The Paradox of Human Connection

Maria Popova, writing at The Marginalian:

The hardest thing in life isn’t getting what we want, isn’t even knowing what we want, but knowing what to want. We think we want connection, but as soon as contact reaches deeper than the skin of being, we recoil with the terror of vulnerability. There is no place more difficult to show up than where marrow meets marrow. And yet that is the only place where two people earn the right to use the word “love.” Our avoidance of that terrifying, transcendent place holds up a mirror to our most fundamental beliefs about life and love, about what we deserve and what we are capable of, about reality and the landscape of the possible.

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Back in 2020 When “No One Was Safe”

Matt Orfalea takes us back to March 2020:

Across the media landscape, the already hyperbolic phrase was often cut short to “Nobody is safe.”

“Nobody is safe.” - Chris Cuomo, CNN (10/23/20)

“Nobody is safe.” - Rob Scmitt, Fox News (3/30/20)

“This virus is raging everywhere and no one is safe” - Senator Bob Casey, CNN (11/20/20)

By August 2021, NPR’s Tamara Keith told CBS News that the phrase had “almost become cliche”.

While the world was told “Nobody is safe from COVID-19” the actual infection fatality rate (IFR) was less than 0.5%. In other words, the natural immune systems of approximately 99.5% would defeat the original Alpha COVID variant without a vaccine. For children, the risk of dying is 0.0%. But the constant “Nobody is safe” mantras led citizens to believe the virus was more deadly than it actually was, spreading a man-made pandemic: a hyperpolarizing pandemic of fear.

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About “Race”

Writing at Journal of Free Black Thought, Amir Zaki is more than ready to dispense with the destructive idea of "race."

In 2023, It appears painfully evident that the concept of different and distinct races is a myth. From a biological perspective, this is nearly indisputable. Yet, legends die hard. In the United States, perhaps more pathologically than most other places on earth, people seem to hold onto this race myth as if their lives depended on it, as both oppressors and victims. The topic takes up an incredible amount of bandwidth in the media. Statistics show this trend has, ironically, been increasing despite the world's ethnic populations and cultures rapidly mixing with one another. This can be partially explained by America’s unique and tarnished past, exceptionalism, and isolation/provincialism. It can also be partially explained simply by habit. We made this bed. And we’ve been sleeping restlessly in it for centuries now.

Participation in race-based language may have some utility because it’s easy to go along with social conventions, but it is ultimately short-sighted, and I argue that we have to rip off the bandaid sooner or later, and I prefer yesterday. The reification and constant reinvention of the concept of race is deeply regressive and keeps everyone in an endless, discriminatory, divisive loop. As Carlos Hoyt, Jr. beautifully puts it, “For some of us, this false logic justifies discrimination and violence. For some of us, it leads us to try the best we can to bring about some sort of state of separate but equal state of racial equality. But we can’t. Race is predicated on separation. Separations that aren’t equal. Separate and unequal is the essential logic of race.”

The concept of separate and distinct races, as we currently understand it, is somewhere around 400 years old, which counts for roughly 0.1% of our human history on Earth. For comparison, the belief in witches lasted roughly 300 years and seems utterly absurd to almost everyone now . . .

My view is that all parties trafficking in race are serving to maintain the status quo, which will always be inequitable, divisive, and exclusionary, especially toward those who don’t fit into any racial categories. Proof that these strategies are failing can be observed easily by looking at the toxic relationships between racialized groups as expressed by the loudest and most powerful voices on social media. We have a billion-dollar anti-racist movement with an invisible enemy. This is a recipe for an endless battle.

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New Suit Alleges U.S. Government Censorship of People Claiming Vaccine-Related Injuries

The New Civil Liberties Alliance is a non-profit civil rights group. On May 22, 2023, it filed a lawsuit

challenging the federal government’s ongoing efforts to work in concert with social media companies and the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project to monitor and censor online support groups catering to those injured by Covid vaccines. This sprawling censorship enterprise has combined the efforts of numerous federal agencies and government actors—including within the White House—to coerce and induce social media platforms to censor, suppress, and label as “misinformation” speech expressed by those who have suffered vaccine-related injuries. In Brianne Dressen, et al. v. Rob Flaherty, et al., NCLA urges the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas to enjoin this government-sponsored censorship and declare this state action unlawful to prevent these Defendants from further censoring such free speech and free association.

NCLA represents Brianne Dressen, Shaun Barcavage, Kristi Dobbs, Nikki Holland, Suzanna Newell, and Ernest Ramirez. All but Mr. Ramirez have suffered vaccine-related injuries. To be clear, these Plaintiffs are not anti-vaxxers. Ms. Dressen, for example, was injured by the AstraZeneca vaccine after she volunteered to participate in vaccine trials for that vaccine. Mr. Ramirez received a Moderna vaccine himself without incident but then lost his 16-year-old son to vaccine-induced cardiac arrest five days after Ernest, Jr. received the Pfizer vaccine. While such vaccine injuries may be rare, further research is necessary to establish the incidence of serious, even fatal, side effects for these still-new vaccines. Meanwhile, the First Amendment forbids Defendants from suppressing the speech and association rights of innocent victims who are just seeking to commiserate with other sufferers.

The suit alleges:

This case challenges the government’s mass-censorship program and the shocking role that it has played (and still plays) in ensuring that disfavored viewpoints deemed a threat to its agenda are suppressed. This sprawling censorship enterprise has involved the efforts of myriad federal agencies and government actors (including within the White House itself) to direct, coerce, and, ultimately, work in concert with social media platforms to censor, muffle, and flag as “misinformation” speech that conflicts with the government’s preferred narrative—including speech that the government explicitly acknowledges to be true.

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Anthrax and COVID

Glenn Greenwald and Saagar Enjeti independently took deep dives to investigate the bizarre and, in fact, highly suspicious, behavior of the U.S. regarding the 2001 anthrax attacks. They discussed their conclusions together on Rumble:

Here's an excerpt of the transcript from their interview:

G. Greenwald: We've been planning the anthrax program we did last night to kind of walk through and remind people of exactly what that attack was, why it was so significant, but also the multiple mysteries embedded within it. And out of the blue, not without knowing I was working on it. You came to me and said, I've currently fallen into this anthrax rabbit hole. And as a result, I've run into a lot of the stuff that you're writing about because I wrote about it almost nonstop for two years in 2007, 2008 and 2009. Tell me what it was that kind of attracted your interest to it? Like what has made you so fascinated by this topic?

Saagar Enjeti: Glenn, for me, it was a lab leak. I mean, at the very beginning, you know, of course, we've done our best to try and dig as deep into lab leak as possible. So, at the very beginning, we started with the Wuhan lab. So obviously we have the Wuhan lab, I think at this point is basically, I mean, I don't really know anybody who doesn't believe that it came out of there. If we can rehash that evidence at a later time, I'll […]

G. Greenwald: I'll tell you some people if you want to find out. But anybody rational does not believe that any longer.

Saagar Enjeti: Yes, there is. There is a tremendous amount, an overwhelming amount of evidence to say that Covid leaked from the Wuhan lab. Then you peel back one layer that's almost boring now at this point. And we look at the U.S. funding. We have Dr. Fauci, Dr. Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance. All of that is now well-established. I wanted to keep going back even more layers. So, then we go to the overall arc of gain-of-function research. Then, I decided to go even higher than gain-of-function research to say, where the hell did this vast amount of money being pumped through the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health, even come from? That leads me to the 2007 Review of the Government Accountability Office about specifically the bioterrorism initiatives that were sparked by the anthrax attacks of 2001. And what I realized, Glenn, is that the 2001 anthrax attacks opened the door and changed completely the way that we handled dangers not just here in the United States, but all across the world. And our dirty fingers are all over gain of function, research opportunities all over funding people who are going into caves, which no human being ever would be in in the first place, getting covered in bat poop and then getting bitten, going back into a lab and being like, “Hey, we found this one thing and tried to develop a vaccine for it just in case that somebody ever does go into that.” And instead, we now have actually vast and ample amounts of evidence. Not only did COVID leak from the Wuhan lab but actually it looks like Ebola. There is a very good case to say that the Ebola outbreak in the mid-2010s also came from the lab. Then you go back even further. And so really what I became interested in is your reporting specifically around the anthrax attacks, because the more I realized that it all started with anthrax and the fact was that everyone was ignoring me on it, I was like, oh, well, they solved that one, right? No, actually, not at all. The FBI accused the wrong man, the person that they pinned it on. They just blamed it on him with no due process at this point. I think you have to be an idiot to think that Bruce Ivins was the person responsible for the anthrax. I mean, many of the people who were even involved in the investigation would tell you that. And so actually, I was saying I can't believe Glenn has been so right for so long.

When he mentioned his own anthrax episode, Glenn was referring to the previous night's show, where he connected bizarre and incriminating behavior by the U.S. in the 2001 anthrax attacks to what appears to be dangerous biological weapon experimentation by the U.S. ever since, leading up to what appears to be the U.S. misconduct related to the release of COVID in Wuhan. It is a long, detailed, gripping and convincing episode.

[More . . . ]

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