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David Stockman On The Parallels Between The COVID Hysteria And The Salem Witch Trials
It would not be going too far to say that the eruption of irrationality and hysteria in America during the COVID-19 period of 2020-2021 most resembled not 1954, when Senator McCarthy set the nation looking for communist moles behind every government desk, or 1919, when the notorious raids of Attorney General Mitchell were rounding up purported Reds in their tens of thousands, but the winter of 1691-1692. That’s when two little girls—Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams of Salem, Massachusetts—fell into the demonic activity of fortune-telling, which soon found them getting strangely ill, having fits, spouting gibberish, and contorting their bodies into odd positions.
The rest became history, of course, when a malpracticing local doctor claimed to have found no physical cause for the girls’ problems and diagnosed them as being afflicted by the “Evil Hand,” commonly known as witchcraft. Other ministers were consulted, who agreed that the only cause could be witchcraft and since the sufferers were believed to be the victims of a dastardly crime, the community set out to find the perpetrators.
Within no time, three witches who were famously accused —the Parris’ slave, Sarah Good, an impoverished homeless woman and Sarah Osborne, who had defied conventional Puritan society. Many more followed, and as the hysteria spread, hundreds were tried for witchcraft and two dozen hanged.
But there is a lesson in this classic tale that is embarrassing in its verisimilitude. Namely, one of the best academic explanations for the outbreak of seizures and convulsions which fueled the Salem hysteria was a disease called “convulsive ergotism”, which is brought on by ingesting rye grain infected with a fungus that can invade developing kernels of the grain, especially under warm and damp conditions.
During the rye harvest in Salem in 1691 these conditions existed at a time when one of the Puritans’ main diet staples was cereal and breads made of the harvested rye. Convulsive ergotism causes violent fits, a crawling sensation on the skin, vomiting, choking, and, hallucinations—meaning that it was Mother Nature in the ordinary course working her episodically unwelcome tricks, not the “Evil Hand” of a spiritual pathogen, which imperiled the community.
Prince Andrew sex abuse accuser Virginia Giuffre will be freed from gagging clause which banned her from speaking publicly about the Duke – one year after he paid out £12m in bid to draw line under scandal
Prince Andrew‘s sex abuse accuser Virginia Giuffre could return to the public eye next month as her gagging clause is lifted.
Ms Giuffre, who now lives in Australia, had alleged that she was forced to have sex with the Duke three times when she was 17 under the orders of the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
She launched her legal action against Andrew in August 2021, seeking unspecified damages for battery, including rape, and the infliction of emotional distress.
It was settled outside of court on February 15, 2022, for a reported £12 million, with £2 million thought to have been donated to her sex trafficking charity. The Duke did not admit wrongdoing and has consistently and vehemently denied the claims.
As part of the settlement last year the Duke of York and Ms Giuffre signed a one-year agreement that meant neither party could discuss the case or financial settlement made.
With this clause lifting within weeks, Ms Giuffre, who is married with children, will likely be free to talk about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse.
This could include writing a book, or conducting printed or televised interviews with the media or writing a book.
The Duke settled the case with Ms Giuffre ahead of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee last year, after having been stripped of all military titles and patronages and ordered by Buckingham Palace not to use his HRH title in January. The Palace also ruled out a return to public duties.
US Virgin Islands AG is FIRED just days after she sued JPMorgan Chase – accusing the bank of ‘pulling the levers’ in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes and ‘turning a blind eye’ as he abused minors at his villa
The attorney general of the US Virgin Islands has been fired by the territory’s governor just days after filing a lawsuit accusing JPMorgan Chase of ‘turning a blind eye’ to Jeffrey Epstein‘s prolific sex crimes.
USVI Governor Albert Bryan Jr confirmed in a statement on Sunday that he had ‘relieved Denise George of her duties as attorney general this weekend’ without offering further details.
George, who had served as the territory’s attorney general for four years, on Tuesday filed a massive lawsuit against JPMorgan, accusing the bank of ‘knowingly providing and pulling the levers through which [Epstein’s] recruiters and victims were paid.’
She did not warn Bryan of her intent to file the lawsuit, and the incident was the final straw in the governor’s increasingly frustrated relationship with her, the Virgin Islands Consortium reported, citing a source familiar with the matter.
Pandemic of the Vaccinated: Wall Street Journal Provides Troubling Data Suggesting COVID Vaccines ‘May be’ Causing COVID Variants to Evolve
Another conspiracy theory turned true.
The Gateway Pundit has been reporting for years that these experimental vaccines are not safe and effective. Now, controlled corporate media finally starting to ask real questions about these shots.
A recent article published in the Wall Street Journal suggested that the Covid outbreak heavily affected most vaccinated people. More and more research points to the possibility that repeated vaccinations make people more vulnerable to XBB and contribute to the rapid evolution of the virus.
It can be recalled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced it is monitoring a new COVID-19 variant known as “XBB,” which is responsible for all new infections in the United States.
Twitter Files Reveal Politicians, Officials Evading the Constitution’s Restrictions
In recent years, social media firms, financial institutions, and hosting platforms have denied services to disfavored customers, sometimes for political reasons. The response from many quarters (myself included) has been that people have free association rights and can generally do business as they please.
But what if these outfits are private-ish, enacting policy on behalf of politicians to spare them pushback or allow for end-runs around constitutional protections? They do so out of ideological agreement, fear of government retaliation, or a mix of both. That messy scenario is what the Twitter Files reveal of the relationship between the social media giant and federal officials. It’s a glimpse of a bigger problem.
“The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about COVID-19 and the pandemic,” wrote David Zweig of The Free Press, who joined Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Free Press founder Bari Weiss in revealing Twitter’s collaboration with the state at the request of new owner Elon Musk. “Internal emails that I viewed at Twitter showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s content according to their wishes.”
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security also leaned on the platform to suppress what officials considered election-related “misinformation.” The files revealed internal disputes over what crossed the line, with decisions based on judgment calls. The employment of former feds and what The Dispatch‘s David French terms “an ideological monoculture” ensured that such decisions generally deferred to authority, especially after the Biden administration took office.
But Twitter isn’t a special case. In 2021, President Joe Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” by allowing discussion of government-disfavored ideas about COVID-19 response. “White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki singled out a dozen specific anti-vaccine Facebook accounts and called on the platform to ban them,” Reason‘s Robby Soave noted at the time.
Large Trucks and Buses Made Before 2010 Now Banned From California Roadways
Big rigs and buses made before 2010 are now banned from operating on California roadways.
The law, which went into effect on New Year’s Day, was part of a set of clean air regulations the California Air Resources Board passed nearly 15 years ago.
According to truck lobbying groups, the new law will prohibit about 10 percent of the commercial motor vehicles that are operating in the state.
“The rule applies to diesel vehicles that weigh at least 14,000 pounds. The air resources board said there are an estimated 200,000 vehicles that have yet to comply with the rule just days before the new year, including roughly 70,000 big rig trucks, or about 10% of the commercial motor vehicles operating in the state, according to trucking lobbying groups,” KCRA reports.
Western Governments Keep Assigning Themselves The Authority To Regulate Online Speech
Depending on what political echo chamber you’ve been viewing it from, the ongoing release of information about the inner workings of pre-Musk Twitter known as “the Twitter Files” might look like the bombshell news story of the century, or it might look like a complete nothingburger whose importance is being wildly exaggerated by the far right.
From where I’m sitting, the Twitter Files look like entirely newsworthy revelations which add new detail to information that had already been spilling out about the way government agencies have been inserting themselves into Silicon Valley’s processes of regulating online speech. Right wing punditry has of course been exaggerating the significance of the releases and spinning them in all kinds of disingenuous ways, and Musk himself plainly has a partisan agenda in releasing the information in the way that he has been, but it’s not actually difficult to separate that from the value of the information being released.
Many liberals and leftists have struggled to grasp this (in my view simple and obvious) distinction, but we’re now seeing articles coming out in publications like The Guardian and Jacobin explaining to their respective audiences that it should actually concern anyone who opposes government tyranny to see secretive agencies taking it upon themselves to control the way people talk to each other on the internet.
“Make no mistake: while some criticisms of the project coming from left of center certainly have merit, that doesn’t mean the disclosures aren’t important, or that the accuracy of the information contained in the files is somehow undermined by the political slant of some of those reporting on it,” writes Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic. “The Twitter Files give us an unprecedented peek behind the curtain at the workings of Twitter’s opaque censorship regime, and expose in greater detail the secret and ongoing merger of social media companies and the US national security state.”
China could claim the moon as its own territory and BAN US astronauts from touching down, NASA boss warns – as the two countries battle in new space race to land on the lunar surface again
A chief at NASA is raising red flags over China’s ambitions to get to the moon.
In a new interview, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson says he and others within the scientific agency are growing increasingly concerned over what the country plans to do when they make it to the moon.
Nelson believes China could attempt to corner the market on resource-rich locations on the moon’s surface and try to block out the U.S. and other countries looking to make it to the lunar object.
‘There is potentially mischief China can do on the moon,’ said one other official monitoring the ‘space race.’
The concerns come less than one month after three Chinese astronauts returned from a six month trip in which they helped to build and open a new space station.
In an interview with Politico, Nelson said he and others are concerned the Communist nation will attempt to claim territory over the moon upon their arrival.
The hypocrisy of ‘those braying the loudest about misinformation’
We live in a time when U.S. politics is not only hyper-partisan, but toxic. Party activists on both sides of the divide assign a higher value to slurring those on the other side – and covering up for those on their side – than to telling the unvarnished truth.
In this hothouse environment, some well-meaning people assert that misinformation and “disinformation” threaten the very pillars of self-government.
The most obvious and immediate problem with this approach is hypocrisy: Many of those braying the loudest about misinformation have made wildly untrue assertions and statements themselves. The long-term problem is that freedom is and always will be utterly incompatible with a society in which the government or private media monopolies control the right of people to speak or write or broadcast without being censored.
In the waning days of December 1793, Thomas Paine was arrested in Paris. This was the height of the “Reign of Terror,” and the result of being detained on political charges, as Paine was, usually meant the guillotine. Paine certainly thought that was to be his fate.
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