Tag: news

OSHA Employer Vaccination Mandate is Narrower than Earlier White House Announcement – But Still has Legal Vulnerabilities


USAvaccineDreamstime

Earlier today, the the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) belatedly issued its Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) requiring COVID-19 testing or vaccination combined with masking in private workplaces controlled by employers with 100 or more employees. As Jonathan Adler explains in his post on the new rule, it has a number of limitations that fix some of the potential legal vulnerabilities of the even broader policy envisioned by the initial White House statement on this policy. Among other things, employees who work remotely or outside are now exempt from the policy. There are also exemptions for employees with relevant disabilities and those with religious objections  that entitle them to “reasonable” accommodations under federal law.

Nonetheless, the mandate remains legally dubious. Jonathan Adler outlines some of the reasons why, and Reason’s Jacob Sullum surveys some others.

Several of the points I made in my post on the initial White House announcement also still apply to the OSHA rule issued today, particularly the following:

The ETS provision allows OSHA to impose regulations without going through the normal “notice and comment” process, and other procedural requirements. For that reason…. courts have subjected previous ETS policies to nondeferential judicial review, and have often struck them down. ETS has only been used nine times before, and in five of those instances (of the six that got litigated at all), courts have struck down at least part of the resulting policy. None of the previous uses of ETS were anywhere near as sweeping as this one.

It’s not hard to see how the present ETS may be vulnerable. A virus, like that at the root of the present pandemic, arguably doesn’t qualify as a “substance or agent.” These terms generally refer to chemicals, liquids or man-made dangers, not living things.

Perhaps it counts as a “new hazard.” But it’s not clear that, in this context, the term “hazard” includes all dangers of any kind, or is limited by the previously listed terms (“substances or agents”).  Perhaps a “new hazard” is simply a dangerous substance or agent that is novel, as opposed to one that, as the statute puts it, has already been “determined to be toxic or physically harmful.” In addition, 19 months into the pandemic, it’s not easy to claim that Covid is a “new” hazard, at all….

Finally, does Covid really pose a “grave danger” to employees when the vast majority of them can easily minimize it by getting vaccinated voluntarily, thereby almost completely eliminating the risk of serious illness and death? If “grave danger” exists even in cases where it is easily avoidable, OSHA would have near-boundless authority to issue ETS regulations on almost any workplace practice.

Virtually any workplace activity poses grave dangers to at least some people, if none of the latter can be expected to take even minimal precautions on their own….

[I]f the administration prevails on this issue, it would set a dangerous precedent, and undermine the constitutional separation of powers. In order to uphold this ETS requirement, courts would have to rule that the statute authorizes OSHA to issue emergency regulations for dangers that 1) are not limited to chemical “substances or agents,” 2) are not really all that “new” and 3) can easily be greatly mitigated by the people the agency seeks to protect.

In combination, these conclusions would allow OSHA to restrict or ban almost any workplace practice. And they could do it without having to go through the notice and comment process, or other procedural constraints that normally apply to major regulations.

As I indicated in my earlier post, I share much of the administration’s frustration with anti-vaxxers, and I am far more sympathetic to vaccination mandates than to virtually any other pandemic-era regulations, such as lockdowns, migration restrictions, and mask mandates. Compared to these other policies, vaccine mandates are both far more effective in promoting public health, and far lesser restrictions on liberty.

But even a potentially beneficial policy should still be undertaken in ways that don’t go beyond the limits of executive authority and threaten to set a dangerous precedent. Even if you trust the Biden administration with such enormous power, you should consider whether you will have equal confidence in the next president, who could well be a Republican (perhaps even the second coming of Donald Trump).

I honestly don’t know which way courts will go on this issue. Perhaps they will be inclined to defer to OSHA’s expertise, unwilling to interfere with a policy that seeks to address a major emergency. But it’s also possible that the combination of the sweeping nature of the employer mandate and the use of ETS authority to circumvent normal notice and comment requirements will draw tough judicial scrutiny, as happened with several prior, less extreme, uses of the ETS power. It’s also possible that OSHA will find creative ways to further narrow the rule, so as to make it less legally vulnerable.

Another possiblity is that the, as the Delta wave recedes and Covid cases wane (assuming they continue to do so), OSHA will eventually withdraw the mandate or severely limit its scope before federal courts have the opportunity to fully consider the legal issues. While lawsuits challenging the ETS policy are likely to be filed very quickly, it could take many weeks to fully litigate them.

There may also be other possible resolutions to this issue, which don’t occur to me right. We shall have to see what happens.

In my earlier post, I noted that the Biden administration is likely on firmer footing in its efforts to impose vaccination requirements on federal employees, federal contractors, and employees of hospitals and other health care facilities receiving federal funding. Today’s OSHA ETS doesn’t cover these other cases, which are under the purview of different agencies.

 

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You Win Some ….

An amusing gag, so I thought I’d pass it along (thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer).

I’d add that, while I congratulate Lt. Gov.-elect Winsome Sears, and appreciate her photo, “winsome” (“generally pleasing and engaging often because of a childlike charm and innocence”) doesn’t quite describe it …. Then again, she was in the Marine Corps (a not generally winsome service), so she’s probably had to confront that tension already.

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“Candidates Matter” – Dems Hit “Panic Button” As GOP Leaders Aim To Flip 60 House Seats In 2022

“Candidates Matter” – Dems Hit “Panic Button” As GOP Leaders Aim To Flip 60 House Seats In 2022

Even though NJ Gov. Phil Murphy managed to squeak out a victory in the Garden State, becoming the first Democratic governor in 4 decades to get reelected in deep-blue New Jersey (barring a recount), the results of the 2021 off-year election cycle have reportedly sent the Democrats into what the Hill describes as a “panic” as House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy launches a new campaign to go after dozens of “swing-seat” representatives.

To add some context for those who weren’t closely following yesterday’s election results in Virginia:  former Clintonite Terry McAuliffe lost his bid for the governorship to GOP newcomer Glenn Youngkin in a state President Biden supposedly carried by 10 points a year ago. Meanwhile, in NJ, former Goldman Sachs executive Murphy just barely hung on to the governorship despite expectations that he would easily survive a challenge from former state assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli.

The GOP immediately went into attack mode, with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy telling reporters his party might be able to flip as many as 60 seats during next year’s midterms.

Here’s more on that from the NYT, which applied its typical liberal spin (excuse us – “analysis”), to McCarthy’s comments:

Puffed up by his party’s successes, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader, predicted that Democrats would lose more than 60 seats next year.

That figure may be exaggerated, but with control of the chamber resting on fewer than a half-dozen seats, many Democrats understood the threat.

Meanwhile, progressive Dems like AOC jumped at the opportunity to take a shot at the party leadership.

Liberal lawmakers pointed the finger back at holdout moderates who have been the main impediments to passage of a separate $1.85 trillion social safety net and climate change bill, which progressives argue must be approved before they supply their votes for the public works measure.

“Candidates matter,” added Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, one of the Democrats who blockaded the infrastructure measure. But virtually all Democrats came away from the sweeping defeats in Virginia and a narrow escape for New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Philip D. Murphy, agreeing that the imperative now was to pass both bills as quickly as possible to prove their party could govern.

But across the US, the mood was unmistakably grim and the message was clear: Dems are increasingly worried about their chances of hanging on to their extremely slim Congressional majority after next year’s vote, as Biden’s domestic agenda gets torn apart in Congress, and the president’s approval rating continues to sag to new lows. As a reminder, the GOP needs to flip a net of just 5 seats to take back the House majority. If they can gain one Senate seat, they’d take control of that chamber.

Top political analysts are already adjusting their calculations: in response to Tuesday’s election results, Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, moved Senate races in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada from the “lean Democratic” to “toss-ups.”

Analyst Dave Wasserman with the Cook Political Report tweeted that Tuesday’s results “are consistent [with] a political environment in which Republicans would comfortably take back both the House and Senate in 2022.”

Although, as Wasserman concedes, there might be a silver lining in it all.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 11/04/2021 – 17:45

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3bOg8jj Tyler Durden

OSHA Employer Vaccination Mandate is Narrower than Earlier White House Announcement – But Still has Legal Vulnerabilities


USAvaccineDreamstime

Earlier today, the the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) belatedly issued its Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) requiring COVID-19 testing or vaccination combined with masking in private workplaces controlled by employers with 100 or more employees. As Jonathan Adler explains in his post on the new rule, it has a number of limitations that fix some of the potential legal vulnerabilities of the even broader policy envisioned by the initial White House statement on this policy. Among other things, employees who work remotely or outside are now exempt from the policy. There are also exemptions for employees with relevant disabilities and those with religious objections  that entitle them to “reasonable” accommodations under federal law.

Nonetheless, the mandate remains legally dubious. Jonathan Adler outlines some of the reasons why, and Reason’s Jacob Sullum surveys some others.

Several of the points I made in my post on the initial White House announcement also still apply to the OSHA rule issued today, particularly the following:

The ETS provision allows OSHA to impose regulations without going through the normal “notice and comment” process, and other procedural requirements. For that reason…. courts have subjected previous ETS policies to nondeferential judicial review, and have often struck them down. ETS has only been used nine times before, and in five of those instances (of the six that got litigated at all), courts have struck down at least part of the resulting policy. None of the previous uses of ETS were anywhere near as sweeping as this one.

It’s not hard to see how the present ETS may be vulnerable. A virus, like that at the root of the present pandemic, arguably doesn’t qualify as a “substance or agent.” These terms generally refer to chemicals, liquids or man-made dangers, not living things.

Perhaps it counts as a “new hazard.” But it’s not clear that, in this context, the term “hazard” includes all dangers of any kind, or is limited by the previously listed terms (“substances or agents”).  Perhaps a “new hazard” is simply a dangerous substance or agent that is novel, as opposed to one that, as the statute puts it, has already been “determined to be toxic or physically harmful.” In addition, 19 months into the pandemic, it’s not easy to claim that Covid is a “new” hazard, at all….

Finally, does Covid really pose a “grave danger” to employees when the vast majority of them can easily minimize it by getting vaccinated voluntarily, thereby almost completely eliminating the risk of serious illness and death? If “grave danger” exists even in cases where it is easily avoidable, OSHA would have near-boundless authority to issue ETS regulations on almost any workplace practice.

Virtually any workplace activity poses grave dangers to at least some people, if none of the latter can be expected to take even minimal precautions on their own….

[I]f the administration prevails on this issue, it would set a dangerous precedent, and undermine the constitutional separation of powers. In order to uphold this ETS requirement, courts would have to rule that the statute authorizes OSHA to issue emergency regulations for dangers that 1) are not limited to chemical “substances or agents,” 2) are not really all that “new” and 3) can easily be greatly mitigated by the people the agency seeks to protect.

In combination, these conclusions would allow OSHA to restrict or ban almost any workplace practice. And they could do it without having to go through the notice and comment process, or other procedural constraints that normally apply to major regulations.

As I indicated in my earlier post, I share much of the administration’s frustration with anti-vaxxers, and I am far more sympathetic to vaccination mandates than to virtually any other pandemic-era regulations, such as lockdowns, migration restrictions, and mask mandates. Compared to these other policies, vaccine mandates are both far more effective in promoting public health, and far lesser restrictions on liberty.

But even a potentially beneficial policy should still be undertaken in ways that don’t go beyond the limits of executive authority and threaten to set a dangerous precedent. Even if you trust the Biden administration with such enormous power, you should consider whether you will have equal confidence in the next president, who could well be a Republican (perhaps even the second coming of Donald Trump).

I honestly don’t know which way courts will go on this issue. Perhaps they will be inclined to defer to OSHA’s expertise, unwilling to interfere with a policy that seeks to address a major emergency. But it’s also possible that the combination of the sweeping nature of the employer mandate and the use of ETS authority to circumvent normal notice and comment requirements will draw tough judicial scrutiny, as happened with several prior, less extreme, uses of the ETS power. It’s also possible that OSHA will find creative ways to further narrow the rule, so as to make it less legally vulnerable.

Another possiblity is that the, as the Delta wave recedes and Covid cases wane (assuming they continue to do so), OSHA will eventually withdraw the mandate or severely limit its scope before federal courts have the opportunity to fully consider the legal issues. While lawsuits challenging the ETS policy are likely to be filed very quickly, it could take many weeks to fully litigate them.

There may also be other possible resolutions to this issue, which don’t occur to me right. We shall have to see what happens.

In my earlier post, I noted that the Biden administration is likely on firmer footing in its efforts to impose vaccination requirements on federal employees, federal contractors, and employees of hospitals and other health care facilities receiving federal funding. Today’s OSHA ETS doesn’t cover these other cases, which are under the purview of different agencies.

 

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You Win Some ….

An amusing gag, so I thought I’d pass it along (thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer).

I’d add that, while I congratulate Lt. Gov.-elect Winsome Sears, and appreciate her photo, “winsome” (“generally pleasing and engaging often because of a childlike charm and innocence”) doesn’t quite describe it …. Then again, she was in the Marine Corps (a not generally winsome service), so she’s probably had to confront that tension already.

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Locked-And-Loaded: Supreme Court Argument Appears To Confirm A Major Gun Rights Victory In The Making

Locked-And-Loaded: Supreme Court Argument Appears To Confirm A Major Gun Rights Victory In The Making

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

We have been discussing (here and here and here) the Supreme Court challenge in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. (NYSRPA) v. Bruen, the first Second Amendment case before the Supreme Court in over ten years. Yesterday’s oral argument appeared to confirm the expectations in those columns on the likely reversal of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and a reinforcement of Second Amendment rights.

In 2008, the Supreme Court recognized the right to bear arms as an individual right in District of Columbia v. Heller. Two years after Heller, in McDonald v. City of Chicago, the court ruled that this right applied against the states.

This case concerns concealed-carry restrictions under N.Y. Penal Law § 400.00(2)(f) that require a showing of “proper cause.” Lower courts have upheld the New York law, but there are ample constitutional concerns over its vague standard, such as showing that you are “of good moral character.”

New York wants to exercise discretion in deciding who needs to carry guns in public while gun owners believe that the law flips the constitutional presumption in favor of such a right.

The oral argument quickly confirmed the likely votes of five justices against the New York law. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh appeared clearly committed to a reversal as well as a possible expansion of protections for gun rights. Chief Justice John Roberts appeared committed to vote against the law but not necessarily on board with a significant expansion of protections from the earlier holdings of the Court.

The surprise of the argument came from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote a strong Second Amendment opinion as an appellate judge.  Barrett appeared open to arguments that greater regulation of guns may be appropriate in cities or “sensitive places.”

As I wrote earlier, justices like Roberts could vote down the law but retain the view in Heller that “like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.” That includes restrictions in “sensitive places.”

However, in one telling moment, Roberts noted that gun rights should be more expansive in cities to allow self-defense. After all, he asked New York Solicitor General Barbara Underwood, “How many muggings take place in the forest?”

One of the interesting issues to watch is whether the majority supports a historical methodology in its analysis, another issue flagged in the earlier columns. Gun control advocates have pushed for a consensus approach based on the rulings of lower courts. The majority seemed to reject that view in favor of a historical approach on how such laws were written historically in England and the colonies.

Kavanaugh, as expected, offered the clearest and strongest position from the right side of the Court. He rejected the consensus approach, a rejection that seemed shared by five other justices.  Those six justices will likely be looking to historical, not consensus, rationales.

The division on the right of the Court may come on how to address limitations or bans for “sensitive places.” Barrett suggested that large gatherings may qualify as such places and warrant restrictions. Roberts suggested that there may be legitimate prohibitions for places like university campuses or “any place where alcohol is served.”

While oral arguments can offer unreliable evidence of actual voting, the questions of the justices support the earlier prediction of a likely big win for gun rights. Any disagreement over rules for “sensitive places” would occur on the other side of a reversal of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 11/04/2021 – 17:25

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US Says Iran Seized Vietnamese Oil Tanker After Video Revealed Intense Stand-Off With US Warship

US Says Iran Seized Vietnamese Oil Tanker After Video Revealed Intense Stand-Off With US Warship

Iran and the US are giving two vastly different accounts of a recent tanker seizure incident in the Sea of Oman. Claims in Iranian state media drove world headlines on Wednesday after the Islamic Republic’s military released video it said proved the US Navy tried to steal Iranian oil when it made moves on a tanker outside the Persian Gulf not far from Iran’s coast.

The disputed incident occurred last week, with contradictory accounts of what happened including accusations and counter-accusations emerging and intensifying this week. A Pentagon spokesperson has blasted the Iranian version as “totally false and untrue,” asserting that “the only seizing that was done was by Iran.”

US officials are charging Iran with seizing a Vietnamese-flagged oil tanker on Oct.24, identified in The Associated Press as the MV Southys. It’s since been reported in Bloomberg and others that the Iranian and Vietnam governments are in talks over freeing the tanker and its crew.

This follows a similar scenario last year into earlier this year which resulted in the IRGC releasing a South Korean tanker, after Seoul agreed to unfreeze over $9 billion in Iran’s assets.

The AP details Washington’s version of events from days ago as follows:

Iran’s powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guard troops on Oct. 24 took control of the MV Southys, a vessel that analysts suspect of trying to transfer sanctioned Iranian crude oil to Asia, at gunpoint. U.S. forces had monitored the seizure, but ultimately didn’t take action as the vessel sailed into Iranian waters.

Iran celebrated its capture of the vessel in dramatic footage aired on state television, the day before the 42nd anniversary of the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

Interestingly, Iran presented the video in question as “proof” that it was actually a US Navy warship trying to seize Iranian oil.

Regardless of the conflicting narratives and accusations, it remains that the footage shows US and Iranian naval forces coming into extremely close proximity, suggesting a shooting war in the Persian Gulf could have erupted.

Western pundits have since expressed shock at just how close the US Navy allowed armed Iranian patrol boats and helicopters to come into their proximity…

Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby has since called Iran’s claims “bogus”. The AP writes, “Asked about Iran’s assertion of U.S. aggression, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said it was false and that it was Iran that had seized what he described as a merchant vessel in the Gulf of Oman on Oct. 24.”

Meanwhile stalled nuclear talks in Vienna still hang in the balance, with Iran announcing this week that it will rejoin the negotiating table on November 29. But as these recent ‘tanker war’ incidents near Iran’s coast show, anything could happen before then, possibly permanently derailing the talks.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 11/04/2021 – 17:05

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The Mainstream Has The Inflation Story Backwards

The Mainstream Has The Inflation Story Backwards

Via SchiffGold.com,

The mainstream blames inflation on “supply chain bottlenecks.” But they have it completely backward. In reality, Federal Reserve-created inflation is causing the supply chain mess.

According to Biden administration talking points, the economy is booming. Americans are flush with cash. And they are demanding lots of goods. The supply chain simply can’t keep up. That’s why we’re seeing empty shelves and rising prices. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg summed up the mainstream mantra.

 Demand is up … because income is up, because the president has successfully guided this economy out of the teeth of a terrifying recession.”

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told a similar tale. She said we have supply chain problems because “people have more money … their wages are up … we’ve seen an economic recovery that is underway.”

This sounds like a lot of spin. But in one sense, the mainstream is right. As Mises Institute Senior Editor Ryan McMaken pointed out in a recent article on the Mises Wire, they are correct when it comes to consumer demand and spending, even if they got it right for the wrong reason.

As Mihai Macovei showed earlier this month, the global volume of trade and shipping volume in 2021 have actually exceeded prepandemic numbers. For example, in the port of Los Angeles, ‘loaded imports’ and ‘total imports’ for the 2020–21 fiscal year (ending June 30, 2021) were both up when compared to the same period of the 2018–19 fiscal year. In other words, it’s not as if little is moving through these ports. In fact, more is moving through them than ever before. That suggests demand is indeed higher.”

But why is demand so much higher? As Psaki said, Americans have more money in their pockets. Wages are up nominally. But it’s not because the economy is booming.

As McMaken points out, it’s due to inflation.

If we look at the immense amount of new money created over the past eighteen months, we should absolutely expect people to have more money sloshing around. But this also means a lot more pressure on the logistical infrastructure as people buy up more consumer goods. The idea that supply chain problems are ‘driving inflation’ gets the causation backward. It’s money supply inflation that’s causing much of the supply chain’s problems. Not the other way around.”

Money creation has slowed somewhat in recent months, but the Federal Reserve continues to print money at breakneck speed. As of September 2021, M2 has increased from $15.2 trillion to $20.9 trillion since February 2020. In the latest period alone, M2 increased by $163 billion. A lot of that money went into the banking system and stock market. But Uncle Sam also handed a lot of that money out in the form of stimulus.

Initially, Americans saved a lot of that stimulus money. They didn’t have much of a choice with the economy on lockdown. Personal savings hit a historic high of over 25%. But savings collapsed over the summer and were back under 8% as of September. McMaken says “the public is now flooding the economy with its former savings.”

And he points out the obvious: the American appetite for spending on consumer goods hasn’t gone away.

Yet there are many reasons to suspect this spending spree is unsupported by actual economic activity and is a phenomenon of monetary inflation. For example, today’s tsunami of spending raises questions when we consider there are still about 5 million fewer people working in the American economy than was the case in early 2020. That means fewer people being paid wages. Without monetary inflation, an economy with millions of fewer workers suggests there should be less spending.”

McMaken points out another economic reality that is in play. Spending tends to increase when inflationary expectations increase. If people think the value of money will decline in the future, the demand for money will decline as well. Economist Ludwig von Mises explained this phenomenon.

Once public opinion is convinced … the prices of all commodities and services will not cease to rise, everybody becomes eager to buy as much as possible and to restrict his cash holding to a minimum size.”

Meanwhile, interest rates are being held artificially low by Fed policy. This further incentivizes spending. As McMaken put it, we live in “a yield-starved” world.

That’s OK for hedge funders who can participate in carry trades and other high-yield forms of investment. But regular people are stuck with interest rates that don’t keep up with price inflation. So it makes more sense to spend dollars rather than save them.”

So, yes, Americans do have more money.  And yes, they are driving demand higher through their spending. But as McMaken says, this is just what we should expect in an inflationary environment.

We should expect demand for everything (but money) to be up.”

So, no, it’s not that Joe Biden has ushered America into a booming economy. This isn’t a sign of a healthy economy at all. It’s an inflationary bubble.

And the real question is how long can this inflationary boom last?

Tyler Durden
Thu, 11/04/2021 – 15:40

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Hope Must Conquer Fear in Politics


wennphotossix118660

Hope means different things, depending on who you ask. Some say hope is inherent to the way someone carries himself in the face of adversity. Others think of hope as a form of superstition, an unfounded belief that everything will be alright in the end. The more cynical among us call hope outright foolishness or naivete. During the COVID-19 pandemic, our capacity to find hope has been regularly tested by lockdowns, the false promises of bureaucrats and the public health establishment, the devastation to people’s livelihoods, the death toll, and the crushing depression that comes with all the above. People could be forgiven for losing sight of hope that the pandemic will ever end.

Politics, too, certainly has a lot of people feeling hopeless. President Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 election spurred a mob to storm the Capitol to try to stop the certification of the election. You could call the incident many things, but at its core, January 6 was an act of desperation by people who lost hope in democracy, in our constitutional processes, and in self-government. You don’t expose yourself to federal criminal charges for fun. You do it because you’ve embraced the lie of “The Flight 93 Election.”

Hope is how you look beyond the trials of the moment to what comes after. It’s what pushes an activist to stand alone on a street corner with a sign bearing a slogan, carrying with it a belief that one person might be moved enough by it to join the cause. Hope is why we vote. Virginia Governor–elect Glenn Youngkin faced the monumental challenge of flipping a blue state that Biden won by 10 percentage points. Did Youngkin spend his final days campaigning saying that, unless he won, the state’s election system was “rigged” or that the vote would be “stolen”? No, because hope was enough.

One of my favorite champions of hope in the realm of fictional revolutionary politics is Princess Leia of Star Wars. She’s got a treasure trove of quotes on the subject that illuminate just why a politics rooted in hope, not paranoia and doom, is exactly what our culture needs right now. Her hope is firm as stone, resolute, and grounded in truth. It’s a model for the kind of hope we need in order to defend liberty. In my upcoming book, How the Force Can Fix the World, I explain why this matters for preserving not only our society and way of life, but our personal happiness as well.

Leia’s Impossible Hope

Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin was never going to spare Alderaan. When Princess Leia misled him about the location of the rebel base in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977), naming the mostly desolate world of Dantooine as the location of the base, Tarkin had already planned a murderous demonstration of the Death Star’s power for all the galaxy to see. Alderaan was Leia’s home. Her parents and fellow rebels, Bail and Breha Organa, were on Alderaan when Tarkin gave the order for the massive orbital space station to fire on the planet. Millions upon millions of lives were snuffed out in an instant. The Death Star, which the Rebellion had risked everything to stop, was now fully operational. Tarkin, whose faith in the Death Star was rooted in the cynical goal of solidifying the Galactic Empire’s hold on power through absolute fear, had made his move and put all his chips on that belief.

He was wrong. I’ve always marveled watching A New Hope and taking note of Princess Leia’s poise and resoluteness throughout that original film. While Luke Skywalker is a beacon of hope to audiences in his own way, Leia strikes me as unique. After escaping the Death Star with Luke, Han Solo, and Chewbacca, it’s Leia who comforts Luke for his loss of Obi-Wan Kenobi. He looks shattered. Leia, on the other hand, having just lost everything in the most literal sense, remains as motivated as ever. She has the eye of the tiger from start to finish.

What Our Future Vision Says About Us

We’ve been living through some seriously dark days during the pandemic. It’s no surprise that mental health professionals are seeing an unprecedented spike in anxiety, depression, and suicides across multiple age groups and demographics. Political systems were strained before the pandemic even began. Populist movements and authoritarian leaders have risen across the globe and chipped away at the democratic consensus that has defined the post–World War II order. In the United States, political violence has flared to levels not seen since the tumultuous 1960s.

No one expected to see a pandemic, riots, and an attack on Congress. This isn’t the future I dreamed of. Maybe you grew up believing mankind would be in space by now, living like The Jetsons or even blasting through hyperspace like Han Solo aboard the Millennium Falcon to new and exciting worlds. The lack of sci-fi technology becoming reality can be kind of demoralizing. We thought we’d have flying cars, but instead we got curbside pickup at Starbucks.

It’s easy to forget that things are getting better all around us in ways that are hard to see. Since my birth in 1989, income per person in the United States has risen 67 percent, life expectancy is up 4 percent, and food supply has increased by 7 percent. When my father was just a boy, mankind was putting its feet on the moon for the first time; today we’re making huge strides toward manned missions to Mars. Heck, the robotic rovers we’ve sent to Mars in recent years have uncovered proof that there used to be water on that distant red planet. Once the question was, “Is there life out there in the stars?” Now we’ve moved on to a new question: Where is that life?

There’s a scene in A New Hope with Luke standing in the desert at dusk, watching the twin suns of Tatooine set on the horizon. It’s one of the most enduring moments of Star Wars from generation to generation. Luke is just a lonely dreamer looking out on the world and believing there must be more to it than what he can see. Luke is all of us at that moment. It doesn’t matter if you’re Elon Musk, risking a fortune on a new space shuttle to make it to Mars, or if you’re a young girl living in a cramped Chicago apartment with five siblings and a dream of making it big in Hollywood, lifting your family out of poverty in the process.

Maybe this is hope, or maybe it’s the American dream. These things go hand in hand.

Hope Beyond Hope Can Be Poisonous

Hope is a lot of things. It can be personified, objectified, or embodied in places, faith, and prose. But the most simple definition for hope is that it’s to want something you can have, at least in theory. I want very badly to have the Jedi power of levitating objects and moving them around my house with my mind, but I don’t have hope of achieving such a thing, nor should I, even in theory. It’s not within the realm of possibility. But what if I watched enough YouTube videos made by weirdos living in their mothers’ basements, telling me beyond a shadow of a doubt that I’m wrong, and this power is in fact attainable? All I’d have to do, according to these armchair wizards of the web, is watch enough of their videos and wire them some money. There’s a good chance that at some point you’ll become bitter and angry. After all, someone sold you false goods, hope beyond hope.

This is what happens to Anakin Skywalker when he is told by a supposed friend, Chancellor Palpatine, about the power to control life and death that is known only to the Sith. Anakin, suffering from visions of his wife Padme dying in childbirth, is lured in by a twisted kind of hope we might understand as an intergalactic spin on the snake-oil salesman who travels from town to town hawking miracle cures that almost certainly will let the buyer down.

Just as hope can push the likes of Princess Leia forward through a tragedy like the destruction of Alderaan, hope can also move a desperate and loving husband to spend the last of his savings or sell the house to get that cure from the roving snake-oil salesman. It’s not unlike the snake oil hawked by politicians who say all our problems will be solved if we just give them votes and power, warping the minds of people who go to great lengths to follow them. There is a light and dark side to everything.

In the Christian tradition, hope sits alongside faith and charity as one of its core virtues and guiding lights. The notion that God would send his son to mankind in order to deliver them from sin and by extension, damnation, is a significant dose of hope for a people in need of redemption. Absent that guiding light and the possibility of salvation, you’d have masses of people mired in endless cycles of guilt and despair.

Hope here is more than a feeling. It’s not something that washes over you and leaves like an emotion. As a virtue, it’s something you discover and hold on to for dear life, despite everything the world will throw at you. Hope is the life vest. Hope is the parachute when you’ve jumped out of a plane. It’s like faith. You can become a person who is hopeful (and positive), or you can become cynical, someone who is predisposed to see the worst in people and in the future.

Even worse, absent hope you can devolve into nihilism, a particularly toxic kind of hopelessness rooted in the belief that nothing matters. Most people aren’t born this way. It’s a learned behavior and one increasingly popular with young people and lauded throughout our popular and political culture. Throughout Star Wars, audiences understand rightly that the Empire is an incredibly evil and morally bankrupt regime. With this being crystal clear, would-be rebels have a choice to make in how they make their stand against the Empire. It’s not good enough to simply oppose it. To win, the Rebel Alliance has to do three things: First, let the people of the galaxy know they’re not alone in feeling angry about the state of things. Second, let people know that the Empire can actually be beaten. Third, paint a picture of a better future.

The Rebel Alliance does all of these things. In our own world, the majority of successful movements and political campaigns do so as well.

There are more than a few nihilistic factions in American politics today competing for the public’s attention and loyalty. Whether they wear black masks or don red hats, the message is the same: The future is bleak and nothing matters. We know this isn’t true. While humanity is messy, we’re living in the best time in human history to be alive, even during the pandemic. There’s a great deal of cause for hope, even as we face down the twin fears of uncertainty and disorder.

As Leia said in Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi, “Hope is like the sun, if you only believe in it when you can see it, you’ll never make it through the night.”

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NIH Officials Allowed EcoHealth Alliance To Self-Police Risky Gain-Of-Function Experiments In Wuhan

NIH Officials Allowed EcoHealth Alliance To Self-Police Risky Gain-Of-Function Experiments In Wuhan

A cache of newly released communications reveals that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) allowed nonprofit genetic engineering firm EcoHealth Alliance to police its own risky research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China.

According to FOIA documents obtained by WhiteCoatWaste, The Intercept, and the House Energy & Commerce Committee, NIH officials were concerned about risky research being done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on a US grant.

As The Intercept notes:

Detailed notes on NIH communications obtained by The Intercept show that beginning in May 2016, agency staff had an unusual exchange with Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, about experiments his group was planning to conduct on coronaviruses under an NIH grant called “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” The notes were taken by congressional staff who transcribed the emails.

EcoHealth was entering the third year of the five-year, $3.1 million grant that included research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other partners. In a 2016 progress report, the group described to NIH its plans to carry out two planned experiments infecting humanized mice with hybrid viruses, known as “chimeras.”

NIH staff members Jenny Greer – a grants management specialist, and Erik Stemmy – a program officer in charge of COVID research, both expressed concern over the risky experiments – telling EcoHealth that their experiments “appear to involve research covered under the pause,” referring to an Obama-era moratorium on gain-of-function research that could be reasonably assumed to make MERS and SARS viruses more transmissible in mammals.

One of EcoHealth’s experiments involved using genetic engineering to create chimeric MERS viruses, while another experiment used bat-virus-derived chimears related to SARS. According to the report, the researchers infected humanized mice with the altered viruses.

Disturbingly, after the two NIH staff members voiced concerns over Gain-of-Function research, the agency allowed EcoHealth to dictate its own definition of GoF, exonerating itself of doing ‘risky’ research. The NIH inserted several obscure reporting requirements suggested by EcoHealth that moved the goalposts of what constitutes GoF.

Of note, The Intercept writes that while the experiments demonstrate a lack of oversight and present dangers to public health, “none of the viruses involved in the work are related closely enough to SARS-CoV-2 to have sparked the pandemic,” according to several scientists contacted by the outlet.

In December 2017, GoF research resumed – as long as it adhered to newly created “Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight,” or P3CO. That said, language crafted by EcoHealth CEO Peter Daszak helped the nonprofit evade oversight once again.

In July 2018, NIAID program officers decided that the experiments on humanized mice — which had been conducted a few months earlier — would get a pass from these restrictions as long as EcoHealth Alliance immediately notified appropriate agency officials according to the circumstances that the group had laid out.

While it is not unusual for grantees to communicate with their federal program officers, the negotiation of this matter did not appropriately reflect the gravity of the situation, according to Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “The discussions reveal that neither party is taking the risks sufficiently seriously,” said Bloom. “MERS-CoV has killed hundreds of people and is thought to pose a pandemic risk, so it’s difficult to see how chimeras of MERS-CoV with other high risk bat coronaviruses shouldn’t also be considered a pandemic risk.” -The Intercept

“It’s absolutely outrageous,” said Pasteur Institute virologist, Simon Wain-Hobson. “The NIH is bending over backward to help people it’s funded. It isn’t clear that the NIH is protecting the U.S. taxpayer.”

Semantics

In a June 8, 2016 response to NIH concerns, Daszak wrote that because EcoHealth’s proposed chimeric viruses were ‘significantly different’ from SARS, the experiments weren’t considered GoF, and should not be restricted.

He wrote that WIV1, the parent of the proposed chimeric SARS-based virus, “has never been demonstrated to infect humans or cause human disease,” adding that previous research “strongly suggests that the chimeric bat spike/bat backbone viruses should not have enhanced pathogenicity in animals.”

What’s more, Daszak ‘gave his group a way out’ according to the report.

If the recombinant viruses grew more quickly than the original viruses on which they were based, he suggested, EcoHealth Alliance and its collaborators would immediately stop its research and inform their NIAID program officer. Specifically, he suggested a threshold beyond which his researchers would not go: If the novel SARS or MERS chimeras showed evidence of enhanced virus growth greater than 1 log (or 10 times) over the original viruses and grow more efficiently in human lung cells, the scientist would immediately stop their experiments with the mutant viruses and inform their NIAID program officer. -The Intercept

The NIH accepted that on its face – with Greer and Stemmy formally accepting it in a July 7 letter noting that the chimeric viruses were “not reasonably anticipated” to “have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.”

According to virologist Jesse Bloom, EcoHealth’s argument that their research did not pose a risk of infection is in contradiction to their justification for the work.

“The entire rationale of EcoHealth’s grant renewal on SARS-related CoVs is that viruses with spikes substantially (10-25%) diverged from SARS-CoV-1 pose a pandemic risk,” said Bloom. “Given that this is the entire rationale for the work, how can they simultaneously argue these viruses should not be regulated as potential pandemic pathogens?“

House GOP

Also interested in the latest release is the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, who wrote a letter to NIH Director Francis Collins looking for answers.

Summarizing key points is Twitter user @gdemaneuf, with entire letter embedded below.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 11/04/2021 – 15:20

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