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- Executive Producers:
- Sir Kenneth, Knight of the Silent Planet
- Associate Executive Producers:
- Alexander of Middle Cascadia
- Sir Yodar of the Main Line
- GummyNerds, Viscount of the Troll Room
- Become a member of the 1381 Club, support the show here
- Knights & Dames
- Kenneth McLarin -> Sir Kenneth, Knight of the Silent Planet
- Andrew Conrad -> Sir Yodar of the Main Line
- Michael Molck (pronunciation: rhymes with caulk) -> Sir Molck Do-er of Things
- End of Show Mixes: Jonation33 - Tom Starkweather - Rolando Gonzalez
- Engineering, Stream Management & Wizardry
- Mark van Dijk - Systems Master
- Ryan Bemrose - Program Director
- Clip Custodian: Neal Jones
- MP named Agent Z on Kanye's Donda Album
- I need to start this note off by sharing that as a hyper-observant zoomer millennial, having the ability to write notes into the show is one of my greatest pleasures. I love trying to parse what I see, and I think on things at a very deep level. If the show ever is in need of an official zoomer, I'd like to throw my hat in the ring. Just call me Agent Z.
- It needs to be shared (especially to our non-millennial producers) that Kanye West's new album, Donda (named after this late mother), represents a possible paradigm shift for people in my general age group. The album is a masterpiece with effortlessly cool sound and a very clear message. Listening to it on the first pass was the first time I've felt inspired by art in a long time, certainly in the past 2 years. I might sound like a fangirl (believe me, I'm not) or like I am over-reacting to hype, but I am being serious when I say that every single song out of the 27 tracks pack a gut-punch to sellout culture, censorship, the new wave of fascism, cancel culture, and the nihilism that has been instilled in the millennial generation and beyond. He is clear in his message that cancel culture is bullshit, and we need to treat it as such. Let me give you a few examples, though I urge everyone to open their minds, regardless of their music taste, and give it a thoughtful listen. Remember that Kanye preformed on SNL wearing a Make America Great Again hat, he's not afraid and he's not out to make friends.
- The album has many religious references and undertones. I urge everyone, regardless of religious belief or lack thereof, to consider God and religious stories as METAPHORS rather than literal. Whether you believe in God or not, it is foolish to not consider that biblical stories and messages are some of the oldest stories of humankind; and are a culmination of principals and lessons to help people see and understand the fabric of reality. Good and evil exist in constant opposition. That is clear everywhere you look, across all spans of time. So I urge everyone to think of God and the devil as simply representations of good and evil for this purpose, as it will make the messages in the music much more clear.
- I might start a Substack just so I can reflect on the message behind every song, but I'll keep it short and give just two highlights. Almost every lyric to the song very appropriately titled "Off the Grid," points to the fake, toxic, and censored society we're now living in. Some lyrical highlights being: "If you got a voice, then you gotta project it, If you got a wrong, then you gotta correct it, if you gotta name, you gotta protect it" and "I gotta make sure they know who they messin' with, I gotta tell 'em "sorry," they too delicate."
- The song "Believe What I Say," uses a "vibe-worthy" melody, which is so genius because no one can deny the song is catchy...paired with these clear lyrics:
- "You were too easily fooled, so easily deceived
- By some dude who's more rather into greed
- Played by your emotions, you were swamped by your needs
- Told me, I didn't believe, you said I was out to deceive, ahaha
- You said that I lie, how did I? I told you everything, didn't I?
- But you just could not believe, man, I'm so peeved
- Your friends all up in your head even when we're in bed
- Your mind's elsewhere, and you say you care? Haha
- I'm laughin' at you all, you think you got me? No, no
- My back ain't against the wall (The wall, the wall, the wall, the wall, the wall)"
- I mean...can it get any more blatant than that?! There is so much more that is notable, but I won't spoil it all. They try so hard to paint Kanye as crazy, but he knows exactly what he is doing. They're just afraid of him.
- I know John says that he doesn't think millennials are waking up, but that has not been my experience. I have witnessed my friends become red-pilled over the past year at an unexpected rate. Kanye's new album is not to be ignored. Even if some sheep won't get the message, it broke Apple music records with 60 million streams in the first day. I have faith more artists will ride the wave, just like I have faith that my peers will rise above.
- As always, thank you for your courage!! My spirits are high and my gratitude is abundant.
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Ivermectin
- 2017 Journal of Antibiotics: Ivermectin: enigmatic multifaceted ‘wonder’ drug continues to surprise and exceed expectations
- NA Pharmacists BOTG
- ***if you use this content I need to be only referred to as the No Agenda Pharmacists***
- I hope this email finds you well! It's been awhile since I've been able to contribute content for the show but I do have one thing for you today and am going to try and give it a go and write you a No Agenda White Paper on some sarscov2 stuff. It was a few weeks ago but I recall you reading a letter from either an NP or an MD talking about ivermectin and how they didn't know or understand how it could even help. I know they were being truthful and frustrated and confused, and their amygdalas are obviously normal sized if they are sending it notes and donations, and I feel an obligation to put something together. I can't promise it for the second Thursday show this week but I'm going to try.
- Please see the attached image file of a screenshot of a thread on the ASHP (American Society of Health System Pharmacists) forums regarding vaccine mandates.
- In it you have the President of APhA (American Pharmacist's Association) as well as the Director of ASHP speaking of how they are not interested in the topic of Informed Consent at all, and there's maybe 2 or 3 pharmacists in the whole thread who aren't all in with mandatory vaccinations.
- This is a quote from one of them, named Jill:
- "You have the right to refuse the vaccine. Your employer has the right to set the conditions for employment. If you don't meet those conditions you don't have a right to work for that employer."
- I think it's important for the public to see how some pharmacists think about mandates and I would appreciate any amplification you could give on this issue.
- WIRED: Better Data on Ivermectin Is Finally on Its Way
- Studies have been small and often not great. The best info so far says don’t use it, get vaccinated, and hang in there for the more promising meds being tested.
- EDWARD MILLS CAME to the meeting last month with very good data. A clinical trials expert at McMaster University, Mills was presenting new results from a trial that is looking at how well half a dozen different drugs treat Covid-19—not for the people so sick they’re in the emergency room or the hospital, but in people whose symptoms haven’t gotten that bad yet. People sick at home, in other words.
- At his online talk, put on by the National Institutes of Health, Mills’ slides told the tale: A relatively safe, familiar, cheap drug reduced the relative risk of mild Covid getting worse by nearly 30 percent. The drug is fluvoxamine, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor—an antidepressant. (It’s also an anti-inflammatory, and inflammation and an overreacting immune system are hallmarks of serious Covid infection, so that might be why it seems to help). Get a bunch of people with Covid and randomize them into two groups; 739 get fluvoxamine and 733 get a placebo. Only 77 of the fluvoxamine-takers end up in the hospital; 109 of the placebo group do. This is exciting.
- Mandates
- Its time to thanks the vaccinated for their courage in this experiment and stop the vaccinations immediately
- All three talk shows shilling vaccine last night
- Boots on the ground in Manhattan — restaurant vaccine mandates
- After NYC and mayor De Blasio made a huge deal out of requiring vaccinations to enter restaurants, I want to provide a boots on the ground report. As you'd expect, it's not exactly as revolutionary as they made it sound.
- I've been to 3 restaurants and a bar in the last week. The 1st restaurant, a high-end place in Hudson Yards, didn't ask to see any vaccine verification. The bar nearby also did not; though it did have a bouncer checking IDs. At the 2nd restaurant, the hostess asked if we had vaccine proof, and said she'd check after we sat down. Unsurprisingly, she never did. At the 3rd, they were checking vaccine cards and comparing to your ID at the door. The people in front of us were actually turned away. (The irony here being that the restaurant is mostly an outdoor courtyard.)
- Between my 3rd restaurant experience and what friends have told me, even the places that are strictly enforcing vaccines aren't actually requiring that you use your "Excelsior" pass. You can show a picture of a vaccine card on your phone -- which, of course, takes about 60 seconds to fake in a PDF editor.
- Best of all of course is that there is still no vaccine requirement for outdoor seating sections, or for any other establishment where you'll spend time in close contact with people like a grocery store or any other retail environment. And because vaccines are now "mandatory" in restaurants, people feel safer and mask usage is even lower than before. Especially among staff.
- So as usual, this was a lovely bit of PR for New York for one news cycle and it doesn't actually make any difference in the fight to "stop the spread." For all of the discussion of NYC being filled with woke drones following all of the rules, it's unsurprising that people are in general just getting on with their lives and not following the edict.
- CDC Changes Definition Of "Vaccination" To No Longer Include "Immunity"
- “Vaccination: The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.”Prior to September 1st, the orginial definiton of “vaccination” on the CDC’s website.
- “Vaccination: The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce protection from a specific disease.”
- Some healthcare employers deferring vaxx requirement for those who had covid - pending Israel outcome
- BOTG Japan Corona and Immunizations
- I wanted to give you a quick BOTG report on what’s going on here in Japan at the moment.
- Japan has had several deaths due to the Moderna vaccination.
- But the government is trying to keep the internet at bay.
- All the while the numbers are not so bad here, right?
- With the Olympics now officially over (there was something going on in Tokyo??) Lol, and the numbers spiking all during the Olympics, they were all but ignored in order to continue the games and attempt to salvage every last yen out of them.
- And with the PM set to resign because he says he doesn’t have the energy to tackle the Corona Virus problem.
- All the best to you guys, keep up the great work.
- I’m still working on something for you for a BOTG report for all of Asia. Due out soon after John’s book is released. :)
- Big Pharma
- The flu has returned to India after an absence of ~18 months.
- Mass Formation
- Gen Z Is Developing Unexplained Tics After Going Online, And Doctors Are Concerned
- The researchers describe "a parallel pandemic of young people aged 12 to 25 years (almost exclusively girls and women) presenting with the rapid onset of complex motor and vocal tic-like behaviors," and state "there have been striking commonalities in the phenomenology of these tic-like behaviors observed across our centers in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia."
- Curiously, the researchers state that for the patients they studied, in addition to experiencing pandemic-related stressors, "all endorsed exposure to influencers on social media (mainly TikTok) with tics or [Tourette's Syndrome]." Indeed, there are thousands of videos, some with millions of views, in a corner of TikTok affectionately referred to as "Tic Tok." According to the researchers, "In some cases, the patients specifically identified an association between these media exposures and the onset of symptoms…. This exposure to tics or tic-like behaviors is a plausible trigger for the behaviors observed in at least some of these patients, based on a disease modeling mechanism."
- AFG
- AFG pull-out, increase in fentanyl reporting coincidence?
- Build Back Better
- Great Reset is our Mein Kampf
- Climate Change
- medical journals crying about climate
- As, I am sure you have read, since the pandemic is done and all is well...
- these 220 journals have had so much time, they were able to (single handedly obviously, each comming to their own conclusion) find a corolation between climate and.... *shuffles deck*...
- (yes, wall street journal, so really sorry...)
- The editorial will appear in The BMJ, The Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, the East African Medical Journal, the Chinese Science Bulletin, the National Medical Journal of India, the Medical Journal of Australia, and 50 BMJ specialist journals including BMJ Global Health and Thorax.
- Is it an editorial, or an add? I LOVE THIS WORLD!
- BLM LGBBTQQIAAP Noodle Gun
- University of Texas at Austin students sue school because it refuses to cancel its 'racist' spirit song 'The Eyes of Texas'
- The lawsuit was filed by the state and campus NAACP and anonymous students
- It claims the school didn't defend black students who opposed the song
- It also alleges that the school violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when it created a separate marching band for students who didn't want to play it
- The song was first performed at a student-organized minstrel show in 1903
- A recent committee found that the song itself had 'no racist intent'
- In a report released in March, the committee found that the song debuted at a minstrel show but was written with no 'racist intent,' instead being meant 'to parody the famous phrases of the university president,' William L. Prather.
- Students, including players, protested the song after the George Floyd protests
- Wealthy donors have threatened to stop giving to UT-Austin over the protests
- The school's football coach said: 'We're going to sing that proudly'
- BTC
- Bitcoin Price Struggles to Stabilize After Flash Crash
- Dead or Alive
- Lennon is Alive PDF
- Probably cannot be said enough. Layered mitigation in school (swiss cheese/safety lasagna, etc).
- -Vaccinate every eligible person
- In person school is so, so important. Let's make it possible.
- OTG
- Silicon valley is a bug and the internet is starting to route around it
- ALL CLIPS
- VIDEO - (23) Bouchra W on Twitter: "Des camps de quarantaine, ce qui (C)tait une th(C)orie de complot il y'a quelques mois devient une r(C)alit(C) anodine, tout §a pour un virus dont le taux de survie approche le 100% sans traitement, imaginez si on devait
- Bouchra W : Des camps de quarantaine, ce qui (C)tait une th(C)orie de complot il y'a quelques mois devient une r(C)alit(C) anodine, tou'... https://t.co/bgxrI8qnRE
- Tue Sep 07 18:29:37 +0000 2021
- VIDEO - (30) Rebel News on Twitter: "Justin Trudeau responds to @tamaraugo's question regarding losing twice in court to Rebel News and deflects to blaming us for the polarization today despite his nationwide unpopularity. WATCH LIVE: https://t.co/U7lPoit
- Rebel News : Justin Trudeau responds to @tamaraugo's question regarding losing twice in court to Rebel News and deflects to blam'... https://t.co/6MlN9Tnzzs
- Thu Sep 09 02:57:56 +0000 2021
- Peter Bjornson : @RebelNewsOnline @TamaraUgo So are you still winning #EzraIrrelevent ? You just got the #smackdown
- Thu Sep 09 12:45:59 +0000 2021
- VIDEO - How the case of one bar's liquor license could bring down the new Texas abortion ban
- Rachel Maddow tells the story of how Cambridge, Massachusetts bar, Grendel's Den, whose case to obtain a liquor license over the objections of a neighboring church was argued before the Supreme Court and won by Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, setting a precedent that could put an end to the new Texas abortion ban. Sept. 8, 2021
- VIDEO - (24) OGP ð...ðº on Twitter: ""We will be looking at what contact tracing looks like in the New World Order" - Dr. Kerry Chant https://t.co/enYwQ9yJH2" / Twitter
- OGP ð...ðº : "We will be looking at what contact tracing looks like in the New World Order" - Dr. Kerry Chanthttps://t.co/enYwQ9yJH2
- Thu Sep 09 02:12:35 +0000 2021
- preston williams : @TeabagginZombie @emmakennytv Right now the world is in danger of being taken over by a dystopic technocracy - a ti'... https://t.co/OnHhGkkXAM
- Thu Sep 09 11:39:26 +0000 2021
- Al Farasha azim al Samawat ð : @TeabagginZombie We Must Crush the NWO.
- Thu Sep 09 11:36:00 +0000 2021
- maurice campbell, Independent Candidate 2021 SPE : @TeabagginZombie Supranational sovereignty of intellectual elite & world bankers is certainly preferable 2 the nati'... https://t.co/hlmWi1Uyc9
- Thu Sep 09 11:31:18 +0000 2021
- Supreme Ruler Of The Universe : @TeabagginZombie https://t.co/mWfGxC6VnQ
- Thu Sep 09 11:27:14 +0000 2021
- Zeno Calhoun : @TeabagginZombie UPDATE - Fact-checkers are scrambling on Twitter to clarify Dr. Kerry Chant's choice of words as t'... https://t.co/iGq4P22aDL
- Thu Sep 09 11:26:05 +0000 2021
- Tiny-Italian : @TeabagginZombie https://t.co/g3oWcUJN6M
- Thu Sep 09 11:23:54 +0000 2021
- VIDEO - IN FULL: Victoria records 324 cases of COVID-19 | ABC News - YouTube
- VIDEO - Mitch Cumstein on Twitter: "@Breaking911 @adamcurry forcing people to completely manufactured vegan mush?" / Twitter
- Mitch Cumstein : @Breaking911 @adamcurry forcing people to completely manufactured vegan mush?
- Thu Sep 09 00:26:14 +0000 2021
- VIDEO - Vaccine Contrast - YouTube
- VIDEO - You're all NPC's - YouTube
- VIDEO - Camperdown: NSW Health limits residents of locked-down tower block to six beers per day | news.com.au '-- Australia's leading news site
- Residents in a Sydney tower block under a strict coronavirus lockdown are having their alcohol deliveries policed.
- Residents in apartment blocks locked-down by NSW Health are having their alcohol deliveries policed as part of a policy to limit the number of drinks being consumed each day.
- NSW Health has imposed rules limiting people in ''NSW Health controlled buildings'' to a certain amount of alcohol each day in a bid to ''ensure the safety of health staff and residents''.
- Mission Australia's Common Ground building in Camperdown is the latest building where occupants are subjected to the harsh rules.
- Residents of the social housing estate have complained that care packages sent by friends and relatives have been searched before they are delivered.
- ''They are searching all bags and things coming into the building '... They confiscated a series of gifts. So things like bottles of spirits, we weren't allowed to have those and we still (aren't),'' Common Ground resident Robin Elhaj said.
- Residents are allowed to receive a ration of one of the following: six beers or pre-mixed drinks, one bottle of wine, or one 375ml bottle of spirits.
- Excess alcohol is being confiscated until lockdown rules are lifted.
- Residents can consult with a clinician if they think they need more than the allowed limit.
- A Sydney Local Health District spokeswoman confirmed the limits are in place in NSW Health's Special Health Accomodation, where Covid-positive patients and close contacts are sent for isolation.
- However it is unclear what powers NSW Health has to limit the delivery of alcohol to people isolating in their own homes; public health orders do not mention alcohol limits.
- A NSW Police spokeswoman said Police officers are not confiscating alcohol delivered to residential buildings, and do not have powers to do so.
- ''In all residential lockdown locations, NSW Police are there to ensure compliance with the Public Health Orders and assist NSW Health if required,'' the Police spokeswoman said.
- A spokeswoman for the Sydney Local Health District said when NSW Health took control of apartment buildings for the purposes of limiting the spread of coronavirus, the buildings became subject to alcohol consumption restrictions.
- Read related topics: Sydney
- VIDEO - Caldron Pool on Twitter: "NSW Government to require churches to use vaccination certificates for entry into worship. https://t.co/Ad1KnVlBcC" / Twitter
- Caldron Pool : NSW Government to require churches to use vaccination certificates for entry into worship. https://t.co/Ad1KnVlBcC
- Mon Sep 06 10:10:45 +0000 2021
- VIDEO - What does Idaho's 'Crisis Standards of Care' mean for Washington hospitals? - YouTube
- VIDEO - (1) The Post Millennial on Twitter: "Biden: "We're going to deal with climate change ... by 2020, make sure all our electricity is zero emissions." https://t.co/SEwNQe1NaQ" / Twitter
- The Post Millennial : Biden: "We're going to deal with climate change ... by 2020, make sure all our electricity is zero emissions." https://t.co/SEwNQe1NaQ
- Wed Sep 08 02:00:15 +0000 2021
- VIDEO - Community calls for action amid sharp increase in deadly traffic crashes in South Los Angeles | abc7.com
- Community leaders and victims' families are hoping to make streets safer amid a sharp increase in the number of deadly traffic crashes, especially in South Los Angeles.
- Over the weekend, a somber display of yellow flags was erected to represent the nearly 1,500 people injured in South L.A. in the last 12 months in traffic violence. Nearly 125 white roses represented the innocent lives lost.
- "What was once a beautiful memory ended up being the last time my family would ever be together," said Bibiana Diaz, who lost her stepfather when a hit-and-run driver ran down her family while they were riding their bikes.
- "When I heard the impact, I turned around to see him in the air, my little sister sliding across the pavement and my nephew stuck beneath another vehicle," she said.
- Community activists say over the last year, traffic deaths have skyrocketed, especially in South L.A., which has seen a 46% increase. The vast majority of those crashes are hit-and-runs.
- On Saturday, victims' families and community leaders gathered to honor those lost and call on drivers not to drive distracted.
- "It's both speed and inattention to basic traffic laws. So I think from the perspective of...the victim, it's completely avoidable," said Cpt. Aaron Ponce with the Los Angeles Police Department's South L.A. Traffic Division.
- From an LAPD officer run down while directing traffic, to a 19-year-old college student killed in a violent crash, community members say so many of the lives lost were preventable.
- The L.A. Department of Transportation says it's working on ways to reduce the growing number of traffic-related crashes and deaths.
- The department's Connie Llanos says that could include Improving signalized intersections and crosswalk or slowing down speed limits where possible by redesigning streets.
- According to the non-profit Streets Are For Everyone (SAFE), L.A. is the hit-and-run capital of the U.S. with 48-52% of all collisions being a hit-and-run.
- Copyright (C) 2021 KABC-TV. All Rights Reserved.
- VIDEO - Larry Elder Tears Into Gavin Newsom's Record Amidst California Recall Election Fight - YouTube
- VIDEO - A Faster Horse - Apple's CSAM reversal, Big Tech pushback in Texas, a spying Lightning cable - YouTube
- VIDEO - Dictator Dan bans unvaxxed from health services - YouTube
- VIDEO - "F*** Joe Biden" Has Become a Nation Wide Trend
- Rumble '-- For more exclusive interviews, insight, and analysis like this, SUBSCRIBE to The Charlie Kirk Show TODAY: https://apple.co/2VCxGsh
- And for EVEN MORE'--tune in to The Charlie Kirk Show LIVE on Salem Radio Network affiliates across the country, 5 days a week from 12'--3PM ET
- To listen live, turn on post notifications on YouTube, check your local affiliates, or head to https://charliekirk.com
- VIDEO - Qantas Pilot Speaks Out About Vaccine Mandate
- RoyalAustralian Published September 7, 2021 248,595 Views 2682 rumbles
- Rumble '-- This brave Australian pilot is facing termination for not submitting to the company's demands of "no jab, no job."
- 2m06sNursing homes concerned about Biden's vaccine mandateWCPO
- 1m51sConservative student speaks out against university's COVID vaccine mandateTheCollegeFix
- 6m12sNHS Whistleblower Speaks out about CoVid19 VaccineGeorge4U
- 30m21sDr. Leslie Diaz speaks about possible third dose of COVID-19 vaccineWPTV
- 9m52sA Holocaust Survivor Speaks out About JesusGod's Way TV
- 37sPalm Beach County School Board Member Alexandria Ayala speaks about mask mandateWPTV
- 22m26sNurse speaks out about irreversible effects of Pfizer (Covid-19) vaccine.LightWalker7
- 3m32sSuperintendents Roundtable: Proposed vaccine mandate l.WKBW
- 3m32sSuperintendents Roundtable: Proposed vaccine mandate l.WKBW
- 2m37sUW-Health speaks about COVID-19 vaccineWTMJMilwaukee
- VIDEO - So now what? What do we do if this is true? - YouTube
- VIDEO - Crisis in America: Millions of Nurses are Resigning or Being Fired Over COVID Vaccine Mandates '' Forbidden Knowledge TV
- Hospitals and health clinics are where the rubber hits the road in the implementation of Globalist Big Pharma genocide, thus one of the major fronts of World War III is being fought by employees of the healthcare system.
- Nurses who were being hailed as ''heroes'' by the propaganda media a year ago are now being called ''terrorists'' for refusing the vaccine mandates.
- Rather than to ask nurses why they don't want the vaxx, these erstwhile heroes are now being cast as ''ignorant'' and ''uneducated'' by the bribed elitists in the gaslighting industrial complex.
- It's estimated that over 50% of the nursing staff in the US will be forced to walk off the job in the next few weeks.
- But exactly who else is better qualified to evaluate the effectiveness or harm caused by the vaxx, if not the nurses who treat those who are vaxxed, every day?
- As Katie Kirn, RN from Michigan says, ''We are being forced to decide between risking debilitating injury or death from this experimental vaccine with the highest mortality rate in history '' which of course, will not be covered by the manufacturer, government or hospital '' or losing our jobs and financial stability. Many nurses are leaving healthcare, altogether.
- ''Exemptions are not the answer. We should not be forced to apply for an exemption from a mandate that is Unconstitutional, in the first place. Freedom is the answer. We went from Hero-to-Zero, essential to completely expendable.''
- Another nurse wields her nursing handbook and says, ''Battery is an assault and it includes willful, violent angry touching of another person's body, clothing or anything attached to them.
- ''Forcibly removing patients' clothing and administering injection after the patient has refused it are all examples of battery. This is in my nursing book from 4 years ago. This is what they teach us.
- ''If we did this to a patient '' if you told your patient informed consent and they said 'No' and you did it, anyway, you would go to jail, you'd get your nursing license taken away and you'd be a criminal.
- ''So, now what they're doing is putting us in a position of saying, 'Either you become a victim of a crime, both voluntarily and the nurse giving the injection, when they know you don't want it, is committing a crime, that nurse can lose their license and we're being told to be a victim of a crime in order to keep our employment.''
- Ask yourself, if you ended up in the hospital, who would you rather be treated by: healthcare workers who stand on principles, even if it means losing their careers, or healthcare workers who are willing the look the other way and follow genocidal protocols, just so they can keep collecting their paychecks?
- VIDEO - Kim Iversen: Is Fauci's Botched Handling Of The AIDS Epidemic Being Repeated? - YouTube
- VIDEO - The Story Of Ivermectin And COVID-19
- Preventing & Treating Covid-19 with Veterinary IvermectinBrian Brown - Journeyman Healer
- VIDEO - Moderna vs Pfizer: Which COVID-19 vaccine is better? - YouTube
- VIDEO - State Dept trying to steal credit for rescue of 4 Americans from Afghanistan, organizer says: 'Total lie' | Fox News
- Published September 06, 2021
- Cory Mills and a private team of military veterans led the effort to rescue Mariam and her three children from AfghanistanEXCLUSIVE: The organizer of a private mission to rescue an American mom, Mariam, and her three children from Afghanistan says the U.S. State Department is now trying to insert itself into the story of her evacuation, despite playing little to no role for much of the rescue effort.
- Senior State Department officials on Monday announced that the "U.S. has facilitated the safe departure of four US citizens by overland route from Afghanistan. Embassy staff was present upon their arrival."
- But those actually involved in the dangerous rescue operation say the State Department deserves little to no credit for Mariam's escape from Afghanistan.
- STATE DEPT BLOCKING PRIVATE RESCUE FLIGHTS FROM LEAVING AFGHANISTAN, ORGANIZERS SAY: 'BLOOD IS ON THEIR HANDS'
- Cory Mills and a private team of military veterans, drawing on funding by private donors including the Sentinel Foundation, led the effort to rescue Mariam and her three children from Afghanistan, where they had been left behind by the Biden administration, multiple sources with knowledge of Mariam's evacuation confirmed to Fox News.
- Mills and his team worked for weeks to get Mariam's family out of Afghanistan after Republican Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson alerted him to the family's plight.
- Mills' team first sought to get the family aboard one of the last government flights out of Kabul, but she was unable to gain admission into the airport. The State Department repeatedly urged the four Americans to go to the airport gate, braving Taliban checkpoints along the way, only for them to be refused admission each time, Mills said.
- The final time Mariam tried to enter the airport, a Taliban fighter pointed a pistol at her head and warned her not to come back. Shortly after that, Taliban fighters asked Kabul locals who knew Mariam how they could find her. Mills' team rushed to get her and the children out of the city and into a safehouse.
- Plan B was to get Mariam and her family aboard a private charter flight from Mazar-i-Sharif airport, but the planes were never cleared to take off. Some private evacuation organizers have blamed the State Department for failing to gain clearance for private charter flights to land in third countries, while Republican Texas Rep. Michael McCaul has blamed the Taliban for the planes remaining grounded.
- Mills' final card to play was to travel overland to a neighboring country '' the exact country is being withheld to avoid jeopardizing future rescue missions '' and attempt to get the family across the border.
- It took multiple attempts and sleight-of-hand tactics that Mills compared to a shell game, but Mariam's family finally crossed the border on Monday '' just before the Taliban closed the checkpoint to prevent Americans from escaping, Mills said.
- The State Department's public posture about Mariam's rescue is "absolute nonsense," Mills told Fox News in an exclusive interview Monday. "The fact that they're spinning this, trying to take 100% credit when they didn't track this family, when they placated this family, when the mother, who was under extreme stress and extreme pressure, reached out to the State Department multiple times and got no help."
- DEM SEN. BLUMENTHAL 'FURIOUS' OVER BIDEN ADMIN DELAYING AMERICANS TRYING TO LEAVE AFGHANISTAN
- A State Department spokesperson, when asked whether the agency is overselling its role in Mariam's rescue, told Fox News in an email: "The Department assisted four Americans depart Afghanistan via an overland route on Monday. We provided guidance to them, worked to facilitate their safe passage, and Embassy officials greeted the Americans once they had crossed the border."
- But Mills and others with knowledge of the operation say the State Department is exaggerating its role and had little to do with the rescue mission until the most dangerous part '' getting Mariam and her children across the border '' was completed.
- "This is an attempt to save face by the administration for the Americans they left behind. This is a woman with three children from age 15 all the way down to two-years-old. And they did nothing to try to expedite this'... But at the very last minute you have these 'senior officials' at the State Department trying to claim credit for this like 'oh yeah look what we've done,'" Mills said.
- "It's like we carried the ball to the 99-and-a-half yard line and them taking it that last half yard and being like 'look what we did.'"
- Rep. Jackson echoed that criticism.
- "The only thing the Biden Administration seems to be good at is patting itself on the back for a job horribly done. This administration left my constituents behind in Afghanistan and now they're lying about their role in getting these four American citizens out," Jackson said.
- CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
- "The State Department didn't do anything for two weeks except put my constituents in danger and leave them stranded. I know this for a fact because my office has been working around the clock to get our people home with no legitimate support from State. Only after Cory Mills and his team got them into the third country did State offer support by securing tourist visas," the congressman continued.
- "Cory and his team are brave patriots. Praise God that American veterans have more resolve than Joe Biden or his State Department."
- Rep. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla, called it a "flat out lie" that the State Department facilitated Mariam's evacuation, saying the credit belongs to a "team of patriots who worked around the clock for two weeks to get them out, despite the many roadblocks from the State Department."
- VIDEO - Glenn Greenwald: Obama Alum ADMITS To Trapping Edward Snowden In Moscow, Then LIED About It - YouTube
- [VIDEO] Aussie Supermarket Shelves Go Bare As Truckers Continue Anti-Vaccine Mandate Blockades
- CultureThey say it takes a total of 72 hours to cripple a city once the trucks stop rolling...this video appears to prove that's true...By Sophie O'Hara September 5, 2021
- Australian truck drivers are mad as hell about vaccine mandates and they're fighting back the only way that they can.
- TIRED OF THE ADS? BECOME A PREMIUM USER TODAY!!
- By not blocking highways and disrupting the food supply chain.
- Daily Mail reported that truck drivers across Australia are gearing up to block major highways and disrupt food supplies to protest against Covid-19 lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations.
- The demonstration, to be held on Monday morning at a secret location south of Brisbane, has been organized by furious truckies promising to bring the roadways in the River City to a standstill.
- Tony Fulton, a popular Australian truck driver who has legions of fans for his Tones Truckin Stories social media page, has become the latest in the industry to post a video vowing to take part in the protest.
- MORE NEWS: [VIDEO] While We Spent 20 Years in Afghanistan The Globalists Did This to Philadelphia
- 'I'm someone that does a bit of research,' Mr. Fulton claimed.
- 'From what I've seen from my research with credible scientists and doctors and stuff, I do not want to get this vaccine.
- 'I am more scared of the vaccine than the virus. Honestly, it scares the living hell out of me.'
- Another Daily Mail report says that supermarkets have urged shoppers not to panic buy as truck drivers threatened to disrupt food supplies across the country with an anti-lockdown protest.
- In a series of online videos, rogue truckies warned logistics operations nationwide would be brought to a halt from 9 am on Tuesday as drivers 'block every highway entering into every state at the same time.''
- Drivers are protesting against Covid regulations, which in some states order regular testing and vaccination for authorized workers who cross domestic borders.
- Australian truck drivers protest vaccine mandates and lockdowns. pic.twitter.com/FO8YJuHZ1K
- '-- Gatekeeper 1111 (@Gatekeeper_1111) August 30, 2021
- And apparently, the blockades are working.
- The supermarket shelves are bare.
- ****FOLLOW US ON CLOUTHUB***
- They say it takes a total of 72 hours to cripple a city once the truckers stop driving.
- That theory looks to be true'...
- You can watch the video below:
- Australia'..... pic.twitter.com/xTqpJ8GaZ7
- '-- Juststeveisfine (@juststeveisfine) September 5, 2021
- Truckers wield an incredible amount of power.
- Just look how quickly they can bring an entire country to its knees.
- >>>FOLLOW US ON TELEGRAM>>>
- I Hope American truckers are watching this in case we ever need them in a pinch.
- Attn: Wayne Dupree is a free speech champion who works tirelessly to bring you news that the mainstream media ignores. But he needs your support in order to keep delivering quality, independent journalism. You can make a huge impact in the war against fake news by pledging as little as $5 per month. Please click here Patreon.com/WDShow to help Wayne battle the fake news media.
- VIDEO - BOMBSHELL: Former Deputy SECDEF Claims Predator Drone Operator Ordered To STAND DOWN Against Kabul Airport Bomber | Newsbusters
- September 1st, 2021 12:43 PM
- UPDATE: Jennifer Griffin of Fox News reports that the official spokesperson for the Department of Defense denies this incident ever happened. We will continue to monitor this story.
- Univision aired a bombshell allegation in the midst of its coverage of the United States' disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. Per former Army Green Beret and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Roger Pardo-Maurer, the Department of Defense had knowledge of the homicide bomber at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, and scrambled a Predator drone only to order it to stand down as it locked on its target. Per Pardo-Maurer, the stand-down order was given in deference to negotiations with the Taliban.
- Watch the stunning allegation, as aired on Univision's midday Edici"n Digital newscast on Tuesday, August 31st, 2021:
- ROGER PARDO-MAURER: What is being said by people who were involved is that the Department of Defense already knew who the bomber was, and when (the Kabul attack would happen), and that a Predator drone had a lock on him, OK, and that they refused to grant permission to fire upon that bomber. (Permission) was requested, and was denied. Why? Because we are in this process of negotiating with the Taliban, who aren't even in control of their own government or their own people.
- More information will emerge in the days to come but this is a deeply disturbing allegation from which two questions emerge: For how long in advance did we have eyes on the Kabul bomber *prior* to his arrival at HKIA, and who issued the stand down order to the Predator drone operator that had a lock on the Kabul bomber?
- Click "Expand" to view the full transcript of the aforementioned interview as aired on Univision's Edici"n Digital on Tuesday, August 31st, 2021:
- PAULINA SODI: The Biden Administration faces serious criticism over the manner in which it has handled the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
- SATCHA PRETTO: And we connect with Roger Pardo-Maurer, who was the Deputy Secretary of Defense and also served in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. We're glad to have you join us on Edici"n Digital.
- ROGER PARDO-MAURER: Thank you very much. Always a privilege.
- PRETTO: Well, Roger, the question many of us are asking ourselves today is: what;s going to happen with those nearly 200 or so Americans that were not evacuated out of Afghanistan?
- PARDO-MAURER: Look, we've got to get them out. They're American citizens. We can't leave anyone behind. Period. Either by reason or by force.
- SODI: Roger, considering the results to date, can it be said that this is a mission accomplished?
- PARDO-MAURER: No. Absolutely not. But, what mission do you refer to? Because this entire episode, which I call the Battle for Evacuation, we've gotten out, as you mentioned, about 122,000. There is an estimated, let's say, 100 or up to 200 thousand to whom we owe to get out, to get out of Afghanistan. So we're not even halfway to fulfillment but, indeed, the United States has left Afghanistan so this has entered into another phase. To all those who are asking, ''what can I do to help?'' ''What's going to happen?'' ''How are we going to honor our promises to the Afghans?'', I say: calm. We're going to see how it gets done, but it's going to get done. Somehow, something is going to get established which people are already talking about an Underground Railroad, inspired by the (original) Underground Railroad with which fugitive slaves were removed from the South prior to the Civil War. So this is by no means over. We're not even halfway there.
- PRETTO: But it will be interesting to see, then, what the strategy that the Biden Administration puts in place. Now, speaking of this president's legacy, when we're talking about 13 service members losing their lives over the past few days- in addition to the 2400 over the past 20 years. What legacy does he leave behind after this chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan?
- PARDO-MAURER: We can't even talk about a legacy. These are events that are still just now becoming news. And what they're already saying, people who are involved, for example, with those 13 service members who- by the way, half were Hispanics. Espinosa, Lopez, Sanchez, Merola, they were Hispanic. What is being said by people who were involved is that the Department of Defense already knew who the bomber was, and when (the Kabul attack would happen), and that a Predator drone had a lock on him, OK, and that they refused to grant permission to fire upon that bomber. (Permission) was requested, and was denied. Why? Because we are in this process of negotiating with the Taliban, who aren't even in control of their own government or their own people. So what is the legacy? It's too soon to talk about that but it is total chaos, poorly managed.
- SODI: Without a doubt, a very interesting issue to analyze. Thank you very much for joining us, Roger Pardo Maurer. Thank you for these words.
- VIDEO - "Universal Health Care" - YouTube
- STORIES
- Sweeping new vaccine mandates for 100 million Americans
- WASHINGTON (AP) '-- President Joe Biden on Thursday is announcing sweeping new federal vaccine requirements affecting as many as 100 million Americans in an all-out effort to increase COVID-19 vaccinations and curb the surging delta variant that is killing thousands each week and jeopardizing the nation's economic recovery.
- The expansive rules mandate that all employers with more than 100 workers require them to be vaccinated or test for the virus weekly, affecting about 80 million Americans. And the roughly 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid also will have to be fully vaccinated.
- Biden is also signing an executive order to require vaccination for employees of the executive branch and contractors who do business with the federal government '-- with no option to test out. That covers several million more workers.
- Biden was to announce the new requirements in a Thursday afternoon address from the White House as part of a new ''action plan'' to address the latest rise in coronavirus cases and the stagnating pace of COVID-19 shots that has raised doubts among the public over his handling of the pandemic.
- Just two months ago Biden prematurely declared the nation's ''independence'' from the virus. Now, despite more than 208 million Americans having at least one dose of the vaccines, the U.S. is seeing about 300% more new COVID-19 infections a day, about two-and-a-half times more hospitalizations, and nearly twice the number of deaths compared to the same time last year.
- Biden's plans were previewed Thursday afternoon by White House press secretary Jen Psaki and other senior administration officials ahead of the speech.
- After months of using promotions to drive the vaccination rate, Biden is taking a much firmer hand, as his aides blame people who have not yet received shots for the sharp rise in cases that is killing more than 1,000 people per day and imperiling a fragile economic rebound.
- Psaki said Biden's ''overarching objective here is to reduce the number of unvaccinated Americans,'' noting about 80 million adults remain unvaccinated.
- An AP-NORC poll conducted in August found that 54% of Americans approved of Biden's stewardship of the public health crisis, down from 66% the month before, driven by a drop in support from Republicans and political independents.
- In addition to the vaccination requirements, Biden is moving to double federal fines for airline passengers who refuse to wear masks on flights or to maintain face covering requirements on federal property in accordance with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines.
- Biden was also to announce that the federal government will work to increase the supply of virus tests, and that the White House has secured concessions from retailers including Walmart, Amazon, and Kroger to sell at-home testing kits at cost beginning this week.
- The administration is also to send additional federal support to assist schools in safely operating, including additional funding for testing. And Biden will call for large entertainment venues and arenas to require vaccinations or proof of a negative test for entry.
- The requirement for large companies to mandate vaccinations or weekly testing for employees will be enacted through a forthcoming rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that carries penalties of $14,000 per violation, an administration official said. The White House did not immediately say when it would take effect, but said workers would have sufficient time to get vaccinated.
- The rule would also require that large companies provide paid time off for vaccination.
- Meanwhile, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will extend a vaccination requirement issued earlier this summer '-- for nursing home staff '-- to other healthcare settings including hospitals, home-health agencies and dialysis centers.
- Separately, the Department of Health and Human Services will require vaccinations in Head Start Programs, as well as schools run by the Department of Defense and Bureau of Indian Education, affecting about 300,000 employees.
- Biden's order for executive branch workers and contractors includes exceptions for workers seeking religious or medical exemptions from vaccination, according to Psaki. Federal workers and contractors will have 75 days to get fully vaccinated. Workers who don't comply will be referred to their agencies' human resources departments for counseling and discipline, to include potential termination.
- ''We would like to be a model'' to other organizations and business around country, Psaki said of the federal workforce. The AP-NORC poll found 55% of Americans in favor of requiring government workers to be fully vaccinated, compared with 21% opposed.
- Biden has encouraged COVID-19 vaccine requirements in settings like schools, workplaces and university campuses, and the White House hopes the strengthened federal mandate will inspire more businesses to follow suit. On Thursday, the Los Angeles Board of Education was expected to vote on requiring all students 12 and older to be fully vaccinated in the the nation's second-largest school district.
- The Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Health and Human Services, the Indian Health Service, and the National Institutes of Health have previously announced vaccine requirements for much of their staffs, and the Pentagon moved last month to require all servicemembers to get vaccinated. Combined, the White House estimates those requirements cover 2.5 million Americans. Thursday's order is expected to impact nearly 2 million more federal workers and potentially millions of contractors.
- More than 177 million are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, but confirmed cases of the virus have shot up in recent weeks to an average of about 140,000 per day with on average about 1,000 Americans dying from the virus daily, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
- Most of the spread '-- and the vast majority of severe illness and death '-- is occurring among those not yet fully vaccinated against the virus. So-called breakthrough infections in vaccinated people occur, but tend to be far less dangerous.
- ''We cannot accept this to be the new normal,'' said Dr. Leana Wen, a former Baltimore health commissioner who comments regularly on the pandemic.. If the pandemic continues unabated, it will mean 500,000 deaths a year. ''Surely no one wants that.''
- Wen has been urging the White House to take a stronger line on vaccine requirements, including the use of so-called vaccine ''passports'' for travel and workplace mandates that leave little wiggle room.
- ''I want to see the full power of the federal government here, and not more half measures,'' she said. ''I want to see a hard reset from the Biden administration, not more nibbling around the edges.''
- Federal officials are moving ahead with plans to begin administering booster shots of the mRNA vaccines to bolster protection against the more transmissible delta variant of the virus. Last month Biden announced plans to make them available beginning on Sept. 20, but only the Pfizer vaccine will likely have received regulatory approval for a third dose by that time. Federal regulators are seeking additional data from Moderna that will likely delay its booster approval until October.
- Officials are aiming to administer the booster shots about eight months after the second dose of the two-dose vaccines.
- Associated Press writer Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar contributed.
- China bans men it sees as not masculine enough from TV
- BEIJING (AP) '-- China's government banned effeminate men on TV and told broadcasters Thursday to promote ''revolutionary culture,'' broadening a campaign to tighten control over business and society and enforce official morality.
- President Xi Jinping has called for a ''national rejuvenation,'' with tighter Communist Party control of business, education, culture and religion. Companies and the public are under increasing pressure to align with its vision for a more powerful China and healthier society.
- The party has reduced children's access to online games and is trying to discourage what it sees as unhealthy attention to celebrities.
- Broadcasters must ''resolutely put an end to sissy men and other abnormal esthetics,'' the National Radio and TV Administration said, using an insulting slang term for effeminate men '-- ''niang pao,'' or literally, ''girlie guns.''
- That reflects official concern that Chinese pop stars, influenced by the sleek, fashionable look of some South Korean and Japanese singers and actors, are failing to encourage China's young men to be masculine enough.
- Broadcasters should avoid promoting ''vulgar internet celebrities'' and admiration of wealth and celebrity, the regulator said. Instead, programs should ''vigorously promote excellent Chinese traditional culture, revolutionary culture and advanced socialist culture.''
- Xi's government also is tightening control over Chinese internet industries.
- It has launched anti-monopoly, data security and other enforcement actions at companies including games and social media provider Tencent Holding and e-commerce giant Alibaba Group that the ruling party worries are too big and independent.
- Rules that took effect Wednesday limit anyone under 18 to three hours per week of online games and prohibit play on school days.
- Game developers already were required to submit new titles for government approval before they could be released. Officials have called on them to add nationalistic themes.
- The party also is tightening control over celebrities.
- Broadcasters should avoid performers who ''violate public order'' or have ''lost morality,'' the regulator said. Programs about the children of celebrities also are banned.
- On Saturday, microblog platform Weibo Corp. suspended thousands of accounts for fan clubs and entertainment news.
- A popular actress, Zhao Wei, has disappeared from streaming platforms without explanation. Her name has been removed from credits of movies and TV programs.
- Thursday's order told broadcasters to limit pay for performers and to avoid contract terms that might help them evade taxes.
- Another actress, Zheng Shuang, was fined 299 million yuan ($46 million) last week on tax evasion charges in a warning to celebrities to be positive role models.
- National Radio and TV Administration: www.nrta.gov.cn
- James O'Keefe: Project Veritas undercover army swells as fed-up insiders come aboard - Washington Times
- Project Veritas President James O'Keefe got his start posing as a pimp for a hidden-camera investigation, but today, he says he has a grassroots army of hundreds of frustrated individuals behind the scenes who have come to him.
- ''It's all transformed in the last few years. Now we have people on the inside that reach out to us,'' Mr. O'Keefe told conservative host Candace Owens on her YouTube show for the Daily Wire.
- That includes his latest sting at a Sacramento high school, which began when a student contacted Project Veritas about an Antifa-friendly AP government teacher with a Chairman Mao poster on his classroom wall.
- Back in the day, ''I had to infiltrate these groups; I had to go undercover,'' Mr. O'Keefe said in the Tuesday interview.
- ''And now, just last week a student inside the school took a photo of the Antifa flag on the wall and told us about the teacher, and we corroborated it,'' he said. ''So it's become kind of a grassroots movement of people on the inside who film what's going on.''
- Project Veritas employs dozens of undercover reporters, he said, but the number of would-be insiders working in the private and public sector who have reached out to Mr. O'Keefe in recent years is ''beyond comprehension.''
- ''As I'm sitting here backstage, [I have] thousands of messages from the military, from the federal government, from school educators, from parents. Everyone wants to do something,'' he said. ''And when I started, everyone was afraid. They're waking up. The quiet people are now starting to grow a pair. They're just, 'Give me a camera, I'm done.' They just want to expose it.''
- Grab a seat, login to @realDailyWire, and enjoy the show with @RealCandaceO! Episode 26 starts now! Watch here: https://t.co/2jNz5GYDSO pic.twitter.com/frEcRDVQM5
- '-- Candace (@thecandaceshow) September 8, 2021 The undercover video of Inderkum High School teacher Gabriel Gipe saying that he had ''180 days to turn them [students] into revolutionaries'' prompted the Natomas Unified School District to place him on administrative leave last week and move to fire him.
- ''Someone in the classroom was our informant,'' said Mr. O'Keefe. ''Every time I break one of these, a hundred more people become informants.''
- He said that ''everyone who worked at the school knew it, and they did nothing,'' while Natomas Superintendent Chris Evans said the district has unearthed no complaints about Mr. Gipe in its internal investigation launched after the Project Veritas video was released Aug. 31.
- Hundreds of parents and community members upset about Mr. Gipe's claims about indoctrinating students showed up the next day at a heated school board meeting livestreamed by Project Veritas.
- That same night, floodingin the aftermath of Hurricane Ida destroyed the guerrilla journalism outfit's headquarters in Mamaroneck, New York.
- ''We have thousands of people now in the country, hundreds activated, currently operating inside,'' Mr. O'Keefe said. ''They are not my employees. These are just whistleblowers, insiders. You name the sector of society, we're on it.''
- Some Project Veritas whistleblowers have paid with their jobs, such as Morgan Kahmann, a Facebook data center technician who leaked documents showing the company's moves to reduce exposure to ''vaccine hesitancy.''
- He raised more than $500,000 on the crowdfunding site GiveSendGo after he was terminated in June.
- ''Sometimes they lose their jobs,'' Mr. O'Keefe said. ''Increasingly, people are so fed up that they place more emphasis and more passion on doing the right thing than whatever might happen to them. This is a phenomenon happening in our world right now with everything going on.''
- Project Veritas is non-partisan, but its probes typically target the left, including tech companies, teachers' unions and media figures.
- Mr. O'Keefe has plenty of enemies. Wikipedia describes him as a ''far-right political activist and provocateur'' '-- he calls himself a ''guerrilla journalist'' '-- and Project Veritas is often accused of selectively or deceptively editing video, which it denies.
- The next target for Project Veritas: newsrooms. Mainstream news outlets are among Project Veritas's biggest critics, but Mr. O'Keefe says there are staffers within newsrooms working with him covertly.
- ''We have people inside almost all newsrooms at this point,'' he said. ''We've had dozens of people reach out to Project Veritas from within newsrooms who are currently recording. They say 'Don't film us'; well, if you're not doing anything wrong, you shouldn't have anything to be afraid of. You'll see stories come out in the coming weeks on that.''
- Sign up for Daily NewslettersCopyright (C) 2021 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.
- China Is OK With Interfering in Guinea's Internal Affairs
- On Sept. 5, Guinean special forces swarmed Conakry, the capital of the West African state, blocking key roads and detaining Alpha Cond(C), the 83-year-old president. Photos and videos quickly emerged of Cond(C) unarmed but in captivity. Soon after, the 41-year-old head of Guinea's special forces, Mamady Doumbouya, appeared on state television to announce the dissolution of the government and constitution, saying a new government would be formed soon.
- As news spread, the usual suspects spoke out: The United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and others condemned Doumbouya's actions, calling for what they said would be a return to democracy. But what made this different was China's rare appearance in the international choir, with Chinese spokesperson Wang Wenbin saying: ''China opposes coup attempts to seize power and calls for the immediate release of President Cond(C).''
- China's condemnation is something of a surprise, given that Beijing has predicated its foreign policy on the principle of noninterference since 1955'--basically staying out of other countries' ''internal affairs,'' whether that's a rebellion, coup, or human rights abuses. China never truly abided by this principle'--former Chinese leader Mao Zedong aided violent Maoist groups around the world for decades'--but over the last 15 years, China has made noninterference a central piece of its engagement with leaders frustrated by the West's human rights pressure.
- On Sept. 5, Guinean special forces swarmed Conakry, the capital of the West African state, blocking key roads and detaining Alpha Cond(C), the 83-year-old president. Photos and videos quickly emerged of Cond(C) unarmed but in captivity. Soon after, the 41-year-old head of Guinea's special forces, Mamady Doumbouya, appeared on state television to announce the dissolution of the government and constitution, saying a new government would be formed soon.
- As news spread, the usual suspects spoke out: The United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and others condemned Doumbouya's actions, calling for what they said would be a return to democracy. But what made this different was China's rare appearance in the international choir, with Chinese spokesperson Wang Wenbin saying: ''China opposes coup attempts to seize power and calls for the immediate release of President Cond(C).''
- China's condemnation is something of a surprise, given that Beijing has predicated its foreign policy on the principle of noninterference since 1955'--basically staying out of other countries' ''internal affairs,'' whether that's a rebellion, coup, or human rights abuses. China never truly abided by this principle'--former Chinese leader Mao Zedong aided violent Maoist groups around the world for decades'--but over the last 15 years, China has made noninterference a central piece of its engagement with leaders frustrated by the West's human rights pressure.
- At times, China did walk the walk: Beijing hesitated to involve itself in the 2011 Libyan civil war, stayed out of the Syria conflict, and played ''the role of spoiler'' at the U.N. Security Council by stonewalling or slowing down the body's efforts to sanction Yemen and Syria's governments. And when coups happened, autocracies hardened, or violent groups seized power in Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Zimbabwe, China refused to join international denunciations, instead prosaically pursuing ties with new regimes (and other groups empowered by them) to secure Chinese interests.
- In the case of Guinea, however, China's calculus was different. Beijing was more invested in Cond(C) than it was in former Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, or former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. China was all-in on Cond(C), relying on him to facilitate the mining and selling of minerals like bauxite (around 50 percent of China's supply comes from Guinea, making it China's number one source of the mineral) and iron ore, which are used for making steel and aluminum, respectively. Beijing's opposition to Cond(C)'s ouster is thus geopolitically understandable.
- But the inconsistency it demonstrates'--nonintervention but only when it works for China'--risks undermining the validity of China's promises to potential partners, among whom only the ''irredeemably corrupt or terminally naive'' take Beijing's ''win-win'' rhetoric seriously. Indeed, Beijing's mercurial wielding of noninterference risks further exposing the ugly underbelly of China's fiercely realpolitik foreign policy.
- China's pitch to leaders the world over is straightforward: Beijing offers vast sums of development funds (and political support) and expects certain goods'--natural resources, ports, military bases, and international political support'--in return. Many developing world leaders sign up for this bargain not out of authoritarian solidarity but for Chinese money; it solves problems, and there is no obvious Western alternative. Where poverty and underdevelopment are the most pressing issues, leaders will not say ''no.'' But with Chinese money, leaders often lean more autocratic.
- The China-Guinea relationship is a very typical example.
- Described as ''Guinea's Mandela,'' Cond(C) is not your average strongman. For decades, he loudly criticized several Guinean dictators, which forced him into French exile; in 2010, he won the country's first democratic elections, becoming its first freely elected president. He promised to turn Guinea'--one of most impoverished, corrupt, and mineral-rich countries on Earth'--into a stable democracy. To do so, he enlisted then-U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and billionaire George Soros as advisors; then-U.S. President Barack Obama granted him an audience. Hopes were high.
- But Cond(C) soon recognized that making good on his huge promises would require money'--a lot of it and quickly. So rather than wait on Western financial aid, which remains limited in speed by bureaucratic red tape and limited in size by voters' preference for spending money at home, and investment, which can be fickle, he turned to China, whose autocratic leadership could bring huge sums of money, fast.
- By 2011, Cond(C) was engaged in negotiations with China over the development of a bauxite mine, the construction of an alumina refinery, a deep-water port, and a coal-fired power plant. By 2014, the Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto mining company and Chinalco, the Chinese state-owned mining company, had signed a $20 billion deal to mine Guinea's iron ore. By 2016, Chinalco had bought out Rio Tinto, leaving it in control of the project. In 2017, China agreed to loan Guinea $20 billion over almost 20 years in exchange for concessions on bauxite. By 2020, China had huge mining interests in Guinea's iron ore and bauxite, of which China is the world's top producer.
- All the while, Cond(C) drifted from his democratic promises, consolidating power while leaving most Guineans in poverty. His tenure was marred also by ethnic violence, his government's brutal crackdowns on protesters, and an Ebola outbreak that killed more than 2,500 people. By the time Cond(C) announced his plans to scrap a constitutional two-term limit in 2020'--thereby allowing him to run for a third term'--his democratic credentials were essentially nil.
- The main opposition parties accordingly boycotted that year's elections. Cond(C)'s party won a supermajority, despite accusations of fraud. And when Guinea's top court confirmed Conde's victory in late 2020, rejecting fraud accusations and handing him a third term his opponents said was unconstitutional, China congratulated him on his victory. (Months before, Cond(C) had built up further goodwill with Beijing by making Guinea one of 53 countries to back China's national security law for Hong Kong at the United Nations.)
- China-Guinea relations were plainly transactional: money and political support in exchange for minerals and political support. Yet in most countries where China has relationships like these, Beijing usually maintains relations with other forces and factions in case their leader is ousted from power.
- In recent years, China engaged Myanmar's military (and the ethnic insurgent groups that fought against it and controlled pockets of the country), even as it deepened ties with the quasi-democratic civilian government, putting Beijing in a decent position when the military took power in a February coup. In Afghanistan, China engaged the Taliban as the Ghani government collapsed. In Sudan (and what would become South Sudan), China supported secessionist insurgents after first backing the government they were fighting against, securing major oil investments in both countries.
- During the Venezuelan political crisis, China engaged opposition leader Juan Guaid" to protect Chinese oil investments despite previously being on close terms with the man he was challenging, Venezuelan President Nicols Maduro. When Maduro held on, China promptly reengaged him, helping prop up his government as if nothing had happened. In Zimbabwe, China courted Mugabe's opposition when it looked like he might fall in 2012 and then cozied up to Emmerson Mnangagwa, the man who ousted him in 2017.
- And in perhaps the most obvious example of China's fair-weather friendship, when the deeply China-friendly Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen responded to his surprising 2013 electoral setback by seeking support from China's Phnom Penh embassy, Chinese diplomats said they would not support him unconditionally but would back ''any Cambodian leader who guarded Beijing's interests.''
- China is evidently willing to back anyone who supports Chinese interests and will not hesitate to discard any ousted leader, even the most pro-China ones.
- But because the Guinea coup came far out of left field, China was unprepared. Beijing had not cultivated relationships with any of Cond(C)'s opponents, so Chinese leaders had no cards to play. They had no plan B in Guinea.
- And because Doumbouya justified the coup on the populist grounds of beating back government ''mismanagement'' and returning power and money to the people'--which perhaps explains why crowds in Conakry are celebrating the takeover'--China was left with little options but to back their leader.
- Indeed, with Doumbouya declaring, ''we are no longer going to entrust politics to one man; we are going to entrust politics to the people'' and ''Guinea is beautiful'--we don't need to rape Guinea anymore; we just need to make love to her,'' it's not hard to see why Chinese diplomats in Guinea are telling Chinese state-run media that his government may seek to review the signed contracts and propose altered existing terms'--including diluting shares held by Chinese investors'--more taxes, or greater local involvement in mining projects (even though Doumbouya promised mining will continue and Chinalco has not yet reported any disruptions).
- China's anti-coup stance in Guinea is not evidence of some newfound concern for democracy. Instead, it's evidence that the coup caught China off guard. And with a potentially less China-friendly regime coming into power, Chinese leaders found themselves with no choice but to stick by Cond(C) in hopes that he is eventually reinstalled.
- Yet Beijing's approach to Guinea has only further exposed the farce that is China's promised nonintervention policy. China is hardly committed; Chinese leaders are wedded to it only as long as internal developments are favorable or at least tolerable for Beijing, as they were in Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, and other countries.
- Despite what Chinese leaders tell their partners in Asia, Africa, and beyond'--that China is a new kind of great power, one that truly respects and cares about its junior partners'--China has no eternal allies or perpetual enemies. It also has no committed principles, whether they be since-jettisoned communist economics or nonintervention practices. For China, like countless great powers before it, realpolitik will always triumph over nonintervention and other promises because China has no permanent friends, enemies, or commitments'--only permanent interests, which Beijing wants no matter the inconsistencies or costs. It isn't alone in that.
- Ivermectin causes sterilization in 85 percent of men, study finds | WGN-TV
- Posted: Sep 8, 2021 / 10:08 PM CDT / Updated: Sep 8, 2021 / 10:08 PM CDT
- NEXSTAR '-- The effects of Ivermectin therapy on human males can have an effect on men's reproductive health.
- Researchers at three universities in Nigeria studied the effects of Ivermectin, which is used to treat river blindness and other medical conditions in humans, on men's sperm counts. According to their study, 85 percent of men who take Ivermectin become sterilized.
- Ivermectin is often used as an anthelmintic to combat parasites in animals and some people have been using it to fight COVID-19 despite health experts' recommendations against it.
- The study conducted by researchers in Nigeria screened 385 patients with river blindness to investigate the effects of Ivermectin on sperm function.
- The researchers found that 85 percent of all male patients treated in a particular center with ivermectin in the recent past who went to the laboratory for routine tests were discovered to have developed various forms, grades and degrees of sperm dysfunction.
- Dysfunctions include the following:
- Low sperm countPoor sperm morphologyTwo headsTiny headsDouble tailsAbsence of tailsAlbino sperm cellsAzoospermia, or the absence of motile spermPoor sperm motility''There was a significant drop in the sperm counts of the patients after their treatment with Ivermectin,'' the study's authors concluded.The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not authorized or approved Ivermectin for treating or preventing COVID-19 in humans or animals.
- But across the country, people have been self-medicating using animal-grade Ivermectin.
- ''Never use medications intended for animals on yourself or other people. Animal Ivermectin products are very different from those approved for humans. Use of animal Ivermectin for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 in humans is dangerous,'' reports the FDA.
- Dr. Ogechika Alozie, infectious disease expert in El Paso, said to use tried-and-true methods of COVID-19 treatment.
- ''The reality is this: the things that we know work so far, dexamethasone, actemra, remdesivir in the hospital. Things that work before you go to the hospital like antibody infusions and the vaccines have loads more data than Ivermectin,'' he said.
- Clinical trials evaluating whether Ivermectin tablets can be used to treat COVID-19 are ongoing, but there is currently no data available to suggest efficacy in fighting the virus.
- Bottom line, vaccines are the best way to combat COVID-19.
- ''I get that people are scared, I get that people are worried,'' said Alozie. ''But it puzzles me that people would use something with such little data compared to something that has such great data and we know works.''
- Top 1 Percent Evade $163 Billion a Year in Taxes, Treasury Finds - The New York Times
- Business | The top 1 percent are evading $163 billion a year in taxes, the Treasury finds. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/08/business/irs-tax-avoidance.html The Biden administration is pushing lawmakers to embrace its proposal to invest in beefing up the Internal Revenue Service to narrow the ''tax gap.'' Credit... Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times WASHINGTON '-- The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans are the nation's most egregious tax evaders, failing to pay as much as $163 billion in owed taxes per year, according to a Treasury Department report released on Wednesday.
- The analysis comes as the Biden administration pushes lawmakers to embrace its ambitious proposal to beef up the Internal Revenue Service to narrow the ''tax gap,'' which it estimates amounts to $7 trillion in unpaid taxes over a decade. The White House has proposed investing $80 billion in the agency over the next 10 years to hire more enforcement staff, overhaul its technology and usher in new information-reporting requirements that would give the government greater insight into tax evasion schemes.
- The proposals have been met with deep skepticism from Republicans and business lobbyists who argue that the I.R.S. cannot be trusted with more power and that the proposals are an invasion of privacy.
- Democrats are counting on raising money by collecting more unpaid taxes to help pay for the $3.5 trillion spending package they are drafting. On Thursday, the House Ways and Means Committee is set to begin formally drafting its voluminous piece of the 10-year measure to combat climate change and reweave the nation's social safety net, with paid family and medical leave, expanded public education, new Medicare benefits and more.
- The Treasury Department estimates that its tax gap proposals could raise $700 billion over a decade.
- The department's report, which was written by Natasha Sarin, deputy assistant secretary for microeconomics, makes the case that narrowing the tax gap is part of the Biden administration's ambition to create a more equitable economy, as audits and enforcement actions will be aimed at the rich.
- ''For the I.R.S. to appropriately enforce the tax laws against high earners and large corporations, it needs funding to hire and train revenue agents who can decipher their thousands of pages of sophisticated tax filings,'' Ms. Sarin wrote. ''It also needs access to information about opaque income streams '-- like proprietorship and partnership income '-- that accrue disproportionately to high earners.''
- The report combines academic research on how the tax gap has historically been distributed across the income scale with 2019 tax data.
- Tax compliance rates are high for low- and middle-income workers who have their taxes deducted automatically from their paychecks. The rich, however, are able to use accounting loopholes to shield their tax liabilities.
- The Biden administration has pledged that individuals with ''actual income'' less than $400,000 per year will not see their audit rates go up.
- A Congressional Budget Office report last week found that expanding the enforcement capacity of the I.R.S. would not raise as much money as the Treasury Department projects. The analysis, which did not include the information reporting part of the tax gap plan, estimated that the additional enforcement funds would raise $200 billion over a decade, while the Treasury Department projected it would raise about $320 billion over that time.
- White House signals new COVID-19 measures coming for unvaccinated Americans | TheHill
- President Biden Joe BidenBiden administration readies lawsuit over Texas abortion law: Report Police expect Capitol fencing reinstalled for Sept. 18 rally Elder warns of 'shenanigans' in California recall election MORE will announce on Thursday new steps in his administration's COVID-19 response that involves testing, mandates, and school measures depending on a person's vaccination status, the White House said.
- White House press secretary Jen Psaki Jen PsakiDefense & National Security: The post-airlift evacuation struggle Conway and Spicer fire back at White House over board resignation requests Overnight Health Care '-- Biden to redouble on pandemic efforts MORE told reporters Wednesday that the new components would affect people across the country.
- ''There are six steps the president's announcing, there will be new components,'' Psaki said. ''Some of that will be related to access to testing, some will be related to mandates, some will be related to how we ensure kids will be protected in schools.''
- The president indicated last week, following the jobs report, that his administration is looking for ways to make it safer for kids to return to school and for workers to return to the office.
- Psaki said more will be previewed Thursday when the components are finalized.
- ''There will be new components that sure, will of course impact people across the country, but we're also all working together to get the virus under control, to return to our normal lives,'' she added.
- Biden's upcoming remarks comes as cases and hospitalizations have increased in areas around the country, in large part due to the highly contagious delta variant.
- When asked if the new steps will affect Americans' lives, Psaki said, ''it depends on if you're vaccinated or not.''
- Digital Currencies Pave Way for Deeply Negative Interest Rates - WSJ
- Investors have been ignoring progress toward government-issued electronic money, even as many countries are progressing rapidly toward their own online cash. They should ask two questions: Will the Federal Reserve issue a digital dollar? And will it eventually replace physical bank notes?
- I think the answer to both questions is yes, and those who agree should be assessing the impact on future monetary policy already, because dramatic change is likely within the timespan of the 30-year Treasury.
- The main monetary power of the digital dollar comes from the abolition of bank notes. If people can't hoard physical money, it becomes much easier to cut interest rates far below zero; otherwise the zero rate on bank notes stuffed under the mattress looks attractive. And if interest rates can go far below zero, monetary policy is suddenly much more powerful and better suited to tackle deflation.
- Before going on, a quick definition: I'm talking here about central bank-issued money usable by you and me, just as bank notes are. It might (or might not) pay interest, but it is different to money in an ordinary bank account, which is created by the commercial bank; the existing central-bank digital money, known as reserves, are used only to settle debts between banks and certain other institutions, not available for ordinary use.
- Deeply negative rates won't come straight away. Initially, central-bank digital currencies will almost certainly be designed to behave as much like ordinary bank notes as possible, to make their adoption easy and minimize disruption, while use of physical cash will be allowed to wither away. But those close to the development agree that monetary caution is unlikely to last.
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- ''Central banks are making lots of effort to make sure that CBDC isn't seen as a possible monetary-policy instrument,'' says Beno®t Coeur(C), head of the Bank for International Settlements' innovation hub and a former European Central Bank policy maker. ''My take is that that discussion will come only later.''
- This matters for investors, because if rates can be taken deeply negative it would shift the long-term outlook for interest rates and inflation. The ECB has a rate of -0.5%, the Bank of Japan -0.1% and the Swiss National Bank -0.75%. But none think they can go below -1%.
- The main limit is that deeply negative rates would encourage people to switch to bank notes to ''earn'' zero on their savings, instead of losing money. There are costs to hoarding large amounts of physical money, including storage and insurance against fire or theft, which allows slightly negative rates. But go deep enough, and negative rates would be applied to an ever-shrinking pool of savings, undermining their efficacy and draining the banks.
- The monetary impact of removing, or at least reducing, this effective lower bound, as economists call it, is profound. Instead of turning to new and still unproven tools like the bond-buying of quantitative easing, central banks would be able to keep cutting rates when a crisis hit. And they would cut a long way'--the trillions of dollars of QE and other experimental policies were equivalent to a ''shadow policy rate'' for federal funds of minus 5% by 2011, according to BIS research.
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- The bank note alternative isn't the only thing preventing central banks from taking rates to -5%.
- ''It isn't natural,'' Mr. Coeur(C) told me. ''Negative rates aren't easy to understand. There will be a reluctance both by central banks and financial institutions to go there [deeply negative].''
- Resistance from politicians and the public would make policy makers cautious about such radical policies, and some central bankers already worry about the side effects from prolonged periods of negative rates. But as Mr. Coeur(C), who oversaw bond-buying while at the ECB, could tell you, what once seemed to be an impossibly extreme monetary policy can quickly become the norm.
- Accept that interest rates might be deeply negative in serious recessions, and there is still a puzzle: Does that make long bond yields lower, or higher?
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- The argument for lower yields is basic mathematics. A 30-year bond should yield the average of the fed-funds rate over the period, plus or minus a risk premium. Take away the lower bound on rates, and the occasional negative rate should mean a lower average, all else equal.
- As usual in economics, though, all else isn't equal. The aim of deeply negative rates would be to stimulate the economy, creating a quicker recovery and allowing the central bank to raise rates again more quickly than if it was stuck at the lower bound for years, as the Fed was from 2008 to 2015 (the longest period without a rate change since at least 1954).
- If negative rates worked, it might not mean a lower average over time. Instead, it might mean higher average inflation, and similar or even higher rates, as the economy could quickly be jerked out of the rut of secular stagnation, and rates and inflation return to normal.
- ''It is hard to say which way it would go,'' says Eswar Prasad, a professor of economics at Cornell University and author of a forthcoming book on digital currencies, ''The Future of Money.'' ''At times of extreme peril, it could make a difference.''
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- Making a decision comes down to how you view monetary policy. If you think it doesn't really work as stimulus anyway, then negative rates would provide little to no extra support; a Japanified economy with even more negative rates might just have lower bond yields, and still no inflation.
- If you agree with the central banks that interest rates are a powerful tool for reflating the economy, then digital money removes the asymmetry that prevents rates being used to tackle deflation. That should remove much of the risk of persistent deflation, justifying higher long-term bond yields.
- Either way, interest rates matter for bond yields, and electronic money can give central banks more freedom with interest rates. How long it takes is up for debate, but some countries have already moved beyond the experimental stage, and policy makers are feeling the pressure from crypto developers, especially so-called stablecoins tied to the value of ordinary currency. It is time for long-term investors to start paying attention.
- Write to James Mackintosh at james.mackintosh@wsj.com
- As Networks Stop Reporting Overnight Ratings, So Ends an Era (Column) - Variety
- NBC's ''Young Rock'' premiered recently to a 1.0 rating in the adults 18 to 49 demographic '-- which sounds awful but in 2021 qualifies as a tremendous debut. In an age when almost everything does between 0.4 and 0.8 in fast national Nielsen ratings, we've truly gotten to the point where live+ same day or even live+3 day and live+7 day numbers don't mean anything anymore. That's why it's not a surprise that following the downsizing of NBC ratings guru (and former Variety ratings expert) Tom Bierbaum, the Peacock network just announced that it would stop the practice of issuing daily fast affiliate ratings reports altogether.
- ''We didn't come to this decision lightly, but believe it's important to accurately reflect how the television business is changing and, specifically, how these early ratings numbers are no longer representative of the performance of a particular show or series,'' wrote NBC's Stuart Levine, another Variety alum who wrote plenty of ratings stories during his time here, and therefore knows the significance of ending those daily morning emails. ''Long gone are the days when a vast majority of viewers watched their favorite shows in the exact timeslot in which they were scheduled.''
- The trend has been heading in this direction for a while, starting in 2015, when Fox was the first to cease its daily ratings spins to the press. Of course, we all still got the numbers and could call up execs to get their takes on hits and misses.
- But these press releases became a bit more embarrassing in recent years; who cares if you won the night with a 0.9 rating, or that it was your best performance in three months on a Tuesday? ABC brass (many of whom were at Fox when the 2015 edict was set) have also pulled back on daily ratings reports, leaving just CBS '-- which has generally stuck with touting much more impressive total-viewer numbers, rather than those increasingly microscopic demos.
- The overnight numbers give a quick initial snapshot of how a show performed live, and offer a clue to how it might do via streaming on demand. Ratings may still matter to advertisers, but the value of a show comes much later: Is it the kind of streaming binge that can be monetized as a subscription draw? We might not know that for months or years.
- ''In a way it's unfair to say, 'The networks have to come clean about who watched them last night,' when we have to trust that Netflix is giving us accurate information,'' says former NBC and Fox scheduling chief Preston Beckman. ''So it kind of levels the playing field a little bit.''
- But much like how film analysis has adjusted to a world without box office punditry during these COVID times, taking away the daily ratings race has the effect of eliminating so much of the fun of television showmanship. Execs of a certain age may recount calling network ratings hotlines at 6 a.m., with a racing heartbeat, to see whether a show premiere was a hit or a flop. (Those hotlines disappeared years ago. I know because I just tried the ones I still have scrawled down somewhere for ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox '-- and they all go to dial tones or recordings of non-working numbers.)
- Remember sweeps? November and February were so important that at the end of the month, network presidents would hold back-to-back press calls to tout and shamelessly spin their performances. Sweeps became less relevant as Nielsen expanded its people meter technology in local markets, eliminating the old-fashioned paper diary that used to make November, February and July extra special. Sweeps hasn't been necessary in major markets forever, which is why it's ridiculous that major stations in New York and Los Angeles still save their ''this common household appliance WILL KILL YOU'' stories for that month.
- But I digress. So much of the primetime strategy that we used to cover in the 1990s and 2000s was about those numbers, from scheduling big events vs. a rival's important premiere, and earning the bragging rights that can be trumpeted in promos, at upfront presentations and yes, in those daily press releases. It was the game. ''I remember the disasters more than the successes,'' Beckman says of those day-after ratings reports. ''I started looking at them in 1980. Even when I retired, I still found myself looking at them every morning. It's something of an addiction.''
- Now, as the importance of the daily report cards fade away, I'd argue it's a good thing for creatives, freed from the tyranny of a flawed yardstick for success. So many great shows or series with real potential were snuffed out because of those initial ratings, and often replaced by shows that performed even worse. But when a new show popped, there was nothing more exciting. Beckman also remembers the thrill of seeing those first few weeks of ''ER'' numbers and knowing that a phenomenon had just been unleashed. Now that so much of TV doesn't adhere to ratings, I also wonder if the TV business is losing a competitive spark that helped inspire some of its best work.
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- Senate's $3.5 Trillion Budget Plan: What's In It, Next Steps : NPR
- Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., unveiled the text of a $3.5 trillion budget framework. J. Scott Applewhite/AP hide caption
- toggle caption J. Scott Applewhite/AP Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., unveiled the text of a $3.5 trillion budget framework.
- J. Scott Applewhite/AP Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has released the text of a $3.5 trillion budget framework that is meant to give Democrats the opportunity to approve major federal investments in child care, family leave and climate change provisions without support of congressional Republicans.
- In a letter sent Monday morning, Schumer told Democrats that the goal is for committees to write legislation to fulfill the spending targets by Sept. 15.
- "When we took the majority in the Senate earlier this year, the American people entrusted us with a great responsibility: to make their lives better," Schumer wrote in the letter. "I am happy to report that we are making great progress towards that goal."
- What's in the planThe budget framework includes instructions to committees that include specific spending targets. Major elements include:
- $726 billion for the Health, Labor, Education and Pensions Committee with expansive instructions to address some of Democrats' top priorities. Those areas include universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds, child care for working families, tuition-free community college, funding for historically black colleges and universities and an expansion of the Pell Grant for higher education. $107 billion for the Judiciary Committee, including instructions to address "lawful permanent status for qualified immigrants." $135 billion for the Committee on Agriculture Nutrition and Forestry, including instructions to address forest fires, reduce carbon emissions and address drought concerns. $332 billion for the Banking Committee, including instructions to invest in public housing, the Housing Trust Fund, housing affordability and equity and community land trusts. $198 billion for the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, including instructions largely related to clean energy development. Democrats go it aloneDemocrats plan to use special budget rules to pass new spending without the threat of a Republican filibuster in the Senate. Republicans have broadly rejected plans for additional spending and have said Democrats are threatening chances of bipartisan support for other critical economic issues, such as increasing or suspending the debt limit.
- Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., promised last week that Republicans would offer no help on the debt limit if Democrats pursue more spending.
- "If our colleagues want to ram through yet another reckless tax and spending spree without our input, if they want all this spending and debt to be their signature legacy, they should leap at the chance to own every bit of it," McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor. "So let me make something perfectly clear: If they don't need or want our input, they won't get our help with the debt limit increase that these reckless plans will require."
- The decision to proceed with budget reconciliation creates a perilous path for top Democrats leading exceedingly thin majorities in both the House and the Senate at a moment of intense fiscal pressure in the country.
- Also, the borrowing limit must be increased by Oct. 1 The federal government already reached the borrowing limit and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that the limit must be increased by Oct. 1 to avoid default. That coincides with the fiscal year end on Sept. 30 '-- one day earlier.
- Democrats did not include a debt limit increase in the budget framework, meaning they will have to find some other way to address the issue.
- Leaders also face a difficult path for approving additional spending through the budget process.
- Passing any legislation under the budget rule known as reconciliation would require unanimous agreement among Democrats. That is far from guaranteed.
- Moderate Democrats, such as Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., have questioned the need for trillions in new spending but have avoided committing to a spending target they can support.
- Progressive Democrats have insisted that the Senate pass a partisan spending package before the House will consider the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that is set to be approved in the Senate this week.
- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has said for weeks that the House will not vote on the bipartisan bill until the Senate has finished work on the additional spending.
- Schumer said Monday that he has been working with Pelosi on this plan.
- Ivermectin causes sterilization in 85 percent of men, study finds | WFLA
- Erin Coulehan, Nexstar Media Wire
- EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) '-- The effects of Ivermectin therapy on human males can have an effect on men's reproductive health.
- Researchers at three universities in Nigeria studied the effects of Ivermectin, which is used to treat river blindness and other medical conditions in humans, on men's sperm counts. According to their study, 85 percent of men who take Ivermectin become sterilized.
- Ivermectin is often used as an anthelmintic to combat parasites in animals and some people have been using it to fight COVID-19 despite health experts' recommendations against it.
- The study conducted by researchers in Nigeria screened 385 patients with river blindness to investigate the effects of Ivermectin on sperm function.
- The researchers found that 85 percent of all male patients treated in a particular center with ivermectin in the recent past who went to the laboratory for routine tests were discovered to have developed various forms, grades and degrees of sperm dysfunction.
- Dysfunctions include the following:
- Low sperm countPoor sperm morphologyTwo headsTiny headsDouble tailsAbsence of tailsAlbino sperm cellsAzoospermia, or the absence of motile spermPoor sperm motility''There was a significant drop in the sperm counts of the patients after their treatment with Ivermectin,'' the study's authors concluded.The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not authorized or approved Ivermectin for treating or preventing COVID-19 in humans or animals.
- But across the country, people have been self-medicating using animal-grade Ivermectin.
- ''Never use medications intended for animals on yourself or other people. Animal Ivermectin products are very different from those approved for humans. Use of animal Ivermectin for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 in humans is dangerous,'' reports the FDA.
- Dr. Ogechika Alozie, infectious disease expert in El Paso, said to use tried-and-true methods of COVID-19 treatment.
- ''The reality is this: the things that we know work so far, dexamethasone, actemra, remdesivir in the hospital. Things that work before you go to the hospital like antibody infusions and the vaccines have loads more data than Ivermectin,'' he said.
- Clinical trials evaluating whether Ivermectin tablets can be used to treat COVID-19 are ongoing, but there is currently no data available to suggest efficacy in fighting the virus.
- Bottom line, vaccines are the best way to combat COVID-19.
- ''I get that people are scared, I get that people are worried,'' said Alozie. ''But it puzzles me that people would use something with such little data compared to something that has such great data and we know works.''
- Global hydropower industry launches ESG standard to attract investors | Reuters
- The Baihetan hydropower plant is seen in operation on the border between Qiaojia county of Yunnan province and Ningnan county of Sichuan province, China June 28, 2021. Picture taken with a drone. cnsphoto via REUTERS
- LONDON, Sept 8 (Reuters) - The Hydropower Sustainability Council (HSC) has launched an environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance standard to enhance transparency in the industry and give investors more confidence in backing new projects, it said on Thursday.
- Hydropower supplied one sixth of global electricity in 2020 but new projects have slowed, partly due to lengthy permitting processes, risks from environmental assessments and opposition from local communities. read more
- ''The hydropower sector needs a credible, transparent certification scheme that will incentivise the best projects,'' Ashok Khosla, chair of the HSC said in a statement.
- ''This will give communities, governments and investors greater confidence about their net benefits and how impacts on the local environment are mitigated,'' he said.
- The HSC is a global body made up of representatives from energy companies, government agencies, financial institutions and social and environmental NGOs.
- Developers will need to put forward projects for the certification which will be assessed by independent experts using several criteria such as labour and working conditions, climate change mitigation and resilience, community impacts and biodiversity impact.
- Several global hydropower project participants said they would seek to achieve the new standard.
- ''We will not participate in hydropower projects which do not fully comply with the requirements set forth in the Hydropower Sustainability Standard,'' Pascal Radue, President and CEO of GE Renewable Energy Hydro Solutions said in the statement.
- Reporting By Susanna Twidale. Editing by Jane Merriman
- Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
- Gen Z Is Developing Unexplained Tics After Going Online, And Doctors Are Concerned
- Alex Turnquist began noticing her tics at the end of her spring semester at Loyola University Chicago. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the then 20-year-old out of her dorm and back home with her parents. It was there, watching videos of herself recorded on Snapchat, that she saw her eyelid twitching uncontrollably in playbacks. Soon after, her head started shaking in a distinctive, jerky way.
- She told her psychiatrist, who wondered if antidepressants had brought on the tics. After a year of follow-up, which included briefly going off the medication to no avail, Turnquist was diagnosed with an abnormal tic disorder. She's still not sure what caused it to appear when it did, but this March she posted to TikTok under the handle @alexandrea.joy after seeing recent reports from the UK that seemed to describe what she was experiencing.
- ''So I developed a tic disorder during the pandemic, and I thought that it was Lexapro that did me in because there's some research on that,'' she says in the video. ''But I just learned that the isolation of the pandemic has been causing a massive outbreak of [tics] in girls.''
- Doctors who specialize in Tourette's Syndrome and other tic disorders have turned their attention to people like Turnquist after seeing referrals for these rapid-onset conditions balloon from 1-5 percent of total cases pre-pandemic to 20-35 percent of them now, according to data from a viewpoint study published on August 13.
- The researchers describe "a parallel pandemic of young people aged 12 to 25'years (almost exclusively girls and women) presenting with the rapid onset of complex motor and vocal tic-like behaviors," and state "there have been striking commonalities in the phenomenology of these tic-like behaviors observed across our centers in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia."
- Curiously, the researchers state that for the patients they studied, in addition to experiencing pandemic-related stressors, "all endorsed exposure to influencers on social media (mainly TikTok) with tics or [Tourette's Syndrome]." Indeed, there are thousands of videos, some with millions of views, in a corner of TikTok affectionately referred to as "Tic Tok." According to the researchers, "In some cases, the patients specifically identified an association between these media exposures and the onset of symptoms'.... This exposure to tics or tic-like behaviors is a plausible trigger for the behaviors observed in at least some of these patients, based on a disease modeling mechanism."
- A separate article published in July, meanwhile, studied popular TikTok influencers with tics, and found that TikTok tics were "distinct" from typical Tourette's symptoms. "We believe this to be an example of mass sociogenic illness, which involves behaviors, emotions, or conditions spreading spontaneously through a group," the authors wrote.
- Now beginning a PhD in molecular immunology and cancer biology at Dartmouth, Turnquist said that her STEM background positioned her better than most to parse through the most recent research on sudden-onset tic disorders, and she agreed with the researchers' conclusions: ''I feel like the stressors of the pandemic were a lot, and it probably pushed some threshold over the edge.''
- ''An Epidemic Within a Pandemic''
- In the fall of 2020, Tamara Pringsheim and Davide Martino, two neurologists at the University of Calgary in Canada, started hearing about cases of rapid-onset tics among young people from other clinicians. A colleague working in the ER told Pringsheim, who is also the medical director of the Tourette's Syndrome and Pediatric Movement Disorders Clinic at the Alberta Children's Hospital, about three teenage girls with oddly similar symptoms admitted over the span of a week. Then, in January, the number of referrals they were getting increased substantially.
- ''It's an epidemic within the pandemic,'' Martino said.
- The patients' symptoms differ meaningfully from those of classical Tourette's Syndrome, the most well-known tic disorder, he said. First of all, Tourette's tics tend to start between the ages of 5 and 7'--Martino said they have not yet seen a patient younger than 11. While Tourette's patients skew male, these referrals were nearly all girls and young women who tended to also have anxiety or a mood disorder. And, they suffered more extreme symptoms than Tourette's patients.
- Based on these differences and others, the neurologists defined the rapid-onset symptoms as functional tic-like behaviors, rather than tics themselves. The pair are co-authors on two studies about the condition in adults and children that were published in July and August, respectively.
- Pringsheim said that telling patients about this distinction could be difficult: ''Sometimes it's a tough conversation, saying, 'I don't think you have Tourette's Syndrome, I think you have these functional tic-like behaviors that have likely been triggered by the distress of the pandemic''--there's some resistance or disappointment,'' she said.
- Though these patients do not have Tourette's, Martino added that their symptoms are no less legitimate and merit specific treatment.
- ''They cannot stop, and we have absolutely witnessed that,'' he said. ''Some of the patients and families we talk to are desperate; we need compassion and commitment to try and help them.''
- What took the pair one step closer to understanding the condition were the tic-like behaviors themselves: for instance, several people would uncontrollably say the word ''beans.'' Though it's a single word, this behavior is considered to be a complex vocalization, unlike the simple facial tics that Tourette's patients often have, like blinking frequently or wrinkling one's nose, Pringsheim said.
- Like most internet ephemera, it's impossible to say for sure where the ''beans'' tic came from, but there are dozens of videos on TikTok and discussions on Reddit that mention the behavior and its connection to @thistrippyhippie, a TikTok creator who announced her Tourette's diagnosis in 2020 and who has 13.5 million followers on the platform.
- Clearly, @thistrippyhippie, a British 21-year-old named Evie Meg, is not at fault for teens on TikTok uncontrollably saying "beans." Neither are the people experiencing these sudden-onset symptoms, which are real and debilitating, according to the researchers studying them. But a growing body of research , including three studies published in August, indicate that these patients don't have a traditional tic disorder.
- Instead, Pringsheim, Martino and other researchers working on this phenomenon believe that the stress of the past year'--from lockdowns to school closures to social isolation'--coupled with pre-existing mental health conditions in some cases led this population to subconsciously require an outlet for their distress. In other words, researchers currently believe the condition does not have a genetic component to its origin like Tourette's , but rather environmental or psychological ones.
- According to the researchers' theory, seeing popular creators with tic disorders on social media sites was the match that ignited the kindling. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.
- Tyla Saxton, who uses the handle @tylatics on TikTok, can point to Evie Meg as the reason she's a creator on Tic Tok, the subculture of TikTok dedicated to people sharing their experiences with tics and tic-like behavior. Saxton, a 23-year-old from the UK, doesn't have a diagnosis yet but is on a waiting list to see a neurologist to diagnose tics that began a year and a half ago, just after Britain exited its first lockdown for COVID-19.
- ''I developed quite severe social anxiety when it started,'' she said, adding that formerly quotidian activities like going outside would cause her to panic and have disruptive tic attacks. ''I then got TikTok and saw some of the people with tics on there'--the main one was @thistrippyhippie. That gave me the confidence to start going out more, and then I decided I wanted to raise awareness for it as well.
- Saxton said that she often picks up tics from watching other Tic Tok creators' videos, something that Turnquist says happens to her, too. ''Catching'' others' tics is common for both those with tic disorders and rapid-onset tic-like behaviors; to give viewers control over what they may absorb, Saxton said that she includes trigger warnings on videos of her demonstrating some of her more violent tics. In one video that begins with a warning screen lasting several seconds, she hits herself repeatedly in the face. Other creators, including Meg, appear with bruises and other injuries caused by violent tics and tic-like behavior.
- Tics and tic-like behaviors can spread on the internet outside of TikTok, too. An article published August 23 in the journal Brain detailed German clinicians' anecdotal experience of noticing an increase in patients with tic-like behaviors over the past two years that bore a resemblance to those that a popular YouTuber documented on the platform.
- ''There's a lot of really weird, backwards stigma on TikTok about tic disorders''
- The researchers theorized that the condition affecting their patients was a form of mass sociogenic illness'--a poorly understood and contentious phenomenon once called mass hysteria. They, and others, have compared their current observations to a famous 2013 outbreak of tics in Le Roy, New York, which is also thought to have been a mass sociogenic illness. The difference this time, the German researchers argued, is that videos on social media induced the condition, rather than face-to-face contact.
- The researchers did not respond to a request for comment.
- Not all clinicians agree with this assessment. An editorial published in April in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood suggested that future studies can test hypotheses related to mass sociogenic illness and a possible biological mechanism. And Martino said that the role of social media has been overemphasized, and it is just one factor among many in the development of these tic-like behaviors.
- ''It's important not to focus all the attention exclusively on social media because we don't want to stigmatize the social media personalities sharing their experiences on TikTok or YouTube,'' he said. ''In most cases, these are individuals who have been doing this within the context of advocacy, and that is in itself not a bad thing, obviously.''
- Because of the connection to social media and the connotations of a sociogenic illness, patients experiencing tics may feel they are not being taken seriously.
- Myah Adele, a social media influencer who uses the handle @maybemyahadele on TikTok, said that she was taking a college course in psychology and watching videos of girls with Tourette's for it. She had developed what she considered ''muscle spasms'' after a traumatic event in 2018, and after watching the videos, she felt herself mimicking the girls' tics. When she told her doctor what was happening, she said her doctor explained that her behavior could be caused by a physical reaction to the grief and trauma she was experiencing.
- Though her doctor diagnosed her with a tic disorder, she said that she still worries about others thinking she's faking her symptoms, and even has to convince herself that she's not making them up.
- ''Two days ago, I was asking myself if I was faking it or not, and obviously I'm not faking it'--I was alone,'' she said, adding that her tics can be stressful and painful, too.
- Turnquist said that she has received some pushback in the comments of her TikToks from users doubting her condition. She said she aimed to spread awareness about sudden-onset tic disorders with her videos and tries not to let the negative comments and threats get to her, adding that the criticism emphasized the need for her efforts.
- ''I feel like there's a lot of really weird, backwards stigma on TikTok about tic disorders," she said. "Like, you aren't allowed to have one unless it's this one."
- Pringsheim said that she and Martino are working on a follow-up study to identify the treatments that work best to manage or cure sudden-onset tic-like behaviors, which they will complete in a few months. Turnquist, however, said that after trying a number of therapies for over a year, she's accepted that her tics are a part of who she is. She does her best to manage her triggers, which include stress, alcohol and exhaustion. But she does not have plans to stop watching and creating videos on TikTok, a decision that Martino said he understands well.
- ''It is a bit unrealistic to ask people to de-expose from social media as a whole," he said.
- 'Horse dewormer' overdose story debunked: We have no such doctor & treat people as normal, hospital says '-- RT USA News
- A shocking story claimed that an Oklahoma hospital had to turn away gunshot victims because so many people had overdosed on ''horse dewormer'' in a bid to treat Covid-19 themselves. The sensation was destroyed by lack of proof.
- As it turns out, the story was horse s**t from top to bottom. When podcast host Joe Rogan announced he was treating his own case of Covid-19 with a cocktail of medications including ivermectin, the establishment commentariat went into overdrive, describing the drug '' a Nobel Prize-winning anti-parasitic widely used around the world '' as a dangerous substance used in the treatment of livestock.
- Even after Rogan kicked Covid-19 within three days, the media's onslaught against ivermectin kept going, as pundits continued to refer to the drug as a ''horse dewormer.'' Rolling Stone, The Independent, The Guardian and other outlets reported on Friday that in one Oklahoma hospital, the ER was so overflowing with ivermectin overdoses that gunshot victims were being turned away.
- Also on rt.com Joe Rogan tests negative for Covid-19 after media storm over medication he used Based on a local report from a few days earlier, these outlets quoted Doctor Jason McElyea of Sallisaw, Oklahoma, who described patients showing a litany of symptoms including nausea, vomiting, muscle aches and even ''vision loss.''
- Yet none of it was true. The hospital McElyea worked at, NHS Sequoyah, released a statement on Saturday disavowing the doctor's story.
- ''Dr. McElyea has not worked at our Sallisaw location in over 2 months,'' the statement read. ''NHS Sequoyah has not treated any patients due to complications related to taking ivermectin. This includes not treating any patients for ivermectin overdose.''
- ''All patients who have visited our emergency room have received medical attention as appropriate. Our hospital has not had to turn away any patients seeking emergency care.''
- The clarification came after a host of liberal pundits had tweeted out McElyea's story as fact.
- "Patients overdosing on ivermectin backing up rural Oklahoma hospitals, ambulances""'The scariest one I've heard of and seen is people coming in with vision loss,' he said."https://t.co/P909GtxBQZ
- '-- Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) September 2, 2021''Dr. McElyea said patients are packing '... eastern and southeastern Oklahoma hospitals '.... 'The ERs are so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and be treated,' he said.'' https://t.co/eUxJNBJbUF
- '-- George Conway (@gtconway3d) September 4, 2021Ivermectin is used to treat parasitic infections in livestock as well as humans, albeit at much higher doses in the former. A number of studies and some anecdotal evidence suggest that the drug can treat Covid-19, but it has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treating the coronavirus.
- The FDA put out a tweet last month warning Americans away from self-medicating with animal formulations of ivermectin, commonly available at veterinary surgeries and feed stores. ''You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it,'' the snarky tweet read.
- Despite some studies touting its efficacy against the virus, discussion of ivermectin as a treatment option is all but banned on some social media platforms. YouTube suspended a sitting US senator for talking about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as treatments, while Twitter blacklisted a peer-reviewed medical journal for publishing evidence of ivermectin's effectiveness.
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- NASA finds evidence of parallel universe where time runs backward: report
- In a scenario straight out of ''The Twilight Zone,'' a group of NASA scientists working on an experiment in Antarctica have detected evidence of a parallel universe '-- where the rules of physics are the opposite of our own, according to a report.
- The concept of a parallel universe has been around since the early 1960s, mostly in the minds of fans of sci-fi TV shows and comics, but now a cosmic ray detection experiment has found particles that could be from a parallel realm that also was born in the Big Bang, the Daily Star reported.
- The experts used a giant balloon to carry NASA's Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna, or ANITA, high above Antarctica, where the frigid, dry air provided the perfect environment with little to no radio noise to distort its findings.
- A constant ''wind'' of high-energy particles constantly arrives on Earth from outer space.
- ANITA Antarctic Hang Test University of Hawai'i at Manoa;Low-energy, subatomic neutrinos with a mass close to zero can pass completely through Earth, but higher-energy objects are stopped by the solid matter of our planet, according to the report.
- That means the high-energy particles can only be detected coming ''down'' from space, but the team's ANITA detected heavier particles, so-called tau neutrinos, which come ''up'' out of the Earth.
- The finding implies that these particles are actually traveling backward in time, suggesting evidence of a parallel universe, according to the Daily Star.
- University of Hawai'i at Manoa;Principal ANITA investigator Peter Gorham, an experimental particle physicist at the University of Hawaii, suggested that the only way the tau neutrino could behave that way is if it changed into a different type of particle before passing through the Earth and then back again.
- Gorham, lead author on a Cornell University paper describing the odd phenomenon, noted that he and his fellow researchers had seen several of these ''impossible events,'' which some were skeptical about.
- ''Not everyone was comfortable with the hypothesis,'' he told New Scientist.
- The simplest explanation for the phenomenon is that at the moment of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, two universes were formed '-- ours and one that from our perspective is running in reverse with time going backward.
- Of course, if there are any inhabitants of a possible parallel universe, they'd consider us the backward ones.
- ''We're left with the most exciting or most boring possibilities,'' said Ibrahim Safa, who also worked on the experiment.
- ARIZ. AG: Tuscon Vaccine Mandate Is Illegal - Breaking911
- FILE PHOTO - Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images AG Warns City Could Lose Millions in Funds
- PHOENIX '' The City of Tucson announced Tuesday that it will be putting its COVID-19 vaccine mandate for its employees on pause after the state's attorney general declared it illegal.
- Attorney General Mark Brnovich says that his office determined the City of Tucson's COVID-19 vaccine mandate for public employees does violate state law for purposes of S.B. 1487, and also is in direct conflict with the Governor's Executive Order 2021-18. Therefore, Tucson must rescind or amend the ordinance to come into compliance with state law, or lose millions of dollars in state funding.
- ''Tucson's vaccine mandate is illegal, and the city could be held liable for attempting to force employees to take it against their beliefs,'' said Attorney General Mark Brnovich. ''COVID-19 vaccinations should be a choice, not a government mandate.''
- Through a ''S.B. 1487'' investigation, the AGO determined Tucson's Ordinance 11869, which mandates COVID-19 vaccines for city employees, violates state law and thus the city cannot require public employees to obtain a COVID-19 vaccine. The legislature's intent was clear when it passed S.B. 1824 earlier this year '' government entities from the local to state level cannot mandate COVID-19 vaccines. This law was further supplemented by the Governor's Executive Order 2021-18 (E.O. 2021-18) in August 2021.In the AGO's opinion, Tucson public employees could rely in good faith on E.O. 2021-18 and state law to refuse the city's COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
- Today, the AGO officially notified the City of Tucson that its COVID-19 vaccine ordinance is in violation of state law and must be rescinded or amended. As expressly provided in S.B. 1487, if the City of Tucson does not rescind its policy within the next 30 days, the AGO will notify the Arizona Treasurer, who will withhold the city's portion of state shared revenue until it comes into compliance.
- Additionally, the AGO believes the City of Tucson could subject itself to potential liability claims if it were to take adverse action against an employee who relies on E.O. 2021-18 and state law to refuse the vaccine.
- Better Data on Ivermectin Is Finally on Its Way | WIRED
- Edward Mills came to the meeting last month with very good data. A clinical trials expert at McMaster University, Mills was presenting new results from a trial that is looking at how well half a dozen different drugs treat Covid-19'--not for the people so sick they're in the emergency room or the hospital, but in people whose symptoms haven't gotten that bad yet. People sick at home, in other words.
- At his online talk, put on by the National Institutes of Health, Mills' slides told the tale: A relatively safe, familiar, cheap drug reduced the relative risk of mild Covid getting worse by nearly 30 percent. The drug is fluvoxamine, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor'--an antidepressant. (It's also an anti-inflammatory, and inflammation and an overreacting immune system are hallmarks of serious Covid infection, so that might be why it seems to help). Get a bunch of people with Covid and randomize them into two groups; 739 get fluvoxamine and 733 get a placebo. Only 77 of the fluvoxamine-takers end up in the hospital; 109 of the placebo group do. This is exciting.
- ''This is the first time these results have been presented in a public forum?'' asked the moderator, Adrian Hernandez, director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute.
- ''Yeah,'' Mills answered. ''You are hearing it for the first time.''
- ''Well, simply, wow,'' Hernandez said. If the data bears out, it'll be only the second repurposed drug that works for outpatient Covid-19. (The other is a steroid called budesonide; other drugs you might have heard of, like remdesivir or dexamethasone, are for people who are severely ill and hospitalized.) The team's results haven't been peer-reviewed or officially published yet, but the Together trial, on which Mills is co-principal investigator, is well-designed and respected. Now, to be clear, fluvoxamine is still a ways off from becoming part of the standard of care for people with Covid-19. Once the Together trial's results get published, guideline-setting organizations like the US Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization will have to take a look. But the Together trial data, if it holds up, seems positive for the SSRI.
- But wait! There's more! In the very same presentation, the very same trial that showed this antidepressant might lessen the symptoms of Covid-19 also showed that the antiparasitic drug ivermectin'--you've heard about that one, right?'--doesn't help at all. In the Together trial, that drug, commonly used against things like river blindness and intestinal roundworms, didn't keep anyone with Covid out of the hospital any better than a placebo. Of 677 people with Covid who got 400 micrograms per kilogram of weight per day for three days, 86 ended up in the ER or hospital; of the 678 people who got a placebo, 95 went. That's not a significant difference, and Mills' team dropped it from the study. (Vaccination, I should add, is still the most effective, safest, cheapest, and easiest way to avoid getting sick.)
- Ivermectin had some promising early results against the virus in petri dishes and in smaller and observational studies, but it still hasn't aced a trial. Of two apparent large-scale confirmations of its effects, one (a preprint from researchers in Egypt) got retracted over concerns about plagiarism and fake data. Scientists and journalists at BuzzFeed have found irregularities in the data from another. A separate, positive review of all the data on ivermectin was rejected from a journal after provisional acceptance for concerns about research integrity and conflicts of interest, while a strict meta-analysis of all the randomized, controlled trials of ivermectin against Covid found no positive effect for the drug. The FDA says people shouldn't take it. The American Medical Association and two pharmacist associations have issued a statement recommending that none of their members prescribe ivermectin for Covid-19 outside of a clinical trial. (Oh, and a physician in Arkansas gave the drug to unknowing, unconsenting prison inmates, which generally is not the side of history you want to be on.)
- Yet ivermectin is still a big deal in the US. Prescriptions spiked to nearly 100,000 in August, 20 times their pre-pandemic level. Talk show hosts, right-wing propagandists, and some physicians are still claiming that the drug is miraculously effective. Shortages and lack of access to prescriptions have led some people to turn to the more readily available veterinary formulations of the drug'--horse and cow deworming agents. That's dangerous, to be sure, though perhaps not enough people actually did it to warrant an unusual amount of snark from a federal agency warning against interspecies self-medication.
- All this confusion and misinformation filled what has been an information vacuum. No one had rock-solid data on cheap, workhorse drugs to fight ''mild'' outpatient Covid. The need for them became apparent early in the pandemic, and it hasn't gone away. Vaccines are powerful armor against the virus, but money, policy, and logistics mean most of the world can't get them, and pockets of political opposition and structural obstacles remain in wealthier countries like the United States. Combine that real need with snake-oil grifterism and political opportunism and you get crazes like this one for ivermectin or last year's for hydroxychloroquine (which mostly faded when big randomized trials like Recovery in England and another at the University of Minnesota found that it had no effect, and doctors stopped prescribing it). Maybe hydroxychloroquine's journey will be a template. ''There was noise on both sides in terms of, is it a cure-all or does it have safety issues? But when the Recovery trial came out with a rigorous, definitive answer of 'No, it doesn't work,' everything quieted down,'' says Hernandez. ''That's the crisis. We haven't had a national system that can rigorously evaluate these in a rapid fashion. That's kind of what we need now to address the ivermectin question, a definitive answer to 'does it work or not?'''
- In North America, trials to get those answers have begun. The Together trial is an adaptive, multi-arm trial'--which means it enrolls people on an ongoing basis and uses statistical techniques to swap drugs in and out as they either succeed or fail. Besides helping dispatch hydroxychloroquine, the Together trial has now similarly shown that the antidiabetes (and sometimes anti-aging) drug metformin doesn't make much of a difference, either.
- But political activists didn't turn metformin into a rhetorical tool; ivermectin has stans so aggressive they make Gamergaters seem chill. Mills says he and his colleagues have been abused and threatened by ivermectin adherents; the trial designers even went through the rigorous process of changing the dosage administered to comport better to the fans' preferred regimen of three days instead of just one. ''We tested, what, seven other drugs? Nobody abuses us about the other drugs. We even showed one of them worked,'' Mills tells me. His team touted positive results for fluvoxamine, ''and that crowd doesn't seem to care. If you ask them, 'Why do you feel so strongly about ivermectin?' they will say, 'Because we feel there should be a cheap, effective drug that can be used by poor people.' OK, well, we have that. We have it with fluvoxamine, and with inhaled budesonide. Why do they not care about those drugs? They don't have an answer. They just want to talk about ivermectin.''
- I've written about this problem before. Since the pandemic began, physicians and researchers have launched hundreds of trials for Covid-19 drugs, involving thousands of volunteer participants. But drug trials are complicated and expensive. Taken individually, few of those trials had the rigorous design or statistical power to give results robust enough to change the standard of care. A few did, of course. The drug remdesivir'--in a trial partially supported by a pharma company'--showed some success. Expensive monoclonal antibodies (touted by Florida governor Ron DeSantis as an alternative to vaccines or masks) were hits, too. But a health care worker has to administer them. ''There was this notion of a 1,000 flowers blooming, all these individual sites doing local trials. But there was no integration of those, so you couldn't generate answers that would change guidelines,'' Hernandez says.
- A big, multicenter trial Hernandez is running'--the sixth in a series of NIH-funded studies called Accelerating Covid'19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines, or Activ-6'--will also look at fluvoxamine, a steroid called fluticasone, and, yes, ivermectin, but at different doses than the Together trial administered. ''People recognized back in the spring that there was a gap in the Activ programs, which is how to study drugs that were easily administered at home and had a long safety record,'' Hernandez says. In his trial, people can sign up from anywhere and get their drugs (or placebos) by mail. It's a convenient way to get data, and it also gets around another problem with drug trials. Over the course of a fast-moving pandemic, a local wave of patients might crest and then break before an academic hospital can set up the infrastructure to actually do the study. But people can sign up for Activ-6 from home, making it a lot more flexible. (Together dealt with that issue by studying people in Brazil, where it was easier to find sick people.)
- Why do another trial at all if the evidence for ivermectin's usefulness is collapsing? Well, for one thing, the researchers started planning it before the collapse began. It takes a while for a big trial to change course. Methodologically and bureaucratically, a lot of groups have to sign off, and researchers and administrators have been planning Activ-6 for months'--since the days when ivermectin looked like a better bet. ''Based on the existing data, particularly the Together trial, there is not any evidence that ivermectin has any role in the outpatient realm,'' says David Boulware, an infectious disease physician and researcher at the University of Minnesota who is cochair of the Activ-6 steering committee. ''There's no data on clinical benefit. Does it prevent hospitalization or ER visits? Does it reduce severity or duration of symptoms? When you put the data together, there's nothing conclusive. The point of Activ-6 is: Let's get a definitive answer, because people are using it.''
- Much of the US response to the pandemic has been exactly this backward'--responsive to misinformation rather than getting out in front of it. This has been going on for long enough that the pandemic itself has changed. Vaccination does an excellent job keeping people out of the hospital, but people get breakthrough cases, albeit relatively mild ones, even where vaccination is common. Everyone would benefit from something their physician could prescribe that'd make them feel better and keep ERs clear for the desperately ill'--with Covid, or anything else. A drug that actually worked in people, with good data behind it? That'd be worth a ''wow.''
- More From WIRED on Covid-19
- ð'(C) The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!Vaccine mandates work'--but only if they're done rightThe US is getting Covid booster shots. The world is furiousThe Delta variant has warped our risk perceptionHow to find a vaccine appointment and what to expectNeed a face mask? Here are ones we like to wearRead all of our coronavirus coverage here
- Howard Stern ROASTS Dead Anti-Vax Radio Hosts, Wants Mandate
- Legendary shock-jock Howard Stern laughed at and mocked right-wing radio hosts who have died of Covid after preaching against vaccines, and made a forceful case that the vaccines should be mandatory.
- On Tuesday's edition of Sirius XM's The Howard Stern Show, the host gleefully derided the recent slew of conservative radio hosts who railed against masks or vaccines or both, only to later become sick and die of the disease.
- ''It's really funny when these radio, the radio guys are the best, they're like four of them died, four of them were like ranting on the air. They will not get vaccinated. They were they were on fire, these guys, it was like day after day, they were all dying and then their dying words are 'I wish I had been more into the vaccine. I wish I had taken it.''' Stern said, laughing several times.
- ''You know, I have trouble drumming up compassion, and I think that's a terrible thing to not be able to drum up compassion for people that are stupid, that they wind up dying,'' co-host Robin Quivers said.
- Where do I have that clip of that Mark, [Marc Bernier], er the guy who died. I got it. Here it is. This is the guy,'' Stern said, playing a clip of Bernier saying he would not get the vaccine.
- Stern remarked that there are three others, and ''they're on the radio preaching this shit.''
- ''I'll tell you what, far as I remember, when I went to school, you had to get a measles vaccine, you had to get a mumps vaccine, you had to get, it was a ton of them,'' Stern said.
- ''When are we going to stop putting up with the idiots in this country and just say, you know, it's mandatory to get vaccinated?'' Stern asked. ''Fuck them, fuck their freedom. I want my freedom to live. I want to get out of the house already. I want to go next door and play chess. I want to go take some pictures.''
- Listen above via SiriusXM.
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- ORWELLIAN: CDC Changes Definition Of "Vaccination" To No Longer Include "Immunity" - Big League Politics
- On September 1st, 2021 the United States Center for Disease Control (CDC) updated its website's definition of the word ''vaccination,'' replacing the word ''immunity'' with ''protection.''
- ''Vaccination: The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.''
- Prior to September 1st, the orginial definiton of ''vaccination'' on the CDC's website. ''Vaccination: The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce protection from a specific disease.''
- As of Septembest 1st, the new definiton of ''vaccination'' on the CDC's website. The change in definition was noticed by Americans around the country with many posting screenshots of the definition before and after the change online.
- One such post was shared on Instagram by conservative political commentator Kangmin Lee, known as @koreanchristianconservative on Instagram.
- ''We're living in 1984.'' Lee writes. ''They keep shifting the goalpost, lying to us, and redefining terms. They did this with herd immunity, anti-vax, and now the definition of vaccination itself from immunity to ''protection'', which is such a broad, vague term. And of course, this is all by design. Wake up America.''
- ''Stop trusting these public health bureaucrats,'' Lee wrote in another comment on his post.
- The post shows a screenshot of a Twitter post saying ''The CDC changes the definition of v'ºccination on September 1st. Replaces 'immunity' with 'protection,''' and also shows screenshots to show evidence of the definition before and after the change, with dates included.
- An Instagram post exposing the CDC's recently changed definitionSuspicions of American institutions like the CDC are at an all-time high, especially with reports of waning vaccine efficacy like Israel's report on Pfziers vaccine being only 39% effective against certain variants.
- Big League Politics has covered Orwellian attacks on language by American institutions in the past, including Merriam-Webster's redefining of the word ''anti-vaxxer'' to include those who do not support forced vaccination.
- 'Recently, the Merriam-Webster dictionary (also called ''The Ministry of Truth'' in some circles) decided to broaden the scope of how to define the word ''anti-vaxxer.''
- Merriam-Webster's website now defines ''anti-vaxxer'' as ''a person who opposes vaccination or laws that mandate vaccination.'' In other words, any person who does not believe in forcing a needle down the arms of others now falls under this term, regardless of their personal views on vaccines.
- ''Welcome to '1984.' This is the Ministry of Truth,'' rapper and podcaster Zuby said on Twitter, in reference to George Orwell's dystopian novel.
- In the past, the Oxford Dictionary took similar action by changing the definition of the word ''bigot.''
- For a long time, the word was defined as someone who is ''intolerant toward those holding different opinions.''
- The new definition reads as a bit more politically targeted'...'
- Read more hereInterestingly, Tony Fauci said that only ''probably a little bit more than half'' of CDC staff are vaccinated against COVID-19, which surprised many as the organization strongly urges all Americans to get the shot, and often has its own representatives push for forced inoculation.
- The CDC currently does not require any of its own staff to receive the COVID-19 vaccination.
- Support Big League Politics by making a donation today. You can also donate via PayPal, Venmo or donate crypto. Your support helps us take on the powerful and report the truth that the mainstream media wants to silence.
- Revealed: LAPD officers told to collect social media data on every civilian they stop | Los Angeles | The Guardian
- T he Los Angeles police department (LAPD) has directed its officers to collect the social media information of every civilian they interview, including individuals who are not arrested or accused of a crime, according to records shared with the Guardian.
- Copies of the ''field interview cards'' that police complete when they question civilians reveal that LAPD officers are instructed to record a civilian's Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media accounts, alongside basic biographical information. An internal memo further shows that the police chief, Michel Moore, told employees that it was critical to collect the data for use in ''investigations, arrests, and prosecutions'', and warned that supervisors would review cards to ensure they were complete.
- The documents, which were obtained by the not-for-profit organization the Brennan Center for Justice, have raised concerns about civil liberties and the potential for mass surveillance of civilians without justification.
- ''There are real dangers about police having all of this social media identifying information at their fingertips,'' said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, a deputy director at the Brennan Center, noting that the information was probably stored in a database that could be used for a wide range of purposes.
- The Brennan Center conducted a review of 40 other police agencies in the US and was unable to find another department that required social media collection on interview cards (though many have not publicly disclosed copies of the cards). The organization also obtained records about the LAPD's social media surveillance technologies, which have raised questions about the monitoring of activist groups including Black Lives Matter.
- Police detain people during the George Floyd protests in Los Angeles on 1 June 2020. Photograph: REX/ShutterstockSurveillance concernsIn 2015, the department added ''social media accounts'' as a line on the physical field interview cards, according to a newly unearthed memo from the previous LAPD chief, Charlie Beck. ''Similar to a nickname or an alias, a person's online persona or identity used for social media '... can be highly beneficial to investigations,'' he wrote.
- While the social media collection has gone largely unnoticed, the LAPD's use of field interview cards has prompted controversy. Last October, prosecutors filed criminal charges against three officers in the LAPD's metro division, accusing them of using the cards to falsely label civilians as gang members after stopping them. That unit also has a history of stopping Black drivers at disproportionately high rates, and according to the LA Times, has more frequently filled out cards for Black and Latino residents they stopped.
- Meanwhile, more than half of the civilians stopped by metro officers and documented in the cards were not arrested or cited, the Times reported. The fact that a department under scrutiny for racial profiling was also engaged in broad scale social media account collection is troubling, said Levinson-Waldman.
- LA police officers are instructed to fill out field interview cards which record social media information. Photograph: LAPDFurthermore, when police obtain social media usernames it opens the door for officers to monitor an individual's connections and ''friends'' online, creating additional privacy concerns. ''It allows for a huge expansion of network surveillance,'' said Levinson-Waldman, noting how police and prosecutors have previously used Facebook photos and ''likes'' to make dubious or false allegations of criminal gang activity.
- Hamid Khan of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition noted that the LAPD also shares data with federal law enforcement agencies through ''fusion centers'', and has previously used ''predictive policing'' technologies that rely on data collected by officers in the field and which can criminalize communities of color.
- ''This is like stop and frisk,'' he said, of the use of field interview cards. ''And this is happening with the clear goal of surveillance.'' The LAPD, he noted, has allowed officers to pose undercover to investigate groups, meaning officers can create fake social media accounts to infiltrate groups.
- Dr Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter LA, said she had long suspected the LAPD conducted ''targeted tracking'' of specific groups or individual accounts, but was surprised to learn of the default collection of this information in everyday encounters. She fears this could be part of ''a massive surveillance operation''.
- Police keep a watchful eye on a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest outside Los Angeles' city hall on 2 June 2020. Photograph: David Buchan/Rex/ShutterstockThe copies of the cards obtained by the Brennan Center also revealed that police are instructed to ask civilians for their social security numbers and are advised to tell interviewees that ''it must be provided'' under federal law. Kathleen Kim, a Loyola law professor and immigrants' rights expert, who previously served on the LA police commission, said she was not aware of any law requiring individuals to disclose social security numbers to local police.
- And she said she was shocked to learn about the social security section on the cards, noting that it was ''so antithetical to the department's own policies'' and clearly violated the spirit of sanctuary laws, which are supposed to prevent officers from asking civilians their immigration status. The LAPD had previously taken steps to ensure it was not requesting place of birth information to improve trust with undocumented communities, she said.
- The LAPD told the Guardian on Tuesday that the field interview card policy was ''being updated'', but declined to provide further details.
- Monitoring Black Lives Matter LAThe revelations of broad social media data collection also raised concerns about how police monitor activists.
- A man is taken into custody during a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Los Angeles on 2 June 2020. Photograph: David Buchan/Rex/ShutterstockThe Brennan Center obtained LAPD documents related to Geofeedia, a private social media monitoring firm that partners with law enforcement and has previously marketed itself as a tool to monitor BLM protests.
- One internal document, which is undated but appeared to be several years old, listed the ''keywords'' and hashtags that the LAPD appeared to be monitoring through Geofeedia '' and they were almost exclusively related to Black Lives Matter and similar leftist protests. It included #BLMLA, #SayHerName, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, #fuckdonaldtrump and the names of people killed by LA police that prompted major protests.
- The list did not include any hashtags for rightwing demonstrations and far-right movements, which have grown increasingly violent in recent years in the region.
- The context in which these search terms were used is unclear from the records provided, and the LAPD did not respond to questions. The city attorney's office said the LAPD stopped using Geofeedia around 2017 and that the agency did not have a current list of keywords for social media monitoring.
- Abdullah, who helped organize around many of the hashtags the LAPD was monitoring, noted that BLM's actions were non-violent: ''They're following Black protesters who are organizing to stop violence and saying, 'Stop killing us' '... And are they turning a blind eye to those who are actually violent: the white supremacist organizations that are growing in number?''
- A man in a Black Lives Matter mask attends a protest in Los Angeles on 14 June 2020. Photograph: tienne Laurent/EPAIn a 2016 memo to LAPD included in the records, another social media tracking company, Dataminr, listed under ''success stories'' its tracking of a BLMLA protest outside a jail, saying the firm ''uncovered the first images of people at the protest'', as well as its tracking of a protest featuring ''a giant blowup statue of Trump''. The local news site, LA Taco, reported last week that LAPD had used Dataminr to monitor last year's BLM protests for George Floyd.
- Jacinta Gonzlez, an organizer with advocacy group, Mijente, said the LAPD records appeared to fit a pattern of how police in America respond to protest organizations: ''There is a long history of law enforcement using surveillance, whether in-person or through digital technologies to attack Black and Latino movements fighting for racial justice.''
- LAPD's new tech: 'address threats before they occur'The Brennan Center's records further revealed the LAPD is now seeking to use technology from a new company, Media Sonar, which also tracks social media for police. In the 2021 budget, the LAPD allotted $73,000 to purchase Media Sonar software to help the department ''address a potential threat or incident before its occurrence''.
- The extent of the LAPD's Media Sonar use is unclear, but the company's communications with the LAPD have raised questions. In one message, the firm said its services can be used to ''stay on-top of drug/gang/weapon slang keywords and hashtags''. Levinson-Waldman said she feared the company or police would misinterpret ''slang'' or lack proper context on local groups and language, and she noted research showing that online threats made by gang-affiliated youth largely don't escalate to violence.
- Protesters carry signs as they gather near city hall in Los Angeles on 3 June 2020. Photograph: tienne Laurent/EPAMedia Sonar also told the LAPD it offers ''pre-built keyword groups'' to ''help jumpstart implementation'' of threat models, and helps police ''cast a wide net''. The firm also said it could provide a ''full digital snapshot of an individual's online presence including all related personas and connections''.
- The messages from Media Sonar suggested that the department needed significant safeguards to ensure that keywords didn't disparately target marginalized communities and checks to ensure the data was accurate, Levinson-Waldman said.
- Records show that the LAPD has requested federal funding for Media Sonar for ''terrorism prevention'', but some advocates are concerned it would be used for protests. In March, a city council report analyzing the LAPD's response to BLM protests recommended the department purchase software to analyze social media content.
- Media Sonar did not respond to inquiries about its relationship with the LAPD. The LAPD did not respond to requests for comment about Media Sonar.
- Premarket stocks trading: El Salvador's bitcoin experiment is a warning to other countries - CNN
- A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business' Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here.
- London (CNN Business)El Salvador's "Bitcoin Day" did not go especially well.
- The impoverished country's vaunted adoption of bitcoin as legal tender on Tuesday was marred by street protests, technical glitches and an
- extreme drop in the value of the controversial digital currency.
- "Chivo Wallet," a storage app created by the government, wasn't immediately available on major app stores. By the end of the day, it had appeared on Apple and Huawei platforms.Hundreds of people marched against bitcoin in various protests across the capital city, the Financial Times reported. The price of bitcoin started the day around $53,000 before plunging by as much as 19%, according to data from Coinbase. The digital currency has since recovered some losses to trade near $46,270.President Nayib Bukele, a right-wing populist who is the driving force behind the bitcoin initiative, took the dramatic price drop in his stride. "Buying the dip," he quipped on Twitter. He also joined online crypto supporters in praising major companies such as
- ( MCD ) for accepting bitcoin as payment.
- Supporters have argued that adopting bitcoin as legal tender will help Salvadorans avoid costly fees on remittances from abroad, which totaled nearly $6 billion last year '-- around a quarter of GDP.
- Bukele may succeed in ironing out the initial technical glitches, but the biggest risks from bitcoin will persist long into the future.
- El Salvador does not have a currency of its own, instead relying on the US dollar. Adding another currency to the mix that's prone to wild changes in value will further complicate the government's budget and tax planning.
- It's also a nightmare for households and businesses, who now have to devote time and resources to deciding whether to hold their funds in dollars or bitcoin. With crypto prices prone to wild swings, the stakes are high.
- Another risk: Adopting bitcoin as legal tender may also encourage crime to flourish, according to the International Monetary Fund, which agreed to provide $389 million in emergency funding to El Salvador in April 2020.
- "Without robust anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism measures, cryptoassets can be used to launder ill-gotten money, fund terrorism, and evade taxes. This could pose risks to a country's financial system, fiscal balance, and relationships with foreign countries and correspondent banks," the IMF said in July.
- Big picture: Credit rating agencies are not impressed. In late July, Moody's Investors Service pushed El Salvador's debt deeper into junk territory, citing "a deterioration in the quality of policymaking" including the government's decision to adopt bitcoin as legal tender.
- Moody's said the country remains susceptible to financing shocks that could jeopardize the government's ability to repay creditors starting in January 2023. That means El Salvador is likely to need another bailout from the IMF.
- Other countries should follow El Salvador with extreme caution. The IMF urged governments to use new digital forms of money only when they can preserve financial stability, efficiency and equality.
- "Attempting to make cryptoassets a national currency is an inadvisable shortcut," the IMF warned.
- Chinese investors pour $1 billion into BlackRock's new fund
- BlackRock's new investment fund in China '-- the first owned entirely by a foreign firm '-- has
- attracted $1 billion from Chinese investors in its first week.
- The world's largest asset manager said Wednesday that the fund '-- which has now raised 6.68 billion yuan '-- was officially established this week and has attracted more than 111,000 investors. It started offering investment products to individual Chinese investors late last month.
- "We are very proud of achieving this milestone for our China fund management business, and are grateful for investors' overwhelming support," said Rachel Lord, BlackRock's chair and head of Asia Pacific.
- Remember: BlackRock's announcement comes days after the company was blasted by billionaire philanthropist George Soros for its efforts in China, which he called a "blunder." BlackRock's new product launch came just weeks after it recommended that investors pile into Chinese assets.
- "Pouring billions of dollars into China now is a tragic mistake," Soros wrote in an op-edrote in an op-ed published Monday by the Wall Street Journal. "It is likely to lose money for BlackRock's clients and, more important, will damage the national security interests of the [United States] and other democracies."
- Soros highlighted Xi's recent crackdown on private business, which he sees as proof that "the regime regards all Chinese companies as instruments of the one-party state." He also referenced "an enormous crisis brewing in China's real estate market," and Xi's efforts to redistribute wealth. These trends, he said, do "not augur well for foreign investors."
- Who's right? Time will tell.
- The humble shipping container
- You probably don't spend much time thinking about
- shipping containers. But these humble building blocks of global trade have become incredibly scarce and extremely expensive during the pandemic.
- Before the Bell's lead author Julia Horowitz spent the past couple weeks reporting on shipping containers and how they're contributing to a global shipping crisis. Backlogs are now looming over the holiday shopping season.
- Before the coronavirus hit, companies could rent a 20-foot or 40-foot box with relative ease, allowing them to move goods at a low cost. But empty boxes remain scattered across Europe and North America, while supply chain delays mean even more are needed to fulfill orders.
- Here's the result: One year ago, companies would pay roughly $1,920 to book a 40-foot steel container on a standard route between China and Europe, according to data from Drewry, a maritime research consultancy.
- Now, they're spending more than $14,000, an increase of more than 600%. Meanwhile, the cost of buying a container has effectively doubled.
- "We are seeing record high rates, particularly on the spot market," said John Fossey, head of container equipment and leasing research at Drewry, referring to the just-in-time reservation of trips on ocean carriers.
- Experts in the container industry aren't sure when prices will ease. But they do agree on one thing: The situation isn't going to be resolved any time soon.
- Gene Seroka, executive director at the Port of Los Angeles, has said that supply chain issues could persist until 2023.
- ( LULU ) report earnings after the closing bell.
- Also today: US job openings data at 10:00 a.m. ET.
- Coming tomorrow: ECB decision and US unemployment claims.
- US vets volunteer to secretly rescue allies in Afghanistan
- A group of highly trained US military veterans has been secretly rescuing hundreds of allied operatives from Afghanistan '-- volunteering over fears those allies would otherwise be left for dead, according to a report.
- The weeklong secret operation dubbed ''Pineapple Express'' has been carried out by a group of special ops veterans including retired Green Berets and SEAL Team commanders, they told ABC News.
- They were driven by deep frustration ''that our own government didn't do this,'' former Navy SEAL Jason Redman told ABC.
- ''We did what we should do, as Americans,'' he said.
- They initially formed to rescue an ex-Afghan commando who was getting death threats from the Taliban for having worked with US special forces and elite SEAL Team Six, ABC said.
- After the US military pulled out of Afghanistan, US vets came back to make sure no one was left behind. REUTERSAfter the Taliban's target and his family of six were rescued, the task force continued rescuing Afghan allies '-- and has so far helped at least 630 get through the deadly ring of steel outside Kabul airport to safely evacuate.
- They normally smuggled people into the airport in the middle of the night, either one person at a time or in pairs.
- Former Lt. Jason C. Redman felt frustrated since his own government was lending out a helping hand to those who needed it. Twitter''That is an astounding number for an organization that was only assembled days before the start of operations and most of its members had never met each other in person,'' former Green Beret Capt. Zac Lois told ABC.
- The group dodged heavily militarized Taliban checkpoints to smuggle people through to the airport, using images of pineapples on their phones to show those being brought in that they were on their side.
- The tropical fruit was also used as a final password '-- since changed '-- that was given to US military members at the airport who were working unofficially in tandem with the heroic veterans, ABC said.
- They defied deadly chaos that one member compared to scenes worthy of a Jason Bourne flick happening every 10 minutes.
- ''I just want to get my people out,'' Maj. Jim Gant, a retired Green Beret who ABC said has been dubbed ''Lawrence of Afghanistan,'' told the network of the daring operation.
- The operation was referred to as ''Pineapple Express.'' Twitter''I have been involved in some of the most incredible missions and operations that a special forces guy could be a part of, and I have never been a part of anything more incredible than this,'' Gant insisted.
- ''The bravery and courage and commitment of my brothers and sisters in the Pineapple community was greater than the US commitment on the battlefield,'' he said.
- The volunteer force was led by another retired Green Beret commander, Lt. Col. Scott Mann, who told ABC the team was proud to have helped ''dozens of high-risk individuals, families with small children, orphans, and pregnant women.''
- ''This Herculean effort couldn't have been done without the unofficial heroes inside the airfield who defied their orders to not help beyond the airport perimeter, by wading into sewage canals and pulling in these targeted people who were flashing pineapples on their phones,'' Mann said.
- Redman is a Navy SEAL veteran who was severely wounded in combat. ASSOCIATED PRESSThe rescues continued ''up to just seconds before ISIS detonated a bomb into the huddled mass of Afghans seeking safety and freedom'' on Thursday, Mann told ABC.
- ABC said some Pineapple Express travelers were injured in the terror attack, and the group was still assessing whether any were among the more than 180 killed.
- Some of those rescued said they witnessed people just inches away from them being killed, while others refused to leave unless their family members were also evacuated.
- ''Leaving a man behind is not in our SEAL ethos. Many Afghans have a stronger vision of our democratic values than many Americans do,'' said Dan O'Shea, a retired SEAL commander and former counterinsurgency adviser in Afghanistan.
- Even though they're no longer on active duty, the veterans have been called heroes for their action. TwitterFormer deputy assistant secretary of defense Mick Mulroy said the task force felt it was their duty to save allies who ''never wavered'' in supporting the US.
- ''I and many of my friends are here today because of their bravery in battle. We owe them all effort to get them out and honor our word,'' Mulroy said.
- EU wil alle bezittingen van burgers registreren
- 8 sep. 2021 11:20:00 door Frank Knopers |
- Categories: Goud en Zilver, Financieel Comments De Europese Commissie denkt na over een nieuw register om alle bezittingen van burgers te registreren. Daarin moeten niet alleen eigendommen in de vorm van onroerend goed, grond en aandelen worden opgenomen, maar ook bezittingen als edelmetalen, cryptomunten, sieraden, kunstwerken, auto's en boten. Dat blijkt uit een nieuw document getiteld ' Feasibility Study for a European asset registry '.
- Volgens de Europese Commissie is een dergelijk register noodzakelijk om belastingontduiking en witwassen te voorkomen. Het geeft de autoriteiten meer informatie om geldstromen in kaart te brengen. Uit de tekst van het voorstel:
- "Het verzamelen van gegevens en de onderlinge koppeling van registers is een belangrijk instrument in het kader van de EU-wetgeving om de toegang van de bevoegde autoriteiten tot financile informatie te versnellen en grensoverschrijdende samenwerking te vergemakkelijken. In het kader van dit project worden verschillende mogelijkheden onderzocht voor het verzamelen van informatie met het oog op het opzetten van een activaregister dat vervolgens kan worden gebruikt voor een toekomstig beleidsinitiatief.
- Er zal worden nagegaan hoe men informatie uit verschillende bronnen over eigendom van activa (bv. kadasters, vennootschapsregisters, trust- en stichtingenregisters, centrale bewaarinstellingen voor effectenbezit, enz. ) kan analyseren en hoe het ontwerp, de reikwijdte en de uitdagingen van een dergelijk vermogensregister van de Unie eruit kan zien. Ook zal worden nagegaan of gegevens over de eigendom van andere activa, zoals cryptomunten, kunstwerken, onroerend goed en goud, in het register kunnen worden opgenomen."
- Financile repressie Hoewel het slechts een voorstel betreft is dit een bijzonder zorgelijke ontwikkeling. Het geeft overheden nog meer inzicht in het vermogen van burgers, bovenop de informatie die ze nu al verzamelen. Opvallend is dat het voorstel alleen belangen van overheden, toezichthouders, banken en NGO's belicht en geen rekening houdt met belangen van Europese burgers. Ook maakt het voorstel niet duidelijk waarom een meer gedetailleerde registratie van bezittingen noodzakelijk is.
- Onder het mom van witwassen en terrorisme wordt de vrijheid en privacy van burgers met een dergelijk register verder aangetast. Overheden gebruiken het als excuus om meer controle uit te kunnen oefenen op de eigen bevolking. Uit verschillende hoeken klinkt dan ook felle kritiek op het voorstel. Volgens de Duitse politicus Markus Ferber gaat de Europese Commissie haar boekje voorbij. "Deze plannen zijn totaal disproportioneel. De relatie tussen de burger en de staat doet me bij dit soort plannen denken aan China, niet aan EU lidstaten".
- Controlestaat De Duitse krant Die Welt concludeert dat met dit register alle bezittingen van goud en bitcoins traceerbaar worden, terwijl het de Oostenrijkse krant Die Presse doet denken aan een hoofdstuk uit Orwell 1984. Volgens de Oostenrijkse Kroner Zeitung is een dergelijke registratie van bezittingen in de praktijk onuitvoerbaar en bovendien zeer kostbaar. Volgens het Duitse tijdschrift Focus wil de EU het vermogen van alle mensen tot op de laatste cent in kaart brengen:
- "Als dit register tot stand zou komen, dan liggen de gevolgen voor de hand. Voor politiek onwelgevallige burgers - en daar vallen niet alleen criminelen onder - wordt het in de toekomst bijvoorbeeld veel moeilijker om hun activiteiten voort te zetten. Het kan bijvoorbeeld gaan om onderzoeksjournalisten of klokkenluiders, die met meer gerichte represailles worden bedreigd.
- De controle van geldstromen, investeringen en activa is in strijd met de menselijke waardigheid. Onder het mom van het voorkomen van witwaspraktijken worden we allemaal doorgelicht. Nu is het tijd voor burgerlijke ongehoorzaamheid. De mensen moeten de straat op, zoals de gele hesjes in Frankrijk."
- Het in kaart brengen van vermogens is een volgende stap in het verscherpen van de controle op burgers. Eerder pleitte de Europese Commissie al voor strenger toezicht op aanbieders van cryptovaluta. Ze wil alle crypto adressen registreren, zodat er een einde komt aan anonieme transacties. Ook heeft de Europese Commissie deze zomer een richtlijn opgesteld om transacties van meer dan '¬10.000 in contanten in de hele Europese Unie te verbieden. Een zorgwekkende ontwikkeling, ook voor spaarders die niks te verbergen hebben.
- Deze bijdrage is afkomstig van Geotrendlines
- Afbeelding boven artikel via Flickr , beschikbaar onder Creative Commons 2.0
- Nielsen Undercounted Viewing, According to Media Rating Council | Broadcasting+Cable
- (Image credit: Eric Audras/Getty Images)The Media Rating Council said that Nielsen's numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic undercounted viewers, as was alleged by networks and distributors represented by the VAB.
- Also Read: How Nielsen Undercount Revelations Will Affect the Upfront
- In a statement, MRC said it believes that total usage of television by persons 18-49--the key demo used to sell advertising--was understated by approximately 2% to 6% for the February 2021 measurement period.
- The MRC added that persons using television estimates that persons using television estimates in the persons 18-49 group was understated by a range of 1% to 5% in February 2021.
- VAB CEO Sean Cunningham said the MRC statement was ''just the tip of the iceberg,'' He noted that it contradicts what Nielsen has been saying and calls for "greater scrutiny" of the situation.
- Also Read: Contradicting Nielsen, Comscore Says TV Use Didn't Fall in Pandemic
- The MRC estimate of Nielsen's undercount covers just one month. Cunningham noted that in February, TV ad spending, according to Nielsen was $3.9 billion. A 1% undercount would represent $468 million and 6% would be $2.8 billion.
- The undercount, according to the VAB was the result of changes in the way the Nielsen panel was maintained during the pandemic. COVID-19 protocols meant Nielsen couldn't send its field people into people's homes. As a result, some homes that were no longer watching TV for unclear reasons were left in the sample.
- Cunningham noted that Nielsen's earnings last week contained $100 million in operations cost savings from having closed field and call centers. That means Nielsen profited from the changes it made in maintaining its sample, he said.
- In its statement, the MRC noted that "the impacts to estimates will vary among different demographic groups and dayparts, and percentage differences, when applied to program estimates, can be misleading because of the small size of the absolute ratings of many programs, which can distort change percentages,"
- MRC also notes, and users of the data "should keep in mind, that this range of impact, as well as the originally reported ratings themselves, are estimates with standard errors associated with them. However, we believe the directional impact noted above is appropriate to consider in assessing the estimates originally reported by Nielsen."
- Nielsen said that the analysis released by the MRC was implemented by Nielsen as requested by the MRC.
- Nielsen noted that 93% of C3 ratings for people 18 to 49 for major networks saw no more than a 0.02 change in ratings points.
- ''We will continue to work with the MRC on other analyses in the future.,'' Nielsen said. ''Throughout the pandemic, Nielsen has been fully transparent in collaborating with the MRC and focused on procedural changes to support its panelists, people and the integrity of currency metrics used by the industry.''
- Nielsen added that it has ''aggressively returned to pre-COVID maintenance procedures and will continue to rigorously work with the MRC and its clients to understand the impacts of both the pandemic and changing consumer viewing behaviors on data and analysis.''
- VAB's Cunningham said that Nielsen's biggest clients, the TV networks and distributors, began noticing "defects" in Nielsen data in April 2002. The tip off was the the Nielsen data was showing drops in total TV usage, whether linear TV, streaming or gaming.
- "Unbeknownst to clients, they had made extensive changes" in June of 2020 to procedures that led to homes that in normal times would have been excluded from the sample being left in last year.
- Overall the size of Nielsen's sample dropped 20% to 29,500 homes. But another 9,400 homes, or 32% of those remaining, were impaired or malfunctioning, Cunningham said.
- Ad Industry Seeks Alternatives After Nielsen Loses Seal of Approval | Broadcasting+Cable
- (Image credit: Getty Images)The TV industry is trying to figure out how it will do business in a world where Nielsen is no longer the dominant measurement company.
- On Sept. 1, the Media Rating Council stripped its seal of approval from Nielsen's national TV measurement product, long the industry's gold standard. The MRC's historic move capped a year in which revelations about Nielsen brought decades of complaints about the ratings leader to a head and created fresh opportunities for a legion of rivals.
- ''The only thing we know for sure is how dissatisfied a lot of the networks are and how serious they are about advancing measurement,'' said Sean Muller, CEO of iSpot.TV, one of the companies hoping to move into any void created by Nielsen's issues.
- The revelation that Nielsen undercounted viewers during the pandemic, potentially costing TV networks hundreds of millions of dollars '-- a charge made public by the industry trade group VAB and confirmed by the MRC '-- brought a new focus to the constant criticism Nielsen has historically received as the industry's umpire.
- A More Complex Picture''The reality is that data has never been more important to content companies, and the challenge of determining exactly who is watching what, when, across multiple platforms has never been more complex,'' AMC Networks president of commercial revenue and partnerships Kim Kelleher said. ''Any company working in this space needs to evolve and deliver accurate and comprehensive information to its customers and the entire competitive ecosystem that exists around content. That's the price of admission today and going forward, bottom line.''
- David Kenny (Image credit: Nielsen)In a letter to clients sent after Nielsen'a accreditation was suspended, Nielsen CEO David Kenny said, ''Rest assured, we will continue to provide the most representative, reliable and robust audience measurement available, which the market can continue to trade on with confidence.''
- Kenny said Nielsen was working on fixing its panels, which became smaller and less reliable during the pandemic; strengthening its business continuity and recovery process; improving how it communicates changes in its methods; and changing the way it incorporates broadband-only homes in ratings.
- To measure the industry in the future, Kenny said the company is working on Nielsen One, which aims to use the most advanced data science to reflect the new ways people are consuming media, ensure inclusion and representation, enable comparability across all platforms and de-duplicate audiences.
- Comcast's NBCUniversal has been the most public about trying to create alternatives to Nielsen, sending out requests for proposal to more than 50 measurement and data companies in a quest for an independent system with multiple vendors providing multiple metrics to replace the current ''outdated'' approach to counting viewers at a time when streaming is on the rise and pay TV subscription continue to erode.
- NBCU said that 80% of the companies it called on are participating, including Nielsen. Additional companies have asked to join the process. NBCU said it expects to wrap up its process by the week of Sept. 20.
- Kim Kelleher (Image credit: AMC Networks)Discovery president and CEO David Zaslav also has been a public critic of Nielsen, whose failure has cost media sellers money. Behind the scenes, Discovery is also seeking some form of redress from the measurement company, according to sources. Discovery is also preparing to use alternate sources for measurement as currency in negotiations with advertisers as soon as the fourth quarter, the sources said. Discovery officials declined to comment.
- As angry as the industry has been with Nielsen in the past, efforts to supplant it have fizzled. This time around, the outcome might be different.
- ''I think if there's a memory of 2021, I think it will be as the year when real change finally got set in motion on measurement and currency after decades of frustration,'' VAB president and CEO Sean Cunningham said.
- The suspension of Nielsen's accreditation removes the blanket endorsement from the MRC and means instead of treating Nielsen metrics as an agreed-upon truth set, buyers and sellers will know the data is still extremely faulty. ''It's now a starting point. There's a need to bring in other measurement data bases, benchmarks and currencies, which started in the upfront,'' Cunningham said.
- How would such a multiverse of measurement work?
- If the buyer favors one set of metrics, and the seller likes another, ''that becomes part of the art of the deal,'' Cunningham said. ''The marketer wins ultimately, because you've got increased competition for market share. That's all the fuel for innovation and accelerating product development you could possibly ask for.''
- In the past, attempts to replace or supplement Nielsen have collapsed in part because clients weren't thrilled about paying multiple ratings suppliers.
- Cunningham acknowledged buyers and sellers would incur extra costs with a multiverse of measurement options. ''But I think those expenses are well incurred if we can assure marketers we're getting closer to the truth and there's some real accuracy in the things they're looking to get business outcomes from.''
- Rivals Ramp Up EffortsWhile there are thousands of data and research companies, the ones most often mentioned as being able to supply the measurements the industry has been looking to Nielsen for are Comscore, iSpot.TV and VideoAmp.
- Even as Nielsen was losing accreditation, rivals were stepping up to get the MRC's checkmark. Comscore said it was working with the MRC to accelerate the start of the process that could lead to accreditation. iSpot's Muller said his company is in the pre-assessment phase of the MRC's accreditations process.
- ''We're an independent measurement company and I think some industry body should be there to ensure that measurement companies are doing what they say they're doing,'' Muller said. The MRC process is laborious, lengthy and costly. ''Maybe some innovations are needed there as well,'' he said.
- Sean Muller (Image credit: iSpot)VideoAmp said it is still evolving the methodology used to integrate data. ''It's in the industry's interest. We'll be there when we're ready,'' VideoAmp chief product officer Cameron Meierhoefer said.
- Muller said success in the measurement business now is all about trust. ''Trust in the current currency is on a very rapid decline at the moment,'' he said. ''You build trust by having really good products that are consistent, that are accurate, standing behind them and getting people to adopt them. It doesn't happen overnight.''
- Sean Cunningham (Image credit: VAB)iSpot.TV built a business by cataloging commercials and using smart TV data to measure how many people watched each one. It now also measures and benchmarks how well ads perform in terms of business impact. NBCU uses iSpot's data to show that Olympic ads were having an impact. Discovery in May said it would use iSpot to give advertisers information about the impact of the commercial run across its linear and streaming properties in the United States.
- Muller said the industry needs separate systems, one to measure advertising and evaluate its impact and value, another to assess the popularity of content to help decide which shows to produce and how to distribute and schedule them. That's especially important in an environment where dynamic ad insertion means that different viewers might see different commercials even while watching the same show at the same time.
- Ultimately, there will be several companies offering those measurements, but not too many. ''Once [buyers and sellers] decide what they want to negotiate on, the best and most trusted in each of these scenarios will rise up,'' Muller said. ''Our core business is helping marketers assess the effectiveness of their creative and media. From an ad-first capability, both in terms of audience delivery and performance, we feel really strongly that the marketplace has already embraced us.''
- Time for Experimentation VideoAmp also sees itself as being one of the two or three companies whose measurement will be used in the future as currency used in contracts between media buyers and sellers, according to Meierhoefer.
- VideoAmp integrates a variety of data sets to measure viewing and advertising outcomes for clients. ''We see ourselves pushing into the more fundamental aspects of measurement in terms of how you value and trade specific inventory,'' Meierhoefer said.
- NBCUniversal used data from iSpot to gauge the impact of ads shown during the Tokyo Olympics. (Image credit: Ulrik Pedersen/NurPhoto via Getty Images)Meierhoefer said that VideoAmp's approach to measurement yields more granular data at a lower cost than legacy measurement companies. He said the expense of maintaining a large-scale sample household panel isn't necessary in a world where data is plentiful.
- ''It's a software problem and the type of problem that we can solve,'' he said. ''I don't have to be a $2 billion company in order to construct a system that has new capabilities to help our clients make money.''
- Between now and the next ad-sales upfront, Meierhoefer said there will be a period of experimentation with clients running things in parallel to see what would happen if they used different metrics. ''I don't think you're going to see a sort of control-alt-delete reboot scenario where suddenly the whole industry just moves,'' he said.
- ''The environment is really fascinating right now,'' Meierhoefen said. ''The industry has grumbled about Nielsen forever. Clients are asking are there alternatives. This is fantastic for us. We feel we're ready to meet the challenge.''
- Jon has been business editor of Broadcasting + Cable since 2010. He focuses on revenue-generating activities, including advertising and distribution, as well as executive intrigue and merger and acquisition activity. Just about any story is fair game, if a dollar sign can make its way into the article. Before B+C, Jon covered the industry for TVWeek, Cable World, Electronic Media, Advertising Age and The New York Post. A native New Yorker, Jon is hiding in plain sight in the suburbs of Chicago.
- Texas schools are surveilling students online, often without their knowledge or consent
- Texas schools are rapidly scaling up the use of technology that monitors email, web history and social media posts of potentially millions of students, often without their knowledge or consent, a Dallas Morning News investigation has found.
- Legal and privacy experts have long raised concerns about this technology and questioned its effectiveness in detecting potential threats. Despite those worries, Texas' schools have spent millions of tax dollars on these services since 2015.
- The proliferation of student surveillance has been fueled by nationwide fears about school shootings, suicides and cyberbullying. Among school districts, no state has more contracts with digital surveillance companies than Texas, according to GovSpend, a company that tracks government spending.
- Using school records and purchasing data, The News examined some of the most widely used monitoring technologies in Texas schools: Social Sentinel, Gaggle, Securly and GoGuardian. In the past six years, more than 200 districts statewide have used these technologies. At least 28 are in North Texas, including some of the largest districts '-- Dallas, Carrollton-Farmers Branch, Carroll, Irving, Coppell and Grapevine-Colleyville ISDs have all used one of the four services.
- The companies offer services ranging from public social media monitoring to tracking nearly everything a student does on a device. Contracts for these services range from a few hundred dollars to six figures, depending on the service and the size of the school or district.
- Social Sentinel says it scans more than a billion posts on social media every day against more than 450,000 words and phrases that indicate potential harm. It then uses artificial intelligence to identify potential threats of violence and suicide.
- Social Sentinel co-founder Gary Margolis has said in news interviews that the service doesn't surveil or monitor students, because it merely scans public social media posts.
- But Amelia Vance, the director of youth and education privacy at the Future of Privacy Forum, disagrees.
- ''It's absolutely a monitoring or surveillance tool,'' Vance said.
- ''The privacy concerns with this are, of course, never-ending.''
- A spokesperson for Navigate 360, the parent company of Social Sentinel, disputed The News' description of how its technology works but declined to specify what was incorrect.
- ''We do not comment publicly on safety systems and processes associated with past, future or current customers,'' the spokesperson wrote. ''Exposing their systematic approach increases the risks to the lives they protect.''
- The other services, Securly's Auditor and Gaggle, use artificial intelligence and a team of people to flag content in Gmail and Google Docs deemed to be concerning.
- Mike Jolley, a director at Securly, said the company encourages all school districts to be transparent with students and parents.
- ''The idea is to be transparent and let them know why you're doing it, because they're going to find out anyway,'' Jolley said. ''We just want to look out for you and make sure you're safe.''
- Gaggle disputed the notion that it was a surveillance tool and said its technology has saved thousands of students' lives by averting suicides.
- Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD said it used Gaggle multiple times to help students in crisis.
- ''There have been multiple incidents in which students at risk have been identified and imminent self-harm was avoided,'' said Dawn Parnell, the district's chief communications officer.
- In some instances, students wrote letters detailing plans to hurt themselves and saying goodbye to their families. Others talked about running away to meet up with people they had met online, Parnell said.
- GoGuardian's ''Beacon'' monitors students even more closely, capturing everything they type into their web browser for signs of imminent violence or self-harm. Any such content triggers an email or text message alert to school officials. The company also offers products that allow schools the ability to block potentially objectionable websites and services that let teachers remotely see and control students' computers.
- ''When students go online, they can also encounter inappropriate or even dangerous content,'' said Jeff Gordon, GoGuardian's director of public relations. ''Schools and educators rely on GoGuardian's products to help create safer digital learning environments so that students can maximize their learning potential on school system technology.''
- 'Behind the scenes'When the University of North Texas bought Social Sentinel in 2015, it did not tell students that their public social media posts could be monitored.
- UNT police Chief Ed Reynolds said he wasn't concerned about the privacy implications of the technology because it captured only public social media posts.
- Reynolds said UNT started using the service after seeing an increase in students talking online about hurting themselves.
- ''What we were trying to do was be proactive,'' he said.
- School officials from Stafford, Smyer, Woodville, Vidor and Blooming Grove ISDs also said they never notified parents or students about the surveillance.
- ''It's something that just happens behind the scenes,'' Rick Hartley, superintendent of Blooming Grove ISD, said of Gaggle.
- Gaggle CEO Jeff Patterson said in a statement that the company encourages schools to be transparent about their service, but they leave it to districts to handle how they communicate with students and parents.
- There is little public information about how the technologies work and how well they perform aside from the companies' claims. Two of the four companies contacted by The News said they had not given their data and code to independent researchers. The other two companies did not comment.
- Patterson said Gaggle does not provide student data to outside parties.
- ''We do not have a third-party analysis of our work, simply because of the significant privacy issues that would be raised if we were to export this sensitive data and information to an independent researcher for review and examination,'' he said.
- In patent documents, Securly says its web filter can track every website a student visits and where the student was while visiting the site. Jolley said they track device locations so districts can keep track of their property and also to alert them in case students search for activity like suicide.
- Although Social Sentinel's tool is designed to detect threats on campuses, it also can inadvertently capture social media posts from people who are not students.
- That's because the company's system considers the location listed in a user's social media profile to determine whether an alert should be issued, Buzzfeed News data provided to The News shows. The service also looks at whether the posters follow an official campus account, even if they never attended the school.
- Margolis, the Social Sentinel founder, has said in interviews that the service has a 90% success rate in detecting the proper context of the 1 billion social media posts it scans every day. But a report from the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., found that even the highest-performing machine learning systems correctly catch the meaning of harmful content only about 80% of the time.
- But an analysis of Social Sentinel data by Buzzfeed News found that the service generated a flood of alerts seeming to contain nonthreatening information.
- Tammy Dowdy, director of communications for Dickinson ISD, told The News that the district is rethinking its use of Social Sentinel after receiving a large number of alerts for nonthreatening posts.
- The Center for Democracy and Technology also found that many popular machine learning tools were more likely to misinterpret women and Black people, sometimes even classifying their speech as another language altogether.
- Vance, the Future of Privacy Forum director, also said these services may lead to fewer students searching for resources they need to get help.
- ''Kids aren't going to look up the National Suicide Hotline,'' Vance said. ''They're not trying to access things if they know that that's going to get them flagged.''
- Schools may not be using these services to stop only shootings and suicides.
- In an email, a Social Sentinel sales director told a Stephen F. Austin State University police detective that the service was used not only to prevent suicides and shootings but also for ''Forestalling potentially volatile protests/demonstrations.''
- News reports also show some schools have used the technology to monitor protesters. A report from Criminal Legal News in 2018 found that East Carolina University used Social Sentinel to identify a non-student activist who was critical of the university's chancellor. A year later, NBC News found that UNC-Chapel Hill had used a geofence, a virtual boundary for a geographic area, to scan the accounts of activists who were protesting a Confederate statue on campus. Documents obtained by NBC show that UNC paid Social Sentinel $73,500 in 2016 for a three-year contract for the service.
- In a blog post, Margolis wrote that he came up with the idea for Social Sentinel when he was the police chief at the University of Vermont, after an officer told him about a planned protest at the university's executive offices, and recent crimes, which were posted on Facebook.
- Legal questionsLegal scholars said it's unclear at what point this type of monitoring may cross a legal line. Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said monitoring technologies are a serious concern, but current case law is unclear about whether their use constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment and whether students would be protected from such a search.
- A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision may shed new light on whether schools can take action against students for their off-campus speech.
- The court ruled in June that a Pennsylvania school district had violated the free-speech rights of a student when it punished her for a vulgar Snapchat message, but the justices declined to set a universal standard for what counts as ''off-campus'' speech.
- ''[F]rom the student speaker's perspective, regulations of off-campus speech, when coupled with regulations of on-campus speech, include all the speech a student utters during the full 24-hour day,'' Justice Stephen Breyer wrote. ''When it comes to political or religious speech that occurs outside school or a school program or activity, the school will have a heavy burden to justify intervention.''
- But students hoping the recent decision would limit schools' authority to surveil may be disappointed. Emily Suski, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, said schools already have extensive surveillance authority under state laws designed to protect against cyberbullying. Breyer's suggestion that teachers stand in place of parents while students are at school may grant even greater surveillance authority, Suski said.
- These services may not only be harmful to students' privacy. Harold Krent, a law professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, said schools could face greater legal liability if they fail to act on an alert from one of these services. Schools could also see more legal troubles if the platforms give students a false sense of security.
- At least one state has tried to limit these technologies. In 2014, California passed a law requiring students and parents to be informed about any technology schools are considering that collects social media data.
- Giovanni Capriglione, a Republican state representative from Southlake, told The News he plans to introduce legislation addressing the lack of transparency associated with monitoring technologies and said Texas' laws don't go far enough in protecting students.
- ''Parents do not know, unfortunately, that their kids are part of a mass surveillance effort,'' Capriglione said. ''And we need to address that, quite simply.''
- While some have worked to limit these technologies, many districts believe a Clinton-era federal law, the Children's Internet Protection Act, already requires them to adopt monitoring technologies. A marketing video posted to Gaggle's YouTube page mentions the law explicitly in its pitch to school districts.
- If these technologies weren't already required, a bill from Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, would have made them all but mandatory. In October 2019, Cornyn introduced the RESPONSE Act, a bill he said would help prevent school shootings. Had it passed, the bill would have modified a 1930s communications law requiring schools receiving federal communications funding to adopt a technology that detects the online activities of children who are at risk of committing self-harm or extreme violence to others.
- Cornyn's office did not respond to requests for comment.
- Cornyn isn't the only prominent Texan to promote monitoring technologies for schools. In his 2018 school safety plan, Gov. Greg Abbott mentioned Social Sentinel and technologies like it as a potential way to address threats made on social media against schools.
- Though some believe there are no problems with these monitoring technologies, a large body of legal, psychological and sociological material suggests that being surveilled, even in the absence of any action taken on the information, has measurable effects on those being monitored.
- A study of more than 1,200 largely younger adults conducted by Oxford researchers found that after being informed about a government surveillance program, survey participants were much less likely to speak or write about certain things, share personal content or engage with social media, and were more cautious about the language they used online. Furthermore, researchers found that the younger the internet user, the greater the chilling effect they reported.
- ''Kids need to have the intellectual ability to make mistakes, to suggest ideas outside the box, to give the wrong answer in class, to just test out their mind,'' Vance said. ''And they are much less likely to do that when they're being surveilled.''
- Dallas Morning News investigative reporter Lauren McGaughy contributed to this report.
- Despite 95% vaccination rate, Cornell today has five times more COVID cases than it did this time last year | The College Fix
- ANALYSIS: If the goal is to prevent infection, the 95 percent vaccination rate on Cornell's campus has not accomplished that
- Cornell University has aggressively pushed its students to get vaccinated, announcing a vaccine mandate for the 2021-22 academic year in April and frequently denying religious and medical exemptions.
- As a result, 95 percent of the campus population, both students and faculty, is vaccinated.
- Despite this, Cornell University has more than five times the amount of confirmed positive cases during its first week of this academic year than it did during its first week of the 2020-21 academic year, according to the Cornell COVID dashboard.
- By the numbers, during the first week of school that ran from Aug. 27 to Sept. 2 of this academic year, Cornell reported 322 positive COVID-19 cases.
- In comparison, during the first week of school last year, which ran from Sept. 3 through Sept. 9 of 2020, Cornell reported 59 positive COVID-19 cases.
- That is 263 more cases, or more than five times the amount of positive cases, when comparing the first week of school.
- Most students attended in-person classes in the fall of 2020 and were required to wear masks, just like this academic year. The increase in positive cases cannot be attributed to an increase in testing '-- in fact, more tests were administered in the first week last fall, according to the Cornell COVID dashboard.
- From Sept. 3 through Sept. 9 of 2020, there were 28,951 COVID tests administered, according to the Cornell COVID dashboard. There were only 59 positive tests, or a 0.2 percent positivity rate.
- In contrast, from Aug. 27 to Sept. 2 of this year, only 27,103 tests were administered, finding 322 positive cases, or a 1.19 percent positivity rate.
- No variable changed: Cornell announced in July that it would still require all individuals, regardless of vaccination status, to wear a mask while inside. The same public health measures, often criticized as too strict, that were in place last year remain in place this year.
- Due to the high amount of positive cases the Ithaca campus is currently experiencing, President Martha Pollack warned classes may be moved online if the trend continues. Meanwhile, the campus has been moved to a ''Code Yellow.''
- If the goal is to prevent infection, the 95 percent COVID-19 vaccination rate on Cornell's campus has not accomplished that.
- As Cornell and many other universities across the country mandate these vaccines, one must ask: to what extent are the vaccines effective? Do the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks for healthy 20-year-olds?
- In August, the CDC director admitted the COVID-19 vaccines cannot prevent transmission. Cornell's recent case surge is further evidence of that.
- The risk of an adverse reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine, while minute, is not zero.
- According to CDC and FDA data, the mRNA vaccines have been linked to increased risk of myocarditis, a serious heart condition, in young people, particularly young men. While this reaction to the vaccine is exceedingly rare, the connection between the mRNA vaccines and myocarditis is higher than previously thought.
- Further, Dr. Robert Malone, one of the founders of mRNA vaccines, warned on evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein's podcast that the spike protein received from vaccination is, in his medical opinion, cytotoxic.
- And according to information released by the Japanese government in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the lipid particles from the Pfizer vaccine concentrate overwhelmingly in the ovaries and also bone marrow.
- Why on earth would Cornell force its students to receive this vaccine?
- To be clear, Americans who are elderly, immunocompromised, or suffer from a serious underlying condition should definitely get the vaccine. But even in those cases, they must still have the freedom to make such a decision for themselves.
- Cornell's draconian COVID-19 policies have failed, and now the administration's promises about a normal, mask-free academic year in return for achieving ''herd immunity'' have come crashing down against the cold reality we all face.
- If the vaccines cannot prevent infection and return us to normalcy, what then, is the point of returning to campus at all?
- Editor's note: The author of this piece has requested and been denied a religious exemption from Cornell's vaccine mandate. He received the first dose of the Moderna vaccine in June.
- MORE: Cornell COVID restrictions 'defy reason,' student columnist says
- IMAGE: Evgenii Mitroshin / Shutterstock
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- Video game developer CEO said he supported Texas' pro-life law and now he's gone from the company | The Post Millennial
- Privacy and free speech are under attack. Take back your internet freedom with
- John Gibson, the CEO of the video game publisher responsible for the titles Chivalry and Killing Floor, is out of a job after he publicly voiced his pro-life views in the wake of Texas' so-called ''Heartbeat bill,'' which makes it illegal to surgically abort a fetus once cardiac activity is detected in the fetus.
- Posting on Twitter, the Tripwire Interactive boss wrote that he was ''proud of the [United States Supreme Court] affirming the Texas law banning abortion for babies with a heartbeat.''
- Gibson stated that the reason he was speaking out on the issue was because of how vocal pro-choice supporters are in vocalizing their political views on social media. Indeed, many major entertainment companies and video game publishers have publicly weighed in on political topics '' always in support of liberal policies, seldom against.
- ''As an entertainer I don't get political often,'' added Gibson. ''Yet with so many vocal peers on the other side of this issue, I felt it was important to go on the record as a pro-life game developer.''
- Gibson's remarks sparked a vocal outcry from both game developers and game journalists alike, triggering more than 10,000 comments and 6,000 retweets, with many vowing to boycott Tripwire's video games.
- If you're looking for a game developer/company to ignore, might I suggest Tripwire Interactive, makers of the somewhat popular Killing Floor series (what a Pro-Life name for a game!)? If you are wondering you can set Steam to ignore games from certain developers. I just did! https://t.co/M7eAbVUPbk
- '-- Kathy (@tittergrrl) September 5, 2021One of the studios whose titles have been published by Tripwire, Shipwright Studios, publicly announced their parting of ways with the publisher over Gibson's remarks.
- ''While your politics are your own, the moment you make them a matter of public discourse you entangle all of those working for and with you. We have worked closely alongside the talented and passionate developers at Tripwire and your partners for the last 3+ years,'' the studio wrote.
- ''We know it is difficult for employees to speak up or act out in these scenarios, and they may not feel comfortable to speak their minds,'' continued Shipwright without any apparent irony. ''It is regrettable, but we feel it would be doing ourselves, your employees, your partners, and the industry as a whole a disservice to allow this pattern to continue without comment.''
- ''We started Shipwright with the idea that it was finally time to put our money where our mouth is. We cannot in good conscience continue to work with Tripwire under the current leadership structure. We will begin the cancellation of our existing contracts effective immediately,'' concluded Shipwright Studios.
- pic.twitter.com/v1m8hzT77q
- '-- Shipwright Studios (@shipwrightstdio) September 5, 2021''We do not share the opinion expressed in a recent tweet by the president of Tripwire, publisher of Chivalry 2,'' remarked Torn Banner Studios, another studio whose titles are published by Tripwire. ''This perspective is not shared by our team, nor is it reflected in the games we create. The statement stands in opposition to what we believe about women's rights.''
- We do not share the opinion expressed in a recent tweet by the president of Tripwire, publisher of Chivalry 2. This perspective is not shared by our team, nor is it reflected in the games we create. The statement stands in opposition to what we believe about women's rights.
- '-- Torn Banner Studios (@TornBanner) September 6, 2021On Monday evening, Tripwire Interactive released a statement to say that Gibson was out of the company effective immediately because of his comments, claiming that the CEO had ''stepped down.''
- ''The comments given by John Gibson are of his own opinion, and do not reflect those of Tripwire Interactive as a company,'' the company said. ''His comments disregarded the values of our whole team, our partners and much of our broader community. Our leadership team at Tripwire are deeply sorry and are unified in our commitment to take swift action and to foster a more positive environment.''
- ''Effective immediately, John Gibson has stepped down as CEO of Tripwire Interactive,'' the statement added. ''Co-founding member and current Vice President, Alan Wilson, will take over as interim CEO. Alan has been with the company since its formation in 2005 and is an active lead in both the studio's business and developmental affairs. Alan will work with the rest of the Tripwire leadership team to take steps with employees and partners to address their concerns including executing a company-wide town hall meeting and promoting open dialogue with Tripwire leadership and all employees. His understanding of both the company's culture and the creative vision of our games will carry the team through this transition, with full support from the other Tripwire leaders.''
- National Archives Places 'Harmful Language Alert' on Page Hosting U.S. Constitution. - The National Pulse
- September 6, 2021 Staff Writer The webpage of the U.S. National Archives that hosts the nation's own Constitution has a ''harmful language alert'' for readers at the top of the page.The alert now appears on many pages on the archives.org website, and links to a page entitled ''NARA's Statement on Potentially Harmful Content,'' which they define as:
- reflect racist, sexist, ableist, misogynistic/misogynoir, and xenophobic opinions and attitudes;be discriminatory towards or exclude diverse views on sexuality, gender, religion, and more;include graphic content of historical events such as violent death, medical procedures, crime, wars/terrorist acts, natural disasters and more;demonstrate bias and exclusion in institutional collecting and digitization policies.Bizarrely, the warning does not appear on a page about Jim Crow, which has no fewer than 6 uses of the word ''n*gg*r.'' Nor does it appear on a page with the word ''k*ke.''
- It does, however, appear on the page of the U.S. Constitution:
- Staff Writer The National Pulse is a part of the American Principles Project.
- Former President Donald Trump serves as guest commentator for Vitor Belfort vs. Evander Holyfield - MMA Fighting
- As part of the upcoming Triller Fight Club event on Sept. 11, former President Donald Trump will serve as a guest commentator for the upcoming card headlined by Evander Holyfield vs. Vitor Belfort.
- Trump's special ''unfiltered boxing commentary'' will be broadcast as part of the pay-per-view airing through FITE TV with the event taking place at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Fla.
- ''I love great fighters and great fights,'' Trump stated in a Triller press release. ''I look forward to seeing both this Saturday night and sharing my thoughts ringside. You won't want to miss this special event.''
- Of course, before he got involved in politics, Trump hosted numerous combat sports events at his hotels and casinos in Atlantic City, N.J., which is how he actually became close friends with UFC President Dana White.
- Trump is billed to ''host and commentate'' the event, which serves as Holyfield's return to action for the first time in over a decade. Former heavyweight champion Holyfield, 58, comes out of retirement to box ex-UFC champ Belfort after his original opponent, Oscar De La Hoya, was forced off the card after contracting COVID-19. Belfort competes in just his second professional boxing fight after a 2006 debut.
- The Triller Fight Club card also features former UFC champions Anderson Silva and Tito Ortiz in a boxing match. Ortiz will feel right at home with Trump providing commentary for his fight after he was a very outspoken supporter of the former president before and during his time in office.
- Ortiz followed in Trump's footsteps after he was elected to serve as mayor pro tem in his hometown of Huntington Beach, Calif. before eventually resigning his post just a few months after he took office.
- Prior to this event, Trump has attended a pair of UFC cards in recent years including UFC 244 in New York in 2019. He then sat cageside for UFC 264 in Las Vegas in July. Now, he'll sit in front of the microphone to provide his own take on the boxing taking place at Triller Fight Club in Florida.
- In addition to Holyfield vs. Belfort and Ortiz vs. Silva, the upcoming show also features David Haye returning to action against Joe Fournier and Andy Vences taking on Jono Carroll.
- The Triller Fight Club event costs $49.99 and is broadcast on FITE TV.
- Students at UT-Austin sue to get school to stop playing 'The Eyes of Texas' song | Daily Mail Online
- University of Texas at Austin students sue school because it refuses to cancel its 'racist' spirit song 'The Eyes of Texas'The lawsuit was filed by the state and campus NAACP and anonymous studentsIt claims the school didn't defend black students who opposed the songIt also alleges that the school violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when it created a separate marching band for students who didn't want to play itThe song was first performed at a student-organized minstrel show in 1903A recent committee found that the song itself had 'no racist intent'Students, including players, protested the song after the George Floyd protestsWealthy donors have threatened to stop giving to UT-Austin over the protestsThe school's football coach said: 'We're going to sing that proudly'By Adam Manno For Dailymail.Com
- Published: 13:44 EDT, 7 September 2021 | Updated: 03:22 EDT, 8 September 2021
- A group of University of Texas at Austin students are suing the school for creating a 'hostile environment' by forcing members of its marching band to play in a separate group because they refuse to play the school's spirit song, 'The Eyes of Texas', at football games.
- 'The Eyes of Texas' was first sung in 1903 at a student-organized minstrel show, a popular form of entertainment in the early 20th century that featured white performers in blackface, in downtown Austin.
- It's been a source of campus-wide debate for more than a year after a summer of Black Lives Matter protests amid the killing of George Floyd - but the university stood by the song in a recent report affirming that it had 'no racist intent' and that it 'remains our alma mater.'
- The lawsuit, filed Friday with the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights on behalf of an anonymous group of students and the Texas chapter of the NAACP, claims the university failed to respond to the harassment of black students who opposed the song.
- At games last fall, members of the marching band refused to play it and some players refused to sing it.
- The lawsuit also alleges that the school is violating the equal protection rights of students after it created a separate marching band for students who refused to play the song last fall, according to the Texas Tribune.
- Students in the Longhorn band are required to play the song.
- 'The Eyes of Texas' is traditionally played at Longhorns football games, but several student athletes and marching band members protested the song at games last fall
- The song was first played at a minstrel show in 1903. Above, the Longhorns mascot leads the team onto the field in September 2008 in Austin, Texas
- A committee led by education professor Richard Reddick found that the song had 'no racist intent' despite where it was first sung
- Alberto Martinez, a history professor at the school, released his own report disputing the university committee's findings
- The suit alleges violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits race discrimination in any 'program or activity' at publicly funded schools act and of the Fourteenth Amendment, which includes the Equal Protection Clause.
- 'As black students, we kind of feel as if it's not like our voices are heard,' Al-Nasser Lawal, a senior at UT-Austin and the president of the school NAACP told the Texas Tribune.
- Some wealthy donors threatened to stop giving money if the school didn't stand by the song.
- 'My wife and I have given an endowment in excess of $1 million to athletics,' read one of several emails from unidentified donors to UT-Austin President Jay Hartzell that were previously published by The Texas Tribune. 'This could very easily be rescinded if things don't drastically change around here.'
- Lawal, the student leading the lawsuit, said: 'The main objective of the administration and the campus is just to appease their wealthy donors so that they can continue to get that funding, and that they don't really have our best interests at heart.'
- President Hartzell announced a committee to look into the song's origins last October.
- The committee was headed by Richard Reddick, a black education professor and the associate dean for equity, community engagement and outreach.
- In a report released in March, the committee found that the song debuted at a minstrel show but was written with no 'racist intent,' instead being meant 'to parody the famous phrases of the university president,' William L. Prather.
- The suit is being filed by the campus and state NAACP and anonymous students. Above, Texas NAACP President Gary Bledsoe at a rally in the state Capitol in June
- It also found no evidence that the title of the song traces back to a quote attributed to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
- 'The history of "The Eyes of Texas" mirrors the history of the United States, Texas, The University of Texas at Austin as well as its band and sports teams. This complexity creates an opportunity for continued learning, sharing and understanding,' states a summary of the report's findings.
- History professor Albert Martinez released his own report later that same month, saying that then-President Prather was indeed inspired by Robert E. Lee when he said, 'the eyes of Texas are upon you,' because Prather's son had said as much in 1936.
- In January, football coach Steve Sarkisian said, '"The Eyes of Texas" is our school song. We're going to sing that song. We're going to sing that proudly.'
- Deadly bat caves & humanized mice tests: Released docs describe 'HIGHEST RISK' involved in US-funded coronavirus research in Wuhan '-- RT World News
- Documents obtained by The Intercept reveal that the US government funded studies into coronavirus in bats in Wuhan long before the pandemic, with the proposal showing it was aware of the risk that researchers would be infected.
- More than 900 pages of material related to this research were published on the non-profit media company's website on Tuesday. The documents were acquired as part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation by The Intercept against the National Institutes of Health.
- The documents detail the work of EcoHealth Alliance, a US-based organization specializing in protection against infectious diseases, and its work with Chinese partners on coronaviruses, specifically those originating in bats.
- Also on rt.com Deadlier than Covid-19, but less contagious: What we know about Nipah bat-borne virus threatening to become new scourge in India The papers detail that EcoHealth Alliance was granted a total of $3.1 million by the federal government, with $599,000 of that going to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The funding received in Wuhan was used in part to identify and genetically alter bat coronaviruses that might infect humans.
- EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak led one of the studies, titled 'Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence', which screened thousands of bats for novel coronaviruses. The research also involved the screening of people who work with live animals.
- However, the released documents include a recognition of the potential risks posed by the project. ''Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled,'' the grant application reads.
- Also on rt.com Biden's latest 'lab leak' report tells us nothing'... but it won't stop the US blaming China for Covid ''In this proposal, they actually point out that they know how risky this work is. They keep talking about people potentially getting bitten '' and they kept records of everyone who got bitten,'' Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, in the US, told The Intercept in response to the release.
- Another revelation was that experimental work with humanized mice (that is, with functioning human genes, cells, tissues, and/or organs) was conducted at the Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, a biosafety level-three lab, and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, mainland China's first biosafety level-four lab, as originally thought.
- The program ran from 2014 to 2019, and was renewed in 2019, only for former US president Donald Trump to cancel it. Robert Kessler, communications manager at EcoHealth Alliance, maintained there wasn't a lot to say on the matter. ''We applied for grants to conduct research. The relevant agencies deemed that to be important research, and thus funded it,'' he noted.
- Also on rt.com Russia building 'sanitary shield' network of labs working with dangerous viruses, to understand pathogens & develop new vaccines While the US has blasted China for not releasing all the relevant information on Covid-19, The Intercept said it had requested the recently released documents back in September 2020.
- Although they don't provide conclusive evidence to support the theory that Covid-19 was leaked from a Chinese lab, it does highlight the fact that risky research into bat coronaviruses was being undertaken in the years leading up the pandemic, and the US was not only well aware of that, but also funded it. Bats have been identified as a possible zoonotic source for the virus.
- World Health Organization experts spent around a month in China from January this year. Their report suggested that cases identified in Wuhan in 2019 were believed to have been acquired from ''a zoonotic source, as many [of those initially infected] reported visiting or working in the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market.''
- Also on rt.com 'Scapegoating China cannot whitewash the US': Beijing blasts Washington ahead of American report into Covid-19 origins Beijing has refused to take part in a second probe, rejecting the lab leak theory while, in turn, calling for an investigation into US-based laboratories.
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- How Instagram Became the Epicenter of a Violent Gang War
- Image: A screenshot of an Instagram Story included in the court document.
- Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard's podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet.
- On an Instagram Live video, Teshae and Quishawn Hanna, two men from Milwaukee, showed off their AR-15 style rifles and handguns to one another. Both were alleged members of the Wild 100's, a gang in the city that was in the middle of a violent feud with another criminal group called the Ghetto Boys Clique, including shootouts at funerals of slain members.
- There was one thing the brothers were careful to not broadcast on Instagram Live, however.
- "I aint gonna show the switches on the live though I ain't gone lie," Quishawn said. Switches here refer to a converter that changes a Glock handgun into an unregistered fully automatic weapon, something that the pair couldn't legally own.
- As they spoke, Richard E. Connors, a Special Agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, quietly watched. He had been monitoring the Wild 100's for months, specifically on Instagram.
- "I have been consistently live-tracking and reviewing social media accounts, including the Target Accounts, for approximately five months," he wrote in a search warrant application trying to get Instagram to hand over data on the brothers and another alleged Wild 100's member called Larry G. Hamilton. "In that timeframe, I have observed known Wild 100's members consistently post, brag, and tag each other in firearms activity, including federal firearms offenses, at least once a week. I have observed Teshae Hanna, Quishawn Hanna, and Larry G. Hamilton discuss the sale and possession of firearms, including firearms with conversion devices, through the Target Accounts."
- Crime is a fact of life on social media, like it is on any communication platform. But the court document shows just how entrenched criminals have become on Instagram, using essentially every Instagram feature available to them'--private messages, public posts, Instagram Stories, and Instagram Live'--to flex their muscle, trade in weapons, and intimidate their rivals.
- "You show the back man motherfucker prolly go federal," Teshae Hanna added on the Instagram Live, referring to the Glock converters.
- A screenshot of Instagram chat logs included in the court document. Image: Motherboard.
- In private messages, which investigators obtained in another legal request to Instagram, Teshae asked Hamilton "Who got heat for sell," referring to firearms.
- "Yo this one ready," Hamilton responded several days later. Hamilton, meanwhile, was discussing weapon sales with several other Instagram users, including the trade of a "Chopp," a term for an AK or AR-style rifle, according to the search warrant application.
- A screenshot of an Instagram Story included in the court document. Image: Motherboard.
- On Instagram Stories, Teshae shared a photo of an assortment of weapons laying on a wooden floor, including handguns with accompanying fully-automatic converters and drum magazines, which let a weapon carry many more bullets than an ordinary magazine. In another Instagram Story, Hamilton posted a photo that included a Glock with a mouth-zipped-shut emoji over the point where a converter would attach to the gun. Some Instagram Stories also showed Teshae pointing a weapon at houses apparently in Milwaukee, with suggestions that he is seeking retribution for Raymond J, Colon, who died in a shooting on March 15. In a third, Teshae appears to show himself spending $3,000 to buy an assortment of firearms.
- At the time of writing, the related Instagram accounts are still online. Instagram acknowledged a request for comment but did not provide a statement in time for publication.
- "Based on the evidence as set forth in this affidavit, case agents are aware that the subjects and targets of this investigation have used different means of Instagram communication (Instagram messenger) and private Instagram messaging on the Target Accounts to obtain, transfer, and discuss the use and possession of firearms, including converting firearms from semi-automatic to fully automatic machineguns," Special Agent Connors wrote in the warrant application.
- ''We respond to valid legal requests but we can't comment on specific cases,'' an Instagram spokesperson said.
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- Recording Artist Victory Boyd Refuses Vaccine for Religious Reasons, NFL Cancels Her National Anthem Opening Day Performance
- An appearance by Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Victory Boyd to perform the National Anthem at the NFL's Sept. 9 season-opening game in Tampa Bay was canceled by the league because she declined for religious reasons to be vaccinated against the CCP Virus.
- ''As I understand that Victory will not be fully vaccinated by the time of the Kickoff game, she would not have been able to comply with the terms of the Game Day Field Access Policy,'' NFL Senior Director for Media and Entertainment Events Seth Dudowsky told Boyd's father and manager, John Boyd, in an Aug. 31 email made available to The Epoch Times.
- ''And as a result, we unfortunately will not be able to invite Victoria to perform the national anthem at this year's Kickoff game,'' Dudowsky said.
- The defending Super Bowl-champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers' home field is Raymond James Stadium, an open-air venue. The 2021 season-opening game is to be played against the Dallas Cowboys.
- ''The NFL's Game Day Field Access Policy requires that all individuals accessing the playing field and surrounding sideline areas within the stadium bowl (including individuals involved in game presentation elements such as the singer of the national anthem) be fully vaccinated.
- ''Under the Policy, 'fully vaccinated' means 14 days have passed since the individual received the final dose required in the vaccine sequence, in accordance with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This requirement is mandatory and fully complies with the laws applicable to the type of business relationship contemplated here, and we are not in a position to make an exception,'' Budowsky told Boyd in the email.
- Dudowsky thus ended weeks of negotiations that initially excited both Boyds because, in addition to a $20,000 performance fee, the occasion provided invaluable national television exposure on one of the NFL's most-watched games other than the Super Bowl.
- The NFL also agreed to cover the travel costs of Boyd and her entourage, ''as well as all costs, expenses and fees related to the services of all of Artist's support personnel in connection with the Performance and all related obligations,'' according to a copy of the contract reviewed by The Epoch Times. The contract was the result of the negotiations but had not yet been officially signed by the parties to it.
- The 27-year-old singer/songwriter blends soul and folk music and has twice before sung the National Anthem at NFL games. She was a member of the team that produced Kanye West's Grammy Award-winning ''Jesus Is King,'' 2020's top contemporary Christian album.
- Boyd was the primary lyricist for the album's ''Closed on Sunday'' and ''God Is'' songs and she made additional contributions to ''Water.'' Her music is available on the Roc Nation label of Jay-Z.
- Her grounds for declining to be vaccinated are rooted in her Christian faith, she told The Epoch Times:
- ''The Bible admonishes Christians to appreciate their bodies as being sacred and a temple of the Holy Spirit and to not participate in things that can defile the body or render the body dysfunctional.
- ''I am in prayer to make sure that the Lord guides me into the right decision concerning receiving an unproven injection with artificial properties that can potentially have a longterm effect on my reproductive health.
- ''If I want to take the vaccine, the decision will be between myself, my doctor and my God. At this point, the Spirit of God is leading me to take a stand for freedom of choice.''
- She also told The Epoch Times that she worries the NFL decision to cancel her for not being vaccinated may herald more disheartening restrictions throughout the music and entertainment industries.
- ''Throughout my life I have overcome many obstacles, but now I was faced with a new glass ceiling that I couldn't break through. It feels like we're going backwards to a familiar place that I thought we had overcome as a country,'' Boyd told The Epoch Times.
- ''To be disqualified because of a discriminatory policy that had nothing to do with my talent made me feel alarmed because of what it implies for not only myself but millions of others,'' she said.
- Dudowsky declined to respond to The Epoch Times' email request for comment, referring it instead to Brian McCarthy, a league spokesman. McCarthy declined to say if the NFL places a higher value on ratings and entertainment than on First Amendment rights, including freedom of religion.
- John Boyd told The Epoch Times he was mystified by the NFL's adamant refusal to make any accommodation of his daughter's religious and medical rights.
- ''My response to the final position of the NFL was one of utter disbelief because I didn't understand why a single person that was willing to comply with all other NFL COVID protocols and submit verification of a current COVID-19 negative test was not allowed to sing the National Anthem in an open-air stadium. It made no common sense to me that the NFL was not willing to make any accommodation,'' John Boyd said.
- John Boyd added in a separate email that he believed ''if accommodations were made for tens of thousands of mask-less, unvaccinated fans screaming over the field and many unvaccinated players running back and forth on the field, surely an accommodation could have been made for a single singer (standing alone distanced from all other people) to sing the National Anthem on the sidelines for only a minute and 45 seconds.''
- The immovable NFL policy was first announced to franchise owners and officials, coaches and players, in a July 1, 2021, memo that detailed processes to be followed by everybody involved with a game, including NFL staff, members of the news media, game coaches and officials on the field and the sidelines, and entertainers.
- Significantly, NFL players are not required to be vaccinated, but those who decline to do so are required to submit to a daily test. A positive result means the player cannot play in a game or participate in practice sessions until he has five consecutive negative daily tests.
- In a tense telephone conversation prompted by Dudowsky's Aug. 31 email, the NFL official told John Boyd that while he understood the manager's concerns, ''unfortunately, that is the NFL's policy that the NFL has stated both privately and publicly, this is not something we're running from or hiding.''
- Dudowsky told Boyd that ''there are players pushing back on this policy,'' but ''the league does feel it has control over its venues, the fields and the protocols.''
- Dudowsky said the NFL's decision to not accommodate Boyd's request to be allowed to perform in an alternative setting on the sidelines or elsewhere in the stadium was not a legal issue.
- ''That is a decision by the NFL, by our events team and our entertainment team,'' Dudowsky told Boyd. He also acknowledged that the NFL made extensive accommodations to entertainers and others during the 2020 season due to the virus that causes COVID-19.
- ''This is our first big one for a national broadcast and it is important that we are showcasing a singer on the field for the first time, other than the Super Bowl, in the last year,'' Dudowsky told Boyd.
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- HillFaith Founding Editor, Congressional Correspondent for The Epoch Times, FOIA Hall of Fame, Reaganaut, Okie/Texan.
- Afghan soldiers trained by UK and US forces have defected and are fighting for the Taliban, sources | Daily Mail Online
- Afghan soldiers trained by UK and US forces 'have defected and are now fighting for the Taliban'British army officers have analysed images of Taliban fighters using weaponsThe sources believe some of the fighters are using techniques they learned from UK and US forces It comes after the Taliban claimed victory in the Panjshir valley, the last province holding out against itBy Rachael Bunyan For Mailonline
- Published: 21:03 EDT, 7 September 2021 | Updated: 02:43 EDT, 8 September 2021
- Afghan soldiers who were trained by British and American forces have reportedly defected and are now fighting for the Taliban, UK army sources revealed.
- British army officers have analysed recent images of the Taliban using their weapons and they believe some of the fighters are using techniques they learned from the UK and US as well as NATO countries.
- A UK military source told The Times that they identified one Taliban fighter using a 'straight finger' over a gun's trigger guard. The source said this indicates they were trained by western forces as veteran members of Taliban hold their AK47s 'randomly'.
- The source said: 'This is the safety training we have,' adding that if they displayed these techniques then we 'know it's our guys'.
- While there is no official confirmation that Afghan soldiers who were trained by the UK and US have switched sides, the military source said it is likely they defected to save themselves after western countries withdrew from Afghanistan last month.
- The source said: 'Everyone just flips sides. You flip sides so you know you won't get done in.'
- It comes after the Taliban on Monday claimed victory in the Panjshir valley, the last province holding out against it.
- Taliban fighters celebrate victory in the Panjshir Valley on Monday. The jihadists claim to have wrestled control of the province and completed a total victory over Afghanistan
- Although it is possible that the Taliban has seized control of the major arteries and villages of the Panjshir, it is equally possible that the resistance has retreated only as far as the steep sides of the mountains from which it will wage a guerilla war
- Pictures on social media showed Taliban members standing in front of the Panjshir governor's compound after days of fighting with the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRFA), commanded by Panjshiri leader Ahmad Massoud.
- Massoud denied that his force, consisting of remnants of the Afghan army as well as local militia fighters, was beaten, and tweeted that 'our resistance will continue'.
- Meanwhile the Taliban's spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, has previously said that 'former forces that were trained and are professionals should be recruited' to the Taliban.
- Another former military source who analysed recent images told the newspaper: 'The new Taliban 2.0, as they are being called, is using the finger discipline.
- 'An untrained force would normally hold the weapon randomly, but if your hand is behind the pistol grip and your finger is over the trigger guard, then you're not going to have a negligent discharge and no one else is going to fire it either.'
- But a defence source disagreed with the claim and said they believed any 'competent' force would teach their soldiers how to handle their weapons in such a way.
- A Ministry of Defence spokesman said: 'We have no evidence to support reports that western-trained former Afghan Security Forces have joined the Taliban.'
- Barbara Kelemen, an intelligence analyst at security intelligence firm Dragonfly, said they had assessed 'reasonable probability' some Afghan soldiers had defected and switched to the Taliban.
- She said: 'Among reasons that would prompt some soldiers to join the Taliban are their previous ties to the group, economic incentives and even personal or familial safety if they perceived defeat for government forces was likely.'
- Afghanistan is on the precipice of a humanitarian disaster three weeks after the fall of Kabul with furious protesters taking to the streets of the capital and locals unable to withdraw money from banks.
- A Taliban fighter points an assault rifle at protesters on the streets of Kabul on Tuesday
- Afghan demonstrators shout slogans during an anti-Pakistan protest, near the Pakistan embassy in Kabul, on Tuesday
- The chaos comes as the Taliban announced a caretaker government, awarding top posts to veteran jihadists as it seeks to bring stability to Afghanistan.
- The announcement came amid another day of angry protests on the streets of Kabul, with Taliban fighters firing into the air to disperse crowds demanding rights for women, work and freedom and movement.
- Basic services have collapsed since the Taliban took power, people cannot withdraw money from banks and Western aid has been cut off.
- The Taliban's chief spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid held a press conference on Tuesday evening to announce UN-sanctioned Mohammad Hassan Akhund as their new leader.
- Taliban co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradar will serve as his deputy; Mullah Yaqub, son of the one-eyed late supreme leader Mullah Omar, was named defence minister; and Sirajuddin Haqqani, wanted by the FBI and the leader of the feared Haqqani network, was named interior minister.
- Opinion | We Work at the A.C.L.U. Here's What We Think About Vaccine Mandates. - The New York Times
- Credit... Jocelyn Tsaih By David Cole and Daniel Mach
- Mr. Cole is the national legal director of the A.C.L.U., and Mr. Mach is the director of its program on freedom of religion and belief.
- Do vaccine mandates violate civil liberties? Some who have refused vaccination claim as much.
- At the A.C.L.U., we are not shy about defending civil liberties, even when they are very unpopular. But we see no civil liberties problem with requiring Covid-19 vaccines in most circumstances.
- While the permissibility of requiring vaccines for particular diseases depends on several factors, when it comes to Covid-19, all considerations point in the same direction. The disease is highly transmissible, serious and often lethal; the vaccines are safe and effective; and crucially there is no equally effective alternative available to protect public health.
- In fact, far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties. They protect the most vulnerable among us, including people with disabilities and fragile immune systems, children too young to be vaccinated and communities of color hit hard by the disease.
- Vaccine requirements also safeguard those whose work involves regular exposure to the public, like teachers, doctors and nurses, bus drivers and grocery store employees. And by inoculating people from the disease's worst effects, the vaccines offer the promise of restoring to all of us our most basic liberties, eventually allowing us to return safely to life as we knew it, in schools and at houses of worship and political meetings '-- not to mention at restaurants, bars and gatherings with family and friends.
- Opinion Conversation Questions surrounding the Covid-19 vaccine and its rollout. Is the pandemic getting worse again? Aaron E. Carroll, the chief health officer for Indiana University, writes that the answer depends on whether you are vaccinated. Are new mask mandates a good idea? Jennifer B. Nuzzo and Beth Blauer, health experts at Johns Hopkins, examine three important questions about masking rules. What do you say to a friend who doesn't want the vaccine? Our chatbot, developed with experts, tackles this thorny conversation. Will masking in schools have negative effects on learning? Judith Danovitch, a research psychologist, explains why there's little reason to worry, and why face coverings may even offer unexpected benefits. Here's why civil liberties objections to Covid vaccine mandates are generally unfounded.
- Vaccines are a justifiable intrusion on autonomy and bodily integrity. That may sound ominous, because we all have the fundamental right to bodily integrity and to make our own health care decisions. But these rights are not absolute. They do not include the right to inflict harm on others.
- While vaccine mandates are not always permissible, they rarely run afoul of civil liberties when they involve highly infectious and devastating diseases like Covid-19. Although this disease is novel, vaccine mandates are not. Schools, health care facilities, the U.S. military and many other institutions have long required vaccination for contagious diseases like mumps and measles that pose far less risk than the coronavirus does today. (And just to be clear, no one is proposing forcible injections or criminal penalties.)
- In the United States alone, more than 39 million people have been infected with Covid-19 and more than 600,000 people have died. People with intellectual and physical disabilities are more likely to contract the disease, and they have much higher rates of hospitalization and death. Children's hospitals in Georgia, Louisiana and other states are reporting high admissions of infected patients, and many are running out of beds.
- Even though the F.D.A. and independent medical experts have found Covid vaccines to be extremely safe and highly effective, a sizable portion of the eligible population has chosen not to be vaccinated. In this context, Covid-19 vaccine mandates '-- much like mask mandates '-- are public health measures necessary to protect people from severe illness and death. They are therefore permissible in many settings where the unvaccinated pose a risk to others, including schools and universities, hospitals, restaurants and bars, workplaces and businesses open to the public.
- While limited exceptions are necessary, most people can be required to be vaccinated. Any vaccination mandate should have exceptions for those for whom the vaccine is medically contraindicated, such as people who have allergies to it. The absence of such exceptions would directly undermine the public health goals of a mandate, although other mandatory precautions, like masking, social distancing, regular testing or working remotely, may be appropriate. Where a vaccine is not medically contraindicated, however, avoiding a deadly threat to the public health typically outweighs personal autonomy and individual freedom.
- What about those who object to vaccination on religious grounds? Like personal autonomy, religious freedom is an essential right, but not an unfettered license to inflict harm on others. As the Supreme Court explained more than 75 years ago in Prince v. Massachusetts: ''The right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or the child to communicable disease or the latter to ill health or death.''
- In the employment context, federal law requires religious accommodations in some circumstances, but not if they would cause an ''undue hardship'' to the employer. Refusing a Covid-19 vaccination poses a direct threat to the health and safety of others in the workplace and likely amounts to an undue hardship unless the employer can devise some other accommodation for the employee, such as working from home.
- Some have objected that in practice, vaccine mandates may have disparate effects on disadvantaged communities or individuals. Such concerns need to be taken seriously. But they don't justify refusals to be vaccinated.
- Every effort should be made to ensure that vaccines are equally available to all without obstacles posed by cost, race, immigration status, geography or job responsibilities. Some undocumented people reportedly have been turned away from vaccination sites because they lack a government ID, for instance, while others have confronted obstacles related to cost, transportation or additional requirements imposed by vaccination clinics.
- Public health officials should take concrete steps to counter vaccine hesitancy among communities of color whose past discriminatory treatment has understandably sown mistrust. Employers imposing mandates should afford workers paid time off as needed to obtain a vaccine and to manage potential side effects. And people should be permitted to offer written proof of vaccination rather than requiring proof via a smartphone app, so as not to disadvantage those who can't afford a smartphone.
- But where vaccines are widely available, equity concerns actually argue in favor of vaccine mandates, precisely because disadvantaged communities have been disproportionately harmed by this disease. These are reasons to make the vaccine easier to get, not for opposing vaccine mandates altogether.
- The real threat to civil liberties comes from states banning vaccine and mask mandates. Even though most Covid-19 vaccine mandates do not infringe civil liberties, several states, including Florida, Iowa, South Carolina and Texas, have banned vaccine mandates or mask mandates '-- and sometimes both '-- in the name of freedom. But these bans directly endanger the public health and make more deaths from the disease inevitable. They trample the rights of the most vulnerable, who want to participate in society without putting their health at grave risk.
- We care deeply about civil liberties and civil rights for all '-- which is precisely why we support vaccine mandates.
- Body Autonomy Is Protected By The Constitution | by Elle Beau ''¸ | Inside of Elle Beau | Medium
- The government cannot force you to save someone else's life against your will, not even the life of a baby Elle Beau ''¸ May 27, 2019·
- Image: PexelsMost discussions about abortion and choice center around whether or not a fetus is a full human being with the same or greater level of rights as an actual woman. When exactly a fertilized egg becomes a true'...
- Bitcoin tumbles 10% as El Salvador adopts it as legal tender
- The price of bitcoin fell Tuesday after breaking through $52,000 late Monday, reaching its highest level since May.
- The price action comes on the day El Salvador is set to adopt the largest cryptocurrency by market cap as legal tender, becoming the first country to do so. Bitcoin fell as low as 16% Tuesday morning. It was last down by about 9% and trading at $47,223.26, according to Coin Metrics.
- Crypto adjacent stocks Microstrategy and Coinbase also fell about 6% and 3.5%, respectively. Coinbase users are experiencing delayed or canceled transactions at "elevated rates," the crypto exchange said in an update on Twitter in the late morning. Kraken, another major crypto exchange, said around the same time that it's investigating delays for users using instant funding methods as well as failed card payments.
- Early Tuesday the country disabled Chivo, its government-run bitcoin wallet, to increase the capacity of the servers, which were hindering new users from installing it, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele announced in a tweet at about 7:00 a.m. EST.
- "Any data they try to enter at this time will give them an error," he said. "This is a relatively straightforward problem, but it cannot be fixed with the system connected."
- The market action is unsurprising, according to Leah Wald, CEO at Valkryie Investments, who said the news was largely priced into the market "a while ago."
- "When this move was first announced, it didn't have nearly as big of an impact on price as some may have expected it might, possibly because El Salvador's population is less than New York City's, but also because the announcement was light on details and people were on the fence about how this was going to be implemented," she told CNBC, noting that much of El Salvador lives in poverty and doesn't have internet or smartphone access required to participate in the bitcoin network. "Transaction fees, processing times, and other hurdles also make this feel more like a beta test rather than a solution to many of the problems plaguing the country's poor," she added.
- As part of the new law, businesses will be required to accept bitcoin for goods and services, though merchants who aren't technologically able to accept bitcoin will be exempt. The government has installed 200 bitcoin ATMs around El Salvador. It also bought 400 bitcoins worth about $20 million and is preloading Chivo wallets with $30 worth of bitcoin for Salvadorans who register.
- Some traders are saying on social media that they will be buying $30 worth of bitcoin in their local fiat currencies to commemorate and support El Salvador's new law, at 3:00 p.m. EST. But bitcoin prices were sliding into the afternoon anyway.
- "What is most worth looking out for is whether or not neighboring countries in Latin America, or those elsewhere around the world, begin to adopt bitcoin as their national currency as well," Wald said. "Should this occur, that is when we could see a parabolic move higher, as the momentum gained from many millions more people having instant access to crypto should result in more adoption, more HODLing, and higher prices."
- Bitcoin advocates have long held there's a strong case for Latin American markets using the cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange, for remittances and even for central banks that experience high currency depreciation.
- On Monday Panamanian politician Gabriel Silva introduced the "Crypto Law," which "seeks to make Panama a country compatible with the blockchain, crypto assets and the internet," he said on Twitter. "This has the potential to create thousands of jobs, attract investment and make the government transparent," he added.
- New Studies Find Evidence Of 'Superhuman' Immunity To COVID-19 In Some People : Goats and Soda : NPR
- An illustration of antibodies attacking a coronavirus particle. Christoph Burgstedt/Science Photo LIbrary /Getty Images hide caption
- toggle caption Christoph Burgstedt/Science Photo LIbrary /Getty Images An illustration of antibodies attacking a coronavirus particle.
- Christoph Burgstedt/Science Photo LIbrary /Getty Images Some scientists have called it "superhuman immunity" or "bulletproof." But immunologist Shane Crotty prefers "hybrid immunity."
- "Overall, hybrid immunity to SARS-CoV-2 appears to be impressively potent," Crotty wrote in commentary in Science back in June.
- No matter what you call it, this type of immunity offers much needed good news in what seems like an endless array of bad news regarding COVID-19.
- Over the past several months, a series of studies has found that some people mount an extraordinarily powerful immune response against SARS-CoV-2. Their bodies produce very high levels of antibodies, but they also make antibodies with great flexibility '-- likely capable of fighting off the variants of coronavirus circulating in the world but also likely effective against variants that may emerge in the future.
- "One could reasonably predict that these people will be quite well-protected against most '-- and perhaps all of '-- the SARS-CoV-2 variants that we are likely to see in the foreseeable future," says Paul Bieniasz, a virologist at the Rockefeller University who helped to lead several of the studies.
- In a study published online last month, Bieniasz and his colleagues found antibodies in these individuals that can strongly neutralize the six variants of concern tested, including delta and beta, as well as several other viruses related to SARS-CoV-2, including one in bats, two in pangolins and the one that caused the first coronavirus pandemic, SARS-CoV-1.
- "This is being a bit more speculative, but I would also suspect that they would have some degree of protection against the SARS-like viruses that have yet to infect humans," Bieniasz says.
- So who is capable of mounting this "superhuman" or "hybrid" immune response?
- People who have had a "hybrid" exposure to the virus. Specifically, they were infected with COVID-19 in 2020 and then immunized with mRNA vaccines this year. "Those people have amazing responses to the vaccine," says virologist Theodora Hatziioannou at the Rockefeller University, who also helped to lead several of the studies. "I think they are in the best position to fight the virus. The antibodies in these people's blood can even neutralize SARS-CoV-1, the first coronavirus, which emerged 20 years ago. That virus is very, very different from SARS-CoV-2."
- In fact, these antibodies could even fight off a virus engineered, on purpose, to be highly resistant to neutralization. This virus contained 20 mutations that are known to prevent SARS-CoV-2 antibodies from binding to it. Antibodies from people who were only vaccinated or only had prior COVID infections were essentially useless against this mutant virus. But antibodies in people with the "hybrid immunity" could neutralize it.
- These findings show how powerful the mRNA vaccines can be in people with prior exposure to SARS-CoV-2, she says. "There's a lot of research now focused on finding a pan-coronavirus vaccine that would protect against all future variants. Our findings tell you that we already have it.
- "But there's a catch, right?" she adds: You first need to be sick with COVID. "After natural infections, the antibodies seem to evolve and become not only more potent but also broader. They become more resistant to mutations within the [virus]."
- Hatziioannou and colleagues don't know if everyone who has had COVID-19 and then an mRNA vaccine will have such a remarkable immune response. "We've only studied the phenomena with a few patients because it's extremely laborious and difficult research to do," she says.
- But she suspects it's quite common. "With every single one of the patients we studied, we saw the same thing." The study reports data on 14 patients.
- Several other studies support her hypothesis '-- and buttress the idea that exposure to both a coronavirus and an mRNA vaccine triggers an exceptionally powerful immune response. In one study, published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine, scientists analyzed antibodies generated by people who had been infected with the original SARS virus, SARS-CoV-1, back in 2002 or 2003 and then received an mRNA vaccine this year.
- Remarkably, these people also produced high levels of antibodies, and '-- it's worth reiterating this point from a few paragraphs above '-- antibodies that could neutralize a whole range of variants and SARS-like viruses.
- Now, of course, there are so many remaining questions. For example, what if you catch COVID after you're vaccinated? Or can a person who hasn't been infected with COVID-19 mount a "superhuman" response if they receive a third dose of vaccine as a booster?
- Hatziiannou says she can't answer either of those questions yet. "I'm pretty certain that a third shot will help a person's antibodies evolve even further, and perhaps they will acquire some breadth [or flexibility], but whether they will ever manage to get the breadth that you see following natural infection, that's unclear."
- Immunologist John Wherry, at the University of Pennsylvania, is a bit more hopeful. "In our research, we already see some of this antibody evolution happening in people who are just vaccinated," he says, "although it probably happens faster in people who have been infected."
- In a recent study, published online in late August, Wherry and his colleagues show that, over time, people who have had only two doses of the vaccine (and no prior infection), start to make more flexible antibodies '-- antibodies that can better recognize many of the variants of concern.
- So a third dose of the vaccine would presumably give those antibodies a boost and push the evolution of the antibodies further, Wherry says. So a person will be better equipped to fight off whatever variant the virus puts out there next.
- "Based on all these findings, it looks like the immune system is eventually going to have the edge over this virus," says Paul Bieniasz at the Rockefeller University. "And if we're lucky, SARS-CoV-2 will eventually fall into that category of viruses that gives us only a mild cold."
- Wipeout in the grocery aisle: Pittsburgh shoppers face spotty shortages as delta variant rages on | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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- Covid-19: Bluff bar's 'disturbing' sign compares Ardern to Hitler, Covid response to Jewish atrocities - NZ Herald
- New Zealand6 Sep, 2021 03:07 AM4 minutes to read
- A Bluff pub is in hot water for putting a sign up on their window that compares Ardern and Bloomfield to Hitler and Goebbels and Covid response to Nazi Jewish atrocities. Photo / Marcus Lush / Twitter
- A Bluff pub is in the firing line after placing a sign in its window comparing the Covid-19 response to Nazi Germany.
- The sign, which is meant to explain to customers that it is mandatory to sign in using the Covid-19 tracer app, makes reference to Nazis Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Operation Reinhard, a German plan to exterminate Jews.
- In a photo taken over the weekend, the sign faces out the window and labels Jacinda Ardern "Hitler" and Dr Ashley Bloomfield "Dr Ashley Goebbels".
- "Welcome to The Eagle, Your friendly Resistance Head Quarters," it says at the top of the sign.
- "Ms Jacinda Hitler and Dr Ashley Goebbels have decreed that it is MANDATORY for you to record your visit.
- "Please use the Big Brother app (Covid-19 tracer app) to scan our QR code.
- "If you don't have Big Brother app please use the Ballot Box to sign in."
- In smaller wording, the sign then goes on to mention Covid-19 passports, and compare the Covid-19 Public Health Response Act issued by Dr Bloomfield to Operation Reinhard.
- "The Government will send you, your credit score along with your Covid passport shortly.
- "Brought to you by Section 11 of the Covid-19 Public Health Response Act 2020 - aka Operation Reinhard (The Final Solution)."
- Underneath the sign the establishment wrote "Pfizer 1 - Delta 0" on a chalkboard.
- The sign has caused hurt in the Jewish community who were victims of the Nazi Germany regime.
- The fine print of the sign which compares the public health response to the Nazi's Operation Reinhard (The Final Solution) where 6 million Jews were killed. Photo / TwitterNew Zealand Jewish Council spokeswoman Juliet Moses told the Herald they are seeing more and more comparisons between Covid-19 and the Holocaust and says it is a "gross trivialisation of the suffering" caused.
- "I feel a combination of disgust, concern and exhaustion, because we are seeing these sorts of comparisons more regularly.
- "Our community still has Holocaust survivors, as well as many descendants of survivors and victims.
- "The comparison - and especially the reference to the 'Final Solution' - is certainly hurtful and disturbing.
- "Even outlining why the comparison is absurd and offensive risks giving it credence it doesn't warrant. But it's important to note that the Nazi regime and the Holocaust it engineered saw the industrialised genocide of six million Jews - that is, the 'Final Solution'.
- "Any comparison between the Government's response to the pandemic and the Nazi regime is a gross trivialisation of the suffering and loss of life that occurred under the Nazis. It is what the Holocaust scholar Professor Deborah Lipstadt terms 'soft core Holocaust denial'."
- Moses added that those who oppose Government responses often invoke antisemitic conspiracy theories in doing so, including Holocaust trivialisation in relation to the pandemic.
- She suggested those making the comparisons should "get better educated about what occurred" and "if they want to criticise the Government's Covid-19 response, they should do so without invoking the Nazi regime or the Holocaust".
- The Herald contacted The Eagle establishment for comment.
- When asked about their intention behind the sign, they said "no comment".
- The Eagle establishment. Photo / FacebookThe messaging has sparked backlash on social media with a number of people calling the pub's decision to promote the sign as "disgusting".
- "If you had an even basic level understanding of history you would know this is not funny and deeply offensive #ignorance101," one person wrote.
- Another said: "This is really off. Not even funny. As an Aucklander in their 5th lockdown and a westie whose got friends affected by floods and stabbings I find this offensive. Not a dollar from my whanau goes to the Eagle you sick b*****ds."
- Others weighed in calling the sign "embarrassing", "disgusting" and said it's "a place to avoid".
- Bluff is currently under alert level 3 restrictions where pubs and restaurants are still closed for dining in but can open and provide contactless takeaway options.
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- Complaints on STOCK Act violations stack up against members of Congress | Fox Business
- Published September 07, 2021
- Watchdog groups question lawmakers' late disclosure of stock transactionsCheck out what's clicking on FoxBusiness.com.
- A government watchdog group asked the Office of Congressional Ethics last week to investigate Assistant Speaker of the House Katherine Clark, D-Mass., for apparently failing to timely disclose up to $285,000 in financial transactions '-- making the potential successor to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the latest among numerous House and Senate members to face ethics complaints about allegedly violating the STOCK Act.
- The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, better known as the STOCK Act, has gained renewed attention during the COVID-19 pandemic when some lawmakers were suspected of using information from government roles to profit.
- Broadly, the law prohibits members of Congress, congressional staffers and certain members of the executive branch and federal judiciary from engaging in insider trading based on information they learn through their government jobs. One provision of the law requires members of Congress to make a "full and complete" statement of their assets and their spouse's assets, debts and income, as well as periodic reports of financial transactions that exceed $1,000 within 30 to 45 days of the transaction.
- PROGRESSIVES' TAX-THE-RICH DREAMS FADE AS DEMOCRATS STRUGGLE FOR VOTES
- Other lawmakers targeted with ethics complaints in recent weeks for potentially violating the law have included former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.
- Specifically, Clark, first elected in 2012, failed to publicly disclose 19 personal stock transactions by her husband within 45 days, according to the ethics complaint. This included investments in Google's parent company Alphabet Inc.; Best Buy; First Solar; investment firm BlackRock; pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline; data management company Iron Mountain; and water technology company Xylem Inc. The transactions valued between $19,019 and $285,000, were made on June 4 but were not disclosed until Aug. 15.
- Clark's potential violation was first reported by Business Insider. Clark's office did not respond to voicemail and email inquiries from Fox News for this story last week.
- The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust has filed a complaint against Wasserman Schultz, as well as Reps. Lori Trahan of Massachusetts and Kathy Castor of Florida for tardy financial disclosures. Last week, the group also filed a complaint against freshman Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz, but the Senate Ethics Committee appears to have already resolved the questions regarding Kelly's transaction.
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- "These disclosure reports are the only way for citizens and watchdog organizations to monitor election officials and determine if they are profiting from positions," Kendra Arnold, executive director of FACT, told Fox News. "The only way to determine this in a timely manner is if they file the reports on time. Some lawmakers file the reports two years or six months late."
- The complaint against Wasserman Schultz, first elected in 2004, says the former DNC chair bought up to $15,000 in stock in Westell Technologies, a telecommunications firm, while her dependent child bought up to $45,000 in stock in the company. The purchases were in October 2020, but she did not disclose the trades until July 2021 '' well past the required deadline.
- Business Insider first reported on the three House members on Aug. 2. FACT made the complaints on Aug. 20. The offices of Wasserman Schultz, Castor and Trahan did not respond to Fox News inquiries for this story.
- The STOCK Act, enacted in 2012 with broad bipartisan support and signed by President Obama, was high profile at the time it passed in response to reporting by author Peter Schweizer in his book, "Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison," and by 60 Minutes.
- "All members are trained on this law. It is a commonly known law," Arnold continued. "When it was passed, it was high profile. It is especially puzzling when longstanding Senate and House members don't follow it."
- The complaint against Castor alleges the Florida congresswoman first elected in 2006 bought $45,000 worth of Berkshire Hathaway stock in June and July of 2020 but waited a year '' July 27, 2021 '' to disclose the investments.
- The ethics complaint against Trahan alleges the Massachusetts congresswoman first elected in 2018, sold up to $15,000 in the software company Stella Connect on Sept. 10, 2020 but waited 10 months '' July 27, to disclose the matter.
- Senators, as well as several other House members, have been accused of violating the STOCK Act in recent months.
- In the case of Paul, the Kentucky senator, it was for a purchase his wife Kelly Paul made of up to $15,000 stock in Gilead Sciences, maker of the medicine remdesivir in February 2020 before the FDA approved it for treatment of COVID-19. She responded that she bought the stock based on the World Health Organization information touting the drug as a promising COVID-19 treatment and that she lost money.
- Still, the Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint against Paul on Aug. 16.
- "This filing, coming over a year late and detailing the financial interest a senator held in a company producing an antiviral drug from the onset of a global pandemic, is a clear example of why greater STOCK Act enforcement is needed," Kedric Payne, general counsel and senior director of ethics at Campaign Legal Center, said in a statement.
- The Campaign Legal Center also filed a complaint against Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., in July alleging the freshman senator failed to properly report 130 separate stock and stock option trades valued at a price of at least $894,000.
- GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE
- A Tuberville spokeswoman told CNBC the senator's financial advisers handle his stock trading and that he didn't know about the individual stock and stock option trades and thus didn't realize the need for disclosure for the STOCK Act's deadline. She said the office put processes in place for timely reporting in the future.
- CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ON FOX BUSINESS
- FACT's complaint against Kelly, the Arizona freshman Democratic senator, filed last Monday says he bought up to $15,000 in Boom Technology by exercising his stock option on April 13, but he didn't report within the 30-45 day deadline. He eventually reported on Aug. 16. However, on Aug. 31, one day after FACT filed the complaint, the Senate Select Committee on Ethics provided a waiver to Kelly for the late filing. This is because Kelly's office previously explained the transaction was required for the senator to move the asset into his newly established, qualified blind trust that the Ethics Committee had approved, and didn't involve the purchase of any new asset. Kelly merely exercised the options that he already held.
- "Based upon the circumstances described and the committee's precedent with respect to penalty waivers, the committee approves your waiver request," the Senate Select Committee on Ethics responded on Aug. 31. "Because you have filed your report and the committee has waived the penalty, the committee considers the matter of this penalty closed."
- CDC Did Not 'Admit Only 6%' of Recorded Deaths from COVID-19 - FactCheck.org
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn't drastically reduced the number of deaths attributable to COVID-19, but posts making that bogus claim have been circulating widely '-- with the help of President Donald Trump, who retweeted one such claim on Aug. 30.
- Twitter has since removed the original tweet, which came from an account dedicated to the pro-Trump conspiracy theory QAnon. But the claim is still readily available on all the major social media platforms . In fact, the same QAnon account that posted the now-deleted tweet includes a screenshot version featuring the president's retweet.
- The post Trump highlighted said: ''This week the CDC quietly updated the Covid number to admit that only 6% of all the 153,504 deaths recorded actually died from Covid. That's 9,210 deaths. The other 94% had 2 to 3 other serious illnesses and the overwhelming majority were of very advanced age.''
- But that's not what the CDC information says.
- In weekly updates provided on the CDC's website, the agency includes information on additional conditions present in patients who died with COVID-19. These other illnesses or conditions found to be present in a patient are called comorbidities. The agency also includes a chart detailing the number of patients with each additional condition.
- For the week referenced in the claim, the CDC explained that the chart ''shows the types of health conditions and contributing causes mentioned in conjunction with deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned.''
- That means that 6% of those who died with COVID-19 through Aug. 15 didn't have any other reported conditions.
- It does not mean that the CDC has ''quietly updated'' the number of deaths associated with COVID-19 to a fraction of what had been reported. It's also not new information; the agency has been providing the same information since May.
- Asked about Trump's tweet during a press briefing on Aug. 31, though, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said that ''he was highlighting new CDC information that came out that was worth noting.''
- At that time, the total number of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. had passed 183,000, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, and the total number of cases across the country had passed 6 million.
- McEnany said that the president was not trying to downplay the death toll.
- The following morning, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, clarified what the CDC data mean.
- He noted that the 6% figure includes cases where COVID-19 was listed as the only cause of death. ''That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of Covid didn't die of Covid-19. They did,'' Fauci said on ABC's ''Good Morning America.''
- ''So the numbers you've been hearing '-- the 180,000-plus deaths '-- are real deaths from Covid-19. Let [there] not be any confusion about that,'' Fauci said.
- Other versions of the claim are misleading, rather than being strictly false. One example is a headline on the conservative outlet Gateway Pundit, which announced: ''This Week CDC Quietly Updated COVID-19 Numbers '' Only 9,210 Americans Died From COVID-19 Alone '' Rest Had Different Other Serious Illnesses.''
- The president retweeted a link to that, too, and the phrase ''only 6%'' trended on Twitter.
- Several media outlets flipped the percentage and reported that 94% of COVID-19 deaths had ''underlying medical conditions.''
- But the data on which all of this is based come from death certificates, which list any causes or conditions that contributed to a person's death. In the case of COVID-19, the disease often causes other serious conditions, such as pneumonia or acute respiratory distress syndrome. Those two conditions are among the ailments with the highest counts in the CDC's comorbidity chart. Some long-term conditions that increase the risk for severe COVID-19, such as diabetes or hypertension, were also listed.
- The underlying cause of death, however, is the condition that started the chain of events that led to a person's death. In 92% of all deaths that mention COVID-19, that disease is listed as the underlying cause of death, Jeff Lancashire, spokesman for the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, told FactCheck.org in an email.
- As the epidemiologist and science writer Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz explained in a recent post, ''it's pretty rare that someone wouldn't have at least one issue caused by coronavirus prior to their death, and all it means is that in 94% of cases people who had COVID-19 also developed other issues, or had other problems at the same time.''
- Meyerowitz-Katz notes that influenza and pneumonia are listed as the most common concurrent diseases, which isn't surprising. ''Similarly,'' he writes, ''respiratory failure, something that the coronavirus directly causes, is listed here as a 'comorbidity' that 55,000 people had.''
- So, it's misleading to say that 94% of those who died with COVID-19 also had other ailments without explaining that the disease causes other serious illnesses. And it's wrong to claim that only 6% of the recorded COVID-19 deaths were caused by the disease.
- Update, Sept. 2: In an interview with Fox News' Laura Ingraham that aired Sept. 1, Trump made this false claim himself, saying, ''I saw a statistic come out the other day, talking about only 6% of the people actually died from COVID, which is a very interest[ing], that they died for '-- from other reasons.''
- Ingraham corrected him, explaining that those who die from COVID-19 often have other conditions, but COVID-19 ''might ultimately have been the key morbidity.''
- ''But it's an interesting statistic,'' Trump responded.
- Editor's note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here.
- Editor's Note: Please consider a donation to FactCheck.org. We do not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Credit card donations may be made through our ''Donate'' page . If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.
- New Details Emerge About U.S.-Funded Coronavirus Research at Chinese Laboratory
- Newly released documents provide details of U.S.-funded research on several types of coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The Intercept has obtained more than nine hundred pages of documents detailing the work of the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based health organization that used federal money to fund bat coronavirus research at the Chinese laboratory. The trove of documents includes two previously unpublished grant proposals that were funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as project updates relating to the EcoHealth Alliance's research, which has been scrutinized amid increased interest in the origins of the pandemic.
- The documents were released in connection with ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation by The Intercept against the National Institutes of Health. The Intercept is making the full documents available to the public.
- ''This is a roadmap to the high-risk research that could have led to the current pandemic,'' said Gary Ruskin, executive director of U.S. Right To Know, a group that has been investigating the origins of Covid-19.
- One of the grants, titled ''Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,'' outlines an ambitious effort led by EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak to screen thousands of bat samples for novel coronaviruses. The research also involved screening people who work with live animals. The documents contain several critical details about the research in Wuhan, including the fact that key experimental work with humanized mice was conducted at a biosafety level 3 lab at Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment '-- and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as was previously assumed. The documents raise additional questions about the theory that the pandemic may have begun in a lab accident, an idea that Daszak has aggressively dismissed.
- The bat coronavirus grant provided the EcoHealth Alliance with a total of $3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans. Even before the pandemic, many scientists were concerned about the potential dangers associated with such experiments. The grant proposal acknowledges some of those dangers: ''Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled.''
- Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, said the documents show that the EcoHealth Alliance has reason to take the lab leak theory seriously. ''In this proposal, they actually point out that they know how risky this work is. They keep talking about people potentially getting bitten '-- and they kept records of everyone who got bitten,'' Chan said. ''Does EcoHealth have those records? And if not, how can they possibly rule out a research-related accident?''
- According to Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, the documents contain critical information about the research done in Wuhan, including about the creation of novel viruses. ''The viruses they constructed were tested for their ability to infect mice that were engineered to display human type receptors on their cell,'' Ebright wrote to The Intercept after reviewing the documents. Ebright also said that the documents make it clear that two different types of novel coronaviruses were able to infect humanized mice. ''While they were working on SARS-related coronavirus, they were carrying out a parallel project at the same time on MERS-related coronavirus,'' Ebright said, referring to the virus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.
- Asked about the grant materials, Robert Kessler, communications manager at EcoHealth Alliance, said, ''We applied for grants to conduct research. The relevant agencies deemed that to be important research, and thus funded it. So I don't know that there's a whole lot to say.''
- The grant was initially awarded for a five-year period '-- from 2014 to 2019. Funding was renewed in 2019 but suspended by the Trump administration in April 2020.
- The closest relative of SARS-CoV-2, which causes Covid-19, is a virus found in bats, making the animals a focal point for efforts to understand the origins of the pandemic. Exactly how the virus jumped to humans is the subject of heated debate. Many scientists believe it was a natural spillover, meaning that the virus passed to humans in a setting such as a wet market or rural area where humans and animals are in close contact. Biosafety experts and internet sleuths who suspect a lab origin, meanwhile, have spent more than a year poring over publicly available information and obscure scientific publications looking for answers. In the past few months, leading scientists have also called for a deeper investigation of the pandemic's origins, as has President Joe Biden, who in May ordered the intelligence community to study the issue. On August 27, Biden announced that the intelligence inquiry was inconclusive.
- Biden blamed China for failing to release critical data, but the U.S. government has also been slow to release information. The Intercept initially requested the proposals in September 2020.
- ''I wish that this document had been released in early 2020,'' said Alina Chan, who has called for an investigation of the lab-leak origin theory. ''It would have changed things massively, just to have all of the information in one place, immediately transparent, in a credible document that was submitted by EcoHealth Alliance.''
- The second grant, Understanding Risk of Zoonotic Virus Emergence in Emerging Infectious Disease Hotspots of Southeast Asia, was awarded in August 2020 and extends through 2025. The proposal, written in 2019, often seems prescient, focusing on scaling-up and deploying resources in Asia in case of an outbreak of an ''emergent infectious disease,'' or EID, and referring to Asia as ''this hottest of the EID hotspots.''
- FOIA Release: Fauci Funded Construction Of 'Chimeric Coronaviruses' In Wuhan | ZeroHedge
- When Dr. Anthony Fauci confidently screamed at Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) in July - calling him a liar for accusing him of funding so-called "Gain-of-Function" (GoF) research in Wuhan, China to make coronaviruses more transmissible to humans, the argument ultimately faded due to Fauci's unsupported claim that the research didn't technically fit the definition of GoF.
- Now, thanks to materials (here and here) released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by The Intercept against the National Institutes of Health (which were unredacted enough to toss Fauci under the bus), we now know that Fauci-funded EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit headed by Peter Daszak, was absolutely engaged in gain-of-function research to make chimeric SARS-based coronaviruses, which they confirmed could infect human cells.
- Peter Daszak (left), Anthony FauciWhile evidence of this research has been pointed to in published studies, the FOIA release provides a key piece to the puzzle which sheds new light on what was going on.
- "This is a roadmap to the high-risk research that could have led to the current pandemic," said Gary Ruskin, executive director of U.S. Right To Know, a group that has been investigating the origins of Covid-19 (via The Intercept).
- Wuhan Institute of Virology Shi 'Bat Lady' Zhengli toasts with Fauci-funded EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak (emerging viruses group photo)And as Rutgers University Board of Governors Chemistry Professor Richard H. Ebright notes, "The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful."
- In short, Fauci lied to Congress when he denied funding Gain-of-Function (GoF) research.
- ''If anybody is lying here, Senator, it is you.'''-- Dr. Fauci to Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). pic.twitter.com/mrEQTCHgRN
- '-- The Recount (@therecount) July 20, 2021Ebright summarized The Intercept's reporting in a Monday night Twitter thread:
- "The trove of documents includes two previously unpublished grant proposals that were funded by the NIAID, as well as project updates relating to the EcoHealth Alliance's research, which has been scrutinized amid increased interest in the origins of the pandemic."
- '-- Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) September 7, 2021Continued (emphasis ours):
- "The trove of documents includes two previously unpublished grant proposals that were funded by the NIAID, as well as project updates relating to the EcoHealth Alliance's research, which has been scrutinized amid increased interest in the origins of the pandemic."
- The materials show that the 2014 and 2019 NIH grants to EcoHealth with subcontracts to WIV funded gain-of-function research as defined in federal policies in effect in 2014-2017 and potential pandemic pathogen enhancement as defined in federal policies in effect in 2017-present.
- (This had been evident previously from published research papers that credited the 2014 grant and from the publicly available summary of the 2019 grant. But this now can be stated definitively from progress reports of the 2014 grant and the full proposal of the 2017 grant.)
- The materials confirm the grants supported the construction--in Wuhan--of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with genetic information from another coronavirus, and confirmed the resulting viruses could infect human cells.
- (Recombinant DNA includes molecules constructed outside of living cells by joining natural or synthetic DNA segments to DNA molecules that can replicate in a living cell, or molecules that result from their replication. -Science Direct) The materials reveal that the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses also could infect mice engineered to display human receptors on cells ("humanized mice").
- The materials further reveal for the first time that one of the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses--one not been previously disclosed publicly--was more pathogenic to humanized mice than the starting virus from which it was constructed...
- ...and thus not only was reasonably anticipated to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity, but, indeed, was *demonstrated* to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity.
- The materials further reveal that the the grants also supported the construction--in Wuhan--of novel chimeric MERS-related coronaviruses that combined spike genes from one MERS-related coronavirus with genetic information from another MERS-related coronavirus.
- The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.
- When asked in the replies where to find specific evidence on GoF research, user @SnupSnus replied:
- the same page is also numbered page 11- whoever made all those numberings set us up for lot's of confusion, "3.3.c humanised mouse experiments"
- '-- Simon Lackner (@SnupSnus) September 7, 2021there is an easy clue; the acknowledgments section of the paper attached in Fauci's panicked e-mails obtained via FOIA. this is the work "expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone". pic.twitter.com/WbLIGDouRE
- '-- counterpopp (@counterpopp) September 7, 2021Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, said the documents show that the EcoHealth Alliance has reason to take the lab leak theory seriously. ''In this proposal, they actually point out that they know how risky this work is. They keep talking about people potentially getting bitten '-- and they kept records of everyone who got bitten,'' Chan said. ''Does EcoHealth have those records? And if not, how can they possibly rule out a research-related accident?'' -The Intercept
- In response to inquiries from The Intercept, EcoHealth communications manager Robert Kessler replied: "We applied for grants to conduct research. The relevant agencies deemed that to be important research, and thus funded it. So I don't know that there's a whole lot to say."
- Stay tuned, things should get really interesting for Fauci and Daszak in the near future.
- So we paid the CCP to develop the virus that they unleashed on the world'...Not surprising'...The media will probably dig into this now just to avoid the Afghanistan disaster but that's not going away anytime soon either .. https://t.co/Ud9YKvmrTt
- '-- Marco Mazzocco, CFA (@MarcoMNYC) September 7, 2021To review the history of EcoHealth, Fauci and Gain-of-Function research which we noted in March:
- In 2014, Peter Daszak, president of New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, received a grant from Dr. Anthony Fauci's National Institutes of Health (NIH) to work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and others to research how bat coronaviruses can 'evolve and jump into the human population.'
- Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth AllianceThe grant's initial funding of $666,442 began in June 2014 with an end date of May 2019, and had paid annually to the tune of $3.7 million under the "Understanding The Risk Of Bat Coronavirus Emergence" project. Notably, the Obama administration cut funding for "gain-of-function" research in October, 2014, four months after Daszak's contract began, while the Wuhan Institute of Virology "had openly participated in gain-of-function research in partnership with U.S. universities and institutions" for years under the leadership of Dr. Shi 'Batwoman' Zhengli, according to the Washington Post's Josh Rogin.
- One of the grants, titled ''Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,'' outlines an ambitious effort led by EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak to screen thousands of bat samples for novel coronaviruses. The research also involved screening people who work with live animals. The documents contain several critical details about the research in Wuhan, including the fact that key experimental work with humanized mice was conducted at a biosafety level 3 lab at Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment '-- and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as was previously assumed. The documents raise additional questions about the theory that the pandemic may have begun in a lab accident, an idea that Daszak has called ''heinous.''
- The grant was initially awarded for a five-year period '-- from 2014 to 2019. Funding was renewed in 2019 but suspended by the Trump administration in April 2020. -The Intercept
- After Rogin exposed diplomatic cables last April expressing grave concerns over safety at WIV, he says: "many of the scientists who spoke out to defend the lab were Shi's research partners and funders, like the head of the global public health nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak; their research was tied to hers, and if the Wuhan lab were implicated in the pandemic, they would have to answer a lot of tough questions."
- In short, Daszak - who has insisted the 'lab escape' theory is impossible, and that random natural origin via intermediary animal species is the only answer - has a massive conflict of interest.
- @PeterDaszak on Gain of Function-experiments, Dec. 2019:"You can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily"
- "... inserting the spike protein into a backbone of another virus"
- "[...] insert these other related diseases and get a better vaccine.''
- Peter?https://t.co/avEIWY1syg pic.twitter.com/vRTGMHgApA
- '-- Bobby Rajesh Malhotra ã Ï (@Bobby_Network) February 28, 2021Furthermore, the biggest clue to SARS2's zoonotic origins are those closest virus relatives in bat caves in Yunnan, China that have been frequently sampled by various labs over the past decade.Why not search there first?
- '-- Alina Chan (@Ayjchan) March 10, 2021Does this count as a form of self-investigation?If you're charged with investigating data/records that you were a part of, and you tell the rest of the team they don't need to audit the records because you already know there's nothing relevant in there and can close the case? pic.twitter.com/9JDPjEMOtr
- '-- Alina Chan (@Ayjchan) March 10, 2021Further reading:
- Fauci In 2012: Gain-Of-Function Research 'Worth Risk Of Lab Accident Sparking Pandemic'Fauci-Funded EcoHealth Refuses To Give Wuhan Documents To Congress'EcoHealth Alliance' Orchestrated Key Scientists' Statement On "Natural Origin" Of SARS-CoV-2Video Of Live Bats In Wuhan Lab Reveals Daszak Lied In Now-Deleted Tweet"Sadly, It Starts With Two Lies": Peter Daszak's Latest Wuhan Screed Shredded
- Sen. Elizabeth Warren calls crypto the 'new shadow bank'
- United States Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the most vocal cryptocurrency skeptics in the U.S. government, has called the cryptocurrency industry the ''new shadow bank.''
- In a Sunday interview with the New York Times, Warren said that the cryptocurrency industry offers ''many of the same services'' as shadow banks but still lacks ''consumer protections or financial stability that back up the traditional system.''
- Warren expressed concerns over the rapidly growing market for stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency whose value can be pegged to that of other assets, including fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar, the euro or commodities like gold.
- The senator said that it's ''worth considering'' banning U.S. banks from holding the reserves to back private stablecoins, a move that ''could effectively end the surging market.''
- The total market capitalization of stablecoins like Tether (USDT) and USDC Coin (USDC) has surged parabolically this year, jumping from around $37 billion in January to $123 billion at the time of writing, according to data from Statista and CoinMarketCap, respectively. Large stablecoin accumulations have been widely perceived as an indicator of buying power for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) as fiat-pegged stablecoins enable a tool for traders to easily deposit on exchanges to buy and sell crypto.
- Related: Circle plans to become a full-reserve national digital currency bank
- Warren's latest remarks come as global financial regulators pay more attention to stablecoins like USDT. According to online reports, the Ontario Securities Commission has recently banned USDT trading services by Canada's first two registered crypto exchanges, Wealthsimple and Coinberry. In mid-July, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called on financial authorities to establish a proper regulatory framework for stablecoins.
- 'Not dealing with rookies': Companies brace for Biden's new labor cops
- The NLRB could alter the status of workers for companies like Lyft and Uber that attempt to classify many as independent contractors, rather than regular employees. | Mario Tama/Getty Images
- A new Democratic majority at the National Labor Relations Board is poised to carry out sweeping policy changes in the coming months that could dramatically shift the balance of power toward workers and away from employers.
- Among the most significant moves are likely to be increasing the number of people who qualify as employees instead of independent contractors so they can receive benefits, expanding protections for employees who speak out on the job, and cracking down on businesses that try to thwart union elections, according to NLRB officials, labor experts and employment attorneys.
- AdvertisementThe actions would be a sharp turnabout from a trend of labor policy favoring employers and would fulfill a key campaign pledge by President Joe Biden to enhance worker protections and power. They're also bound to spark a backlash from businesses.
- ''From the employers' standpoint, we're in for a very, very challenging time '-- frankly, even more challenging than under'' the Obama administration, said attorney Michael Lotito, who represents businesses for law firm Littler Mendelson. ''We're not dealing with rookies. We have individuals who know what they want to accomplish'' and ''have been given a directive as to what to accomplish.''
- Some analysts say the agency's expected rulings could even serve as a backdoor for enacting provisions included in Democrats' Protecting the Right to Organize Act, the filibuster-stalled bill that would vastly expand workers' ability to join unions in potentially the most important overhaul of U.S. labor law since the 1940s.
- Lotito predicts that employers will go to court against the agency for acting outside its jurisdiction. ''This board is going to test, significantly, the envelope,'' he said. ''The appellate practice emanating out of board decisions is going to explode.''
- AdvertisementThe NLRB, responsible for implementing the National Labor Relations Act, is an independent agency that operates outside of White House control. But Biden '-- a self-described union man who made organized labor a key focus of his campaign '-- lost no time in installing pro-union appointees to help deliver on his plan to resuscitate declining union membership.
- ''That is an indication of the sense of importance that the NLRB would play in his administration,'' Ifedapo Adeleye, a professor at Georgetown University, said. ''It's a very big signal about the change of direction.''
- The National Labor Relations Board building. | AP Photo/Jon Elswick
- The week of his inauguration, Biden forced out two Trump-era NLRB counsels '-- the first time in more than 70 years a president has exercised that power '-- and installed Democrat Lauren McFerran as chair. He nominated Obama alum Jennifer Abruzzo as general counsel the following month and two additional Democratic members not long after.
- All of Biden's nominees are former union lawyers who have represented the likes of SEIU and the Communications Workers of America. Abruzzo also served as deputy general counsel during President Barack Obama's administration, a role in which she helped oversee decisions that one study estimated overturned more than 4,500 years of precedent.
- AdvertisementThough the NLRB can't make any statutory changes, it can issue rulings that affect the law's implementation. Many unions have been wary of bringing cases before the board in past years, fearing the ramifications of a Republican majority. But with friendly faces in power, they're likely to resume.
- ''They've got allies,'' Sean Redmond, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's executive director of labor policy, said. ''There's not nearly as much to worry about from their standpoint.''
- The NLRB declined to comment for this story.
- Abruzzo sent a memo in August, laying out her priorities for the next few years by directing regional offices to hotline specific cases. As the agency's top cop, she has a strong hand in choosing which cases come before the board.
- ''The general counsel's 10-page memorandum to the field was breathtaking,'' Lotito said. ''It's almost like, 'We're here to remake labor law.'''
- Taken together, the issues she outlined signify a broad effort to roll back the Trump-era agency's pro-employer efforts and tilt the balance of power back toward workers.
- High on the list is what Abruzzo describes in her memo as ''employee status,'' or cases that deal with independent contractors. The PRO Act would extend the right to collective bargaining to gig workers by using the so-called ABC test '-- a three-prong set of standards employers must meet if they want to classify a worker as an independent contractor '-- to define them as employees under the NLRA. Experts say the NLRB is likely to use its rulings to similarly include such workers, which could affect gig economy giants like Lyft and Uber.
- The Trump board took ''an excessively narrow approach to defining an independent contractor that is inconsistent with both the common law and the goals of the Act,'' McFerran told POLITICO in June. ''I certainly think the law as it is written now should correctly be read far more broadly in a variety of ways.''
- Advertisement''There's gonna be a big change in the way gig economy businesses operate,'' said Dan Altchek, who represents employers for law firm Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr. ''The business models aren't going to work the way they exist.''
- Abruzzo also called on regional offices to send up cases dealing with protected activity: actions that employees can take without fear of retribution from their employer. The issue has already garnered attention; in August, the board heard a case charging that Google violated the National Labor Relations Act when it fired multiple employees who circulated a petition calling on the company to stop doing business with ICE, the immigration agency, among other things. The same month, an NLRB official filed a complaint against Home Depot alleging it broke the law by penalizing an employee wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt.
- Under President Donald Trump, the NLRB ''very narrowly defined the scope of protected activity and limited the channels employees can use to engage in such activity,'' McFerran said in June. "The law is intended to be read much more broadly in its coverage and to broadly protect workers' ability to come together and engage in self-advocacy.''
- Abruzzo also told regional directors to submit any cases dealing with ''employee handbook rules,'' which employers interpret as a return to an Obama-era tendency to scrutinize those documents in search of potential NLRA violations.
- During the Obama administration, regional directors ''would go to the employee handbook and just scour through the handbook ... and use that as a pretense to take some sort of enforcement action," said Redmond of the Chamber of Commerce. "We can expect to see it again.''
- One of the most significant areas for the board to focus its attention on is so-called Gissel bargaining orders. The board ruled in 1969 that if an employer is found to commit labor practices that prevent a free and fair election from being held '-- in that case, Gissel Packing '-- the agency can order the employer to recognize the union. Abruzzo directed regional offices to get advice on all cases seeking a Gissel bargaining order.
- The PRO Act would also empower workers to form a union by signing authorization cards, slips of paper indicating that the employee wants to be represented by a union.
- Still, experts say there are significant limits to the NLRB's power, given that it cannot alter statutory law and that all its rulings could be repealed by the next Republican majority.
- Advertisement''They can't undo right-to-work laws; they can't undo secondary boycott laws,'' said Wilma Liebman, who chaired the NLRB under Obama. ''So many of the things the PRO Act calls for are totally out of the ability of the board.''
- If Democrats hope to permanently change U.S. labor law, they will probably have to pass the PRO Act.
- The NLRB is ''no substitute for legislative change,'' said Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.), a key member of the House Education and Labor Committee. ''The back-and-forth doesn't lead to lasting change.''
- Why streetlights on Milwaukee interstates, highways are purple
- Some Milwaukee drivers have noticed that streetlights along the interstate have recently taken on a distinctive purple hue.
- It's not on purpose '-- a technical issue caused the 3-year-old LED lights to change colors.
- The state Department of Transportation installed a batch of LED lights in 2018 as part of a wide-scale conversion of Milwaukee's streetlights led by the Department of Public Works in an effort to save energy costs.
- In March, hundreds of the lights '-- mostly in the southeast region '-- began changing color from white to purple because of a technical glitch in the bulb.
- Michael Pyritz, regional communications manager for the DOT's southeast region, said the manufacturer who supplied the lights, American Electric Lighting, will be replacing the lights and compensating the department.
- "We are not going to a purple-hued street lighting plan," Pyritz said. "I didn't imagine that anybody was going to become that attached to them."
- The replacement lights will again be bright white to "safely light our interstate system," he said.
- Pyritz said the department estimates around 300 lights have changed color.
- Many communities around the country are experiencing the purple light effect, including Eau Claire and cities in Kansas, South Carolina, Illinois and Florida.
- Duke Energy, which installed the lights in some other regions, said there are likely thousands of LED lights installed throughout the country that will turn purple.
- Reporter Grace McDermott contributed to this article.
- Contact Drake Bentley at (414) 391-5647 or DBentley1@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DrakeBentleyMJS.
- Opinion | Joe Manchin is foolish to indefinitely hold up the reconciliation bill - The Washington Post
- Joe Manchin III has a bad case of the slows.
- Abraham Lincoln once diagnosed George McClellan with the same problem. The Army general offered excuse after excuse to justify dawdling at key moments in the Civil War. This allowed Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, with a smaller force, to outmaneuver Union troops.
- Manchin's call last week to ''hit a strategic pause on the budget-reconciliation legislation,'' with no end in sight, is uncannily McClellanesque. The moderate West Virginia Democrat expressed fear about debt, inflation and the possibility that another coronavirus variant could necessitate more stimulus spending down the road. He said he will never vote for a package as large as the $3.5 trillion being considered.
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- The senator's broader concerns are legitimate, but his op-ed last week for the Wall Street Journal argued against straw men. His desire to indefinitely postpone consideration of the primary legislative vehicle for advancing President Biden's domestic agenda could spell doom for Democrats.
- Opinion by Henry Olsen: Manchin sees clearly what his party's progressives don't or won't
- To be sure, Manchin is in the driver's seat, because Democrats cannot spare a single vote in the 50-50 Senate (with Vice President Harris breaking ties). In other words, he has the power to slim down the bill to his liking and ensure it is fully paid for without accounting gimmicks.
- But Manchin talks about the reconciliation bill as though it's another economic stimulus, akin to the $1.9 trillion covid-19 relief package that passed this year without being paid for. He knows better.
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- Because it's not subject to the filibuster, reconciliation is the only realistic way for Democrats to pass significant changes to the social safety net. The measure includes meaningful policy shifts on climate change, education, health care, immigration and other issues.
- No question some of what liberals want goes too far '-- why should rich kids get free community college? '-- but Democratic leaders and the White House have signaled a willingness to take out many of the more excessive measures.
- Manchin also complained in his op-ed that Republicans used reconciliation to pass tax cuts in 2017 that benefited rich investors more than workers, while adding more than $1 trillion to the national debt. Does the senator think the GOP won't use reconciliation again when they're back in charge?
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- Moreover, Friday's bad jobs report shows that the economy is not overheating, as Manchin fears. The delta variant has hobbled the recovery. Economists expect September's employment numbers to be even worse.
- And contrary to Manchin's intimations, this bill can be fully funded. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who can afford no more than three Democratic defections, says the House will only approve something that can get 50 votes in the Senate. A four-page menu of potential ways to raise revenue as part of the package has been circulating among senators.
- If it's the debt Manchin's genuinely most concerned about, why doesn't he reconsider his resistance to raising the corporate tax rate as part of the funding mechanism?
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- In politics, speed wins. Dithering only makes passing even a compromise bill much harder because it gives critics the chance to organize opposition. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, Business Roundtable and other corporate interests are all mobilizing to derail the bill.
- Pelosi aims to settle differences between House and Senate Democrats on various topline numbers by Sept. 15, so committees can then hash out specifics. She's agreed to hold a vote the roughly $1 trillion infrastructure plan by Sept. 27. But liberals say they won't vote for infrastructure if there's still no deal on reconciliation.
- The window for Democrats to govern is closing fast. The rule of thumb in the Capitol has always been that you govern in odd-numbered years and campaign in even-numbered ones. 2022 begins in four months.
- Opinion by Greg Sargent: Joe Manchin's new threat to destroy Biden's agenda is worse than it seems
- Failing to pass the infrastructure and reconciliation bills could paralyze the Biden presidency that's been made to look hapless this summer by its flat-footed response to the delta variant and the calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Fresh Washington Post-ABC News polling shows Biden's approval rating has dropped to 44 percent. Fifty-seven percent of independents disapprove of his performance.
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- Manchin also complained about artificial deadlines in his op-ed, but when does anything get done in Washington without them? Ultimately, liberals and moderates will have to compromise, and Democrats from deep-blue states need to be sensitive to Manchin's political plight; in November, President Donald Trump's margin of victory was larger in West Virginia than in every other state except Wyoming. Conversely, Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) '-- who has also said she won't vote for a $3.5 trillion bill '-- owe specifics to their colleagues about their bottom lines.
- Lincoln tried to get McClellan to advance against Lee. Finally, the president fired the general. ''If General McClellan did not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it,'' the 16th president told associates.
- If Senator Manchin prevents Democrats from using their majority, Republicans will be happy to borrow it next November.
- MAP: Where have Austin's homicides occurred in 2021? | KXAN Austin
- AUSTIN (KXAN) '-- KXAN is keeping track of the number of homicides in the City of Austin. On July 23, the total number reported in 2021 surpassed the total for all of 2020.
- The charts below will be updated as we learn new information. Scroll down for a map of where each incident occurred.
- As of Sept. 6, there have been 56 homicides in Austin in 2021.
- The chart below shows how the number of homicides reported in recent years changed over time.
- Below is a map showing where homicides have occurred in 2021. The map is interactive, so clicking on or hovering over a dot will reveal information about that incident.
- JanuaryJanuary 11: Austin man charged with murder after east Austin shooting kills 1January 19: Man dropped off at south Austin home, shot and killed moments later January 22: Man arrested in connection with south Austin apartment complex shootingJanuary 26: Terminally-ill doctor held hostages, shot pediatrician and himself at her officeJanuary 29: Woman arrested, accused of shooting, killing 19-year-old in north Austin in JanuaryFebruaryFebruary 2: Man dead after report of multiple gunshots at east Austin apartment complexFebruary 3: Man found dead inside vehicle in southeast Austin identified by policeFebruary 6: Search underway for suspect in north Austin shooting, police identify victim found in crashed vehicle February 14: Police need help finding person in connection with Valentine's Day murder at Austin Motel 6February 16: Man faces murder charge after wife found dead at south Austin hotel roomFebruary 16: 'I killed Flaco': Austin mother's wired conversation with her teen son leads to homicide chargeFebruary 18: Man, woman charged after 2-year-old girl in their care dies from severe skull injuryFebruary 28: 4 face capital murder charges in connection with deadly February shootingMarchMarch 7: Austin mother, boyfriend charged after 6-year-old dies due to severe burns from boiling waterMarch 14: Victim identified from Sunday shooting that took place inside 7th Street clubMarch 18: Man arrested in connection with deadly north Austin shootingMarch 21: Have you seen him? Austin police still searching for 20-year-old suspect in deadly March shootingMarch 22: Man killed in 'drug-related' shooting identified by Austin police, officers still looking for gunmanMarch 25: APD identifies man shot, killed after gunman knocked at his south Austin homeMarch 27: 20-year-old found shot inside crashed Audi in east Austin dies a day laterMarch 28: APD identifies man killed at north Austin hotelMarch 31: Man killed Huston-Tillotson student in her apartment after 2 dates, police sayAprilApril 2: 28 year-old dies morning after fight at east Austin strip club, suspect arrestedApril 6: Suspect faces murder, aggravated assault charges in connection with 2 Austin shootingsApril 14: 2nd man arrested, accused of shooting, killing 18-year-old in north Austin in AprilApril 18: Former detective arrested, charged in triple murder after manhuntApril 25: Man arrested, accused of shooting, killing 15-year-old in north AustinApril 29: 18-year-old arrested in connection with murder at southeast Austin apartmentMayMay 2: Man faces murder charge after 23-year-old victim dies one day after downtown shootingMay 5: 16-year-old accused of shooting, killing another teen, abandoning body inside car trunk in Bell CountyMay 15: Man shot, killed in east Austin after argument Saturday night identifiedMay 20: 15-year-old faces murder charge, accused of shooting, killing pregnant woman in downtown AustinMay 23: 22-year-old bystander dies at hospital 3 days after shooting near Austin strip clubMay 31: Police: Son shoots father, then himself on Memorial Day in south AustinJuneJune 11: Man shot and killed during southeast Austin meetup with children in carJune 12: Son accused of shooting, killing his mother in north Austin SaturdayJune 12: New teenage suspect identified in Austin 6th Street mass shooting, charges dropped against 2 teensJune 16: Man dies from gunshot wound after being found in north Austin parking lotJune 20: Austin police identify teen murdered at weekend birthday partyJune 23: Man, woman charged in death of man found shot in east Austin parkJune 24: Police identify man found shot inside car in east Austin, suspect in serious conditionJune 25: Man dies after reportedly being run over by car in north Austin parking lotJune 27: Man killed in northeast Austin stabbing identified by policeJulyJuly 7: 2 charged with murder in connection with north Austin homicideJuly 12: 18-year-old accused of murdering man, hurting 2 others in northwest AustinJuly 17: No suspect identified yet in fatal downtown Austin shooting near 6th StreetJuly 23: Police identify man who died at south Austin gas station after being stabbedAugustAugust 1: Man killed in Austin's 49th homicide of 2021 identified, city surpasses 2020 totalAugust 2: U.S. Marshals task force arrests man accused of north Austin murderAugust 11: 33-year-old woman shot and killed after reported break-in at Austin apartmentAugust 27: 19-year-old killed in south Austin shooting identified, case still under investigationSeptemberSeptember 1: Man shot, killed in southeast Austin identified by policeSeptember 1: APD investigating 2 deadly shootings in southeast Austin early WednesdaySeptember 4: Man arrested after allegedly shooting, killing woman off I-35 in Austin road rage incident
- Rolling Stone Pushed Fake News on Ivermectin, but What Happened Next Was Even Worse '' RedState
- As we reported previously, Rolling Stone put out a story claiming that hospitals in Oklahoma were unable to treat gunshot victims because they were so overloaded with overdoses of people taking ivermectin for dealing with COVID.
- Gunshot victims left waiting as horse dewormer overdoses overwhelm Oklahoma hospitals, doctor says https://t.co/ke654AV6o1 pic.twitter.com/Is4nAsSOyA
- '-- Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) September 3, 2021
- Their source for this incredible story? One doctor. No cites from statistics, hospitals, or anyone else. But they did have a really nice misleading picture of people waiting in line. As though gunshot victims would be outside the hospital, waiting on a line. Turns out that it was an old picture of people waiting for vaccines. The winter coats gave it away a bit.
- Of course, the greater claim about the overdoses was false. One of the hospitals where the doctor had worked in the past said it wasn't true for their hospital and that he hadn't worked there in months (and so really wouldn't know what was going on there now).
- Rolling Stone later updated their article to note the correction by the hospital. They should have retracted the whole story, but they don't have enough moral fiber to do so, apparently. A ''correction'' that basically obliterates the story means the story should be retracted.
- But this story already went everywhere '-- quoted and pushed by everyone in the liberal disinformation universe, including by Rachel Maddow who has still not corrected or pulled her tweet.
- "Patients overdosing on ivermectin backing up rural Oklahoma hospitals, ambulances"
- "'The scariest one I've heard of and seen is people coming in with vision loss,' he said."https://t.co/P909GtxBQZ
- '-- Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) September 2, 2021
- Now, this tweet is very instructive.
- It shows how worthless Maddow is that they didn't even do any basic checking before spreading something which practically screamed out that it wasn't going to be true. Some ''journalism.'' But again, it confirmed her biases about those ignorant people from Oklahoma so that was the important thing, not the truth. And the same thing for the ton of media that just followed right along without question.
- The fact that it's still up on Twitter pretty much says it all when it comes to the ''disinformation'' industry. Where are the fact-checkers who jump immediately to twist anything a Republican says to false (even when it's true)? Where's Twitter, to label how misleading this is? None of that seems to be in operation here.
- So, once again, what we see when it comes to all this '-- different rules apply for those on the left.
- As noted by the decisively non-MAGA journalist Joe @Bernstein '' who just wrote a great Harper's story on the bullshit ''disinformation'' industry '' that she gets away with this because she's liberal, and Twitter won't even put a note on it, shows the fraud:https://t.co/LrK0hGWb7q
- '-- Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 6, 2021
- The entire ''anti-disinformation''/''anti-extremism'' industry is a gigantic fraud, funded by the same tiny handful of billionaires, governments and NGOs: a scam to control discourse while feigning neutral, non-ideological goals to battle ''disinformation'':https://t.co/MxYjCfq7js
- '-- Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 6, 2021
- These are the people who want to censor the internet on the grounds that you're not responsible enough to disseminate information and therefore they '-- media and tech overlords '-- are needed to police the discourse and stop disinformation.
- These are pure disinformation agents. pic.twitter.com/1mHXhhDwFg
- '-- Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 6, 2021
- That's really what it gets down to. One word: control.
- We Are Witnessing the Greatest Mass Hypnosis of All Time | HypnoMarc
- Yes! You read that right '' We are witnessing the greatest mass hypnosis of all time. Three weeks ago, I released a video on my vlog channel, Hypnosis Hangout, where I talked about the end of the world as we know it. That message was specifically directed at hypnotists as a wake-up call to start making changes to the way they do both stage and clinical hypnosis. What I missed at the time of that video were the signs of an event that even the best hypnotists in the world didn't even see and are still missing.
- In hypnosis, we know that the state of trance hypnosis is achieved in only one of two ways; either overload of the central nervous system, or fatigue of the nervous system. The current Covid19 crisis has created both of these conditions and as a result, it has caused the most suggestible state that a person could ever be in. Whether by design or accident, the result is the same, it is the transformation by the formation of this trance, that our futures are being shaped and we don't see it or are so tranced out that we don't care.
- Please understand that I am not talking about conspiracy, although there will be many others that do. I am simply observing a phenomenon that I see every day in my work as a clinical hypnotist to help people change behaviors or my work on stage entertaining people by having them engage in a host of zany and fun skits. They hear what I am saying, they understand they are doing the things I ask and willingly do so. In both those situations, I am using my skills to bypass what is known as the critical faculty of the conscious or rational mind and move right to the subconscious mind. It is the subconscious mind that truly controls all of our behaviors and since this is now open to the continued suggestions by the constant messaging, people are being forever changed.
- Let me pull back the curtain a bit on how this process works and show you what has happened and is continuing to happen in this current emergency. Many of you have witnessed what hypnotists call an instant or shock induction. These are the dramatic inductions that many stage and street hypnotists use to induce a trance state (hypnosis) in their volunteers. It literally takes just a few seconds for this to happen. What the hypnotist typically does is cause a firing of that portion of the brain known as the amygdala. We literally hijack the amygdala which is responsible for the ''fight/flight/freeze'' mechanism of our bodies. It is in this split second of time, that the subconscious mind is looking for a program that will provide an appropriate response. Nancy Moyer, MD., describes it as ''When stress makes you feel strong anger, aggression, or fear, the fight-or-flight response is activated. '... It happens when a situation causes your amygdala to hijack control of your response to stress. The amygdala disables the frontal lobes and activates the fight-or-flight response.[i]'' It is this most basic of instinctual responses that is responsible for our survival as a species. It is caused by the release of cortisol, a powerful stress hormone.
- There are several extremely critical parts of this phenomena of amygdala hijack that are the essence of what I am seeing and which concerns me. As stated above, the amygdala disables the frontal lobe of our brains. The frontal lobe is the part of the brain that controls important cognitive skills in humans, such as emotional expression, problem solving, memory, language, judgment, and sexual behaviors. It is, in essence, the ''control panel'' of our personality and our ability to communicate.[ii] We lose our ability to make rational judgements, our stress increases and dramatic physical changes take place in our bodies. Most importantly, we become and remain highly suggestible in this highly aroused state. Our subconscious minds are seeking to find that ''program'' that will free us from this threat and we take that cue from the perceived leaders.
- Language matters and the language of this coronavirus epidemic, is truly concerning. It is concerning not just because of the fear and uncertainty that it is stoking, but the amazing subtleties of language that are being introduced and nuanced in the process. We have heard the experts and the media speak of concepts of herd immunity and social distancing. The unspoken message is striking here! The masses are no more than a herd that can be shepherded into controlled behaviors. We have willingly and without question given up fundamental rights and liberties. We are told that we need to do this for the protection of the community until we develop a herd immunity. And since our frontal lobe judgement has been shut down by the stress and trance state we are in, people are generally unable to access their problem solving abilities. And people take the solutions they are given by the ''experts'' because they are paralyzed by uncertainty. They are, in every sense frozen.
- The rapid spread of this pandemic, was the ''shock'' induction into this hypnotic state. The continued uncertainty. the loss of lives, jobs, forced isolation, fear created by the infection numbers and death count is creating a type of fractionation, what hypnotists commonly refer to as a deepening of the hypnotic state through continual wakening and reinduction of trance. We are being fatigued by the numbness of isolation, the restriction of the very activities that would counteract the harmful physical effects of constant stress and reduce the cortisol loads in our bodies. People can no longer access walking and running parks because state, county and local municipalities have closed them. These are the very activities that physicians know reduce stress, increase immune responses and most importantly improve our overall ability to physically, emotionally and spiritually deal with the pandemic.
- Our children are isolated, afraid and stressed. They will carry the scars of this experience for the rest of their lives. Their very sense of safety and security has been shaken. It is now more important than ever that we reduce the stress and fear. Medical experts speak to us about the increased risk factors that place those infected with Covid19 at greatest jeopardy. These factors include, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity. These are the very things that result from high cortisol levels. High cortisol is also responsible for increased anxiety, increased irritability, rapid weight gain and muscle weakness. These are all conditions that can be counteracted by increased activity and responsible use of our open spaces.
- As a clinical hypnotist, my job is to help people find a path to improve their lives and resolve the traumas that have crippled many of them. I will continue to help them deal with pain, both physical and emotional. I continue to help them find those resource states that will empower them to be an even better version of themselves. And while this truly may be the end of the world as we know it, I sit here today fully confident that I will continue to help people be better. I know, without any doubt, I will continue to help people to love and laugh again, and to deal with the challenges of this pandemic.
- Every hypnotist knows these words are true: ''What the Mind Conceives, the Body Achieves.'' I believe that we have a unique opportunity to be an even better version of ourselves. I believe that when we all awaken from this imposed state of hypnosis, that we will do so with a new vision, a new resolve and a new understanding of how amazing we can be. 1! 2! 3! WIDE AWAKE!
- Hypnotist, Author and Motivational SpeakerABOUT THE AUTHORMarc Marshall is a certified clinical and stage hypnotist, medical hypnotist and certified mind-body specialist, author and motivational speaker at the New Jersey Hypnosis Center in Summit NJ. He specializes in dealing with trauma, sexual trauma, pain, medical hypnosis and works with clients to empower and teach them how to improve their lives through hypnosis and mindfulness practice. For more information or to schedule an appointment or interview, email info@hypnomarc.com or visit his website '' www.hypnomarc.com
- #covid19, #coronavirus, #hypnosis, #masshypnosis, #fear, #stress, #anxiety, #obesity, #marcmarshall, #newjerseyhypnosis, #newjerseyhypnosiscenter, #njhypnosis, #hypnomarc, #health, #stress, #hypnotherapy, #hypnotize, #covid19hypnosis, #AmericaWorksTogether, #stayhome @tuckercarlson @foxnews @seanhannity @lauraingraham @cnn #drfauci
- [i] Amygdala Hijack: What It Is, Why It Happens & How to Make '... (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.healthline.com/health/stress/amygdala-hijack.
- [ii] Frontal Lobe Anatomy & Pictures | Healthline. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.healthline.com/human-body-maps/frontal-lobe.
- State Dept blocking private rescue flights from leaving Afghanistan, organizers say: 'Blood is on their hands' | Fox News
- FIRST ON FOX: Americans engaged in the rescue of U.S. citizens, SIVs and green card holders left behind by President Biden in Afghanistan are horrified by what they describe as inexplicable delays from the State Department that are preventing evacuation flights from leaving the country.
- The State Department's delays are recklessly endangering American lives, three different individuals involved in the private evacuation effort told Fox News.
- Rick Clay, who runs the private rescue group PlanB, told Fox News that the State Department is the only thing preventing the flights he's organizing from leaving Afghanistan.
- Two other American individuals separately involved in evacuation efforts, whom Fox News is not naming to avoid jeopardizing ongoing rescue efforts, similarly said that the State Department is the sole entity preventing their charter flights from leaving Afghanistan.
- "This is zero place to be negotiating with American lives. Those are our people standing on the tarmac and all it takes is a f****ing phone call," one of those individuals, who has been integral to private evacuation efforts from Afghanistan, told Fox News.
- "If one life is lost as a result of this, the blood is on the White House's hands. The blood is on their hands," that individual said, adding: "It is not the Taliban that is holding this up '' as much as it sickens me to say that '' it is the United States government."
- That individual suggested that the State Department's obstruction is motivated in part by embarrassment that private individuals are rescuing Americans that the U.S. government left behind.
- Those seeking clearance to land in Qatar were informed by military channels that they must first go through the State Department to gain approval, an email reviewed by Fox News shows.
- Clay has a manifest of 4,500 names of U.S. citizens, green card holders, SIVs and refugees trying to get state-side. So far, they've given the State Department 800 names for a first round of flights. Fox News has reviewed that manifest, which confirms Clay's account.
- US MILITARY ESCAPE FROM AFGHANISTAN: AIR FORCE CREWS DESCRIBE 'APOCALYPTIC' FINAL SCENES
- "It is imperative that we get into Doha where there [are] other refugee centers," the PlanB founder told Fox News in a text message. "That is where I've asked for clearance."
- Clay told Fox News that his organization is "having problems getting permission" from the Biden State Department "to land on the return flight" from Afghanistan in a neighboring country.
- The State Department "is not allowing any private charters carrying refugees [to] land anywhere" in nearby countries if they are coming out of Afghanistan and is making different "excuses" as to why, such as pointing to the lack of air traffic controllers and radar issues, Clay told Fox News this week. The two other individuals separately involved in private evacuation efforts confirmed Clay's account.
- "If we can get aircraft in and pick up people and bring them out, why can't we take them to Doha to the refugee center or other refugee centers?" Clay remarked. "This makes no sense."
- "We still have Americans we can get out," he added.
- After making little to no progress with the State Department, Clay's group turned to senators from both parties: Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., have all sought to help PlanB and other organizations secure the approval they need to get the evacuees safely out of Afghanistan, organizers and Senate staffers told Fox News.
- Clay received word on Thursday that their flights out of Afghanistan would eventually receive approval following the State Department's review of their manifest '-- a task that could take several days even as just the initial 800 names are subjected to the vetting process.
- As of Sunday evening, the State Department had yet to give PlanB the green light to land any of their flights in any countries neighboring Afghanistan.
- The two other Americans involved in another private evacuation effort told Fox News that the State Department has secured them clearance to land in a neighboring country and that the Taliban has given them the green light to take off, dependent on State Department approval '' which hasn't come.
- BIDEN HELPS SECURE TAJIKISTAN'S BORDER AMID US BORDER CRISIS
- Meanwhile, Taliban fighters are reportedly carrying out executions against those who helped American troops during the war.
- Clay shared some of the messages that he has received from a family on the PlanB manifest list that he has been in contact with.
- "Please save us as soon as possible," one message said. "My family and I are facing a lot of problems. My children's health is deteriorating day by day due to many worries."
- "On the other hand, there are reports that the Taliban have recruited people in the Ministry of Technology and Communications to find people who will cooperate with US forces," the person said. "If they find out anything about me, they will kill me and my family."
- Johnson told Fox News in a statement that it is "hard to believe that the U.S. government would deny American citizens and Afghan allies who helped save American lives the ability to evacuate Afghanistan."
- "However, what we've been hearing from people actually involved in evacuation is completely different from the administration's rosy spin," the senator said. "When I hear President Biden declare this debacle an 'extraordinary success' it not only shows he's detached from reality, it also calls into question everything this administration is telling the American people."
- CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
- During a briefing on Thursday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki and State Department spokesman Ned Price both denied that the Biden administration was preventing planes from leaving Afghanistan.
- The State Department pointed Fox News to Price's remarks Thursday in lieu of a comment for this article.
- Houston Keene is a reporter for Fox News Digital. You can find him on Twitter at @HoustonKeene.
- UK Vax Passport Company ''ENTRUST'' is Owned by Nazi Joseph Goebbels' Step-Grandchildren | SGT Report
- from History Politics Theory:
- Disclaimer: I am not suicidal and have no intentions of killing myself, either with a red scarf or with a gunshot to the back of the head, or with any other method.
- I knew next-to-nothing about the Quandt family prior to watching this video [go watch!]. I knew the name was associated with BMW, but not much else. Thanks to Amazing Polly who put the video together, I learned quite a bit about them, including that they own major interest in the company that's putting out the UK Vaccine Passports.
- Isn't it quite convenient that a company who created technology to segregate (in their eyes) undesirable members of society (unvaccinated) has deep family roots with the Nazis, who did the same thing in their own way?
- TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
- G¼nther QuandtG¼nther Quandt was a ''German Industrialist'' whose legacy includes BMW automobiles and Altana (chemicals), a spin-off of the VARTA manufacturing company he acquired shortly after World War I. During World War I, he and many members of his family supplied the German military with uniforms, which is where much of his start-up capital originated. He used that money to purchase Accumulatorenfabrik (AFA) AG, a battery manufacturer that became VARTA, a potash-mining company, multiple metal-working companies, and large shares in BMW and Daimler-Benz.
- His first marriage resulted in two sons, Herbert and Helmut. His first wife died of the Spanish Flu in 1918, and Helmut died of appendicitis in 1927. He remarried to a woman named Magda Ritschel in 1921; they had a son named Harald. Gunther and Magda divorced in 1929; Magda remarried to Joseph Goebbels (with Adolf Hitler serving as Best Man) '' and the wedding took place on some of Gunther Quandt's property. This photo shows the wedding between Joseph and Magda, with a young Herbert at their side and Adolf Hitler close behind them.
- Gunther joined the Nazi Party in 1933 shortly following Hitler's rise to power. At one point just prior to this, Gunther was arrested under ''false pretenses'' and Goebbels himself put in a good word for him to ensure his quick release. There must not have been much, if any, animosity between the two men.
- In 1937 he was awarded the title of Wehrwirtschaftsf¼hrer by Hitler himself. This made Gunther a ''Leader in the Defense Economy.'' As the war began, Gunther's companies supplied ammunition, rifles, artillery, and batteries via the use of slave labor sourced from concentration camps in at least three factories. In AFA's factory (the predecessor to VARTA), there was an execution area set up. The ''free'' (slave) labor for his various industrial ventures is what earned the family a large base for the wealth they enjoy today. In other words, their family success was built upon slave labor. One of the prosecutors from the Nuremberg trials was on record as stating that if they had the evidence back in the 1940s, ''Quandt would have been charged with the same offenses as (German industrialists) Flick, Krupp, and the directors of IG Farben.''
- His wealth and stake in many companies transferred to his sons Herbert and Harald upon his death.
- There's quite a lot more to the Nazi connection. Here is an award-winning documentary regarding the family's refusal to acknowledge their war crimes (German audio with English subtitles):
- Herbert QuandtGunther's older son, Herbert, assisted him with many of his World War II endeavors, including the extensive slave labor. Herbert was awarded a position on the board of AFA/VARTA in 1940 and was made the director of Pertrix GmbH (a British subsidiary).
- During World War II, he was the ''director of personnel'' at his family's factories. In other words, he was in charge of ensuring they had enough slave labor to keep up with production. He ''personally oversaw an estimated death of 40 to 80 people each month through the use of slave labor with each slave staying alive approximately 6 months.''
- When Gunther died in 1954, Herbert and Harald inherited about 200 businesses. In 1959, he increased his stake in BMW from 30% to 50% and financed the initial design and production of the BMW 700, which is said by many to be a turning point that ''saved the company.'' The money to do so, of course, came primarily from the pure profits he enjoyed due to the use of slave labor during the war.
- In 1960 he married his secretary and third wife, Johanna Bruhn; they had two children, Stefan Quandt and Susanne (Quandt) Klatten. Stefan now holds 23.7% of BMW and Susanne owns 19.2%. Both have been on the Board of Directors at BMW since 1997, along with involvement in several other lucrative business ventures.
- The Entrust ConnectionThe Quandt family purchased 43% of the company Data Card Corporation in August of 1987. One month later, they purchased almost the entire remaining portion of the company to give them a 97% ownership of Data Card Corporation.
- In 2013, Data Card Corp bought Entrust Inc. for $500 million in cash. Entrust CEO Bill Conner says that ''this is about the next generation for finance. Your phone becomes a virtual smartcard.'' And enhanced tracking device.
- Clients of Data Card & Entrust are listed as including the U.S. Department of State, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Justice, The State of Illinois, the U.S. Coast Guard, NASA, U.S. & U.K. Postal Services, 3M, Lloyds TSB, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, RBC, several other banks & credit unions, and many more.
- And now they're going to be in charge of tracking your ''vaccination status'' '' and, more than likely, your location, how many people you're with, etc. for ''social distancing'' purposes. Anything that is authoritarian, creepy, and Covid-related, they've got it covered.
- My TakeI am vehemently against ''Vaccine Passports'' or any other sort of tracking related to Covid-19 or any other health activity '' or any activity period. The corporations are doing the work for the government to enact policies without having to go through the proper legal channels. The government doesn't have to pass a passport law if all the big businesses require such an asinine thing for entry in the first place.
- Beyond that, the evidence is clearly showing that ''the holy and mighty vaccinated'' are getting sick at a rate equal to or greater than the ''deplorable, dirty unvaccinated'' and that the vaccines are ''not effective against new Greek Letter Strains.'' So if they're not protecting anyone, why the continued push?
- People put so much blind trust in the government and mainstream media that they'll be lining up for the ''Delta Variant Vaccine'' and the ''Lambda Variant Vaccine'' and the ''Delta Tau Chi Variant Vaccine.'' It won't matter how many new strains, how many times the vaccines don't work, how many people die or have serious health consequences from the vaccines '' they'll still line up so they can get their free doughnuts and bags of weed.
- Read More @ HistoryPoliticsTheory.org
- Action on Climate Change Is Urged by Medical Journals in Unprecedented Plea - WSJ
- Editors of 220 leading medical, nursing and public-health journals from around the world called for urgent action on climate change, in a joint editorial published on Sunday.
- The editorial, which appeared in journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, the British Medical Journal and The Lancet, warns that current efforts aren't enough to address health problems resulting from rising global temperatures caused by emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
- ''Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world,'' the journals' editors say in the editorial. If unchecked, they say, rising temperatures ''risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.''
- In their shared statement, the editors press for ''fundamental changes in how our societies and economies are organized and how we live'' to limit future global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels'--a goal arising from the 2015 Paris climate summit.
- Greenhouse-gas emissions from human activity have raised global temperatures by 1.1 degrees C since the Industrial Revolution began in the mid-19th century, according to scientific studies.
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- The editorial is aimed at world leaders participating in a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly that begins on Sept. 14, as well as those who will be gathering in November at a global climate treaty conference in Glasgow, Scotland. The latter gathering, known as COP26, is expected to address more ambitious efforts to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.
- The editorial was published in journals from China, India, Australia, Africa and South America in addition to those from the U.S. and the U.K. The effort was organized by the U.K. Health Alliance on Climate Change, a coalition of 21 health organizations including the British Medical Association, the Royal Society of Medicine and the Royal College of Nursing.
- ''It is an unusual happening and it is driven by unusual circumstances,'' Dr. Eric J. Rubin, editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, said of the editorial. ''It is evident that climate change is a problem. What is less evident to people is that it is a public-health problem, not just a physical catastrophe.''
- Rising temperature and other manifestations of climate change have brought higher rates of heart and lung ailments and infectious diseases, as well as of injuries and premature deaths tied to extreme weather, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2015, for example, extreme heat was blamed for the deaths of nearly 3,300 people in France, according to the Brussels-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters.
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- Climate change also takes a toll on mental health. Heat waves, floods and other extreme weather events'--which research shows have become more common as a result of climate change'--can cause anxiety and depression, according to the American Psychiatric Association. A 2019 study published in Nature Climate Change linked increased temperatures to a rise in suicides.
- The editorial warns that the health impacts of climate change disproportionately affect children, elderly people and those with underlying medical conditions as well as ethnic minorities'--which vary from country to country. These and certain other communities'--including pregnant women, immigrants, indigenous people, disabled people and workers exposed to extreme weather'--are especially vulnerable to climate change, according to the American Public Health Association.
- The editorial comes on the heels of a report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in August, which said record heat waves, extreme droughts, more intense storms, melting ice sheets and rising seas were attributable in large part to heat-trapping gases such as methane released by agriculture and carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.
- The report, which was based on a three-year analysis of 14,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies and improved climate models, indicates that without rapid reductions in emissions, global temperatures could rise 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels over the next 20 years. Climate models have proven to be quite accurate at predicting global temperature changes, according to a 2019 study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
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- Many governments and businesses have set targets to reach net-zero emissions, some as soon as 2030. But the editorial calls such targets ''easy to set and hard to achieve. Concern is growing that temperature rises above 1.5 degrees C are beginning to be seen as inevitable, or even acceptable, to powerful members of the global community.''
- Among other measures, the editorial calls for wealthy countries to go beyond an existing commitment to provide $100 billion a year in aid to help low-income countries adapt to rising temperatures. More funding is needed for mitigation and adaptation, the editorial says, and it should come as grants rather than loans and should be aimed at helping to redesign transport systems, food distribution networks, financial markets and healthcare systems.
- "Health professionals have been on the front-line of the Covid-19 crisis,'' Dr. Fiona Godlee, editor in chief of the British Medical Journal, said. ''And they are united in warning that going above 1.5 C and allowing the continued destruction of nature will bring the next, far deadlier crisis.''
- Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com
- Medical Schools Are Pushed to Train Doctors for Climate Change - WSJ
- More doctors, health organizations and students are pushing for medical education to include climate change, saying that physicians and other health-care workers need to prepare for the risks associated with rising global temperatures.
- The movement, recently backed by the American Medical Association, is showing emerging signs of impact. At the University of Minnesota, medical, nursing and pharmacy schools, among others, have added content or tweaked existing classes to incorporate climate-related topics. The University of Illinois College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign added a diagnosis exercise about worsening asthma due to increased wildfires from climate change. The Mayo Clinic is starting discussions this month on how to integrate the topic into its medical school's curriculum.
- Schools picking up the content are still in the minority. It can be hard to fit into an already-packed curriculum, and faculty at many schools still lack expertise in the topic, say some educators. But advocates of climate-change education say health-care providers must be trained to prevent, detect and treat conditions that may rise or emerge in new places as the climate changes.
- ''This is really the greatest health danger of our century,'' said Mona Sarfaty, the director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, a coalition of medical associations that represents roughly 600,000 doctors. ''We must respond and make sure our health professionals are sufficiently educated.''
- Last year was the fourth-warmest on record, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the five hottest years have all occurred since 2014.
- Increased temperatures, extreme weather events and air pollution tied to climate change take a toll on human health, physicians say. Hot weather can lead to illness and deaths from conditions such as heat stroke. Health professionals say they are seeing more severe allergies, respiratory illnesses and cardiovascular conditions due to increased air pollution and wildfires. Cases of infectious diseases like Lyme disease are also rising in some areas, as ticks, fleas and mosquitoes expand into new territory or take advantage of warmer winters.
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- These and other hazards including mental-health problems and food insecurity will worsen in the future, experts say.
- So far, climate-related content is largely limited to electives and lectures, and hasn't been flagged as a topic in core curriculum, according to a study of the national medical-school-curriculum database published late 2018 in the journal Academic Medicine.
- ''With limited curricular time and with many basic science and clinical science matters that need to be covered during the formative years of medical school, our educators must choose between topics that are more fundamental over others,'' said a statement from the NYU School of Medicine and the NYU Long Island School of Medicine, which doesn't have widespread coursework on climate change.
- But 187 schools and programs have joined a two-year-old coalition launched by Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health that supports including climate change in health education. The Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education offers resources including links to slides, videos and online courses, as well as curriculum suggestions.
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- The AMA adopted its policy to support teaching on climate change to all physicians and medical students this June, and the International Federation of Medical Students' Associations wants medical schools to add the topic by next year.
- ''Even in the past month, I've felt more of an exponential growth,'' said Sheri Weiser, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, who has helped lead the movement to add climate-change education there.
- UCSF has elective courses on climate and health and has worked to weave the content throughout the curriculum. One course, offered through the department of obstetrics and gynecology, discusses environmental exposures and women's health. Other classes discuss sustainability and the carbon footprint of the health-care system.
- At New York's Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, a faculty-led initiative gets students involved in developing coursework. Christian Cayon spent the summer after his first year looking for spots in the curriculum where climate change could fit, such as asthma or heat illness. Mr. Cayon says he helped get a medical microbiology course to add content, including the connection between climate change and increasing tick-borne diseases. The Climate Change Curriculum Infusion Project has since added content to four additional courses.
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- The push for climate-change education is also focusing on health-care providers already in practice. Professional meetings for specialists including psychiatrists, dermatologists and pediatricians have included sessions and committees discussing the issue. The Yale School of Medicine offers a continuing medical education certificate in climate change and health, and the University of Colorado Department of Emergency Medicine now offers a fellowship for physicians on climate change and health policy.
- Write to Brianna Abbott at brianna.abbott@wsj.com
- Best ivermectin meta analysis - YouTube
- Schelling Point: Cooperating Without Communicating
- Nivi: Let's talk about Schelling points.
- Naval: The Schelling point is a game theory concept made famous by Thomas Schelling in his book, The Strategy of Conflict , which I recommend.
- It's about multiplayer games where people respond based on what they think the other person's response will be. He came up with a mathematical formalization to answer: How do you get people who cannot communicate with each other to coordinate?
- Use social norms to cooperate when you can't communicate
- Suppose I want to meet with you, but I don't tell you where or when to meet. You also want to meet with me, but we can't communicate. That sounds like an impossible problem to solve'--we can't do it. But not quite.
- You can use social norms to converge on a Schelling point. I know you're rational and educated. And you know I'm rational and educated. We're both going to start thinking.
- When will we meet? If we have to pick an arbitrary date, we'll probably pick New Year's Eve. What time will we meet? Midnight or 12:01 a.m. Where will we meet? If we're Americans, the big meeting spot is probably New York City, the most important city. Where in New York City will we meet? Probably under the clock at Grand Central Station. Maybe you end up at the Empire State Building, but not likely.
- You can find Schelling points in business, art and politics
- There are many games'--whether it's business or art or politics'--where you can find a Schelling point. So you can cooperate with the other person, even when you can't communicate.
- Here's a simple example: Suppose two companies are competing heavily and hold an oligopoly. Let's say the price fluctuates between $8 and $12 for whatever the service is. Don't be surprised if they converge on $10 without ever talking to each other.
- Vaccine Failure and the Way Out - by eugyppius - eugyppius
- The Corona vaccines don't work very well. Ubiquitous statistics showing that the vaccinated enjoy substantial protection against serious illness and death seem wrong. In some cases they are probably manipulated. They are certainly confounded by the different testing regimes to which the vaccinated and the unvaccinated are subjected. Once you forget the specifics of efficacy and look at the broader picture, it is easy to see where we are. The vaccines have not reduced Corona mortality compared to the same time last year in any jurisdiction that I know of. Countries with high vaccination rates are now seeing the same number of deaths, or more, as they had at the beginning of September 2020. Time is a flat circle.
- If you peer deeper, you'll generally find this: The vaccinated remain substantially protected against serious illness or death, but the unvaccinated are entering the hospital and dying at very high rates indeed, as if to compensate. Thus Israel has maintained the same case fatality rate of around 0.7%, before and after mass vaccination. If this is just Delta being more dangerous, then we would expect countries with lower vaccination rates to be enduring truly staggering mortality right now, but they are not. In heavily vaccinated countries, Delta is raging with a rare fury among the unvaccinated, but in lesser-vaccinated countries it is doing nothing unusual. This means that the efficacy statistics are broadly unreliable. The exact reasons don't really matter: Either the vaccines have the power to change the whole picture, or they don't.
- None of this should surprise us. Vaccines against coronaviruses have been used in animals for decades, and none of them work very well. Generally they begin to fail after a few months. Despite their technical sophistication, our mRNA and vector vaccines against SARS-2 are no different. They had some success when they were first rolled out, but if anything that probably made things worse. They effectively killed off the older Kent lineage and reduced the overall genetic diversity of SARS-2. Cases plummeted in the United Kingdom and Israel, and Delta emerged victorious from this bottleneck event. When newly vaccinated Icelanders travelled to the Delta-saturated UK for holiday, they did not even enjoy an initial period of protection against infection. They brought Delta back to Iceland, where the new strain circulated among vaccinated and unvaccinated at nearly the same rate.
- In a world where the symptomatic mostly stay home, Corona is locked in a balancing act. It can't make people too sick too soon, or its hosts will remove themselves from circulation and infect nobody. Delta is more aggressive than prior strains, probably to the point of disadvantaging itself in containment-happy countries. The more aggressive, earlier replication allows it to get the jump on immunity in the vaccinated, however, who can also tolerate more virus replication with fewer symptoms. Together with ordinary antigenic drift, this would seem to be the mechanism that has brought Delta to prominence. We are probably justified in calling this phenomenon a weak Marek Effect. Our universal vaccination campaigns worked just well enough to speed up the evolutionary processes that are always and everywhere optimising Corona.
- It is impossible to believe that this failure was not foreseen. The scientists who developed the vaccines knew for sure how things would play out. That's why they concluded the trials after three or four months and vaccinated their controls. It's why they have been talking about boosters from the very beginning. It's why, if you listened carefully, you never heard Zero Covid sloganeering coming from Team Vaccine. Only the comparative morons on Team Lockdown ever talked like that.
- Our politicians and our new public health dictators, on the other hand, remained oblivious to the limited potential of the vaccines. They continue to insist on universal vaccination and green passes, while it is obvious that these will do nothing to influence the course of the pandemic. It is worth asking why, because when you think about it, you can see that the vaccine roll-out came with an inbuilt exit strategy. The vaccines arrived most everywhere in the spring, as Corona was going out of season anyway. Policymakers immediately claimed declining infections as a victory for the vaccines, but they failed to take the next step and declare the war won and either discontinue their case counts, or at the very least exclude the vaccinated from infection and mortality statistics. Instead, they deployed half measures, devising new regulations that exempt the vaccinated from testing most of the time, while failing to shut the door on the pandemic and maintaining numbers that are just reliable enough to reveal the futility of their policies.
- This was the second time our brave health dictatorship failed to use the obvious, purpose-built exit ramp of seasonality. The first was in Spring 2020, after the entire West (with the exceptions of Sweden and Belarus) bought into mass containment and Corona infections collapsed everywhere in April. Establishment scientific voices had by this time spent two months denying that there would be significant seasonal effects, on the basis of some superficial modelling studies. As with the vaccine roll-out, denying seasonality allowed them to declare a policy victory. As with the vaccine roll-out, the stage was set for everybody to say that they had defeated Corona, fold up shop and go home. This is, you will note, exactly what China did. They tightened official testing criteria, declared the pandemic over with and never looked back. Western countries, though, kept the ball in the air all summer long, just as they are keeping the ball in the air now.
- Governments are both more powerful and more paralysed than they have been at any other point in history. Powers have diffused throughout the realms of bureaucracy. By distributing power in this way, occupational classes ensure loyalty and unanimity across the whole of the civil service, academia and the press. The consequence is that states have become profoundly and permanently demobilised, incapable of acting according to coherent strategies. Over and over in Corona, we see clear hints of strategic thinking in certain quarters '' the exit ramps are among the clearest signs '' but these are always overridden by the broader momentum of countless thousands of nameless, faceless optimisers and hystericists who sit on hundreds of boring pointless committees performing the same iterative destructive acts of governance over and over.
- These are bureaucratic processes of untold complexity, all of them steered in roughly the same direction by a loose system of Schelling points. The mysterious power of globalist organisations like the World Economic Forum is the coordination they provide, by acting as venues for the occupational elites to formulate policy schemes among themselves and to propagate these plans and ideals through loose networks of affiliated tycoons, journalists and NGOs. Until now, Corona policy in every western country has unfolded more or less according to the same script, devised by the World Health Organisation at the end of February 2020. The final act was supposed to be the wide-scale eradication of Corona after mass vaccination. It is now clear that this will never happen. For the first time since March 2020, there is no obvious international consensus on the way forward.
- A few countries, or perhaps even a few prominent politicians or public health pundits who do not have their heads up their asses, could change everything. Everyone who is not crazy needs to start insisting on the same simple message:
- We have to live with Corona, it will always be with us. Biannual boosters for the entire population will not solve anything. They will only reduce the effectiveness of vaccines by encouraging antigenic drift. The vaccines are, at best, a solution for the elderly and the vulnerable only. Everyone will get Corona, even the vaccinated, and children need to get it while they are still young and while it poses no risk to them. In this way, SARS-2 will become an unimportant virus in the coming years.
- UPDATE: My critics complain that Delta has a different seasonality, so calendar-date comparisons are inappropriate. This was only an attempt to simplify. Compare mortality statistics however you want: They have, as a rule, not improved. My critics complain further that Israel's unchanging case fatality rate is an outlier, and that the CFR is declining elsewhere. This is true! I only cited Israel to illustrate the shifting burden of mortality and hospitalisation to the unvaccinated. Official case fatality rates are obviously determined by local diagnostic policies and in themselves they mean almost nothing.
- Denmark, Netherlands impose travel ban on unvaccinated U.S. tourist
- September 5, 2021 | 1:12am
- Denmark and the Netherlands have imposed a travel ban on unvaccinated US tourist, as they will also require US vaccinated travelers to self isolate. Getty Images
- Unvaccinated US tourists are no longer welcome in Denmark or The Netherlands.
- The countries announced the new vaccination requirements days after the European Union took the country off its safe travel list earlier in the week over the surge in COVID-19 cases, according to USA Today.
- The move led other EU countries to respond with new restrictions on American visitors.
- In addition to banning unvaccinated Americans, The Netherlands will also require US travelers who have had their shots to self isolate, officials said.
- Bulgaria will now completely ban travel from the states, and Italy imposed testing and quarantine requirements on US tourists, the article said.
- The US has yet to welcome most European tourists to the country, according to the CDC.
- In addition to Netherlands and Denmark, the move is leading other EU countries to respond with new restrictions on American visitors. ZUMA PressThere have been an average of 1,114 daily deaths across the 50 states over the past week, and more than 150,000 new daily cases, federal health officials reported Saturday.
- Only 53 percent of the US population is fully vaccinated, compared to about 70 percent of people in the EU, officials said.
- Important changes for travellers to the Netherlands as of September 4th 2021 | News item | Government.nl
- News item | 03-09-2021 | 09:00
- At 00:01 am on 4 September 2021 a number of important changes will come into effect for people travelling to the Netherlands. New countries have been designated as high-risk or very high-risk areas. Before travelling to the Netherlands, consult the Dutch travel advice for the country you are travelling from. The travel advice explains what requirements you must comply with.
- Changes to list of safe countries within the EUWithin the EU, Germany and Hungary will be designated high-risk areas. This means that travellers from these countries will need to show a COVID certificate (proof of vaccination or recovery or a negative test result) when travelling to the Netherlands. This requirement will come into effect on 6 September 9:00 am. Consult the travel advice (in Dutch) to find out what documents you need to show.
- Changes regarding countries outside the EUAs of 4 September 0:01 am the United States, Israel, Kosovo, Montenegro and North Macedonia will be designated very high-risk areas. This means the EU entry ban will apply to these countries. People travelling from these countries will only be able enter the Netherlands if they are fully vaccinated or fall under one of the exemption categories for the EU entry ban. They are also required to quarantine for 10 days on arrival as of 4 september 9:00 am. As of 6 September, they must also show a negative test result. Proof of recovery or vaccination will no longer be sufficient.
- Lebanon will be designated a high-risk area and fall under the EU entry ban as of 4 September 0:01 am, with fully vaccinated travellers exempt from the entry ban. The current COVID certificate requirement will remain unchanged.
- Changes regarding countries where there is a variant of concernAs of 4 September 0:01 am, the category 'very high-risk area where there is a variant of concern' will cease to exist. Additional measures had been in place for the 16 countries in this category (South Africa and countries in South and Central America). As of 4 September 0:01 am these countries will be moved to either the category 'high-risk area' or the category 'very high-risk area'.
- Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay will be designated high-risk areas. Brazil, French Guiana, Guyana, Panama, Suriname, Venezuela and South Africa will be designated very high-risk areas.
- As of 4 September 0:01 am, travellers who have been fully vaccinated or fall under one of the exemption categories for the EU entry ban will be able to enter the EU. The requirement for some travellers to show two negative test results will be lifted. However, other requirements still apply. People travelling from a high-risk area must show a COVID certificate (proof of vaccination or recovery or a negative test result) and the health declaration. People travelling from a very high-risk area must show a negative test result (proof of vaccination or recovery is not sufficient) and the health declaration, and must comply with the mandatory quarantine requirement.
- The EU travel ban will come into effect at 4 september 0:01 am, the mandatory quarantine requirement at 4 september 9:00 am and test obligations at 6 september 9:00 am.
- More informationFor more details, consult the checklist for entering or returning to the Netherlands. To find out if the mandatory self-quarantine requirement applies to you, consult the information about mandatory quarantine.
- Moderna's Mysterious Coronavirus Vaccine Delivery System
- Massachusetts, on May 18, 2020.
- Boston Globe via Getty Images
- On Monday, Vice President Mike Pence helped launch the big late-stage trial of Moderna Therapeutics' Covid-19 vaccine. ''It is remarkable to think that Moderna'--that will be initiating this phase 3 clinical trial'--actually entered phase 1 back in March,'' Pence said.
- Moderna has moved lightning fast and is doing work based on bleeding-edge messenger RNA technology that could result in a viable vaccine. There is widespread hope Moderna's vaccine will play an important role in combating the pandemic. To aid the effort, Moderna has secured $955 million of commitments from the federal government's Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).
- Wall Street also has high expectations for the vaccine, and Moderna's stock has quadrupled this year to a market valuation of $30 billion, allowing Moderna to raise $1.3 billion in a May stock offering. Moderna insiders have sold some $250 million of shares as the stock has soared.
- With the stakes incredibly high, the mystery around a key technological component of Moderna's coronavirus vaccine has only become deeper. Last week, the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board rejected Moderna's challenge to a patent owned by Arbutus Biopharma ABUS related to the lipid nanoparticle (LNP) technology that is crucial to Moderna's mRNA medicines.
- For a decade, Moderna has been working to develop mRNA technology that could turn the body's cells into drug factories. In order for the approach to work, Moderna needs to safely deliver the mRNA to the body's cells without the payload breaking down in the bloodstream. As a result, any mRNA vaccine or therapeutic consists of two components, the actual sequence mRNA and the delivery mechanism. Moderna has clearly engineered the first component, but there remain questions about the second. No mRNA vaccine or medicine has ever been approved by U.S. or European regulators.
- Even though Moderna took the trouble to try to invalidate the patent owned by Arbutus, a small Canadian biotechnology company, Moderna said after it lost its patent challenge that its LNP technology had advanced well beyond the technology described in the Arbutus patent. Moderna claimed the LNP used to make mRNA-1273, its Covid-19 vaccine candidate, is not covered by the Arbutus patent. ''Moderna is not aware of any significant intellectual property impediments for any products we intend to commercialize, including mRNA-1273,'' the company said.
- In June, researchers from the NIH and Moderna made a manuscript preprint of preclinical data for mRNA-1273 available on bioRxiv, an open-access preprint repository. The preprint described Moderna's coronavirus vaccine candidate as using delivery technology that appears to be covered in the Arbutus patent that was upheld last week. The preprint of the study that tested the vaccine in mice described the mRNA for mRNA-1273 as being encapsulated into LNP ''at molar ratio of 50:10:38.5:1.5 (ionizable lipid:DSPC:cholesterol:PEG-lipid).''
- The first claim of the upheld Arbutus patent describes ''a cationic lipid comprising from 50 mol % to 65 mol % of the total lipid present in the particle;'' a non-cationic lipid comprising a mixture of phospholipid and cholesterol, where the ''phospholipid comprises from 4 mol % to 10 mol %'' and the cholesterol comprises ''30 mol % to 40 mol %;'' and a conjugated lipid ''comprising from 0.5 mol % to 2 mol %.''
- In a statement to Forbes, Ray Jordan, Moderna's chief corporate affairs officer, said the June preprint describes data generated using a preclinical research formulation of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine that is not the same as the vaccine itself.
- ''While the authors of the preprint used the term 'mRNA-1273' for convenience of the reader, the preprint does not describe the cGMP process by which we make our messenger RNA and LNP or the final drug product composition in our commercial candidate (mRNA-1273),'' Jordan wrote in a statement.
- When asked if Moderna would provide the molar ratios at which mRNA-1273 encapsulates its LNP, Jordan said, ''Nope, we are not disclosing our proprietary ratios at this time.''
- MORE FROM FORBES Fueled By $500 Million In Federal Cash, Moderna Races To Make A Billion Doses Of An Unproven Cure By Leah Rosenbaum In a different preclinical study testing Moderna's vaccine in non-human primates that was published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Monday, the authors wrote mRNA-1273 is encapsulated in LNP as described in a 2019 paper, which said the mRNA was encapsulated at the same molar ratios as in the mouse study.
- The description of the phase 1 study of Moderna's coronavirus vaccine registered with the federal government shows the LNP for mRNA-1273 is composed of an ionizable (cationic) lipid; cholesterol; DSPC (phospholipid) and PEG2000-DMG (conjugated anti-aggregation lipid). The percentages of the four components in the formulation of mRNA-1273 were not disclosed in the clinical trial registration or the July publication of an interim analysis of the Phase 1 study of mRNA-1273 in The New England Journal of Medicine. The appendix of the interim analysis redacts information associated with LNP.
- For years, Stephane Bancel, the billionaire CEO of Moderna, has said the company had moved beyond the delivery technology owned by Arbutus. ''We knew it was not very good,'' he told Forbes in 2016. ''It was just okay.'' He said Moderna was producing its own nanoparticle lipids, N1GEL, for example, and licensing another from Merck MRK. He added that Moderna only used the Arbutus technology initially and had stopped using it for new drugs back in 2016.
- When Moderna was first getting off the ground, Bancel turned to a tiny company called Acuitas to get access to a delivery technology for his mRNA vision. Acuitas was headquartered in the Vancouver, British Columbia, home of Thomas Madden, who founded it in 2009. Madden had been involved in a lawsuit with Tekmira Pharmaceuticals, which had merged with a company Madden had worked for and eliminated his position. Through the litigation, Madden secured a license for the LNP technology he had helped develop. Bancel decided to get a license for the LNP technology from Acuitas and not Tekmira, which later changed its name to Arbutus.
- In 2016, Arbutus terminated Acuitas' license to the LNP technology, causing Acuitas to sue Arbutus in British Columbia court. Arbutus countersued, claiming Acuitas had no right to sublicense the LNP technology to Moderna. A B.C. judge issued a temporary 2017 injunction stopping Acuitas from further sublicensing the LNP technology.
- A year later, in 2018, Arbutus reached a settlement with Madden that terminated Acuitas' license and stipulated Moderna could only use the technology in four vaccines that targeted viruses that had already been identified.
- The Arbutus patents have since been taken over by Genevant Sciences, a subsidiary of Roivant Sciences, which is Arbutus' biggest shareholder and run by Vivek Ramaswamy. Arbutus retains a stake in Genevant and a right to a portion of the economics of the patents. Genevant declined to comment.
- In the years since the Acuitas settlement, other vaccine candidates developed by Moderna have been described in publications with LNP technology comprised of the four components listed in the Arbutus patent with formulated percentages that seem to run through the patent. For example, publication of a study of an HIV vaccine listed on Moderna's website in July describes mRNA as being encapsulated by LNP ''at molar ratio of 50:10:38.5:1.5 (ionizable lipid:DSPC:cholesterol:PEG-lipid).''
- Moderna has challenged three of the Arbutus patents at the adjudicative body within the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. One of its challenges was successful, another partially successful, and the challenge against the third patent was lost last week. There are three other relevant Arbutus patents that Moderna has not tried to challenge.
- Whatever happens on the intellectual property front, it is highly unlikely that a patent issue will get in the way of the development or distribution of a Covid-19 vaccine. But shareholders of Moderna's hot stock were broadly warned in a May securities filing that the company had instituted inter-partes review proceedings against issued U.S. patents related to mRNA delivery and the unsuccessful invalidation of those patents might lead to the kind of litigation that could result in substantial damages.
- Taxpayers also might have an interest in knowing the ownership of the delivery technologies used by an mRNA vaccine backed by nearly $1 billion of federal government funds. When asked about the delivery technologies, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which houses BARDA, said that intellectual property is assessed for any company submitting a proposal to BARDA, as part of the proposal evaluation process.
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- Drew Holden on Twitter: "ð§µTHREAD𧵠We've got to talk about the Rolling Stone invermectin article. Turns out the story about rural hospitals so flooded with ODs that they couldn't treat other patients was made up, entirely invented. A lot of peopl
- Drew Holden : ð§µTHREADð§µWe've got to talk about the Rolling Stone invermectin article. Turns out the story about rural hospitals'... https://t.co/P28XIRhTrl
- Sun Sep 05 18:57:08 +0000 2021
- Joost van Severen : @DrewHolden360 The same BS-article made it even to Belgian mainstream media. Your horse gets exact the same weight-'... https://t.co/MFAQeV2v8M
- Mon Sep 06 12:29:24 +0000 2021
