An interesting development has been brought to light. The LAUSD finally and reluctantly rescinds their v a c c i n e mandate, pressured by judges’ repeatedly expressed concerns about rationale since the shots don’t work to prevent infection or transmission.
As reported by Teachers for Choice, Leslie Manookian of Health Freedom Defense Fund was a guest with Michael Kane hosting CHD TVs “Good morning CHD“. She noted that likely LAUSD attorney Connie Michaels advised her clients to rescind the mandate and then argue the case is moot, to avoid losing the case. Same as we are seeing in New York in state and federal cases in support of medical and religious freedom.
None of these cases are moot, as teachers, healthcare workers and NYC workers are still facing discrimination, and a multitude of obstacles from getting their jobs, seniority and employment benefits back, not to mention lost income.
Leslie laid out the importance of the LAUSD case as follows:
The SCOTUS Jacobson v. Massachusetts case 197 U.S. 11 (1905) has been wildly misconstrued to justify authoritarian overreach.
In Jacobson, SCOTUS held that in extreme circumstances, such as a smallpox outbreak with a death rate of 30- 40%, a jurisdiction might mandate a safe and effective v a c c i n e or allow a fine to be paid by those who declined the v a c c i n e.
Jacobson never imposed you could plunge a needle in the arm of anyone who was opposed to being v a c c i nated, or use such a mandate as a condition of employment.
Case law that says you have the right to refuse unwanted medical treatment: Washington v. Harper 494 U.S. 210 (1990) case on behalf of prisoners who didn’t want to take psychiatric drugs. SCOTUS: “You have a liberty interest in refusing unwanted medical treatment”. There is a growing body of case law supporting the right to refuse medical treatment that might extend or save your life, that you have a zone of privacy around you in which the state cannot intrude. More recent case law says you have the right to bodily autonomy and the right to decide what you put in your body, and to decide whether or not to accept life saving or life extending medical treatment. This stuff cannot be forced upon you, nor can the state intrude into your privacy.
“It seems to us that [attorney] Connie Michaels and LAUSD got it backwards. HFDF asserts the right to bodily autonomy for any and all medical treatments. Surely, then, the state must prove that a vaccine works if it seeks to justify mandating its use. Otherwise, where is the limit on state power?”
As can be seen here, no one threatened to take away Jacobson’s livelihood. He was fined, and that was it.
(Jacobson at the time was ordered to pay a $5 fine for his refusal to vaccinate his son. With an inflation rate of 31.09 in 2023, that amounts to $155.45).
This is a powerful totem — symbolizing transformation, healing and eternity. The Snake is wisdom expressed through healing. The Snake turns venom into medicine.
Snake teaches sharpening and more accurate intuition. Snake energy is the energy of wholeness, cosmic consciousness, and the ability to experience anything willingly and without resistance.
It is the knowledge that all things are equal in creation. It also signals a transition in your life. New opportunities and/or changes. Snake is fire medicine, the medicine of transmutation.
On a material level, it is vitality; on an emotional level, it is ambition and dreams; on a mental level, it is intellect and power; on a spiritual level (the highest level), it is wisdom, understanding and wholeness.
Snake magic is heavy magic. Become the Magician: transmute the energy and accept the power of the fire.
Squashing spotted lanternflies isn’t always easy. Maybe that’s obvious. Maybe you’ve tried it, after encountering kill-on-sight orders. The dotted, mothlike bugs tend to hop, after all, sometimes narrowly escaping the (almost) perfectly timed thud of a sneaker. So when you get one, you celebrate.
“See ’em? SQUISH ’EM!” reads one tweet, complete with a trophy photo of two bug carcasses stuffed inside tiny glass jars. “I KILLED A SPOTTED LANTERNFLY!!!” another exclaims. And another: “I can honestly say that’s the biggest adrenaline rush I’ve had all 2020.”
Haters have organized “squishathons” and spotted-lanternfly-killing pub crawls. “It’s kind of a crusade,” according to Brad Line, who lives in Pennsylvania. He developed an app called Squishr, which ranks users’ spotted-lanternfly kills, complete with gory photos as evidence, on a national leaderboard.
The motive for attacks of such self-congratulatory glee—and such careful viciousness—is supposed to be a dire environmental prognosis, our belief that the spotted lanternfly is a threat to Mother Nature herself. The bug’s wide-ranging appetite for at least 103 different plants worldwide, according to the latest research, has perhaps contributed to its reputation as an indiscriminate life-drainer. “If you see thousands of these very large insects feeding on your tree, then the first thought you’re going to have is That tree is not going to survive this,” Brian Walsh, a Penn State Extension educator, told me. Yet in the eight years since the bugs first made American backyards their home, some of the most shocking damage has come not from spotted lanternflies themselves, but from overzealous (and very human) attempts to stop them.
The bugs were first found in the United States in Berks County, Pennsylvania, in 2014, after supposedly hitching a ride as a bundle of eggs from China via a shipment of stone. Spotted-lanternfly infestations have since been documented in 11 states, but are centralized in the stretch of Eastern Seaboard from Virginia to New York. Female spotted lanternflies can pop out 30 to 50 potential offspring packed tightly into an egg mass smaller than a human thumb. A single tree can host more than 12,000 of the grown sap-suckers across one week.
When the lanternflies showed up here, the “really problematic” proclivity for grapes and stone-fruit crops they had already demonstrated in South Korea alarmed researchers, according to Emelie Swackhamer, who educates locals on the invasive bug for Penn State Extension. Even after Korean vineyards were sprayed with pesticides, spotted lanternflies were reported to “rapidly repopulate,” swarming in from adjacent wooded areas. They can devastate grape crops by feeding on sap and excreting a substance called honeydew, which causes black-mold growth, Kelli Hoover, a Penn State entomologist who studies the insect, told me. So worries were, in part, justified: A 2020 study found that among a sampling of Pennsylvanian vineyards, higher densities of spotted lanternflies were linked with a decrease in fruit production and overall vine health. Hoover has heard of entire vineyards succumbing to spotted-lanternfly-induced stress.
“It is the most unusual insect I’ve ever studied,” she said. “It’s probably the hardest to do research on”—in part because of its voracious appetite. Scientists have been able to raise another invasive bug, the Asian long-horned beetle, on maple branches, logs, and even an “artificial diet,” Hoover told me. Spotted lanternflies survive on potted trees—if they’re swapped out every few weeks. And even then, they don’t thrive like they would in nature. Researchers still don’t have a grasp of key facts, such as exactly how far spotted lanternflies can travel in their life span, or key defenses, such as how best to trap them.
So, sure, the spotted lanternfly isn’t really a bug you’d want to cozy up to. But maybe its critics have all been a little hasty to judge so hard.
Take, for example, economic impact. In 2019, a report from Penn State projected that spotted-lanternfly-related damage in total could cost Pennsylvania more than $324 million annually if the bugs continued to spread. But Erin Otto, a national-policy manager in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, cautions that, so far, “damage to vineyards in Pennsylvania has been scattered and inconsistent.” She would need to see more research before putting a dollar amount to the totality of harm.
The zeal, though, can go too far—especially among those at wit’s end. In 2018, while working as a landscaper, Walsh, of Penn State Extension, fielded a request to check out a tree that was, apparently, well on its way to death-by-spotted-lanternfly. At his new client’s home, Walsh found an oak in poor health; branches on the lower fourth of the tree had yellowing leaves. Notably absent—at least in any alarming number—were spotted lanternflies.
After a round of questions (what attempt had the tree’s owner made at combatting the bugs?) and a telling observation (splotches of dead grass beneath the tree’s canopy), Walsh came to a sinking realization: His client had done the damage herself. Instead of using an insecticide, she’d mistakenly sprayed an herbicide called glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, as high as she could reach.
“People can get very bent out of shape,” Walsh said, “and declare all-out war” on the lanternflies. He’s heard of Pennsylvanians running propane torches up and down the trunks of their trees; he’s heard of people dousing plant life with kerosene, engine-starting fluid, and oven cleaner to deal with the pesky bugs. Initially, Walsh told me, there was confusion as to whether common pesticides could legally be used to kill spotted lanternflies in the state (because the critters weren’t listed on any labels). Turns out, they can.
“There’s a lot of irresponsible behavior to try and manage these guys,” Anne Johnson said. “I’ve seen people say, ‘Oh, I use a can of hairspray and I light it on fire,’ and I’m like, ‘Um, that’s going to do way more damage than these guys did.’”
It’s easier to garner support for any cause—bug genocide included—with a rallying cry. In the case of the spotted lanternfly, the label “invasive species” has been enough to work people into a frenzy.
In the beginning, there was a glimmer of hope that stomping out spotted lanternflies—literally—might stifle their spread. The past few years, many in the invasive bug’s orbit have resigned themselves to a different vision of the future. “We’re going to have to learn to live with them,” Hoover said.
After spotted lanternflies were first found in Staten Island, New York, in the summer of 2020, a new generation of do-gooder bug-squishers was born. But some back in Pennsylvania are losing steam. “The fatigue sets in after a couple years,” Line said. People start feeling “this kind of hopelessness that Well, there’s nothing we can do.”
Really, no one person can control the world in this way; the spread of non-native species seems, at this point, like a fact of life. And yet the anxiety persists, most recently swirling around the joro spider, the latest Asian bug to make news for its impending sprawl up the East Coast. This time, Americans are being told the “invasive” arachnid is unlikely to cause any harm at all—on the contrary, it might even keep other pests in check. We don’t need to lift a finger or stomp our feet. Can we resist the squish?
Abigail Gruskin is a journalist based in New York City, where she reports on local politics and cultural trends.
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