Melissa Agard Battles COVID Misinformation In A Wisconsin Legislature That's Full Of It
By John Nichols

Last week, during a public hearing on legislation that would prohibit Wisconsin business owners from seeking proof of vaccination before allowing people who are potentially infected with COVID from entering their stores or restaurants, Republican legislators spread the virus of misinformation.

Joining a national push to block vaccine mandates that are intended to protect the health and safety of business owners, their workers and customers, Republican members of the Wisconsin Assembly and Senate have been promoting a package of bills that seek to take away the right of business owners to operate responsibly in the midst of a surging pandemic.

The bills are wrongheaded on their face.

But the arguments that Republican legislators made for them took last Wednesday's session of the Senate Committee on Health to the intersection where ignorance and misinformation meet.

The Jan. 12 hearing by the Senate Committee on Health included at least four different Republican-sponsored bills disallowing business vaccine mandates. The Wisconsin bills are part of a nationwide trend of state bills that would nullify vaccine mandates.

State Sen. Mary Felzkowski, R-Irma, used the term "experimental drug" to describe various vaccines that have been widely researched, widely tested and widely distributed. As Wisconsin Public Radio reminded listeners after recounting Felzkowski's rant, "Reuters, in a fact check last year, found that claims about the vaccines being experimental were not true. All COVID-19 vaccines currently available in the United States have also been approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration."

Felzkowski's false premises were dangerous, as they encourage skepticism about vaccines at a time when the omicron variant is sweeping across Wisconsin and unvaccinated people are contributing to a crisis that threatens to overwhelm many of the state's hospitals.

Despite Felzkowski's best efforts, however, the insurance agent from Irma didn't utter the most absurd statement from a Republican legislator.

That dishonor went to Wisconsin state Rep. Treig Pronschinske, who during the Jan. 12 public hearing delivered a statement that jettisoned any regard for science.

The western Wisconsin Republican claimed that the virus can't be stopped because it can't be seen.

"If you can't see the virus, if you can't see anything, how are you going to do it? How can you stop it? How?" Pronschinske ranted. "You physically cannot see the virus, you don't know if it is in this room or if it's outside. Or if it even exists right now in here. You have no clue. How are you going to stop that?"

It is true, as USA Today pointed out in a recent fact-check column, "Viruses cannot be seen with optical magnifying microscopes, which go up to 1,000 times magnification, and can be imaged only by electron microscopes. At 25 times magnification, one wouldn't be able to see cells, which are considerably bigger than viruses."

But that doesn't mean you cannot do anything about viruses. Throughout history, scientists and doctors have successfully battled viruses and infections that cannot be seen. To suggest, as Pronschinske does, that it is hard to combat a virus that we cannot see is not just absurd, it is damaging to the struggle to get ahead of the pandemic.

False premises, lies, misinformation and deliberate appeals to ignorance need to be called out.

State Sen. Melissa Agard recognizes that. The Madison Democrat pushed back against the absurdity of statements made in last week's health committee hearing.

"The testimony being heard today in the Senate Committee on Health is dangerous and continues to perpetuate false narratives about COVID," she said on Jan. 12. "Our neighbors and loved ones are dying. We need to put the falsehoods to bed and listen to our medical experts to best protect ourselves, our neighbors, and our medical professionals."

In a Republican-controlled Legislature that so frequently goes off the rails - especially on issues of public health and safety - it is easy to become frustrated. But Agard refuses to give up on the fight for science, common sense and the truth.

"As we near the two year mark of the COVID-19 pandemic and cases are skyrocketing, Republicans are still promoting and peddling misinformation that contradicts scientists and medical professionals. We, as a state, have to do better in order to best protect ourselves and those who are most vulnerable in our communities," said Agard, who argued that, "What we should be doing is providing our communities and healthcare professionals the necessary tools to stop this surge of COVID cases. We should be respecting Wisconsin businesses who are trying to keep their employees and communities safe."

(c) 2022 John Nichols writes about politics for The Capitol Times. His book on protests and politics, Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, is published by Nation Books. Follow John Nichols on Twitter @NicholsUprising.

Americas Were Part Of A Global Network Long Before Columbus
By James Donahue

It has been well established that Columbus was not the first European to set foot on North America. Evidence in the rocks have made it clear that Leif Ericsson and his crew of Vikings sailed to Newfoundland and perhaps portions of New England an estimated 500 years earlier.

We have written about other markings in the rocks in Michigan, rocks with perfectly cut holes like the kind used as anchors by Mongolian and Chinese sailors for thousands of years found off the coast of California, and a strange similarity of customs and language of both Native American tribes and Mongolian people. All of this strongly suggests that the Mongols, perhaps under the reign of Genghis Khan or his grandson, Kublai Khan, also were among the early settlers in North America.

In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, near the site of the Keweenaw copper deposits, have been found rock formations with carved markings identified as Oghamic. People who study ancient text believe they were made by Celtic travelers from Europe who perhaps came to bring copper back to Europe as early as five to eight centuries B.C.E. English explorers that arrived in the area in the Fifteenth Century reportedly came upon a tribe of blond-haired, blue-eyed Mandan Indians that spoke a form of ancient Gaelic. Yet another stone with Celtic markings turned up in Colorado in 1980.

Of course both the North and South American continents were already inhabited when Columbus arrived. The people were not all tribes of half-naked "Indians" who lived in crude dwellings in the forests. Large cities filled with well-developed cultures existed, or their ruins were found throughout much of Latin and South America, and one large city known as Cahokia existed along the Mississippi River near the place where St. Louis, Missouri now stands. It was once a thriving city of about 30,000 people.

Amateur archaeologists began excavating ancient fire pits in Ohio that author William Connor believes are the remains of prehistoric iron furnaces dating back 2,000 years. His book argues that whoever lived in central North America at about the time of Christ knew and understood the technology of smelting iron to make steel.

That massive stone pyramids were constructed at some ancient time in South America, Egypt, the Middle East, India and China strongly suggests that people who lived in that ancient of times not only knew each other, but shared in a common wisdom and desire to erect such monuments. Structures that appear to be the remains of similar pyramids have been found in Florida and deep in the oceans of the world, which may date the construction of these megaliths to a very ancient time, before the seas covered some of them.

Evidence of ancient global commerce has been found all over the world. Copper jewelry and other items, made from copper mined in Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, have turned in archaeological digs in Europe and South America.

Roman and Sicilian coins have been found in Venezuela, Maine, Texas, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Illinois, some of them dating to at least 100 years B.C.E. Roman pottery was unearthed in Mexico that was dated to about the second century C.E. A carved head was discovered by an archaeologist at Calixtlahuaca, Mexico in 1933 that has been identified as originating from the Hellenistic-Roman school of art and dated about 200 C.E. Also in 1886, the remains of a Roman styled shipwreck was found in Galveston Bay, Texas. Then there has been the strange Egyptian connection. Two statuettes, a male and female, both distinctly ancient Egyptian in dress and cartouches and believed to depict Osiris and Isis, were uncovered in ancient Mayan ruins at Acajutia, Mexico, in 1914. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were found on a rock cliff north of Sydney, Australia. The carvings tell a story of explorers who were shipwrecked in a strange land and the death of their leader. Scholars have dated the event somewhere between 1779 and 2748 B.C.E. In 1982 archaeologists found the fossilized remains of kangaroos and other animals native to Australia at Fayum in Egypt. Thus there is evidence that ships not only sailed from Egypt to Australia, but returned again.

There also have been found strange inscriptions, carved in rocks, in various places in the Americas that strongly support the theory that many visitors from Europe came here, and the people living here may have gone there.

For example, a botanist noticed and identified plants in a fresco painting uncovered in the ruins of Pompeii, Italy, that included a pineapple and a species of squash that were both native to the Americas.

A carved inscription on a vertical wall of rock, 3,000 feet up, near Rio de Janerio, reads: "Tyre, Phoenicia, Badezir, Firstborn of Jethbaal . . . " It is dated in the Ninth Century B.C.E.

A carved story in Phoenician text, found near Parahyba, Brazil, has been translated to read: "We are sons of Canaan, from Sidon, the city of the king. Commerce has cast us on this distant shore, a land of mountains. We set a youth for the exalted gods and goddesses in the nineteenth year of Hiram, our mighty king. We embarked from Ezion-Geber, into the Red Sea and voyaged with ten ships. We were at sea together for two years around the land belonging to Ham but were separated by a storm, and we were no longer with our companions. So we have come here, twelve men and three women, on a . . . shore which I, the Admiral, control. But auspiciously may the gods and goddesses favor us."

A stone found at Kensington, Minnesota in 1898, contains an inscription describing an expedition by Norsemen into North America in the 1300's.

Even the Japanese appear to have been building ships and exploring the world. It is said that steel blades believed made in Japan have been found in Alaska and distinctive pottery from Japan has turned up in Ecuador.

Then there is the famous Piri Reis world map, said to have been created by Sixteenth Century Ottoman Turkish Admiral Piri Reis. It shows an amazingly accurate description of not only Europe and North Africa, but the coasts of North and South America, various Atlantic islands and strangely, the coast of Antarctica as it really looks under the ice.

Such detail has only recently been discovered with the help of modern technology that allows NASA to peer through the ice and get accurate images of the Earth from space. Some say Piri Reis copied this map from very ancient maps that existed in his day.

(c) 2022 James L. Donahue is a retired newspaper reporter, editor and columnist with more than 40 years of experience in professional writing. He is the published author of five books, all dealing with Michigan history, and several magazine articles.

Overthrowing Governments Is A Giant Failure
By David Swanson

In a new, very U.S., very academic book by Alexander Downes called Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong, the immorality of overthrowing other people's governments cannot be found. The illegality of it seemingly does not exist. The fact that attempted overthrows often fail, and that those failures can have catastrophic results, doesn't enter into it. But successful government overthrows - the focus of the book - turn out to usually be giant stinking disasters on their own terms, leading to civil wars, leading to further wars with the overthrower, leading to governments that do not do what the overthrower wanted, and certainly - and rather predictably - not leading to even what passes for "democracy" in Western culture.

The evidence is pretty overwhelming that a takeover or a "regime change" of Ukraine by either the U.S. or Russia would be very likely be a disaster for Ukraine and for the U.S. or Russia (oh, and also all life on Earth if the nukes get used) - and that the actual U.S.-backed coup of 2014 has been a catastrophe on the model of those in (though it is not itself in) Downes' book.

: Downes uses a super-selective list of overthrows, while more comprehensive ones exist. He looks at 120 cases of successful "regime changes" by 153 "interveners" between 1816 and 2008. On this list, the top foreign pirates overthrowing governments are the United States with 33, Britain with 16, USSR 16, Prussia / Germany 14, France 11, Guatemala 8, Austria 7, El Salvador 5, Italy 5.,P> "We're Number One! We're Number One!"

The most common victims of foreign overthrows are Honduras 8 times, Afghanistan 6, Nicaragua 5, Dominican Republic 5, Belgium 4, Hungary 4, Guatemala 4, and El Salvador 3. In fairness, Honduras was dressed provocatively and really asking for it.

Downes examines these lawless government overthrows and concludes that they do not reliably produce governments that behave as desired, do not usually "improve relations between interveners and targets" - meaning that more war is likely between the two countries, and that installed leaders are at high risk of losing power violently, while regime-changed nations have a high risk of civil strife.

You wouldn't think this required any explanation, but Downes provides one: "My theory explains these violent outcomes through two mechanisms. The first, which I label military disintegration, elaborates how regime change can produce immediate insurgency and civil war by fragmenting and dispersing the target's military forces. The second, the problem of competing principals, details how the mismatched preferences of imposed leaders' two masters-the intervening state and a leader's domestic audience-place leaders in a dilemma in which responding to the interests of one exacerbates the risk of conflict with the other, thereby increasing the likelihood of both patron-protege conflict and internal conflict in the target." So, now all we need is governments that behave like rational actors in academic models. Then we can feed them this data on how the crime of overthrowing governments (and incidentally slaughtering huge number of people in many cases) tends to fail on its own terms, and we'll be all set.

Or we need the academic models to include the driving interests of weapons sales, sadism, petty grievances, machismo, and powerlust, and recalculate the outcomes. That might also work.

A third possibility would be obeying laws, but that's stuff for insignificant little people.

(c) 2022 David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015 and 2016 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.