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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Philosophy and History of Science in the Age of COVID – Part II Science vs Pseudo-Science. Jack Kerwick

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/philosophy-and-history-science-age-covid-part-ii-jack-kerwick/

“In this house, we believe in…science.” 

“The science is settled.” 

“Science says….” 

As I began demonstrating in a previous essay, anyone who espouses such clichés is scientifically illiterate. Science is not some ahistorical abstraction embodying the proverbial God’s eye view of the cosmos. It has a particularly colorful past extending back centuries, a history replete with all of the nit and grit, all of the contingencies and relativities, characteristic of all cultural phenomena. And the history of science includes, of course, rival philosophies of science. 

It was also mentioned that the 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant revolutionized Western philosophy when he argued that it is not, as had always been assumed, the mind that passively and impartially mirrors the world. Rather, it is the world that is made to comport with the mind. The only world that human beings can meaningfully speak of is the world that has been constructed in terms of the mind’s own internal structures. These structures are comprised of the “pure intuitions” of space and time and a dozen “categories,” including the categories of “causality” and what philosophers have traditionally called “substance.” 

Space, time, universal causation, and the existence of entities that endure over time are not necessarily objective features of the universe to be discovered by scientific inquiry but, quite the contrary, the very pre-conditions of all inquiry. They are features of the human mind supplied in advance of all experience and in the absence of which we can experience nothing. 

Kant was provoked to develop his “Copernican revolution” after he was awakened by his “dogmatic slumbers” by his predecessor, David Hume. To Kant’s legacy we will return. Not everyone, it is critical to note here, was persuaded by him to abandon Hume. 

The American Medical Association Falls to CRT By S.R. Piccoli

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/the_american_medical_association_falls_to_crt.html

Cultural Marxism has found its way into the medical profession.
“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” This well-known quote is a liberal translation of Antonio Gramsci popularized by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, which renders “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” as “Now is the time of monsters.” Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist leader and theoretician who is considered the forefather of Critical Race Theory, had probably no idea that, a century later, such an accurate insight into his time would prove to be incredibly prophetic of our own here and now. Today the monsters — or morbid symptoms — are among us as neighbors, colleagues, and friends accept and embrace the Critical Race Theory and its ramifications in the many fields of human life and scientific research.

One of these fields — perhaps the most unthinkable — is that of medical science and practice. Things have meaningfully changed since on June 25, 2021, White Coats for Black Lives (WC4BL), a national organization led by medical students, published its statement of “vision and values.” The organization, which boasts 75 chapters at medical schools across the country and was called to action by the Black Lives Matter movement, “aims to dismantle racism in medicine and fight for the health of Black people and other people of color […]. Our job is two-fold: 1) dismantling dominant, exploitative systems in the United States, which are largely reliant on anti-Black racism, colonialism, cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism; and 2) rebuilding a future that supports the health and well-being of marginalized communities.” WC4BL also focuses on “dismantling fatphobia,” embracing “Black queer feminist praxis (theory and practice),” “unlearning toxic medical knowledge and relearning medical care that centers the needs of Black people and communities.”

Kamala Harris is now officially a joke By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/kamala_harris_is_now_officially_a_joke.html

There is no way to recover national political standing once a politician becomes a popular butt of humor, a punchline in a degrading joke. Ask Dan Quayle, who has disappeared from the scene so completely that nobody has even gotten him on the record about the vice presidency of Kamala Harris. My guess is that he is enjoying bitter laughter.

Last Thursday’s interview with Craig Melvin of Democrat-friendly NBC sealed her fate. The Zen koan-like statement, “It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day,” closes the case, a brilliantly meaningless platitude that seems to demand meditation, as if there must be some enlightenment lurking in the vast mental emptiness.

But of course, there isn’t. More and more people are reluctantly coming to the conclusion that the woman who is a heartbeat away from the presidency, whose incumbent is elderly and afflicted by dementia, is a dummy. I resisted that conclusion in part because, after all, she was elected California’s attorney general and senator and she is the daughter of two professors, but mostly out of fear for our nation. But as her ex-staffers multiply in number, reports are proliferating of those who know her up close privately saying that, yeah, she is that stupid.

The sole plausible explanation for her rise is disgraceful. When she was younger and prettier, she had a sexual relationship with a powerful married man decades older than she, and thanks to his influence in a corrupt one-party state whose media would never question a Democrat politician on the rise, she had high political office handed to her, ratified by voters dutifully accepting party dictates.

This, too, is utterly mockable, and now that the dam is breaking, will be mentioned more often as she becomes an embarrassment to the party.

Youngkin signs executive orders banning critical race theory and mask mandates on first day as governor

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/patriotism-unity/youngkin-signs-executive-orders-banning-critical-race-theory-and-mask-mandates-on-first-day-as-governor

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin started his term with a slew of executive orders Saturday to address key campaign issues.

After being sworn in as the 74th governor of Virginia, Youngkin signed 11 executive orders, a handful of which were aimed at allowing parents to exert control over their children’s education by ordering schools to stop teaching critical race theory and implementing mask mandates in public schools.

“Parents should have a say in what is taught in school because, in Virginia, parents have a fundamental right to make decisions with regards to their child’s upbringing, education, and care,” Youngkin said in his inauguration speech Saturday. “To parents, I say we respect you. And we will empower you in the education of your children.”

Youngkin, who made education a focal point of his campaign, also issued an executive order directing officials to “investigate wrongdoing in Loudoun County.” This alluded to the scandal in which the school board was accused of covering up or failing to address multiple sexual assault allegations, one of which resulted in the conviction of a male student who identified as gender fluid.

Vaccine Aristocrats Strike Again As yokel-bashing reaches impressive new heights, reports of yet another year of record profits and a widening wealth gap go unnoticed Matt Taibbi

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/vaccine-aristocrats-strike-again

Jimmy Kimmel Live, fast becoming Leonid Brezhnev’s never-realized dream of a Soviet Tonight Show, just put out a high-effort gag called “Anti-Vax Barbie.” It’s impressively on-message:

The skit begins with jazzy VO: “There’s a new doll in town and the fun is contagious. It’s Anti-Vax Barbie! She’s STRONG. She’s INDEPENDENT. She doesn’t trust SCIENCE!”

In a shirt reading, I CALL MY OWN SHOTS, Barbie drawls, “Bill Gates is the Antichrist!” The doll even “comes with a computer so she can do her own research!” (We see Barbie typing and twanging, “Sez here Moderna turns yer teeth Jewish!”). When you take Anti-Vax Barbie shopping, she attacks the cashier who demands she wear a mask, while another Barbie in a shirt reading PFIZER TELLS LIEZERS films the besieged worker and yells, “I’m reporting you, bitch, you’re going to jail!”

You can also take Barbie “to the stables,” where she’ll chug ivermectin! Moreover, the only “man-date” this Barbie cares about is “with her proud boyfriend Ken,” who wears a “Let’s Go Brandon” tee and can’t hear his Barbie-pal — the one dressed in JOHNSON AND JOHNSON IS SATAN AND SATAN shirt — because he’s listening to Alex Jones tell him the truth about monoclonal antibodies. The kicker is a hoot:

Exclusively sold in Florida and Kentucky! Barbie dream ventilator sold separately!

Mocking the hayseeds is always fun, but what a bonus, when you can jack off some of TV’s biggest advertisers at the same time!

HIDING THE BODIES: DIANA WEST

https://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/4413/Hiding-the-Bodies.aspx

Thank you, Art Moore of World Net Daily, for reporting on the tag-team treachery of Fauci and Walensky after a US Senator finally, if inadequately, confronted them both with the VAERS covid “vaccine” body count in “Fauci, Walensky dodge when asked about number of vaccine deaths.”

Before I discuss the substance of Moore’s story, I’d like to point out why it is likely to remain a news media exclusive forever: The lethality of the covid “vaccine” is the last thing media and political and money elites want us “useless eaters” to understand. The mantra they have pressed on us is “safe and effective,” which I think of as the new “Sieg Heil.” We’re supposed to repeat after them, while sucking on the same old puff-blah, “Fauci, Walensky testify while omicron prompts many possible changes” (Associated Press); or the same old melodrama, “Criticized by Senators, U.S. Health Officials Defend Omicron Response” (NYT); or, worst of all, the “battle” of Fauci vs. Paul, those fake gladiators in the arena fighting over nothing. (I’ll get back to that.) Among others, CNBC pushed the latter (“Fauci says Sen. Rand Paul’s false accusations ‘kindles the crazies’ and have incited death threats”), as did Fox, only the other way around (“Rand Paul rips Fauci following latest hearing fireworks: He doesn’t want debate because he ‘is science’).

Whatever Fauci and Rand Paul lob at each other in these recurring “showdowns,” their dispute over virus research in Wuhan has nothing, zip, nada, to do with the agony of our nation. We are not dying over the origins of a virus which may not exist, or even over the virus itself (plus “variants”) with its 99+ percent survival rate, and whose average age of death approximates the average age of death.

We are dying from the tyrannical “cure”: each and every act of oppression imposed on us by our very own governments and institutions, all in the name of a fake plague called “covid.” From “flattening the curve (15 days), to “lockdowns” forever, to “social distancing” and other totalitarian measures including incessant “testing” (with a fake test), we find ourselves not on the road to something they mockingly call “public health,” but rather to a state of perpetual fear, vaxx apartheid, “green passes,” concentration camps (happening), digital currency (to come), a vaxx-caused die-off and overall sickening of the world’s peoples, and, I am increasingly persuaded, the goal of ending the human species itself in gene-engineered and nano-wired “transhumanism.”

The little president who cried racism Biden hides in the last refuge of today’s scoundrels : Charles Lipson

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/little-president-falsely-cried-racism-biden-atlanta/

President Biden’s wisdom and penetrating intelligence sometimes escape him. So far, they have stayed away for fifty years and show no signs of returning. They are often accompanied by wild exaggerations, invented personal stories and hyperbolic attacks on opponents.

Examples are not hard to find, and the public is catching on. The latest fulmination came during a campaign-style rally in Atlanta on Tuesday, aimed at supporting his bill to nationalize election laws. Since that bill contravenes America’s long, constitutionally enshrined tradition that state legislatures control voting rules (as long as they don’t violate individual civil rights), the bill will fail in the Senate, blocked by the filibuster.

Biden, once a man of the Senate, has long supported the filibuster. That’s now changed. In the Atlanta speech, he urged the Senate to junk it. Other Democratic senators, who strongly supported the filibuster when they were in the minority, have flip-flopped, too. New York’s Chuck Schumer once told the Senate that eliminating the filibuster would turn the United States into a “banana republic.” Now, he wears a Chiquita sticker on his lapel.

Despite Biden and Schumer’s efforts, the filibuster will remain. What prevents a change? The votes of all fifty Republicans plus two Democrats: Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. The other Democrats have attacked them without mercy.

Position Vacant: An Antipodean DeSantis Peter Smith

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/public-health/2022/01/position-vacant-an-antipodean-desantis/

When deaths have to be up-played. Whenever Trump can be blamed. Otherwise, here’s the latest from CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky: “The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75 percent, occurred in people who had at least four co-morbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with.”

We’ve recently learnt that half of those in hospital recorded as COVID patients have in fact entered hospital for other reasons. They were routinely tested and found to have the virus. It’s likely deaths, too, have been overstated and, to boot in Australia, have been offset by the drop in deaths from influenza-cum-pneumonia (IP).

To the end October, the latest figures available, deaths from IP were 1,816 in 2021, 1,877 in 2020 compared with an average of 2908 across 2015-19. The difference adds up to about the number of registered COVID deaths to the end October 2021. With a median age of death at around 85 years, it’s true to say that when you get to that age all bets are off.

Let’s not beat around the bush. This has been the greatest overreaction since the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were shot. Now healthy five-year-olds, with zero chance of succumbing to the virus, are being lined up to be injected with an mRNA vaccine, the long-term effects of which are unknown. With such abandonment of responsibility, conscience, decency and common sense, why think this will be over by Christmas? Middle Ages, Modern Ages, CVOID Ages.

Annastacia Palaszczuk’s keeping kids from school for two weeks to give them a better chance of getting the shot, before risking their lives in the classroom. Idiocy, yes. But she’s not as stupid as she acts. There’s a rat cunning at work among the elite and the political class. First, this week’s small example; second, last week’s.

Dominic Perrottet, what a disappointment (see below), says at a press conference on Monday that “over half” the patients in intensive care in NSW are unvaccinated. Half an hour or so later Scott Morrison says that Perrottet said that the patients in intensive care were “predominantly” unvaccinated. Is this an example of the noble lie that Ron DeSantis has rightly rejected in Florida? Or it is simply that today’s callow, ill-educated speech writers no longer have a facility with words?

Joe Biden: Deep State Puppet Will the country be able to survive three more years of a deep state conspiracy presided over by an angry, incompetent, and increasingly senile puppet? By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/15/joe-biden-deep-state-puppet/

I almost feel sorry for Joe Biden. 

The emphasis, I hasten to add, is on the adverb. Perhaps, if he didn’t make me feel thoroughly sorry for the United States of America, my sympathy for him would be unalloyed. But even many in Biden’s own party are aghast at his performance as president. 

It’s almost a matter of smell, of that sixth sense that alerts sensitive souls to impending disaster. Animals somehow know when an earthquake is coming, even before the ground begins to tremble. The far-left activist Stacey Abrams is well endowed with those antennae, which is why she invented “scheduling issues” and gave the president’s speech in Atlanta a miss last week. The aroma of events like that have a way of clinging to someone, and Abrams had the good sense to know that Joe Biden on “voting rights” and the run-up to Martin Luther King Day was likely to be a redolent affair. 

In the event, it was much worse than she, or anyone else for that matter, could have foreseen. Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff called it the “the worst presidential speech in modern history.” But Paul is a generous man. There was really no need for that qualifying “modern.” Paul mentions Jimmy Carter’s disastrous “malaise speech” of 1979 as a contender for the palm. That speech was indeed horrible. It was one of the things that lost Carter the election the next year. But Biden’s speech was far worse. Carter’s speech was a bizarre combination of cramped, hectoring moralism, much of it lifted from Christopher Lasch, and a repellent, cardigan-clad sentimentality and faux folksiness. 

Carter’s speech, however, was not mendacious. It was simply wrong. Biden’s, on the contrary, was a veritable tissue of incontinent hyperbole, partisan posturing, and outright lies. Even Dick Durbin, Democratic lapdog though he is, acknowledged that Biden “went a little too far in his rhetoric.” You think so, Dick?

Forget about Biden’s description of the January 6 protest at the Capitol as “an attempted coup . . . against the legally expressed will of the American people.” That was insane, granted, but what will be remembered is his over-the-top, shark-jumping hyperbole “I ask every elected official in America,” Biden said in one of the most cringe-making moments of the speech, “How do you want to be remembered? Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?” Oh, dear. It took about 15 seconds for House Republicans to produce a newspaper clipping in which Biden bragged about being praised by George Wallace. That was back when then-Senator Biden was a proud segregationist. 

Mitch McConnell was waiting offstage with the ax: “He shouted that if you disagree with him, you’re George Wallace,” McConnell said. “If you don’t pass the laws he wants, you’re Bull Connor, and if you oppose giving Democrats untrammeled, one-party control of the country, well, you’re Jefferson Davis.” 

The Biden administration’s bizarre response to the Texas hostage crisis By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/the_biden_administrations_bizarre_response_to_the_texas_hostage_crisis.html

On Saturday afternoon, a man claiming to be the brother of the Pakistani terrorist Aafia Siddiqui (aka “Lady al Qaeda”) stormed a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, and took four people hostage. The resulting standoff lasted for several hours before all four hostages escaped or were freed and the hostage-taker killed. During the event, the Biden administration once again showed itself to be completely tone-deaf, issuing a bizarre, clinical tweet that didn’t even mention that the entire event revolved around al Qaeda-related genocidal antisemitism.

Congregation Beth Israel was almost empty on Saturday because it was live-streaming its Sabbath services. Because of that live-streaming, everyone heard an Islamist enter the synagogue shortly after 10:00 a.m. and take hostage the four people who were there, including the rabbi. He insisted that the government release Siddiqui, a fanatic al Qaeda supporter who was imprisoned in Texas for 86 years after she shot at U.S. service members and was found to have actively plotted mass-casualty al Qaeda attacks.

In the early evening, one hostage was released. Then, shortly before 10 p.m., the 12-hour-long nightmare ended with a frightening denouement. Cameras caught two of the hostages racing out of the building as the terrorist followed them out, aiming his gun at them before he retreated into the building. Soon after, a SWAT team stormed the building, killing the Islamist and freeing the remaining hostage: