1251: Viewpoint Discrimination

My wife worked for URBAN outfitters. Anthropology was one of the brands.

> She worked for them for 10 years.

> You can skip this part. the only reason she never left the store level was

> because she met me and we had our first child on oct 28 2012 At 1158 EST,

> random birth theory. (Two minutes before the 5yr anniversary show.)

> Nick was used in URBO but it had nothing to do with black people. It was a

> word to describ

Adam and John

I'm sending this to both of you because I know Adam's email has been messed up.

Please use the following as a guide for fact finding. I don't want to be a source of the information. I want to keep my job.

On Thursday show you meantioned Greg Glassman, stepping down as CEO of CrossFit.

He won't be out of a job for 10 years - he is the Founder and Owner of CrossFit. Still the dictator.

It wasn't because he Tweeted "Floyd 19". There was a bunch of stuff - it is really easy to Google "CrossFit CEO". The fact that no effort was put into research before you said what you did about him really pissed me off. There were much larger reasons - mainly Glassman is a dictatorial A-hole that people didn't like for years. The guy he had replace him isn't liked very much either. I expect Adam to be the researcher of the show. This wasn't like Adam, obviously just repeating what some other person Tweeted or whatever.

I am a Producer of your show, since day 1. Also DSC and John on Tech TV before.

Baron of Costa Mesa. Although I moved to Salt Lake City a few months ago.

I am a Production Assistant at a Media company in SLC. We are prepping a live show that streams this weekend on YouTube, the Rogue Invitational which is no longer featuring any CrossFit sanctioning or branding if avoidable. It is a uber streaming extravaganza there are numerous Dudes Named Ben here making a really slick show with almost 40 Fitness athletes streaming from all over the world. The opposite of the crappy networks shows we have seen during the lockdown. These people could not meet in one place anymore so we are doing this.

This is the first event in which CrossFit is not involved. Events are where they make real money. The annual gym affiliation is $3000 a year not $1000. Words matter.

Glassman is pissed because his money is really from the CrossFit Games coming up in August. Covid rules don't allow large assemblies anymore. That is the deeper story about the Floyd 19 it was about the lockdown based on models, he thinks stink. There are lots of YouTube videos by CrossFit athletes that go into the details.

I am glad none of my co-workers got hit-in-the-mouth because they would of thought I was a nut-job for listening to Thursday's show., based on the bad info.

Brian - Baron of Costa Mesa

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Sun, 14 Jun 2020 06:33

On Thursday, June 4, 2020, a 22-year-old activist named Kennedy Mitchum reached out to the publishers of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to express her frustration with their definition of the word "racist:"

A belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.

Mitchum felt this was inadequate to fully cover the scope of systemic issues and unconscious biases that affect race relations in America. Growing up in Florissant, Missouri '-- just a few miles away from Ferguson '-- she'd grown tired of trying to explain to people that racism can come in different forms than cross burning in white hoods. It's not always a conscious, intentional, or deliberate attitude of hateful violence; it's often something more insidious. As she explained to CNN, "That definition is not representative of what is actually happening in the world. The way that racism occurs in real life is not just prejudice it's the systemic racism that is happening for a lot of black Americans."

Mitchum didn't expect to hear anything back from Merriam-Webster. But to her surprise, they responded the very next day '-- and after a brief back-and-forth, they were sufficiently convinced of Mitchum's point, and agreed to update the entry. "This revision would not have been made without your persistence in contacting us about this problem," wrote Editor Alex Chambers in an email. "We sincerely thank you for repeatedly writing in and apologize for the harm and offense we have caused in failing to address this issue sooner."

The official Merriam-Webster definition of "racism" now reads as follows (with emphasis added):

a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race(a). doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles(b). a political or social system founded on racismracial prejudice or discriminationIf you're a linguistic prescriptionist '-- that is to say, you revere the dictionary as some objective authority that speaks from on high like the voice of a syntactical God handing down the Ten Commandments of words '-- then this is probably an insult to your entire perception of reality.

If you '-- like Noah Webster himself, and anyone else who isn't a disciplinarian dictator '-- are a linguistic descriptivist, then you recognize that languages are constantly evolving, and the only thing that dictates the meaning of a word is how actual people actually use it.

While I'd argue that racism was never as simple as some conscious, calculated hatred of skin color, it's still important that we're finally starting to recognize all the ugly complications of the issue that have allowed it to fester all these years.

A Missouri woman asked Merriam-Webster to update its definition of racism and now officials will make the change [David Williams / CNN]

Image: Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

Apartment complex employee suspended for barring black residents from swimming poolpic.twitter.com/JuwOpJZCLW '-- E ðŸ...‹ (@royaal_e) June 9, 2020 A black woman posted a video on Twitter showing her interaction with an apartment complex employee in Knoxville, Tennessee who would not allow her to enter the community swimming pool, even though the employee was allowing white people to enter without challenging them. The Root reports that ['...]

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READ THE RESTThese desktops, laptops, and tablets '-- from Microsoft, Lenovo, and HP '-- are all on saleIf you need a new laptop or tablet, you're in luck. Every once in awhile, we like to compile all the best deals we're seeing in one place, so you can upgrade your tech while still saving a boatload of money. Whether you're a Microsoft fan, a Lenovo believer, an HP devotee, or completely brand ['...]

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Archived Version

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 19:38

Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll believes there's a team doing their due diligence on potentially signing Colin Kaepernick.

According to Joe Fann, Carroll told reporters Thursday that he took a call from a franchise about Kaepernick, and that ''someone is interested.'' (RELATED: David Hookstead Is The True King In The North When It Comes To College Football)

Carroll famously brought the former 49ers quarterback in for a 2017 visit, and Kaep has been thrust back into the news thanks to new debates about the national anthem.

Damn, are you all ready to buckle up? If Kaepernick gets a contract offer from an NFL team, then things are going to get wild.

Now, that's not to say that's what will happen, but NFL teams don't make phone calls unless they're interested.

That's the nature of the beast.

The question then becomes what will Kaepernick do once he gets an offer. Will he accept or turn it down? If he turns it down, then his martyr status is over forever because it'll be proof he wasn't kept out of the league.

If he accepts it and things go sideways, then it's proof he didn't belong there in the first place.

Either way, Kaepernick getting a deal offered to him would accelerate this situation coming to an end. Keep checking back for more updates as we have them!

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Archived Version

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 13:51

June 12 (UPI) '-- At least one NFL team is interested in signing free agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll told reporters Thursday that another team called him to ask for information about the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback. Carroll did not disclose the team's name.

''I know somebody's interested, and we'll see what happens with that,'' Carroll said. ''I thought the irony of that was crazy, because I knew I was coming on this press conference and [reporters] were going to ask me a million questions about this.''

Kaepernick visited with the Seahawks in 2017 after he opted out of the final season of his contract with the 49ers. He had another workout scheduled with the team in 2018 before it was canceled. Carroll said the phone call he received was the first he had received since the workout.

Kaepernick has not played in the NFL since 2016, the year he protested police brutality and racial inequality before games by kneeling during the national anthem. Kaepernick would have been released had he not opted out of the final year of his pact with San Francisco.

Carroll said one of the reasons the Seahawks didn't sign Kaepernick was because he didn't see him as a backup quarterback, a role he would have likely filled behind starter Russell Wilson. He said he wishes the team would have signed Kaepernick then, but now has less need at the position.

''He just backed up even more of what we had seen in his character and smarts, in his togetherness and his competitiveness, to the point where it was so obvious that he's a starter in the NFL,'' Carroll said of Kaepernick.

''He was a dominant figure as a football player, and that's how we saw him. The fact that it didn't work out, I figured he was going to wind up starting somewhere for sure, and it just didn't happen.''

Critics maintain that NFL owners have blackballed Kaepernick from the league because of his controversial protests. The NFL did not back Kaepernick at the time of his protests and created a rule that banned kneeling during the anthem in 2018.

The league readdressed the protests June 5 amid unrest in the United States after the death of George Floyd.

''We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest,'' NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said.

Goodell did not mention Kaepernick in his latest statement.

Other teams have expressed interest in Kaepernick since 2016. His attorney, Mark Geragos, said in 2018 that two teams were interested in the former 49ers quarterback. At least a half dozen NFL teams attended a workout Kaepernick had in November but he remained unsigned.

Kaepernick, 32, completed 59.8 percent of his throws for 12,271 yards, 72 touchdowns and 30 interceptions in 69 games for the 49ers.

The second-round pick in the 2011 NFL Draft posted a 1-10 record as a starter and completed 59.2 percent of his throws for 2,241 yards, 16 touchdowns and four interceptions in 12 games during his final season with the 49ers.

Kaepernick also had 2,300 rushing yards and 13 rushing scores in six NFL seasons. He helped lead the 49ers to a Super Bowl appearance in 2013.

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Archived Version

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 08:24

John Cleese has attacked the decision to remove an episode of sitcom ''Fawlty Towers'' from a streaming site as ''stupid,'' as well as taking a swipe at those who take a revisionist view of history in the context of the Black Lives Matter debate.

On Friday, BBC-owned TV network UKTV announced on Twitter that it had temporarily removed an episode of ''Fawlty Towers,'' ''The Germans,'' from its Gold download service as it contained ''racial slurs.'' The service said it wished to ''review'' the episode, and ''consider our options.'' It said some shows ''carry warnings and others are edited.''

It is believed the ''racial slurs'' are contained in a scene in which the character known as the Major uses the N-word when referring to Caribbean sportsmen.

Speaking to Australian newspaper The Age, Cleese said: ''The Major was an old fossil left over from decades before. We were not supporting his views, we were making fun of them. If they can't see that, if people are too stupid to see that, what can one say?''

He slammed BBC executives for yielding to pressure from protesters. ''A lot of the people in charge now at the BBC just want to hang onto their jobs,'' he said. ''If a few people get excited they pacify them rather than standing their ground as they would have done 30 or 40 years ago.''

Cleese also said it was wrong to judge older works of art by modern standards. ''The Greeks in 500 B.C. felt that culture, or any kind of real civilization, was only possible because of slavery '' does that mean we should take down all the statues of Socrates?''

Cleese repeated this view on Twitter, saying he was ''very confused about toppling statues.''

He added: ''Similarly, the Romans enslaved the British for 400 years. So are we due reparations from the Italians? And Sir Isaac Newton was a shareholder in the South Sea Company, which included slave trading among its activities. What do we do about his statues? It's rather complicated.''

This Tweet was met by a barrage of rebukes. Hieronymus Brock replied: ''It isn't. Our civilization is a direct beneficiary of chattel slavery. Direct. You can equivocate about other forms of slavery, but none of those were directly responsible for the privilege you/I now have or the oppression of those of color now. You're smarter than this, sir.''

Despite his criticism of revisionism, Cleese applauded the Black Lives Matter protest movement. ''At the moment there is a huge swell of anger and a really admirable feeling that we must make our society less discriminatory, and I think that part of it is very good,'' he told The Age.

''It seems to me the best parts of the George Floyd protests have been very moving and very, very powerful,'' he added.

''There are looters, just as there are rogue police, but if we let our focus be on the 10% who are always trying to f'-- everything up, we might forget that what it's really about is trying to behave a bit more kindly towards everyone.''

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Archived Version

Sat, 13 Jun 2020 12:53

In 2018, Barbara Fedida, a senior ABC News executive in charge of talent, was sitting in a meeting with colleagues discussing fraught contract negotiations with one of ABC's biggest stars, ''Good Morning America'' anchor Robin Roberts.

Roberts, a Black woman who has co-anchored ''Good Morning America'' since 2005, wanted more money as part of a contract renewal, and Fedida felt that Roberts had gotten enough. Fedida then asked what more Roberts could want and said it wasn't as if the network was asking Roberts to ''pick cotton,'' according to one source who was in the room and witnessed the exchange. Two other sources who were not present but were told about the incident soon afterward confirmed the account to HuffPost.

That remark is part of a long pattern of insensitive statements, including racist comments, made by Fedida to people who report to her, according to the sources who spoke to HuffPost. Fedida has been the subject of more than a dozen human resources complaints and was the subject of a human resources investigation in 2016 that led ABC News to hire an executive coach for her, sources said. Staffers at ABC News who knew about the investigation told HuffPost they were stunned that it did not end in her dismissal.

Fedida, who has worked under two ABC News presidents, Ben Sherwood and now James Goldston, has helped to foster an environment so toxic that several former staffers and talent told HuffPost that when they left the network they felt like they were leaving an abusive marriage.

Two years after Fedida allegedly made the racist comment about Roberts, Fedida remains in power at ABC News, where sources say her alleged misconduct has led the network to spend millions of dollars in confidential settlements with former talent and staff, including at least one settlement related to allegations of racial discrimination.

Fedida's impact on the news division has been devastating, according to the sources who spoke to HuffPost. Key talent and executives have left or been forced out, and all the sources who spoke to HuffPost said her behavior has had a detrimental effect on ABC News reporting.

''To say that she's an abusive figure is an understatement,'' said one former ABC News employee.

Fedida said in regards to Kendis Gibson, who is Black and at the time was an ABC News anchor, that ABC 'spends more on toilet paper than we ever would on him,' a source who heard Fedida make the comment told HuffPost. In response to a list of 28 fact-checking questions, ABC News said: ''There are deeply disturbing allegations in this story that we need to investigate, and we have placed Barbara Fedida on administrative leave while we conduct a thorough and complete investigation. These allegations do not represent the values and culture of ABC News, where we strive to make everyone feel respected in a thriving, diverse and inclusive workplace.''

This story is based on interviews with 34 sources over the course of six months. The sources are current and former ABC News staff and talent, as well as other sources with knowledge of Fedida's conduct and of the inner workings of ABC News.

None of the sources were willing to speak on the record, either because they had signed nondisclosure agreements with ABC News, feared reprisal from Fedida or other top ABC News executives, or were not allowed to speak with members of the press on the record without prior authorization.

In a statement from her attorney, Fedida said: ''Throughout my career, I have been a champion for increased diversity in network news. Building a news division where everyone can thrive has been my life's mission. I am proud of my decades of work of hiring, supporting and promoting talented journalists of color. And, unlike these heartbreaking and incredibly misleading claims about me, that track record is well-documented and undeniable.''

A Talent Executive With Unusual Power

Fedida's title at ABC News is senior vice president, talent and business. As part of her role at ABC, she oversees the network's diversity and inclusion efforts. Fedida's career started at ABC News in 1989, where she served as a production associate for the legendary anchor Peter Jennings. Fedida held various producer roles until she was named director of standards and practices in 2001 and then director of talent recruitment and development.

In 2006, she left ABC News for CBS News, where she first served as executive director of talent, and then was promoted to vice president of talent and development. In 2011, she left CBS News and returned to ABC News.

Normally, a talent executive in a network news division is responsible for finding new talent, and developing and working with the network's current talent.

Fedida does all that at ABC News, but her role and influence go far beyond that. She is essentially a deputy to Goldston and has been tasked with being an enforcer and dealing with all of the difficult issues he doesn't want to handle. She held a similar position with Ben Sherwood when he was in charge of the news division.

''There were a lot of things James and Ben didn't want to deal with, and Barbara was always willing to handle them,'' a former ABC News staffer told HuffPost. And by doing that, according to sources, she made herself invaluable.

Fedida also would refer to women as 'cunts' openly in the office, according to several staffers who personally heard her use the word. Essentially, Fedida is a problem-solver who helps make unpleasant situations go away. And every source who spoke to HuffPost said that's how she has remained in power despite engaging in behavior that would normally get any other executive ousted.

Fedida has excelled at ABC in part because of a key ally, Tanya Menton, who has worked for the Walt Disney Co. (the parent company of ABC News) for over two decades and currently serves as vice president of litigation. Menton has been involved in settlement negotiations related to Fedida and other ABC News executives, and has personally handled the response to some of the human resources complaints about Fedida's conduct, according to three sources.

Inappropriate Comments And Questions

At a company holiday lunch that took place after a series of mass shootings across the United States, Fedida asked attendees, all of whom reported to her, who they thought would be the most likely ABC News staffer to be an active shooter in the building, sources who were at the event told HuffPost. Fedida was the subject of HR complaints for the offensive question.

Fedida also would refer to women as ''cunts'' openly in the office, according to several staffers who personally heard her use the word.

Fedida said in regards to Kendis Gibson, who is Black and at the time was an ABC News anchor, that ABC ''spends more on toilet paper than we ever would on him,'' a source who heard Fedida make the comment told HuffPost. Another source was told about the comment after the meeting. Gibson now serves as an anchor at MSNBC.

'The Black Manifesto'

In more than a dozen interviews, sources who spoke with HuffPost said Fedida, despite overseeing ABC's diversity and inclusion efforts, appeared to have a clear distaste for the efforts and would often develop animus toward staffers or talent who tried to champion the efforts, including staffers she put in charge of improving diversity and inclusion.

Fedida, according to five sources, has shown little interest in the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), despite diversity and inclusion being key parts of her role at the network.

Network executives and talent attend NABJ's annual convention and sit in booths to network and talk to young black journalists for potential recruitment efforts and mentoring. Fedida has rarely appeared at the NABJ convention, which is a huge departure from what her counterparts at other networks do. At NBC News, for example, top talent executives attend the NABJ convention annually and sit in the booth to critique newsreels and offer advice. The NBC News head of talent has only missed two NABJ conventions in 30 years, according to a source familiar with her attendance.

A source told HuffPost that ABC executives dubbed that letter 'the Black manifesto.' Fedida used the phrase when talking about the document, according to one source who heard her say it directly. One situation in which Fedida actively sabotaged diversity efforts at ABC involved her combative relationship with a group of Black journalists who organized to advocate for more inclusivity at the network. Chief among the organizers of the group was Mara Schiavocampo, an ABC correspondent.

The group came together in the summer of 2016. ABC News was preparing to hold a town hall with then-President Barack Obama about race relations. Interviews with U.S. presidents are significant news events, and networks put a great deal of preparation into them. Typically the interviewer '-- in this case, the anchor of ABC's ''World News Tonight,'' David Muir, who is white '-- and staff meet regularly to plan out questions.

None of the staffers initially involved in the planning process were Black, according to multiple sources familiar with it, which led Black journalists at ABC News to organize the advocacy group.

The group, according to multiple sources, held conference calls and put together a detailed letter to Goldston. The goals were relatively modest, among them that of having one senior Black producer on every show and interviewing a Black candidate for every job opening.

Somehow, the letter came to the attention of Goldston and Fedida. A source told HuffPost that ABC executives dubbed that letter ''the Black manifesto.'' Fedida used the phrase when talking about the document, according to one source who heard her say it directly.

What followed was a meeting with Goldston and the group, which multiple sources who attended described as tense. Robin Roberts was directly involved in all the meetings, a rarity for an anchor of her stature.

In a second meeting with Goldston, when Goldston told Roberts that colleagues were pushing back on some of the proposals, Roberts, who was visibly angry, said, ''Were they carrying torches and chanting 'You will not replace us?''' The phrase, which is frequently used by white supremacists, was inspired by Renaud Camus, the white supremacist French philosopher and writer who created the ''great replacement'' theory that mass migration of Muslims would replace white Europeans.

Roberts also went through a list of Black candidates she presented to ABC News for consideration for various roles. She added that ABC News didn't take the candidates seriously despite the fact that they were qualified, according to two sources who were in the room. Roberts said the candidates sought employment elsewhere, according to the sources.

In a statement, ABC News said, ''James and Barbara welcomed the opportunity to hear from this group and meet with them regularly. These conversations have led to positive change in the news division.''

Despite any progress that may have been made, the group of Black journalists at ABC News gathered on a conference call with Goldston and Fedida last Thursday to express frustration with coverage around the reaction to the police killing of George Floyd and with ABC's efforts toward inclusion of black candidates for positions within the network, according to two sources who were on the call and another source who heard about it afterward.

''My personal experience with Barbara Fedida is that she is not racist. I know what racism looks, smells and sounds like. Barbara Fedida is not any of those things. But I am respectful of other colleagues who have had a different experience,'' Byron Pitts, a Black ABC News anchor, told HuffPost.

Back in 2016, Schiavocampo's involvement as a leader of this group put a target on her back with Fedida. Soon, multiple sources said, Fedida started making disparaging comments about Schiavocampo behind her back.

Then in February 2017, ABC News decided not to renew Schiavocampo's contract. But Schiavocampo didn't find out the decision until July 2017. After she was told, she was taken off the air, even though her contract didn't expire until 2018.

Schiavocampo, through her attorneys, approached ABC News with a legal claim that included an allegation of racial discrimination perpetrated by Fedida.

The network gave Schiavocampo a financial settlement. As part of the deal, Schiavocampo signed a nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreement.

When reached by phone, Schiavocampo declined to comment.

Follow Yashar '-- or send him a tip '-- on Twitter: @yashar>>

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Archived Version

Sat, 13 Jun 2020 00:37

Yesterday, we discussed the effort to remove one of the country's most distinguished economists from his position because Harald Uhlig, the senior editor of the Journal of Political Economy, criticized Black Lives Matter and the Defund The Police movement. Now, Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson is reportedly facing demands that he be fired because he wrote a blog about the Black Lives Matter movement. Jacobson is the founder of the conservative website Legal Insurrection. A letter by his colleagues is a chilling reminder of the rapid loss of free speech values on campuses around the United States.

Twenty-one colleagues at Cornell signed a June 9, a letter denouncing unnamed ''commentators'... attached to Ivy League Institutions'' as calls were made to the Dean to have Jacobson fired. The professors lashed out against academic commentators who criticize the looting as effectively racists:

''These commentators express rage over the sporadic looting that has taken place amidst the largely peaceful protests, calling for organized manhunts to track down those responsible. Theirs is a form of racism that gives cover to those police who use their batons and tear gas and rubber bullets and fists to silence and maim their critics.

These commentators are the defenders of institutionalized racism and violence. They are entitled to their viewpoints. We do not name them, so as to deprive them of a larger platform for their racist speech.''

The letter is signed by a huge number of clinicians (Professors Zohra Ahmed, Sandra Babcock, Briana Beltran, Celia Bigoness, John Blume, Elizabeth Brundige, Angela Cornell, Sujata Gibson, Mark H. Jackson, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer, Cortelyou Kenney, Sital Kalantry, Ian M. Kysel, Mallory J. Livingston, Delphine Lourtau, Beth Lyon, Estelle McKee, Keir Weyble, Carlton E. Williams, and Stephen Yale-Loehr).

Not a word about academic freedom or free of speech; not a suggestion that critics of these protests could have anything other than racist motivations. It is the antipathy of the intellectual foundations for higher education. Rather than address the merits of arguments, you attack those with opposing views personally and viciously. That has become a standard approach to critics on our campuses. Unless you agree with the actions of the movement, you are per se racist. It is a mantra that is all too familiar historically: if you are not part of the resistance, you are reactionary.

It is rather bizarre that these professors would focus on ''commentators attached to Ivy League Institutions.'' First, it confines the objection to Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University. Second, it is strikingly elitist. It would suggest that somehow these schools are the only important measure '-- or at least those schools matter the most. From anything other than an elitist (even privileged) perspective, the focus on ivy league schools exclusively is far from self-evident since most of those schools are ranked behind non-Ivy League schools in U.S. News & World Report, including Cornell which is ranked 17th among universities. Finally, it suggests that the presence of conservative (which they seem to view as synonymous with racist) scholars have no place at such schools. That last point is unfortunately the view of many faculty at top schools which are overwhelmingly if not exclusively liberal.

The professors, of course, have every right to to denounce writers for what they believe are racist elements or messaging in their writings. However, they specifically go after scholars who they believe defend ''institutionalized racism and violence'' and ''express rage over the sporadic looting that has taken place.'' That would encompass what they describe as seemingly ''informed commentary'' supporting institutions of a racist society. It is an all-too-familiar attack on campuses against speakers and academics. What is most striking for me is the inclusion of Professors Mark H. Jackson and Cortelyou Kenney, who teach in the Cornell First Amendment Clinic. They are in fact the Director and Associate Director of the First Amendment Clinic, which is presumably committed to the value of free speech even at private institutions. So these professors teach free speech and just signed a letter that people who question the BLM movement or denounce the looting are per se or at least presumptive racists. It is reflection of how free speech is being redefined to exclude protections with those who hold opposing views.

Jacobson wrote two posts he wrote about the Black Lives Matter movement, including one the ''hands up don't shoot'' mantra and another on what he viewed as the movement's destructive politics.

The language is sweeping and insulting of the BLM movement:

''The goal is to destroy capitalism, and to seek revenge. The Black Lives Matter movement, founded based on fraudulent narratives of the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases, is led by anti-American, anti-capitalist activists. They have concocted a false narrative of mass murder of Blacks at the hands of police, when the statistics show otherwise. They will exploit George Floyd's death mercilessly to drive that agenda. And they will have some success, because all the institutions listed above are behind them.''

I am unfamiliar with Jacobson's writings. Once again, however, the merits of such arguments are immaterial. What is disturbing is the effort to silence Jacobson because he holds such opposing views. This letter coincides with what Jacobson says is an effort to get him fired. That would not be unexpected. Conservative and libertarian academics are increasingly being subject to discipline or harassed by their Administrations in the hope of getting them to leave faculties. Moreover, many in the BLM movement use equally inflammatory language but are rarely called out by Administrators, students, or faculty. Why cannot both views we treated as enriching the debate on a campus, allowing sharply different values to be heard in a pluralistic academic environment?

The message for other faculty by these Cornell clinicians is both clear and intimidating. Disagree with the BLM movement or the protests and you will be labeled a racist. Indeed, the letter ends on a menacing note: ''And we will continue to expose and respond to racism masquerading as informed commentary.'' Thus, if you attempt ''informed commentary'' on the costs of looting and the need for great law enforcement, you are a per se racist.

I have previously discussed how college protesters are increasingly denouncing free speech and the foundations for liberal democracies. Some protesters reject classic liberalism and the belief in free speech as part of the oppression on campus. We have been discussing the rising intolerance and violence on college campuses , particularly against conservative speakers. (here and here and here and here ). Berkeley has been the focus of much concern over mob rule on our campuses as violent protesters have succeeded in silencing speakers, even including a few speakers like an ACLU official . Both students and some faculty have maintained the position that they have a right to silence those with whom they disagree and even student newspapers have declared opposing speech to be outside of the protections of free speech . At another University of California campus, professors actually rallied around a professor who physically assaulted pro-life advocates and tore down their display. In the meantime, academics and deans have said that there is no free speech protection for offensive or ''disingenuous'' speech. CUNY Law Dean Mary Lu Bilek showed how far this trend has gone. When conservative law professor Josh Blackman was stopped from speaking about ''the importance of free speech,'' Bilek insisted that disrupting the speech on free speech was free speech .

The recent protests have served as a catalyst for the rising intolerance on our campus. There is an enforced orthodoxy that is captured in the Cornell letter. These letters are successful in creating a chilling effect on academics who are intimidated by these threats. To be labelled as a racist is devastating to an academic career and these professors know that. Now, even ''informed commentary'' will be denounced as racist if a professor raises a dissenting view. It is not just the death of free speech but our intellectual mission on university and college campuses.

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Archived Version

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 12:02

A college professor is living under police protection after rebuffing a request to exempt minority students from taking final exams in the wake of George Floyd's death.

University of California Los Angeles accounting professor Gordon Klein faced threats of violence after he declined a student's request that he delay a final exam in light of national unrest. The university suspended the professor for three weeks beginning on June 25 and launched a discrimination investigation into the incident. Klein declined a request for comment, but a Malibu Police Department spokesman said the department increased police presence near the educator's home after Klein received multiple threats.

Many universities faced disruptions stemming from the coronavirus, but the demonstrations and riots that followed Floyd's death in police custody have led students to petition for delays or outright cancellations of classes and final exams. Those requests have quickly turned into threats on social media for professors who refuse to grant such accommodations. In the face of public pressure, UCLA administrators bowed to student demands and removed Klein from his class.

On Monday, Anderson School of Management dean Antonio Bernardo sent an email to students announcing an investigation into Klein's "troubling" behavior. The dean apologized to students for the "added stress" a substitution of an instructor may cause. The message also announced that Klein's classes would be transferred to professors Judson Caskey and Brett Trueman, who also serves as the Anderson school's diversity committee chairman.

An email obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon shows that Caskey urged professors to avoid changing final exam plans in the face of student demands.

"If students ask for accommodations such as assignment delays or exam cancellations, I strongly encourage you to follow the normal procedures (accommodations from the [Center for Accessible Education] office, death/illness in the family, religious observance, etc.)," Caskey wrote in a June 1 email.

The controversy began after UCLA student Emilia Martinez published a screenshot of Klein's email to Twitter on June 2. Martinez, who is not one of Klein's students, went public after a friend showed her a copy of the message, sparking protests and a petition to fire the professor. Martinez praised the university for taking quick action.

"I think it's appropriate that they are investigating, I think it's fair," she told the Free Beacon.

A university spokesman declined to comment on Klein's situation, citing "confidentiality and privacy laws and concerns."

"UCLA and UCLA Anderson are committed to creating a learning, working, and living environment that is free from discrimination, harassment, or retaliation," the spokesman said.

Some higher education activists say that the school's treatment of Klein threatens academic freedom. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) said it has seen an uptick in instances of colleges called upon to investigate students and faculty for expressing their opinions about protests and discussions of police brutality. FIRE spokeswoman Katlyn Patton said the First Amendment allows Klein to "manage the content and direction of his course" at a taxpayer-funded university.

"As a lecturer at a public institution bound by the First Amendment, Klein has significant rights to manage the content and direction of his course, and his disagreement with the students' reasoning does not amount to harassment or unlawful discrimination," Patton said.

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, called UCLA's suspension of Klein "disturbing."

"Professor Klein is right. Treating students on the basis of equality is morally, ethically, and legally sound," Wood said. "The fact that his complaining student has gotten traction with her complaint is disturbing."

While Klein remains under police protection, his students have won concessions from the university.

Bernardo, who did not return a request for comment, has increased the time students have to complete exams, given the "difficult circumstances."

Chrissy Clark is a staff reporter at the Washington Free Beacon. She reports on college campuses and issues of higher education. Her work is featured in The Federalist and The Daily Signal. Chrissy received her degree in political science from Michigan State University. Follow her on social media @chrissyclark_ or contact her at chrissy@freebeacon.com.

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 13:00

(C) Townhall Media/Julio Rosas Cosmic commentary: Dumpster fire near the CHAZ in Seattle, Washington.

As we've previously

reported, the Democrat/media-driven rush

to "cancel" anyone who decides to think for themselves instead of participating in left-wing groupthink in the aftermath of

the death of George Floyd is at a fever pitch, with professors, media figures, and pro sports

icons among those being tossed into the fire left and right.

But in an ironic twist of fate, a cancel notice may soon be coming for Raz Simone, the "warlord" of the radical Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle, Washington as old homophobic tweets from his Twitter account have surfaced that appear to be legit, based on various web archive websites (language warning):

Here's the

archived version of the above screen grab, available for viewing as of this writing.

Here's the

archived link for one of the tweets in the above four-tweet screen grab.

In spite of evidence to the contrary, Simone is employing the Joy Reid "I was hacked" defense.

The "hacked" excuse is pathetic, for reasons explained here:

Plus, there is the Google search footprint:

Simone also tried to claim he was not even on Twitter in 2010, which was a lie:

Here are related tweets from Simone that he has not deleted (probably too busy warlording and stuff to have time to delete them all.

Will the supposedly inclusive and tolerant utopian "summer of love"

safe haven for so-called peaceful social justice warriors vote Simone off the island? Stay tuned...

Based in North Carolina, Sister Toldjah is a former liberal and a 16+ year writer with an emphasis on media bias, social issues, and the culture wars.

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 09:13

June 12, 2020 | 9:10pm

Howard Stern has become the latest in a long list of celebrities and power players to be forced to confront their use of blackface.

On Thursday a video appeared online showing Stern in minstrel-style makeup, liberally using the N-word. It was cut together with a recent appearance on ''The View'' during which he claimed he'd never used that word.

Sources tell Page Six that the clip '-- a skit that seems to take aim at Ted Danson's infamous 1993 blackface performance with then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg '-- was part of Stern's ''New Year's Rotten Eve Pageant,'' which aired on pay-per-view on December 31 that year.

In the video he plays Danson, and addresses his long-time black sidekick Robin Quivers, making corny and highly racist jokes, such as, ''What do you call a black rocket scientist?,'' the punchline to which is the N-word.

When his audience seems shocked by the language, Stern defends himself by saying, ''Whoopi wrote it!'' Then he calls Quivers a ''smelly'' N-word, and again excuses himself by saying, ''Whoopi wrote that.''

The point of the skit seems to be that Danson used Goldberg's apparent blessing of his behavior as license to be freely racist.

Longtime Stern employee Steve Grillo of the Aftershock XL podcast network '-- who worked on the special '-- tells Page Six that he doesn't believe Stern is racist and that he never used that language off-air. He said that because the show was on pay-per-view and wasn't governed by Stern's longtime nemesis the FCC, their attitude was, ''We've got the whole world watching '-- let's push the limits.'' He added, ''The leash was off and they were going to be rabid dogs.''

The clip was first posted by controversial filmmaker Tariq Nasheed and bubbled up among right-wing Twitter users '-- possibly because Stern recently came out against President Trump '-- and was eventually retweeted by Donald Trump Jr.

A rep for Stern didn't get back to us.

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Fri, 12 Jun 2020 12:59

Published Fri, Jun 12 2020 9:50 AM EDT

Updated 2 hours ago

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Starbucks will allow workers to wear attire and accessories highlighting the Black Lives Matter movement, reversing its prior policy.After Buzzfeed reported the chain's initial policy, consumers on social media began calling for boycotts of the coffee chain.The company will make 250,000 shirts with a design that includes "Black Lives Matter" and "No Justice, No Peace" available to workers.Starbucks said Friday that the chain would allow workers to wear attire and accessories highlighting the Black Lives Matter movement, reversing its prior stance after social media users called for boycotts of the company.

Buzzfeed first reported on Wednesday that the coffee chain would not allow its employees to wear Black Lives Matter clothing or accessories, and management justified the decision by saying that such items could be misunderstood and incite violence. While Starbucks has a policy against wearing personal, political or religious clothing or accessories, workers told Buzzfeed that the company hands out buttons and attire celebrating LGBTQ rights and marriage equality.

Now, Starbucks will be doing the same for Black Lives Matter. The chain will make 250,000 shirts with a design that includes "Black Lives Matter" and "No Justice, No Peace" available to workers in its company-owned cafes in the United States and Canada. The company said that it began planning to provide shirts for employees last week.

Until the shirts arrive, employees can wear pins or shirts to show support.

Starbucks design for the t-shirt they're going to be giving to employees.

Source: Starbucks

In early June, as protesters filled the streets of U.S. cities and small towns to call attention to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans at the hands of police, Starbucks joined the flood of other corporations supporting Black Lives Matter. It pledged $1 million to organizations that promote "racial equity and more inclusive and just communities."

After Buzzfeed reported the chain's policy, consumers on social media began calling for boycotts of the coffee chain, which has drawn fire in the past for racial insensitivity that contradicts its progressive reputation. In 2018, Starbucks closed down cafes across the country for an afternoon of racial bias training after police arrested two Black men at one of its Philadelphia locations for sitting down without ordering anything.

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 13:26

''My grandbaby loves Paw Patrol, this shit is going too far.''Even leftist rapper Ice Cube is against the idea of canceling Paw Patrol, a popular cartoon that has come under fire because one of its characters is a police dog.

The long-running show features puppies that work in different professions (such as police, construction, firefighting, medicine, and the like) who rush around their town to save people, right wrongs, and maintain order.

But since one of the characters is a police dog, leftists are targeting the cartoon in the wake of emboldened Black Lives Matter activists looking to eliminate anything they don't like all across American society.

But Ice Cube '-- who has a long history of hate for police '-- thinks targeting the cartoon is absurd. ''My grandbaby loves Paw Patrol, this shit is going too far,'' the Fuck Da Policerapper tweeted on Thursday.

My grand baby loves Paw Patrol, this shit is going too far🂠https://t.co/hpgtict8Uu

'-- Ice Cube (@icecube) June 12, 2020

Read more

Owen reveals why most virtue signaling is being used by the left to push their radical agenda.

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Thu, 11 Jun 2020 15:27

YouTube will create a $100 million fund ''dedicated to amplifying and developing the voices of Black creators and artists and their stories,'' the CEO announced Thursday.

CEO Susan Wojcicki committed to the multi-year fund in her mid-year update to ''center and amplify Black voices and perspectives'' on the video platform.

''We have always been proud that we are a platform that celebrates a broad and diverse set of voices,'' she wrote. ''And we have implemented many policies and product features to protect our communities.

''But we recognize we need to do more, in particular with the Black community, and that is why we are committing to following actions,'' she added.

Wojcicki cited the upcoming live stream fundraising event ''Bear Witness, Take Action'' as an example of content YouTube wishes to further promote. The event produced by YouTube Originals will feature creators, artists, public figures and activists for discussions and musical performances on Saturday, with the donations going to the Equal Justice Initiative.

The platform's Spotlight channel will focus on racial justice issues through the rest of the month, including perspectives from black community members, historical content, educational videos and protest coverage, she said.

The CEO also vowed to do more to protect diverse communities from hate and harassment, saying the company will review how its policies work for everyone but especially the black community and ''close any gaps.''

''More broadly, we will work to ensure Black users, artists, and creators can share their stories and be protected from hateful, white supremacist, and bullying content,'' she said.

Wojcicki said last quarter the platform removed more than 100,000 videos and 100 million comments for violating its hate speech and harassment policies that were updated last year.

The 2019 ban prohibits videos that argue that a group is superior to another based on race, gender, religion or sexual orientation as a way to ''justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion.''

The mid-year update also discussed the update to policies to elevate trusted information on coronavirus and prevent content with harmful medical misinformation from spreading. YouTube has removed more than 200,000 videos for violating those policies, she said.

YouTube's announcement comes as several corporations are reviewing their policies to be more racially sensitive in the wake of George Floyd's death and protests over police treatment of minority populations.

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Thu, 11 Jun 2020 15:59

Shortly after Gelman's resignation Thursday, staffers said on social media that the decision was "not enough" and that The Wing must do more to support its Black and brown employees.

by Maxwell Strachan

Jun 11 2020, 2:51pm Snap

Audrey Gelman, the co-founder of The Wing, resigned from her position as CEO on Thursday, as employees publicly voiced their anger with the company's "systemic" mistreatment of people of color and said must do more to fix the upper-class women's co-working space.

''The resignation of Audrey Gelman as CEO of the Wing is not enough. The systemic issues at The Wing extend beyond one individual," The Wing's organizing employees said in an email to VICE News.

The Wing confirmed Gelman's resignation and said the company planned to replace her with "a newly formed Office of the CEO," a three-person group that will include co-founder and COO Lauren Kassan, senior vice president of marketing and communications Celestine Maddy, and senior vice president of operations Ashley Peterson.

"The past three months have brought change to our society, our culture, our business and our team in ways no one could have imagined," the company said in a statement. "The Wing remains a vital resource for thousands of women navigating their path to success. But the moment calls for a rethinking of how we meet their needs moving forward and for new leadership that can guide The Wing into the future."

The company has long faced accusations of perpetuating an environment, both for its staff and members, that was far less inclusive than its branding attested to. Gelman told staff over email on Thursday that her decision to step down was "the right thing for the business" and "the best way to bring The Wing along into a long overdue era of change," according to an email obtained by reporter Kara Swisher

Minutes after Gelman announced her resignation, employees of The Wing began to publicly express their frustrations with the company on social media, taking particular issues with the company's treatment of people of color." Using identical messages, the employees said they were participating in a ''digital walkout in solidarity with the people without whom The Wing would not exist'--particularly our Black and brown coworkers."

"Simply put, The Wing doesn't practice the intersectional feminism that it preaches to the rest of the world," the statement said.

An error occurred while retrieving the Tweet. It might have been deleted.

On Thursday afternoon, The Wing's organizing employees released an additional statement to VICE News saying that 93 percent of the company's non-executive full-time employees had signed a petition demanding that the board take additional specific steps to improve the situation at the company.

''We are frustrated and saddened by the incompetence and lack of accountability demonstrated time and time again by The Wing's leadership,'' the organizing employees stated. ''Last year, our co-founders admitted that their own biases, blind spots, willful ignorance, and conscious decision to prioritize growth led to a dysfunctional company structure and have had a lasting impact on the performance of our business.''.

''Without transparency and clear growth paths for employees, these leadership decisions have disproportionately failed and continue to fail people of color at The Wing,'' the employees added.

In November, amidst its own struggles, WeWork'--which had led a Series B funding round for The Wing'--divested from the company. In recent months, The Wing has additionally struggled to grapple with the economic effects of the the COVID-19 pandemic, which has made crowding indoors medically inadvisable. In early April, Gelman and Kassan told staff that the company's revenue had dropped by 95 percent as a result of the pandemic'--a development which the founders said forced them to lay off nearly all hourly employees and half of of the corporate staff.

Here is the entire statement provided by the The Wing's organizing employees:

As employees of The Wing, we have been told over and over by our leadership that we're a mission-driven company, even as the company's actions consistently prove otherwise. In solidarity with so many of our colleagues '-- past, present, and in particular, the Black and brown people without whom The Wing would not exist '--as a united group of employees, we are participating in a virtual walkout beginning today, Thursday, June 11, 2020.

We are frustrated and saddened by the incompetence and lack of accountability demonstrated time and time again by The Wing's leadership. Last year, our co-founders admitted that their own biases, blind spots, willful ignorance, and conscious decision to prioritize growth led to a dysfunctional company structure and have had a lasting impact on the performance of our business.

Without transparency and clear growth paths for employees, these leadership decisions have disproportionately failed and continue to fail people of color at The Wing. A quick look at our social media reveals several detailed accounts from former space team members, most of whom are Black and brown people, about the abuse they endured in our spaces and the lack of support they received from The Wing's leadership. The public perception of The Wing is at an all-time low '-- and rightfully so.

The resignation of Audrey Gelman as CEO of the Wing is not enough. The systemic issues at The Wing extend beyond one individual.

We have presented several additional immediate demands to our board as well as several commitments to long term changes once new leadership is instated.

Outside of our executive team, 93% of our current full-time employees - 67 out of 72 people have signed the petition in support of our demands

We look forward to working together to rebuild The Wing and create a company, culture, and community that's equitable, profitable, and representative of the values and causes we claim to uplift.

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Thu, 11 Jun 2020 16:11

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The Nigel Farage Show had been on air since 2017 Nigel Farage is to leave his talk show on LBC radio with "immediate effect", the station confirmed on Thursday.

The station thanked the Brexit Party leader for his "enormous contribution".

The Nigel Farage Show aired five days a week. On Wednesday, he told listeners he would be back as usual on Thursday, but the schedule has now been changed.

"Nigel Farage's contract with LBC is up very shortly and, following discussions with him, Nigel is stepping down from LBC with immediate effect," LBC said.

The station added: "We thank Nigel for the enormous contribution he has made to LBC and wish him well."

The Nigel Farage Show had been on air for three years, and offered callers the chance to sound off about political topics.

On Wednesday's show he signed off with the words: "I'm back tomorrow at six," suggesting his contract situation accelerated in the last 24 hours.

Apparently responding to the news, fellow presenter James O'Brien tweeted: "We got our station back."

In 2018, he launched a podcast called Farage Against The Machine, which caused rock band Rage Against the Machine to send a cease and desist letter telling him to stop using the name. He refused, but LBC cancelled the series.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media caption The MEP's last sitting in the European ParliamentAs former Ukip leader, Farage was influential in gathering momentum for the campaign to leave the EU.

This week the 56-year-old compared Black Lives Matters protestors to the Taliban, for demolishing statues of slaves traders.

His departure comes after the station's owners Global Radio were criticised by some presenters over its response to the protests, following the death of George Floyd.

A Global spokesperson told the BBC the company had taken "several steps in recent days" to improve its inclusivity, "including the formation of a BAME committee".

They added: "This said, we recognise there is still a lot of work to do. Global is committed to recruiting the highest level of expertise and experience, regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation or disability.

"Like a lot of businesses, we are honest enough to say that we are still finding our feet and learning fast."

Follow us on Facebook or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk .

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Thu, 11 Jun 2020 18:26

St. John's University fired its assistant fencing coach for racist comments made during a virtual meeting that was leaked on Instagram, the school confirmed to The New York Post.

On Wednesday, Boris Vaksman was dismissed after he said the ''majority'' of blacks steal, kill and do drugs, and President Abraham Lincoln ''made a mistake'' by ending slavery.

LEBRON JAMES FORMS GROUP AIMED AT GETTING AFRICAN-AMERICANS TO VOTE, TACKLING VOTER SUPPRESSION

''As soon as the recording was brought to our attention the matter was immediately investigated and the individual no longer works at the University,'' St. John's athletic director Mike Cragg said in a statement. ''The racist comments expressed are completely unacceptable and a rejection of everything for which the University stands.''

Vaksman, whose name and bio were removed from the school's website immediately, had been the assistant coach at St. John's under Yury Gelman since 2006.

BLUE JACKETS' JOHN TORTORELLA CHANGES 2016 STANCE VOWING TO BENCH PLAYERS PROTESTING DURING THE NATIONAL ANTHEM

In the video, he started off by saying, ''Because the most trouble [is] coming from where? '... from black people.'' And then he added: ''Because they don't want to work, they steal, they kill, they [do] drugs, everything comes from [black people]. The majority.''

He then said that Lincoln made a mistake to end slavery.

''I think '... what's his name, Lincoln, made a mistake,'' Vaksman said in reference to President Abraham Lincoln ending slavery in 1863 by signing the Emancipation Proclamation.

The video was posted anonymously on Instagram and reposted by Olympian Ibtihaj Muhammad, who shared the video with a message.

''Ever wonder what racism looks like behind closed doors? Boris Vaksman, a fencing coach in NYC, can be seen here advocating for the enslavement of Black people. This is what racism looks like in fencing, a small piece of a larger puzzle,'' Muhammad wrote. ''This video is a reminder that coaches and teachers, those people entrusted with building us, educating us, and protecting us, too often perpetuate the discriminatory treatment and behaviors that normalize racism.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM

''To our allies who are committed to being anti-racist, it's important we understand that what we're seeing today, what we're protesting, what we've experienced as Black people, did not begin today. The pain and trauma Black people have endured started over 400 years ago, when the toxicity and culture of white supremacy washed onto American shores.

"There are a lot of people who are resistant to change," Muhammad added. "It's time we acknowledge the impact racism has on our society. How many of you are willing to triumph against this intolerance? Together, let's hold people accountable. Enough is enough."

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Fri, 12 Jun 2020 08:38

An iconic mountain range in Western Australia's north will be renamed to remove the link to a former "tyrant" monarch responsible for the deaths of millions of people in Africa.

Key points: The King Leopold Ranges were named after a Belgian king in 1879 Successive state governments have tried to change the name Traditional owners will be consulted on a new name for the areaThe WA Government plans to rename the King Leopold Ranges, a lengthy section of hills and gorges including several popular tourist destinations in the Kimberley region.

The King Leopold Ranges are named after the former king of Belgium, whose atrocities and violent reign of the Congo Free State led to up to 10 million deaths.

King Leopold II never visited WA and held no connection to the state, other than having the site named after him.

Lands Minister Ben Wyatt said King Leopold II was an "evil tyrant" who should not be honoured in WA, pointing to the fact that a statue of him in Antwerp had been taken down after being repeatedly vandalised during Black Lives Matter protests.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Ben Wyatt announces King Leopold ranges in the Kimberley to be renamed Download 4.8 MB "It highlights the absurdity that we still have something named after someone who the Belgians do not have any kind sentiment to themselves," Mr Wyatt told ABC Radio Perth.

"He was a nasty piece of work and we have this odd historical artefact still with us about why it is named after him."

There have been moves within successive state governments to rename the King Leopold Ranges over more than a decade, but Mr Wyatt said those had been delayed because numerous native title groups had input over the issue.

Mountains named after mass-murdering 'tyrant'The King Leopold Ranges run 567 kilometres through the heart of the Kimberley and include popular tourist destinations such as Bell and Dimond gorges.

They received their colonial name in 1879 from Alexander Forrest, brother of WA's first premier John Forrest, who selected the Belgian monarch due to Leopold II's "interest in exploration".

But Leopold's bloodthirsty reign over the Congo Free State '-- estimated to have claimed up to 10 million lives '-- has sparked continuing calls for the ranges to be renamed.

King Leopold Ranges run 567 kilometres through the heart of the Kimberley.(ABC Open contributor Stories from the Scenic Route)An international outcry eventually forced Belgium to annex what had previously been the king's personal fiefdom in 1908.

Former WA Geographic Names Committee secretary Brian Goodchild said Forrest's call reflected the approach at the time.

"There were a lot of mountains through the Pilbara and Kimberley named after European royalty," he said.

"The Oscar Range for King Oscar of Sweden, Baron Negri of Italy has the Negri River in the East Kimberley; these were all European royalty the Forrest brothers connected with exploration.

"[But] it was very clear [Leopold] was a tyrant and involved in the exploitation of people."

Call for traditional owners' input on new nameIt is still not clear how long the naming issue will take to resolve, but Mr Wyatt said he wanted it done as soon as possible.

"It has been delayed for a number of reasons but the time for that delay is up," he said.

"I can get on and rename that fairly quickly once I have consensus from the two main groups up there."

A number of native title groups will have a say in what to rename the King Leopold Ranges.(ABC Open contributor jesbarbz)Kimberley Land Council chairman Anthony Watson said the decision was a positive step, urging the Government to negotiate with traditional owners over a future name.

"[The history of King Leopold] was shocking and it was a shame that it got brought to Australia," Mr Watson said.

"Once we knew his background, we needed to reflect a good positive name."

Mr Goodchild contributed a previous effort to rename the ranges launched by the Carpenter government in 2008.

The cause was picked up again by Barnett government environment minister Albert Jacob in 2017, who had a personal stake in the debate with his Belgium-born grandfather sent to Congo after King Leopold's reign.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. As statues fall and Black Lives Matter rallies continue, former WA Environment Minister Albert Jacob says King Leopold Ranges in the Kimberley are still waiting to be renamed Download 3.5 MB Mr Goodchild agreed involving traditional owners in the renaming could prove a complicated exercise.

"The '... complication is finding a single name, as Aboriginal names were more localised and this range covers different regions and native title claimant areas," he said.

Stretching from the far western to the far eastern Kimberley at their fullest extent, the ranges fall into the country of a number of the region's traditional owner groups.

The King Leopold Ranges connects several popular tourist destinations in the Kimberley region.(ABC Open contributor jesbarbz)In a statement, the Wilinggin Aboriginal Corporation, representing the Ngarinyin traditional owners of more than 60,000 square kilometres of the Kimberley, including part of the Ranges, said consultation would be critical.

"The Wilinggin native title group is very supportive of the move and congratulates the Minister on his announcement," he said.

"We will be fully engaged in the process and hope that proper recognition for all traditional owner groups will occur."

Other traditional owner groups declined to comment, citing a desire to see more detail of Mr Wyatt's proposal.

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Thu, 11 Jun 2020 19:36

Leaders at the Berklee College of Music have apologized for allowing Boston police to use restrooms at the campus concert hall as violence erupted on city streets following peaceful protests against the killings of Black Americans on May 31.

The decision by Berklee Public Safety staff to allow officers staged at Massachusetts Avenue and Boylston Street to use the Berklee Performance Center's restrooms was ''not a formal decision by the institution, but an informal one, made on the spot,'' Berklee President Roger H. Brown, Senior Vice President for Administration and Finance Mac Hisey, and Police Chief David Ransom said in a statement posted to Facebook Wednesday night.

''Some have asked if the campus was used to house or stage activity of the Boston Police; it was not,'' they added.

Representatives for the college did not immediately respond to a request for further comment Wednesday evening.

The officials said members of the campus community have expressed anger, pain, and a feeling of betrayal because police were given access to the building, particularly because the concert hall is closed to students due to the coronavirus pandemic.

''Allowing police officers into the space was in no way meant to undermine Berklee's support for Black Lives Matter,'' Brown, Hisey, and Ransom said in the statement.

They said the officers should not have been allowed to use the restrooms, and that police would not be permitted to do so in the future.

''We are deeply sorry for the impact this had on our community and for perpetuating feelings of oppression, silencing, and marginalization,'' they said. ''We will make a more concerted effort to consider the effects of our actions.''

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Fri, 12 Jun 2020 09:27

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who on Wednesday demanded the removal of Confederate statues occupying the U.S. Capitol, has remained silent on her father's role in overseeing the dedication of the Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee Monument while serving as Baltimore's mayor in 1948.

Pelosi this week formally requested the removal of Confederate statues occupying the U.S. Capitol, dismissing them as ''monuments to men who advocated cruelty and barbarism to achieve such a plainly racist end.'' Her demand comes as angry protesters across the nation take matters into their own hands, vandalizing '-- and in some cases, beheading '-- statues and monuments memorializing the Civil War era and beyond.

''As I have said before, the halls of Congress are the very heart of our democracy. The statues in the Capitol should embody our highest ideals as Americans, expressing who we are and who we aspire to be as a nation,'' Pelosi said in her letter to Committee Chair Roy Blunt (R-MO) and Vice Chair Zoe Lofgren (D-CA).

''Monuments to men who advocated cruelty and barbarism to achieve such a plainly racist end are a grotesque affront to these ideals,'' she continued. ''Their statues pay homage to hate, not heritage. They must be removed.''

However, her father, Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr., oversaw the dedication of such a statue in Baltimore's Wyman Park '-- the Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee Monument '-- as mayor of the city in 1948. At the time, the Speaker's father said people could look to Jackson's and Lee's lives as inspiration and urged Americans to ''emulate Jackson's example and stand like a stone wall against aggression in any form that would seek to destroy the liberty of the world.''

''World Wars I and II found the North and South fighting for a common cause, and the generalship and military science displayed by these two great men in the War between the States lived on and were applied in the military plans of our nation in Europe and the Pacific areas,'' D'Alesandro said at the dedication ceremony, as detailed by the Baltimore Sun. He continued:

Today with our nation beset by subversive groups and propaganda which seeks to destroy our national unity, we can look for inspiration to the lives of Lee and Jackson to remind us to be resolute and determined in preserving our sacred institutions '... remain steadfast in our determination to preserve freedom, not only for ourselves, but for other liberty-loving nations who are striving to preserve their national unity as free nations.

''In these days of uncertainty and turmoil, Americans must emulate Jackson's example and stand like a stone wall against aggression in any form that would seek to destroy the liberty of the world,'' he added.

City crews removed the statue in August 2017 under the direction of the city council:

The Lee/Jackson statue in Baltimore's Wyman Park being removed at 3:45a Listen for my live reports @wbalradio w/ @BryanNehman from N Balt pic.twitter.com/ZpDeDLJuVb

'-- Scott Wykoff (@ScottWykoffWBAL) August 16, 2017

Pelosi's office did not respond to Breitbart News's request for comment on the matter.

This is not the only inquiry Pelosi refused to answer regarding her family's history. The Speaker has also, in recent weeks, criticized President Trump's response to violent riots.

In a June 4 letter to the president, she wrote:

We are concerned about the increased militarization and lack of clarity that may increase chaos. I am writing to request a full list of the agencies involved and clarifications of the roles and responsibilities of the troops and federal law enforcement resources operating in the city. Congress and the American people need to know who is in charge, what is the chain of command, what is the mission, and by what authority is the National Guard from other states operating in the capital.

However, Pelosi's brother, while serving as Baltimore's mayor in the 1960s, specifically requested then-Gov. Spiro Agnew call in the National Guard to quell the unrest during the riots of 1968.

As Baltimore Magazine detailed:

At 10 p.m., city police admitted their inability to contain the chaos, and Governor Spiro Agnew, at the request of Baltimore Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro III, called in the National Guard, simultaneously issuing an 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew for the city.

By late evening on Saturday, April 6, 1968, the Baltimore riots were in full swing. When the sun rose the next day, 5,500 National Guardsmen, 400 state troopers, and 1,200 city cops occupied Baltimore. Three people were dead; 70 injured; more than 100 arrested; and 250 fire alarms had been reported. On the East Side, still-smoldering buildings lined streets and sidewalks that were flecked with shards of broken glass.

Sparked by the April 4 assassination of civil-rights patriarch Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, and fueled by decades of repressed anger and resentment over perceived political, social, and economic injustices, African-American communities erupted in violence in Baltimore and many other U.S. cities'--New York, Boston, Detroit, Cincinnati, and Tallahassee'--with Chicago and Washington, D.C., suffering the most extensive damage.

The Speaker's office did not return Breitbart News's request for comment on her brother's use of the National Guard, either.

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 13:18

Officers of the Hallandale Beach Police Department were so angered by their chief kneeling to show solidarity with protesters that every member of the SWAT team resigned from those duties.

The officers did not resign completely from the police force, and will stay on duty.

Those who resigned specifically cited City of Hallandale Beach Police Chief Sonia Quinones kneeling with protesters against racism, hatred, and intolerance as the reason for their startling act.

"The risk of carrying out our duties in this capacity is no longer acceptable to us and our families. The anguish and stress of knowing that what we may be lawfully called upon to do in today's political climate combined with the team's current situation and several recent local events, leave us in a position that is untenable," the officers said in their resignation letter.

Chief Quinones will meet with the officers who resigned on Monday in order to hear out their grievances.

The city said that they will continue to have SWAT services through mutual aid agreements with other cities.

Police agencies have responded to the outbreak of protests and rioting in different ways. While some have tried to maintain their distance from the goals of the protests, others have openly joined demonstrators.

Here's more about the resignations: Hallandale Beach SWAT Members Resign From Teamwww.youtube.com

Hi Adam.

You mentioned recently the English Football (Sorry Soccer) Teams kneeling and someone mentioned Liverpool FC and thought I would highlight some connections with the kneeling trend and Nike.

Liverpool were due to have their Kit made by Nike next Season (From 1st June) but because the season has been extended Nike made an "Arrangement" with Liverpool to allow Liverpool to carry on wearing their current kit, made by New Balance, until the end of the season.

The next day the photo of all the Liverpool players kneeling on the pitch came out.

Swiftly followed be Chelsea FC (Kit also made by Nike)

Also when the teams started to go back to training a few black players were voicing their concerns over the Corona Virus effecting minority people more than White people. (Not sure if this has a thing in the US also)

Raheem Sterling was one such player.

After the demonstrations / riots started he came out in support of the protests and encouraged people to join them.

One minute he is complaining about lack of protection for black people and then urging mass gatherings the next.

Just thought you would like an example of British people being stupid too.

Thanks to you and John for all you do and keeping us sane.

Nigel

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Sun, 14 Jun 2020 06:40

The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle has made significant strides in planting and growing their own vegetables amid efforts to really put the "autonomous" in "autonomous zone."The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle has made significant strides in planting and growing their own vegetables amid efforts to really put the "autonomous" in "autonomous zone."

The fundamental issue that Seattle's insurgents appear to have with the US is its staunch support and perpetuation of capitalism, which many of them perceive to be synonymous with racism.

Fresh food given out for free at ''mutual aid stations'' inside the Seattle #CapitolHillAutonomousZone. Packaged snacks provided include Kirkland Signature products and more from Costco. pic.twitter.com/la5KLZEF9b

'-- Andy Ng´ (@MrAndyNgo) June 12, 2020Therefore, grocery stores in the US are apparently racist since they operate under the economic system of capitalism. But members of CHAZ still need to eat, and have quickly developed a work-around to the capitalist system they so utterly condemn and wish to squash (no pun intended).

The Twitter account @farmingforrevo1 tweeted a photo of the strong progress CHAZ gardeners have made so far with their literal "grassroots" attempt to provide nourishment to all those within the zone.

We are concerned. We should be able to help. This isn't on it's face a bad idea. Would have cut out the grass, plant the plants, and place the cardboard around to stop weeds and cover with mulch or soil. #chazseattle #CHAZ pic.twitter.com/yiMPy9c14i

'-- FarmingForRevolution (@farmingforrevo1) June 12, 2020What these ambitious gardeners did not consider before falling to their knees and digging in is that putting cardboard under the soil of the plants does not augur well for the longevity and production of what it is they are planting.

But one cannot fault them for the effort.

Another Twitter account that goes by @buckeye36 shared a couple photos of more gardening work from the ambitious gardeners wishing to provide for the zone.

They should have the citizens of Chaz grow them a new field on top of cardboard & topsoil pic.twitter.com/W4AIudV6eb

'-- ð'‰ð'¨ð'žð'¥ ð''ð''ð'ð'°ð'šð'ð'­ð'"'­¸'­¸'­¸ (@buckeye36) June 12, 2020These same gardeners have, again, made the same mistake in putting cardboard under the topsoil instead of removing the grass and planting the crops directly into the earth.

The farm co-op in CHAZ seems to be going about as well as expected. pic.twitter.com/bLmLNm9ouq

'-- Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) June 12, 2020Everyone is familiar with Karl Marx's famous one-liner: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." But it appears that these ambitious gardeners have missed out on the crucial bit about "ability."

And it does not stop there.

These ambitious gardeners in CHAZ have even started to build up what is known as a "potato tower," which is a widely debunked strategy in growing large quantities of potatoes within a small, square-shaped tower.

Holy shit, they're trying to figure out how to grow food in the CHAZ. 🤣🂠pic.twitter.com/Mtf6Uiv7LL

'-- Kaitain 🇺🇸 (@Kaitain_AZ) June 10, 2020But for now, efforts to grow and cultivate their crops have been hampered by the appearance of a homeless man who turned the farming plot into a fighting arena, challenging passersby to mortal combat.

A homeless Chad has taken over the garden in CHAZ and destroyed it. pic.twitter.com/7Cv4LGRhgH

'-- Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) June 13, 2020Only time will tell if the CHAZ will exist long enough to see what is reaped out of what the ambitious gardeners have sown, but it goes without saying that capitalism and its grocery stores exist for very good reasons'--one of which is that we do not have to rely on unskilled anarchists to provide us our sources of sustenance.

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Fri, 12 Jun 2020 08:39

Joe Biden on Thursday compared the death of George Floyd to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, saying Floyd's death had a bigger global "impact" than King's.

At an economic reopening roundtable in Philadelphia, the former vice president spoke of how the advent of smartphones had precipitated global participation in the movement against police brutality and racial injustice.

''Even Dr. King's assassination did not have the worldwide impact that George Floyd's death did,'' Biden said.

''It's just like television changed the Civil Rights movement for the better when they saw Bull Connor and his dogs ripping the clothes off of elderly black women going to church and firehoses ripping the skin off of young kids,'' he continued.

''What happened to George Floyd '-- now you got how many people around the country, millions of cell phones. It's changed the way everybody's looking at this,'' he continued. ''Look at the millions of people marching around the world.''

Biden both met with Floyd's family and sent a video message for his funeral in the days following his death in police custody. He said that African-Americans live with the fear of wondering if they'll be next.

BIDEN CAMP REPORTEDLY INSISTING ECONOMIC ADVISORS NOT PUBLICLY DISCLOSE ROLES, IGNITING CONCERNS ABOUT TV HITS

''People all across this country are enraged and rightly so. Everyday African-Americans go about their lives with constant anxiety and trauma of wondering, 'Will I be next?' Sounds like an exaggeration but it's not,'' Biden said on May 29.

On June 1 Biden met with black community leaders in Wilmington, Del., where he faced criticism for his support of the 1994 crime bill and added pressure to pick a black female running mate.

''Over the eight years you were vice president, there was lots of successes, but the African-American community did not experience the same economic opportunity and upward mobility that they did in the '90s,'' state Senator Darius Brown told the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Rev. Shanika Perry, youth pastor of Bethel AME Church, brought up concerns young people have with Biden's support of the 1994 crime bill.

''It's been difficult to serve as a surrogate to them because they have great issues with the participation in that. And so they want to know how do you plan to undo the impact of the mass incarceration and the things that have resulted from that particular crime bill,'' she told the former vice president.

In his first 100 days as president, Biden promised to set up a ''police oversight board.''

BIDEN SAYS TRUMP WILL ATTEMPT TO 'STEAL' THE ELECTION

In the Obama administration, he said, ''We set up, in the Justice Department, the ability for the Civil Rights Division to go in and look at the practices and policies of police departments. That's why we were able to stop stop-and-frisk.

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''Reestablish that with more teeth in it. Because we also have to fundamentally change the way in which police are trained,'' he continued.

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Fri, 12 Jun 2020 18:48

The Minneapolis City Council on Friday unanimously passed a resolution to replace the police departmentThe council will pursue a community-led public safety system as a replacementCouncil members signing the resolution said reform of the police would not work and a full replacement of the current system was necessary'No amount of reforms will prevent lethal violence and abuse by some members of the Police Department against members of our community,' it said The move comes days after a veto-proof majority of the council voted to disband the police department The decision follows weeks of protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of the city's police The Minneapolis City Council on Friday unanimously passed a resolution to replace the city's police department with a community-led public safety system.

The move comes days after a veto-proof majority of the council voted to disband the police department after the country erupted in protest over the killing of George Floyd, a black man who died when a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

The Minneapolis vote was cast as New York City Council pushed to cut $1billion from the NYPD's budget.

The gigantic cut to the Big Apple police department's $6billion annual budget could see a reduction in the size of the force from 36,000 to 33,000, while removing functions like school safety and homeless outreach from the police.

The Minneapolis Police Department is to be disbanded and replaced with a community-led public safety system, the city council voted Friday. Pictured, member of the MPD stand in a line on May 27 while facing protesters demonstrating against the death of George Floyd The City of Minneapolis announced on Friday that it has voted to begin the process of replacing the police department with a community-led public safety system What will Minneapolis look like without a police department? There is no short-term plan to scrap the Minneapolis police department, the city council says

As of Friday, the council have started a year-long process to find recommendations for what will replace it

The replacement is set to be a community-led public safety system that will redirect funds from the department and channel them into community services aimed at preventing crime

Money could be redirected to mental health services, social services, jobs programs, and arts groups

Jobs such as traffic stops, overdose call-outs and mental health calls may be taken away from officers

One recommendation from activists involves a smaller, more-specialized force of 'public servants' who would deal with solving violent crimes

County sheriffs, whose jurisdiction includes Minneapolis, could be used as a stop-gap police force

In Minneapolis, the council voted for the community-led replacement Friday as members felt that the police department as it stands is past reform.

'The murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, by Minneapolis police officers is a tragedy that shows that no amount of reforms will prevent lethal violence and abuse by some members of the Police Department against members of our community, especially Black people and people of color,' five council members wrote in the resolution.

It added that Floyd's death was one in a 'tragically long list' of people killed by the city's police that had led to 'wave of protests and uprisings across the United States and across the world and has led to thousands of voices asking for change'.

'Today's unanimous City Council resolution advances our shared commitment to transformative change in how Minneapolis approaches public safety so that every member of our community can be truly safe,' said City Council President Lisa Bender.

'As we respond to demands for immediate action to reduce police violence and support community safety, we will invite our community to help shape long-term transformative change, centering the voices of those most impacted by community violence and police violence.'

According to the resolution, the city council will now begin a year-long process of engaging 'with every willing community member in Minneapolis' to come up with a new public safety model.

It added that the process would center on 'the voices of Black people, American Indian people, people of color, immigrants, victims of harm, and other stakeholders who have been historically marginalized or under-served by our present system'.

'Together, we will identify what safety looks like for everyone,' the resolution reads.

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City Council President Lisa Bender, pictured, said Friday that the resolution 'advances our shared commitment to transformative change in how Minneapolis approaches public safety' The Minneapolis City Council on Friday voted for the city's police department, pictured, to be replaced with a community-led public safety systemThe council also commissioned a new work group named the Future of Community Safety Work Group to deliver recommendations by July 24 on how to engage with community stakeholders to transform the public safety system.

It will be made up of staff from the Office of Violence Prevention, the Department of Civil Rights, and the City Coordinator's Office, in coordination with the 911 Working Group, the Division of Race and Equity, Neighborhood and Community Relations and other relevant departments.

'American democracy is an experiment, each generation has an opportunity to move this experiment forward, toward living out the true meaning of its creed,' said City Council Vice President Andrea Jenkins.

'This resolution represents our moment to contribute to the progression of equality and freedom of every resident of the City of Minneapolis.

The city's mayor, Jacob Frey, has stopped short of vying to abolish the police department, although he said this week he supported 'massive structural reform to revise a structurally racist system'.

Friday's resolution said that the council would continue to work will willing partners such as Mayor Frey and Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo as the process of establishing the replacement continues.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, pictured, does not support the disbanding of the police department but has called for a different kind of reform to improve accountabilit New York City Council is pushing to cut the NYPD budget by up to $1billion that could see a reduction in the size of the force from 36,000 to 33,000Elsewhere in New York City, the city council is pushing to cut the force's budget by up to $1billion, according to New York Daily News.

The reduced budget could result in a hiring freeze that will decrease the number in the force by 3,000.

'We believe that we can and should work to get to $1 billion in cuts to New York City's police spending in the Fiscal 2021 budget, an unprecedented reduction that would not only limit the scope of the NYPD, but also show our commitment towards moving away from the failed policing policies of the past,' said Council Speaker Corey Johnson in a joint statement with the chairs of the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus.

The Council's Budget Negotiating Team presented to prospective changes to the council members of Thursday and Friday.

However, Mayor Bill de Blasio has opposed such a large reduction, New York Daily News reports.

A source told the paper that the council was still making a decision over how the money would redistributed as the city faces a massive loss in tax revenue as a result of the coronavirus shutdown.

'We're still negotiating,' they said. 'The key areas obviously would be summer youth employment, education, health care '-- all of the things that created the disparities around COVID-19.'

The budget must be approved by the council and the mayor by June 30.

New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson has supported a $1billion cut to New York City's police spending in the 2021 budget, a move he said would help the city to 'show our commitment towards moving away from the failed policing policies of the past' Protesters demanding change in the wake of the death of George Floyd outside the Minnesota State Capitol Friday where a special session of the legislature was about to beginThe Minneapolis city council's decision came as key Republican lawmakers in the Minnesota state Senate that they'll block most of the ambitious changes Democrats want to make to policing in the state where Floyd died.

Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka and the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, Warren Limmer, laid out their agenda shortly before the Legislature convened for a special session.

They said there's only a limited amount of time to act because they intend to adjourn next Friday no matter what.

That would effectively force the state House to adjourn too, but Gazelka said lawmakers would continue to work on bigger changes.

'Minnesota has the opportunity to lead the way for the whole nation for reconciliation of the races and some of the problems we're addressing,' Gazelka said. 'Let's begin here.'

Minnesota is one of several states where Democratic lawmakers and governors are hoping to harness the anger over Floyd´s death to remake law enforcement, including by adding new restrictions on the use of force.

The movement to 'defund the police,' as some advocates have termed it, predates the current protests.

State legislatures have been slow to tackle those issues, however, since they were thrust into the spotlight by a wave of police killings of young black men in 2014, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Yet the movement has won new support since a video of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressing his knee to the neck of Floyd horrified viewers around the world.

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Sun, 14 Jun 2020 06:33

On Thursday, June 4, 2020, a 22-year-old activist named Kennedy Mitchum reached out to the publishers of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to express her frustration with their definition of the word "racist:"

A belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.

Mitchum felt this was inadequate to fully cover the scope of systemic issues and unconscious biases that affect race relations in America. Growing up in Florissant, Missouri '-- just a few miles away from Ferguson '-- she'd grown tired of trying to explain to people that racism can come in different forms than cross burning in white hoods. It's not always a conscious, intentional, or deliberate attitude of hateful violence; it's often something more insidious. As she explained to CNN, "That definition is not representative of what is actually happening in the world. The way that racism occurs in real life is not just prejudice it's the systemic racism that is happening for a lot of black Americans."

Mitchum didn't expect to hear anything back from Merriam-Webster. But to her surprise, they responded the very next day '-- and after a brief back-and-forth, they were sufficiently convinced of Mitchum's point, and agreed to update the entry. "This revision would not have been made without your persistence in contacting us about this problem," wrote Editor Alex Chambers in an email. "We sincerely thank you for repeatedly writing in and apologize for the harm and offense we have caused in failing to address this issue sooner."

The official Merriam-Webster definition of "racism" now reads as follows (with emphasis added):

a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race(a). doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles(b). a political or social system founded on racismracial prejudice or discriminationIf you're a linguistic prescriptionist '-- that is to say, you revere the dictionary as some objective authority that speaks from on high like the voice of a syntactical God handing down the Ten Commandments of words '-- then this is probably an insult to your entire perception of reality.

If you '-- like Noah Webster himself, and anyone else who isn't a disciplinarian dictator '-- are a linguistic descriptivist, then you recognize that languages are constantly evolving, and the only thing that dictates the meaning of a word is how actual people actually use it.

While I'd argue that racism was never as simple as some conscious, calculated hatred of skin color, it's still important that we're finally starting to recognize all the ugly complications of the issue that have allowed it to fester all these years.

A Missouri woman asked Merriam-Webster to update its definition of racism and now officials will make the change [David Williams / CNN]

Image: Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

Apartment complex employee suspended for barring black residents from swimming poolpic.twitter.com/JuwOpJZCLW '-- E ðŸ...‹ (@royaal_e) June 9, 2020 A black woman posted a video on Twitter showing her interaction with an apartment complex employee in Knoxville, Tennessee who would not allow her to enter the community swimming pool, even though the employee was allowing white people to enter without challenging them. The Root reports that ['...]

READ THE RESTWhite lawyer who spat on black high schooler charged with hate crimeStephanie Rapkin, the Wisconsin attorney who was recorded spitting on a 17-year-old at an anti-racism rally in Milwaukee was charged with a hate crime, reports AP. From AP: According to the criminal complaint, Rapkin told an investigating officer she was a cancer survivor and felt threatened because she was surrounded by protesters who were not ['...]

READ THE RESTCop pulls over, warns black man for driving 65 mph in a 70 mph zoneThis video, posted Feb 18, 2020, depicts a black motorist, Ace Perry, being pulled over by a white police officer. The officer says he was suspicious because Perry was traveling 65 mph in a 70 mph zone. The officer, who identifies himself as deputy Snow, issues Perry with a warning but refuses to tell him ['...]

READ THE RESTLearn how to make the perfect drink every time with this mixology trainingIt never hurts to know your way around a bar. But unlike a TV bar like Cheers, a gregarious disposition and knowing everybody's name does not a bartender make. There's actually a lot more that goes into slinging drinks like Tom Cruise than a quick pour or an umbrella on top. The average cocktail requires ['...]

READ THE RESTThese desktops, laptops, and tablets '-- from Microsoft, Lenovo, and HP '-- are all on saleIf you need a new laptop or tablet, you're in luck. Every once in awhile, we like to compile all the best deals we're seeing in one place, so you can upgrade your tech while still saving a boatload of money. Whether you're a Microsoft fan, a Lenovo believer, an HP devotee, or completely brand ['...]

READ THE RESTWin a Nintendo Switch, Animal Crossing New Horizons and more '-- all for FREEIn a time of high anxiety, there are few activities quite as calming as looking for shells, shaking trees and maybe catching a fish or two. Nintendo's Animal Crossing might just be one of the most soothing video games ever created '-- and in an age of constantly escalating fear levels, we're all for anything ['...]

READ THE REST

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Sun, 14 Jun 2020 06:47

(Natural News) God bless the truckers! News is breaking today that nearly 4 out of 5 truckers across America will refuse to make deliveries to cities where Democrats have de-funded or abolished the police.

Truckers are the lifelines to cities, bringing food, fuel, medicine and other essential items into cities (which are artificial constructs that depend on imports just to survive). Sadly, truckers get little credit for their crucial role in keeping society running, and truckers put their lives at risk when they roll into Democrat-run cities that are collapsing into Black Lives Matter chaos and terrorism. (BLM is now understood to mean Burn, Loot and Murder.)

The mad violence, looting and ''reparations'' demands of lunatic Left-wing terrorist groups means that trucks full of supplies are among the high-risk targets. Truck drivers aren't fools, and they are increasingly deciding to avoid carrying loads into cities where anarchy-oriented Leftists / Democrats are de-funding or abolishing police.

Just yesterday, the city council of Minneapolis voted to completely disband the police department. Once implemented, this will plunge Minneapolis into a third world scenario of lawlessness and total chaos, perhaps making Ilhan Omar feel right at home as she successfully brings the lawlessness of her home country to America. (Fact: Minneapolis, with an enormous number of immigrants from Somalia, is now the No. 1 radical Islamic terrorism recruitment city in America.)

77% of truckers say they will refuse to deliver to cities where police are de-funded''Truck driving is historically ranked as one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. In 2018, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistic reported truck driving as the most deadly job in the country,'' writes CDLlife.com, a site dedicated to commercial trucking.

''Truck drivers have spent the last year on the front line of a global pandemic and protests. Now many are fearful of what might happen if police departs disband or are defunded.''

CDL Life, which has a mobile app, ran a poll that asked commercial truck drivers if they would deliver loads to cities where police departments have been de-funded or abolished. So far, 77% of respondents said they would refuse to deliver loads to such cities.

As CDLlife.com explains, some of the responses from truckers include:

'' I will not deliver to an area with a disbanded police department. My life matter and I do this for my family. We are already at the mercy of these towns and cities with laws and hate against us for parking, getting a meal or even using a restroom.

'' For my own safety and security of my customers' loads, I have already informed my dispatcher that I will refuse all loads to cities that have defunded their police departments.

'' '...if something was to happen and you have to take matters into your own hands, and then you risk being prosecuted for protecting yourself.

As I wrote in January of this year in an important story that warned about a ''super supply chain crisis'' hitting America's cities:

Radical left-wing domestic terrorism groups such as Antifa routinely stage physical assaults on Trump supporters across America, using deadly weapons and mob violence to commit acts of intimidation against their political opponents. The idea that these radical left-wing groups might quickly escalate their tactics into city-wide chaos, murder and mayhem is no stretch of the imagination. This seems to be their plan.

Yes, I wrote that in January. So don't believe those who say, ''Nobody saw this coming.'' We saw this coming!

Without truck loads full of goods, every city collapses into total chaos within 96 hoursBy de-funding or abolishing police, radical left-wing Democrats (''DEMONcrats'') are deliberately pushing their own cities toward collapse and chaos so they can then blame Trump for all the problems they caused themselves.

Every city in America collapses into chaos inside of 96 hours if the trucks stop rolling. Grocery stores, for example, only stock enough food for about 2-3 days of normal grocery shopping. Once the deliveries cease, the sudden increase in purchasing from the locals will wipe out grocery store shelves in less than 24 hours.

If you thought the George Floyd riots were bad, that was just a tiny taste of what you'll see once deliveries of food, fuel, medicine and consumer goods are halted.

It also begs the question: Who will be stupid enough to drive trucks full of goods into left-wing cities that have collapsed into chaos and ''warlord'' autonomous zones where police are banned?

Nobody, of course.

Perhaps the city council members who voted to abolish the police can try to find an available rig and deliver a few truckloads of products themselves, but it won't be enough. Cities need a steady supply of large volumes of trucks to restock the shelves at grocery stores and big box stores like Home Depot and Lowe's. Imagine the total panic when cities like Los Angeles run out of toilet paper and frozen burritos.

And with Walmart now donating $100 million to left-wing terrorism-linked groups, it seems that even corporate America is so stupid that they will empower the very terrorists who are going to destroy the cities and gut their own retail stores (which will be mercilessly looted).

Behold your new liberal ''utopia'' depicted in this video, as looters ransack the local Target store. This is what's coming to every city in America that's run by terror-supporting democrats:

Here's another scene of what you can look forward to if you live in a city run by Democrats, a political party that now overtly supports left-wing terrorists, anarchy and lawlessness:

And here's a scene from the Oakland riots from a few years ago, when looters ransacked a truck and set fire to buses. This is just a small taste of what's to come across America's democrat-run cities:

This underscores the critical urgency of getting out of the cities while you still canBy destroying the rule of law, Democrats are making their cities unsafe for the execution of basic functions (such as commercial deliveries) upon which the citizens rely for basic survival. A city without police protection, run by left-wing warlords and Black Lives Matter terrorist gangs, is a city that cannot function. Yet this is exactly what Democrats are doing quite deliberately, including the Mayor of Seattle and the Governor of Washington, both of whom are actively supporting rogue left-wing terrorist cells that have already seized six city blocks of downtown Seattle and declared themselves to be a new sovereign nation.

The critical takeaway from this is that every person living in a U.S. city needs to double down on their efforts to bug out from those cities as quickly as possible. This is not a temporary weekend getaway; it needs to be a permanent relocation out of the cities and into a low-density rural area. The cities are rapidly collapsing into a level of lawnessless that will soon lead to a collapse of food supplies. And once that happens, everything descends into chaos and gang warfare. The police will be unable to protect you. Heck, they can't protect you now.

Democrat city ''leaders,'' if you can even call them that, have already proven that they will side with left-wing terrorists rather than protect their own citizens. Even though Americans who live in cities are paying sky-high property taxes that are supposed to provide services such as a 911 police response, the police are now being de-funded and abolished. Some sections of the cities '-- such as in Seattle '-- are being completely surrendered to terrorist groups like Black Lives Matter, which openly advocates the killing of police and executions of white people.

Thus, even if you are paying the city property taxes, you aren't getting city services. Instead, your cities are being handed over to terrorist cells with names like Black Lives Matter and Antifa, both of which are radical extremist terrorist organizations.

Only rural America will fight back (and shoot back) against left-wing terrorist groupsSince you can't rely on clueless Democrats to assert the rule of law, your only play at this point is to get out of the cities and create physical distance between yourself and the hoards of starving looters who will soon be attempting to scour the countryside, looking for food and shelter.

Once the Black Lives Matter terrorists exit the cities and leave the protections of the corrupt Democrat mayors, they will enter rural counties where they will be met with an overwhelming kinetic response from armed rural citizens and sheriff's departments. The Black Lives Matter terrorist groups can't survive in rural America, because rural Americans will shoot back and hold their ground, unlike left-wing city dwellers who have been disarmed and transformed into weak-willed ''white guilt'' jellyfish who bow down and lick the boots of black extremist terrorist groups like BLM.

If you wish to survive the collapse of the cities '-- something I've been warning about for many years '-- your window of opportunity to get out is rapidly collapsing.

In 2017, we published, ''ANALYSIS: The big cities most likely to collapse into violence and social unrest.''

In 2015, we published, ''America's cities will collapse into utter chaos the day the EBT cards stop working.''

Early this year, I wrote about the ''super supply chain crisis,'' talking about how, ''America's cities may collapse into war zones.'' From that story, published in January, before the pandemic was even news:

James Lab issued a Dec. 17th press release in which he warned of ''nationwide riots that will impede truckers' ability to make deliveries of products for Americans' consumption.'' Those supplies include food, fuel, medicine, ammunition and other supplies on which Americans depend each day.

Radical left-wing domestic terrorism groups such as Antifa routinely stage physical assaults on Trump supporters across America, using deadly weapons and mob violence to commit acts of intimidation against their political opponents. The idea that these radical left-wing groups might quickly escalate their tactics into city-wide chaos, murder and mayhem is no stretch of the imagination. This seems to be their plan.

In other words, yes, we saw all this coming. We do you think I live way out in the country, far from any city, surrounded by rugged rural country? It's because my entire ranch is basically one giant rifle range, and I know the ranges and the ballistics holds for every landmark on the ranch. The zombies won't get far in rural Texas. You can bank on that.

You should really watch the whole series of ''The Joy of Shooting'' that I filmed in central Texas with some of my military buddies. Over several episodes, they teach you the basics of shooting and self-defense. Check it out:

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Skip to main content U.S. Code Notes For the purposes of this chapter'-- (1) The term ''

Indian Wars'' means the campaigns, engagements, and expeditions of the United States military forces against Indian tribes or nations, service in which has been recognized heretofore as pensionable service.

(2) The term ''World War I'' includes, in the case of any veteran, any period of service performed by such veteran after November 11, 1918 , and before July 2, 1921 , if such veteran served in the active military, naval, or air service after April 5, 1917 , and before November 12, 1918 .

(4) The term ''

period of war'' means the Mexican border period, World War I, World War II, the Korean conflict, the Vietnam era, the Persian Gulf War, and the period beginning on the date of any future declaration of war by the

Congress

and ending on the date prescribed by Presidential proclamation or concurrent resolution of the

Congress

.

(

Pub. L. 85''857,

Sept. 2, 1958

,

72 Stat. 1134, §'¯501;

Pub. L. 94''169, title I, §'¯106(1),

Dec. 23, 1975

,

89 Stat. 1017;

Pub. L. 95''588, title I, §'¯101,

Nov. 4, 1978

,

92 Stat. 2497;

Pub. L. 102''25, title III, §'¯333(a),

Apr. 6, 1991

,

105 Stat. 88; renumbered §'¯1501,

Pub. L. 102''83, §'¯5(a),

Aug. 6, 1991

,

105 Stat. 406.)

Prior ProvisionsPrior sections 1500 and 1501 were renumbered sections 3100 and 3101 of this title, respectively.

Another prior section 1501, Pub. L. 85''857, Sept. 2, 1958 , 72 Stat. 1171; Pub. L. 93''508, title I, §'¯101(1), Dec. 3, 1974 , 88 Stat. 1578, defined ''World War II'' and ''vocational rehabilitation'' for purposes of chapter 31 of this title, prior to the general revision of chapter 31 of this title by Pub. L. 96''466. Section 802(a)(3) of Pub. L. 96''466, set out as an Effective Date note under section 3100 of this title, provided that this prior section 1501 continue in effect until Mar. 31, 1981 .

Secretary of Veterans Affairs Notice of Dishonest, Predatory, or Otherwise Unlawful Practices Targeting Individuals Who Are Eligible for Increased Pension on Basis of Need for Regular Aid and AttendancePub. L. 115''131, §'¯2(a), Mar. 9, 2018 , 132 Stat. 334, provided that:

''The Secretary of

Veterans Affairs

shall include on the internet website of the Department of

Veterans Affairs

a warning to veterans relating to dishonest, predatory, or otherwise unlawful practices targeting individuals who are eligible for increased pension under

chapter 15 of title 38, United States Code, on the basis of need for regular aid and attendance.''

Pension Program for Nonservice-Connected Disability or Death; Report by AdministratorPub. L. 94''432, title IV, §'¯404, Sept. 30, 1976 , 90 Stat. 1372, provided that, due to certain insufficiencies in pension program for nonservice-connected disability or death authorized by this chapter, and lack of sufficient long-range information as to actual and anticipated financial characteristics of potential pensioners and their families upon which to estimate costs of existing alternative pension programs, it was necessary for Administrator of Veterans' Affairs to study existing and alternative nonservice-connected pension programs and to submit a report to Congress and the President not later than Oct. 1, 1977 , on alternative courses of legislative and administrative action and long-range cost estimates therefor.

Study of Needs and Problems of Veterans and Their Widows Seventy-Two Years of Age or Older; Report by AdministratorPub. L. 93''527, §'¯8, Dec. 21, 1974 , 88 Stat. 1705, directed Administrator of Veterans' Affairs to study needs and problems of veterans and their widows seventy-two years of age or older and required him to report to Congress and President not later than one hundred and eighty days after convening of Ninety-fourth Congress results of study together with any recommendations for legislative or administrative action.

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A deeper look at the policies behind the death of George FloydPictured: Derek Chauvin (left) and George FloydThe world has united in protest after a graphic video emerged showing a Black man dying under the restraint of a White police officer. The victim, George Floyd, was in clear distress. He was pinned to the ground by three officers, with one officer '-- Derek Chauvin '-- placing a knee on his neck. For over five minutes, he tells the officers that he is unable to breathe. George Floyd died as horrified bystanders told the officers they were killing him.

The video is unquestionably horrific.

But in our rush to condemn an aggressive use of force and pursue justice for George Floyd, we have ignored crucial information which is necessary in judging the conduct of the officers. While nothing can absolve George Floyd's death, these facts do cast doubt on the appropriateness of a murder charge for Chauvin, and paint a more nuanced picture of the events leading up to the tragic encounter.

There are six crucial pieces of information '-- six facts '-- that have been largely omitted from discussion on the Chauvin's conduct. Taken together, they likely exonerate the officer of a murder charge. Rather than indicating illegal and excessive force, they instead show an officer who rigidly followed the procedures deemed appropriate by the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD). The evidence points to the MPD and the local political establishment, rather than the individual officer, as ultimately responsible for George Floyd's death.

These six facts are as follows:

George Floyd was experiencing cardiopulmonary and psychological distress minutes before he was placed on the ground, let alone had a knee to his neck.The Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) allows the use of neck restraint on suspects who actively resist arrest, and George Floyd actively resisted arrest on two occasions, including immediately prior to neck restraint being used.The officers were recorded on their body cams assessing George Floyd as suffering from ''excited delirium syndrome'' (ExDS), a condition which the MPD considers an extreme threat to both the officers and the suspect. A white paper used by the MPD acknowledges that ExDS suspects may die irrespective of force involved. The officers' response to this situation was in line with MPD guidelines for ExDS.Restraining the suspect on his or her abdomen (prone restraint) is a common tactic in ExDS situations, and the white paper used by the MPD instructs the officers to control the suspect until paramedics arrive.Floyd's autopsy revealed a potentially lethal concoction of drugs '-- not just a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl, but also methamphetamine. Together with his history of drug abuse and two serious heart conditions, Floyd's condition was exceptionally and unusually fragile.Chauvin's neck restraint is unlikely to have exerted a dangerous amount of force to Floyd's neck. Floyd is shown on video able to lift his head and neck, and a robust study on double-knee restraints showed a median force exertion of approximately approximately 105lbs.Let's be clear: the actions of Chauvin and the other officers were absolutely wrong. But they were also in line with MPD rules and procedures for the condition which they determined was George Floyd was suffering from. An act that would normally be considered a clear and heinous abuse of force, such as a knee-to-neck restraint on a suspect suffering from pulmonary distress, can be legitimatized if there are overriding concerns not known to bystanders but known to the officers. In the case of George Floyd, the overriding concern was that he was suffering from ExDS, given a number of relevant facts known to the officers. This was not known to the bystanders, who only saw a man with pulmonary distress pinned down with a knee on his neck. While the officers may still be found guilty of manslaughter, the probability of a guilty verdict for the murder charge is low, and the public should be aware of this well in advance of the verdict.

While we should pursue justice for George Floyd, we should be absolutely sure that we are pursuing justice against his real killers. A careful examination of the evidence points to the procedures and rules of the MPD, rather than the police officers following these procedures and rules, as the real killers of George Floyd. If anyone murdered George Floyd, it was the MPD and the local political establishment. This is why Attorney General Keith Ellison has expressed how difficult a conviction will be.

''Trying this case will not be an easy thing. Winning a conviction will be hard,'' Ellison said.

There is still much to the case that remains unknown. As new information emerges, we should adjust our view accordingly. But a close inspection of all current information does not point to a murder charge being appropriate.

From the original government complaint, we know that he was falling to the ground and claiming he couldn't breathe while still standing up.

Mr. Floyd stiffened up, fell to the ground, and told the officers he was claustrophobic ['...] Mr. Floyd did not voluntarily get in the car and struggled with the officers by intentionally falling down, saying he was not going in the car, and refusing to stand still ['...] While standing outside the car, Mr. Floyd began saying and repeating that he could not breathe.

From the 911 transcript, we know that George Floyd was acting ''drunk'' and ''not in control of himself'' before the police were called. The 911 caller is concerned that such an ''awfully drunk'' man would attempt to operate a vehicle. This is an important departure from the earlier media reports, which indicated the officers were only called over a counterfeit bill.

''Um someone comes our store and give us fake bills and we realize it before he left the store, and we ran back outside, they was sitting on their car ['...], and he's sitting on his car cause he is awfully drunk and he's not in control of himself'' ['...] He is not acting right ['...] and [he's] not acting right so and [he] started to go, drive the car.''

This information on its own is of no significance. In fact, aggressively restraining someone who is experiencing distress only makes that restraint all the more heinous. But as will be seen later, when this information is seen in light of George Floyd's behavior, it led the officers to suspect he was suffering from ExDS '-- a far more dangerous scenario than simple distress.

The Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) recognizes two types of resistance to arrest. There is active resistance, defined as follows:

a response to police efforts to bring a person into custody or control for detainment or arrest. A subject engages in active resistance when engaging in physical actions (or verbal behavior reflecting an intention) to make it more difficult for officers to achieve actual physical control.

And passive resistance, defined as follows:

a response to police efforts to bring a person into custody or control for detainment or arrest. This is behavior initiated by a subject, when the subject does not comply with verbal or physical control efforts, yet the subject does not attempt to defeat an officer's control efforts.

Passive resistance is when a suspect is non-compliant in an arrest, but will not act to stop an officer from enacting an arrest. Imagine a child in a supermarket who has a meltdown and drops to the floor '-- this is passive resistance, as guardian can easily pick up the child. Now imagine a child who not only drops to the floor but pulls against their guardian. This is active resistance.

The MPD allows the use of force in action resistance. Relevantly, the MPD allows neck restraint. It is defined as:

Non-deadly force option. Defined as compressing one or both sides of a person's neck with an arm or leg, without applying direct pressure to the trachea or airway (front of the neck). Only sworn employees who have received training from the MPD Training Unit are authorized to use neck restraints.

There are two types of neck restraint. What we are interested is in conscious neck restraint, defined as:

The subject is placed in a neck restraint with intent to control, and not to render the subject unconscious, by only applying light to moderate pressure.

The Conscious Neck Restraint may be used against a subject who is actively resisting.

We know from the original government complaint that Floyd was actively resisting, because they admit as much:

Mr. Floyd actively resisted being handcuffed.

We also know from the original complaint that he resisted again:

The officers made several attempts to get Mr. Floyd in the backseat of squad 320 from the driver's side. Mr. Floyd did not voluntarily get in the car and struggled with the officers by intentionally falling down, saying he was not going in the car, and refusing to stand still.

While standing outside the car, Mr. Floyd began saying and repeating that he could not breathe. The defendant went to the passenger side and tried to get Mr. Floyd into the car from that side and Lane and Kueng assisted.

The defendant pulled Mr. Floyd out of the passenger side of the squad car at 8:19:38 p.m. and Mr. Floyd went to the ground face down and still handcuffed

The three officers were unable to keep him in the police car. The little video evidence we have indicates that there was a struggle. ''The defendant pulled Mr. Floyd out of the passenger side of the squad car'' likely because they were unable to close the squad car door due to his resistance. A longer video was posted by the popular activist Shaun King which indicates a struggle. Shaun King believes this video shows the officers beating Floyd, however the government (who has access to the body cams) did not write this in their complaint (which they would, as it would help their case).

There appears to be two cases of active resistance, including immediately prior to prone restraint. As such, neck restraint was permissible in order to control George Floyd. Remember that the MPD guideline is to use light to moderate force. An officer placing a knee on a suspect's neck does not mean he is exerting full force, and there is evidence that light to moderate pressure was used on Floyd. Given that Floyd was saying he couldn't breathe while resisting being placed in the police car, the officers could not reasonably believe that light to moderate pressure would cause his proclaimed symptoms.

For reasons not yet known, Minneapolis is refusing to release the officers' body cams of this moment. This information is important in order to determine how Floyd was acting the exact moment the officers pulled him from the police car. It is unconscionable that this information has not been released to the public. We must assume, given all relevant information already known, that their reason for pulling him out of the car was his continued resistance as noted in the government complaint.

(Note: the original page for the MPD detailing use of force has been wiped. Here is an archive hosted by '-- for some reason '-- the San Francisco police department. And here is an archive of the archive, just in case.)

In 2018, the MPD published a report on the use of ketamine in excited delirium. Attached to this report is an authoritative document on excited delirium entitled ''White Paper Report on Excited Delirium''. A white paper is an authoritative report. The MPD attached this white paper because it was considered by the MPD the most authoritative document on excited delirium syndrome (ExDS).

The report specifies the nature of ExDS, the symptoms of ExDS, as well as what police officers should consider when dealing with those they suspect of suffering from ExDS. The report is long. First, let's backtrack and establish that the officers did in fact suspect excited delirium. WaPo hosts the original government complaint:

Officer Lane said, ''I am worried about excited delirium or whatever.'' The defendant said, ''That's why we have him on his stomach.''

It must be understood that the public does not yet have enough information to conclude whether the police were accurate in their assessment of ExDS. We have some information indicating that the determination is correct, but absent the full body cam recording, we are unable to make a complete judgment on this point. This is discouraging, because the entire case rests on this point. We know that two officers believed he was experiencing ExDS, and that the other two officers did not comment to the contrary. We also know that George Floyd had some symptoms of ExDS, but we do not know if he had all symptoms of ExDS, or if he had any symptoms indicating the contrary. Below are the symptoms, affixed with whether we know he experienced the symptom or not:

Sweating [Y]Police Noncompliance [Y]Lack of Tiring [Y]Unusual Strength [?]Pain Tolerance [?]Tachypnea [?]Tactile Hyperthermia [?]Bizarre behavior generating calls to police [Y]Suspected or known psychostimulant drug or alcohol intoxication [Y]Erratic or violent behavior [?]Ongoing struggle despite futility [Y]Yelling/shouting/guttural sounds [?]Agitation [Y]Inappropriately Clothed [N]Mirror/Glass Attraction [?]Suspected or known psychiatric illness [N]Failure to recognize or respond to police presence at the scene [likely N]Some of these symptoms can only be determined from body cameras. Unfortunately, other symptoms can only be determined by the officers' account. It is not possible to know whether he was experiencing tactile hyperthermia except by asking the officers who had touched his skin. We will have to work with these limitations in our analysis of the event. However, that both the brand new officer (Lane) and the veteran officer (Chauvin) suspected ExDS is not poor evidence. And that no officer objected to this determination must also be considered.

There are also symptoms that we know in hindsight, but which the officers did not know. For instance, George Floyd had a history of stimulant abuse, as detailed in his arrest log, with four previous arrests involving drugs.

The White Paper goes on to describe the dangers of excited delirium, both to the officer and the suspect. This information is important, and explains why the officers responded as they did:

''Given the irrational and potentially violent, dangerous, and lethal behavior of an ExDS subject, any LEO interaction with a person in this situation risks significant injury or death to either the LEO or the ExDS subject who has a potentially lethal medical syndrome. This already challenging situation has the potential for intense public scrutiny coupled with the expectation of a perfect outcome. Anything less creates a situation of potential public outrage. Unfortunately, this dangerous medical situation makes perfect outcomes difficult in many circumstances.''

''LEOs must also be aware that remorse, normal fear and understanding of surroundings, and rational thoughts for safety are absent in such subjects.''''ExDS subjects are known to be irrational, often violent and relatively impervious to pain. Unfortunately, almost everything taught to LEOs about control of subjects relies on a suspect to either be rational, appropriate, or to comply with painful stimuli. Tools and tactics available to LEOs (such as pepper spray, impact batons, joint lock maneuvers, punches and kicks, and ECD's, especially when used for pain compliance) that are traditionally effective in controlling resisting subjects, are likely to be less effective on ExDS subjects.''''The goals of LEOs in these situations should be to 1) recognize possible ExDS, contain the subject, and call for EMS; 2) take the subject into custody quickly, safely, and efficiently if necessary; and 3) then immediately turn the care of the subject over to EMS personnel when they arrive for treatment and transport to definitive medical care.''''In those cases where a death occurs while in custody, there is the additional difficulty of separating any potential contribution of control measures from the underlying pathology. For example, was death due to the police control tool, or to positional asphyxia, or from ExDS, or from interplay of all these factors? Even in the situation where all caregivers agree that a patient is in an active delirious state, there is no proof of the most safe and effective control measure or therapy for what is most likely an extremely agitated patient.''''There are well-documented cases of ExDS deaths with minimal restraint such as handcuffs without ECD use. This underscores that this is a potentially fatal syndrome in and of itself, sometimes reversible when expert medical treatment is immediately available''.Each of these bullet points is of the utmost importance in understanding Chauvin's state of mind. These points must be re-read and thoroughly understood before pronouncing judgment on an officer who was simply following these statements during the arrest. If you are skimming this article I advise you to spend time on these bullet points. Remember: the officer's job is to follow protocol, not to re-write protocol during an arrest. It is the politician's job to ensure that the protocols are correct, no the police officer's.

There has been some controversy in the media regarding the legitimacy of ExDS as a true medical condition. It should be mentioned that ExDS is recognized by the American College of Emergency Physicians as a true medical emergency, and ACEP played a role in drafting the White Paper for ExDS. But regardless of its legitimacy, ExDS is recognized by the Minneapolis Police Department. It bears repeating that Officer Chauvin is not tasked with determining the legitimacy of the syndromes which his department and local government already recognizes. Any question of the legitimacy of ExDS must be lodged against the government of Minneapolis '-- Mayor Frey '-- and the MPD, not Officer Chauvin.

As noted earlier, the government complaint against Chauvin states that the officers suspected excited delirium:

Lane asked, ''should we roll him on his side?'' and the defendant said, ''No, staying put where we got him.'' Officer Lane said, ''I am worried about excited delirium or whatever.'' The defendant said, ''That's why we have him on his stomach.''

This excerpt is of twofold importance. First, it demonstrates that two officers suspected excited delirium. Second, it demonstrates that Chauvin was restraining Floyd in this position because he suspected excited delirium (''that's why we have him on his stomach''). Restraining an individual on his stomach is common in ExDS encounters. This is called ''prone restraint''. In fact, it is often the recommended form of restraint until the officers can safely put the suspect in a different position:

As mentioned before, people experiencing EXD are highly agitated, violent, and show signs of unexpected strength so it is not surprising that most require physical restraint. The prone maximal restraint position (PMRP, also known as ''hobble'' or ''hogtie''), where the person's ankles and wrists are bound together behind their back, has been used extensively by field personnel. In far fewer cases, persons have been tied to a hospital gurney or manually held prone with knee pressure on the back or neck.

Two years ago, the 8th circuit ruled on a case involving both prone restraint and ExDS, writing that officers are entitled to qualified immunity in cases involving prone restraint, specifically denying 4th amendment privilege against excessive force:

Officers determined that keeping Layton in a prone position was best given his continued resistance, and Baker pressed Layton's shoulders to the ground while Groby held Layton's thighs ['...] this court has not deemed prone restraint unconstitutional in and of itself the few times we have addressed the issue ['...] Under these cases, there is no clearly established right against the use of prone restraints for a suspect that has been resisting.

Now, qualified immunity is just that: qualified. The court ruled that prone restraint is not necessarily excessive in suspects who have been resisting arrest, even if that suspect is experiencing ExDS. This does not mean prone restraint is always justified, but that it isn't always unjustified. We still must examine the use of prone restraint on a case-by-case basis.

Informational Asymmetry: what the police and EMTs know, and what the public knowsIt's important to understand that the public '-- including journalists '-- are not well-versed in ExDS, and consequently do not have a good intuition as to what constitutes excessive force. As noted in the white paper, ''there is no proof of the most safe and effective control measure,'' ''any LEO interaction with a person in this situation risks significant injury or death'', ''this already challenging situation has the potential for intense public scrutiny coupled with the expectation of a perfect outcome ['...] Unfortunately, this dangerous medical situation makes perfect outcomes difficult ['...].'' It would helpful here to examine ExDS in depth, and compare it to the George Floyd case.

Willard TruckenmillerWillard Truckenmiler was a sheriff's deputy. While celebrating his birthday, he began to display ''agitated and unusual behavior''. When officers arrived on the scene '-- many of them his colleagues'-- he did not recognize them and assumed a fighting stance. The responding officers suspected ExDS. The officers ''handcuffed him and forced him to into a seated position on the ground'', and EMS personnel gave him ketamine. Moments later he experienced trouble breathing and went into cardiac arrest. He died two days later.

In the case of Truckenmiller, it is unreasonable to assume the police acted on prejudice '-- Truckenmiller was a colleague and police officer. It is unreasonable to assume that his cardiac arrest was due to use of force, because he was not held in prone restraint and was quickly given ketamine by the EMS. Despite all of this, Truckenmiller experienced trouble breathing, had a heart attack, and died. This demonstrates that ExDS is ''potentially fatal syndrome in and of itself'', as the white paper used by the MPD notes. It is also proof that ExDS deaths are not necessarily caused by excessive force or prejudice.

Roy ScottRoy Scott was 65 years old. Police were called to his residence. After coming outside with a pipe in his hand and pulling a knife out of his pocket, police decided to pat him down. The police handcuffed him and began patting him down when he began experiencing extreme emotional distress. The police tried to deescalate verbally, which did not work. They then tried keeping the suspect on his back, which did not work. They momentarily placed him in the prone position, and even engaged in neck restraint for less than a minute. The police are calm the entire time '-- one officer tells the other officer to ''just keep holding him, he's going to keep rolling around, he's going to hurt himself''. The police eventually place him on his side in the recovery position, which is a candidate for the safest restraint position in ExDS encounters. They hold his head with their palms so that he doesn't bang it on the ground.

The Roy Scott video '-- linked above '-- may just be the best case recorded of how police should deal with ExDS. Everything they did was correct. They went above and beyond in deescalating the situation. The officers had compassion for Roy Scott.

But Roy Scott still died. How?

As the Journal of Emergency Medical Services notes,

''The usual response by subjects to restraints is to either accept that fighting is futile or continue to be verbally abusive. The patient with excited delirium, however, continues to fight the restraints until cardiac arrest occurs.''

This is what happened to Roy Scott. It did not matter how the officers restrained him, because he would fight against the restraints past the point of exhaustion and into cardiac arrest.

More Cases of NoteIt takes four officers to restrain this man experiencing ExDS in prone restraint until the EMT arrives (likely with ketamine).In this case from 2011, the officers used a taser and knee-to-back prone-restraint.In this more recent video, it takes six officers, a taser, and multiple batons to restrain the suspect. Even with six officers restraining him, he is still able to get halfway up. At 6:14 in the video, a Black police officer kicks the suspect near the head and then applies force near the suspect's neck '-- this is appropriate use of force, even though it appears unnecessary, because the suspect was an extreme threat. This particular ExDS suspect was able to cause facial injuries to the officers despite being overpowered 6-to-1. As the white paper notes, ExDS suspects often ''show signs of unexpected strength''.A Parallel Case: Donald LewisOut of all the cases of ExDS and prone restraint available, the Donald Lewis case most clearly mirrors the George Floyd case. Donald Lewis was a white man suffering from excited delirium.

The police first decide to use verbal deescalation. This doesn't work, as he runs into traffic. He says he is going to die while being restrained by the police. From 1:50 to 2:40, we see an officer use knee-to-neck restraint. Lewis' condition does not deteriorate from prone restraint, and he continues actively resisting arrest. They then use zip ties and hobble prone restraint. At 3:50 he tries to bite the officers (this is especially dangerous for officers who would prefer not to risk exposure to HIV or hepatitis). At 4:04 he appears to call for his mom. At 5:25 a Black police officer uses knee-to-neck restraint against the white suspect. The Black police officer resumes this position seconds later. The suspect dies in this position.

The parallel to our current case does not end here. An official autopsy declared cause of death ''sudden respiratory arrest following physical struggling restraint due to cocaine-induced excited delirium.'' The legal team hired Dr. Michael Baden, who testified that Lewis died from ''asphyxia caused by neck compression.'' Baden is the same medical examiner who was hired by the George Floyd family, and made a similar finding. Baden is also the same medical examiner who was hired for Eric Garner, and declared death by ''compression of the neck''. Baden is also the same medical examiner who was hired by the Brown family to examine Michael Brown, and Baden found that Brown died while surrendering, an assertion totally disproven by a DoJ investigation spearheaded by AG Eric Holder under Obama. Suffice it to say, Michael Baden has a very specific interest, and a very tenuous track record. The Court will be aware of this when weighing the autopsies.

After recruiting Baden, a suit against the police was filed. As per CSMonitor,

The 11th Circuit rejected the contention that hogtying was unreasonable once Lewis was already handcuffed and his legs shackled. ''Even though most of the officers in this case testified that Lewis was not a danger to them and was merely resisting arrest, he was, as the district court described, 'an agitated and uncooperative man with only a tenuous grasp on reality,' '' the appeals-court panel said. ['...] The panel concluded: ''Because of his refusal to sit upright and his inability to remain calm, Lewis remained a safety risk to himself and to others.''

A case of note in a scientific journalAn article, ''Delayed In-Custody Death involving Excited Delirium'', proves that ExDS deaths can occur without any restraint or even drug stimulant.

This case study presents a 37-year-old male who was experiencing excited delirium (ExD) and died in a county jail 4 days after being taken into custody. The male died in a jail observation cell without having been restrained and was not under the influence of a drug stimulant. The subject had a documented psychiatric history of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and was known to consume marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamines. This case illustrates the pernicious effects of ExD and how its lethality can be delayed when many cases involve drug use and use of force where subjects die shortly thereafter. Implications of ExD for correctional agencies and efforts of responding to it in correctional and law enforcement contexts are discussed.

It may be of interest to see what EMS personnel on the ground think about ExDS. Using archives of comments on the popular forum Reddit, we can get a halfway decent gauge of how professionals dealing with ExDS feel about the condition. One user, more than a year before the George Floyd incident, asked the following: '' What is your excited delirium story? What tactics would you recommend for handling such individuals?'':

The two top responses to this question are illuminating:

EMS personnel answer, ''What is your excited delirium story? What tactics would you recommend for handling such individuals?George Floyd's autopsy sheds light on his state of cardiovascular health. He was found to have arteriosclerotic heart disease and hypertensive heart disease. Additionally, he was found to have the following drugs in his system:

Fentanyl 11 ng/mL 2.Norfentanyl 5.6 ng/mL 3. 4-ANPP 0.65 ng/mL 4.Methamphetamine 19 ng/mLThis level of fentanyl is dangerous. One review of fentanyl overdoses found a median amount of ng/mL in an overdose to be approximately 10 ng/mL:

Despite the ubiquitous presence of multiple drugs in these decedents, the effects of fentanyl were evidently so strong that there were no statistical differences in the fentanyl level (mean and standard deviation) with or without the presence of these co-intoxicants. The range of fentanyl levels was wide, from 0.75 to 113.00 ng/mL, with an average of 9.96 ng/mL.

Compare this information to an article published in Frontiers of Physiology detailing medical findings in ExDS deaths:

Many patients with excited delirium also have significant cardiovascular and psychiatric diseases. Autopsies often reveal severe atherosclerosis, cardiomyopathy and diabetes. Cardiomyopathy results from chronic cocaine and methamphetamine abuse. Atherosclerosis and diabetes can also be the result of smoking, obesity and a lack of overall health care. The combination of the metabolic arrest with severe cardiovascular disease makes a successful resuscitation highly unlikely.

To be clear: this information cannot be considered relevant in judging the officer's actions. It is only relevant in determining Floyd's cause of death, as well as the probability (in hindsight) of George Floyd experiencing ExDS. The actions of the police are never justified in hindsight, but must always be justified given what the officers knew firsthand. With that said, if we are determining the likelihood of Floyd dying from excessive force rather than an especially fragile cardiovascular system, it is minor relevance.

From the footage we have of Floyd's arrest, we see at 2:11 Floyd is able to lift his head and neck despite the placement of Chauvin's knee. This occurs exactly at 2:11 through 2:12, and only for a moment. Yet this act would be impossible were Chauvin exerting a dangerous amount of pressure with his knee.

Remember what we know about ExDS: the suspect struggles with restraint regardless of restraint used. That Chauvin has his knee in a position to exert force if the suspect tries to flee does not mean that he is exerting force the entire time. The knee is there to prevent Floyd from getting up, not from pushing Floyd into the concrete. This is a preventative force position rather than an aggressive force position.

It is, of course, impossible to know just how much pressure Chauvin is exerting in this encounter. He could be exerting only as much force as is required to keep him down. And he could be exerting maximal force. How can we know?

Well, there is one study on the weight of a single-knee and double-knee restraint on the body. On average, single-knee restraint distributes around 70 lbs of force. But Chauvin, for most of the arrest, was engaged in a double-knee restraint position. According to the study, the double-knee position (which Chauvin uses) produces a median force of 48 kg, or 106 lbs. This force would be distributed between the side of his neck and back, unless Chauvin were consciously applying more force in one of these locations. If the force applied were split evenly, that is only 53 lbs of exertion spread across the side of Floyd's neck. This amount of force, while uncomfortable, is not enough to stop a suspect from breathing and not enough to cut off blood flow to the brain.

But let's take a look at that study again. The study concludes that the double-knee weight was exactly 23.3 kg plus 24% of a specific LEO's body weight. Some preliminary information indicates Chauvin is 156 lbs, which is a reasonable estimate, as the footage shows him to be thin and of average height. This means Chauvin was exerting 90 lbs in the double-knee position, for 45 lbs exerted spread across the back and the neck (implying balanced force). 45 lbs is definitively insufficient to restrict breathing or blood-flow in the neck. The other officers are of a similar build.

A Minneapolis-based StudyThis study conducted at the Minneapolis-based University of Minnesota. The officers were recruited from the Minneapolis police department. The study was conducted last year.

There are 800 LEOs in Minneapolis. The study has 41 participants, meaning 5% of the officers in Minneapolis participated in the study. If you are an officer in the MPD and you spoke to 9 other officers about the use of prone restraint, the probability is that one of you would have been a participant. It's probable that Chauvin knew about this study. With four officers involved in Floyd's arrest, there's roughly a 21% chance that one of them was a participant in the very study.

The conclusions of the study are enough to exonerate the officers from a murder charge:

''Our data do not support the hypothesis of restraint asphyxia.''''When a cause of death cannot otherwise be determined, positional asphyxia is often suggested ['...] Proponents of this theory often hypothesize that subjects restrained prone, with applied downward weight force, hobbled, or in maximal restraint (restrained on their stomach with hands and wrists secured to the handcuffs) were unable to breathe because the position caused chest wall and abdominal restriction that prevented adequate expansion of the lungs. Subsequent rigorous scientific studies, however, using sophisticated measurements have debunked the positional or restraint asphyxia hypothesis because the prone position does not produce respiratory compromise.''''To date, none of the published human clinical studies, or epidemiological studies, support the hypothesis that the pronerestraint position causes or contributes to ventilatory compromise''''DiMaio and DiMaio observed that acceptance of the concept of positional asphyxia as the cause of death in restraint associated deaths often involves the suspension of common sense and logical thinking. Further, other researchers have commented that positional asphyxia is an interesting theory unsupported by the experimental data. Nor are significant changes in cardiovascular measures found.''The prosecution is going to have tremendous difficulty proving murder, when Chauvin likely knew of the scientific research indicating that prone restraint is not excessively dangerous to the suspect's cardiovascular health.

The NYT published a ''play by play'' analysis on YouTube, analyzing how George Floyd died. They omit important information in their analysis.

The NYT shows Floyd being cuffed behind his back, but then cut the footage so that you do not see the struggle that occurred while he was being cuffed.The NYT mentions complaints made against the officers. However, the NYT does not mention that only one of these complaints was found to have merit against Chauvin, when he asked a woman who was speeding 10 MPH over the limit to step out of her car. The NYT omits the average number of complaints against officers, which is approximately one every 3 years. The NYT also omits that Chauvin obtained two medals of valor, which was ironically reported by the NYT elsewhere.The NYT says ''we don't know why'' they pulled Floyd out of the car. This is misleading, as we know they were unable to keep him detained in the squad car.The NYT omitted that Floyd was able to lift up his head and neck.The NYT omitted '-- completely '-- that the officers believed he was suffering from ExDS. (This is not a joke. The NYT omitted the linchpin of the case.)The NYT ignores his history of drug use, his two heart conditions, as well as the fentanyl found in his system.

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Sun, 14 Jun 2020 07:29

Skip to contentBikers for Trump plans to topple Raz's regime and reconquer the land for the United StatesA Facebook event, purportedly run by Bikers for Trump, invites motor cycle enthusiasts from around the United States to descend on the Seattle Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and reconquer the territory for the United States, in what may be described as a punitive expedition into the sovereign country.

Bikers for Trump leads a coalition that already has prominent groups from the American West Coast pledging to join together to recapture the autonomous zone, and claims that they had no right to ''illegally'' secede from the United States and form their own six-block nation.

Their punitive expedition is scheduled for July 4, 2020, the United States Independence Day. It is unknown if this date holds significance in CHAZ.

Revolution? The Clueless in Seattle idiots of CHAZ declare their independence of USA & Seattle, then make a list of demands '' from whom? You won't believe how they intend to defend themselves and provide food & water

From their Facebook event:

On July 4th, Independence Day, a coalition of patriot groups and all who want to join are going to retake the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone for America. Antifa members are illegally occupying public property and terrorizing small businesses in the neighborhood. American patriots have agreed to come together again, remove the barricades illegally obstructing traffic, and free the people in the zone.

You do not need a bike to join. Any and all patriots with all vehicles are coming to this event.We are not going to hurt anybody, break the law etc. We are simply going to tear down the illegal barriers on public property, clean up the mess these communist kids made, and return the police station over to Seattle Police Department control.

The event also claims that the Oathkeepers, an American group of former military and law enforcement officials who pledge to uphold their oath to the U.S. Constitution, will be part of their expedition.

Additionally, Super Happy Fun America, an organization famous for hosting Straight Pride Parades, is involved as an attendee.

CHAZ, originally founded as an anarcho-syndicalist commune, appears to have descended into feudalism under its current warlord, Raz Simone,who leads a group of private police in the autonomous zone.

The Seattle Chief of Police also confirmed the existence of reports of a protection racket within CHAZ's borders, indicating that Simeone's private police may be expecting payment for their services.

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 12:59

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Media caption Some of the protesters in central London were seen attacking policePolice were pelted with bottles during confrontations with demonstrators in London, where hundreds gathered despite warnings to avoid protests.

Groups gathered in the centre of the capital, claiming they were protecting statues from anti-racism activists.

Home Secretary Priti Patel described the violence as "thoroughly unacceptable thuggery".

Some anti-racism demonstrations have also taken place across the UK, including in central London.

The Met Police had placed restrictions on several groups intending to protest, including having to finish at 17:00 BST, following violent scenes last weekend.

However, several groups remained on the streets of central London after the cut-off.

As some protestors apparently moved towards Waterloo Station around 18:00 BST, both the underground and mainline station were temporarily closed due to the protests - but later reopened.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan urged demonstrators to "leave now" to prevent further violence and the spread of coronavirus in the city.

Various groups from around the country, including some far-right activists, said they had come to London to protect symbols of British history.

Hundreds of mostly white men gathered around the Cenotaph war memorial in Whitehall and the boarded-up statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square.

There were a number of clashes with police in riot gear as crowds - chanting "England" and raising their arms - surged towards lines of officers.

Some protesters managed to break metal barriers around the Cenotaph on Whitehall while hurling flag poles, a smoke flare and a traffic cone towards police who were striking them back with batons.

Large groups of right-wing protesters then moved to Trafalgar Square, where fireworks were thrown across the crowds.

A statement from the London Ambulance Service said it had treated 15 patients, including two police officers, for injuries at the protests.

"Six of these patients - all members of the public - have now been taken to hospital." The ambulance crews remain at the scene.

Image copyright PA Media Image caption Police are confronted by protestors in Whitehall near Parliament Square Image copyright Reuters Image caption Flares and smoke bombs have been thrown in Trafalgar Square Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Police form a barrier in front of anti-racist protesters near Leicester Square Police attempted to stop protesters getting to Hyde Park where an anti-racist demonstration, which had largely been peaceful, was taking place.

Organisers from the Black Lives Matter movement had urged people not to join any anti-racism rallies planned for the weekend over fears there could be clashes with far-right groups. One demonstration planned for Saturday in London was brought forward by a day.

Image copyright AFP Image caption Protesters take the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement as they march near Marble Arch in Central London Sharing footage of the clashes with police on Twitter, Home Secretary Priti Patel described it as "unacceptable thuggery".

"Any perpetrators of violence or vandalism should expect to face the full force of the law," she wrote.

"Violence towards our police officers will not be tolerated."

The Met Police Federation described it as "unacceptable", tweeting that its officers "do not come to work to face this level of violence and abuse".

At the scene in Parliament SquareBy BBC home affairs correspondent Dominic Casciani

Image copyright EPA Image caption Hundreds of protesters gathered outside Parliament on Saturday From mid-morning hundreds of men - most of whom were already drinking - headed into Parliament Square.

Some were members of football hooligan networks who had put aside their differences for the day. Others were from the far-right.

But despite claims that the day was about defending British heritage, it soon became violent.

Groups looked for opportunities to attack the police. Bottles and cans were thrown at their lines and horses - smoke bombs and fireworks set off. Journalists who came too close were threatened.

One bare-chested man kicked a police officer to the ground and there were repeated attempts by others to storm barriers as the police contained the trouble.

By late afternoon, some had left to find more beer - only to find their way back blocked by riot police.

Others tried to regroup on nearby streets as the police played cat and mouse - using their numbers to repeatedly contain and block attempts to take violence around the city.

Speaking before the clashes, the leader of the far-right group Britain First, Paul Golding - convicted last month of an offence under the Terrorism Act - said they had turned out to "guard our monuments".

The statue of Churchill was boxed up to protect it from potential damage, after protesters daubed "was a racist" on it last weekend.

Hundreds of people also gathered in Glasgow, Bristol and Belfast as part of events organised to "protect" war memorials.

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Activists congregated at the cenotaph in George Square in Glasgow Many anti-racism protests have been held around the country, including in Brighton, Newcastle, Liverpool and Chelmsford.

In Brighton, some anti-racism protesters clashed with right-wing groups gathered at the city's War Memorial.

That came after more than 1,000 protesters had gathered, wearing black clothes and masks, to form a mile-long line along the seafront as they held a silent protest.

In Newcastle, demonstrators supporting the Black Lives Matter movement were heckled by a large counter-protest.

Image copyright PA Media Image caption Protesters take part in a silent vigil on Brighton Pier Image copyright Reuters Image caption Protesters from Black Lives Matter gather in the centre of Newcastle Denise Richards, who is involved in the Black Lives Matter movement in Derbyshire, said her chapter had decided not to protest in London on Saturday.

She told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that peaceful protesters feared they would be caught up in violent clashes with far-right demonstrators and this could "tarnish" the work of Black Lives Matter.

Nick Lowles, chief executive of campaign group Hope Not Hate, said there was a "very serious" threat of trouble from far-right activists and commended Black Lives Matter for standing down their plans to protest in London on Saturday.

"There are some people who are genuinely concerned about the protection of their statues and monuments but many people are coming for a fight and they are talking openly about it on their social media accounts," he told the programme.

A Black Lives Matter demonstration took place in central London on Friday evening with leaders of the march urging those in attendance to keep the demonstration "peaceful" and not to join any anti-racism rallies planned for the weekend.

The Met Police have imposed measures requiring all demonstrations to come to an end at 17:00 BST and giving officers enhanced powers to stop and search individuals, after police learned some people were coming into London to cause harm and were likely to bring weapons with them.

The Section 60 order will remain in place until 02:00 BST on Sunday.

The restrictions come in the wake of violence and serious disorder in Westminster at the end of protests last weekend.

While police said those demonstrations were on the whole peaceful, there were dozens of arrests and 27 police officers were injured.

Demonstrations have been taking place across the world following the death in police custody of African American George Floyd in Minneapolis last month.

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 13:07

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PARIS (Sputnik) - The French police used tear gas to handle unrest in the centre of Paris that erupted amid massive protest against racism and police brutality, a Sputnik correspondent reported from the scene.

The rally started at about 2:30 p. m. local time (12:30 GMT) on the Place de la Republique and protesters were expected to march toward the Palais Garnier but policemen cordoned off the area. According to media reports, some 10,000 people are taking part in the rally.

In about an hour and a half, people wearing black clothes '-- mostly young men '-- formed a group and began throwing glass bottles, cans with paint and other debris at the police blocking the street. Protesters set fire to a pile of garbage on the roadway, and a section of the square is now engulfed in smoke.

'‹After the police used tear gas, the crowd briefly moved away from the cordoned-off area, but as soon as gas dispersed, rioters returned. Some of them are trying to break windows of a nearby mobile operator store.

A wave of protests against racial inequality has swept through the United States and many other countries in the wake of African American man George Floyd's death in police custody the US city of Minneapolis on 25 May. French cities such as Marseille and Lyon, which also have large populations of African descent, are expecting similar marches over the weekend.

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 00:34

Brian Hart @ BrianHartPR

Jan 25 He voted for it before you were born. More recently, when President Obama was running for re-election in 2012, Biden came out publicly in favor of marriage equality and pushed Obama to do the same, which paved the way for the Supreme Court to rule in favor.

View conversation · Joanne Cory @ jcorycma

Jan 26 Abortion existence goes WAAAAAAAY back in history long before the existence of Planned Parenthood and PP existed when abortion was federally illegal. They are a Women's health clinic. If YOU don't want an abortion don't have one! Let other women make their own decision.

View conversation ·

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 13:15

The Trump administration announced Friday that it was finalizing the elimination of an Obama-era regulation prohibiting health care discrimination against certain LGBT individuals.

In 2016, the Obama administration extended protections under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which "prohibits discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability in certain health programs and activities." The updated rule redefined sex discrimination to include gender identity '-- defining that as "one's internal sense of gender, which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female" '-- and pregnancy termination, or abortion.

In a statement on Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services said the Obama administration's change "exceeded the scope of the authority delegated by Congress in Section 1557."

"HHS will enforce Section 1557 by returning to the government's interpretation of sex discrimination according to the plain meaning of the word 'sex' as male or female and as determined by biology," the HHS said.

The move will also save consumers billions of dollars.

From the HHS:

The final rule will also relieve the American people of approximately $2.9 billion in unnecessary regulatory burdens over five years from eliminating the mandate for regulated entities to send patients and customers excessive "notice and taglines" inserts in 15 or more foreign languages in almost every health care mailing, costs that get passed down to patients and consumers.These expensive notices have not generally proven effective at accomplishing their purpose of providing meaningful language access to healthcare.

In response, top Democratic leaders attacked President Donald Trump, noting the finalization of the regulation change came during Pride Month, the month-long celebration of LGBT people.

Joe Biden"On the fourth anniversary of Pulse. In the middle of Pride month. During a global pandemic. Donald Trump's cruelty truly knows no bounds. We have to defeat him this November," Biden said.

Sen. Bernie Sanders"It is outrageous that Trump, in the middle of a pandemic, is working to prevent LGBTQ+ Americans from getting health care they need. Discrimination of any kind has no place in our society. We must defeat Trump, guarantee health care as a right and protect all LGBTQ+ Americans," Sanders said.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren"In the middle of a pandemic, the President wants to strip away health care & risk LGBTQ+ Americans' lives to pander to right-wing ideologues. This is hateful & wrong. Trump must protect LGBTQ+ rights, and if he won't, the Senate must act," Warren said.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi"Our nation is in the midst of a health and economic crisis of staggering proportions. The Administration's shameful rule is an attack on the health care of women, communities of color, seniors, the disabled and the LGBTQ community," Pelosi said.

Sen. Kamala Harris"The callousness of Trump to announce this during LGBTQ+ Pride month as the country mourns the four year anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting. The cruelty is the point and it knows no bounds. We will fight this," Harris said.

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 10:26

Sometimes it seems life can't get any worse in this country. Already in terror of a pandemic, Americans have lately been bombarded with images of grotesque state-sponsored violence, from the murder of George Floyd to countless scenes of police clubbing and brutalizing protesters.

Our president, Donald Trump, is a clown who makes a great reality-show villain but is uniquely toolless as the leader of a superpower nation. Watching him try to think through two society-imperiling crises is like waiting for a gerbil to solve Fermat's theorem. Calls to ''dominate'' marchers and ad-libbed speculations about Floyd's ''great day'' looking down from heaven at Trump's crisis management and new unemployment numbers (''only'' 21 million out of work!) were pure gasoline at a tinderbox moment. The man seems determined to talk us into civil war.

But police violence, and Trump's daily assaults on the presidential competence standard, are only part of the disaster. On the other side of the political aisle, among self-described liberals, we're watching an intellectual revolution. It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It's become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.

The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.

They've conned organization after organization into empowering panels to search out thoughtcrime, and it's established now that anything can be an offense, from a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King's ''Letter from a Birmingham Jail'' out loud to a data scientist fired* from a research firm for '-- get this '-- retweeting an academic study suggesting nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones!

Now, this madness is coming for journalism. Beginning on Friday, June 5th, a series of controversies rocked the media. By my count, at least eight news organizations dealt with internal uprisings (it was likely more). Most involved groups of reporters and staffers demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues who'd made politically ''problematic'' editorial or social media decisions.

The New York Times, the Intercept, Vox, the Philadelphia Inquirier, Variety, and others saw challenges to management.

Probably the most disturbing story involved Intercept writer Lee Fang, one of a fast-shrinking number of young reporters actually skilled in investigative journalism. Fang's work in the area of campaign finance especially has led to concrete impact, including a record fine to a conservative Super PAC: few young reporters have done more to combat corruption.

Yet Fang found himself denounced online as a racist, then hauled before H.R. His crime? During protests, he tweeted this interview with an African-American man named Maximum Fr, who described having two cousins murdered in the East Oakland neighborhood where he grew up. Saying his aunt is still not over those killings, Max asked:

I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?... Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it's going to be national news, but if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of'... It's stuff just like that that I just want in the mix.

Shortly after, a co-worker of Fang's, Akela Lacy, wrote, ''Tired of being made to deal continually with my co-worker @lhfang continuing to push black on black crime narratives after being repeatedly asked not to. This isn't about me and him, it's about institutional racism and using free speech to couch anti-blackness. I am so fucking tired.'' She followed with, ''Stop being racist Lee.''

The tweet received tens of thousands of likes and responses along the lines of, ''Lee Fang has been like this for years, but the current moment only makes his anti-Blackness more glaring,'' and ''Lee Fang spouting racist bullshit it must be a day ending in day.'' A significant number of Fang's co-workers, nearly all white, as well as reporters from other major news organizations like the New York Times and MSNBC and political activists (one former Elizabeth Warren staffer tweeted, ''Get him!''), issued likes and messages of support for the notion that Fang was a racist. Though he had support within the organization, no one among his co-workers was willing to say anything in his defense publicly.

Like many reporters, Fang has always viewed it as part of his job to ask questions in all directions. He's written critically of political figures on the center-left, the left, and ''obviously on the right,'' and his reporting has inspired serious threats in the past. None of those past experiences were as terrifying as this blitz by would-be colleagues, which he described as ''jarring,'' ''deeply isolating,'' and ''unique in my professional experience.''

To save his career, Fang had to craft a public apology for ''insensitivity to the lived experience of others.'' According to one friend of his, it's been communicated to Fang that his continued employment at The Intercept is contingent upon avoiding comments that may upset colleagues. Lacy to her credit publicly thanked Fang for his statement and expressed willingness to have a conversation; unfortunately, the throng of Intercept co-workers who piled on her initial accusation did not join her in this.

I first met Lee Fang in 2014 and have never known him to be anything but kind, gracious, and easygoing. He also appears earnestly committed to making the world a better place through his work. It's stunning that so many colleagues are comfortable using a word as extreme and villainous as racist to describe him.

Though he describes his upbringing as ''solidly middle-class,'' Fang grew up in up in a diverse community in Prince George's County, Maryland, and attended public schools where he was frequently among the few non-African Americans in his class. As a teenager, he was witness to the murder of a young man outside his home by police who were never prosecuted, and also volunteered at a shelter for trafficked women, two of whom were murdered. If there's an edge to Fang at all, it seems geared toward people in our business who grew up in affluent circumstances and might intellectualize topics that have personal meaning for him.

In the tweets that got him in trouble with Lacy and other co-workers, he questioned the logic of protesters attacking immigrant-owned businesses ''with no connection to police brutality at all.'' He also offered his opinion on Martin Luther King's attitude toward violent protest (Fang's take was that King did not support it; Lacy responded, ''you know they killed him too right''). These are issues around which there is still considerable disagreement among self-described liberals, even among self-described leftists. Fang also commented, presciently as it turns out, that many reporters were ''terrified of openly challenging the lefty conventional wisdom around riots.''

Lacy says she never intended for Fang to be ''fired, 'canceled,' or deplatformed,'' but appeared irritated by questions on the subject, which she says suggest, ''there is more concern about naming racism than letting it persist.''

Max himself was stunned to find out that his comments on all this had created a Twitter firestorm. ''I couldn't believe they were coming for the man's job over something I said,'' he recounts. ''It was not Lee's opinion. It was my opinion.''

By phone, Max spoke of a responsibility he feels Black people have to speak out against all forms of violence, ''precisely because we experience it the most.'' He described being affected by the Floyd story, but also by the story of retired African-American police captain David Dorn, shot to death in recent protests in St. Louis. He also mentioned Tony Timpa, a white man whose 2016 asphyxiation by police was only uncovered last year. In body-camera footage, police are heard joking after Timpa passed out and stopped moving, ''I don't want to go to school! Five more minutes, Mom!''

''If it happens to anyone, it has to be called out,'' Max says.

Max described discussions in which it was argued to him that bringing up these other incidents now is not helpful to the causes being articulated at the protests. He understands that point of view. He just disagrees.

''They say, there has to be the right time and a place to talk about that,'' he says. ''But my point is, when? I want to speak out now.'' He pauses. ''We've taken the narrative, and instead of being inclusive with it, we've become exclusive with it. Why?''

There were other incidents. The editors of Bon Apetit and Refinery29 both resigned amid accusations of toxic workplace culture. The editor of Variety, Claudia Eller, was placed on leave after calling a South Asian freelance writer ''bitter'' in a Twitter exchange about minority hiring at her company. The self-abasing apology (''I have tried to diversify our newsroom over the past seven years, but I HAVE NOT DONE ENOUGH'') was insufficient. Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Inquirer's editor, Stan Wischowski, was forced out after approving a headline, ''Buildings matter, too.''

In the most discussed incident, Times editorial page editor James Bennet was ousted for green-lighting an anti-protest editorial by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton entitled, ''Send in the troops.''

I'm no fan of Cotton, but as was the case with Michael Moore's documentary and many other controversial speech episodes, it's not clear that many of the people angriest about the piece in question even read it. In classic Times fashion, the paper has already scrubbed a mistake they made misreporting what their own editorial said, in an article about Bennet's ouster. Here's how the piece by Marc Tracy read originally (emphasis mine):

James Bennet, the editorial page editor of The New York Times, has resigned after a controversy over an Op-Ed by a senator calling for military force against protesters in American cities.

Here's how the piece reads now:

James Bennet resigned on Sunday from his job as the editorial page editor of The New York Times, days after the newspaper's opinion section, which he oversaw, published a much-criticized Op-Ed by a United States senator calling for a military response to civic unrest in American cities.

Cotton did not call for ''military force against protesters in American cities.'' He spoke of a ''show of force,'' to rectify a situation a significant portion of the country saw as spiraling out of control. It's an important distinction. Cotton was presenting one side of the most important question on the most important issue of a critically important day in American history.

As Cotton points out in the piece, he was advancing a view arguably held by a majority of the country. A Morning Consult poll showed 58% of Americans either strongly or somewhat supported the idea of ''calling in the U.S. military to supplement city police forces.'' That survey included 40% of self-described ''liberals'' and 37% of African-Americans. To declare a point of view held by that many people not only not worthy of discussion, but so toxic that publication of it without even necessarily agreeing requires dismissal, is a dramatic reversal for a newspaper that long cast itself as the national paper of record.

Incidentally, that same poll cited by Cotton showed that 73% of Americans described protecting property as ''very important,'' while an additional 16% considered it ''somewhat important.'' This means the Philadelphia Inquirer editor was fired for running a headline '' ''Buildings matter, too'' '' that the poll said expressed a view held by 89% of the population, including 64% of African-Americans.

(Would I have run the Inquirer headline? No. In the context of the moment, the use of the word ''matter'' especially sounds like the paper is equating ''Black lives'' and ''buildings,'' an odious and indefensible comparison. But why not just make this case in a rebuttal editorial? Make it a teaching moment? How can any editor operate knowing that airing opinions shared by a majority of readers might cost his or her job?)

The main thing accomplished by removing those types of editorials from newspapers '-- apart from scaring the hell out of editors '-- is to shield readers from knowledge of what a major segment of American society is thinking.

It also guarantees that opinion writers and editors alike will shape views to avoid upsetting colleagues, which means that instead of hearing what our differences are and how we might address those issues, newspaper readers will instead be presented with page after page of people professing to agree with one another. That's not agitation, that's misinformation.

The instinct to shield audiences from views or facts deemed politically uncomfortable has been in evidence since Trump became a national phenomenon. We saw it when reporters told audiences Hillary Clinton's small crowds were a ''wholly intentional'' campaign decision. I listened to colleagues that summer of 2016 talk about ignoring poll results, or anecdotes about Hillary's troubled campaign, on the grounds that doing otherwise might ''help Trump'' (or, worse, be perceived that way).

Even if you embrace a wholly politically utilitarian vision of the news media '' I don't, but let's say '' non-reporting of that ''enthusiasm'' story, or ignoring adverse poll results, didn't help Hillary's campaign. I'd argue it more likely accomplished the opposite, contributing to voter apathy by conveying the false impression that her victory was secure.

After the 2016 election, we began to see staff uprisings. In one case, publishers at the Nation faced a revolt '' from the Editor on down '' after articles by Aaron Mate and Patrick Lawrence questioning the evidentiary basis for Russiagate claims was run. Subsequent events, including the recent declassification of congressional testimony, revealed that Mate especially was right to point out that officials had no evidence for a Trump-Russia collusion case. It's precisely because such unpopular views often turn out to be valid that we stress publishing and debating them in the press.

In a related incident, the New Yorker ran an article about Glenn Greenwald's Russiagate skepticism that quoted that same Nation editor, Joan Walsh, who had edited Greenwald at Salon. She suggested to the New Yorker that Greenwald's reservations were rooted in ''disdain'' for the Democratic Party, in part because of its closeness to Wall Street, but also because of the ''ascendance of women and people of color.'' The message was clear: even if you win a Pulitzer Prize, you can be accused of racism for deviating from approved narratives, even on questions that have nothing to do with race (the New Yorker piece also implied Greenwald's intransigence on Russia was pathological and grounded in trauma from childhood).

In the case of Cotton, Times staffers protested on the grounds that ''Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.'' Bennet's editorial decision was not merely ill-considered, but literally life-threatening (note pundits in the space of a few weeks have told us that protesting during lockdowns and not protesting during lockdowns are both literally lethal). The Times first attempted to rectify the situation by apologizing, adding a long Editor's note to Cotton's piece that read, as so many recent ''apologies'' have, like a note written by a hostage.

Editors begged forgiveness for not being more involved, for not thinking to urge Cotton to sound less like Cotton (''Editors should have offered suggestions''), and for allowing rhetoric that was ''needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate.'' That last line is sadly funny, in the context of an episode in which reporters were seeking to pre-empt a debate rather than have one at all; of course, no one got the joke, since a primary characteristic of the current political climate is a total absence of a sense of humor in any direction.

As many guessed, the ''apology'' was not enough, and Bennet was whacked a day later in a terse announcement.

His replacement, Kathleen Kingsbury, issued a staff directive essentially telling employees they now had a veto over anything that made them uncomfortable: ''Anyone who sees any piece of Opinion journalism, headlines, social posts, photos'--you name it'--that gives you the slightest pause, please call or text me immediately.''

All these episodes sent a signal to everyone in a business already shedding jobs at an extraordinary rate that failure to toe certain editorial lines can and will result in the loss of your job. Perhaps additionally, you could face a public shaming campaign in which you will be denounced as a racist and rendered unemployable.

These tensions led to amazing contradictions in coverage. For all the extraordinary/inexplicable scenes of police viciousness in recent weeks '-- and there was a ton of it, ranging from police slashing tires in Minneapolis, to Buffalo officers knocking over an elderly man, to Philadelphia police attacking protesters '-- there were also 12 deaths in the first nine days of protests, only one at the hands of a police officer (involving a man who may or may not have been aiming a gun at police).

Looting in some communities has been so bad that people have been left without banks to cash checks, or pharmacies to fill prescriptions; business owners have been wiped out (''My life is gone,'' commented one Philly store owner); a car dealership in San Leandro, California saw 74 cars stolen in a single night. It isn't the whole story, but it's demonstrably true that violence, arson, and rioting are occurring.

However, because it is politically untenable to discuss this in ways that do not suggest support, reporters have been twisting themselves into knots. We are seeing headlines previously imaginable only in The Onion, e.g., ''27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London.''

Even people who try to keep up with protest goals find themselves denounced the moment they fail to submit to some new tenet of ever-evolving doctrine, via a surprisingly consistent stream of retorts: fuck you, shut up, send money, do better, check yourself, I'm tired and racist.

Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, who argued for police reform and attempted to show solidarity with protesters in his city, was shouted down after he refused to commit to defunding the police. Protesters shouted ''Get the fuck out!'' at him, then chanted ''Shame!'' and threw refuse, Game of Thrones-style, as he skulked out of the gathering. Frey's ''shame'' was refusing to endorse a position polls show 65% of Americans oppose, including 62% of Democrats, with just 15% of all people, and only 33% of African-Americans, in support.

Each passing day sees more scenes that recall something closer to cult religion than politics. White protesters in Floyd's Houston hometown kneeling and praying to black residents for ''forgiveness'... for years and years of racism'' are one thing, but what are we to make of white police in Cary, North Carolina, kneeling and washing the feet of Black pastors? What about Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer kneeling while dressed in ''African kente cloth scarves''?

There is symbolism here that goes beyond frustration with police or even with racism: these are orgiastic, quasi-religious, and most of all, deeply weird scenes, and the press is too paralyzed to wonder at it. In a business where the first job requirement was once the willingness to ask tough questions, we've become afraid to ask obvious ones.

On CNN, Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender was asked a hypothetical question about a future without police: ''What if in the middle of the night, my home is broken into? Who do I call?'' When Bender, who is white, answered, ''I know that comes from a place of privilege,'' questions popped to mind. Does privilege mean one should let someone break into one's home, or that one shouldn't ask that hypothetical question? (I was genuinely confused). In any other situation, a media person pounces on a provocative response to dig out its meaning, but an increasingly long list of words and topics are deemed too dangerous to discuss.

The media in the last four years has devolved into a succession of moral manias. We are told the Most Important Thing Ever is happening for days or weeks at a time, until subjects are abruptly dropped and forgotten, but the tone of warlike emergency remains: from James Comey's firing, to the deification of Robert Mueller, to the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, to the democracy-imperiling threat to intelligence ''whistleblowers,'' all those interminable months of Ukrainegate hearings (while Covid-19 advanced), to fury at the death wish of lockdown violators, to the sudden reversal on that same issue, etc.

It's been learned in these episodes we may freely misreport reality, so long as the political goal is righteous. It was okay to publish the now-discredited Steele dossier, because Trump is scum. MSNBC could put Michael Avenatti on live TV to air a gang rape allegation without vetting, because who cared about Brett Kavanaugh '' except press airing of that wild story ended up being a crucial factor in convincing key swing voter Maine Senator Susan Collins the anti-Kavanaugh campaign was a political hit job (the allegation illustrated, ''why the presumption of innocence is so important,'' she said). Reporters who were anxious to prevent Kavanaugh's appointment, in other words, ended up helping it happen through overzealousness.

There were no press calls for self-audits after those episodes, just as there won't be a few weeks from now if Covid-19 cases spike, or a few months from now if Donald Trump wins re-election successfully painting the Democrats as supporters of violent protest who want to abolish police. No: press activism is limited to denouncing and shaming colleagues for insufficient fealty to the cheap knockoff of bullying campus Marxism that passes for leftist thought these days.

The traditional view of the press was never based on some contrived, mathematical notion of ''balance,'' i.e. five paragraphs of Republicans for every five paragraphs of Democrats. The ideal instead was that we showed you everything we could see, good and bad, ugly and not, trusting that a better-informed public would make better decisions. This vision of media stressed accuracy, truth, and trust in the reader's judgment as the routes to positive social change.

For all our infamous failings, journalists once had some toughness to them. We were supposed to be willing to go to jail for sources we might not even like, and fly off to war zones or disaster areas without question when editors asked. It was also once considered a virtue to flout the disapproval of colleagues to fight for stories we believed in (Watergate, for instance).

Today no one with a salary will stand up for colleagues like Lee Fang. Our brave truth-tellers make great shows of shaking fists at our parody president, but not one of them will talk honestly about the fear running through their own newsrooms. People depend on us to tell them what we see, not what we think. What good are we if we're afraid to do it?

I'm aware of this tweet suggesting the reasons for Shor's firing are unknown. I stand by the characterization made in the piece.

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 10:28

Dark crimson velvet, dark purple silk, and jet-black cloth, with linen of dazzling whiteness, composed the festive dress of the President, who marched at the head of his Committee carrying an enormous nosegay, like that which a hundred and twenty-one years later, Monsieur de

Robespierre

displayed at the festival of "The Supreme Being."

For mercy's sake, then, what would you call Robespierre ? Come, come, do not strip the latter of his just rights to bestow them on the Corsican, who, to my mind, has usurped quite enough."

"Nay, madame; I would place each of these heroes on his right pedestal -- that of Robespierre on his scaffold in the Place Louis Quinze; that of Napoleon on the column of the Place Vendome.

The hatred of the Portas and the Piombos and their terrible passions were inscribed on this page of the civil law as the annals of a people (contained, it may be, in one word only,--Napoleon,

Robespierre

) are engraved on a tombstone.

Meanwhile, he cast his eyes over that unfortunate city, which contained so much deep misery and so many heroic virtues, and recalling the saying of Louis XI, his political predecessor, as he himself was the predecessor of

Robespierre

, he repeated this maxim of Tristan's gossip: "Divide in order to reign."

Evans Pott was his name, and even the great Boss of Vermissa felt towards him something of the repulsion and fear which the huge Danton may have felt for the puny but dangerous

Robespierre

.

There comes a Mirabeau or a Danton, a

Robespierre

or a Napoleon, or proconsuls, or an emperor, and there is an end of deliberations and debates.

Rabourdin wore habitually a blue surcoat, a white cravat, a waistcoat crossed a la

Robespierre

, black trousers without straps, gray silk stockings and low shoes.

1586: Sir Thomas Harriot introduces potatoes to Europe 1794: French Revolutionary leader Maximilien

Robespierre

and 22 other leaders of "the Terror" are guillotined 1858: The first ever aerial photo is taken (from a balloon) by French photographer Nadar 1900: The hamburger is created by Louis Lassing, in Connecticut 1933: The first singing telegram is delivered in New York 1938: The Cunard-White Star liner, Mauretania, is launched at Birkenhead 1954: On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando, is released 1959: The UK starts using postal codes 1988: Paddy Ashdown, right, is elected the first leader of the new Social and Liberal Democrat Party, later the Lib Dems 2008: Weston-super-Mare's Grand Pier burns down for the second time in 80 years

| 1794: Maximilien

Robespierre

, one of the leaders of the French Revolution, was guillotined in Paris.

French lawyer and politician Maximilien

Robespierre

was maybe the most influential figure of the French Revolution.

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Fri, 12 Jun 2020 09:25

While other events may have started to overshadow the coronavirus pandemic, the virus is still very much a big deal around the globe. Now, in order with a request from the European Union, US tech giants including Google are going to produce regular reports regarding misinformation online about the coronavirus.

Speaking to The Verge, Google, Facebook, and Twitter have all confirmed that they will work in order with the EU's request. That request asks the tech giants to produce monthly reports with ''detailed data'' regarding each company's efforts to combat misinformation and ''fake news'' regarding COVID-19. These companies have not confirmed when these reports will start or what the first steps will be, though.

The reasoning behind this request, of course, is to stop the spread of misinformation surrounding the coronavirus pandemic through sources such as Google Search and social media. That false information could end up do harm in a number of ways, such as people trying unapproved treatments. Misinformation could also be detrimental to a vaccine given that there are many online who loudly speak out against vaccines. Scientists have said, though, that a vaccine will be vital to ''normality.''

Matt Brittin, president of Google EMEA, said regarding the reports:

The global pandemic has shown that more people need more accurate information more than ever. Through our cooperation with Vice-President Jourova and national authorities we know that working together, companies and policymakers can make more difference than working alone. We're committed to the Code of Practice and to our work together to find new and creative ways to continue the fight against disinformation.

More on Coronavirus:Google Maps using crowdsourced data to help you avoid crowds on public transitGoogle lays out office reopening plans, benefits for WFH employeesCOVID-19 exposure notification system rolling out now to AndroidFTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

Check out 9to5Google on YouTube for more news:

About the AuthorBen Schoon @NexusBen

Ben is a writer and video producer for 9to5Google.

Find him on Twitter @NexusBen. Send tips to schoon@9to5g.com or encrypted to benschoon@protonmail.com.

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Archived Version

Sat, 13 Jun 2020 09:14

By Jason O'Toole, who has worked as a senior feature writer for the Irish Daily Mail, a columnist with the Irish Sunday Mirror and senior editor of Hot Press magazine. He's also the author of several best-selling books.

The British scientist known as Professor Lockdown has undermined the draconian policy he unleashed on the world by confessing that Britain hasn't fared any better in tackling the disease than the laid-back Scandis.

Professor Neil Ferguson probably woke up this morning breathing a massive sigh of relief because he hadn't been ripped to shreds again in the British newspapers for this second time in just under a month '' this time over his startling admission that there has been no significant difference in the levels of Covid-19 suppression when comparing the UK and Sweden.

During his evidence to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on Tuesday, he said: ''They [Swedish scientists] came to a different policy conclusion based really on quite similar science. I don't agree with it but scientifically they're not far from scientists in any part of the world.''

Also on rt.com 'Very destructive' SECOND wave of Covid-19 may come as countries lift restrictions, WHO warns He then acknowledged that the Swedish authorities had ''got a long way to the same effect'' without a full lockdown.

In other words, in the type of roundabout waffling way you'd expect from a bumbling boffin, the scientist '' dubbed 'Professor Lockdown' after he cajoled Boris Johnson into bringing the British economy to a screeching halt '' reckons Sweden has essentially coped very well without being forced into any draconian lockdown, thank you very much.

So where was the indignation about how his recommendations f**ked up the economy and made people prisoners in their own homes? It certainly wasn't to be seen splashed across any British front pages. Indeed, it was hard enough to find much, if any, coverage of this very significant news story on Wednesday.

Read more

It was buried inside the Daily Telegraph on page seven, running across a third of a page or less, with a very accurate subheading stating in clear black and white: ''Professor admits radical Scandinavian policy worked as well as British policy of shutting down.''

The evidence from the two countries' differing approaches has left the professor with little escape route. UK (full lockdown/businesses shut down): 579 Covid-19 deaths per million of population. Sweden (softer restrictions/businesses kept open): 442 deaths per million.

But why make such a startling confession now, when he could have wriggled away by saying it's too early to assess the data as the disease is still running its course? The cynic in me wonders if Dr Ferguson's matter-of-fact admission that a full lockdown probably didn't make a blind bit of difference was fueled by ulterior motives. Seeing as his own reputation is already in tatters, was it a warped act of revenge against Boris Johnson for being forced to fall on his sword after being caught breaking lockdown with his married lover?

Or here's one for conspiracy theorists: instead of wanting to throw BoJo under the bus, could it have been a case of wanting to hide something else that's about to come down the track? With America now burning in the wake of the atrocious murder of George Floyd, the confession at this juncture reminds me somewhat of how a British government spin doctor sent out a memo only 30 minutes after the second plane hit the Twin Towers on 9/11 with the cynical recommendation that''it's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.''

Also on rt.com I've signed death certificates during Covid-19. Here's why you can't trust any of the statistics on the number of victims At the moment, the biggest accusation they could face is needlessly making a hames (for those of you who aren't Irish, this means a 'big mess') of the economy. Even Sweden's state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell has since said that, while he regrets not implanting stricter measures to stop the spread of Covid-19, he ''still would not have gone as far as other European countries did.''

But the Swede being plagued with self-doubt sounds much more like someone racked with guilt about ''what ifs?'' like an Oskar Schindler type of character who was pictured crying at the end of the Spielberg film because he was convinced he could've done better.

According to Aric Dromi, CEO of the Sweden-based Tempus Motu Think Tank, both the UK and Sweden's response to Covid-19 is ''ego driven and lacking in strategy.'' He told me: ''Differences in the social structure between the UK and Sweden should have made a bigger impact between the numbers infected. The Swedish economy, for example, far from being protected by remaining open, has still been badly damaged as it relies heavily on exports, despite the lack of a lockdown. For both countries, it represents a human sacrifice on the altar of economics, and it is wholly unacceptable.''

Also on rt.com BoJo government blasted again as new lockdown 'SEX BAN' prompts orgy of scorn and mockery It all reminds me of when John Cleese in the 'Gourmet Night' episode of 'Fawlty Towers' told guests that there were only three different types of duck on the menu that night '' with orange, with cherries or ''surprise,'' which turned out to be ''duck without oranges or cherries.'' And if you don't like duck? As Basil Fawlty quipped, ''Ah, well, if you don't like duck, uhhh, you're rather stuck.''

At the end of the day, it might still be too early to fully know which was the right way to go, which begs the question: Why did Prof. Ferguson jump the gun and heap such fulsome praise '' no pun intended here '' on the Swedish model? Whatever way you spin it here, he has, once again, ''undermined'' the lockdown just like he did ''after violating quarantine he designed to meet married lover.''

He might've been dubbed ''Dr Strangelove'' after that embarrassing slip up '' but now he just comes across as a nutty professor after his latest confession. These strong words might just come back to haunt BoJo when he next goes before the electorate. With a crippled economy thanks to the draconian measures, he's going to find the next election will be all about his mishandling of Covid-19, and specifically, ''the economy, stupid.''

If you like this story, share it with a friend!

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 11:27

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Sun, 14 Jun 2020 06:58

A deeper look at the policies behind the death of George FloydPictured: Derek Chauvin (left) and George FloydThe world has united in protest after a graphic video emerged showing a Black man dying under the restraint of a White police officer. The victim, George Floyd, was in clear distress. He was pinned to the ground by three officers, with one officer '-- Derek Chauvin '-- placing a knee on his neck. For over five minutes, he tells the officers that he is unable to breathe. George Floyd died as horrified bystanders told the officers they were killing him.

The video is unquestionably horrific.

But in our rush to condemn an aggressive use of force and pursue justice for George Floyd, we have ignored crucial information which is necessary in judging the conduct of the officers. While nothing can absolve George Floyd's death, these facts do cast doubt on the appropriateness of a murder charge for Chauvin, and paint a more nuanced picture of the events leading up to the tragic encounter.

There are six crucial pieces of information '-- six facts '-- that have been largely omitted from discussion on the Chauvin's conduct. Taken together, they likely exonerate the officer of a murder charge. Rather than indicating illegal and excessive force, they instead show an officer who rigidly followed the procedures deemed appropriate by the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD). The evidence points to the MPD and the local political establishment, rather than the individual officer, as ultimately responsible for George Floyd's death.

These six facts are as follows:

George Floyd was experiencing cardiopulmonary and psychological distress minutes before he was placed on the ground, let alone had a knee to his neck.The Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) allows the use of neck restraint on suspects who actively resist arrest, and George Floyd actively resisted arrest on two occasions, including immediately prior to neck restraint being used.The officers were recorded on their body cams assessing George Floyd as suffering from ''excited delirium syndrome'' (ExDS), a condition which the MPD considers an extreme threat to both the officers and the suspect. A white paper used by the MPD acknowledges that ExDS suspects may die irrespective of force involved. The officers' response to this situation was in line with MPD guidelines for ExDS.Restraining the suspect on his or her abdomen (prone restraint) is a common tactic in ExDS situations, and the white paper used by the MPD instructs the officers to control the suspect until paramedics arrive.Floyd's autopsy revealed a potentially lethal concoction of drugs '-- not just a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl, but also methamphetamine. Together with his history of drug abuse and two serious heart conditions, Floyd's condition was exceptionally and unusually fragile.Chauvin's neck restraint is unlikely to have exerted a dangerous amount of force to Floyd's neck. Floyd is shown on video able to lift his head and neck, and a robust study on double-knee restraints showed a median force exertion of approximately approximately 105lbs.Let's be clear: the actions of Chauvin and the other officers were absolutely wrong. But they were also in line with MPD rules and procedures for the condition which they determined was George Floyd was suffering from. An act that would normally be considered a clear and heinous abuse of force, such as a knee-to-neck restraint on a suspect suffering from pulmonary distress, can be legitimatized if there are overriding concerns not known to bystanders but known to the officers. In the case of George Floyd, the overriding concern was that he was suffering from ExDS, given a number of relevant facts known to the officers. This was not known to the bystanders, who only saw a man with pulmonary distress pinned down with a knee on his neck. While the officers may still be found guilty of manslaughter, the probability of a guilty verdict for the murder charge is low, and the public should be aware of this well in advance of the verdict.

While we should pursue justice for George Floyd, we should be absolutely sure that we are pursuing justice against his real killers. A careful examination of the evidence points to the procedures and rules of the MPD, rather than the police officers following these procedures and rules, as the real killers of George Floyd. If anyone murdered George Floyd, it was the MPD and the local political establishment. This is why Attorney General Keith Ellison has expressed how difficult a conviction will be.

''Trying this case will not be an easy thing. Winning a conviction will be hard,'' Ellison said.

There is still much to the case that remains unknown. As new information emerges, we should adjust our view accordingly. But a close inspection of all current information does not point to a murder charge being appropriate.

From the original government complaint, we know that he was falling to the ground and claiming he couldn't breathe while still standing up.

Mr. Floyd stiffened up, fell to the ground, and told the officers he was claustrophobic ['...] Mr. Floyd did not voluntarily get in the car and struggled with the officers by intentionally falling down, saying he was not going in the car, and refusing to stand still ['...] While standing outside the car, Mr. Floyd began saying and repeating that he could not breathe.

From the 911 transcript, we know that George Floyd was acting ''drunk'' and ''not in control of himself'' before the police were called. The 911 caller is concerned that such an ''awfully drunk'' man would attempt to operate a vehicle. This is an important departure from the earlier media reports, which indicated the officers were only called over a counterfeit bill.

''Um someone comes our store and give us fake bills and we realize it before he left the store, and we ran back outside, they was sitting on their car ['...], and he's sitting on his car cause he is awfully drunk and he's not in control of himself'' ['...] He is not acting right ['...] and [he's] not acting right so and [he] started to go, drive the car.''

This information on its own is of no significance. In fact, aggressively restraining someone who is experiencing distress only makes that restraint all the more heinous. But as will be seen later, when this information is seen in light of George Floyd's behavior, it led the officers to suspect he was suffering from ExDS '-- a far more dangerous scenario than simple distress.

The Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) recognizes two types of resistance to arrest. There is active resistance, defined as follows:

a response to police efforts to bring a person into custody or control for detainment or arrest. A subject engages in active resistance when engaging in physical actions (or verbal behavior reflecting an intention) to make it more difficult for officers to achieve actual physical control.

And passive resistance, defined as follows:

a response to police efforts to bring a person into custody or control for detainment or arrest. This is behavior initiated by a subject, when the subject does not comply with verbal or physical control efforts, yet the subject does not attempt to defeat an officer's control efforts.

Passive resistance is when a suspect is non-compliant in an arrest, but will not act to stop an officer from enacting an arrest. Imagine a child in a supermarket who has a meltdown and drops to the floor '-- this is passive resistance, as guardian can easily pick up the child. Now imagine a child who not only drops to the floor but pulls against their guardian. This is active resistance.

The MPD allows the use of force in action resistance. Relevantly, the MPD allows neck restraint. It is defined as:

Non-deadly force option. Defined as compressing one or both sides of a person's neck with an arm or leg, without applying direct pressure to the trachea or airway (front of the neck). Only sworn employees who have received training from the MPD Training Unit are authorized to use neck restraints.

There are two types of neck restraint. What we are interested is in conscious neck restraint, defined as:

The subject is placed in a neck restraint with intent to control, and not to render the subject unconscious, by only applying light to moderate pressure.

The Conscious Neck Restraint may be used against a subject who is actively resisting.

We know from the original government complaint that Floyd was actively resisting, because they admit as much:

Mr. Floyd actively resisted being handcuffed.

We also know from the original complaint that he resisted again:

The officers made several attempts to get Mr. Floyd in the backseat of squad 320 from the driver's side. Mr. Floyd did not voluntarily get in the car and struggled with the officers by intentionally falling down, saying he was not going in the car, and refusing to stand still.

While standing outside the car, Mr. Floyd began saying and repeating that he could not breathe. The defendant went to the passenger side and tried to get Mr. Floyd into the car from that side and Lane and Kueng assisted.

The defendant pulled Mr. Floyd out of the passenger side of the squad car at 8:19:38 p.m. and Mr. Floyd went to the ground face down and still handcuffed

The three officers were unable to keep him in the police car. The little video evidence we have indicates that there was a struggle. ''The defendant pulled Mr. Floyd out of the passenger side of the squad car'' likely because they were unable to close the squad car door due to his resistance. A longer video was posted by the popular activist Shaun King which indicates a struggle. Shaun King believes this video shows the officers beating Floyd, however the government (who has access to the body cams) did not write this in their complaint (which they would, as it would help their case).

There appears to be two cases of active resistance, including immediately prior to prone restraint. As such, neck restraint was permissible in order to control George Floyd. Remember that the MPD guideline is to use light to moderate force. An officer placing a knee on a suspect's neck does not mean he is exerting full force, and there is evidence that light to moderate pressure was used on Floyd. Given that Floyd was saying he couldn't breathe while resisting being placed in the police car, the officers could not reasonably believe that light to moderate pressure would cause his proclaimed symptoms.

For reasons not yet known, Minneapolis is refusing to release the officers' body cams of this moment. This information is important in order to determine how Floyd was acting the exact moment the officers pulled him from the police car. It is unconscionable that this information has not been released to the public. We must assume, given all relevant information already known, that their reason for pulling him out of the car was his continued resistance as noted in the government complaint.

(Note: the original page for the MPD detailing use of force has been wiped. Here is an archive hosted by '-- for some reason '-- the San Francisco police department. And here is an archive of the archive, just in case.)

In 2018, the MPD published a report on the use of ketamine in excited delirium. Attached to this report is an authoritative document on excited delirium entitled ''White Paper Report on Excited Delirium''. A white paper is an authoritative report. The MPD attached this white paper because it was considered by the MPD the most authoritative document on excited delirium syndrome (ExDS).

The report specifies the nature of ExDS, the symptoms of ExDS, as well as what police officers should consider when dealing with those they suspect of suffering from ExDS. The report is long. First, let's backtrack and establish that the officers did in fact suspect excited delirium. WaPo hosts the original government complaint:

Officer Lane said, ''I am worried about excited delirium or whatever.'' The defendant said, ''That's why we have him on his stomach.''

It must be understood that the public does not yet have enough information to conclude whether the police were accurate in their assessment of ExDS. We have some information indicating that the determination is correct, but absent the full body cam recording, we are unable to make a complete judgment on this point. This is discouraging, because the entire case rests on this point. We know that two officers believed he was experiencing ExDS, and that the other two officers did not comment to the contrary. We also know that George Floyd had some symptoms of ExDS, but we do not know if he had all symptoms of ExDS, or if he had any symptoms indicating the contrary. Below are the symptoms, affixed with whether we know he experienced the symptom or not:

Sweating [Y]Police Noncompliance [Y]Lack of Tiring [Y]Unusual Strength [?]Pain Tolerance [?]Tachypnea [?]Tactile Hyperthermia [?]Bizarre behavior generating calls to police [Y]Suspected or known psychostimulant drug or alcohol intoxication [Y]Erratic or violent behavior [?]Ongoing struggle despite futility [Y]Yelling/shouting/guttural sounds [?]Agitation [Y]Inappropriately Clothed [N]Mirror/Glass Attraction [?]Suspected or known psychiatric illness [N]Failure to recognize or respond to police presence at the scene [likely N]Some of these symptoms can only be determined from body cameras. Unfortunately, other symptoms can only be determined by the officers' account. It is not possible to know whether he was experiencing tactile hyperthermia except by asking the officers who had touched his skin. We will have to work with these limitations in our analysis of the event. However, that both the brand new officer (Lane) and the veteran officer (Chauvin) suspected ExDS is not poor evidence. And that no officer objected to this determination must also be considered.

There are also symptoms that we know in hindsight, but which the officers did not know. For instance, George Floyd had a history of stimulant abuse, as detailed in his arrest log, with four previous arrests involving drugs.

The White Paper goes on to describe the dangers of excited delirium, both to the officer and the suspect. This information is important, and explains why the officers responded as they did:

''Given the irrational and potentially violent, dangerous, and lethal behavior of an ExDS subject, any LEO interaction with a person in this situation risks significant injury or death to either the LEO or the ExDS subject who has a potentially lethal medical syndrome. This already challenging situation has the potential for intense public scrutiny coupled with the expectation of a perfect outcome. Anything less creates a situation of potential public outrage. Unfortunately, this dangerous medical situation makes perfect outcomes difficult in many circumstances.''

''LEOs must also be aware that remorse, normal fear and understanding of surroundings, and rational thoughts for safety are absent in such subjects.''''ExDS subjects are known to be irrational, often violent and relatively impervious to pain. Unfortunately, almost everything taught to LEOs about control of subjects relies on a suspect to either be rational, appropriate, or to comply with painful stimuli. Tools and tactics available to LEOs (such as pepper spray, impact batons, joint lock maneuvers, punches and kicks, and ECD's, especially when used for pain compliance) that are traditionally effective in controlling resisting subjects, are likely to be less effective on ExDS subjects.''''The goals of LEOs in these situations should be to 1) recognize possible ExDS, contain the subject, and call for EMS; 2) take the subject into custody quickly, safely, and efficiently if necessary; and 3) then immediately turn the care of the subject over to EMS personnel when they arrive for treatment and transport to definitive medical care.''''In those cases where a death occurs while in custody, there is the additional difficulty of separating any potential contribution of control measures from the underlying pathology. For example, was death due to the police control tool, or to positional asphyxia, or from ExDS, or from interplay of all these factors? Even in the situation where all caregivers agree that a patient is in an active delirious state, there is no proof of the most safe and effective control measure or therapy for what is most likely an extremely agitated patient.''''There are well-documented cases of ExDS deaths with minimal restraint such as handcuffs without ECD use. This underscores that this is a potentially fatal syndrome in and of itself, sometimes reversible when expert medical treatment is immediately available''.Each of these bullet points is of the utmost importance in understanding Chauvin's state of mind. These points must be re-read and thoroughly understood before pronouncing judgment on an officer who was simply following these statements during the arrest. If you are skimming this article I advise you to spend time on these bullet points. Remember: the officer's job is to follow protocol, not to re-write protocol during an arrest. It is the politician's job to ensure that the protocols are correct, no the police officer's.

There has been some controversy in the media regarding the legitimacy of ExDS as a true medical condition. It should be mentioned that ExDS is recognized by the American College of Emergency Physicians as a true medical emergency, and ACEP played a role in drafting the White Paper for ExDS. But regardless of its legitimacy, ExDS is recognized by the Minneapolis Police Department. It bears repeating that Officer Chauvin is not tasked with determining the legitimacy of the syndromes which his department and local government already recognizes. Any question of the legitimacy of ExDS must be lodged against the government of Minneapolis '-- Mayor Frey '-- and the MPD, not Officer Chauvin.

As noted earlier, the government complaint against Chauvin states that the officers suspected excited delirium:

Lane asked, ''should we roll him on his side?'' and the defendant said, ''No, staying put where we got him.'' Officer Lane said, ''I am worried about excited delirium or whatever.'' The defendant said, ''That's why we have him on his stomach.''

This excerpt is of twofold importance. First, it demonstrates that two officers suspected excited delirium. Second, it demonstrates that Chauvin was restraining Floyd in this position because he suspected excited delirium (''that's why we have him on his stomach''). Restraining an individual on his stomach is common in ExDS encounters. This is called ''prone restraint''. In fact, it is often the recommended form of restraint until the officers can safely put the suspect in a different position:

As mentioned before, people experiencing EXD are highly agitated, violent, and show signs of unexpected strength so it is not surprising that most require physical restraint. The prone maximal restraint position (PMRP, also known as ''hobble'' or ''hogtie''), where the person's ankles and wrists are bound together behind their back, has been used extensively by field personnel. In far fewer cases, persons have been tied to a hospital gurney or manually held prone with knee pressure on the back or neck.

Two years ago, the 8th circuit ruled on a case involving both prone restraint and ExDS, writing that officers are entitled to qualified immunity in cases involving prone restraint, specifically denying 4th amendment privilege against excessive force:

Officers determined that keeping Layton in a prone position was best given his continued resistance, and Baker pressed Layton's shoulders to the ground while Groby held Layton's thighs ['...] this court has not deemed prone restraint unconstitutional in and of itself the few times we have addressed the issue ['...] Under these cases, there is no clearly established right against the use of prone restraints for a suspect that has been resisting.

Now, qualified immunity is just that: qualified. The court ruled that prone restraint is not necessarily excessive in suspects who have been resisting arrest, even if that suspect is experiencing ExDS. This does not mean prone restraint is always justified, but that it isn't always unjustified. We still must examine the use of prone restraint on a case-by-case basis.

Informational Asymmetry: what the police and EMTs know, and what the public knowsIt's important to understand that the public '-- including journalists '-- are not well-versed in ExDS, and consequently do not have a good intuition as to what constitutes excessive force. As noted in the white paper, ''there is no proof of the most safe and effective control measure,'' ''any LEO interaction with a person in this situation risks significant injury or death'', ''this already challenging situation has the potential for intense public scrutiny coupled with the expectation of a perfect outcome ['...] Unfortunately, this dangerous medical situation makes perfect outcomes difficult ['...].'' It would helpful here to examine ExDS in depth, and compare it to the George Floyd case.

Willard TruckenmillerWillard Truckenmiler was a sheriff's deputy. While celebrating his birthday, he began to display ''agitated and unusual behavior''. When officers arrived on the scene '-- many of them his colleagues'-- he did not recognize them and assumed a fighting stance. The responding officers suspected ExDS. The officers ''handcuffed him and forced him to into a seated position on the ground'', and EMS personnel gave him ketamine. Moments later he experienced trouble breathing and went into cardiac arrest. He died two days later.

In the case of Truckenmiller, it is unreasonable to assume the police acted on prejudice '-- Truckenmiller was a colleague and police officer. It is unreasonable to assume that his cardiac arrest was due to use of force, because he was not held in prone restraint and was quickly given ketamine by the EMS. Despite all of this, Truckenmiller experienced trouble breathing, had a heart attack, and died. This demonstrates that ExDS is ''potentially fatal syndrome in and of itself'', as the white paper used by the MPD notes. It is also proof that ExDS deaths are not necessarily caused by excessive force or prejudice.

Roy ScottRoy Scott was 65 years old. Police were called to his residence. After coming outside with a pipe in his hand and pulling a knife out of his pocket, police decided to pat him down. The police handcuffed him and began patting him down when he began experiencing extreme emotional distress. The police tried to deescalate verbally, which did not work. They then tried keeping the suspect on his back, which did not work. They momentarily placed him in the prone position, and even engaged in neck restraint for less than a minute. The police are calm the entire time '-- one officer tells the other officer to ''just keep holding him, he's going to keep rolling around, he's going to hurt himself''. The police eventually place him on his side in the recovery position, which is a candidate for the safest restraint position in ExDS encounters. They hold his head with their palms so that he doesn't bang it on the ground.

The Roy Scott video '-- linked above '-- may just be the best case recorded of how police should deal with ExDS. Everything they did was correct. They went above and beyond in deescalating the situation. The officers had compassion for Roy Scott.

But Roy Scott still died. How?

As the Journal of Emergency Medical Services notes,

''The usual response by subjects to restraints is to either accept that fighting is futile or continue to be verbally abusive. The patient with excited delirium, however, continues to fight the restraints until cardiac arrest occurs.''

This is what happened to Roy Scott. It did not matter how the officers restrained him, because he would fight against the restraints past the point of exhaustion and into cardiac arrest.

More Cases of NoteIt takes four officers to restrain this man experiencing ExDS in prone restraint until the EMT arrives (likely with ketamine).In this case from 2011, the officers used a taser and knee-to-back prone-restraint.In this more recent video, it takes six officers, a taser, and multiple batons to restrain the suspect. Even with six officers restraining him, he is still able to get halfway up. At 6:14 in the video, a Black police officer kicks the suspect near the head and then applies force near the suspect's neck '-- this is appropriate use of force, even though it appears unnecessary, because the suspect was an extreme threat. This particular ExDS suspect was able to cause facial injuries to the officers despite being overpowered 6-to-1. As the white paper notes, ExDS suspects often ''show signs of unexpected strength''.A Parallel Case: Donald LewisOut of all the cases of ExDS and prone restraint available, the Donald Lewis case most clearly mirrors the George Floyd case. Donald Lewis was a white man suffering from excited delirium.

The police first decide to use verbal deescalation. This doesn't work, as he runs into traffic. He says he is going to die while being restrained by the police. From 1:50 to 2:40, we see an officer use knee-to-neck restraint. Lewis' condition does not deteriorate from prone restraint, and he continues actively resisting arrest. They then use zip ties and hobble prone restraint. At 3:50 he tries to bite the officers (this is especially dangerous for officers who would prefer not to risk exposure to HIV or hepatitis). At 4:04 he appears to call for his mom. At 5:25 a Black police officer uses knee-to-neck restraint against the white suspect. The Black police officer resumes this position seconds later. The suspect dies in this position.

The parallel to our current case does not end here. An official autopsy declared cause of death ''sudden respiratory arrest following physical struggling restraint due to cocaine-induced excited delirium.'' The legal team hired Dr. Michael Baden, who testified that Lewis died from ''asphyxia caused by neck compression.'' Baden is the same medical examiner who was hired by the George Floyd family, and made a similar finding. Baden is also the same medical examiner who was hired for Eric Garner, and declared death by ''compression of the neck''. Baden is also the same medical examiner who was hired by the Brown family to examine Michael Brown, and Baden found that Brown died while surrendering, an assertion totally disproven by a DoJ investigation spearheaded by AG Eric Holder under Obama. Suffice it to say, Michael Baden has a very specific interest, and a very tenuous track record. The Court will be aware of this when weighing the autopsies.

After recruiting Baden, a suit against the police was filed. As per CSMonitor,

The 11th Circuit rejected the contention that hogtying was unreasonable once Lewis was already handcuffed and his legs shackled. ''Even though most of the officers in this case testified that Lewis was not a danger to them and was merely resisting arrest, he was, as the district court described, 'an agitated and uncooperative man with only a tenuous grasp on reality,' '' the appeals-court panel said. ['...] The panel concluded: ''Because of his refusal to sit upright and his inability to remain calm, Lewis remained a safety risk to himself and to others.''

A case of note in a scientific journalAn article, ''Delayed In-Custody Death involving Excited Delirium'', proves that ExDS deaths can occur without any restraint or even drug stimulant.

This case study presents a 37-year-old male who was experiencing excited delirium (ExD) and died in a county jail 4 days after being taken into custody. The male died in a jail observation cell without having been restrained and was not under the influence of a drug stimulant. The subject had a documented psychiatric history of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and was known to consume marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamines. This case illustrates the pernicious effects of ExD and how its lethality can be delayed when many cases involve drug use and use of force where subjects die shortly thereafter. Implications of ExD for correctional agencies and efforts of responding to it in correctional and law enforcement contexts are discussed.

It may be of interest to see what EMS personnel on the ground think about ExDS. Using archives of comments on the popular forum Reddit, we can get a halfway decent gauge of how professionals dealing with ExDS feel about the condition. One user, more than a year before the George Floyd incident, asked the following: '' What is your excited delirium story? What tactics would you recommend for handling such individuals?'':

The two top responses to this question are illuminating:

EMS personnel answer, ''What is your excited delirium story? What tactics would you recommend for handling such individuals?George Floyd's autopsy sheds light on his state of cardiovascular health. He was found to have arteriosclerotic heart disease and hypertensive heart disease. Additionally, he was found to have the following drugs in his system:

Fentanyl 11 ng/mL 2.Norfentanyl 5.6 ng/mL 3. 4-ANPP 0.65 ng/mL 4.Methamphetamine 19 ng/mLThis level of fentanyl is dangerous. One review of fentanyl overdoses found a median amount of ng/mL in an overdose to be approximately 10 ng/mL:

Despite the ubiquitous presence of multiple drugs in these decedents, the effects of fentanyl were evidently so strong that there were no statistical differences in the fentanyl level (mean and standard deviation) with or without the presence of these co-intoxicants. The range of fentanyl levels was wide, from 0.75 to 113.00 ng/mL, with an average of 9.96 ng/mL.

Compare this information to an article published in Frontiers of Physiology detailing medical findings in ExDS deaths:

Many patients with excited delirium also have significant cardiovascular and psychiatric diseases. Autopsies often reveal severe atherosclerosis, cardiomyopathy and diabetes. Cardiomyopathy results from chronic cocaine and methamphetamine abuse. Atherosclerosis and diabetes can also be the result of smoking, obesity and a lack of overall health care. The combination of the metabolic arrest with severe cardiovascular disease makes a successful resuscitation highly unlikely.

To be clear: this information cannot be considered relevant in judging the officer's actions. It is only relevant in determining Floyd's cause of death, as well as the probability (in hindsight) of George Floyd experiencing ExDS. The actions of the police are never justified in hindsight, but must always be justified given what the officers knew firsthand. With that said, if we are determining the likelihood of Floyd dying from excessive force rather than an especially fragile cardiovascular system, it is minor relevance.

From the footage we have of Floyd's arrest, we see at 2:11 Floyd is able to lift his head and neck despite the placement of Chauvin's knee. This occurs exactly at 2:11 through 2:12, and only for a moment. Yet this act would be impossible were Chauvin exerting a dangerous amount of pressure with his knee.

Remember what we know about ExDS: the suspect struggles with restraint regardless of restraint used. That Chauvin has his knee in a position to exert force if the suspect tries to flee does not mean that he is exerting force the entire time. The knee is there to prevent Floyd from getting up, not from pushing Floyd into the concrete. This is a preventative force position rather than an aggressive force position.

It is, of course, impossible to know just how much pressure Chauvin is exerting in this encounter. He could be exerting only as much force as is required to keep him down. And he could be exerting maximal force. How can we know?

Well, there is one study on the weight of a single-knee and double-knee restraint on the body. On average, single-knee restraint distributes around 70 lbs of force. But Chauvin, for most of the arrest, was engaged in a double-knee restraint position. According to the study, the double-knee position (which Chauvin uses) produces a median force of 48 kg, or 106 lbs. This force would be distributed between the side of his neck and back, unless Chauvin were consciously applying more force in one of these locations. If the force applied were split evenly, that is only 53 lbs of exertion spread across the side of Floyd's neck. This amount of force, while uncomfortable, is not enough to stop a suspect from breathing and not enough to cut off blood flow to the brain.

But let's take a look at that study again. The study concludes that the double-knee weight was exactly 23.3 kg plus 24% of a specific LEO's body weight. Some preliminary information indicates Chauvin is 156 lbs, which is a reasonable estimate, as the footage shows him to be thin and of average height. This means Chauvin was exerting 90 lbs in the double-knee position, for 45 lbs exerted spread across the back and the neck (implying balanced force). 45 lbs is definitively insufficient to restrict breathing or blood-flow in the neck. The other officers are of a similar build.

A Minneapolis-based StudyThis study conducted at the Minneapolis-based University of Minnesota. The officers were recruited from the Minneapolis police department. The study was conducted last year.

There are 800 LEOs in Minneapolis. The study has 41 participants, meaning 5% of the officers in Minneapolis participated in the study. If you are an officer in the MPD and you spoke to 9 other officers about the use of prone restraint, the probability is that one of you would have been a participant. It's probable that Chauvin knew about this study. With four officers involved in Floyd's arrest, there's roughly a 21% chance that one of them was a participant in the very study.

The conclusions of the study are enough to exonerate the officers from a murder charge:

''Our data do not support the hypothesis of restraint asphyxia.''''When a cause of death cannot otherwise be determined, positional asphyxia is often suggested ['...] Proponents of this theory often hypothesize that subjects restrained prone, with applied downward weight force, hobbled, or in maximal restraint (restrained on their stomach with hands and wrists secured to the handcuffs) were unable to breathe because the position caused chest wall and abdominal restriction that prevented adequate expansion of the lungs. Subsequent rigorous scientific studies, however, using sophisticated measurements have debunked the positional or restraint asphyxia hypothesis because the prone position does not produce respiratory compromise.''''To date, none of the published human clinical studies, or epidemiological studies, support the hypothesis that the pronerestraint position causes or contributes to ventilatory compromise''''DiMaio and DiMaio observed that acceptance of the concept of positional asphyxia as the cause of death in restraint associated deaths often involves the suspension of common sense and logical thinking. Further, other researchers have commented that positional asphyxia is an interesting theory unsupported by the experimental data. Nor are significant changes in cardiovascular measures found.''The prosecution is going to have tremendous difficulty proving murder, when Chauvin likely knew of the scientific research indicating that prone restraint is not excessively dangerous to the suspect's cardiovascular health.

The NYT published a ''play by play'' analysis on YouTube, analyzing how George Floyd died. They omit important information in their analysis.

The NYT shows Floyd being cuffed behind his back, but then cut the footage so that you do not see the struggle that occurred while he was being cuffed.The NYT mentions complaints made against the officers. However, the NYT does not mention that only one of these complaints was found to have merit against Chauvin, when he asked a woman who was speeding 10 MPH over the limit to step out of her car. The NYT omits the average number of complaints against officers, which is approximately one every 3 years. The NYT also omits that Chauvin obtained two medals of valor, which was ironically reported by the NYT elsewhere.The NYT says ''we don't know why'' they pulled Floyd out of the car. This is misleading, as we know they were unable to keep him detained in the squad car.The NYT omitted that Floyd was able to lift up his head and neck.The NYT omitted '-- completely '-- that the officers believed he was suffering from ExDS. (This is not a joke. The NYT omitted the linchpin of the case.)The NYT ignores his history of drug use, his two heart conditions, as well as the fentanyl found in his system.

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Sun, 14 Jun 2020 07:09

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 09:30

One in five hospital patients with coronavirus caught it while on wards, papers by Government scientists have revealed.

The findings come alongside orders to all hospitals to enforce social distancing between staff in order to stop doctors and nurses from "congregating" and fuelling the spread of the virus.

An investigation by The Telegraph reveals that it was not until May 18 '' nearly two months after Britain entered lockdown '' that health chiefs finally issued guidance on how hospital workers should implement social distancing.

It comes amid growing concern that NHS trusts have become a major source of coronavirus "re-seeding" into communities. Government scientific advisers are worried that, while medics are keeping their distance from patients, their "backstage" behaviour is allowing the virus to circulate.

On Friday, the latest figures showed a slight rise in the 'R' rate '' the rate at which coronavirus reproduces '' to between 0.8 and one in England, up from between 0.7 and one.

Government advisers are concerned that high transmission rates within hospitals and care homes are to blame, making it far more difficult to ease the UK's lockdown restrictions.

Papers published by Sage on Friday show that, at the peak of the epidemic, transmission within hospitals was believed to account for up to 22 per cent of hospitalised patients and up to 11 per cent of deaths.

The research, prepared for the Cabinet Office, says these figures do not include staff or those attending outpatient appointments, meaning they are "very likely to be an underestimate".

The failure to stem the crisis has prompted a letter from the NHS England medical director, Professor Stephen Powis, instructing hospitals to "minimise" close contacts between staff, with workers told to "avoid congregating at central work stations" and take staggered staff breaks.

One senior NHS manager said: "The situation is ridiculous. It seems hard to believe, given that the whole country has been talking about social distancing for months, but it is only now that some NHS trusts are really thinking about basic measures like ensuring nurses aren't all hanging out together."

Hospitals and care home outbreaks 'leave UK stuck'Health chiefs have written to every hospital and GP practice, urging them to make changes in order to reduce levels of transmission of coronavirus within clinical settings.

From next week, all staff, patients and visitors will be required to wear masks in hospitals.

The move was prompted by fears that Britain remains stuck in lockdown because it has been unable to get a grip on outbreaks in hospitals and care homes, which leak out into local communities and increase the risk of a second wave.

While the UK recorded its first case of Covid-19 in late January and entered lockdown on March 23, an investigation by The Telegraph reveals:

It was not until May 18 that health chiefs finally issued guidance advising NHS staff on how to ensure social distancing;More than one in 10 hospital deaths from Covid-19 involved those who had been admitted without the virus, new evidence suggests;Concern from Government advisers that health workers adhering to social distancing rules on the ward are behaving differently "backstage", with the virus spread during coffee breaks and huddles;Documents showing that the disastrous decision to stop routine testing and tracing followed advice from Public Health England (PHE) that "transmission chains in closed settings such as care facilities do not have the same implications as those chains in the community";Research showing more than 40 per cent of frontline healthcare workers at one major London hospital have been infected by Covid-19 '' more than twice the level at other large European centres.The letter from Prof Powis instructs health service hospitals to take "further action to tackle infections acquired in the NHS itself".

The letter, also signed by the NHS chief nurse and operating officer, spells out the importance of "all staff adhering to social distancing (two metres) wherever possible in non-clinical areas".

It follows growing concern that coronavirus is spreading within hospitals because Britain failed to introduce basic measures, such as masks, routine staff testing and strict social distancing, which have helped to contain the virus in other parts of Europe.

The instructions follow the infection of 100 staff at Weston General Hospital, which forced its closure to new patients for two and a half weeks.

Asked about surges of infections in hospitals, Prof Powis said that, as community incidence was falling, the focus would be on "individual outbreaks" where they occur.

He said all hospital workers will wear masks regardless of whether they are on frontline duties in a bid to reduce infection rates.

"When you move out of the ward areas where PPE [personal protective equipment] is worn and into the corridors and spaces where sometimes it can be harder to manage social distancing, it's important that the use of face masks is there to further reduce attack the chance of transmission," he said.

The May 18 updating of the PHE guidance on infection control included advice about how NHS trusts should ensure that staff follow social distancing protocols. This was a full week after the Government had issued advice to other employers considering reopening their workplaces.

The PHE guidance said all staff should adhere to social distancing wherever possible, and ward practice should be reviewed to minimise close contact between groups of staff for prolonged periods and congregation at nurses' stations.

Previous advice had said "social distancing of two metres should be facilitated wherever this is possible", without making any reference to staff.

'Some hospital staff say it's more like home than home'There are growing fears that the behaviour of health and care workers '' who are often working in crowded and stressful situations '' is driving up the rate.

Members of the New and Emerging Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag), which advises the Government, are concerned that workers who observe social distancing rules in public behave differently "backstage".

One said: "There is a good bit of anecdotal evidence that the hospital staff are rigorous with infection control on Covid wards when they're doing Covid-related work. But as soon as they come off the wards, you get stories of 10 doctors clustering round an X-ray viewer without any regard to social distancing or masks or anything like that.

"People will sit round and they will have their coffee, and the language that some hospital staff used is that it's 'more like home than home'."

At a webinar late last month, senior officials expressed similar concerns. Dr Chris Moran, the deputy national strategic incident director for Covid-19, told fellow managers: "I've witnessed, and I'm sure you've all witnessed, that actually healthcare workers have not necessarily been the best at managing social distancing.

"We know when directly managing patients social distancing is impossible, that's what PPE is for, to protect both sides of the equation. But I think in the staff-only areas we could do quite a lot better in some of the places that I've visited."

Last week, Sage members warned the Lords science and technology select committee that the situation was putting the rest of the country at risk of a second wave.

Professor John Edmunds said: "These are not completely separated epidemics'... they seep back out into the community, probably largely through healthcare workers or care home workers who are picking up the virus themselves, unfortunately, bringing it home, and potentially infecting their family members and others."

The papers released by Sage suggest health officials failed to properly consider the risks of allowing the virus to spread in care homes.

While care home deaths are expected to make up at least half the fatalities caused directly or indirectly by the virus, a paper by PHE on when to abandon the policy of contact tracing said: "Transmission chains in closed settings such as care facilities do not have the same implications as those chains in the community."

The discussions came ahead of the decision to abandon routine testing and tracing of Covid-cases from March 13, leaving patterns of disease unchecked for more than two months.

Research led by University College London Hospitals (UCLH), which was co-authored by Sage member Professor Susan Michie and has yet to be peer-reviewed, has shone a light on how far the infection has spread among staff.

The study found that, of 200 frontline health workers at University College London Hospitals, 43.5 per cent had been infected with Covid-19 by early May.

This was considerably higher than researchers had expected after larger studies of healthcare workers at hospitals in Barcelona and Birmingham found that just 11 and 24 per cent respectively had been infected.

An NHS spokesman said: "Hospitals across the country have long-standing, effective mechanisms for infection prevention and control, and the NHS has regularly communicated the guidance which is set by PHE, as well as supporting trusts with data and a checklist to share learning and help limit the spread of infection.

"The Government has always been clear that social distancing is recommended for everyone."

PHE said the four UK chief medical officers, alongside PHE and the NHS, jointly issued infection prevention control guidance for health and social care workers on April 24, which reinforced existing guidance for the UK that "social distancing of two metres should be facilitated wherever this is possible".

The guidance did not suggest how this should be achieved.

Duncan Selbie, the PHE chief executive, said the Sage report on transmission of spread in care homes "highlighted that spread in the community operates differently to spread in a care home '' it does not say that transmission could not occur from a care home into the community."

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 12:28

Norwegian and British vaccine scientists have published unequivocal evidence that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, is man-made.

The authors state two conclusions: (1) the mutations that would normally be seen in the course of animal to human transmission have not occurred in SARS-CoV-2, indicating that it was fully ''pre-adapted'' for human infection and (2) SARS-CoV-2 has insertions in its protein sequence that have never been detected in nature and contribute to its infectivity and pathogenicity.

That is, SARS-CoV-2 has a receptor binding domain specifically designed for the human angiotensin converting enzyme-2 receptor (ACE2) found in lungs, kidneys, intestines and blood vessels.

In addition, SARS-CoV-2 has a furin polybasic cleavage site not found in any closely-related bat coronaviruses as well as other artificially inserted charged amino acids that enhance the virus' ability to bind to and enter human cells by forming ''salt bridges'' between the virus and the cell surface.

Those modifications are key to understanding the unique transmissibility and potency of SARS-CoV-2.

The authors explain that the COVID-19 pandemic is revealing neurological, haematological and immunological pathogenicity, which cannot be explained by infectivity via the ACE2 receptor alone.

There have been wide-ranging clinical observations such as a loss of taste and smell, sore throat, dry cough, headache and severe gastrointestinal pain with diarrhoea.

SARS-CoV-2 binding to the bitter/sweet receptors in the upper respiratory tract provides a perfect location for transmission by coughing.

According to the authors, oral and upper respiratory infection can lead to transmission to the lower respiratory tract, gastrointestinal effects and a cascade of inflammation-producing immunological responses.

The wide-spread systemic release of the virus, due to its co-receptor enhancement, could explain the multiple clinical findings on the cardiovascular system, immunological T-cells, cells associated with neuropathological conditions and, finally, the severe hypoxia seen in advanced cases of the disease.

As the authors correctly note, the development of an effective vaccine cannot be accomplished without an objective analysis of the structure of SARS-CoV-2, its mode of action and its origin.

That effort has been hampered by China's refusal to fully disclose the information it possesses, in conjunction with a politically-motivated scientific misinformation campaign by Beijing to avoid responsibility, by some Western scientists with a vested interest in the outcome and by an uninformed and servile media.

That includes the editorial decisions of scientific and medical journals, which seem to favour, overwhelmingly, the narrative that the COVID-19 pandemic is just another naturally-occurring outbreak, even to the extent of censoring opposing views.

Until now, the cover-up of the true origin of the COVID-19 pandemic has been successful.

No less than the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the United States has blindly accepted the scientific ''conventional wisdom'' promoted by the Chinese Communist Party, issuing the following April 30, 2020 statement:

''The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.''

Remarkedly, there has never been conclusive scientific evidence to support that claim, yet many appear content endorsing the naturally-occurring narrative, mostly out of ignorance or an unwillingness to accept the ugly truth.

That ugly truth is - China manufactured SARS-CoV-2 and, through a combination of hubris, incompetence and recklessness, unleashed it on the world.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL)

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Fri, 12 Jun 2020 12:12

New York leaders faced an unanticipated crisis as the new coronavirus overwhelmed the nation's largest city. Their response was marred by missed warning signs and policies that many health-care workers say put residents at greater risk and led to unnecessary deaths.

In the first few days of March, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio assured New Yorkers things were under control. On March 2, Mr. de Blasio tweeted that people should go see a movie.

Only after the disease had gripped the city's low-income neighborhoods in early March did Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio mobilize public and private hospitals to create more beds and intensive-care units. The hasty expansion that ensued, led by New York government leaders and hospital administrators, produced mistakes that helped worsen the crisis, health-care workers say.

The virus has hit New York harder than any other state, cutting through its densely populated urban neighborhoods and devastating the economy. New York state's death toll of 30,575 accounted for 7% of the world's deaths and 27% of American deaths as of June 11, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

The Wall Street Journal talked to nearly 90 front-line doctors, nurses, health-care workers, hospital administrators and government officials, and reviewed emails, legal documents and memos, to analyze what went wrong. Among the missteps they identify:

' Improper patient transfers. Some patients were too sick to have been transferred between hospitals. Squabbling between the Cuomo and de Blasio administrations contributed to an uncoordinated effort.

' Insufficient isolation protocols. Hospitals often mixed infected patients with the uninfected early on, and the virus spread to non-Covid-19 units.

' Inadequate staff planning. Hospitals added hundreds of intensive-care beds but not always enough trained staff, leading to improper treatments and overlooked patients dying alone.

' Mixed messages. State, city government and hospital officials kept shifting guidelines about when exposed and ill front-line workers should return to work.

' Overreliance on government sources for key equipment. Hospitals turned to the state and federal government for hundreds of ventilators, but many were faulty or inadequate.

' Procurement-planning gaps. While leaders focused attention on procuring ventilators, hospitals didn't always provide for adequate supplies of critical resources including oxygen, vital-signs monitors and dialysis machines.

' Incomplete staff-protection policies. Many hospitals provided staff with insufficient protective equipment and testing.

A spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio, Freddi Goldstein, and a member of Mr. Cuomo's virus task force, Gareth Rhodes, said the city and state did everything they could to increase hospital capacity and enhance social distancing once the risk became clear. ''Ultimately our hospitals withstood the pressure and our doctors and nurses delivered heroically,'' Ms. Goldstein said.

Kenneth Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, defended the state and hospitals' response as remarkable considering the ''wartime conditions,'' adding: ''We have a large, very sophisticated hospital system. It took us to the breaking point.''

One planning lapse showed up in improper patient transfers. More than 1,600 largely Covid-19 patients in two of the state's largest hospital systems were moved from overloaded hospitals to ones less hit, according to spokespeople for those systems. Some patients arrived in worse condition than when they left, sometimes without names and treatment information, said doctors and nurses at several hospitals.

Under normal protocol, only stable patients typically would be transferred, but these people came in with ''one foot in the grave,'' said Dr. David Buziashvili, who worked many shifts at Bellevue hospital, part of the city's public system, NYC Health + Hospitals. On one shift there, he was alarmed to see 10 new transfers in beds with little medical information, he said. ''That is not how it should be done, and it is not safe for the patient at all.''

A Health + Hospitals spokeswoman, Stephanie Guzmn, said the city's 11-facility hospital system provided ''the highest quality care to all New Yorkers.'' Only the least-sick patients were transferred between hospitals and their personal information was in a centralized system, she said.

Avery Cohen, a City Hall spokeswoman, blamed the state for denying a request from the city to establish a centralized hub, called a Healthcare Evacuation Call Center, that would have helped better coordinate transfers between hospitals, whether they were private or public. ''We were grasping for every tool at our disposal to save as many lives as possible.'' Ms. Cohen said. ''The state was not interested.''

Dani Lever, a spokeswoman for the governor, said that system wasn't designed for individual patient transfers. She said a state transfer system was created in late March after hundreds of open beds near harder-hit New York City hospitals had gone unnoticed.

Extraordinary outbreakThe New York state outbreak was extraordinary, and much of the disarray in its hospitals from mid-March on traced to impacts few had anticipated, including the federal government.

The impact was made worse because the city went into the pandemic less prepared than it could have been. The city hospital system has long been considered underfunded. Private hospitals in the outer boroughs, particularly Queens, had closed over the years. New York hospitals had long ignored alarms raised by the nurses' union and respiratory therapists about insufficient staffing levels, according to nurses and respiratory therapists at several city hospitals.

A contributing factor was New York leaders' delayed reaction. Early signs of the virus's arrival'--including a rise in patients with flulike symptoms visiting hospitals'--went largely uninvestigated by hospital, state and city officials. The city health department was limiting testing primarily to travelers from China, following the federal government's lead. Throughout February in calls with hospitals, the city health department played down the possibility that the virus could spread through the air or by asymptomatic people.

In early March at Health + Hospitals' Elmhurst, Dr. Chad Meyers and his colleagues in the emergency room worried they were missing community spread of Covid-19. But when they called the city's health department to get patients tested, it rejected for testing even many patients who satisfied the criteria, Dr. Meyers said, leading to ''often protracted and unproductive calls'' with the department.

Hospital, city and state officials said they were relying on the federal government for testing capability and were limited by criteria set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on whom they could test. Jason McDonald, a CDC spokesman, said: ''CDC testing guidance has always allowed for clinical discretion. So, while we set guidelines, states and health-care providers have had the flexibility to determine who to test.''

In an April interview, Health + Hospitals Chief Executive Mitchell Katz said the system prepared as best it could, given the difficulties of building additional space in already-full hospitals. In a May 15 city-council meeting, he said he should have acted quicker.

While leaders in states like California and Ohio acted quickly to contain the spread, Messrs. Cuomo and de Blasio delayed taking measures to close the state and city even as the number of cases swelled, despite warnings from doctors, nurses and schoolteachers. California issued a statewide lockdown with 1,005 cases as of March 19, while New York remained open with 5,704 cases, according to updated Johns Hopkins data.

Even after New York announced its first coronavirus case on March 1, the city health department was advising New Yorkers they were more likely to get the flu. ''I speak for the mayor also on this one'--we think we have the best health-care system on the planet,'' Mr. Cuomo said at a March 2 news conference.

Five days later, Mr. Cuomo declared a state of emergency, but medical and emergency-response experts worried the city and state administrations still weren't taking matters seriously enough.

Richard Serino, an adviser to the city and a former deputy administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told a senior aide to Mr. de Blasio early on March 13 that he was ''concerned about the cavalier attitude of the hospital community'' in the city, especially compared with other cities like Boston, according to an email. Officials with the city's emergency-management agency agreed, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Serino in April said he didn't recall the email and praised the city's response.

March 13 became a turning point after it became clear there was community spread from one man in a New York City suburb. The city went from planning for a future crisis to responding to one already there. Two days later, when Mr. de Blasio said known New York City cases had already ballooned past 300, he reluctantly closed schools. Los Angeles closed schools around the same time with about 50 cases, according to Johns Hopkins data.

By March 20, the ICU of the Northwell Health system's Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens was overflowing, and Health + Hospitals' Elmhurst had to borrow ventilators from a sister hospital to keep up, the Journal reported that month. The governor ordered most of New York be put under quarantine two days later.

On March 23, Mr. Cuomo ordered hospitals to increase capacity to treat Covid-19 by 50%, anticipating the need for 140,000 new beds. When hospital executives asked where they would get staffing, beds and protective gear, state officials told them to ''do your best,'' said a hospital executive familiar with the conversation.

Ms. Lever, the governor's spokeswoman, said the state offered every hospital access to 90,000 volunteer health-care workers and to a central inventory system for the resources and equipment they needed to fight the virus.

Once they realized how widespread the virus had become, Messrs. Cuomo and de Blasio sparred with President Trump to procure more equipment and sought out creative ways to jump-start ventilator production. Both were frank about the gravity of the illness in daily public briefings, and Mr. Cuomo's job-performance rating soared. Mr. de Blasio focused on inequities within the city, establishing a food program, providing meals at city schools and using out-of-work taxi and for-hire vehicle drivers to make deliveries to homebound residents.

'Absolute crisis'Among the missteps that would make matters worse after mid-March, health-care workers said, was that government officials and hospital administrators failed to create adequate plans to provide the needed staff as they expanded beds into operating theaters, old auditoriums and lobbies.

''Creating beds isn't the most difficult thing,'' said Northwell CEO Michael Dowling. ''The issues that get complicated with the creation of beds is the staffing. This isn't like you can put any staff on any bed at any place.''

The crisis would eventually peak at nearly 19,000 hospitalizations, but even that number overloaded the system.

As Covid-19 patients flooded into NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia, the private hospital created new pop-up ICUs. The inadequacy of staffing levels quickly became clear in one operating-room-turned-ICU, according to medical staff there and emails residents sent attending physicians. Garbage in the makeshift 80-bed unit overflowed with contaminated needles, masks and gowns. Urine and blood stains were at times found on the ground and equipment, according to the workers and emails.

''The scope of patient needs compared with the training and resources available presented an absolute crisis,'' said Julia Symborski, a nurse who worked in the new ICU. ''You can magically make an ICU appear, but you can't make staff appear immediately.''

A NewYork-Presbyterian spokeswoman, Kate Spaziani, defended the hospital system's response to the ''unprecedented challenges, many anticipated, others unexpected.''

Across New York, hospitals sometimes mismanaged the staff they did have and were slow to staff up with additional critical-care nurses and key respiratory therapists to manage the growing number of patients on ventilators, dozens of front-line workers said.

It isn't that there weren't staff available nationwide: Brian Cleary, CEO of Krucial Staffing, an agency Health + Hospitals tapped to send 4,000 medical staff during the crisis, said it could have sent in 6,000 more ''without blinking.''

A Health + Hospitals spokeswoman said the hospital began securing additional staffing in early January and Krucial ''does not encompass the full scope of the assistance we sought from outside groups.''

In some cases, available doctors and trained critical-care nurses said hospitals failed to reduce the bureaucracy to get them in quickly. Chelsea Walsh, a traveling nurse from Hawaii, said red tape from NewYork-Presbyterian'--including a request for her to take a drug test'--discouraged her from working there, so she took shifts elsewhere in the city. ''I couldn't work for a hospital in the middle of a crisis that wanted me to do paperwork before I help save someone's life. The paperwork and the administration's rules delayed a lot of care.''

While travel nurses arrived at Bellevue and other locations, ''a lot of them had no experience whatsoever,'' said Laura Jaramillo, a Bellevue ER nurse. She had to spend time training some of them while also juggling patient care.

The Health + Hospitals spokeswoman said new staffers were ''formally trained to cover the areas they were posted in.''

In the new operating-room ICU at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia, one respiratory therapist at times cared for over 80 patients a shift, according to workers and emails; seeing about 10 a shift is typical in normal times, respiratory therapists said. Overworked staffers there weren't able to suction mucus out of patients' lungs often enough, resulting in patient complications, according to the workers and emails. Intubated patients' lips were bleeding and many developed sores on their backs, called pressure ulcers, from not being turned enough.

''We are not running these ICUs safely or appropriately,'' a Columbia resident wrote in an email to the attending physicians. ''The emotional burden of working in these sci-fi-movie-gone-wrong ICUs is through the roof.''

NewYork-Presbyterian's Ms. Spaziani said the hospital system began recruiting additional staff in February and ended up with more than 2,850 volunteers and temporary front-line staff, including 150 additional respiratory therapists.

Joji Thadathil, a Health + Hospitals Elmhurst respiratory therapist, estimated that more staffing and better equipment could have saved 30% to 40% of Covid-19 patients who died there. Rio Flores, a respiratory therapist, said he documented 50 patients who died in part due to improper ventilator settings by untrained staff and state-provided ventilators with limited functionality at the NewYork-Presbyterian system's Lower Manhattan hospital. Respiratory therapy is a specialized job that requires a license and at least two years of training.

The Health + Hospitals spokeswoman said the system ''mobilized quickly to shift staff'...and equipment to the hardest hit hospitals.'' NewYork-Presbyterian's Ms. Spaziani said the hospital received no such reports about ventilator malfunctions.

The staffing shortages led to hospitals losing track at times of admitted patients. At Brookdale University Hospital Medical Center in Brooklyn, a family member called the ER to inquire about their mother in her 80s. An ER doctor said that when he looked the patient up, he realized she had died two days prior. ''This is happening daily,'' the doctor said during the peak.

Brookdale spokesman Khari Edwards said the hospital's staff ''did their absolute best to provide care to those in need during this pandemic.''

Air supplyDuring the surge's early days, Mr. Cuomo, Mr. de Blasio and hospital officials often talked publicly about the urgent need for ventilators. That procurement emphasis, some medical workers said, overshadowed staffing and other vital needs like oxygen and oxygen monitors.

Supplemental oxygen became especially important to keep Covid-19 patients breathing and off the dwindling supply of ventilators, especially once it became clear most patients on ventilators were dying. At least eight New York City hospitals experienced problems with their oxygen supplies, said some health-care workers and state officials.

It wasn't that oxygen wasn't available on the market, said some gas experts. Kimberly Menard, a spokeswoman for Pennsylvania-based Airgas, a unit of France's Air Liquide SA, said that while the company saw increased demand from hospitals, it ''has not experienced an inability to supply requested medical oxygen anywhere in the U.S.''

The problem was that the state, city and hospitals' action plans didn't quickly step up their ability to procure and dole out enough oxygen and related supplies, including vital-signs monitors to keep track of patients. At Health + Hospitals' Lincoln in the Bronx, a severe oxygen shortage hit mid-surge, said doctors there including Dr. Dasol Kang. He said some Covid-19 patients, including a woman in her 50s and a man in his late 40s, languished without portable oxygen tanks, worsening so much they needed intubation and later died.

The Health + Hospitals spokeswoman said the hospital didn't experience a shortage and never rationed oxygen. The facility nearly doubled its daily oxygen supply in response to the surge, she said.

Mr. Dowling, Northwell's CEO, said the hospital system was using some 50 times more oxygen than ever before and ran into pressure points. ''Did we at a few locations have to address an oxygen issue? Yes. Did we run out of oxygen? No.''

With scores of patients needing ICU-level care, hospitals ran short of the vital-signs machines needed to effectively monitor such patients and of the staff needed to keep track of them. Covid-19 patients gasping for breath sometimes weren't being properly monitored as they lay hooked up to oxygen, and sometimes died without anyone's knowing, said doctors and nurses from at least eight New York City hospitals.

Often this happened when patients, feeling suffocated, pulled off their oxygen masks. Jenna Smarrella, a traveling nurse from Ohio, said she had a patient in his 80s who seemed stable at Health + Hospitals' Harlem. When she came back, he had removed his mask and was dead. ''If he was on a monitor,'' she said, ''I would have known.''

The Health + Hospitals spokeswoman said it had an ample supply of monitors to track patients continuously.

Medtronic PLC, a medical-equipment company that creates respiratory-monitoring systems for hospitals, said there was no shortage of such equipment and it was able to meet increased demand from New York during that time frame. Dr¤ger Inc., another such company, said it was ''able to meet patient monitoring demand and did not encounter monitoring shortages in 2020.''

Despite emphasizing ventilators, the Cuomo and de Blasio administrations and hospital leaders didn't ensure a supply of quality equipment, health-care workers said. A big surprise to doctors and nurses was the number of shoddy ventilators, called LTVs, distributed by the state from its own stockpile and by both the state and city from the federal government's reserve.

Several health-care workers, including Mr. Thadathil, the Elmhurst respiratory therapist, and Dr. Meyers, the ER physician, said the government ventilators were old and many patients worsened on them, leading to collapsed lungs and other complications. Because LTV alarms often rang, ''it's impossible to know if one of those vents actually is trying to indicate something dangerous is happening,'' Dr. Meyers said.

The Health + Hospitals spokeswoman said many state ventilators ''were not 'ready to go' when they came.'' She said the system did additional maintenance before they could be used on patients.

Ms. Lever, the governor's spokeswoman, said the state tested every ventilator before sending them to hospitals and received no complaints about faulty ventilators.

The government and hospital action plans also failed to procure enough equipment including IV pumps that control medicine flow, and dialysis machines'--even though, by early March, it was evident from Chinese data that kidney failure was a main issue Covid-19 patients face.

At Health + Hospitals Lincoln's ICU during the first two weeks of April, Dr. Donya Bani Hani said she saw a Covid-19 patient die every day or two because of complications dialysis might have prevented though some were worsening and might have died anyway. At Bellevue's ICUs, at least 10 patients died because they couldn't get dialysis in time, a doctor there said. Another physician there, Dr. Buziashvili, said he saw a patient aged in the 50s die waiting in line for a machine. Still, he said ''Bellevue did well to adapt and restructure appropriately as we gained more knowledge on the virus.''

The system's spokeswoman said no patient died due to lack of dialysis treatment.

Transfer squabbleThe discord between the Cuomo and de Blasio administrations, which have a long history of conflict, complicated patient transfers.

When New York City's Office of Emergency Management realized massive mobilization would be needed to coordinate transferring hundreds of Covid-19 patients from overwhelmed hospitals, the mayor's administration sought the state's help to activate a centralized evacuation hub previously used for emergencies like superstorm Sandy, according to city officials.

Twice, the state's department of health denied the request, the officials said. When the state gave the green light on March 26, the hub was used to transport patients only to Javits Center and the USNS Comfort Navy ship, the officials said'--facilities set up with the federal government that ended up disappointing hospital executives because they weren't initially built for critical care or to take Covid-19 patients and eventually took only mild to moderately ill Covid patients.

Ms. Lever, the spokeswoman for the governor, said that throughout March, the city publicly made clear its preference was to handle patient transfers on its own or not move patients at all.

After state officials found hundreds of open hospital beds were going unnoticed while other hospitals were overrun, Mr. Cuomo announced a state-run program on March 30 to coordinate beds, equipment and staff. An ad hoc team of agency officials and top aides to Mr. Cuomo put together a mapping tool and began calling facilities that were close to capacity and helping coordinate transfers, said Jim Malatras, the president of SUNY Empire State College who has been advising Mr. Cuomo's pandemic response.

But the system didn't supervise the transfer of medical records about patients or follow up on their conditions once they were moved, he said. ''You were trying to manage volume,'' Mr. Malatras said, ''not necessarily the individual patient need.''

State officials said the transfer system ultimately helped save lives, such as when oxygen-tank lines began to freeze because they were overloaded with ventilators at Flushing Hospital Medical Center and Jamaica Hospital Medical Center. The state was able to coordinate 26 transfers within an hour to hospitals in the city and upstate. A spokesman for the hospitals confirmed the episode but declined to comment further.

The state didn't coordinate transfers inside hospital systems, where inadequate coordination made matters worse for some Covid-19 patients. In Health + Hospitals Bellevue's emergency room, ambulances hauled in about 30 transfers nearly every day for a few weeks during the surge from hospitals like the system's Elmhurst, Lincoln and Woodhull. Often, the patients arrived in critical condition'--something unusual in normal times'--several nurses and doctors at Bellevue said. Some of those died soon after arriving.

One April evening, ER nurse George Good had just toe-tagged a corpse when he saw a newly transferred man in his mid-60s roll in with a breathing tube. He was ''hanging onto life by a thread,'' Mr. Good said, then his heart rate started to plummet: 63, 43, 32, nothing. Mr. Good said he saw some other transfers die soon after arriving in the ER. ''It was just something we kind of had to deal with.''

Three transfers from Health + Hospitals' Woodhull in Brooklyn came in one night ''coding'' and in need of resuscitation within 30 minutes of getting there, another Bellevue doctor said. All three died. Under normal protocol, patients on the verge of death are rarely transferred.

Dr. Buziashvili at Bellevue was disturbed that at times the transfers lacked records of prior treatment'--records that normally are a standard part of patient transfer. He had three or four ''patient unknowns,'' arriving with no name. In one case, a family member came in to identify the patient.

Health + Hospitals said it transferred about 850 patients during the crisis but declined to disclose how many transfers survived. ''Covid patients were generally unstable, and their conditions changed rapidly regardless of area of care or transport,'' the system's spokeswoman said.

Cross-infectionsAs New York lurched into action in mid-March, shifting state, city and hospital policies sometimes put patients and medical staff at risk. Early on, most hospitals told staff to isolate suspected Covid-19 patients in rooms with negative air pressure to limit spread.

But as patients flooded in, hospitals including Maimonides Medical Center, Health + Hospitals' Bellevue and Harlem, and Northwell's Staten Island University Hospital housed suspected Covid-19 patients together, sometimes side-by-side or in the same vicinity as confirmed Covid-19 patients, health-care workers there said. Sick patients likely infected some neighbors in the days it sometimes took to get test results, they said.

Hospital administrators in February had said they had enough isolation rooms to deal with the crisis. When the scope became clearer in mid-March, health-care workers said, government and hospital leaders could have set up more negative-pressure areas with proper ventilation or field hospitals to take in and quickly isolate patients suspected of having Covid-19.

The Health + Hospitals, Northwell and Maimonides spokespeople said they made every effort to isolate suspected Covid-19 patients based on symptoms but were thrown curveballs as patients presented with nontypical symptoms and space became constrained. Health + Hospitals' CEO, Dr. Katz, said he believed a crowded hospital was preferable to a field hospital: ''I'd rather have patients in hallways in a hospital than have them be at an armory.''

It didn't help that New York City, state government and hospital officials, often relying on CDC guidance, kept shifting guidelines about when sick and exposed front-line workers should return to work'--and didn't plan for thorough staff testing. Initially, the government and hospital officials recommended health-care workers with high-risk exposures quarantine for 14 days.

Then the city on March 17 changed its guidance, recommending hospitals tell such workers they could keep working so long as they didn't show symptoms. Montefiore Medical Center passed that guidance along to workers in a March 18 memo. Some health-care workers there said they took that as an instruction to stay on the job.

The city's guidance on testing further confused matters: ''DO NOT TEST asymptomatic and/or exposed'' workers, read a March 20 city memo to hospitals, citing supply shortages.

The state on March 28 said workers who tested positive could return after seven days, so long as they were fever-free for 72 hours and their symptoms had improved. Hospitals didn't always follow the state's guideline, sometimes telling ill workers to return early, according to affidavits filed by nurses in a union lawsuit against the state health department.

A New York County Supreme Court judge on May 28 dismissed the nurses' union's suit against the health department, saying it was beyond judicial review.

Lincoln's Dr. Kang couldn't find a face shield before running in to help intubate a patient who was crashing. He soon tested positive and left work in late March. After two weeks, he said, hospital administrators told him to return if he didn't have severe symptoms. He was still coughing and couldn't smell anything but came back. Dr. Kang said he was shocked he wasn't retested although tests were available at the time.

Spokespeople for hospitals including Health + Hospitals said they followed state, city and federal guidelines for their return-to-work policies. The CDC on March 17 was advising that confirmed Covid-positive health-care workers shouldn't return to work until they received a negative test and their symptoms had improved, according to a notice at the time from the Greater New York Hospital Association. On April 30, the CDC updated its guidance to say Covid-positive workers didn't necessarily need a negative test to return and could wait 10 days after symptoms first appeared and 72 hours after they abated.

PPE paucityHospital officials said that, as early as January, they started to see signs there was a world-wide shortage of personal protective equipment, or PPE.

But before the mid-March surge, many New York government and hospital leaders assured citizens there was enough PPE. Montefiore CEO Philip Ozuah said in a Feb. 7 memo to employees about coronavirus that ''we are well prepared to meet this clinical challenge.'' A Montefiore spokeswoman, Elizabeth Kaledin, said: ''At the time of this memo, Montefiore was making all efforts to acquire PPE.''

Many hospital administrators advised staffers in the first week of the mid-March surge that a thin surgical mask was enough to protect them from droplets produced by coughs. Later, they were told to wear the more robust N95 masks. Then the CDC said that, in a shortage, a covering like a bandanna could suffice.

In televised conferences starting in late March, Mr. Cuomo repeatedly said New York had enough protective gear, based on assurances he was hearing from hospitals.

But by then it was clear inside some hospital systems that efforts to procure PPE had fallen short, resulting in administrators scrambling mid-crisis. In mid-April, after hearing from distressed front-line workers, state officials realized some hospital supervisors and administrations were holding on to masks even when there were enough to go around, a state official said.

The governor's office in mid-April directed hospitals to give a new N95 mask daily if a worker asked. That didn't universally happen, said the nurses' union, which filed the suit against the state's health department, saying it failed to ''fulfill its mandate to protect the health of the public'' and neglected to enforce guidelines around protective gear at hospitals.

A state health-department spokesman, Gary Holmes, said: ''Throughout this crisis we worked with our nurses and other front line heroes to make sure they had the proper equipment they needed amidst a world-wide shortage, and we were in constant contact with both union and hospitals to accomplish this.''

Some workers said hospitals gave no clear policies on when N95 masks were considered soiled, and sometimes they only found out too late. Mikhail Migirov, a respiratory therapist at NewYork Presbyterian-Lower Manhattan, discovered his N95 was no longer fitting during an intubation when he was able to smell the patient's breath. ''Oh my God,'' he said he thought. He later tested positive for Covid-19.

NewYork-Presbyterian said staff were instructed to test the seals on their masks and request new masks if they were no longer safe.

Scott Amrhein, a trade-association executive who helped procure PPE for nursing-home workers, became so distraught about the shortage of protective gear, among other issues nursing homes faced, that he died by suicide March 30, his son said. His father, he said, felt government officials had ignored him and the situation was getting worse for nursing homes, which were also now taking in Covid patients from overloaded hospitals.

Mr. Amrhein was fielding hundreds of calls daily in late March from nursing homes and hadn't slept in weeks, said his son, Justin Amrhein. In emails to his friends and colleagues, the father said he didn't know how to slow the building disaster.

''It is a travesty,'' the elder Mr. Amrhein wrote, ''that our society and our leaders fail continuously'--as now'--to elevate, value and respect that critical work.''

'--Joe Palazzolo, Melanie Grayce West, Jimmy Vielkind and Paul Berger contributed to this article.

Write to Shalini Ramachandran at shalini.ramachandran@wsj.com, Laura Kusisto at laura.kusisto@wsj.com and Katie Honan at Katie.Honan@wsj.com

Link to Article

Archived Version

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 13:22

A friend texted me a short message this morning. ''You called it!'' That's because just a few days after I said the COVID-19 vaccine would be used to target black people with a depopulation ''kill switch'' injection, Melinda Gates came right out and stated that the new vaccines should be administered with a priority preference for ''people of color.'' (See source below.)

Right from the start, it's a bigoted assertion. If vaccines are safe and effective, then Melinda Gates is essentially saying, ''white lives don't matter.'' But if vaccines are risky and dangerous '-- which this new covid-19 vaccine is almost certain to be '-- she's essentially saying it's okay to run medical experiments on black Americans to find out what happens.

Black people are almost always the guinea pigs for the medical experiments of the globalists, of course. You don't even have to look very hard to see the history of government-backed Big Pharma and vaccine experiments on black soldiers, black prisoners and black civilians, both in the United States as well as across Africa.

Seeing the very same people who promote global depopulation '-- Bill and Melinda Gates '-- now suddenly urging COVID-19 vaccine ''equality'' efforts to make sure all the black people are vaccinated first is raising eyebrows across black America. Most notably among Nation of Islam followers who are arguably more aware than anyone else about how white, rich globalists have been waging a war of genocide against black people for at least three generations.

The clock is ticking. Black people have no more than 18 months before they will be hunted down with ''contact tracing'' enforcers and forcibly vaccinated with a dangerous, experimental coronavirus vaccine that bypassed nearly all the usual safety protocols typically required by the FDA.

'--

First, they're coming for the doctors'... and then blacksIn an interview published by TIME.com, Melinda Gates says that health care workers (i.e. doctors) should all be vaccinated first. This will ensure the deaths of many doctors and nurses who would normally respond to a pandemic, making sure that the next wave of the depopulation bioweapon is highly successful.

After the doctors are vaccinated, they're coming for the blacks next. As Melinda Gates explains, ''In the U.S., that would be black people next, quite honestly, and many other people of color. They are having disproportionate effects from COVID-19.''

Remember, these are the same black people who are being openly encouraged to abandon all precautions and join the Black Lives Matter protests, so let's drop any pretext that the ''authorities'' care about black people. They're practically telling all people of color to run out and get infected as quickly as possible.

That wave of post-protest infections, of course, will justify the mass vaccination of black people in the name of ''social justice.'' It will all be marketed to the black community as a special bonus treatment, a kind of ''black privilege'' to get you infected with the vaccine ahead of whites.

The media, of course, will never tell black Americans that Bill Gates' polio vaccines have paralyzed half a million children in India.

The media is already rolling out the narrative that will demand black people line up to be vaccinated firstWe're already seeing the genocidal mainstream media rolling out an absurd propaganda campaign right now that claims covid-19 is ''racist.'' The disproportionate number of black deaths from covid-19 is being heavily pushed as a pretext to demand that black people get the vaccines first. What black Americans aren't being told, of course, it that many black people will be forced to take the covid-19 vaccine against their will.

America's inner cities will become echoes of Tuskegee as black Americans are threatened with being dragged away to FEMA quarantine camps if they don't submit to the state's demands that they be injected with the new experimental vaccine.

Just yesterday, I interviewed a resident of California who was stalked by a ''contract tracer'' who came to her house, peeked through her windows and demanded she submit to a highly invasive covid-19 contact tracing surveillance operation. She has never even been tested for, or diagnosed with, covid-19. This door-to-door surveillance operation is being beta tested in California and will soon be rolled out across the entire country. What it means is that all across the black-dominated inner cities of Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Baltimore, Atlanta and every other city, black Americans will be tracked and surveiled by vaccine-toting ''health care'' enforcers who will flag vaccine resisters as ''dissidents'' to be hauled away to FEMA quarantine camps.

Make no mistake: This is coming. This is why I've repeatedly urged black Americans to ''know your real enemy.'' It's not the racist white cop nearly as much as it's the genocidal white lab-coat wearing mother f##kers who run the vaccine industry and want you dead.

'--

This is why every black American needs to own a gun, where it is legal to do so. The rich, white globalists are coming for you, and they're on a mission of genocide. Instead of putting a knee on your neck, they're going to put a needle in your arm, and that needle will contain specific mRNA protein synthesis instructions that will hijack your body's cells and cause your body to declare war on itself, resulting in potentially deadly levels of inflammation and autoimmune disorders.

When the vaccine side effects roll in, the media will cover it all up. The tech giants will censor anyone who tells the truth. Black Americans will die in numbers that will dwarf all the police brutality statistics combined, and by the time the truth comes out, the vaccine industry will claim they made an honest mistake and have now ''fixed the problem.'' They will have complete legal immunity, too, making sure they can never be sued by the families of the victims they have destroyed.

Just yesterday, the WHO announced something that completely eliminated any rationale for vaccinesAll of this comes on the heels of the WHO announcing just yesterday that there's virtually no spread of the coronavirus from asymptomatic carriers. Yet the very existence of asymptomatic carriers was the logical basis for demanding masks, lockdowns, social distancing and rapid vaccines. Without asymptomatic carriers, it means that only people who show obvious symptoms can spread the coronavirus, and that makes them very easy to spot and avoid (or isolate).

In other words, vaccines aren't even necessary anymore, according to the WHO's data. So why the mad rush to manufacture them and make them mandatory for ''people of color'' when the actual risk of asymptomatic transmission is very close to zero?

And if authorities would simply tell black Americans to take vitamin D and zinc, the number of blacks being killed by covid-19 would plummet to something approaching zero, at least for those who aren't already suffering from chronic comorbidity factors.

The bottom line is that rich, white globalists are lining up the world for a genocidal vaccine ''kill switch,'' and they've set up the full narrative to target blacks first. They're going to mass murder black people while pretending that ''Black Lives Matter.''

And I'm a white guy revealing all this, by the way, so the media can't easily dismiss this as merely a ''black conspiracy.'' Nope, it's actually genocidal reality, and it falls in line with the whole history of efforts to cull black people through infertility chemicals, infertility vaccines, abortion clinics, wars and now vaccines.

Get the truth by reading Vaccines.news and watching videos on Brighteon.com, the free speech alternative to YouTu

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Jun. 13, 2020 | 08:02 PM

US President Donald Trump salutes during the 2020 United States Military Academy Graduation Ceremony at West Point, New York, US, June 13, 2020. REUTERS/Mike Segar

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SHARE EASILY: https://tinyurl.com/Lift-All-Voices

Re-Published with Permission. Visit Ben at https://grrrgraphics.com/.

Ben Garrison @ Phi Beta Iota

Text including full names, and open letter, below the fold.

Lift Every Voice and Sing is widely viewed as the single most powerful black song in favor of unity.

Dr. Cynthia McKinney, uniquely a former six-term Congresswoman from Georgia as a Democrat and also a Green Party presidential nominee, is one of the authentic Black leaders of America who are waiting for The President to use the power of his office to unleash opportunities for Black patriots who love America and want equal access to political office, to capital markets, to workplace dignity, and to the President of the United States of America.

This cartoon celebrates all authentic black leaders, all but one '' JR Valrey '-- ignored by the White House, and a handful of selected white voices also not heard by the White House. Each of these leaders asserts they had nothing to do with the protests; they condemn the protests that seek to divide black patriots from white patriots in support of globalization and its agenda; and they stand ready to lift their voices in song for a united America, provided President Donald Trump accepts their offer of support in formulating an Executive Order '' ideally to be issued on 19 June 2020, the 19th of June being a date of great significance to all black Americans '' that pardons both Native American and Black Panther leaders still in jail for defending their communities from government assault; creates a National Police Safety Board (NPSB) able to respond to police incidents with the same degree of speed and competence displayed by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB); and simultaneously declares that the police will be de-militarized, subject to the rule of law when they abuse their armed force; and that they will no longer receive training from foreign powers.

On the organ, Louis Farrakhan, Nation of Islam.

In the choir to the left, Kalonji Changa, How to Build a People's Army; Omali Yeshitela, founder of Uhuru Movement; Marianne Williamson former Democratic presidential candidate, author, The Politics of Love; and Reverend Bill Owens, President of the Coalition of African American Pastors, over 7,000 in number.

In the choir to the right, Killer Mike, American rapper, songwriters, actor, activist; JR Valrey, advocacy journalist, ''Minister of Information'' Block Report Web; Ajamu Baraka, co-founder US Human Rights Network, Green Party; Glen Ford, co-founder Black Agenda Report; Philip Smith, co-founder National African American Gun Association; Kathleen Neal Cleaver, JD, professor of law, Black Power, Black Panther; Pastor Randy Short, PhD, historian, activist; Jo Jorgensen, Libertarian candidate for President 2020.

At the lectern, Cynthia McKinney, PhD, Democratic Congresswoman (GA), Green Party candidate for President, human rights activist, professor of business and co-founder #UNRIG.

On either side of the group, Don Debar, producer and host of Community Public Radio, and Paul Fuller, jazz bassist, composer, producer.

Our President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump need no introduction.

An Open Letter to the President from Cynthia McKinney, as well as a copy of the letter from the Black Panthers to Black Hip-Hop artists, can be seen at https://tinyurl.com/Lift-All-Voices.

We join our brothers and sisters in Christ in calling for every American to lift their voices in song and prayer, toward unity with integrity, toward uniting all patriots black, white, and other. #MAGA!

Sponsored by Robert David Steele, founder, #UNRIG, author Trump Revolution Series.

Open Letter to the PresidentDoing Nothing Is Not An Option

June 11, 2020

Mr. President:

I pen this note to you at a time of great peril for our country. The militarization of the police, and their training by foreign powers, has created a culture of intolerance and intimidation far removed from community-oriented policing. It is an inescapable fact that, for many, the police are to be feared: as Matt Taibbi notes in his book, The Divide, the police, the FBI, and the Department of Justice all give the rich a free pass because the rich have an infinite supply of lawyers and instead, law enforcement goes after poor people. Blacks are being arrested, at midnight, standing alone in front of their homes, for the crime of ''blocking pedestrian traffic.''

As I was about to send this, I received a copy of a brilliant, authentic letter from Dr. Kathleen Cleaver and other original Black Panther Party members, addressed to Black (Hip-Hop) artists, some of whom have, in the past, been surveilled by elements of the US government and local police departments in a COINTELPRO redux. Their letter also makes reference to past US government ''search and destroy'' missions against the Black community by the FBI with abuses far greater than the recent FBI abuses against you and your campaign staff.

Within your Constitutional powers rests the ability to fashion a solution that ''goes big,'' is informed by principles of restorative justice, and has the potential to end criminal police behavior and prosecutorial misconduct, as we witnessed in recent cases in Minnesota and Georgia.

If you were to issue an Executive Order on June 19, 2020, that pardons both Native American and Black Panther leaders still in jail for defending their communities from government assault; and also create a National Police Safety Board (NPSB) able to respond to police incidents with the same degree of speed and competence displayed by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB); and simultaneously declare that the police will be de-militarized, subject to the rule of law when they abuse their armed force, and that they will no longer receive training from foreign powers, I believe you will find a surge of support from previously-apathetic communities that did not vote in 2016.

Sincerely,Cynthia Ann McKinney, PhD

Open Letter from the Original Black Panther Party Members to Black (Hip-Hop) Artist Who Have an Interest in Our Community

(TI, KILLER MIKE, CARDI B, KANYE, JZ, P-DIDDY, LUDACRIS, 50 CENTS and others)

Greetings and Solidarity to each of you. In recognition of your individual voice, influence, and cultural following among current generations of Black people/Africans in the Diaspora and on the continent, we salute you.

While we only know you from the public domain, we know that many of you come from backgrounds where you faced poverty, police brutality, lack of healthcare and other forms of oppression like most Black people. We all recognize that we are in a watershed period of economic and government failure, a pandemic and now a resistance movement from which things will never emerge the same.

What we all do in this period will directly impact the fortunes, survival and freedom dreams of Black People, and others around the world who suffer from the same oppression. Whether its South American Favelas, South African Shanty Towns, Palestinian territories or the Black urban ghettoes of racist America, capitalism and white supremacy has turned the entire world into a ghetto for the profits of a few. So, we should pay attention to each other, because here, in the heart of racist America we are all we have, and along with our true allies, are truly all we need.

Individually we who write this letter are former members of the original Black Panther Party, co-founded in 1966 by the late Huey P. Newton, and Bobby Seal in Oakland, California. We were targets of the FBI's infamous Counter Intelligence Program (codename COINTELPRO) which killed many of our comrades, including Fred Hampton, Mark Clark and numerous other Panthers and revolutionary freedom fighters. We are veterans of government search and destroy missions that forced our beloved Comrade Assata Shakur into exile. We are former Black Political Prisoners who spent decades in U.S. prisons, like our comrades Sundiata Acoli, Jalil Muntaqim and Mumia Abdul-Jamal who are still locked down today. In short, we were on the front line of government efforts to kill and destroy the Black radical movements for civil/human rights including the right to self-determination.

Some of us were also racist law enforcement's worst nightmare, armed combatants in the revolutionary Black underground, the Black Liberation Army (BLA). Much of our history in our people's struggle has been kept away from you and seemingly unavailable to your generation as you reinvent what was done in the past. Our people's enemies haven't changed, circumstances and conditions have. History never repeats itself '' but it damn sure can rhyme.

The question is where do we, Black people, oppressed peoples, go from here? What is to be done? Make no mistake, we are still at war. A war that began when, as Malcolm said, ''Plymouth Rock landed on us'' and it has continued to this day unabated.

It is our duty as revolutionary freedom fighters to pass on lessons, wisdom, knowledge and experiences to the next generation of freedom fighters, cultural workers and activists. In that manner, an oppressed people can resist domination from one generation to the next without reinventing failures, pitfalls, or the mistakes of the previous generation. It is our enemy's job to prevent this, and isolate one generation from the other. It is their duty to denigrate the history of militant and radical traditions and burnish the history of integrationist who think we can simply vote our way out of this problem. It is for this reason that we have stepped forward at this neo-fascist moment in history driven by the current crisis of capitalist culture, an ongoing pandemic and the now renewed attention and massive demonstrations brought on by ongoing police murders in our community.

We have chosen to focus this letter on you because our enemies constantly target you to help ''calm'' the people down. They hope your new class status will outweigh your racial and class analysis. You have a chance to prove them wrong and with your resources and influence you can be crucial to the collective survival of our people. Tattoos, expensive cars and private jets don't inoculate anyone from a disease and don't render you bullet proof. We have to collectively provide for our own human agency and not delude ourselves into thinking it's safer to integrate into a maligned system of greed and dehumanization.

Some may say we as Panther veterans are not the Black people you should be seen talking to. Niggas should know their place we've been told and this is one reason that powerless Black folks have sports figures, actors, musicians and brought-off politicians as their public opinion makers. The voices of the disenfranchised is only heard when they rage against the machine that has ground down their lives.

We have all been encouraged by the energy of the Black masses and our allies in protesting the murder of George Floyd, but as each of you are well aware the murder and brutality visited upon our people is nothing aberrational or new. The butchering, torture, and dehumanization of Black people extends back to the days of bullwhips, castrations and mass rape on the plantations of America's European ''founding fathers'' and continues to this day. This is the legacy from which modern law enforcement in America derived its overarching purpose, the protection of property and wealth, not people '-- especially not Black people. No amount of training, social sensitivity, counseling, or smaller police forces will change the current impact of this history on law enforcement. Only our control of public safety in our communities will break this historical context for modern law enforcement. This begins with decentralization of the police, and community control of public safety.

This season of political struggle is indeed about the ''Ballot and the Bullet.'' To organize the former, (ballot) all progressive and radical forces in America need to come together in a United Front Against Fascism and the militarized police state. This is what the BPP did at the height of the tumultuous sixties, resulting in delaying the outright consolidation of right-wing racist takeover of American foreign and domestic policy.

We must also look beyond solutions that are strictly based on legislative reform, voting, or individual capitalist enterprises. Black folks must survive institutional racist paradigms of power and exercise political and social self-determinant power. The public platforms each of you have can go a long way in creating this tactical and strategic organizing vision. With this in mind we ask you who have a certain sway over the attitudes and minds of today's Black youth to do the following.

Let's meet and talk through a strategy based on liberating Black People and our respective roles.Help create new cooperative enterprises where ownership is shared and its directed towards the needs of our people not consumerist enterprises.Support radical and revolutionary Black organizations that have a history of accomplishment and institution building in our community that is independent of major corporate donations, government grants or foundation foundingThrough your media reach support the current rebellion in the streets and mass organizing for radical changeIf you are opposed to property destruction then call for massive demonstrations at key government and private instillations and give free concerts to ensure large numbers of people come outWork with us and others to create and fund an independent Black political platform and candidates with radical demands for Black control and redistribution of this country's wealth and reparations.Let us create a Black Red Cross where we become our own first responders in times of natural or man-made disasters/pandemics.Fight for the demilitarization and the decentralization of the police where the local community through local boards control the hiring, firing and disciplining of police in their community.Let us create a system of not only a new policing paradigm but one where we create a community restorative justice and end the prison industrial complex.These are just some of the things you/we can do to create a united Black Liberation Front to challenge our oppressive conditions in the united states and erase the class divide between the overwhelming majority of our people and those few like yours who have some wealth and influence. This is all our opportunity to do what's best for our people and be on the right side of history.

Original Black Panthers Members,

KATHLEEN CLEAVER, SEKOU ODINGA, CLEO SILVERS, JAMAL JOSEPH, YASMEEN MAJID, VICTOR HOUSTON, PAULA PEEBLES, BILAL SUNNI ALI, JIHAD MUMIT, DHORUBA BIN-WAHAD. Supported by Community Movement Builders.

Any media inquires (on letter immediately above) please contact Kamau Franklin at kamaufranklin@gmail.com

RELATED:

Trump Triumph Part II: $100 Trillion Stolen by Wall Street Recoverable '-- Robert Steele's Open Letter to the President

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 14:42

(C) Reuters/Stephanie Keith/Tami Chappell/Brian Snyder

The CDC has warned that the Covid-19 pandemic is far from over and that states may be forced to reintroduce lockdowns -

just as President Trump prepares to resume his campaign rallies after weeks of crowded protests nationwide. Health agency's deputy director for infectious diseases, Jay Butler, told reporters Friday:

"If cases begin to go up again, particularly if they go up dramatically, it's important to recognize that more mitigation efforts such as what were implemented back in March may be needed again. Every activity that involves interacting with others has some degree of risk right now... It's important to remember the situation is unprecedented and the pandemic is ongoing." With dozens of localities cautiously lifting sweeping lockdown policies imposed in March to contain the virus, some states have already seen a resurgence in cases and hospitalizations, among them North Carolina, Arizona and Texas.

The spike comes on the heels of packed street protests over police brutality in hundreds of American cities, seeing thousands of demonstrators gather in close proximity since late May, disregarding social distancing guidelines.

Although CDC Director Robert Redfield issued a delayed warning last week that the protests could be a "seeding event" for Covid-19, mainstream press coverage of the demonstrations largely ignored the virus threat, despite overwhelmingly negative and hectoring treatment of anti-lockdown protests just months prior.

But as US President Donald Trump prepares to hold his own campaign rally, the first since the pandemic took hold in the country, the CDC has issued a new guidance for mass gatherings, "strongly" encouraging participants to don masks and take other precautions. Pressed by reporters to specify whether the advice applied to political rallies, presumably with the president in mind, Butler would only say that the recommendations are "not commands."

The organizers of the Trump rally, set for Tulsa, Oklahoma next week,

have asked attendees to sign a waiver acknowledging that "an inherent risk of exposure to Covid-19 exists in any public place where people are present" and to agree not to hold the campaign liable for any "illness or injury" that may result. In stark contrast to the George Floyd protests,

the upcoming rally has already generated a spate of negative headlines, suggesting the event will expose thousands to the virus and drive a surge in cases.The US topped

2 million cases of the coronavirus earlier this week, counting more than 114,000 fatalities in total since the outbreak began, with Butler warning the figure could soar to 130,000 by July. Worldwide, the virus has infected some 7.6 million people and killed over 425,000. While some areas in the US, Europe and Asia have seen a downward trend in cases and deaths, the pathogen is rapidly spreading through South America, which the World Health Organization has dubbed the world's next

major epicenter for the illness.

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In January 2015, food sales at restaurants overtook those at grocery stores for the first time. Most thought this marked a permanent shift in the American meal.

Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, that trend took a U-turn. Restaurant revenue cratered, while shoppers emptied grocery shelves stocking up on food to cook at home. And with sales of pantry items soaring, shoppers found themselves reaching for an old reliable.

In April, sales of Kraft macaroni and cheese were up 27% from the same time last year. General Mills, the maker of Annie's mac and cheese, has seen a similar bump.

The cheap, boxed meal has long been a poster child for processed food. While it's often dismissed as stuff for kids, a lot of grownups secretly savor it. As I tell my own students, we love to bad mouth processed foods'--usually while our mouths are full of it. It's also played an important role in kitchen science, wars and women's liberation.

Solving the Age-Old Problem of Spoiled CheesePeople have eaten pasta and cheese together for hundreds of years. Clifford Wright, the doyen of Mediterranean food history, says the first written recipe for macaroni and cheese was created in the court of the king of Naples in the 13th century, while the first reference in an English language cookbook likely appeared in Elizabeth Raffald's 1769 book ''The Experienced English Housekeeper.''

Neopolitans eating macaroni, which they often dressed with Parmesan cheese and a little salt. (Universal History Archive / Getty Images)An internet search for macaroni and cheese recipes will turn up over 5 million hits, but many still prefer to get theirs in a box'--the kind with pasta that comes in shapes ranging from shells to Pokemon characters, accompanied by a packet of powdered cheese sauce.

Boxed macaroni and cheese was one outcome of the quest for ways to keep cheese longer. Some cheese gets better as it ages'--a well-aged cheddar is one of life's delights'--but once most cheeses hit their prime, they tend to quickly go bad. Before household refrigeration became common, many retailers wouldn't even stock cheese in the summer because it spoiled so quickly.

Processed cheese solved this age-old problem.

Credit for inventing processed cheese should go to a pair of Swiss food chemists named Walter Gerber and Fritz Stettler who, in 1913, were looking for a way to improve the shelf life of Emmenthaler cheese using sodium citrate. When they heated up the treated cheese, they noticed it melted better as well. But Chicago cheese salesman James L. Kraft was awarded the first patent for processed cheese in 1916.

Kraft understood the spoilage problem and had tried various solutions to it. He tried putting it tin foil packages, sealing it in jars, even canning it. But none of these solutions caught on with the public.

He eventually realized that the same bacteria that made cheese age nicely was also the bacteria that ultimately caused it to go bad. So he took some cheddar cheese scraps, heated them to kill the bacteria, ground them up with some sodium phosphate as an emulsifier and voila'--Kraft processed cheese was born.

These early processed cheeses were similar to the processed American cheese slices we see in the stores today, though wrapping slices individually didn't happen for another 40 years. Kraft's first big customer was the U.S. Army, which bought more than 6 million pounds of the stuff to feed soldiers in World War I. A number of variations appeared in the following years, including Velveeta and Cheez Whiz.

The product was a hit, but Kraft wanted to find more ways to sell processed cheese, and eventually came up with the idea to make a powdered base. The packet in the box of macaroni and cheese is essentially a cheese sauce that has been partially defatted and dehydrated. When you make it, you're adding back the fat and the liquid when you mix in the milk and butter.

From the start, Kraft was selling convenience, as with this 1975 ad. (Jamie on Flickr under CC BY-NC 2.0)In 1937, Kraft debuted its boxed macaroni and cheese, which it sold for 19 cents and contained four servings. Its slogan was ''make a meal for four in nine minutes,'' and the product got a big lift with American consumers during World War II because you could get two boxes and spend only one ration point. With meat hard to come by, the cheap main dish substitute was a hit.

When Natural Was NastyToday, food that's simple, pure and natural is all the craze, while disdain for processed foods is practically a credo among sophisticated consumers.

But when Kraft's different forms of processed cheese came out, they found widespread acceptance despite their strange textures. The fact that it wasn't natural didn't seem to bother consumers at all. In fact, as international food historian Rachel Laudan has noted, back then, ''natural was something quite nasty.'' She describes fresh milk as warm and ''unmistakably a bodily secretion.'' Throughout the history of cookery, most recipes aimed to transform an unappetizing raw product into something delightful and delectable.

So for most consumers, processed foods were a godsend. They kept well, tended to be easily digestible and, most importantly, they tasted good. Many of them could be easily prepared, freeing women from spending entire days cooking and giving them more time to pursue professions and avocations.

In some ways, processed foods were also healthier. They could be fortified with vitamins and minerals, and, in an era before everyone had access to mechanical refrigeration, the fact that they kept well meant consumers were less likely to contract diseases from spoiled, rotten foods. Pasteurization of dairy products virtually eliminated diseases like undulant fever, while foods processed and canned in large factories were less likely to harbor food-borne illnesses that could crop up due to faulty or improperly sanitized equipment used by home canners.

Given today's marketing emphasis on the fresh, local and natural, one might think that processed foods are going the way of the dinosaur. But this isn't the case. Almost all the processed foods invented in the 20th century are still being produced in one form or another. While you may not see much Tang on American shelves, it's hugely popular in the Middle East and Central and South America.

And mac and cheese'--with roughly 7 million boxes of Kraft's version sold each week'--continues to be devoured in good times and bad. Whether it recalls happier, simpler times or feeds a family on a shoestring budget, the Day-Glo orange dinner is here to stay.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Jeffrey Miller is an associate professor and program coordinator of Hospitality Management at Colorado Statue University.

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450,544 views | | Jun 10, 2020, 08:18pm EDT

Billy Bambrough Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I write about how bitcoin, crypto and blockchain can change the world.

Bitcoin has struggled to find support in the U.S. government, with president Donald Trump, along with Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, leading the criticism.

Now, it's been revealed the U.S. Department of Defense has wargamed scenarios involving a Generation Z rebellion that uses bitcoin to undermine and evade ''the establishment.''

MORE FROM FORBES Bitcoin Counters Donald Trump's Antifa Protest Threat By Billy Bambrough D.C., the United States.

Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images

In the Pentagon war game, young people born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s use cyber attacks to steal money and convert it to bitcoin, documents published by investigative news site The Intercept revealed.

Called the 2018 Joint Land, Air and Sea Strategic Special Program (JLASS), the war game is set in 2025 and is ''intended to reflect a plausible depiction of major trends and influences in the world regions.''

The scenario, which echoes recent protests in the U.S. and around the world against racial injustice, involves some members of Gen Z, who see themselves ''as agents for social change'' and believe the ''system is rigged'' against them, begin a ''global cyber campaign to expose injustice and corruption and to support causes it deem[s] beneficial.''

The group, called Zbellion, encourages cyber attacks against organizations that support ''the establishment,'' funnelling stolen cash into bitcoin to make ''small, below the threshold donations'' to ''worthy recipients'' and Zbellion members.

The program, which also reportedly wargamed scenarios involving Islamist militants and anti-capitalist extremists, was conducted by students and faculty from the U.S. military's war colleges, the training ground for prospective generals and admirals.

MORE FROM FORBES China Could Force Donald Trump And The Fed To Destroy The U.S. Banking System By Billy Bambrough Defence has seriously considered the possibility bitcoin could be used by future rebellions.

The Intercept / The Department of Defense

Bitcoin has increasingly been adopted by Wall Street and the world's biggest financial institutions since its 2017 price explosion but remains a tool to fight government control.

The Pentagon war game documents have been revealed after Florida Republican Representative Matt Gaetz called for the government to ''freeze'' the money of demonstrators after country-wide protests over the killing of George Floyd turned violent this month.

''One of the most important tools in the authoritarian toolkit is the ability to freeze the funding of legitimate political dissent,'' Nathaniel Whittemore, a bitcoin and cryptocurrency consultant and strategist, said previously.

''By separating the infrastructure of money from the infrastructure of state power, bitcoin makes it that much harder for this type of politically motivated confiscation.''

Bitcoin has seen a surge of interest in recent months due to the coronavirus pandemic and never-before-seen levels of government borrowing.

''In the wake of unprecedented central bank action around the Covid-19 crisis, it seemed like the most relevant narrative of bitcoin in 2020 was as a hedge against inflation,'' Whittemore said.

''It appears, however, that its capacity for censorship resistance might be just as relevant.''

Follow me on

Twitter. I am a journalist with significant experience covering technology, finance, economics, and business around the world. As the founding editor of Verdict.co.uk I reported

'... Read More I am a journalist with significant experience covering technology, finance, economics, and business around the world. As the founding editor of Verdict.co.uk I reported on how technology is changing business, political trends, and the latest culture and lifestyle. I have covered the rise of bitcoin and cryptocurrency since 2012 and have charted its emergence as a niche technology into the greatest threat to the established financial system the world has ever seen and the most important new technology since the internet itself. I have worked and written for CityAM, the Financial Times, and the New Statesman, amongst others. Follow me on Twitter @billybambrough or email me on billyATbillybambrough.com.Disclosure: I occasionally hold some small amount of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

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Link to Article

Archived Version

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 11:25

Scientists combed through nearly 30 years of earthquake data to probe huge and mysterious objects near the Earth's core.

by Becky Ferreira

Jun 11 2020, 6:03pm Snap

Scientists have discovered a vast structure made of dense material occupying the boundary between Earth's liquid outer core and the lower mantle, a zone some 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) beneath our feet.

The researchers used a machine learning algorithm that was originally developed to analyze distant galaxies to probe the mysterious phenomenon occurring deep within our own planet, according to a paper published on Thursday in Science.

One of these enormous anomalies, located deep under the Marquesas Islands, had never been detected before, while another structure beneath Hawaii was found to be much larger than previously estimated.

Scientists led by Doyeon Kim, a seismologist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland, fed seismograms captured from hundreds of earthquakes that occurred between 1990 to 2018 into an algorithm called Sequencer. While seismological studies tend to focus on relatively small datasets of regional earthquake activity, Sequencer allowed Kim and his colleagues to analyze 7,000 measurements of earthquakes'--each with a magnitude of at least 6.5'--that shook the subterranean world under the Pacific Ocean within the past three decades.

''This study is very special because, for the first time, we get to systematically look at such a large dataset that actually covers more or less the entire Pacific basin,'' Kim said in a call. Though scientists have previously mapped out structures deep inside Earth, this study presents a rare opportunity to "bring everything in together and try to explain it in a global context,'' he noted.

Earthquakes create seismic waves that travel through Earth's interior where they become scattered and distorted by structures deep inside our planet. These warped patterns are captured in seismograms, which are recordings of wave activity inside Earth, enabling seismologists to capture rare glimpses of Earth's inaccessible underworld.

The team focused on seismograms produced by shear (S) waves that travel along the boundary between Earth's core and the lower portion of the mantle that borders it. These waves are the slower secondary waves that follow the initial tremors made by earthquakes, called primary (P) waves, and they generally produce clearer signals.

''We normally like to use S waves because they are larger in amplitude and the data is more or less clean because there is less P wave traffic,'' said Kim. In particular, the team looked for the shear waves diffracting along the core-mantle boundary. ''Because it diffracts along that surface, it's a great phase to look for these tiny structures on top of the core-mantle boundary,'' Kim noted.

When the shear waves hit these structures, they produce a type of echo-like signature known as a ''postcursor'' (there are helpful figures of this process on Kim's website). These echoes indicate the presence of anomalies deep inside Earth called ultra low velocity zones (ULVZs), which are dense patches on the core-mantle boundary spanning hundreds of kilometers.

Nobody knows exactly how ULVZs are formed or what they are made of, but it's clear that they have diameters of about a hundred kilometers and that they are dense enough to slow down waves that pass through them.

By running thousands of seismograms through Sequencer, Kim and his colleagues found that the strongest postcursor signals in their dataset emanate from under Hawai'i and the Marquesas Islands. This is tantalizing evidence of the existence of two ''mega-ULVZs,'' zones that stretch for about 1,000 kilometers, or more.

An updated map of Earth's interior based on the new study. Image: D. Kim, V. Lek­c, B. M(C)nard, D. Baron and M. Taghizadeh-Popp

While the Hawaiian structure has been partially mapped out in previous studies, Kim's team found that its dimensions are much larger than expected. Meanwhile, the mega-ULVZ detected under the Marquesas Islands represents ''a previously unidentified localized wave-speed anomaly,'' according to the study.

Mega-ULVZs are intriguing structures not only due to their size, but because they may be composed of exotic materials that date back to a time before Earth had a Moon. These huge anomalous chunks could be partially melted material that predate the Moon formation event, which scientists think was a gigantic collision between early Earth and a Mars-sized object more than four billion years ago.

''This is very interesting because this might indicate that mega-ULVZs are special and may host primitive geochemical signatures that have been relatively unmixed since early Earth history,'' Kim said.

The new study demonstrates the applications of algorithms like Sequencer, which use a special type of process called unsupervised learning, in processing complex datasets like those found in astronomy, seismology, and countless other scientific fields. As opposed to supervised learning algorithms, which are trained to sort information based on known labels, unsupervised algorithms are designed to find insights in unlabelled datasets.

''What if we don't really know what to look for in the dataset?'' explained Kim. ''This is the typical question we'd like to think about because the lower mantle, the target of our study, still has so many unknowns. It's not really surprising to find almost anything in the lower mantle because we cannot actually go inside and take a look at it with our bare eyes.''

''When you use a sequencer, what it actually does is find additional information hidden behind this dataset,'' he continued. ''So, what we did here is find an optimal arrangement in the dataset itself. We're not actually altering the dataset; we're not doing anything but just rearranging and finding this optimal arrangement. That's what Sequencer does.''

The team plans to continue developing this novel way of peering into Earth by examining higher-frequency waves that might yield finer details about the enigmatic structures on the core-mantle boundary. The researchers also hope to expand their dataset to seismograms produced under the Atlantic Ocean.

''We're hoping that Sequencer will be able to basically let us use all of these diverse datasets and bring them together to look for these lower mantle structures systematically,'' Kim concluded. ''That is our vision going forward, to answer more questions about the lower mantle in general.''

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Sun, 14 Jun 2020 07:28

PBS affiliates across the country today will begin airing a five-minute version of the new documentary SEVEN directed by Loose Change creator Dylan Avery about the explosive findings of the recently completed University of Alaska Fairbanks study on the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7.

The short film, titled Spotlight On: SEVEN, will run for a minimum of three months on up to 200 local PBS stations, reaching at least three million viewers.

For those wanting to watch the short film on television, ''Spotlight On'' programs do not air at scheduled times because they run as needed in between longer shows. To have a good chance of catching it, you'll need to be tuned in to PBS often. But rest assured that Spotlight On: SEVEN will be seen by at least three million people, most of whom will never have heard of or seen the collapse of Building 7.

We at Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth are grateful to the hundreds of supporters who donated so that SEVEN could air on PBS.

The impending release of SEVEN on PBS has been attracting media coverage all week, including this report on nationally broadcast Fox News Radio:

Clip from Film: ''You didn't hear anything about World Trade Center 7, not for a long time.''

Reporter: ''A film dedicated to the controversy surrounding the collapse of World Trade Center Building #7 will air on PBS starting Thursday. The film is a project of the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Together, they dispute the original findings from the National Institute of Standards of Technology that say it's the first tall building to fall due to fire.''

Clip from Film: ''They [federal investigators] ignored evidence. And it wasn't because they didn't know about it.''

Reporter: ''Following the release of their own study and joining together with the families of those that lost loved ones, they submitted a request for correction so that a new theory that is physically possible and consistent with the evidence emerges. Michelle Pollino, Fox News.''

The landmark study, led by Professor Leroy Hulsey, and the request for correction, spearheaded by AE911Truth, were also covered favorably recently in Daily Commercial News, one of Canada's top construction news publications.

The feature-length version of SEVEN is being targeted for release in September to coincide with this year's 9/11 anniversary. Stay tuned for updates!

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Sun, 14 Jun 2020 07:11

The notoriously left-wing CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, stood in stunned silence when confronted with a question about the company's lack of policy on political tolerance and viewpoint discrimination at the company's annual investor meeting.

The question was posed by Justin Danhof, Director of the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research, which frequently attends the public meetings of American corporations to question them on their growing political extremism.

Danhof asked:

For today's annual meeting, I filed a shareholder resolution with the goal of having Salesforce amend its equal employment opportunity (EEO) policy to protect employees from potential viewpoint discrimination. Rather than doing so, the company petitioned the SEC, arguing that it was within its ordinary business operations to discriminate against its employees based on their ideological views. Given Silicon Valley's well-known liberal leanings, combined with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's far-left public-facing statements and actions taken on behalf of the company, we are concerned that conservatives may face a hostile work environment at the company.

Furthermore, the company is ignoring the financial risks of viewpoint discrimination. Alphabet recently ended a years-long lawsuit for firing a conservative engineer.

Given all this, will you commit today to amend Salesforce's EEO policy to explicitly protect against discrimination based on viewpoint and ideology?

For ten seconds, Benioff offered no response, even though he fired off many answers in response to other questions at the meeting. Eventually, Salesforce general counsel Amy Weaver chimed in, saying ''[w]e have a longstanding belief that it is important to have diverse sets of views and policies within our company, and our employees reflect that.''

''The left is trying to do to corporate America what it's done to academic for decades now,'' said Justin Danhof in comments to Breitbart News.

''What the left is doing is trying to take over the tops of corporations, and that's through corporate board placements '-- they've got search firms that identify only liberal candidates.''

''The other way you would go about taking over an organization is from the bottom up'... It's [like] college campuses where conservatives are very much silenced. You embolden the woke voices at the same time. You let the LGBTQ crowd protest your campus and demand change and demand action. You 'give in' to the woke crowd and you silence conservative voices.''

''You're seeing the same thing happen on corporate campuses now. I've probably had probably around a hundred meetings a year with corporate leaders, across sectors'... And I'll ask them, why do you take any liberal [cause] seriously. Why do you fund planned parenthood? Why do you oppose the travel ban? Why do you oppose President Trump's tax cuts? Every single answer I get is almost exactly the same, it's 'that's what our employees want us to do.'''

''Especially in Silicon Valley, we've seen instances of conservatives being fired for speaking their truth.''

Danhof explained that he wanted to find solutions so that will help conservatives feel safe to speak out inside their far-left companies without risking their job security.

''I said look, let's take a look at these companies' EEO policy, because when lawsuits start that's where they're going to be based. I started filing resolutions to fix this bottom-up problem, as I see it.''

Danhof said that many companies have amended their EEO policies in response to his queries, but that Salesforce, led by its left-wing CEO, refused.

''Not only did [Salesforce] refuse, but they actually petitioned the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and sought approval to remove my proposal from the proxy.''

''They argued that it was within their ordinary business operations to be able to discriminate against their own employees based on their ideological viewpoints. You can't make this stuff up!''

Are you an insider at Google, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.

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Sun, 14 Jun 2020 06:48

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 17:50

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 13:28

{snip}

Forbes reports that Apple CEO Tim Cook recently announced a $100 million program to promote racial justice inside the company. {snip}

Cook reportedly plans to expand its recruitment efforts with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), create a camp for black developers, and increase spending with black-owned businesses. Cook stated that Apple would be forming a partnership with the Equal Justice Initiative which is a nonprofit group providing legal representation to prisoners who they believe have been denied a fair trial.

{snip}

Cook tweeted a video discussing the new program, which can be seen below:

The unfinished work of racial justice and equality call us all to account. Things must change, and Apple's committed to being a force for that change. Today, I'm proud to announce Apple's Racial Equity and Justice Initiative, with a $100 million commitment. pic.twitter.com/AoYafq2xlp

'-- Tim Cook (@tim_cook) June 11, 2020

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 13:10

Posted

Police in California on Friday said a young black man found hanging from a tree likely committed suicide, stirring outrage among community members who said authorities were too quick to draw conclusions about what could have been a hate crime. Jonah Green reports.

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 13:04

Skip to contentThis kind of racism is what kicked off black civil rights movementIn another example of anti-white racism, the Black Lives Matter group forced allied white protesters to the back of the march during a rally in Seattle, Washington.

Reports from the protest on Friday reveal that the BLM organization created a ''black-led march'' to the Antifa-controlled Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in the heart of downtown Seattle.

Traffic cameras capture demonstrators heading from Judkins Park, en route to Jefferson Park as part of the silent march organized by Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County. pic.twitter.com/up7dqMJCSb

'-- Joe Veyera (@JoeVeyera) June 12, 2020

One participant told The Gateway Pundit:

I attended today's Black Lives Matter march in Seattle, which started downtown before making its way to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.

As an early supporter of BLM I was saddened and disheartened to see that the organizers were requiring all Whites to go to the back of the march, with protest leaders shouting, screaming and shoving, militantly ordering ''Whites to the back!'' Later, I was told this had been published in advance on their website and any surprise on my part was my own fault. Upon checking, this turned out to be factual.

I truly felt this is inconsistent with the message of diversity, inclusion and equity of BLM and an afront to civil rights pioneers like Rosa Parks.

Sure enough, the Black Lives Matter Seattle chapter website explains the order to force whites to the back of the march.

Not only that, but BLM activists are also pressuring whites to pay $10 each in ''reparations'' in order to stay at CHAZ.

All white people are required to give $10 to one black person in the CHAZ autonomous zone. pic.twitter.com/LRETSvOzci

'-- Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) June 13, 2020

Isn't this the kind of racist behavior that compelled civil rights icon Rosa Parks to refuse to sit in the back of the bus in Alabama in 1955?

A very brave black woman confronts violent protesters being funded by George Soros.

The first-ever nascent iodine Survival Shield X-2 Spray is finally here! Now available at 33% off!

`};let stream_id = 1;toggleStreamsButton.addEventListener('click', (event) => {event.preventDefault();const target = event.currentTarget;if (stream_id === 1) {target.innerHTML = 'Alex Jones Show';player.innerHTML = getEmbedCode('5c59c724f7c188001c3d8e2f');stream_id = 2;}else {target.innerHTML = 'Infowars Network Live Feed';player.innerHTML = getEmbedCode('5b92a1e6568f22455f55be2b');stream_id = 1;}}); })();

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 12:13

The History Channel in late May produced a mostly laudable documentary series on Ulysses S. Grant, rightly hailing the legacy of the victorious Union general and the president who fought for civil rights. However, the series contained what's become a recurring problem in some historical reflections on the Civil War. Throughout the three part series, the production repeatedly showed the slave-holding Confederates as red states and the Union north as blue states. In reality, it's the reverse.

As anyone familiar with history knows, the Confederates were Democrats. It was Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party that fought the war to preserve the union and ultimately to end slavery. As Marine and retired U.S. Army War College professor Daniel Douds astutely explained Grant's strategy to defeat the Confederates, the on-screen graphic showcased the (incorrect) blue state/red state dynamic.

DANIEL DOUDS (Colonel USMC Retired, Professor, U.S. Army War College): Grant's idea when he becomes commanding general is to get all of the Union forces to act in harmony. He wants to move on Mobile Bay, one of the last Confederate ports. He wants Sherman to advance on Atlanta. He wants Franz Sigel to go down the Shenandoah Valley, the breadbasket of the Confederacy in the east. Benjamin Butler will come up the James River and get at Richmond from the south, hopefully dividing some of Lee's attention. And then finally, the Army of the Potomac will head at Robert E. Lee in Richmond. It's those five pieces acting in concert that is his original vision for how this war should come to a close.

Now, a charitable person might say the choices were unintentional and not meant to associate modern red states with slavery. But if so, why not just use blue and gray, the actual colors of Civil War uniforms?

This isn't the first time such a historical revisionism has occurred. CBS Sunday Morning on April 7, 2019 featured a story on the Reconstruction era after the Civil War and former slaves who entered Congress in the 1870s. The visuals for the CBS segment used the political ''red and blue'' state graphics.

Inconvenient or not, the slave-defending Confederacy was run by Democrats. Documentaries should reflect that fact.

NewsBusters Reader,

The media are hard at work weaving a web of confusion, misinformation, and conspiracy surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.

At MRC's NewsBusters, we cut through the hypocrisy and expose the media's bias, bringing the truth to the American people'--but without you, our efforts can only go so far.

The media is using whatever crisis it can to swing the upcoming election'--they have an agenda and the truth is not part of it.

This is why NewsBusters, a program of the MRC, exists. To take on the liberal media, expose their toxic bias, and stop them in their tracks. We are part of the only organization purely dedicated to this critical mission and we need your help to fuel this fight.

Donate today to help NewsBusters continue to document and expose liberal media bias. $25 a month goes a long way in the fight for a free and fair media.

And now, thanks to the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, you can make up to a $300 gift to the 501(c)(3) non-profit organization of your choice and use it as a tax deduction on your 2020 taxes, even if you take the standard deduction on your returns.

- The NewsBusters Team

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 11:46

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 11:35

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) '-- A major in China's People's Liberation Army has been arrested at Los Angeles International Airport, telling federal authorities that he has been stealing secrets from the medical researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and sending them to a military lab in China, officials announced Thursday.

In a joint statement, U.S. Attorney David Anderson and FBI Special Agent in Charge, San Francisco, John Bennett announced that Xin Wang was taken into federal custody on June 7th as he was attempting to board a flight to Tianjin, China.

Federal prosecutors said Wang had entered the United States on a fake passport on March 26, 2019 posing as medical researcher interested in doing work at UCSF. He had joined the lab and begun accessing medical research.

Investigators have determined he is, in fact, a major in the People's Republic of China's People's Liberation Army. He said on his multiple entry visa application that he had left military medical service in 2016 and was involved in private research.

According to court documents, Wang '-- who had traveled back forth from United States and China '-- was part of an elaborate plot that included observing the layout of the UCSF lab and bringing back information on how to replicate it in China.

''(US Border Patrol agents) received information that Wang had studies from UCSF with him which he was taking to share with his PLA colleagues, and he had sent research to his lab in China via email,'' officials said in a release. ''Wang similarly told his supervising UCSF professor that he had duplicated some of the work of that professor at the lab in China.''

Federal officials said some of the work of the UCSF lab was funded by grants from the United States Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health.

Wang is charged with visa fraud. If convicted, he faces a maximum statutory penalty of ten years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

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Sat, 13 Jun 2020 09:33

The contraption can charge the car in 40 hours.

June 11, 2020 Tesla owner and YouTube influencer ItsYeBoi decided he wanted to charge his Tesla while driving so he came up with an ingenious contraption. He created a large solar panel-equipped trailer that he could attach to the back of his car to follow him everywhere.

RELATED: TESLA IS ON A MISSION TO INVENT THE PERFECT BATTERY

It's not a speedy contraption- it takes the car 40 hours to charge- but it is one that works. ItsYeBoi created this unique trailer from scratch, buying the solar panels independently and then putting them together on the carriage. The whole thing cost him $2,500.

"So what we are going to do is get a trailer to attach the solar panels to the trailer. But we got to make sure they're angled toward the Sun so we can maximize solar input. Is that a thing? I don't know," said ItsYeBoi in his video.

"Then we are going to attach the trailer to the Tesla. Charge the Tesla and create the world's first solar trailer for Tesla charging."

The invention is a cool look into the future where we might just all be able to charge our vehicles as we go. Can you imagine it? Driving forever?

However, right now its kind of a cumbersome invention as pulling a heavy trailer along is bound to reduce a vehicle's range, not to mention it might cause some trouble on highways and expressways.

You may remember ItsYeBoi from a video where he shot a gun at a so called-bulletproof Tesla to see how it would hold up. The influencer sure does seem to like experimenting with his Tesla or perhaps it just attracts followers.

What do you think of his solar trailer? Is it an intelligent way to charge while riding or a burdensome addition to a car that functions pretty well on its own?

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Log in Sign up Jack Posobiec @ JackPosobiec

3h They were trying to expand the Antifastan farm but a homeless guy has taken over it

pic.twitter.com/msrhcdGed2 View photo · Jack Posobiec @ JackPosobiec Replying to @JackPosobiec Update: Homeless guy is now challenging passerby to mortal combat for control of the farm

pic.twitter.com/sYFRhYuROx 7:38 PM - 12 Jun 2020 Twitter by: Jack Posobiec @JackPosobiec Jack Bristow @ RambaldiDevice

3h Replying to

@JackPosobiec CHAZ's first minister of agriculture

View conversation · jucel @ alexrob72373622

3h Replying to

@RambaldiDevice @JackPosobiec and last!

View conversation · Essential Fleccas 🇺🇸 @ fleccas

3h Replying to

@JackPosobiec CHAZ now has UFC

View conversation · CHAZ Warlord Rozay @ aRossforWords1

2h Replying to

@fleccas @JackPosobiec Looking more and more like the American dream with each passing hour ðŸ

View conversation · Sydney Watson @ SydneyLWatson

2h Replying to

@JackPosobiec These people are batshit.

View conversation · Jason J. Stone @ jasonstonenola

2h Replying to

@SydneyLWatson @JackPosobiec Not only are they insane, but they've been enabled to believe they are right

View conversation · Julia G @ PTM_JAG

3h Replying to

@JackPosobiec It actually does just keep getting better. The mayor and leftists in general keep trying to deny that it is a sh*t show, but lucky for us, Chaz residents have cell phones and Lord knows they can't resist putting it on social media

View conversation · I CAN CHAZ CHEEZBURGER @ econolith

3h Replying to

@JackPosobiec @seanmdav We want anarchy!!Wait, that's not cool, why's that guy doing that?!?!We need rules!!Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

View conversation · Jake Markey @ JakeAMarkey

3h Replying to

@JackPosobiec I'm trying to understand, what is up with the cardboard? Do they not know under the grass is the same dirt?

View conversation · Jeanne Appleby DeSilver @ arrowsmithwoman

3h Replying to

@JakeAMarkey @JackPosobiec They think it will prevent weeds from taking over their crops!

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Fri, 12 Jun 2020 17:48

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The real victims of misinformation spread by nurse Erin Marie Olszewski shared their stories with me. Just a sample of excerpts (anonymized) below (will be adding more as I find a minute to edit to keep them anonymous). See our original debunking of ''Perspectives of the Pandemic'' here.

From a physician fellow at Elmhurst:As someone who worked in those units and know the individuals and patients she referenced I can say without question that she spoke from a place of ignorance.

That she would use lazy and faulty conclusions based on superficial observations to assign motives to and assassinate the character of people who worked tirelessly is unconscionable. I know these residents and doctors, who paid emotional and physical (got sick w/ covid) toll trying their best.

Furthermore, I respect that she had concerns about patient care and applaud a system of accountability that would give her a voice to ask questions. THE PROBLEM IS SHE NEVER ASKED'..... SHE JUST ASSUMED.

Had she have asked questions and had civil discussions with the medical team this is what they would have told her:

While it is true that some patients tested negative, those patients all had horrendously deranged inflammatory makers (with distributive shock on pressure) and chest x rays clearly demonstrating lung injury. In this case the responsible thing to do is to assume covid positive and give the available treatment. Speaking of which, all of these patients received an adjunctive anti inflammatory treatment consistent w CDC recs at the time so I'm not sure what her point regarding Plaquenil was.

This is because you're likely dealing with a false Negative test because these patients were often unintentionally swabbed too superficially (i.e. didn't get oropharynx because people testing don't want to cause the patient discomfort and also limit their own exposure, which is understandable). This was a limitation of the test itself at the time. This also completely undermines the notion that these patients were inappropriately intubated for conditions like ''anxiety''. There was clear evidence of underlying organic disease processes and high flow O2 was often attempted prior to intubation when possible, but in addition to needing more respiratory support these patients also would develop encephalopathy and require intubation for airway protection.

She makes the mistake of comparing a limited experience w/ covid in Florida to a different population of patients (much sicker) in New York.

Each of her other arguments/points could be similarly refuted by anyone with first hand knowledge of the situation. You get the point.

This nurse may think she is helping in her own delusional way but effectively she is type-casting an entire community and hospital as inept, inadequate, and ignorant. I wonder if she would have made this video if she was working in the established hospitals across in Manhattan? I've worked shifts I'm both ICU's during this crisis. While Elmhurst is a public hospital and as a result may lack some resources, I can tell you the medical decision making was consistent in both and outcomes were similar. These were simply sick patients. Inherent in her video is a bias and prejudice that is damaging in its own right.

Of course I was mad, but of this makes me sad more than anything. Sad for colleagues who were portrayed as inhuman/inept when they volunteered to do these shifts because they felt the call to duty (no hefty hazard pay required, like this nurse received). These same individuals shed tears over their patients, I've seen it, they just chose to do so privately, confiding only in their closest friends, rather than online. They also got sacrificed their bodies and got sick caring for their patients.

I'm sad that someone would hijack the struggle of an underserved community for the purpose of their own narrative, and in doing so stereotype them all in a damaging way.

But most of all, I'm thankful you took the time to stand up for them. They certainly appreciate it.

From a traveling nurse co-worker at Elmhurst:First, as healthcare professionals we all can see through the misconception and ill perspective of the psycho that worked hand in hand next to me. Someone I thought was a friend, someone that was in the trenches of Elmhurst with me-I thought-for all the right reasons.

But, here is Erin Marie'... Firstly, Covid rule outs WERE homed with Covid positive patients at the beginning of this pandemic-why- because the hospital was 80% OVER capacity. Imagine-we had 152 patients on ventilators when I walked through that door April 11th. We still have original Covid patients in the ICU units-some that were intubated at the end of March. They are now successfully trached, out of bed to chair, and undergoing pt/ot as they should be. Truth-there are patients that have negative Covid tests-falsely-why because they had elevated inflammatory markers on admission. Huge cause for a false negative-clinically present with glass ground opacities in the lungs, and rapid onset of multi organ system failure. And, as you said-false negatives and false positives happen. In the case of my *** patient (Erin mentioned)-I can tell you more about that person than I can myself. Presented to the ED with shortness of breath and a cough. No underlying medical conditions. Now, take into consideration-this is the melting pot of the US-there are so many ethnicities and cultures here-healthcare is not free and they are underprivileged and don't receive treatment when they should'... was admitted to a Covid med surg floor ( tested positive) on a nasal canula, to venti mask to nonrebreather to eventually bipap. Was proning during this time. He was also receiving hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. Guess what happened next-had a MI-prolonged QT. That's what landed him on the ventilator with renal failure to follow. He had a dialysis catheter placed, an a-line, and a triple lumen central line. Why. Because those are needed tools in the ICU-that's a critical care patient-Covid or not. I don't know about you but I'm not infusing levophed, vasopressin, and neo through peripherals that need to be changed every 72 hours on someone with poor vascular access and terrible perfusion. A line for ABGS and blood draws to be able to wean or titrate the ventilator and replace electrolytes as needed, and review renal panels for preparation of HD. All of these lines and tubes and we still with help of an Air Force prone team were proning my patient!

Truth-Erin Marie is NOT a critical care nurse-she claims she is an ED nurse. She was taught how to inline suction, how to titrate drips, and how to open and insert the chamber into the epi syringe during a code(I'm pretty sure that must have been used in her ED career at some point). The night she videotaped and recorded my conversation and my patient was the night he passed. (Redacted for patient privacy)

Following the deaths of these three patients on that same night, CCU became a clean unit-there is no Covid or suspected Covid in the unit. Shoe covers are only worn in level 3 zones-not throughout the entire facility as she claims. What Erin doesn't share is that the ''dentist and ophthalmologist'' working in the ICUs they have a defined role-they are the medical professionals that FaceTime family members at bedside. They are not treating! They are an extension of the nursing staff so we can provide more time caring for our patients and less time answering phone calls and talking to families'...during this pandemic. What Erin doesn't share is she was moved from night shift to dayshift on her own accord(it seems once she got what she wanted from her recordings) and shortly after terminated by Elmhurst and Krucial staffing for accusing a physician of murdering her patient.

To express the level of betrayal, hurt , doubt, pure disgust and anger is something I can not put into words. Working at a level one trauma center in a hurricane prevalent area, I came to Elmhurst to give the regular staff some reprieve-a fresh face-a strong skill set-and to answer my nursing oath. I thought others did too and man did this one nurse prove me wrong. We were welcomed with open arms and air hugs.

My heart hurts for the regular staff at Elmhurst-they are good nurses-they have good docs(and bad docs) but who doesn't. But, the amount of mistrust, doubt, and fear that her video portrays to an otherwise already underprivileged city hospital-that's not ok. All I keep thinking about are the families, the morale of the staff'...there was no good to come from her video. It puts agency nurses in a terrible light-we already face obstacles of ''oh you're just a travel nurse'' We aren't all the same. Please feel free to share with the tribe-just keep it anonymous for me-The reputation is fractured. The morale is terrible. And it's not fair for these nurses-most CCRN certified to always be portrayed in a negative light. And, it shows credibility that not all travel nurses are snakes.

From a pulmonary attending who cared for one of the patients mentioned:I'm pulmonary/critical care in *** and volunteered through SCCM to go to NY as a pulmonary/critical care physician. I ended up at Elmhurst for a month and loved it. PCCM was needed so badly there; they got hammered and badly needed critical care docs. That's an easier story to tell by voice than by the written word. Everyone there that I worked with, from the nurses to the docs, the residents and fellows, all worked really hard for the benefit of every patient. The residents got thrown into the lion's mouth when the virus hit that hospital. It was really bad for them. The hospital ran out of ventilators and they had to decide who got ventilators (exame: choose between the older grandfather or the younger 40 year old with kids, etc.), which tore them up emotionally a lot. Many told me how they cried over what they saw and really had what I would describe as moral distress. Later the hospital got ventilators (less-than-ideal travel vents) but they needed staff. It was over a month later before Locums and volunteers started to arrive.

Anyway, I saw that Erin person around a few times but she was never the nurse on any of my patients. It turned out she was making inflammatory posts on social media which people picked up on.

She was an agency nurse with Krucial and was working nights. Apparently no one saw her social media posts, which were really inflammatory. She got busted when she had remained logged in for 12 hours outside of her assigned shift time gathering information. She got moved to days and then her social media posts were found by someone (her staffing agency?) and they pulled her from the ''A4 unit'' (normally a step down floor that was converted into an ICU) and sent her to the ER to work. Very shortly after that same day she was kicked out. The part in italics was told to me by a nurse from her agency.

A few days ago I saw Erin's video and was as shocked by it and how misleading it was. The part that I can directly refute is her crying claim at the end of it where she says a resident incorrectly ambu-bagged her patidet suggesting it led to his death. Absolutely untrue.

Here is what really happened on the morning she was thrown out: I was rounding on A4 and they called a code a few doors down from where my team was. I walked over and started my assessment. The patient was morbidly obese and hypoxic and had weak pulse. We immediately disconnected the vent and tried to bag him to evaluate the airway, but there was no air movement; the bag could not squeeze. I tried to suction the trach and the suction catheter could not advanced through the trach, so I knew it was occluded or dislodged from the trachea. As we examined the patient quickly, it was immediately apparent that there was a ton of subcutaneous air on the chest (right > left), so I knew the trach got pushed out from the trachea. There was no way ay that time to find the trachea through the stoma. I was there with an ER doc who was acting as an intensivist on a different team. I intubated the gentleman and he did bilateral chest tubes, which confirmed tension pneumothorax. A CRNA came and I asked him to confirm tube placement, as the views were terrible considering the size of his neck and the capnometer was giving us equivocal readings. The CRNA used a glide scope and we decided to make sure the ETT was in place so he used a Bougie and then we put a 2nd tube over that and knew we were definitely in. We had already started CPR and marched through ACLS like military cadence. Unfortunately he never regained his pulse or blood pressure. I called it at 18 minutes, with the full agreement of the other attendings, including the patient's medicine attending. Many were upset over the gentleman's death as apparently he had been doing so well and was actually improving.

As to why he developed a spontaneous tension pneumothorax, I don't know. The nurses were saying a resident was in the room beforehand adjusting the PEEP, but I spoke to the residents and then an attending who said he was making some ventilatory adjustments and never touched the PEEP. I told the nurses after the code what happened and that it looked like a spontaneous pneumothorax and the trach came out from the subcutaneous air. There was no resident ''incorrectly ambu-bagging'' the patient which led to his death.

That AM, the nurses had been sympathetic to Erin (clearly one had called her), but by later that day her social media posts had started making the rounds. As nurses read them, they were OUTRAGED at what she was stating and doing. Since then, many things that she posted on her Facebook have been deleted, but the reality is that someone in her agency and the hospital figured out she was a wolf in sheep's clothing and booted her out due to her social media posts and apparently her IT violations.

From an ICU nurse at Elmhurst:I am a MICU/CCU nurse at Elmhurst Hospital. The way you spoke up for us literally made tears come out of my eyes. We were once called heroes now we are murderers. We are getting death threats and are told not to wear our scrubs for safety when coming to work. I worked with COVID19 patients since day 1, got sick, went thru emotional turmoil along with physical exhaustion. I will never forget how much we sweat with our googles fogged up, had headaches and a sore throat with wearing the N95 for more than 12 hours running room to room as the saturation levels went down to the 40's.

So many of us got sick and to have someone who came to make up some story and twist it is so wrong. This nurse deserves her license revoked. She puts the profession of nursing to a shame. She claims her private institution in Florida had no deaths related to COVID. According to her facebook she is from Tampa Florida which falls under Hillsborough county which had 81 deaths. The total population of Tampa, Fl is 392,890 whereas the total population in Queens, NY is 2.73 million.

This so called holistic anti-vax , anti-chemo RN from the ED who claims to have all crossed trained nurses when in fact she was being taught how to suction patients on the vent has convinced certain people that COVID-19 did not even exist and the solution to COVID is sunshine, sea water, hydroxychloroquine and vitamin C.

There is no cure for COVID-19 as of yet. We tried the plasma, hydroxychloroquine remdesimvir and more which did not improve some of these patients' conditions. We were physically tired where I had worked 14 1/2 hour shifts but the emotional turmoil this brought upon us cannot even be expressed in words. We had to open up 160 ICU beds.

I can not even imagine how the lies of this person affected those who are already grieving with the loss of their family members. We held a candle light vigil because we wanted to say a few words and have closure because of everyone who passed. So these are nurses and doctors who do care. People like Erin Marie Olszewski have no shame and do not care for anyone but themselves.

Thank you Dr. Z because the only people who seem to know she is lying at this time are healthcare professionals.

From a traveling nurse at Elmhurst:As a travel nurse working at Elmhurst hospital I just wanted to thank you for your videos supporting those of us that work here. Have we done everything right? No, it's an unknown disease and mistakes were made. I know for a fact that everyone here has worked their hardest and done everything possible to treat the patients here. I've seen the staff nurses get teary-eyed when they talk about the first few days of the pandemic. I've seen doctors and nurses work tirelessly to save patients and do all they can for them, sometimes even if nothing is left to be done but hold their hand. So, from the bottom of my heart, I thank you for not letting the truth go unknown.

From an Elmhurst nurse:I'm one of the nurses at Elmhurst who got to work with Erin Marie Olszewski in the ICUs when she was still there. This controversy has caused myself and my coworkers frustration, anxiety and just sadness at how we are being portrayed as villains in the media by a woman who clearly doesn't even know half of what she's talking about. Who came to Elmhurst with an agenda. I was able to work with her a couple of shifts. I had talked to her about some of the drips her patient was receiving and she didn't seem to know much about why the medication was being given and probably even what the medication was '' she just seemed clueless. That's when it became evident to me that she did not have a lot of ICU experience. She admitted as much and said that she was an ED nurse but had some ICU experience a long time ago. In one instance, she had a patient in severe ARDS on a lot of sedation and a Nimbex drip who was breathing asynchronous with the vent and desaturating and the assessment that her patient might need more paralysis flew by her. Nobody belittled her or made her feel out of place because we knew that the ICUs needed help, that ICU nurses were in short supply, and that the hospital was full of ICU patients on otherwise non-ICU floors which made me guess that management must have been putting a mix of ICU and non ICU nurses throughout the whole hospital. She accuses us of misusing PPE, but I have observed her on many occasions going into and out of patient's rooms without washing her hands or using alcohol-based sanitizers. She does not change out her gowns between patients, either. And so I find some of her virtue signaling as incredibly hypocritical. I've heard about the other incidences that she discusses on her video, but am unable to personally comment on them because I've not witnessed them directly. But her sweeping statements and ill-informed assumptions have seemed to gain a lot of traction and I am now afraid for my physical safety coming into and out of the hospital dressed as a healthcare worker.

Thank you for being a voice for the Elmhurst staff. I was told by some of my coworkers that our managers have come around and told the staff to be careful because we have already started receiving death threats. This is so distressing because we feel like we have fought so much, sacrificed so much, been through so much only to be maligned and made to look like murderers at the end of the day.

More stories coming shortly'...Hey everyone, it's Dr. Z. Okay, I put out a video yesterday about Erin Marie and her video about being the epicenter undercover nurse at Elmhurst Hospital at County, public hospital in New York at the epicenter of the COVID-19 epidemic. In her video, I went through and very rationally debunked a lot of the stuff she said, but none of that matters. What matters is she has created a kind of harm that is so inexcusable that it makes me seethe with anger and I'm gonna try to control that anger to tell you what's happened since.

Since I put out that video, I've gotten message after message from frontline healthcare workers, doctors and nurses and trainees and residents and fellows, who work at Elmhurst, during one of the worst experiences in modern memory in health care. Taking care of a rush of sick, sick, sick COVID patients, all of whom who are trying to die, in a situation where they had limited resources and all hands were on deck. We had volunteer doctors who reached out to me who were cited. She did this undercover expose where she recorded them without their permission and put it out on the internet, accusing them of murder, accusing them of incompetence, these caring, amazing clinicians.

And why do I say this, because they've told me their stories that they can't say publicly. Why? Because their effing professionals. Because they actually listen when we talk about patient privacy. They can't even fight back. So they email me out of desperation, saying please keep this anonymous, but here's why what she said is not just wrong, it's hurtful. We have staff that are there, losing patients they're trying to save to a disease nobody understands yet. And they're crying in private in the call rooms, in the hallways, and she's calling them murderers, this woman who comes from Florida, gets hazard pay, as part of crucial staffing, solely with an agenda, to do this expose so she can get views. This is someone who's anti-vaccine, who spouts conspiracy theories on her website, and she comes in and does this inexcusable act to people who actually care.

And what do they do, they reach out to me because they don't have a voice. I have argued time and time again that we should speak out when we see injustice in health care, when we're being mistreated, when our patients are being mistreated. And people said, well ZDogg, isn't that what she's doing? No. She's a con artist who's using other people's suffering to further her own, her own fame. And you wanna see heroes, you wanna see people who wanna speak out but can't. They're the people who are emailing me. I'm gonna take their stories, I'm gonna print them verbatim and anonymize them on my website where this video will live, and I want you to read them, they deserve to be heard.

They are so demoralized, and I want to tell you guys, everybody at Elmhurst Hospital who's listening to this, who worked with this woman, who fed back to me who exactly she is, someone who is not an ICU nurse, was never trained to be an ICU nurse, had to be taught how to suction an ET tube. This is the same person who's claiming to understand COVID and all the mismanagement that's going on. Is there, are there mistakes, yes, are there trainees, yes, are there bad doctors, yes. But is this the way that you speak out? Through straight slander of good people who are behaving heroically in a time of need, who are volunteering, who are getting sick and dying of COVID? No, and we won't stand for it. Share this video, that's it, read the stories, let's give them a voice. All right, that's it.

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Thu, 11 Jun 2020 19:35

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Thu, 11 Jun 2020 18:56

Joe Biden's campaign has made it clear that the former vice president does not support the campaign to ''defund the police.'' On Wednesday night, The Daily Show host Trevor Noah tried to see if he could get him there.

''You know, many activists and organizers have come out saying, there have been repeated attempts to reform many police departments,'' Noah said. ''Were it not for civilian cameras, we wouldn't know the truth oftentimes.'' As police departments continue to be ''contradicted'' by video evidence, the host asked Biden directly, ''If you were to become president, do you think that there would be a world where defunding the police would be the solution?''

''Well I think there are a lot of changes they can take place, period, without having to defund the police completely,'' Biden replied, seeming to make the same conflation that those on the right have been making between defunding and abolishing police departments.

''I don't think the police should be defunded,'' the Democratic presidential candidate said definitively. ''But I think that conditions should be placed upon them where departments are having to take significant reforms.'' He cited a ''national use of force standard'' and mandatory reporting of misconduct to the Justice Department as two examples of changes he would make.

Biden went on to push back on defunding the police by saying that he doesn't believe his social worker daughter should have to respond to potentially dangerous situations that would normally be handled by armed cops.

Noah, in turn, asked Biden if he thinks there is anyone besides the police who should be responding to mental health crises, for instance. He pointed to the old adage, ''If you're a hammer, then everything is a nail.''

When Noah argued that it's not police who are defusing situations in mental institutions, Biden replied, ''No, but they are, though. They also use force in those mental institutions when someone's out of hand. They put them in straitjackets.''

''It's not that simple,'' Biden said. ''But that should be the objective. We should put the police second in those circumstances and not first.''

By the end of this section of his interview, Noah had more or less moved Biden to endorse what activists call ''defund the police,'' even if he wasn't willing to use those words.

''I think we should turn over as much as we can to non-armed police officers to de-escalate things related to mental illness, homelessness and drug abuse,'' Biden said.

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