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Biden Policies Could Spell the End of Freelance Contractors, Republicans Say

Republican members of Congress say President Joe Biden’s administration is waging war on independent contractors. Democrats counter that they are trying to ensure workers are not exploited and businesses compete on a level playing field.

Kim Kavin, a freelance writer from New Jersey, said this is not a partisan issue.

“Our members have voted for everybody from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump,” Kavin told the Subcommittee on Workforce Protection of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

“All of us are in agreement on this.”

Kavin is one of five witnesses called before the committee for a hearing entitled “Examining Biden’s War on Independent Contractors.”

The hearing was called because the Biden administration is pushing a policy to deny Americans a fundamental right, according to Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.).

“Today’s hearing is about the right to earn a living. In a free society, few rights are as fundamental,” he said.

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Speak Your Truth: Don’t Let the Government Criminalize Free Speech

“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”—George Washington

What the police state wants is a silent, compliant, oblivious citizenry.

What the First Amendment affirms is an engaged citizenry that speaks truth to power using whatever peaceful means are available to us.

Speaking one’s truth doesn’t have to be the same for each person, and that truth doesn’t have to be palatable or pleasant or even factual.

We can be loud.

We can be obnoxious.

We can be politically incorrect.

We can be conspiratorial or mean or offensive.

We can be all these things because the First Amendment takes a broad, classically liberal approach to the free speech rights of the citizenry: in a nutshell, the government may not encroach or limit the citizenry’s right to freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly and protest.

This is why the First Amendment is so critical.

It gives the citizenry the right to speak freely, protest peacefully, expose government wrongdoing, and criticize the government without fear of retaliation, arrest or incarceration.

Nowhere in the First Amendment does it permit the government to limit speech in order to avoid causing offense, hurting someone’s feelings, safeguarding government secrets, protecting government officials, discouraging bullying, penalizing hateful ideas and actions, eliminating terrorism, combatting prejudice and intolerance, and the like.

When expressive activity crosses the line into violence, free speech protections end.

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Writer Rachel Pollack, who reimagined the practice of tarot, dies at 77

Science fiction and comic book writer Rachel Pollack, who died April 7 at age 77, transformed tarot – from a practice once dismissed as an esoteric parlor trick, into a means of connection that felt personal, political and rooted in community. “We were trying to break the tarot free from what it had been, and open up a whole new way of being,” Pollack said in a 2019 interview with Masters of the Tarot.

Her 1980 book Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom was named for the number of cards in a tarot deck. In it, Pollack explored archetypes that hadn’t been updated much since their creation in the 1400s. Based on rigid gender and class stereotypes, traditional tarot left little space for reinterpretation. Pollack reimagined it through the lens of feminism, and saw it as a path to the divine. She wrote a book exploring Salvador Dali’s tarot and even created a deck of her own called the Shining Tribe tarot.

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Whistleblowers: Trying Hard Not to Adjust to a Sick Society

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti, Asian Indian philosopher

Last weekend, I talked my two grandsons into joining me to watch The Fifth Estate, the new feature film about WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. The movie is being marketed as an “action thriller” and is reportedly having a hard time competing, revenue-wise, with two current blockbuster movies, Gravity and Captain Phillips. (I don’t doubt that fact because, at the end of the Saturday afternoon screening, we were the only ones left in the theater; folks who had been in the audience at the beginning had bailed out, presumably for more mindless, more entertaining fare elsewhere in the multiplex theater.)

For those readers who are not fully aware of what WikiLeaks really is, here is a good definition from a supporter:

WikiLeaks is an international, online, non-profit organisation which publishes information submitted by courageous whistleblowers, people with conscience. Most whistleblowers prefer to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. Google what happened to Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. They are being hounded, hunted, criminalised, ostracized, ex-communicated by the very top people whose secret criminal deals and activities they have exposed.

The final sentence of that quote explains why tremendous courage is necessary to be a whistleblower and why most of us are too frightened to speak out when witnessing injustice. The last phrase summarizes what is a major component of what constitutes “a profoundly sick society”.

I brought my grandsons to see the WikiLeaks film because I thought it was important to expose them to a movie about a historically important movement that was trying to respond to Krishmamurti’s concerns (about the western society he had witnessed in the first half of the 20th century). My busy, “wired-in” grandsons, like most distracted, computer game savvy, over-entertained adolescent students their age, seem to be relatively oblivious to pertinent past history – and even current events. I see the eternal truth of George Santanana’s powerful truism about the mistakes made by sick societies who are historically illiterate: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Whistleblowers, who are all motivated by their consciences, might be our only hope.

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The Man Who Touched an Alien at Brazil’s Roswell – Newly Released Forensic Report Shows a Strange Bacteria Killed Him


On January 20, 1996, the incident that has since become known as ‘Brazil’s Roswell’ began when three young women in Varginha, a major metropolitan city in southeastern Brazil, reported seeing an alien being described as having red eyes, a large head with “spots like veins on the skin” and an unsteady bipedal gait that made them think it was injured or sick. This was followed by more reports of aliens, UFO sightings, military presence, witnesses who allegedly filmed aliens being removed from the area, and one young policeman who claimed to have touched one of the extraterrestrials and was infected with a mysterious disease which soon killed him. Details of his experience and death have remained sketchy at best, but documentary filmmaker James Fox managed to finally get detailed reports from witnesses for his 2022 documentary on the Varginha incident called “Moment of Contact.” Fox returned to Varginha this year and recently announced he has obtained more information from the forensic pathologist who examined the young policeman who allegedly touched an alien. What he found could shed new light on Brazil’s Roswell.

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Leaks Spelling the End for Ukraine

A Washington Post headline last week was a bombshell for someone who has only been reading about the Ukraine war in The Washington Post and other Western media: “U.S. doubts Ukraine counteroffensive will yield big gains, leaked document says.”

The story admits that Western media audiences have been misled about the course of the war, that essentially what mainstream media has been reporting about Ukraine has been a pack of lies: namely that Ukraine is winning the war and is poised to launch an offensive that will lead to a final victory. 

Instead, the second paragraph of the piece makes clear the leaked documents show the long-planned Ukrainian offensive will fail miserably — “a marked departure from the Biden administration’s public statements about the vitality of Ukraine’s military.”  

In other words, U.S. officials have been lying about the state of the war to the public and to reporters who have faithfully reported their every word without a hint of skepticism.

The Post said, as if it’s a bad thing, that the leaks will likely “embolden critics who feel the United States and NATO should do more to push for a negotiated settlement to the conflict.”

That has begun to happen. Writing in the uber-Establishment Foreign Affairs, former State Department official Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, write that “it is difficult to feel sanguine about where the war is headed.”

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FLASHBACK (2013): With Sounds of Praise and Acclamation

In the last month of 2011, the United States Senate voted in approval of the National Defense Authorization Act and President Obama expressed no concern about the law which would strip Americans of their Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights.   “Due Process of Law” and the “right to a speedy a public trial,” two bold facets of the American justice system, would be undermined by the ink from a pen and the clapping hands of American’s representatives.

And for the first time in American history, indefinite detention of any person suspected, without charge or trial, was placed into legal code.  The individual rights of the American against the dangers of tyranny were abolished.

How did the American people react?  They voted for the abolitionists in 2012.

What will become of such a provision?  And if utilized, will the American people leap to their feet in outrage?  That question has been answered.

With swarms of military-grade weaponry and tanks strong enough to attack the armies of the world, tyranny under the guise of security descended upon the American people in Boston.

Asked to come out with their hands over their heads, the citizenry of Boston and surrounding areas were driven out of their homes without warrant and without “necessary and proper cause.”  The people of the so-called “land of the free” were treated as criminals before being proven as such.  It is under the guise of securing the peace that tyranny enters a land.

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Celebrating The 80th Anniversary Of Bicycle Day: A Different Kind Of Trip

Every year, on April 19, an important anniversary rolls around that you may never have heard of. To those in the know, it’s called Bicycle Day, and it commemorates the first-ever intentional LSD trip. 

It all started when a Swiss chemist called Albert Hofmann had a very peculiar time while cycling home from the lab. Hofmann was the first person to synthesize LSD back in 1938. He did it by isolating chemical compounds found in a fungus called ergot, which infects grasses like rye and can have some profound effects on any humans unfortunate enough to accidentally consume it.

It’s safe to say that Hofmann didn’t think much of his discovery to begin with. What we now know as LSD was actually the 25th in a long line of similar compounds that he’d been experimenting with, and Hofmann’s research notes from the time reportedly reveal how no one was particularly enthused by it: “The new substance, however, aroused no special interest in our pharmacologists and physicians; testing was therefore discontinued.”

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