’être of their nationalities. In the case of the United States, there have always been some soft points in this rationale, and to a slight extent, there may be some merit in addressing them.

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The facts were that Americans really had no more civil rights after the Revolution than before, nor measurably more civil rights than citizens of England, Switzerland, most of the Netherlands, and parts of Scandinavia. But they had a resident government. Unlike almost all the nations of Europe and East Asia, in a world of only about 25 sovereign countries, the United States did not have a language of its own, and its founders, with great ingenuity, and eloquence invented for it the vocation of freedom and opportunity. The lore was not of the past but of the future. And with the dramatic emergence of the Americans, facilitated by Franklin’s stupendous feat in persuading the absolutist French monarchy to go to war on behalf of secessionism, democracy, and republicanism, the eyes of the world were on America and have never ceased to be on America these 245 years.

There was from the start the terrible problem of slavery, which belied the assertion that “all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” The Civil War was conducted in the North to preserve the Union, and only the immense political dexterity of Abraham Lincoln achieved the approval of the emancipation of the slaves as a war aim, in part to stir unrest within the Confederacy.

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When Franklin D. Roosevelt was hassling Winston Churchill in the midst of World War II about granting independence to India and suggesting texts from the founding of America as models to use, Churchill was well within his rights in saying to his entourage (although, unfortunately, he did not say it to Roosevelt) that he would take his solicitude for the vast masses of India more seriously if he could pass an anti-lynching law in his own Congress.

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Even to those who wish America well, the whole argument of American exceptionalism became threadbare and tiresome decades ago, and is entirely now a question of scale, a measurement by which China threatens the United States more seriously than has any other country in over a century.

One of the most nauseatingly persistent American delusions is that the American justice system is one of the best in the world. As I have written here and elsewhere, it is an appalling, disgraceful, terribly unjust 360-degree cartel for the avaricious legal profession, and on the criminal side, it has been so undermined by the corruption of the plea bargain system that it is essentially the right of prosecutors to suborn false inculpatory testimony with no danger of sanctions for their misconduct.

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But with all that said, the flag-waving, anthem-singing, traditional pride in America was and remains substantially justified. All nations have somewhat delusional self-images and though the American star system elevates many who are not stars, the current eruption of Americophobia is vastly excessive, utterly despicable, cannot remotely be sustained, and is propagated, not just by the faddishly and aggressively ignorant, but also by disturbed and often wicked people.

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The United States now has an official regime of lies, supported by an almost worthlessly dishonest media, and scores of millions of Americans have been brainwashed into the false view that they live in an evil country. This lie will not succeed because everyone in America can see that it is not true.

Most Americans are reasonable and fair-minded people most of the time, and their numbers, their patience, and the righteousness of their not-uncritical faith in and love for their country will ultimately prevail. There was no excuse for the secretary of state to turn a meeting with the Chinese on American soil into a confessional for a cringe-worthy recitation of America’s faults. Despite everything, America remains a proud country with much to be proud of, and no person nor any nationality can stand unlimited, unjustified, self-loathing. It will end sooner than we dare think, and it will take down its ghastly and contemptible preceptors with it, including the dismal Pharisees of this administration."

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‘Up to 80%’ of people in Sicily refusing AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine over safety concerns

"The vast majority of people offered the Oxford/AstraZeneca anti-Covid vaccine Vaxzevria on the southern Italian island of Sicily are refusing to take it, according to the region’s president, Nello Musumeci.

“In Sicily, there is an 80% refusal rate of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Every 100 people, 80 say no,” Musumeci said late Saturday night, according to media reports.

He added that it is “natural” for people to be hesitant about the vaccine – recently rebranded as Vaxzevria – but they must believe scientists when they tell them that “it is more dangerous not to get vaccinated than to get vaccinated.”

In a Sunday statement, a spokesperson for the president attempted to clear up the comments, saying Musumeci meant to say “up to 80 percent” are refusing the vaccine, as some regions have a much lower refusal rate, such as Syracuse, where just 30% apparently feared the vaccine enough to say no."

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WATCH how CNN pressures Lyft CEO into taking a political stance on Georgia voting laws

"Zimmer pointed out that pulling out of the states with the election security laws would harm Lyft workers and customers. But his response did not deter Harlow from continuing to press the issue, asserting that company CEOs have a responsibility to intervene in political issues.

“This really, I think, brings up the fundamental question for you and every other president and CEO of a company out there, which is what’s the role of the CEO going forward?” she continued. “Is it now your job as the head of a public company to use your power and your money to decide and push what you think is best for people, even outside of your core business?”

Zimmer did agree that company bosses can use their platforms to intervene in politics. But according to Harlow, companies are not doing enough:

“I wonder if you think using your voice louder and more CEOs speaking out sooner about this law in Georgia as it was making its way through the state legislature, or as Texas, if that would have made a difference? Some are looking now and saying, why weren’t you guys screaming at the top of your lungs a month ago?”"

If you're a publicly traded company you should stay out of politics.

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YouTube CEO: It’s easy to “make up content and post it from your basement” so we boost “authoritative sources”

"YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has acknowledged that the platform’s policy of boosting “authoritative” mainstream media sources and suppressing independent creators in search makes it “harder, in some cases, for channels, maybe who are getting started or smaller, to be able to be visible when there’s a major event or when people are looking at something that is science or news related” but insists that that the policy is “really, really important.”

Wojcicki made the comments during an interview with The Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson, at the World Economic Forum’s Global Technology Governance Summit 2021.

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“When we had the Las Vegas shooting, unfortunately, there were a lot of people who were uploading content that was not factual, that was not correct. And it’s much easier to just make up content and post it from your, your basement than it is to actually go to the site and to be able to report and have high-quality journalistic reporting. And so, that was just an example of what happens if you don’t have that kind of ranking.

So sure, we want to enable citizen journalism and other people to be able to report and other people to be able to share information on new channels but when we’re dealing with a sensitive topic, we have to have that information coming from authoritative sources so that the right and accurate information is viewed by our users first.”

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“But if you look at that, breaking artists or discovering the new latest small musician is very different if you’re looking for something like cancer information. You don’t wanna see someone who is just posting information for the first time when you’re dealing with cancer. You wanna see it from established medical organization.

And so, what we’ve done is really fine-tune our algorithms to be able to make sure that we are still giving the new creators the ability to be found when it comes to music or humor or something funny or so many different categories, beauty, crafts, learning, how-to, right, all these different areas but when dealing with sensitive areas, we really need to take a different approach.”

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Despite these assertions from YouTube executives that only mainstream media sources can provide accurate information to viewers, there are numerous examples where these so-called authoritative sources have pushed fake news.

Last month, multiple mainstream media outlets admitted that their previous reports claiming that then-President Trump had told the chief investigator at the Georgia Secretary of State’s office to “find the fraud” were false.

Another example of fake news from a mainstream media outlet, that’s particularly relevant in light of these basement analogies, is CNN’s Chris Cuomo staging his exit from self-isolation in his basement after admitting he left his house a week earlier.

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Yet they’re given a pass because YouTube has decided that they’re authoritative. Videos from mainstream media outlets reporting on the fake “find the fraud” Trump quotes as if they’re were real and uncritically covering Cuomo’s staged exit from quarantine in his basement still top YouTube’s search results."

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Tim Cook dreams of the day Americans vote by iPhone

"When asked if technology might be the answer to “voting issues” like election rigging, Cook was very enthusiastic in embracing the idea, saying, “I would dream of that.”

He then justified this stance by adding that since banking and health information is already handled by Big Tech – in his words, “we have more information on a phone about us than in our houses” – so voting should be no exception.

According to Cook, the debate about voting rights may be misdirected, as the real focus should be on solving problems by using technology.

Referring to this vaguely as “incorporation of updated technology” he said it would mean that more US residents than ever – i.e., those with phones, would be able to vote. Cook believes that the real problem is in making voting simple, and judging by his statements published by the New York Times, he has no particular concerns that the election system might in reality face more security challenges if people are allowed to vote using a phone – nor that the idea might cause more political acrimony."

Paper & pens is as high tech as voting should get.