Society

After the House of Representatives decided yesterday that it would be, well, a bit much to leave millions of Israeli civilians at risk of being blown up in their own beds, the 'progressive' wing of the Democrat party was devastated. 'Minutes before the vote closed, Ms Ocasio-Cortez tearfully huddled with her allies,' ran a heartrending report in this morning's New York Times, describing the House’s 420-to-9 decision to approve funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. 'The tableau underscored how wrenching the vote was for even outspoken progressives, who have been caught between their principles and the still powerful pro-Israel voices in their party, such as influential lobbyists and rabbis.

Aspiring hermits Prince Harry and Meghan Markle retreated to the notably reclusive borough of Manhattan today to visit the One World Observatory and the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The not-so-royal couple were accompanied by Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York and Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City. But neither New York politician saw fit to don a face mask outside — nor did they ask their esteemed guests to. Instead, Hochul, de Blasio, his wife Chirlane McCray and their son Dante, bared their faces and posed up close for photos with the Sussexes in front of the gathered crowd. https://twitter.

Does humanity deserve a prolonged existence on Earth? Cockburn begs the question after learning that tonight is Climate Night on America’s late-night ‘light entertainment’ programs. ‘7 Shows. 1 Planet. Hot Enough For You?’, asks the poster, which depicts TBS’s Samantha Bee brandishing a whiteboard, Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah, CBS’s Stephen Colbert and James Corden posing with globes, NBC’s Seth Meyers holding a pot plant…and stock images of his network mate Jimmy Fallon and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, who presumably care about the climate a little, but not enough to actually strike a pose for it. https://twitter.

The biggest shock amid the COVID-19 pandemic has been the discovery that the virus may have been released during an illegal collaboration on so-called 'gain-of-function' research between the US nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Recently revealed National Institutes of Health (NIH) documents show that American taxpayers directly subsidized this joint effort, despite a federal government ban on any experiment that might give pathogens the ability to leap species. Even worse was that EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak tried to shut down any debate on whether the coronavirus had been leaked from a lab by getting 27 prominent scientists to endorse a March 2020 letter to the medical journal the Lancet.

We recently left the country for the first time since the pandemic began. I could say that we’d always wanted to go to Iceland, but the truth is, we’d wanted to go to Iceland ever since we heard how sanely they handle visitors. Even at the height of the pandemic in 2020, they didn’t require COVID tests for children. They still don’t. Iceland is the world’s most vaccinated nation, with 86 percent of the country having gotten the jab. A recent ‘spike’ (they peaked at 170 cases per day in mid-August) led to an indoor mask mandate, but it doesn’t apply to kids. The mandate is also very loosely enforced. There are no Karens shrieking at people to mask up in shops, and I saw many unmasked Icelanders indoors.

I want to prepare you for something right off the bat — nothing is going to happen to Anthony Fauci. He’s not going to prison. He’s not going to be brought up on perjury charges. He’s going to be allowed to retire quietly from his post, with presidential honors, and slip into a cast member role on Dancing with the Stars, although The Masked Singer seems more appropriate. Now that we’ve settled this and tempered any expectations a pitchforked mob might have, let's examine the latest bombshell reporting from the Intercept.

The first time I heard about ivermectin was from my doctor early on in the Era of COVID-hysteria. The United States still had a functioning president, we had yet to arm the Taliban or give them lists of Americans and Afghan 'allies' they might want to execute, and a vaccine against the worst scourge since the Black Death was, if the experts were to be believed, years, maybe decades away. Of course, the experts weren’t to be believed. Donald Trump’s Manhattan Project approach to getting a vaccine developed in record time bore fruit. Pfizer had the first vaccine ready to go before the 2020 election, but selflessly waited until just after the election to make the announcement.

America is a porned-out society. Half of young men and a fifth of young women admit to viewing porn in the past week (millions more do so and then lie to pollsters about it). Prestige cable shows such as Game of Thrones built their popularity through a bevy of brazenly-displayed breasts. The best-selling book of the 2010s was an erotic BDSM novel; the second and third-place spots were taken by its sequels. And the concept of a quick, dirty, cheap high extends outside the domain of sex, which is why the world has food porn, architecture porn, and military porn. And now, enter a new genre: COVID-19 death porn. On Saturday, the Daytona Beach News-Journal noted the death of radio host Marc Bernier after a three-week battle with COVID.

What do you do when a health crisis gets politicized beyond reason? You send in a bunch of hyper-partisan agencies to investigate, of course! For months, anyone who doubted that the coronavirus originated from a wet market in Wuhan was labeled a fringe, tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist. The 'serious people' in our media, as Jonathan Karl labeled them, mocked the likes of former president Donald Trump, Sen. Tom Cotton and Sen. Rand Paul for even broaching the subject. However, towards the end of Trump’s administration, classified information revealed that in November 2019, three workers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology went to a hospital due to flu-like symptoms. The press would have been totally fine ignoring this inconvenient information.

'Families marching five by five Hurrah! Hurrah! Families marching five by five Hurrah! Hurrah! Some people choose their family And they love each other so proudly And they all go marching in The Big Parade!' In June, the Journal of Medical Ethics spelled out what it means in practice to teach children that family bonds are optional. If the world is to ‘take LGBT testimony seriously,’ argued Maura Priest, a bioethicist at the Arizona State University, then ‘parents should lose veto power over most transition-related pediatric care’. In many states, this is already well-established. In 2015, Oregon passed a law giving minors the right to receive transgender medical interventions at taxpayers’ expense, and without their parents’ consent.

Well, Donald Trump doesn’t seem so bad now, does he? I don’t say that because Joe Biden has turned out to be as competent or less, but because at his press conference in reaction to the fall of Kabul, he sounded Trumpian. By which I mean, honest. Honest that staying in Afghanistan so long was a mistake, that their government was corrupt, that if its army wasn't prepared to defend itself then we shouldn't do it for them, and that this is what a withdrawal looks like: horribly, brutally honest. The endgame was a disaster because America’s intel was wrong, so the US had less time to get out than it thought, and because Biden lacks the acuity to respond to changing conditions. Biden looks like Brezhnev after heart-attack number seven.

After months of uncertainty, the Centers for Disease Control shifted its policy this week to fully recommend that pregnant and breastfeeding women get vaccinated against COVID-19. The announcement marked a significant shift for expecting mothers, many of whom have struggled to weigh the risks and benefits of taking an experimental vaccine while growing a baby inside. Yet, in announcing the new guidance, the CDC carefully called pregnant and breastfeeding women ‘people’, implying that men, too, can give birth and produce breast milk. You could dismiss this as a harmless bit of inclusion, meant not to offend the trans men (born female-bodied) who are pregnant and breastfeeding.

How many headlines have you seen about climate and environmental racism? So many you think of it as a real problem? Now, how many articles have you actually read about climate racism? If you’ve read one, just one, then you already know it doesn’t exist. Once you get past the fear-mongering click bait and the SEO-friendly headlines, almost all reportage of climate racism dances around the real issue: wealth inequality. Journalists are quick to note that poverty perpetuates climatological and environmental issues against inner-city working-class Americans, many of whom are non-white, but no less American. They don't seem quite so bothered about rural Americans with cancers and lung disease caused by pesticides and pollutants, almost all of whom are Caucasian.

Pop sensation and slave-4-her-father Britney Spears sent papists into a frenzy on Thursday night by mentioning her Catholic faith to her nearly 33 million Instagram followers in a photo caption. 'I just got back from mass...I’m Catholic now...let us pray,' the 39-year-old star wrote. 'huge draft get,' tweeted the Atlantic's Elizabeth Bruenig. Cockburn thinks the signs have been there all along. Not only did Britney grow up in Louisiana, where Catholicism is far more widespread than elsewhere in the South due to its former status as a French colony, she's been dropping subtle hints in her art. Take the music video for her breakout single '...Baby One More Time'. How different the schoolgirl chic she adopted looks in the light of her newly announced faith.

A top editor at the New York Times instructed Times staffers not to investigate the origins of COVID-19, two Times employees confirmed today. ‘In early 2020,’ a veteran Times employee tells me, ‘I suggested to a senior editor at the paper that we investigate the origins of COVID-19. I was told it was dangerous to run a piece about the origins of the coronavirus. There was resistance to running anything that could suggest that [COVID-19 was manmade or had leaked accidentally from a lab].' The global pandemic was then in its early stages. Donald Trump was running for reelection and calling SARS-CoV-2 the ‘Chinese virus’.

The Biden administration is desperate for some fresh ideas as they attempt to convince more Americans to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Between White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Rochelle Walensky, we are constantly hearing about the White House’s latest creative ways to encourage people to get vaccinated. The administration seems eager to push the notion that all of the vaccine holdouts are Trump supporters. Unfortunately for them, recent studies suggest otherwise.