Comment:
I was trained as a chemist. A large part of my professional career was working in various parts of the filtration industry. I developed a line of mixed esters of cellulose membrane filters. Millipore type filters, that were used to sterilize flu vaccines for Merck Sharp and Dohme as well as other medical products companies. I developed respiratory protection products for Wilson Safety Products used in the mining industry. I worked for Baxter developing medical / IV filters. I have patents on three IV filters I invented. Baxter sold more than 5 million of one of those every year for most of a decade. I know a little bit about filters.
Surgical masks were not designed as filters and were not intended to be used as filters. Surgical masks were designed to be used by surgeons standing face down over an operating table holding a patient with an open wound. The surgeon wearing the mask would be able to talk to others in the room without discharging spittle droplets into the patient’s wound. Spittle droplets are large and can cause infection.
I witnessed a test of surgical masks. Small plaster particles were generated in a room. They were visible as a white dust in the air. A man was properly fitted with a surgical mask and spent a short time in the room. When he came out the mask was removed. A camera was focused on the man’s face. The entire area that had been covered by the mask was coated by the white dust. The camera showed that his nostrils and his mouth had been penetrated by the white dust. The dust particles were measured and found to be around 40 micrometers in diameter. The particles that penetrated the mask were the same diameter.
Covid-19 virus molecules are about 0.1 micrometers in diameter. That is 400 times smaller than the plaster particles that penetrated the mask.
Surgical masks will not prevent the wearer from inhaling or exhaling viruses or bacteria. They provide absolutely no protection for either the wearer or anyone nearby. They create a very dangerous false sense of security for everyone. They also force the wearer to rebreath carbon dioxide. Which will over time reduce the wearers blood oxygen level. That can become very dangerous especially for older people.
This farce is being promoted by sleazy politicians who believe that if they can convince people that they are protecting them or creating a safe environment for them by pushing this mask farce those people will re-elect them.
All politicians pushing this dangerous mask farce should be voted out of office as soon as possible.
Monthly Archives: March 2021
Lavrov: Russia Is Against Vaccine Passports, Inoculation Ought to Be Voluntary
Moscow expects that the European Union’s plans to introduce coronavirus vaccine passports won’t discriminate against Russian nationals, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a press conference on Tuesday.
“At our level, we informed our colleagues in the European Union that we expected them to make decisions that will not discriminate against Russian nationals,” he pointed out.
The Russian top diplomat emphasized that the European Union’s move to introduce “vaccine passports” could lead to forced vaccination and would violate the principle that inoculation should be voluntary.
“It seems that the initiative runs counter to the rules of democracy because EU countries decided that vaccination would be voluntary,” Lavrov noted. “It means that people will be forced to get vaccinated in order to be able to travel, and people in the European Union can hardly imagine their life without traveling between countries,” he added.
“We’ll see how it plays out. I hope that a decision will be made based on the positions of member states. The principle that vaccination should be voluntary is very important,” the Russian foreign minister stressed.
On Monday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced plans to introduce coronavirus vaccination certificates.
The Met Police are Institutionally Brutal, as I found Out When They Arrested Me
Dr Lisa McKenzie [excerpt]
I have seen this myself, as I have a long history with the Metropolitan Police – one that I did not ask for or want.
My first ‘interaction’ with them was in 1984, when I was 16 and on a women’s picket in Nottinghamshire during the miners’ strike. I was with my mum and my aunties as we stood at the pit entrance, where the men breaking the strike would walk past, waving money at us and shouting they would pay for our food for sexual favours. The police who were protecting them were happy to encourage them and laugh along with them.
The Metropolitan Police had been bussed into Nottinghamshire in their thousands, collecting overtime money, to facilitate breaking the strike for Margaret Thatcher’s government. They were not there for anyone’s safety, as we found out; my aunty shouted “scab” and was immediately arrested, my other aunty shouted, “I hope your next shit’s a hedgehog” and was dragged across the car park to the police van, and my mum was hauled away and arrested, too.
As a vulnerable teen, I was distraught, but the police had no interest in me or my welfare and two of them pulled me across the car park away from the scene, as they drove off with my family locked in the back of a wagon. I had to make my way back home, with my knees and legs pouring with blood, not knowing what had happened to my family.
Their case was kicked out later at Nottingham Crown Court, but in the 1980s there was no justice for us. We were working-class women, supporting the striking miners and considered the enemy within.
This was my first engagement with the Metropolitan Police, but not the last. In 2015, I was at another picket in East London outside a private development which we had named ‘Poor Doors’. It was a development which discriminated between private tenants and social tenants, with the latter only having access to their building through a door down the side alley while the former accessed their apartments from the front door. It was a blatant form of social apartheid, and a group of us picketed that door for almost a year trying to bring attention to the growing normalising of discrimination in London.
In April of that year, I was arrested for allegedly putting a tiny sticker on the window of the development two weeks previously. I was apprehended by two officers and immediately surrounded by around 15 other police officers.
I was lost in a sea of yellow jackets, and my friends on the picket couldn’t see me and had no idea what was happening. I am 5ft 2inches, and had been handcuffed behind my back and dragged into a police vehicle.
The picket of 10 people was being policed by around 100 officers, and the situation was intimidating and frightening.
I arrived at Bethnal Green police station in East London where I sat and waited to be processed, still in the cuffs, which were cutting into me. It took the custody sergeant to insist I was uncuffed, asking what threat I could possibly be three hours after being arrested. It was a busy night, and even the young lads in the station who’d been arrested for drug dealing were frightened of me, asking what I’d done to be cuffed and policed so heavily. I was locked up for eight hours and released at 3am, when I had to walk home alone.
In October that year, I went to court. The eventual charge was ‘joint enterprise to criminal damage’ – that someone unknown to them and to me had put a sticker on a window and I had been present. The police admitted in court that I had been targeted, and the judge expressed his discomfort at this. Although I was found not guilty, I wanted to hold the police to account for their unfair treatment of me, but in order to do that my legal fees would have been in excess of £17,000 ($23,606). I don’t have that kind of money, and they went unchallenged.
I was arrested again in March 2017 on a picket line at the London School of Economics, where I worked, supporting cleaners who were fighting for fair pay and conditions. Again, I was cuffed behind my back and thrown in a very insecure van that sped through the narrow streets of Covent Garden. I was injured on the way to Charing Cross police station, where I was thrown in a cell next to a man who was shouting “I’m a rapist” with his door open. Apparently, he was considered so dangerous that I was unable to leave my cell to make the call I was entitled to, and an officer had to sit watching him for four hours to ensure he didn’t harm himself. After I was released, the case was ‘No Further Actioned’.
I’ve witnessed this blatant disregard for women from police time and again over the years. I’ve been on hundreds of protests, and seen women pulled from crowds, laid on their fronts with officers kneeling on them, being thrown around like dolls and treated roughly by men in full riot gear. I have suffered trauma and abuse at the hands of the Met Police, to the point I have been reluctant to go to them for help when I have been a victim of crime.
As a working-class woman from a council estate, I do not see them as public servants. I see them as state apparatus – a tool to enforce the political will of powerful interests in Westminster, ensuring that global capitalism can do business without the interference of sections of the public that are either undesirable, unable or unwilling to comply. As long as the police are intrinsically connected to and used by the state as tools to enforce a political will, no one will be safe from them – and the events of the past week have done nothing to change my mind on that front.
MIT & Harvard Study Suggests mRNA Vaccine Might Permanently Alter DNA After All
Dr. Doug Corrigan via Science With Dr. Doug
“The authors sought to answer how a PCR test is able to detect segments of viral RNA when the virus is presumably absent from a person’s body. They hypothesized that somehow segments of the viral RNA were being copied into DNA and then integrated permanently into the DNA of somatic cells”
In my previous blog, “Will an RNA Vaccine Permanently Alter My DNA?”, I laid out several molecular pathways that would potentially enable the RNA in an mRNA vaccine to be copied and permanently integrated into our DNA. I was absolutely not surprised to find that the majority of people claimed that this prospect was impossible; in fact, I was expecting this response – partly because most people don’t possess a deep enough understanding of molecular biology, and partly because of other implicit biases.
After all, we’ve been told in no uncertain terms that it would be impossible for the mRNA in a vaccine to become integrated into our DNA, simply because “RNA doesn’t work that way.” Well, this current research which was released not too long after my original article demonstrates that yes, indeed, “RNA does work that way”. In my original article, I spelled out this exact molecular pathway.
Specifically, a new study by MIT and Harvard scientists demonstrates that segments of the RNA from the coronavirus itself are most likely becoming a permanent fixture in human DNA. (study linked below). This was once thought near impossible, for the same reasons which are presented to assure us that an RNA vaccine could accomplish no such feat. Against the tides of current biological dogma, these researchers found that the genetic segments of this RNA virus are more than likely making their way into our genome. They also found that the exact pathway that I laid out in in my original article is more than likely the pathway being used (retrotransposon, and in particular a LINE-1 element) for this retro-integration to occur.
And, unlike my previous blog where I hypothesize that such an occurrence would be extremely rare (mainly because I was attempting to temper expectations more conservatively due to the lack of empirical evidence), it appears that this integration of viral RNA segments into our DNA is not as rare as I initially hypothesized. It’s difficult for me to put a number on the probability due to data limitations present in the paper, but based on the frequency they were able to measure this phenomenon in both petri dishes and COVID patients, the probability is much greater than I initially anticipated. Due to this current research, I now place this risk as a more probable event than my original estimation.
To be fair, this study didn’t show that the RNA from the current vaccines is being integrated into our DNA. However, they did show, quite convincingly, that there exists a viable cellular pathway whereby snippets of SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA could become integrated into our genomic DNA. In my opinion, more research is needed to both corroborate these findings, and to close some gaps.
That being said, this data can be used to make a conjecture as to whether the RNA present in an RNA vaccine could potentially alter human DNA. This is because an mRNA vaccine consists of snippets of the viral RNA from the genome of SARS-CoV-2; in particular, the current mRNA vaccines harbor stabilized mRNA which encodes the Spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, which is the protein that enables the virus to bind to cell-surface receptors and infect our cells.
This was thought near impossible. Based on this ground-breaking study, I would hope that the highly presumptuous claim that such a scenario is impossible will find its way to the trash bin labeled: “Things We Were Absolutely and Unequivocally Certain Couldn’t Happen Which Actually Happened”; although, I have a suspicious feeling that the importance of this study will be minimized in quick order with reports from experts who attempt to poke holes in their work. It’s important to add that this paper is a pre-print that is not peer-reviewed yet; but I went through all of the data, methods, and results, and I see very little wrong with the paper, and some gaps that need closing- but, at least from the standpoint of being able to answer the question: can RNA from the coronavirus use existing cellular pathways to integrate permanently into our DNA? From that perspective, their paper is rock-solid. Also, please take note that these are respected scientists from MIT and Harvard.
Quoting from their paper:
“In support of this hypothesis, we found chimeric transcripts consisting of viral fused to cellular sequences in published data sets of SARS-CoV-2 infected cultured cells and primary cells of patients, consistent with the transcription of viral sequences integrated into the genome. To experimentally corroborate the possibility of viral retro-integration, we describe evidence that SARS-CoV-2 RNAs can be reverse transcribed in human cells by reverse transcriptase (RT) from LINE-1 elements or by HIV-1 RT, and that these DNA sequences can be integrated into the cell genome and subsequently be transcribed. Human endogenous LINE-1 expression was induced upon SARS-CoV-2 infection or by cytokine exposure in cultured cells, suggesting a molecular mechanism for SARS-CoV-2 retro-integration in patients. This novel feature of SARS-CoV-2 infection may explain why patients can continue to produce viral RNA after recovery and suggests a new aspect of RNA virus replication.”
Why did these researchers bother to investigate whether viral RNA could become hardwired into our genomic DNA? It turns out their motive had nothing to do with mRNA vaccines.
The researchers were puzzled by the fact that there is a respectable number of people who are testing positive for COVID-19 by PCR long after the infection was gone. It was also shown that these people were not reinfected.
The authors sought to answer how a PCR test is able to detect segments of viral RNA when the virus is presumably absent from a person’s body. They hypothesized that somehow segments of the viral RNA were being copied into DNA and then integrated permanently into the DNA of somatic cells. This would allow these cells to continuously churn out pieces of viral RNA that would be detected in a PCR test, even though no active infection existed.
Through their experiments, they did not find full-length viral RNA integrated into genomic DNA; rather, they found smaller segments of the viral DNA, mostly representing the nucleocapsid (N) protein of the virus, although other viral segments were found integrated into human DNA at a lower frequency.
In this paper, they demonstrate that:
1) Segments of SARS-CoV-2 Viral RNA can become integrated into human genomic DNA.
2) This newly acquired viral sequence is not silent, meaning that these genetically modified regions of genomic DNA are transcriptionally active (DNA is being converted back into RNA).
3) Segments of SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA retro-integrated into human genomic DNA in cell culture. This retro-integration into genomic DNA of COVID-19 patients is also implied indirectly from the detection of chimeric RNA transcripts in cells derived from COVID-19 patients. Although their RNAseq data suggests that genomic alteration is taking place in COVID-19 patients, to prove this point conclusively, PCR, DNA sequencing, or Southern Blot should be carried out on purified genomic DNA of COVID-19 patients to prove this point conclusively. This is a gap that needs to be closed in the research. The in vitro data in human cell lines, however, is air tight.
4) This viral retro-integration of RNA into DNA can be induced by endogenous LINE-1 retrotransposons, which produce an active reverse transcriptase (RT) that converts RNA into DNA. (All humans have multiple copies of LINE-1 retrotransposons residing in their genome.). The frequency of retro-integration of viral RNA into DNA is positively correlated with LINE-1 expression levels in the cell.
5) These LINE-1 retrotransposons can be activated by viral infection with SARS-CoV-2, or cytokine exposure to cells, and this increases the probability of retro-integration.
Instead of going through all of their results in detail (you can do that if you like by reading their paper linked below), I will answer the big question on everyone’s mind – If the virus is able to accomplish this, then why should I care if the vaccine does the same thing?
Well, first let’s just address the big elephant in the room first. First, you should care because, “THEY TOLD YOU THAT THIS WAS IMPOSSIBLE AND TO JUST SHUT UP AND TAKE THE VACCINE.” These pathways that I hypothesized (and these researchers verified with their experiments) are not unknown to people who understand molecular biology at a deeper level. This is not hidden knowledge which is only available to the initiated. I can assure you that the people who are developing the vaccines are people who understand molecular biology at a very sophisticated level. So, why didn’t they discover this, or even ask this question, or even do some experiments to rule it out? Instead, they just used superficially simplistic biology 101 as a smoke screen to tell you that RNA doesn’t convert into DNA. This is utterly disingenuous, and this lack of candor is what motivated me to write my original article. They could have figured this out easily.
Second, there’s a big difference between the scenario where people randomly, and unwittingly, have their genetics monkeyed with because they were exposed to the coronavirus, and the scenario where we willfully vaccinate billions of people while telling them this isn’t happening. Wouldn’t you agree? What is the logic in saying, “Well, this bad thing may or may not happen to you, so we’re going to remove the mystery and ensure that it happens to everyone.”? In my best estimate, this is an ethical decision that you ought to make, not them.
Third, the RNA in the vaccine is a different animal than the RNA produced by the virus.The RNA in the vaccine is artificially engineered. First, it is engineered to stay around in your cells for a much longer time than usual (RNA is naturally unstable and degrades quickly in the cell). Second, it is engineered such that it is efficient at being translated into protein (they accomplish this by codon optimization). Increasing the stability of the RNA increases the probability that it will become integrated into your DNA; and, increasing the translation efficiency increases the amount of protein translated from the RNA if it does happen to become incorporated into your DNA in a transcriptionally active region of your genome. Theoretically, this means that whatever negative effects are associated with the natural process of viral RNA/DNA integration, these negative effects could be more frequent and more pronounced with the vaccine when compared to the natural virus.
As a side note, these researchers found that the genetic information for the nucleocapsid “N” protein was, by far, the largest culprit for being permanently integrated into human DNA (because this RNA is more abundant when the virus replicates in our cells). The vaccine, on the other hand, contains RNA that encodes the Spike (S) protein. Therefore, if the mRNA from the vaccine (or subsegments thereof) were to make its way into a transcriptionally-active region of our genome through a retro-integration process, it will cause our cells to produce an over-abundance of Spike protein, rather than N protein. Our immune system does make antibodies to both N and S proteins, but it is the Spike protein which is the prime target for our immune system because it exists on the outside of the virus. If our cells become permanent (rather than temporary) Spike Protein producing factories due to permanent alteration of our genomic DNA, this could lead to serious autoimmune problems. I would imagine that autoimmunity profiles arising from such a scenario would be differentiated based on order of events (i.e., whether or not someone is vaccinated before or after exposure to coronavirus).
Again, this is a theoretical exercise I am presenting for consideration. I am not making the claim that an mRNA vaccine will permanently alter your genomic DNA, and I didn’t make this claim in my first article, although it appears that troll sites made the fallacious claim that I did. I simply asked the question, and provided hypothetical, plausible molecular pathways by which such an event could occur. I believe this current research validates that this is at least plausible, and most likely probable. It most certainly deserves closer inspection and testing to rule this possibility out, and I would hope that a rigorous and comprehensive test program would be instituted with the same enthusiasm that propelled the vaccine haphazardly through the normal safety checkpoints.
Obviously, even given this information, people are still free to get vaccinated, and will do so according to the overall balance of risks and rewards that they perceive in their mind. The purpose of my article is to make sure you can make that assessment fairly by possessing all potential risks and rewards, rather than an incomplete set. For something as important as this, you should not be operating in the dark.
I would encourage you to share this article to let others know of the potential risks and rewards.
Referenced Article:
Dutch police crack down on anti-lockdown protesters who were peacefully gathered in a park. A woman is struck…
Ron Paul: Is Biden Holding America Hostage Until ‘Independence’ Day?
Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,
Last week President Biden addressed the nation on the first anniversary of the coronavirus being declared a “pandemic.” It was a disturbing speech, warning us that the “hopeful spring” will only emerge “from a dark winter” if all Americans “stick with the rules.”
Whose rules? His rules.
The message from the president was clear: he will only allow us to have some of our freedoms back if we do exactly as he tells us. It was the language of extortion, of a bank robber who demands you do what he says or face the consequences. It was not the language of someone we are told is the leader of the free world.
In the speech Biden laid out a list of what was taken from us over the past year, “weddings, birthdays, graduations…family reunions, the Sunday night rituals.” It was as if somehow the virus, instead of authoritarian government officials, prevented us from enjoying these normal human activities.
Though we continue to see Covid disappear across the country with the end of the winter season, Biden was not about to let go of his perceived power to control our lives. He said, “if we do all this, if we do our part, if we do this together, by July the 4, there’s a good chance you, your families and friends, will be able to get together in your backyard or in your neighborhood and have a cookout or a barbecue and celebrate Independence Day. That doesn’t mean large events with lots of people together, but it does mean small groups will be able to get together.”
Imagine our Founders hearing this speech. The US president might – just might – allow small family gatherings at home in four months if we follow all of his rules. King George looked benevolent by comparison!
As Rep. Thomas Massie Tweeted shortly after the speech, “If you’re waiting for permission from the chief executive to celebrate Independence Day with your family, you clearly don’t grasp the concept of Independence.”
It seems like yesterday – it almost was – that Biden “asked” us to just wear the mask for 100 days. “Just 100 days to mask, not forever. 100 days,” he said. So from “just 100 days” to maybe you can have a small gathering by July 4th? Perhaps he just forgot his earlier speech?
As usual, the goalposts keep being moved because politicians cannot bear the possibility that they might have to give up some of that power over us they have grabbed for themselves. Fauci made the usual mainstream media rounds over the weekend and was asked by the fawning host when Americans might have permission to hold weddings again!
So now Americans need Fauci’s permission to get married? What is happening to this country? The propaganda is so relentless that it seems most Americans don’t see how not normal this is! In saner times, Fauci would be laughed off the stage. Now, he’s treated as some sort of divine source of truth.
Biden promised he was “using every power…as the president of the United States to put us on a war footing.” Of that I have no doubt. But Biden’s war is not against the virus. It’s against the US Constitution and liberty itself.
How Partisan Politics Rots Your Brain
Authored by David D’Amato via Libertarian Institute & Libertarianism.org,
Recent research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques is allowing us to peer into the connections, yet shrouded in mystery, between local brain activity, cognitive processes, and partisan attachment. This developing body of knowledge has revealed the profound importance of evolution in shaping the ways in which our brains process all kinds of information, in particular political information. At the center of this evolutionary journey is the importance of groups—of being initiated and accepted into them, of aligning ourselves with them, of being loyal to them regardless of philosophical considerations. The social dynamics of group membership and participation are programmed more deeply into our brains than is abstract philosophizing. “In other words, people will go along with the group, even if the ideas oppose their own ideologies—belonging may have more value than facts.” Because we once moved from place to place as nomads, such groups are our homes even more than any physical locations are.
We now have decades of research suggesting—if not proving— “the ubiquity of emotion‐biased motivated reasoning,” reasoning that is qualitatively different from the kind operating when subjects are engaged in “cold reasoning,” where the subjects lack a “strong emotional stake” in the subjects at issue. Coupled with a growing literature on the startling character and extent of political ignorance, the current state has dire implications for human freedom. The stakes are high: in their 2018 study of why and how partisanship impairs the brain’s ability to process information objectively, NYU researchers Jay J. Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira note that “partisanship can alter memory, implicit evaluation, and even perceptual judgments.”
One recent study, published last fall by a team from Berkeley, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins, set out to better understand how partisan biases develop in the brain. The researchers had subjects watch a series of videos, using fMRI to explore the “neural mechanisms that underlie the biased processing of real‐world political content.” The results showed that partisan team members process identical information in highly biased and motivated ways. The researchers locate this neural polarization in the part of the brain known as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region associated with understanding and formulating narratives. The study also found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that to the extent a given participant’s brain activity during the videos aligned with that of the “average liberal” or “average conservative,” the participant was more likely to take up that group’s position.
The study accords with years of previous research showing that partisans’ opinions on important social, political, and economic issues are affected by subconscious brain processes—processes of which they’re neither aware nor in control. This ought to be deeply concerning to everyone who belongs to a political team: processes are taking place in your brain, underneath or beyond the level of direct awareness, that are informing your conclusions about important social and political issues. To reflect on this for even a moment should fill anyone who aspires to critical thinking or rationality with a kind of dread, for loyalty to the team seems to be overriding the higher faculties of the mind.
But, the authors are careful to note, it’s important not to interpret these results as pointing to some kind of determinism, whereby we can’t choose how to think or what we believe. As one of of the study’s authors, Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, says, “Critically, these differences do not imply that people are hardwired to disagree.” Rather, these neural pathways seem to be carved largely by the kinds and sources of the media we consume. From the data yielded by such research, among many other similar studies, a picture begins to emerge of partisanship as a kind of mind poisoning, an infection that leads to serious and, importantly, measurable cognitive impairment. Evidence suggests that, under the influence of partisanship, we can’t even understand our own thoughts and opinions.
In another important, recent experiment, researchers wanted to understand the relative accuracy of participants’ introspective constructs. The researchers set out to gauge people’s ability to understand their own choices, to see clearly “the elements of internal argumentation that lead to [their] choices.” In particular, the researchers wanted to know how subjects would deal with choices that had been manipulated—that is, whether subjects would “notice mismatches between their intended choice and the outcome they are presented with.” Would subjects recognize that something was off? If they failed to notice the manipulation, would they offer justifications for choices they had not even made? The assumption is that subjects who fail to notice the mismatches must not really understand the reasons for their choices or “the internal processes leading to a moral or political judgment.”
The results revealed a conspicuous “introspective blindness to the internal processes leading to a moral or political judgment.” People didn’t seem to understand why they had made the decisions they’d made (or had not made), though some exhibited what the researchers call “unconscious detection of self‐deception“—these subjects were unable to detect the manipulations of their answers, but they did register lower confidence in the manipulated choices, which the authors suggest points to “the existence of a neural mechanism unconsciously monitoring our own thoughts.”
Once one has chosen and joined a team, she has very little control over her own thoughts. When they are introduced, new data are distorted, misinterpreted, or discarded based on their consistency with what we may describe as a program running in the background: partisanship leads the team member into a cognitive position of unconscious self‐deception. Few of us, if fully understanding this phenomenon, would choose it for themselves—at least that’s the hope of many who study this area. As the authors observe, “reflecting on our beliefs may help to develop free societies.” They suggest that if citizens better understood the brain mechanics of the cognitive impairment and self‐deception brought on by partisanship, they’d be positioned to make better decisions. Research has shown that “reflecting on how we make decisions leads to better decisions.”
Similar research on self‐deception in politics has also confirmed the presence of the Dunning‐Kruger effect (to summarize, people think they know a lot more than they actually do). Further, the effect is exaggerated within the context of politics, with low‐knowledge participants describing themselves as even more knowledgeable than usual once partisanship is made a conspicuous factor. Vitor Geraldi Haase and Isabella Starling‐Alves posit that the kind of self‐deception that is such “a major characteristic of political partisanship…probably evolved as an evolutionary adaptive strategy to deal with the intragroup‐extragroup dynamics of human evolution.” Objective truth, meaning roughly an accurate model of reality, is not important, at least not anywhere near as important, as conformity and indeed submission, which we may associate with social reality.
Whatever its flaws, evolutionary psychology offers us several promising leads on the question of just why the brain isn’t able to perform on partisanship. This notion of social reality is an important clue. At this juncture, it is important to underline the fact that when we speak of partisanship, we are not speaking of ideology; the relationship between partisan identification and political ideology is complicated, the connection between the two not particularly strong. Ideologues tend to think systematically, and the philosophical contents of their beliefs are deeply important to them. What is important to the partisan is not what she believes, but that she aligns her beliefs with those of her team or in-group—or else, as may be the case, that she is loyal to and supportive of the party group despite any real or perceived ideological nonconcurrences.
Americans tend to vastly overestimate the differences in political ideology and policy preferences between Democrats and Republicans. In fact, most Americans are not at all ideological, can’t describe ideologies accurately (as their proponents would describe them), and have almost no information on either the history of ideas or the empirical evidence that bears on particular political or policy questions. Interestingly, partisanship doesn’t necessarily seem to be about politics in the normative or philosophical sense, as “people place party loyalty over policy, and even over truth.” There are actually relatively weak correlations between partisan identity and concrete policy preferences. “[P]artisan affect is inconsistently (and perhaps artifactually) founded in policy attitudes.”
Indeed, strong partisanship is necessarily an impediment to ideological thinking insofar as ideology is predicated on an integrated and consistent approach to policy questions, as against the blind, team‐rooting approach associated in the literature with partisanship. Ideological people, whatever their flaws, hold political actors and government bodies to account. Partisans change positions readily and shamelessly, depending on anything from who is living in the White House, to the vagaries of party leaders, to what is perceived as popular at the moment. Further, individual Americans’ political opinions are remarkably unstable over time, vacillating between glaring contradictions, relying on a confused amalgam of elite opinions. Partisanship as we know it rather seems to be a holdover from humankind’s history of tribal loyalty, with “selective pressures hav[ing] sculpted human minds to be tribal.” That is, evolution selected for just the kinds of cognitive biases we find in partisans on both sides today (importantly, neither “team” is immune).
A recent paper published by the American Psychological Association suggests that from a cognitive and psychoneurological standpoint, partisans of the left and right are much more like each other than they are like nonpartisans. As study co‐author Leor Zmigrod writes, “Regardless of the direction and content of their political beliefs, extreme partisans had a similar cognitive profile.” Specifically, partisans of all stripes show lower levels of cognitive flexibility; importantly, even when processing information that has no political character, they are more dogmatic, less adaptable, and less able to complete tasks that require an “ability to adapt to novel or changing environments and a capacity to switch between modes of thinking.”
Partisanship quite literally makes one dumb—or is it that dumb people are just more likely to be committed partisans? Zmigrod is careful to point out that the study can’t give us the answer to that question, that we would need longitudinal studies in order to better understand the causal direction and causal phenomena at play. As soon as partisanship is introduced, as soon as a question mentions a politician or political party, subjects are unable to accurately assess basic facts. Indeed, remarkably, tinging a question with a political shade renders many subjects unable to answer a simple question even when they are given the answer. Relatedly, studies have shown that one’s political affiliations even affect her ability to perform basic math: given an operation that yields a statistic contradicting a subject’s partisan view, the subject will tend to question the result rather than updating based on the evidence or attempting to reconcile the new information with her politics.
In a groundbreaking study published last summer, a team of researchers led by the University of Exeter’s Darren Schreiber attempted to address the lack of brain imaging research specifically aimed at better understanding nonpartisans, a group that has been neglected as almost all such research has focused on the differences between the brains of partisans of the left and right. The study found that nonpartisans’ brains are different from those of their brainwashed brethren, particularly in “regions that are typically involved in social cognition.”
It may be that the next stage in human evolution will involve rewiring our brains to accept the fact that current groups are artificially and arbitrarily defined—that all human beings are one people. For just as there is harmful, toxic tribalism, there is also socially beneficial, cooperative, cosmopolitanism. As social policy expert Elizabeth A. Segal writes, “Ultimately our goal should be to build the tribe we all belong to: that of humanity.” Libertarians take this lesson quite seriously, for we tend to see ourselves as part of a common global community of connected individuals who are perfectly capable of dealing with one another through peaceful and mutually‐beneficial interactions. We celebrate social, cultural, religious, and linguistic differences as the spice of life rather than see them as dividing lines or impediments to willing collaboration. If we can understand and think clearly through partisanship, we can begin to build a freer world based not on arbitrary divisions and compromised reasoning, but on mutual respect and renewed emphasis on rigorous critical thinking.
One Third of All Countries Worldwide Completely Closed to International Tourism – According to UN
The latest data from the United Nation World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) showed that 32 percent of destinations worldwide – 69 in total – are now completely closed for global tourism as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Of those, just over half – 38 destinations – have been completely closed for at least 40 weeks, and 34 percent of all destinations are still partially closed to international tourists.
According to the UNWTO report, the emergence of new variants of the Covid-19 virus has prompted many governments to reverse efforts to ease restrictions on travel, with total closures to tourists most prevalent in Asia and the Pacific nations, and Europe.
“Travel restrictions have been widely used to restrict the spread of the virus. Now, as we work to restart tourism, we must recognize that restrictions are just one part of the solution. Their use must be based on the latest data and analysis, and consistently reviewed so as to allow for the safe and responsible restart of a sector upon which many millions of businesses and jobs depend,” said UNWTO Secretary-General Zurab Pololikashvili.
The report said that regional differences with regard to travel restrictions remain. “Of the 69 destinations where borders are completely closed to tourists, 30 are in Asia and the Pacific, 15 are in Europe, 11 are in Africa, 10 are in the Americas, and three are in the Middle East.”
At a Certain Point, Even the Gestapo Had to Stop Cancelling People
On April 26, 1933, the interior minister for the German state of Prussia issued a decree creating a new secret state police, or Geheime Staats Polizei, abbreviated: Gestapo.
The Gestapo was tasked with stamping out all opposition to Germany’s new Chancellor and the party he brought to power one year earlier.
It operated by collecting tips from ordinary citizens, including even school children. And this network of Gestapo informants changed Germans’ behavior almost overnight.
Even a joke about the ruling party could land you in a Gestapo interrogation room. Talking politics around your children became a dangerous gamble.
According to Erik Larson’s book In the Garden of Beasts, 37% of denunciations “arose not from heartfelt political beliefs, but from private conflicts with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial.”
For example in one case, a grocery store clerk reported a customer who insisted on receiving the wrong change. The customer was accused of tax fraud.
Another man lent a banned book to his friend, and was quickly denounced by his friend’s wife.
The new Chancellor— who encouraged the behavior — was so shocked by the citizens’ eagerness to rat out their neighbors that he remarked, “We are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness.”
That Chancellor, of course, was Adolf Hitler.
The secret police didn’t need wire taps in every home or spies on every street corner. They found an army of willing, eager informants in the general population.
The volume of denunciations was so great, in fact, that the Gestapo actually had to ask people to stop reporting political crimes to them, because they were overwhelmed and found it impossible to process them all.
Obviously Germany in the 1930s is an extreme case, and I’m not saying that the West today is in the same boat. Not even close.
The similarity, however, is how quickly things changed.
In Nazi Germany, the entire culture changed literally within a few months. In early Spring of 1933, people were still civil to one another. By the summer, they were ratting out their friends and neighbors to the secret police.
Similarly, it wasn’t that long ago that people in the west felt free to speak their minds and state an opinion.
Today saying the wrong words can get you fired, cancelled, and your life turned upside down.
For example, lately there’s been a number of so-called “fact checkers,” i.e. self-appointed censors, who are upset about a new app called Clubhouse.
If you haven’t heard of it, Clubhouse allows people to discuss different topics in audio-only chat rooms.
The audio-based content does not allow recording. And that means there is no record of conversations.
As one fact-checker laments:
“…there are no screenshots. There is no way to drag up old Clubhouse posts years later like a user might do on Twitter. There is no way to record conversations—meaning there is no way to prove that someone said anything controversial at all. . . Users on Clubhouse know, or at least believe, that they can openly speak their mind with zero repercussions.”
The horror!
This drives the ‘fact checkers’ bananas. They want people to be afraid to speak their minds. They want people to fear being denounced if they do not adhere to the doctrine of wokeness.
One particularly angry fact checker penned a virtriolic article noting that the Chinese government has already banned Clubhouse.
She then asks the reader, “If Xi Jinping’s administration isn’t ignoring Clubhouse, why should fact-checkers? Why should you?”
Apparently, the repressive Chinese regime is a shining example that the fact checkers think we should all follow.
Just like the West followed China’s lead on imprisoning people inside their homes in the name of stopping the spread of Covid-19, the West should apparently stamp out any platform that allows intellectual dissent.
Of course, intellectual dissent covers a lot of ground these days.
For example, a professor at John Hopkins School of Medicine wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal recently predicting “We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April”.
The author has impeccible credentials; in addition to his MD, he obtained a Maser of Public Health from Harvard, served at the World Health Organization, and was recommended by the American College of Surgeons to become the Surgeon General of the United States.
But the fact checkers don’t think that his view should be repeated.
So Facebook’s fact checkers stuck a “misinformation” label on the article, stating: “Missing Context. Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.”
Sure, there are scientists who think that herd immunity is a long way off.
But Facebook’s fact-checkers decided for everyone which scientists’ opinions were ‘correct’ and which scientists’ opinions should be censored.
The aim of these people is to put reinforce a specific narrative, and denounce anything contrary to that narrative as “misinformation” or “hate speech”. And anyone who is caught sharing or espousing such views is derided as a conspiracy theorist… or worse.
Accept the opinions they tell you are correct, or be denounced.
The Rights Of The Naturally Immune
Authored by Thomas Harrington via The American Institute for Economic Research,
There is an important issue that, in the midst of all the talk of vaccines, has not gotten nearly the attention it deserves: the civil rights of those who have already developed natural immunity to the SARS-CoV-2, the virus that is said to cause Covid.
Yesterday, I got the results of the test I took to detect whether I had developed a T-Cell response to the virus.
Like the antibody test I took almost 2 months ago, it was positive.
These two things would appear to demonstrate that for all intents and purposes my body knew exactly what to do with this virus and that it probably has the equipment to dispose of it again were it, or one of its cousins, to revisit me in the near-to-medium term.
And even if one or another related strain were to visit me in that future, studies suggest strongly that the attack would be considerably less virulent than the one I overcame without excessive trouble in December.
In a halfway rational world, what to do going forward in regard to getting a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 virus would be something I’d discuss with my doctor in the discreet quarters of the examination room. Were it to be offered, I would politely refuse it. And he, seeing the test evidence in my file, would raise no objection.
And since the danger to me in the future from the virus is minuscule, and the science has clearly borne out what Fauci and Maria Van Kerkhove of the WHO flatly said was true before someone upstairs got to them—that asymptomatic transmission of respiratory diseases of this type is virtually nonexistent—I’d be free to live my life as I pleased without a mask, and with complete freedom of movement.
But instead of this, I am facing enormous pressure to get a vaccine in order to recover my basic rights as a citizen.
And even then, those in charge are saying, I will still have to run around with a completely useless, breath-robbing and personality-canceling mask on my face.
And all this for a disease that, even before the introduction of vaccines, gave those infected by it a roughly 997.5 out of 1,000 chance of survival.
The civil authorities have decided, in effect, that fully indemnified pharmaceutical companies, whose pasts are obscenely littered with fraud, and the calculated creation of crises in order to up revenues on their products (OxyContin anyone?), have the de facto “right” to force me to take an experimental vaccine that, in the very, very best of circumstances, will only match what my apparently well-functioning body has already given me without any side effects.
And this, while straight out telling me that even if I submit to their government-coerced medical experiment I will probably still not get my full constitutional rights back.
This is an important issue that needs to be addressed much more vigorously than has been the case up until now.